Palsta: A Slow Garden

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 the quiet kind. It never buzzes, never appears over what you were doing, never turns red and never counts a streak. 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. Too much of either hurts it too.

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. One clock runs every plant in the game, and money cannot make it run faster.

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 plant tended by two different people on the same day grows half as fast again.

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. 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, SEEDS AND THE HERBARIUM

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.

Keep a plant healthy past maturity and it sets seed of its own, into your satchel. 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 money cannot buy.

The herbarium keeps the seeds you choose never to sow, and the greatest plants anyone has grown, each at its best and still there after it dies. It ranks plants, never people.

WHAT IT DOES NOT HAVE

No chat. No usernames. No ranking of people. 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.

PURCHASES

Seeds, a refill or two, and a tip jar. Paid species are slower to grow than the free ones and never stronger, and they arrive in your satchel so you decide which plot they go into, and when.

The watering can and the compost sack refill themselves every morning. If you run dry, a refill costs Gaia points, which you earn by helping neighbours, or money if you would rather. The tip jar buys nothing at all.

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, so the app needs a connection.

Made for RevenueCat Shipaton 2026: https://devpost.com/software/palsta-a-slow-garden

Plant something. Come back tomorrow.