# What is a click tower on Square Town?

> A click tower is a favicon on Square Town's 3D wall: ctrl+drag tilts the grid and every icon becomes a box whose height equals its click count, tinted its colour.

Source: https://square.pov.town/glossary/click-tower

A **click tower** (on Square Town) is what a favicon square becomes in the wall's 3D view: a box with the favicon on its top face whose **height equals its click count**, its sides tinted with the icon's dominant colour. Top-down, Square Town ([square.pov.town](/)) is a classic 2D wall; **ctrl+drag** (two-finger drag up on touch, twist to rotate) orbits the camera into 3D and the most-clicked sites stand tallest. Nobody can buy height — only clicks build it.

> **TL;DR:** the wall is a three.js scene. Flat = the map. Tilted = a city whose skyline is traffic.

## How it works on Square Town

Every outbound click goes through `/go/:id`, is counted, and is stored on the listing. In 3D, a square with 0 clicks is a flat tile; each click adds height, capped at 8 cells tall so a viral square doesn't hide the block behind it. The tint comes from sampling the favicon in the browser and picking its dominant chromatic hue; grey, black or white icons get a neutral slate. Empty cells carry hash-seeded trees and lakes (real geometry, gone the moment the cell is bought), a shadow-casting sun follows the viewer's local time — east at 06:00, south at noon, west at 18:00, moonlight at night — and now and then birds or a hot-air balloon cross above the towers.

The starting view can be set by URL: `?yaw=&tilt=&zoom=&hour=&theme=` (e.g. `?tilt=0.9&hour=7.5` for a dawn skyline). Views, clicks and kisses per square are on your [deed](/glossary/deed); the click counts behind every tower are public in `GET /api/state` (see [/api](/api)). Rules: [/how-it-works](/how-it-works).

## Where else it appears

Data-as-height is a known trick; what varies is what the height *means*. As of August 2026, The City Mesh builds a 3D hex city where a bigger payment is a taller building; SaaSCity gives SaaS logos floors by traction; Million Dollar Metropolis is a static WebGL city; Million Dollar Homepage 3D is a 3D-navigable pixel wall with the classic sell-out model; GitHub Skyline turns contributions into bars. The nearest 2D analogue is Nmap's Icons of the Web (2010), a favicon collage where icon size is proportional to traffic. Square Town is the only one where height is earned by clicks on a wall you also own a square of. Why it's built this way: [/blog/why-the-wall-is-3d](/blog/why-the-wall-is-3d).

## Example

Your project square gets 3 clicks in its first week: a low, blue-tinted box. A newsletter mention brings 40 more and it hits the height cap, casting a shadow across the trees to the west at 4 pm your time. Someone kisses it because it looks impressive. Its neighbour, unclicked, stays a flat tile — same $1, different skyline.

## FAQ

### How do I see the 3D view?

Hold ctrl and drag on desktop; on touch, drag up with two fingers and twist to rotate. Drag without ctrl pans; scroll or pinch zooms.

### What decides a tower's height?

Its click count — the number of times visitors followed the square's link through Square Town. Zero clicks is a flat tile; height is capped at 8 cells.

### Can I pay to make my tower taller?

No. Height comes only from clicks. Money buys the square (or an eviction), not the skyline.

### What colour is my tower?

The dominant colour of your favicon, sampled in the browser. Grey, black or white icons get a neutral slate.