SUGARHOUSE

A maple sugaring incremental. The weather is the clock.

Late February: a sugarbush under snow and a cold sugarhouse at the foot of the slope. Sap runs only on a day whose night froze and whose afternoon thawed, so you play the forecast. Tap the bush before the big run, gather the pails, keep the fire under the evaporator, and boil the season down into jars before the buds break and the sap turns.

What you do

• Tap by the trunk. A tree's size says how many spouts it takes safely: none under 10 inches across, one from 10, two from 18, three from 25. Drive more and it gives more sap this spring and pays for it in health for years, charged on the most taps it carried, so pulling them on the last day does not dodge it. A bush tapped greedily every spring dies.
• Draw the tubing. Buy gravity tubing and drag steel blue lines down the slope. Sap only runs downhill: never uphill, never two level steps in a row, never over a rock.
• Thin for firewood. The evaporator burns wood. Fell a tree and its neighbours get the light, and a sapling sprouts from the stump two summers later. Dead trees can be felled too.
• Boil it right. By the rule of 86, about forty three gallons of 2% sap make one gallon of syrup, and every half gallon fills a jar. Early sweet sap boils golden, late sap dark, and sap left standing in the tank sours.
• The jar window. Every spring ends with that season's jars on the sugarhouse window, each in its own colour with its own paper label, lettered with its spring where the jar is big enough, beside a map of your bush.
• Eight upgrades. Gravity tubing, a bigger evaporator pan, a woodshed, a vacuum pump, maple candy, a second bush up the hill, a grading kit, and the fair jar. After that the county fair runs every spring: show your best jar since the last one and count your ribbons.

A careful sugarmaker reaches the first fair in about five springs, around twenty minutes at normal speed, and the bush carries on after it. No game over: a lean spring is just a lean spring, and the bush is waiting next year. It saves by itself in your browser and never sends anything anywhere. Mouse, touch or keyboard, and it plays on phones held upright or sideways.

Controls

Click or tap a tree to use the tool you have chosen. 1 2 3 4 tap, pull a tap, fell, tubing · G gather · F the fire · Space or P pause · + and - speed · arrows and Enter work the bush from the keyboard · H how it works · M sound.

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Paid, from the same studio

• THE TURNING YEAR ($9.99): one dial turns the season across the whole world; freeze a brook into a road, or melt a fell to float a boat.
• ROOTWORK ($5.99): grow one seed's roots down through a generated meadow to reach every pocket of water, never upward.
• NIGHT PLOUGH ($5.99): before dawn, clear every street of a snowed in village with one plough and end back at the depot.

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, including its one snow texture; the cover illustration on this page was made with an image model. The music and every sound effect are synthesised by our own code, with no generative audio model. Body type: Alegreya Sans, under the SIL Open Font License, which ships beside it.

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