How the pieces attach
Each wall piece is a flat board with two small square feet near its ends (a single centered foot on very short pieces). Each foot is exactly as deep as your material thickness, so it passes all the way through a matching slot cut into the base plate and sits flush with the underside.
Where two walls meet at a real 90° angle, the two boards butt together perfectly flush — no finger joints needed. Their nearest feet sit close to that same corner but not quite touching: two solid tabs can't share the same slot, so each keeps its own small, properly-sized pocket, leaving a hairline gap between the two holes.
Where a long straight wall has to be split into more than one standard piece (see below), there's a small unavoidable gap — about one material thickness — exactly at that seam. It's far smaller than anything that could roll through it.
Kerf compensation
Kerf is the width of material your laser actually vaporizes along the cut line — real, physical material is always a little narrower (or a hole a little wider) than the line you drew. The tool compensates automatically: solid tabs are drawn slightly larger, holes are drawn slightly smaller, so the parts you get after cutting match their intended size.
Cut a small test tab-and-slot sample in your actual material first, and adjust the Kerf field until it fits the way you like — snug or easy, your laser and material will differ from someone else's.
Standardized piece sizes
Instead of every wall segment being a uniquely-shaped piece, long runs are split into a small set of standard lengths (1 to your "max piece size" in cells), each labeled only with its size number. Every piece sharing a number is byte-for-byte identical — same length, same feet — no matter which wall it came from, its orientation, or which board it was cut on (given matching settings). That's what lets you print many boards, tip all the pieces into one bowl, and just grab the size you need instead of hunting for one specific numbered part.
The maze size isn't set directly — it's Cell size × Columns and Cell size × Rows. Since every maze uses the same fixed cell size, a "3" is exactly the same length whether it came from a horizontal or vertical wall, on this board or any other one you generate with matching material thickness, kerf, and cell size.
Four settings determine a piece's actual physical size: cell size, material thickness, kerf, and max piece size. Change any one of them and every piece on the new board stops matching boards made before the change — there's no way around that, since it's what actually determines the cut geometry. To help you avoid doing this by accident, the tool remembers these four values from the last time you opened the page and shows a warning naming exactly which one(s) drifted, for as long as they differ. Keep all four the same across every board you want to mix in one bowl.
Exception: the four outer edges are each cut as one continuous piece the full length of that side, whenever it fits your specified work area — no seam along the most visible part of the maze. Its label is just that side's cell count (e.g. "10"), always larger than your max piece size, so it's easy to tell apart from a universal standard piece. Since its length depends on your columns/rows, it only matches other boards built with the exact same grid size. If it wouldn't fit the work area you set, that edge falls back to normal standardized chunks instead.
Gap between parts
This is just how far apart the cut parts sit from each other on the sheet — the base plate and all the wall pieces laid out side by side for cutting. It has nothing to do with the maze design itself; it only controls how tightly your laser packs the parts on the material, so neighboring cut lines don't scorch into each other.
Seed & reproducibility
Every maze layout is generated from a numeric seed. Leave the Seed field blank and you get a new random layout each time you click Generate (or reload the page). To get back to a maze you liked, copy its number from "Last seed used" — or just click Use this seed — into the Seed field, then generate again.
Generation algorithms
Both produce a "perfect" maze (exactly one path between any two points, no loops) — they just differ in texture:
- Depth-first — long, winding corridors with fewer branch points. The classic maze look.
- Prim's — shorter, more evenly distributed branches and dead ends.
Start & end markers
Above the maze preview, pick Tap sets start or Tap sets end, then click the middle of any cell to place that point there (Shift+click also works as a shortcut for the end point, if you're on a desktop and already have a wall selected to toggle). Then choose how each is marked on the base plate:
- Colored dot (default) — a filled reference dot, not cut. Walls are fully closed by default, so no physical opening is implied; you just place the marble at the start and lift it out at the end.
- Cut hole — an actual circular hole (kerf-compensated like every other cut on the plate), so the marble drops in and stops there instead of being lifted out by hand. Set Hole diameter to match your marble — it defaults to 4 mm, and should stay smaller than your cell size or it'll cut into neighboring walls.
Work area limit
If your laser bed has a fixed size, enter it under "Work area." The tool packs pieces across that full width instead of narrowing them to the base plate's own width, and warns you if the finished cut sheet still won't fit — it doesn't currently split a design across multiple sheets automatically.