CROSSBLOOM

An apple tree cannot pollinate itself.

CROSSBLOOM is a free orchard incremental that plays in your browser. You take on your grandmother's orchard: seven old GOODWIFE trees on a slope, all one variety, so they barely crop. An apple sets fruit only on the days a DIFFERENT variety beside it is in bloom too. Bees carry the pollen, and they only work the trees around the one they are on.

The one rule

Every variety blooms in its own window of spring:

• EARLY varieties on days 1 to 5
• MID varieties on days 4 to 8
• LATE varieties on days 7 to 11
• a wilding CRAB all spring: it pollinates any other variety, but crab pollen sets only half a crop

Early and mid share two days, mid and late share two, early and late share none. Where you plant each tree decides whether it crops. A cross on the grass shows how good a partner the variety you have chosen would have there: green for a full crop, amber for part of one (the tree’s own info line says how much, and why), a red dash for none.

Four things that pull against each other

• The blossom. Nine varieties, each with a bloom window. GRANDSIRE is a triploid: a big crop, but sterile pollen, so it needs two named partners for a full crop and pollinates nobody. Beehives let bees range two cells instead of one.
• The frost. On a frost night cold air runs down the slope like water and pools in the low ground and in an old pond hollow. Open blossom standing in it is lost: half of it where the cold air lies shallow, all of it where it lies deep. A hedge breaks the wind for the bees, but it also dams the cold air above it, unless you leave a gap in the line. The FROST button shows where a hard frost would pool.
• The rootstock. Dwarfing trees bloom next spring but crop small, low in the cold. Vigorous trees take five years, crop big, hold their blossom above a shallow frost, and shade the trees beside them.
• The crop. Dessert apples sell in autumn or rot. Keepers fetch three times as much from the apple store in winter. Cider apples go to the press, which pays for a blend of sharp, sweet and bittersweet in near-equal shares, so you need all three bloom windows working.

The goal

The wassail: one year in which all eight named varieties crop thirty apples or more and the press makes a 90% blend. Then the village comes up the hill with lanterns to toast the orchard you grew, drawn in full on a winter night with every tree in view. A single variety never sets an apple, and a random planting rarely balances the press.

Nine upgrades

Each opens when the orchard has earned enough in all: vigorous rootstock, an apple store, cider scions, a hedger, a cider press, beehives, rare scions, frost candles for frost nights, and the neighbour's lower field.

Nothing restarts

No clicking for apples: every action is a planting, a graft, a hedge or a hive. It saves as you go, and the orchard keeps growing and selling while you are away, for up to a year. One tree on dwarfing stock, of any variety, is free every year, so no orchard is ever a dead end. Summer and autumn pass twice as fast as the seasons where you decide things. Every season repaints it: blossom, swelling fruit, autumn gold and bare winter limbs.

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

• 1 plant, 2 graft, 3 hedge, 4 hive, 5 grub out, V variety, R rootstock
• the arrow keys and Enter act on the orchard
• T tabs, F 3x speed, X frost map, P pause, H help, M sound

It plays on desktop and phones, and switches to its own tall layout on an upright phone. The wassail takes a little under half an hour at normal speed (less at 3x), and play goes on after that.

Paid, from the same studio

• 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.
• ROOTWORK ($5.99): under a generated meadow, grow one seed's roots down through the soil to reach every pocket of water.

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 ground plates from our own procedural pixel engine. That covers every tree, blossom, bee, hedge and frost pool. 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. The apple varieties are invented names.

More free browser games: COPPICE, COMBWRIGHT, AFFINEUR. Everything we make: csaf.itch.io.