ROOTBOUND

A plant that thrives grows big, and a big plant shades, drains and sours the ground around it. The bed you laid out perfectly stops working because it worked. The shovel is the only answer, and it costs the plant real health to use.

ROOTBOUND is a free garden simulation with twelve real plant species in it. Every cell of the garden holds four invisible values, light, moisture, soil pH and nutrient, and every species wants a particular band on all four of them. You dig beds, you plant specimens where their niche is met, and they grow in real time through four stages: seedling, young, mature, flowering. Then they start editing the ground for everything around them.

What you do

• Dig. Rough ground becomes a workable bed, and digging is free. The scarce thing in this game is never ground, it is ground that suits the plant you want to put in it.
• Look. Four overlays paint light, water, soil pH and feed across the whole garden, so you can see the shade a tree is throwing before you plant anything into it.
• Plant. A plant is scored on its worst axis rather than on an average of the four, so perfect light in bone dry soil is a dying plant and not a mediocre one. When something is unhappy it names the axis in words you can act on: too shaded here, ground too poor here, soil too limy here.
• Move. Lifting a plant costs it health, scaled by how big it has grown, so the specimens you are proudest of are the ones you can least afford to move. There are four shovels, and the one you start with cannot lift a mature birch at all: the shock it deals is 1.008 against a health bar that stops at 1.000. A tree needs a better blade, and better blades cost seeds.
• Amend. Once you have bought a longer blade you can dig compost, sharp grit, garden lime and leafmould into a cell, and that change is permanent. It is the other answer to a bed that has gone wrong, and it competes with moving for the same seeds.

You have to grow the shade before you can use it

Three of the twelve plants cannot live in open ground, and the only things in the game that make shade are the sunflower, the rhubarb and the birch. Measured across seven fresh gardens, the best that open ground offers is 0.43 for the lady fern, 0.29 for the hosta and 0.00 for wild garlic, and none of those is enough to flower. Under two mature birches the same hosta reads 0.885 and thrives. Those same two birches take a lavender standing on its own best sunny cell from 1.000 to 0.000.

So the garden has an arc, and it is the one a real piece of ground has. You start in full sun with thyme and lavender, because an empty garden is all sun. You grow the canopy that the shade lovers need. Then you move everything that cannot live under it. The soil keeps a record too: a birch acidifies the ground beneath it, and that acidity is still there after the birch is gone.

Seasons move the shadows for you

Four seasons of twelve days each. The sun sits high in summer and low in winter, so the same garden is a different light map in December with nothing planted and nothing moved. Every species flowers in exactly one season and that is its only yield window. Nothing flowers in winter and almost nothing grows, which is what makes winter the season you rearrange in.

The herbarium is the score, and it is permanent

The first time a plant flowers, that species is pressed into the herbarium for good. It stays pressed if the plant later dies, if you dig it up, or if the whole bed goes wrong afterwards. Twelve pressed specimens ends the game. Nothing you have already recorded can be taken away from you.

The twelve plants

• Creeping Thyme, Thymus serpyllum. Wants it hot, dry, poor and limy. Nothing else in the garden wants all four.
• Lavender, Lavandula angustifolia. The first thing that ever grew here. It will be the first thing the shade kills.
• Rosemary, Salvia rosmarinus. Woody and upright, and the first plant you can unlock that flowers in spring.
• Ling Heather, Calluna vulgaris. Sun and acid and hungry ground. It will not forgive a limed bed.
• Sunflower, Helianthus annuus. Pays best of the early plants and eats most. The first real shade you can grow on purpose.
• Bluebell, Hyacinthoides non-scripta. Dappled light under something taller. It wants a neighbour, not an open bed.
• Foxglove, Digitalis purpurea. A spire of bells at the edge of the shade. It marks where the wood begins.
• Rhubarb, Rheum rhabarbarum. Enormous leaves and a gross appetite. It shades and starves everything it touches.
• Silver Birch, Betula pendula. The shade engine. Everything in the second half of this garden lives in its shadow.
• Lady Fern, Athyrium filix-femina. No flower, only spores, and it will not tolerate an hour of open sun.
• Hosta, Hosta sieboldiana. Blue ribbed plates of leaf. A single hour of midday sun scorches it brown.
• Wild Garlic, Allium ursinum. The deepest shade in the garden, and the last thing you will ever press.

Some things worth knowing

• A garden day takes three seconds at normal speed, and there is a triple speed button for the long wait between flowerings.
• You start with fourteen seeds and a thyme that costs nothing.
• The garden opens out in three plots, and every plant you press unlocks something new to plant.
• A plant dying costs you that plant. It never costs you the run.
• Nothing here is random. The same garden seed grows the same ground every time.

Controls

Mouse or touch for everything. There are keys if you want them: D to dig, M to move, L and W for the light and water overlays, space to pause, 1 and 3 for speed, H for how it works, S for sound.

Free, plays in the browser, and it saves itself after every day in the garden.

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Made by Core Systems Asset Factory. AI disclosure, in full: the code is AI written. The graphics are AI written too, in the sense that every sprite and ground plate you see is drawn by our own procedural code rather than by an image model, and no diffusion model was used for the art in this game. The sound effects and the music loop are synthesised by our own code, not generated by an audio model. The text on this page and in the game is AI written.

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