Temple
#C24A38 L* 48 C* 59 h 37°
Tier 1 · Minutes, almost anywhere
Temple pillars and doors, lanterns, spring couplets, brick. The most abundant saturated colour on a Taiwanese street.
Huxle · The pool
Twelve colours, and why each one is there.
These are the colours Huxle draws from. They are Taiwanese street colour — temple red, taxi yellow, convenience-store green, betel palm, taro — and they were chosen with measurements rather than by eye, because the first pool was picked by eye and turned out to be too hard to find.
Persimmon
#E08240 L* 64 C* 59 h 58°
Tier 1 · Minutes, almost anywhere
Safety cones, construction netting, convenience-store orange, monk robes. Manufactured deliberately bright so it reads at distance.
Amber
#DDA845 L* 72 C* 58 h 80°
Tier 1 · Minutes, almost anywhere
Taxi yellow, road paint, ginkgo, temple gold, beer. Kept dark enough that it stops clipping in direct sun.
Leaf
#4F9757 L* 57 C* 46 h 144°
Tier 1 · Minutes, almost anywhere
Foliage — the most abundant saturated colour outdoors anywhere, year-round in Taiwan. It should be the easiest colour in the game.
Sky
#2A8FC4 L* 56 C* 37 h 254°
Tier 1 · Minutes, almost anywhere
Sky, signage, uniforms, and the blue truck tarps that are everywhere here.
Blossom
#DE7391 L* 62 C* 45 h 4°
Tier 2 · Needs a walk
Blossom, bakery boxes, plastic stools, dragon-fruit flesh. Pink is a basic colour category, so you can hold it in your head while you look.
Lime
#9BAA4E L* 67 C* 49 h 113°
Tier 2 · Needs a walk
New leaves, limes, sports courts, bamboo, betel palm. Pushed until it became a nameable “lime” rather than a colour between two names.
Cobalt
#41589F L* 38 C* 50 h 292°
Tier 2 · Needs a walk
Denim, night signage, uniforms, ceramics. The dark anchor the first pool never had.
Plum
#B8497E L* 48 C* 51 h 352°
Tier 2 · Needs a walk
Dragon fruit, bougainvillea, neon.
Pine
#1F7A5E L* 46 C* 34 h 167°
Tier 3 · Rare
Bottle glass, park benches, convenience-store green, jade, hedges. Deliberately deep.
Teal
#1B8A8C L* 52 C* 30 h 199°
Tier 3 · Rare
Tiles, pool water, retro shopfronts, MRT signage. Cyan cannot reach high chroma at this lightness on a phone screen, so Teal stays the hardest colour — hard on purpose, not by accident.
Taro
#7E52A0 L* 43 C* 49 h 313°
Tier 3 · Rare
Taro products, orchids, night lighting. Purple is genuinely under-supplied in the world, which is why it is rare here too.
L*, C* and h° are the CIELAB values each colour was selected on: lightness, how saturated it is, and where it sits on the colour wheel. Captions are set in the ink that clears WCAG AA against their own swatch — five of the twelve need white and seven need black, which is why one blanket “contrasting” colour doesn't work.
The rules they follow.
Five, and they are the reason the list looks the way it does.
Nameable
Every colour lands inside a basic colour category. Looking for something is categorical — you can hold “red” in your head, but not “yellow-green”. A colour between two names can't be searched for, even when it's right in front of you.
Saturated, mostly C* 45–59
Which is also what the world manufactures. Paint, plastic, signage and textiles are made saturated because saturation is what reads at a distance.
Lightness L* 38–72
Above about 80 a colour clips and washes out in sunlight. Below about 35 the shadows crush it. The first pool had a colour at L* 84 and low chroma — both failure modes at once.
Spread by what exists
Greens and blues are over-supplied in the world; true cyan and purple are under-supplied. So Teal and Taro are rare rather than excluded — the difficulty is deliberate, not accidental.
A ladder, not a flat line
Five colours you'll pass within minutes, four that need a walk, three that are genuinely rare. Uniform difficulty was the thing being fixed; a mix is the goal.
No near-neutrals
Tans and beiges map to a hugely abundant real category — wood, cardboard, sand — but they sit so close to grey that the scorer can't tell them apart. A brown that can't be told from a warm wall isn't a target. Dropping them changed the numbers most.
Measured, not asserted.
Both pools were scored against the same 66 photographs, so the rebuild could be checked rather than argued about.
- Photos matching nothing
- 15 of 66 before · 6 of 66 after
- Cross-family false passes
- 2.0% before · 4.6% after
This is a trade, not a clean win. Far more findable, which was the goal, and slightly looser. That's the right side of the trade for a game whose complaint was that nothing could be found — but it shouldn't be described as a straight improvement, so it isn't.
One more honest note: those 66 photos were all shot hunting four colours — green, red, blue and orange — so they over-sample the warm end and say nothing about how often Taro or Pine actually turns up. Ranking these by real-world findability needs photos from ordinary walks, and that hasn't been done yet.
Go and find one.
One of these twelve is today's colour. It's the same one for everyone.