Gardens

Play: userland.sh (no sign-up) · Wiki: wiki.userland.sh

Gardens is a slow, idle garden game in the spirit of Kittens Game as a test. You start with a small plot. Then you build a garden, then farming and mining, and eventually stations and bases in space. Your resources run down the left, the things you can do sit in the middle, and a calendar and a log of everything that’s happened are on the right. Hover over almost anything and it tells you what it is, what it costs and what it does.

It keeps opening up. There are eleven production tabs, from Garden and Farming through Arcana and Rites to Lunar, Interplanetary, Astrobiology, Quantum and Interstellar. Alongside them are a village, science, a workshop, trade and missions. Later come achievements, legends, time shards, laurels, and starting a new garden altogether. Magic starts, of course, with a mushroom. (House rule: no magical creatures.) There’s no sign-up: the game just remembers you as a gardener in that browser. It’s plain JavaScript, no build step, with a small server that holds your save, keeps honest time, and keeps a few secrets.

There’s a full wiki too, covering every tab, resource and event and how saves and time away work. It’s built from the game’s own data, so it can’t drift out of date.

When you come back after a break, the game works out everything that happened while you were gone. Rather than replaying every tick, it skips straight to the moments that matter: a store running dry or filling up, research finishing. Tests check that this gives exactly the same result as playing it live. Eight hours away takes about a tenth of a second to work out.

Then there’s the stuff you’re never told about. A counter quietly tallies every action by every player, and it only ever goes up. A hidden value tracks how present you’ve been. One night in a hundred, black rain falls for everyone at once, timed to the real sunset. And now and then the log says “Someone is watching you”. None of it is in the game’s wiki, on purpose.

It went through three different games in one week before it became this one, and every design call I made along the way is in the commit log, word for word.

Specs