Pinned scroll story — the viewport becomes a geological core cross-section and scroll drives a drill bit descending through procedurally banded strata, with content panels crossfading per band and a mono HUD ticking depth.
Use when a pinned scroll story where the viewport becomes a geological core sample and a drill bit descends through strata as DOM content panels crossfade per band; use for a long-form narrative with distinct content sections, not an abstract flythrough or a real-image reveal; pick scroll-particle-tunnel instead when the journey is an abstract flythrough with callouts rather than content sections, scroll-defrost when a single real image should resolve as you scroll, or timeline-changelog-wave when the sections are dated events accumulating rather than a narrative.
Scroll to drive the drill. Five strata, one platform — from the pixels at the surface down to the bedrock it all stands on. The vein marks the seam everything depends on.
Everything the user touches renders here: design tokens, optimistic state, and a 60fps interaction budget. Nothing below this band is visible, but every band below shapes how it feels.
react 19 · edge-rendered · p75 INP 84ms
02 / API
Contract stratum
A thin, typed boundary where every request is validated, shaped, and signed. Breaking changes surface here as schema drift long before they reach a client.
graphql + rest · 214 endpoints · p99 121ms
03 / Engine
Compute band
Schedulers, queues, and the rules engine burn through about two million jobs a day. Backpressure is absorbed inside this band, so spikes never reach the surface.
12 workers · 2.1M jobs/day · retry ×3
04 / Storage
Sedimented state
Every event since day zero is compacted into columnar layers — cheap to scan, impossible to lose. The accent vein marks the write-ahead log, the one seam everything above depends on.
wal + columnar · 41TB · rpo 0s
05 / Bedrock
Bedrock / infra
Machines, networks, and the failure domains everything above stands on. It moves rarely, and when it does, the whole column feels it.
3 regions · 9 AZs · chaos-tested weekly
field notes
Every layer, logged
The cross-section above is generated once per resize into an offscreen atlas — value-noise grain, quantized to three grays, one accent vein. Use the band labels on the left edge to jump straight to a stratum.
strata
5 bands
grain
3px cells
vein
1 seam
depth
128 m
Props
Prop
Type
Default
Description
bands?
CoreSampleBand[]
DEFAULT_BANDS
strata content, top → bottom; band 4 (index 3) carries the accent vein
totalDepth?
number
128
depth in meters the HUD reads at full scroll
trackVh?
number
250
scroll-track height in vh; the sticky stage is always 100vh