Deep Soil - Permaculture Gamified

Hi Permies!

I've been building a little browser game called Deep Soil. I'm not a programmer; I made it with Claude (Anthropic's AI assistant) as a pair-programming partner over a lot of sessions. I bring the permaculture side, it writes the code I can't.

https://claude.ai/public/artifacts/ea4e4612-a29b-4086-ab41-2d4fadafc182

The idea is simple: I'd love to get more people thinking about carbon sequestration and regenerative farming, and a game seemed like a fun way to do it. You start with one bare tile and a tent. Over real-world days and weeks, you build soil with water, carbon and mulch, eventually graduating to grow plant guilds, dig swales, raise animals, forage, and observe. The carbon you sequester is tracked in tonnes at the top of the screen so you can watch it accumulate. Real permaculture logic underneath: hugelkultur takes 30 days of nitrogen tie-up before it pays off, mycorrhizae accelerate trees, dandelions are pioneers (not weeds), wine cap mushrooms build soil dramatically. If this were ever published, I'd have all players contribute to a global pool of virtual carbon offsets to inspire action and proceeds from the game could actually fund real carbon farmers. So, you'd have two metrics: virtual and real carbon.

It's an idle game, which might be new to some folks. That means it's designed to run in the background while you're not playing. You check in for five minutes, set your character to forage or observe the land, then close the tab and go live your life. When you come back an hour or a day later, things have happened. Buckets of water collected. Plants grew. A blackberry got foraged. Soul Shards accumulated from quiet contemplation. The game respects your time — it isn't trying to glue your eyes to a screen. The slowness is the point. Nature's actual time scales accelerated from seasons into days are the rhythm the game runs on.

It's free, no ads, no signup, plays in any browser including phones. Still in active development with rough edges. I'd love it if some of you tried it and told me whether it's fun, whether the permaculture stuff feels right, and what's missing. Click or drop the link into your web browser and give it a session or two, and if it doesn't click in the first 10 minutes, that's useful feedback too.

Don't be thrown off by the simple beginnings, there is weeks, months, and years worth of content to unlock with continued play.

Thank you for considering.

Abishai

Conceptually I've always thought a game like this had the potential to do good things in the world, and think you're on the right track.

My suggestion to get people to actually engage in information they can learn from the "observations" section is to provide additional soul shards if they can correctly answer some questions about previous tool-tips you've shown them.

It would be interesting to see how you could work design into the game also, currently you have this hexagonal grid system, but maybe you could create "synergies" when players correctly stack functions side-by-side, etc.

On a testing note, there seem to be quite a number of number related bugs, all values carbon sequestration seem to be NaN, as well as the "avg" counter at the bottom of the screen, so there's some code issues here... I suspect you will only be able to get so-far with just Claude vibe coding, but you have a nice little prototype already that you may be able to get some real coders/permie volunteers to help out with.

I wish you success here as someone who spent too many hours playing games in their teens.

Thanks! It has a very long gameplay arc so I'm early game with the prototype myself. There's a lot to unlock that I haven't even seen yet, which is kind of funny. But the architecture is there for weeks, months, years worth of play, so the scale is immense. Yes, there are a number of programming bugs I've already been working on. But already multiple species can stack on the same hex depending on "layer" (e.g., roots, leaves, tall, insectary) to build guilds. The soil architecture is much more sophisticated than is shown because I haven't unlocked soil science yet which displays nitrogen, carbon, biota, water, and other factors (I've seen it before I hid it) based on real theory or science. But already you can see soil health emerging in the color of the hex tile. Temperature, wind, elevation, rain, and other factors interact. There's late-game stuff for major earthworks including swales, ponds, and keyline rips as well as buildings, mobile chicken tractors, and rocket stoves and all that. I love that I'm just as surprised by the game as anyone else and I just let it tick along while I do my work. I'm going for a rain barrel next, but have to save up for it! I've had Claude analyze the works of the best designers from Alan Savory to Mark Shepard to get the soil dynamics rights and other interacting features.

It also saves between sessions as long as your browser history is intact, so I'd love for some people to give it a try. Doesn't take but minutes of your day but the effects are cumulative over time!

