Palsta: A Slow Garden

APN201

In-app purchases

About this game

Palsta is an allotment. Six plots of soil, and a clock that runs whether you are watching or not.

You plant something. It takes days. Grass and clover come up in a week, a rowan wants most of a season, and an oak takes three months to reach adulthood and then stands for ten years of real time. Nothing here can be hurried and nothing is waiting for you - the garden carries on, and you find out what happened while you were gone.

ON YOUR HOME SCREEN

Put a plant on your home screen and it shows the one that most needs you, with how much water and food it has left. It fits a single cell or a large tile, and the plant is drawn rather than photographed, so it is your plant - grown from your seed, shaped by how you have kept it.

This is the only reminder Palsta has, and it is deliberately the quiet kind. It never buzzes, never appears over what you were doing, never turns red, and never counts a streak. It does not want anything from you. You glance at it, or you do not, and the garden carries on either way.

WHAT YOU DO

Water. Feed. Choose what goes where. That is the whole list.

A dry plant stops growing and then starts dying. A hungry plant stops growing but keeps its health. A sick plant attracts pests, and pests move - which is why a neglected garden is everyone's problem and not only its owner's.

Old plants are hard to kill. A young oak dies of one dry week; a full-grown one shrugs off a drought it would not have survived at five. Rare species are the most demanding of all, because patience is the only thing money buys here. One clock runs every plant in the game.

YOUR NEIGHBOURS

You are given neighbours. You do not choose them, they do not choose you, and nobody has a name.

In someone else's palsta you can water and you can feed. There is no third button, because the server will not accept any other instruction. You cannot message anyone, rank above anyone, take anything, or do harm by trying. If a stranger's garden is parched you can fix it, and they will never know who it was.

A multiplayer game where the only available move is kindness. That is not a slogan, it is the shape of the API.

DRAWN, NOT PAINTED

Every plant is generated as vector line-work in the manner of an old botanical plate - Flora Danica by way of the Voynich manuscript, roots and all. There is not one image file in this app. Nothing is a photograph or a sprite; each specimen is drawn from its own seed, so your birch is nobody else's birch, and you can lean in and look at it.

SOIL, AND WHAT YOUR OWN PLANTS GIVE BACK

The six plots are not the same. Sand drains fast and holds what you feed it; peat holds water and leaches; clay and loam sit between. No soil is simply the best one, so where a seed goes is a decision rather than an obvious answer.

Keep a plant healthy past maturity and it sets seed of its own, into your satchel - and now and then one of those seeds is a mutation, which breeds true down the generations. A line you bred is the one thing in this game that money genuinely cannot buy.

WHAT IT DOES NOT HAVE

No chat. No usernames. No leaderboards. No streaks, no daily-login guilt, no notifications begging you back. No energy timers. No ads. No loot boxes - when you buy a seed you choose the species yourself, and a mutation cannot be bought at any price.

PURCHASES

Seeds, and nothing else. Paid species are slower to grow than the free ones and never stronger, and they arrive in your satchel so that you decide which plot they go into, and when. The free catalogue, all six plots, every neighbour and every day of tending cost nothing.
Palsta signs you in anonymously. No account, no email, no password.

The garden lives on the server rather than on your phone, so the app needs a connection to run.

Plant something. Come back tomorrow.

What’s new

Grow your own zen garden.
Bug fixes.