Press kit
Everything here is checkable. If a number below is wrong, it is a bug and we would like to know.
In one line
A gardening game in which the weather is the real weather outside your window — and one game day is one real day.
How it actually works
- You pick a location. The game pulls that place's live conditions, 16-day forecast and daily history from Open-Meteo.
- Crops advance on growing degree days: each day contributes
max(0, min(mean temp, upper limit) − base temp), accumulated until the crop matures. The same seed needs a very different number of days in Dublin and in Guangzhou. - Soil moisture is settled daily from real rainfall and evaporation. Frost, heatwaves and drought have real thresholds per crop — a damage point and a kill point.
- Time cannot be bought. There is no booster, no skip, no way to make tomorrow come early.
Two free tools, no sign-up
These are the parts that are useful whether or not you ever play the game — and they are the ones worth linking to.
- Frost forecast — any location on Earth: frost risk for the next 16 nights, which crops would be damaged and which killed, plus the average last-spring and first-autumn frost dates for that spot. Optional push alerts without an account.
- Planting calendar — 24 cities × 12 months: what to sow, when you would harvest it, whether it finishes before the first frost, and what to start indoors this month counted back from the last frost date.
Where the numbers come from
Weather and climate: Open-Meteo (ERA5 reanalysis for history). Typical frost dates are averaged from the actual sub-zero nights in the last 5 years of daily records — not from monthly means, which smooth frost away entirely. Crop parameters (base temperature, degree days to maturity, frost damage and kill points, heat stress) come from horticultural and agronomic sources and are listed openly on every crop page.
An honest limitation: weather data is gridded, so it flattens terrain. Hollows, rooftops and exposed beds freeze earlier than any grid figure suggests. We say this on the tools themselves too — the dates are a guide, not a guarantee.
Facts you can quote
| What it is | Free browser game, installable as a PWA |
|---|---|
| Price | Free. No ads, no in-app purchases, no time-skip |
| Sign-up | Not required to play |
| Languages | English and Chinese |
| Crops modelled | 26, each with published agronomic parameters |
| Planting calendars | 24 cities × 12 months, in both languages |
| Time scale | 1 game day = 1 real day |
| Made by | One person, independently |
What it deliberately does not have
No loot boxes, no random mutations, no paid shortcuts, no timed shop resets, no stealing from other players. The whole point is that a day is a day; anything that lets you buy your way past that would break it.
Assets
- Key art, 1200×630 PNG
- App icon, 512×512 PNG
- Screenshots: the garden scene changes with real weather and time of day, so the cleanest way to get a current one is to open the game and use the in-game 📷 button, which renders a full-bleed poster of your own garden.
Contact
Questions, review copies of anything, or a correction: fanyang.me. Happy to walk through the model or explain why a particular crop behaves the way it does in a particular city.