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 very early game with the prototype myself, so 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, and years worth of play.