Each frame, the follower casts a ray directly toward your cursor. If no obstacles intersect the ray, it uses direct Reynolds steering with smooth proportional arrival deceleration.

When direct line-of-sight is blocked (e.g. inside U-bends, concave cups, or chicane mazes), a single Breadth-First Search expands outward from the target across a 28px clearance grid. This creates an exact geodesic distance gradient flowing through corridors and escape openings without getting trapped in local minima.

To eliminate rigid grid staircases, the follower looks ahead down the flood path and raycasts to find the furthest visible node. It steers directly toward this shortcut waypoint, turning discrete grid cells into a continuous, organic curve.

Steering forces are filtered through an exponential moving average (lerp), eliminating nervous jitter. When skimming obstacles or chicane walls, perpendicular velocity into the wall is zeroed while tangential velocity is preserved, allowing high-speed sliding with zero deceleration.

Followers exert inverse-square quadratic repulsive forces on neighboring dots with elastic separation cushions, ensuring they never overlap and naturally settle into an orbital rosette around the cursor.