Your engine is rendering a couple of NaNs (not a number) to my screen.

Also, I'm playing this on a giant monitor and it's using a tiny sliver of my screen while keeping things small enough that I have to lean in to read them.

Thanks for the feedback! I should be able to fix bugs and update everyone's games. I just asked it to fix the NaNs. I believe that was occurring when there is nothing planted where it would normally show % of growth. You'll have to refresh your browser to get the updates.

Also, the screen issue is because it was optimized for phone. I'll see if we can adjust for PC browser to make it easier to see. Refresh to see if this helps.

Thanks! Love the feedback.

A

Just some quick feedback here regarding the "go to work" function.

Currently it generates money so slowly that it's almost always better to select the forage function and hope for wild food drops to sell.

In order to more accurately reflect the way which most people start out in permaculture,I think it would be interesting for it to generate significant portions of your income in the beginning, then as your farm starts to grow and you have more produce available, it becomes less relevant.

In future development you also may wish to consider there being different job options, some of which earn you less money, but help you to gain experience in permaculture-relevant fields (working as a farm-hand, etc).

Thanks for the feedback again, Alex. I actually noticed the same thing yesterday between the two passive actions and made a change.

I like your idea of apprenticing somewhere. For now there’s an option to increase your income from your source of work and then a research tree to improve permaculture skills, so these are separate, but I will keep that in mind.

This new link has been updated:

https://claude.ai/public/artifacts/ea4e4612-a29b-4086-ab41-2d4fadafc182

Happy to help!

I just have it on in the background while I work at the moment and it seems to tick along fine.

Sorry to keep giving more advice, but I will say that one area I feel could be improved is the watering/mulching system. As it stands there is no idea of knowing how much mulch is on your plot/how hydrated it is, and you can just endlessly add layers of mulch and more buckets of water with seemingly no outcome. Perhaps some kind of hydration percentage for the plot, and how many mm thick your mulch is could be displayed on the lower bar where growth percentage is shown?

I agree! I hid those stats behind soil science which has to be unlocked. During an earlier version, you could see nitrogen, carbon, biota, compaction, and other soil factors. They are there, but they are hidden until or unless you unlock soil science. Players are left guessing until then, but the shade of the tile and how it acts can queue you in. In general, till once, plant something, and water and mulch once a day. Over tilling causes significant long-term compaction issues and kills biota. I’m glad you’re enjoying it.

Abishai Graeff wrote:I agree! I hid those stats behind soil science which has to be unlocked. During an earlier version, you could see nitrogen, carbon, biota, compaction, and other soil factors.

Hiding the more gritty stats behind soil science definitely makes sense, after all, nitrogen/carbon/biota levels cannot be tested without specialist equipment and knowledge.

Compaction, mulch thickness and water needs however are observable landscape features with no requirement for specialist knowledge, so perhaps basic information could be provided until soil science is unlocked? Maybe it could be provided after spending some time doing "observation" on the tile. After all, making informed decisions is what permaculture is all about!

Examples could be:

Water:
the ground feels wet, but your plants are wilting (continuous over-watering)
the ground feels wet and your plants look hydrated
the soil surface looks dry, but your plants aren't wilting
the soil surface looks dry, and your plants are wilting slightly

Mulch:
the ground is finely mulched. Some weeds are poking through.
the ground has a thick layer of mulch.

Compaction:
The ground feels tough beneath your feet
The ground feels loose beneath your feet
The ground feels firm beneath your feet

Once you unlock soil science you can then read the exact percentages of moisture, thickness of mulch, compaction, etc.

Hope this helps you on your journey!

Definitely. I'm hitting my limit with what AI can do for me. For example, I had "cracking" to indicate dry clay soil but the visual kept rendering worse every time I tried to fix it before I removed it all together. There is a visual for mulch depth but it only renders as a small ring of dash-lines which I circled in my attachment. I also tried to fix that things are "clumped" toward the center of the tile but no matter how many times I try to command that changed, it didn't improve much. So some of these things would require a programmer and a visual artist. The goal was to have the whole tile "full" and even "overflowing" the tile. I can keep trying to tweak that a bit more because I agree with you fully. As of yesterday, I had a bug where the observation function fully broke on me, which I think I've fixed.

