Plant simulator

botany

We're used to the idea that many AAA games are becoming more complicated and more demanding, often taking dozens or even hundreds of hours to conquer. But there's a subclass of games that attempt to do the opposite. It's one of the reasons why Stardew Valley was so successful, as many players used its farming and growing aspects to wind down and relax without having to plough their real gardens. The wonderful botany takes this even further in both implementation and in the demands it puts on you mentally. It does this first by being a simple Python 3 command-line application you can grab and run from its repository without requiring installation or dependencies for configuration. Secondly, it requires very little attention or thought. Like a real plant, it demands simply that you take a look occasionally and don't abandon it.

On first launch, the game starts with you being given a seed. You're not told any of this directly, but you can read about it within the included instructions. It then becomes your task to water the plant, check on its growth and remember to come back every 24 hours to do the same. There are more than 20 different species of plants, all drawn as ASCII art, and given random attributes when you first run the game, but just like with real plants, it takes days for anything to appear from that initial seed. If you forget to water your ASCII, it will perish, and your flower can mutate at any stage of its development. But if it survives, you can harvest the growth and use this to seed a new generation with a 20-percent growth bonus. Even more impressively, you can visit other people growing plants from their command line by entering their name, and they can visit you. Visitors can view and even water your plant, helping to keep everything healthy if you go on holiday, for instance, which is a lot easier to organize over a network than someone visiting your IRL garden.

Project Website

https://github.com/jifunks/botany

Botany lets you grow ASCII plants on the command line and let your friends visit to help water and watch over your creation.