How to play
- Pick a meadow. The free sandbox starts with every species and no limits. Scenarios give you a goal, a time limit and a small budget of animals, plants or land to change.
- Watch first. Press play and let a season go by. Tap any animal to follow it: its card shows how fed, watered and rested it is, its inherited traits and its life story so far. The Species tab says how each population is doing, and Graphs draws them over time.
- Change something. Choose a tool under the meadow, then tap or paint: place rabbits, deer, foxes, wolves or a beehive, plant flowers, berry bushes or grass, dig water, plant trees or drop rocks. Remove clears whatever is under the brush.
- Trigger an event. Rain, drought, a wildfire where you tap, a harsh winter, or a disease in one species. Then speed time up to 16× and see how the meadow copes.
Drag to look around and pinch to zoom. With a mouse, click the meadow first and then scroll to zoom (or hold Ctrl or ⌘ while scrolling), so scrolling the page never gets caught. The minimap jumps across the meadow. Your meadow saves itself as you play, and three save slots keep the ones you want to come back to.
How the ecology works
Nothing here follows a population formula. Each animal makes its own choices every moment, and the patterns come from all of them together.
- Grass grows fastest when half grazed, spreads into bare ground from its edges, slows almost to nothing in winter and in a drought, and grows back greener on ash after a fire. Near water it grows best.
- Rabbits graze, drink, sleep in burrows and breed whenever they are well fed, so litters come thick and fast on good grass and dry up as it is grazed short. Many young rabbits wander off to dig a warren of their own, which is how empty ground gets settled again. They run for their burrow when a fox pounces, and cross the stream at the gravel fords.
- Deer graze in herds, browse berry bushes and twigs, swim the stream, and give birth in late winter and spring. Among trees they are hard for wolves to pull down. Too many deer and the bushes are eaten to stumps.
- Foxes stalk rabbits alone, creeping close before a short sprint, and raise cubs in a den whenever they are eating well. When rabbits get scarce a fox goes after them less and gets by on voles and beetles: enough to keep a few foxes alive, never enough to raise cubs.
- Wolves live in packs and hunt deer together: alone, a wolf only now and then brings down a weak deer; two or three together often do. When deer are few, a pack hunts them less and scavenges. One female in a pack raises cubs at a time, and young wolves leave a big pack to found their own.
- Bees carry nectar from flowers and bush blossom back to the hive. Flowers they visit set seed; berry bushes they visit fruit far more. Hives store honey for winter, raise long-lived winter bees in autumn, and swarm to a new tree when they’re crowded.
Put those together and the numbers take turns: rabbits boom, foxes multiply on the plenty, rabbits are eaten down, foxes go hungry, and the rabbits recover while foxes are few. The fox peak comes after the rabbit peak, in our test meadows usually by one to five seasons. Over sixteen game years, five of eight test meadows went round two or more times, most often every two and a half to six years; the others swung once or too shallowly to count. Every young animal also inherits its parents’ speed, size and sight with small random changes, so the Traits chart shows populations adapting to whatever is killing them.
The six scenarios
- Balance
- Keep foxes and rabbits alive for 5 years. Stars for: both alive after 5 years; foxes never below 3, rabbits never below 20; no disease released.
- Rabbit plague
- End an autumn with 600 rabbits or fewer (but some) and grass over 55% of the meadow, within 4 years. Stars for: meadow recovered in 4 years; recovered within 2 years; no disease released.
- Reintroduce wolves
- Have a wolf pack alive after 4 years. Stars for: wolves alive after 4 years; deer below 90; berry bushes up by a quarter.
- Survive the drought
- End the second year with at least 200 rabbits and 28 deer. Stars for: meadow recovered after 2 years; rabbits never fell below 20; dug ponds, using 40 water tiles or fewer.
- Pollinator collapse
- End a summer with 150 bees and 550 flowers, within 3 years. Stars for: bees and flowers back within 3 years; within 2 years; placed at most 1 new hive.
- Island
- Keep foxes and rabbits alive on the island for 3 years. Stars for: both alive after 3 years; foxes never below 2, rabbits never below 10; no disease released.
Two labs have no goal. Population growth starts six rabbits on an empty meadow so you can watch the S-shaped curve of a population filling its space, and Natural selection starts slow, short-sighted rabbits among foxes so you can watch the Traits chart climb.
Tips
- Place predators early and in small numbers. A few foxes among a rabbit boom will multiply on their own; a dozen at once eat the rabbits down and then starve.
- When a species is down to its last few, add a pair rather than one: every young animal needs a mother and a father.
- Water is life in a drought. Dig small ponds near warrens and herds, not in a far corner, and plant grass around them: moist ground stays green.
- Flowers need bees to spread, and bees need flowers to eat. Plant flowers in a ring round a new hive.
- Follow one animal for a whole day at 1× speed. Watching a rabbit graze, bolt for its burrow and dig a new one explains the graphs better than anything.
Want something faster? Try Golf with its daily course, or a quick round of 2048 or Minesweeper.