I've attached an image of the soil profile that shows up in the intro video I added. It doesn't show the stat bars that will also be there once soil science is unlocked but does show the side profile of soil for a given tile.

So, anyway. I'm a designer and not a programmer or artist. I'll keep considering all your feedback and really appreciate it. For example, I'd have to think about your suggestion to add those comments because right now observation comments aren't tied to specific tiles or game functions at all; they're just generic.

By the way, soul shard generation is a base state with a multiplier based on how much carbon you have sequestered and total soil health. Observation is meant to function as an additional multiplier to that, indicating things like life, passion, vitality, inspiration, and motivation. I also overhauled the tournament feature this week which I call "simulated trials." The idea is that the game takes a snapshot of your farm and runs threat simulations like insects, fire, and other risk vectors including social pressure, then gives you "resilience" tokens based on how long your farm lasts against the threat before it closes the simulation and returns you to your normal farm. You can spend on special upgrades that give your farm permanent multiplier bonuses such as a mason bee home for permanent pollination bonuses or you can unlock NPC bots like a dog that visually roams the screen and deters predators. Threat simulators occur once per (real time) week.

Best,

A

Important note: I haven't figured out how to get the game to save between sessions on a phone, so I recommend playing on a PC. I tried to enable a save/load function on the phone but that doesn't work for me.

On PC, if you want to do a hard cache reset to ensure the most recent game updates, do the following:

Ctrl+Shift+R (or Cmd+Shift+R on Mac) F12, right-click refresh button, Empty Cache and Hard Reload

Nuclear option (resets game to beginning): Open the page in an Incognito window

I totally understand the limitations you're working with. There's only so far you can get with pure AI development at the current time...

The prototype is sound though, and I think it works well conceptually as an idle game. All you need now is someone to buy in to helping with the project!

Yeah. That would be cool. But you’ve bought in to play it and give it a whirl. That’s enough for me for now.

Hey, here's the latest update of the game with LOTS of updates and fixes. I can't upload .html or .zip here so I'm not sure how else to share this. If I can figure out how to share either of these for download, it might update your game without losing your progress.

https://abishaigraeff.neocities.org/deep_soil_standalone.html

Also, if you wanna mess with mid-late game, type "jedi" into the "testing" area in the menu. You should be able to switch between "early," "mid," and "late" games.

Best,

Jesse Fister

I was interested to see if you were still working on it!

It's been gently ticking away in the background and I'd been focusing on unlocking skills to test. It's likely that all the issues I'd found have already been fixed!

Would you like me to continue reporting things I notice? Or will you leave the project here for now?

Yes, slowly in the background. I have a couple more weeks of paid Claude subscription.

Send me your email and I'll send you the most recent file directly. You may not lose your save that way.

If anyone know a better way to share the .zip or .html file so that I can drop new updates periodically, please let me know.

I would love a list of bugs. Maybe check the new version first to see what's been addressed.

A couple major updates included fixing and enhancing topography, keyline, and lidar functions; improving graphic renderings of all objects; and massive overhaul to the farm Threat Simulations. I've also adjusted things for balance and fixed a lot of bugs. Here's one rendering of the topography and lidar function in isolation from other game functions. The soil science is there! There's also a lot more dialogue early on to help players get the feel for what's going on through simulated "observation" even prior to researching soil science and other technical tools. So it's teaching more now as well.

I've gone ahead and sent you a purple moosage. I'll see if the new version fixes things before I report them

Best of success with your project...!

It seems similar in scale to what Jason Rohrer has done with his various games. His most recent completed game is One Hour, One Life.

Ok, so I do think this is the best link to use for the game. I'll just keep updating it here. I hope you like the music updates!

"Mid" and "late" game now only offers resources if you want to explore that. Of course, I recommend doing it the regular way without the cheat. It should run parallel saves if you want to play around with it.

https://abishaigraeff.neocities.org/deep_soil_standalone.html

Is there a way for an admin to replace this link on the first thread to help new visitors?

Make sure to update your game about once-per-week using this link (a simple refresh doesn't do it). Lots of continued improvements!

https://abishaigraeff.neocities.org/deep_soil_standalone.html