COPPICE

Cut the wood. It grows back.

COPPICE is a free woodland incremental that plays in your browser. You take on a hazel wood nobody has cut in twenty years. Most of the stools are overstood, choking on their own poles and losing vigour. Bramble holds the gaps, and a few old oaks stand over it all. Hazel grows back from the stump when you cut it. For centuries this wood was cut a patch at a time and never cleared, and you are going to bring it back.

The one rule

A stool's age when the crew cuts it decides what it gives:

• 2 to 4 years: beanpoles
• 5 to 9 years: hurdle rods
• 10 years and more: cordwood
• under 2 years: nothing but brash, and the stool is weakened

Every cut stool grows again from the stump. You mark stools, and the crew cuts them in autumn and winter, in the order you marked them.

Three things that pull against each other

• The wood. Stools grow by their vigour and their light, and a grown oak shades the ones beside it. Past sixteen years a stool is overstood and declines, and an old weak one can collapse into bramble. Deer browse the fresh shoots unless you ring them with a dead hedge of brash. You can layer a hazel rod into a gap to root a new stool, and plant oaks.
• The trade. Each market takes only so much a day, and each wants more in its own season: beanpoles in spring, cordwood for the winter, hurdles for lambing. Cut the whole wood at one age and you flood one market while the others go without. A hurdle maker weaves rods into hurdles, and a charcoal clamp burns cordwood for the forge.
• The wildlife. Every spring the Trust surveys the wood for five species. Bluebells want fresh light and fritillaries want fresh clearings the deer left alone. Nightingales need a block of thicket, dormice need connected hazel old enough to bear nuts, and woodpeckers need grown oaks.

The goal

Find all five species in one survey. No single age of hazel holds them all. Only a wood cut in rotation, a share each winter and in blocks so that every age stands at once, can. Cutting everything for money never gets there, and it earns less too.

Eleven upgrades

The upgrades open up as more of the wood comes back into rotation:

• woodsmen and better billhooks
• a carter's round to more villages
• a hurdle maker, a charcoal clamp and an iron ring kiln
• an oak nursery, a deer fence and a keeper
• walkers who pay to see the wildlife
• a woodward who marks one coupe each autumn on the rotation you choose

Nothing restarts

It saves as you go. While you are away the wood keeps growing, the crew keeps cutting and the carter keeps selling, for up to a year. Every season repaints the whole wood: spring bluebells, full summer leaf, autumn gold, and winter twigs and catkins.

Controls: tap or click to play. From the keyboard:

• 1 mark, 2 hedge, 3 layer, 4 oak
• the arrow keys and Enter act on the wood
• T tabs, F 3x speed, P pause, H help, M sound

It plays on desktop and phones, and switches to its own tall layout on an upright phone. A finished wood takes about fifteen to twenty minutes at normal speed, and play goes on after that.

Paid, from the same studio

• ROOTWORK ($5.99): under a generated meadow, grow one seed's roots down through the soil to reach every pocket of water.
• THE TURNING YEAR ($9.99): one dial turns the season across the whole world, and it will not hold still.
• MILLWRIGHT ($5.99): raise three windmills in a farming parish, where every farm carts its sacks to the nearest mill.

Credits and disclosure. Made by Core Systems Asset Factory. Code and text were written with AI assistance. Every picture in the game is drawn by code written for it, plus three woodland-floor plates from our own procedural pixel engine. That covers every stool, oak, deer and bluebell. The cover is composed from the game's own renderer. The music and the sound effects are synthesised by code, with no generative audio model.

More free browser games: THEODOLITE, STAGHORN, UNDERSTORY. Everything we make: csaf.itch.io.