A quiet farming game. Northern Europe, about 1010 AD.
Thirteen years on one plot. Stumps come out, fences go up section by section, the field darkens as the soil comes good, and a barn replaces the shed. Nothing resets between years.
You are working a patch of unclaimed forest edge into a farm. Nobody attacks you, nothing chases you, and you cannot lose. A bad winter means a lean season, not a game over.
There are no quest markers, no achievement popups and no tutorial voice. At the end of each season the journal writes three to five sentences about what actually happened, and keeps every one of them.
npm install
npm run dev # the game
npm run play # the same simulation, in the terminal
npm test # 90 tests
Simulation and rendering are completely separate.
src/sim/ headless. no THREE, no DOM, no window, no fs
src/game/ snapshot.ts + host.ts — the only place the two halves meet
src/renderer/ three.js. reads snapshots, writes nothing back
src/testkit/ automated players, for proving the economy without a human
GameHost owns the state. Anything that changes the world calls perform();
anything that looks at it gets a structuredClone that is deep-frozen in
development, so an accidental write throws instead of quietly corrupting the
save. tests/architecture.test.ts greps src/sim for three, document,
window, canvas and fs on every run.
The plot is a 24×24 tile grid owned by the simulation. The renderer only ever reads it. Swap renderers and the game survives untouched.
Day by day. Every action costs both stamina and daylight. Daylight runs a real solar curve at sixty degrees north, and every season boundary is a solstice or an equinox — spring opens at twelve hours and climbs to eighteen, autumn falls from twelve to six, winter climbs back. Heat lags the light by about a week, the way ground and water actually behave. Stamina binds the summer; daylight binds the winter. That trade is most of why the seasons feel different.
Weather is a state, not a dice roll. Temperature, cloud, precipitation and wind drift day to day with seasonal bias and multi-day fronts, so a wet week feels like a wet week. It is described in a line of prose each morning and never as a forecast. Snow lies and melts unevenly — the wood keeps its drifts for days after the field is bare. Puddles stand for days and dry slowly.
Hunting is trap-tending. You place snares on a forest tile and check them some days later. Results resolve in a line or two. Empty snares are common and stated plainly. A roe deer is a genuine event.
Accumulation is permanent. Stumps come out and never come back. Fences go up section by section around ground that has carried a crop. The field darkens as the soil improves. A shed becomes a barn. A path wears into the grass where you actually walk — and ploughing erases it, because a turned tile is not a path any more.
Animals change what a day looks like. Hens, rabbits, a goat, sheep, a pig, and finally an ox who halves the labour of breaking ground. Neglect makes them thin and unproductive; nothing ever dies of it. A dog improves the snares, a cat cuts what the store loses to rats. Both age. There is a setting to turn animal ageing off entirely.
The solstice at sixty degrees north — eighteen hours of light, and the sun taking a long shallow arc around the sky rather than passing overhead.
One InstancedMesh per model, about thirty draw calls for the whole plot no
matter how full it gets. Orthographic camera at a true three-quarter pitch;
pan and zoom are clamped and there is no free orbit.
One directional light is the sun, driven by the simulation's solar geometry. Cloud scales it and softens the shadows. After dark the moon takes over on a real 29-day cycle: a full midwinter moon rides at fifty degrees and is up all night, while a full midsummer moon barely scrapes the horizon. A clear winter night is genuinely workable. Shadows are one cascade at 2048, tight around the plot. Nothing is baked.
The journal, read back through the years.
A full midwinter moon rides at fifty degrees and is up all night, while the midwinter sun barely clears six. The hearth throws the only warm light.
| drag | pan |
| scroll | zoom |
R |
swing slowly to the opposite side |
J |
the journal |
[ ] |
scrub the hour (debug) |
M |
sound on and off |
Esc |
back to real time |
The renderer accepts debug parameters: ?years=10&day=52&hour=23&cloud=0.1&force=snow.
npm run map -- 10 the plot after ten years, in ASCII
npm run sim a ten-year economy report for two automated players
npm run shot -- 10 render the current scene headless to a PNG
npm run dist package with electron-builder
Kenney Nature Kit 2.1, CC0. See assets/README.md for the source and how to
restore it.
The livestock are drop-in ready: put eight GLBs named animal_hen.glb,
animal_ox.glb and so on into public/models/ and they are used on the next
load, re-centred and scaled to fit whatever size they were authored at. No code
changes. Anything missing falls back to a flat-shaded stand-in, which is what
ships today. assets/README.md has the table and where to get them.
Synthesised, not sampled — partly so there is no licence question, mostly because it answers the weather. The wind bed opens and brightens as the wind rises, rain comes up through the same filter, snow is duller and quieter, the stream runs fuller after rain, and the fire only crackles when there is wood on it. Birds are sparse and only in daylight in the growing seasons. There is no music and nothing plays because you did something correct.
Checked across eight seeds and twelve years, for both an automated diligent player and one that never farms at all:
| careless | diligent | |
|---|---|---|
| hungry nights in 12 years | 0–1 | 28–51, nearly all in year one |
| cold nights | 0 | 0–2 |
| grain at year twelve | 0–28 | 56–378 |
| tiles ever worked | 0 | 69–74 of a 69–78 tile clearing |
The careless player survives every winter on every seed and never builds anything. The diligent one has one lean first year and is comfortable after, and by year twelve has worked essentially the whole clearing — the ox is what makes the last third of it reachable.
npm run dist
electron-builder is configured for macOS (dmg and zip), Windows (nsis) and
Linux (AppImage). The macOS arm64 bundle has been built and launched — about
277 MB, unsigned, so Gatekeeper will want right-click → Open the first time.
There is no application icon yet.
The animal GLBs themselves — the loader is in and waiting for them. An app icon. Code signing, if it is ever to leave this machine.