TEA ESTATE

Pluck it fine, fire it right, and sell it by the grade.

TEA ESTATE is a free incremental for your browser about a hill tea estate. Your pluckers go round the sections of bushes, the factory withers, rolls, oxidises and fires each day's leaf, and every six days the tea goes to auction by grade. Two decisions run the estate and they pull against each other: how fine to pluck, and how long to oxidise.

How it plays

• The field. Every day the bushes grow new shoots, slowly in the first flush and fastest in the monsoon. Bright tips on a section are leaf waiting to be plucked; they turn olive when the leaf grows coarse.
• The plucking standard. FINE takes two leaves and a bud and makes the best tea, but the round is slow. COARSE strips everything fast and makes poor tea. The PLUCKING panel shows the race: how many days a round takes against how many days the leaf stays fine.
• The oxidation dial. Every flush wants a different time, and the weather moves it a little every day. The tea taster's green band always holds the right time, a copper pip shows what the last batch really wanted, and too long flattens the grade faster than too short.
• The factory takes a fixed weight of leaf a day. Leaf it cannot take waits in the sacks, loses quality every day and is thrown away after three days.
• The auction sells everything by grade, from FTGFOP down to DUST. The second flush pays best, and a glut of one grade at one sale lowers its price.
• Build as the years open it: new sections, pluckers' lines, withering troughs, a tea taster, an orthodox roller, shade trees and a city broker. Each one appears on the estate map. From year 5 you can buy the estate from the agency house, which ends the story; a well run estate gets there in about six game years. After that you can keep running it.

Controls

Mouse or touch for everything: drag the dial or tap minus and plus, tap a standard, tap a plant plate to build. On a keyboard: Left and Right turn the dial a minute, Up and Down five minutes, 1 2 3 set the standard, Q W E R T Y U build, B buys the estate (press it twice to sign), Space or P pauses, + and - change the speed (1x, 3x, 8x), H shows how to play, M turns the sound off and on, and Escape opens the menu. Landscape screens get the wide layout and upright phones a tall one.

The estate saves at every auction, whenever you build, change the standard or turn the dial, and when you leave the page. CONTINUE on the title picks it up.

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Paid, from the same studio

• Verdant 09, Town ($9.99): the tileset this estate's grass, cobbles, walls, doors and yard pieces come from, with a whole town for your own maps.
• Verdant 01, Overworld ($4.99): grass, trees and lakes as a 16x16 overworld tileset.
• GLASSWRIGHT ($6.99): run a medieval glassworks, where every window you complete is drawn by the game.

Credits and disclosure. Made by Core Systems Asset Factory. The code and the text were written with AI assistance. The grass, cobbles, walls, doors, windows and yard pieces are tiles from our own Verdant 09 Town pack, made by our own procedural tile code, itself AI written; the rows of tea bushes, the hills, the tin roofs, the pluckers, the dial and every screen are drawn by the game's own code. The music and every sound are synthesised by the game's own code (the two music loops were rendered from it), with no generative audio model and no samples. Typefaces: IM Fell English SC and Alegreya Sans, under the SIL Open Font License, which ships beside them.