Core Loop Notes
Resources
- Seeds: plant new flowers.
- Coins: earned by cutting and selling flowers; spent on tools and future expansion.
- Observation notes: gained by observing plants and visitors.
- Compost: restores persistent pot nutrients.
- Double-order vouchers: rare event rewards that double one fixed order coin payout.
Primary Loop
The loop is intentionally visible in the prototype. Bloom is now a continuous tradeoff rather than a blocking fork: sell early for full freshness value, or wait for visitors, card progress, and infrequent rare seeds while the sale price falls in visible steps.
Flower Material and Order Loop
The player makes one meaningful decision at harvest instead of clicking once per crafted item. Direct sale preserves a quick cash route. Storing flowers delays the reward, but matching a recipe pays a premium. The first balance test succeeds if unlocking moonflower does not retire mint: the player should still intentionally plant mint to complete both common and rare-accent orders.
Visitor Seed Loop
This adds a second loop on top of the basic gardening loop: flowers are not only harvest endpoints, they are ecological invitations. A visitor can be purely informational, helpful to the current plant, or a carrier of new seeds.
Visitor recording is passive after arrival:
The player never has to click every visitor. Arrival remains visible on the pot for a few seconds, then resolves automatically. Cards replace repetitive clicking with long-term familiarity progress.
Money and Tool Loop
The first tool lasts for eight actual watering triggers rather than eight seconds. It belongs to one flower bed and remains installed there across harvests until its durability is used up; planted and empty beds both expose that installed state. A selected planted bed states the exact automatic threshold and remaining triggers, and briefly highlights when a trigger occurs. When the third bed becomes occupied, the greenhouse grants and automatically installs one trial dripper and presents it as a persistent automation milestone, so the player sees the promise before the first four-bed workload peaks. No manual activation or second install action is required. Further drippers still come from the coin economy, and the central tank remains the permanent relief milestone.
After the central tank is installed, a 420-coin cycling soil feeder becomes the next permanent capital project. While a plant is growing, the machine monitors its bed. Below 35% nutrients it automatically spends one stored compost and restores 42 nutrient points. The equipment card shows whether it is monitoring or waiting for compost, and a triggered bed briefly reports the automatic feed.
This machine closes an existing resource loop instead of inventing a second harvest interface: growth drains persistent soil, harvest or decline returns compost, and the machine routes that compost back into active production. It never purchases inputs or acts while compost is unavailable. Manual fertilizing remains available above the emergency threshold for players who want to prepare a valuable crop early.
The first sorting-bench experiment was removed after playtesting. At four to eight beds, grouping two or three existing harvest commands did not change strategy or create enough relief to justify a named capital machine. Batch sale and stock remain valid scale problems, but should return only with larger production volume, mixed-selection controls, or explicit inventory policies.
Lucky Wheel Loop
The wheel is an occasional burst layered above the guaranteed economy. It consumes coins or common flowers, but each Cup limits the player to three total draws. Results save before animation, rare-seed pity persists across events, and no real-money or full-bank multiplier exists.
Plants
| Plant | Role | Visitor Hook |
|---|---|---|
| Mint | Fast starter plant | Can attract aphids when left dry |
| Calendula | Friendly flowering plant | Attracts bees while blooming |
| Moonflower | Slower night-themed plant | First step toward later nocturnal visitors |
| Wildberry flower | Rare visitor seed | Attracts birds more often |
| Hydrangea | Soil-depth tutorial plant | Color changes with ordinary or specialist soil |
| Borage | Wheel-limited blue flower | Attracts bees more readily while blooming |
Visitors
| Visitor | Role | First Behavior |
|---|---|---|
| Bee | Helpful visitor | Adds an extra seed when an observed bloom returns to soil |
| Aphid | Mild pest | Slows growth, attracts ladybugs |
| Ladybug | Helpful visitor | Clears aphids and gives notes |
| Sparrow | Seed carrier | Can bring rare wildberry seeds |
Care and Soil Loop
The prototype now includes a first gentle environment layer:
Each plant has a visible preferred water range. Being outside it slows growth and adds stress, but the player can correct the situation: water a dry pot, or loosen wet soil to drain it. A fully stressed plant declines early instead of disappearing. "Collect seed and return to soil" always gives back one seed and compost, so a mistake changes the reward instead of ending progression.
Severe drought uses a deliberately disproportionate visual joke instead of a continuous alarm. Crossing into the severe range triggers one brief low-budget disaster-broadcast performance, then leaves a stable high-contrast warning. Manual watering answers with one short recovery stamp. This keeps urgent state scanning obvious without turning an idle garden into a wall of flashing cards.
Soil nutrients persist in each pot across plantings. Growth consumes nutrients, harvest and decline create compost, and compost restores a pot.
Soil Depth Loop
Soil preparation is isolated inside the soil lab instead of repeating three controls on every empty bed. Ordinary potting soil is free and permanent. Acidic substrate and garden lime are concrete purchased materials that turn one empty position into a specialist bed for three completed harvests. Time and offline progress do not consume the effect. The bed shows its remaining harvests and returns to ordinary soil after the final one.
Blue, purple, and pink hydrangea now each feed a repeatable order, so color discovery creates recurring demand rather than one useful blue route and two decorative leftovers. During the Spring Cup, the same three-state choice appears only inside an empty event pot while hydrangea is selected. Specialist products are drawn from normal inventory; switching away before planting refunds them. Blue and pink specialist candidates receive a small difficulty credit, while all three colors remain visible through judging and the flower market.
Adjacent mismatch only slows growth; the strongest mismatch also removes one flower but never kills the plant or blocks seed recovery. Hydrangea accepts all three profiles and turns them into visible colors and separate stored materials.
Soil texture, drainage, light placement, and detailed numeric pH remain deferred until this three-state model proves useful.
Tick Rules
Every second:
- Planted pots lose a little water.
- Plants grow fastest inside their own preferred water range.
- Prolonged drought or waterlogging adds stress and can cause early decline.
- Healthy conditions gradually recover stress.
- Growth consumes persistent soil nutrients; depleted soil slows growth.
- A specialist soil profile applies a stable growth modifier and loses one use only after a completed harvest.
- Hydrangea records a color variant when bloom begins.
- Low stress and rich soil each add one flower to the final bloom.
- A bloom starts at full freshness and can attract matching visitors automatically.
- Selling remains available throughout bloom, but lower freshness reduces the price.
- Stocking also respects freshness: fresh blooms enter at full yield, mid-age blooms lose one usable flower, and old blooms lose two, with a minimum of one.
- A bloom eventually declines and returns seed and compost if it is not sold.
- Visitors may bring known or rare seeds when observed.
- Aphids can appear on stressed growing plants.
- Ladybugs can appear when aphids are present.
Spring Cup Arc Loop
This arc sits above the ordinary greenhouse loops. Event pots do not connect to the central tank, so the short competition asks for active care, but watering still resolves in one action. The deadline spends only when a seed is planted; offline time and real dates never consume event rounds.
One seed from each remaining event candidate returns at closing. Failure can lose the entry fee and four planting opportunities, but it cannot destroy unique seeds, the home greenhouse, tools, or stored materials.
Done For First Prototype
The first prototype is successful if a player can play for five minutes and naturally think, "I want to harvest one more bloom."