# Special modes¶

SWIFT comes with a few special modes of operating to perform additional tasks.

## Static particles¶

For some test problems it is convenient to have a set of particles that do not perceive any gravitational forces and just act as sources for the force calculation. This can be achieved by configuring SWIFT with the option --enable-no-gravity-below-id=N. This will zero the accelerations of all particles with id (strictly) lower than N at every time-step. Note that if these particles have an initial velocity they will keep moving at that speed.

This will also naturally set their time-step to the maximal value (TimeIntegration:dt_max) set in the parameter file.

A typical use-case for this feature is to study the evolution of one particle orbiting a static halo made of particles. This can be used to assess the quality of the gravity tree and time integration. As more particles are added to the halo, the orbits will get closer to the analytic solution as the noise in the sampling of the halo is reduced.

Note also that this does not affect the hydrodynamic forces. This mode is purely designed for gravity-only accuracy tests.

## Gravity glasses¶

For many problems in cosmology, it is important to start a simulation with no initial noise in the particle distribution. Such a “glass” can be created by starting from a random distribution of particles and running with the sign of gravity reversed until all the particles reach a steady state. To run SWIFT in this mode, configure the code with --enable-glass-making.

Note that this will not generate the initial random distribution of particles. An initial condition file with particles still has to be provided.