UNDERSTORY

The forest floor eats everything. You are what does the eating.

You are the mycelium under a forest floor. Spread hyphae across the litter, digest what you reach, and fruit where it counts. There is no run, no reset and no death screen. Ground can dry out and die back, but your spores, your upgrades, your fruiting bodies and the substrate you have opened are permanent. You never start over.

Two systems that fight

SPREAD wants you far from home, because new ground is new food.

DECAY punishes exactly that. Moisture falls away from springs and fruiting bodies, and a cell can only get as dense as its moisture allows, while density multiplies both your yield and the spores a fruiting pays. Push past your water and the frontier thins out behind you. Sit still and you eat your ground down to nothing while rival mould creeps into what is left.

Neither expanding nor holding is a strategy on its own. That is the game.

Prestige that does not wipe the board

Fruiting is how you make spores, and it costs you: biomass, plus density from the cell and the ring around it. What you get back is permanent. A fruiting body waters and anchors the ground near it, and keeps shedding spores for as long as it stands. Fruiting bodies must stand at least three cells apart, so where you put them is the decision.

Four substrates, four different problems

Substrate	Food	Yield	Moisture
Leaf litter	55	1.0	95%	poor, easy, holds water
Deadwood	210	2.7	62%	four times the food, needs lignin
Bone	520	6.2	20%	enormously rich, desperately dry
Stone lichen	never depletes	1.35	42%	almost nothing, forever

A new band is a new problem, not a bigger number.

Everything you see, the game drew

Forty eight fruiting bodies, six cap families across eight palettes, drawn at run time from hand authored shapes. No sprite sheet, no texture atlas. The five substrate plates are procedurally generated from a hand authored palette by our own pixel art engine, not from an image model. The music is synthesised from oscillators, and the sound effects are not files at all, they are made in your browser at the moment you hear them.

• Free, plays in the browser. No account, no install.
• Saves itself to your browser, and keeps growing for up to eight hours while you are away.
• Mouse only. Runs about seven hours end to end if you go for the whole upgrade tree.

More free browser games from CSAF

• BANNERET: SUCCESSION — Plant the banner and the whole House charges it. The dead stay dead, their heirs inherit the blood, flaws and all.
• CHARGE BARGE — Drive a storm ironclad up a hostile coast. Volts buy the hull; surge buys the miracle; the ram is a decision.
• OTTERBOUND — Six otters, one raft, and a river that never ends the same way twice.
• THE LAST FLOCK — Your army is a crowd you shape with movement alone, and it dies.
• RUSTBLOOM — You never find the key. You forge it. A top-down adventure where every lock has many answers.
• SECOND INTENT — A duel where the opponent is openly building a read on you, and shows you exactly what it has learned.
• FLOODMARK — The flood is not the disaster. The flood is the harvest. A cozy town builder you play by aiming a river.
• ANNEAL — Pour it big. Pour it right. You rarely get both. A free foundry game about size and temper.
• PERIGEE — An indirect god game where your only lever is the moon. Set the orbit; the tide does everything else.
• PRISMHORN — Seven bands leave your horn at once. Each one is a verb, and they fire together: you aim all seven or none.
• STARCHART — Every voyage you fly is inscribed forever. The route you took becomes the constellation.
• HALFLIGHT — Everything in the vault is decaying. That is what pays you.
• WHAT WE BURN — A horror game about the cost of staying warm. Burn what made you a person, or freeze holding on to it.

Core Systems Asset Factory also builds game development tools and asset packs: tilesets, sprite packs, sound effects, music, and editor plugins for RPG Maker MZ, Unity, Unreal and GameMaker.