Maelstrom simulates frame by frame, in order. The simulation state at frame 100 depends on frames 0 through 99. This one architectural fact explains most of Maelstrom's behaviour.
Playback and scrubbing
- When you scrub backwards, Maelstrom loads a cached frame from memory.
- When you scrub forward past the cache, it silently re-computes the missing frames.
- Any parameter change that affects physics clears the cache and restarts the simulation from frame 0. A visible "caching" indicator shows up during re-computation.
Bake mode
Bake Simulation freezes the cache so you can scrub freely without recomputation. Use it once your setup is final and you're moving on to animating visual parameters or rendering out.
Determinism
The solver is deterministic: identical configuration plus identical inputs produces byte-identical results across machines. If two people see different simulations on the same project file, something is different in the inputs (AE version, layer data) — not in Maelstrom itself.