ROOTWORK

Grow the roots. Share every path you can.

A seed has landed in a meadow. Somewhere under it, pools of water sit in the soil between the clay and the stones. Grow its roots down to every one of them and it flowers.

Hold a direction and the root tip grows into the soil, one cell at a time. Loam is easy, clay is slow and costly, old worm burrows are quick, and stones cannot be grown through at all. Roots never grow upward. Slide back along the roots you have already grown to start a new branch from anywhere on them. With a mouse or a finger, drag from the tip along the path you want and the root grows exactly there.

Every soil has a leanest root system, and the game knows it exactly

Every cell of root costs the seed sugar, and a root that two pools can share is paid for once. For every soil the game works out the cheapest root system there is (exactly, not a guess), and the notch in your sugar gauge shows where it would stand if you grew it. Match it for GOLD. Get within 5% for SILVER, within 15% for BRONZE.

After every bloom, press X to see the best roots drawn over your own. They often fork in the middle of nowhere, far from any pool, so that two or three pools can share one long root. Learning to see those forks before you start is most of the game.

Forty seeds, forty wildflowers

Every soil blooms its own flower above the grass when the last pool is reached: harebell, foxglove, cow parsley, viper's bugloss. They are pressed into a herbarium you can page through from the seed screen.

Play it in your browser first

The free edition on this page is ten soils. The $5.99 Windows download is forty, with more pools to share as it goes, all forty flowers for the herbarium, and an ending.

---

Controls. Arrows or WASD: hold to grow, or to slide along your roots. Mouse or touch: press on the tip or any root and drag the path you want; tap a root to jump to it. Z or Enter to confirm, X for back and the best roots, P to pause, M to mute. On the seed screen, Up opens the herbarium and Down shows the rules.

Paid, from the same studio: NIGHT PLOUGH ($5.99), clear every street of a snowbound village before dawn, doubling back as little as you can · WARDLOCK ($7.99), forty-eight generated warded locks for the Game Boy, each with a proof of its shortest solution · LODESTONE ($6.99), one carved harness, four sockets, twelve marks, and nothing readable alone · everything else at csaf.itch.io

---

Made by Core Systems Asset Factory. Every soil and every wildflower is generated by the game's own code, and the best root system for each soil is computed by that same code. The browser edition's source is unminified.

AI disclosure: the code, art and text were made with generative AI assistance. The music and sound effects are procedural synthesis from note data, not the output of a generative audio model.