Cultivation

About the game

Cultivation is a game about a community of gardeners who grow food for themselves on a shared island. There is no right way to play it. You can keep to your own corner and feed your family, trade fruit with the neighbours until they like you enough to let you lead them, or make trouble by poisoning the soil. Two runs rarely go the same way.

You start with one gardener, three seeds and a patch of land you have not claimed yet. Click the Plot button and then two places on the map to mark a plot. Plant a seed in it, carry water from the lake and pour it over the seedling, and wait until the flowers fall away and the fruit ripens. Fruit feeds you, and eating it also gives you more seeds. Your gardener uses up three nutrients, red, yellow and purple, simply by living, more by walking and most by walking while carrying water. When one of them runs out, your gardener ages faster, and only fruit of the right colour puts it back.

The other gardeners are not scenery. They have their own plots, they like or dislike what you do, and they tell you so with little flying symbols: a green plus for pleasure, a red cross for anger. Give them fruit and they may give some back; if they like you a lot you may be able to mate with them, and if they adore you they may even let you lead them. Mate with someone another gardener is fond of and you will make an enemy.

The game ends when your genetic line dies out. Until then, when your gardener dies you take over its oldest descendant. There is also a goal for the long run: a gate to immortality that opens one ring at a time, each time your current gardener dies in the same spot, until five rings are open and you can lead some of your fellow gardeners through it.

Cultivation was made by Jason Rohrer between 2006 and 2007 and released into the public domain. Nothing in it is drawn by hand except the font: the ground, the plants, the gardeners and their faces, and even the music are generated by the program, so every island, every plant and every tune is different.

Playing it here

This is the original game, compiled for the browser from its source code. The download is under 2 MB. The game is in English, nothing is saved (every visit starts a new island), and sound needs a click on the page first, as in any browser. On the first screen the game offers a tutorial that walks you through a whole game: click the green button to take it, the red one to skip it. The tutorial stops the game while you read.

The game was made for a small window and works best at about 600 by 600 pixels on screen; here it follows the size of the frame.

Controls

Getting started

Plot, plant, water. Mark a plot, select a seed in the left bar (the three brown triangles) and press Plant. A tan circle over a plant means it needs more water to finish growing. You can only plant, water and harvest inside your own plot.

Match seed and soil. Dark seeds like dark soil and light seeds like light soil. The colour under a seed in your storage is the colour of the fruit it will give, which tells you which nutrient it will restore.

Watch the buttons. A button lights up only when the action is possible. When the Harvest button wakes up near a plant, its fruit is ripe.

Be kind to the neighbours. Plots can overlap, and overlapping plots are the main source of quarrels. Gifts make friends, and fighting gardeners can ruin the island for everybody. The Lead button can calm a fight.

Tips

Eat before you run dry. Fruit rots. It turns white and shrinks, so harvest it and use it soon. A gardener who is low on any nutrient ages faster, and a baby that follows you stops growing when it is low on one.

Plan the last steps. To open the gate you need to survive at least five generations and have each gardener die where the first one died. Poisoned ground destroys a gate, and fruit you carry across it turns poisoned, which can be a quick way to die in the right place.

Look after your descendants. When you die you take over your oldest living descendant, so children are how the game goes on. When the line is gone, the game is over, but you can keep watching the island and start again with the Restart button.

Frequently asked questions

Does it have an end? Yes, in two ways: your line dies out, or you pass through the gate to immortality.

Is it multiplayer? No. The other gardeners are computer-controlled.

Can I save? No. A game lasts as long as your line does.

Does it work on a phone? It needs only clicks, so a tablet or a phone can work, but it was made for a mouse.