HEFTSTONE

A flock that knows its own ground.

HEFTSTONE is a free hill farm incremental that plays in your browser. At the head of a valley there are small stony fields by the house and the open fell above them, where no fence has ever stood. Your ewes stay on their own patch of fell because they KNOW it. That learned ground is called a heft. Ewe teaches it to lamb, and it is the farm's real capital.

Four things that pull against each other

• The hefts. At each autumn sale you keep a share of every heft's ewe lambs, and they are born on its ground. Bought-in ewes know nothing. They stray at the gather, and they reset the heft's generations to nothing. A heft gains a generation at each sale where every ewe on it was born on it.
• The fell. Heather feeds the flock, is winter browse and earns the stewardship payment. Graze it past what it carries and it wears out and goes to rough grass, which carries fewer sheep. Leave grass ungrazed beside bracken and the bracken takes it. You can cut bracken, and spread heather brash on grass.
• Stone and walls. The in-bye fields are full of stone. Clearing a field improves its grass and puts the stone on the pile. The stone builds the walls, one stone per edge of a field. A walled field lambs in spring only if it is open, and grows hay only on the summer days it stands shut, so the year asks you to open and shut it in turn. Winter frost knocks gaps in the walls, oftener the older they are, and a gap is mended for a day's walling.
• The year. Lambing on the open in-bye in spring, clipping and hay in summer, the gather and the store-lamb sale in autumn, and the flocks down on hay in winter. The dealer sells only 80 bales a winter.

The goal

THE VALLEY HOLDS: all three fell sections are yours, every heft is three generations born on its own ground, 60% of the fell is good heather, and the six in-bye fields by the house are walled (the two intakes on the slope do not count). Then the valley is drawn from above at dusk, with every wall you built and each heft's ground washed in its colour.

Nothing restarts. The farm saves as you go and keeps working while you are away, for up to a year. A bad winter costs sheep and hay, never the ground the surviving ewes know.

Controls: tap or click a field or the fell to choose it, then its buttons. It also plays from the keyboard alone: the arrow keys and Enter over the valley, the number keys for the buttons of the panel you are on (each shows its number), T to move to the next panel, plus F 3x speed, P pause, H help, M sound and Esc back. It plays on desktop and on a phone held upright, with its own tall layout.

Paid, from the same studio

• GLASSWRIGHT ($9.99): run a medieval glassworks, where every window you complete is drawn by the game.
• THE TURNING YEAR ($9.99): one world drawn four times over; turn the season and hold it while the year pulls back.
• MILLWRIGHT ($5.99): raise three windmills in a farming parish so every farm's cart has the shortest road.

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, over ground plates from our own procedural pixel engine. The music ("The Gather") and the sound effects are synthesised by code, with no generative audio model. The breed and place names are invented.

More free browser games: CROSSBLOOM, COPPICE, THEODOLITE. Everything we make: csaf.itch.io.