- 01Read water and weather
- 02Compare growth stages
- 03Allocate irrigation
- 04Resolve growth and harvest
An irrigation budget
Water per round cannot satisfy every plot. Allocation across growth stages changes harvest timing and yield.
Play the lab
An original teaching experiment. Parameters explain a tradeoff and do not reproduce the referenced games.
Resource tradeoffs: from a mechanism to a small game →
The player's decision
Finish a nearly mature crop or protect a seedling that needs consecutive watering?
Original scenario
Original setup: three plots share two buckets a day. A vegetable needs one more watering; a fruit plant needs three. Rain in two days may reward waiting over equal distribution.
Start with this prototype
Build three plots over four turns with two daily buckets. Show remaining growth and weather, then resolve watering together. Win by meeting a harvest target; retry the same forecast without real-time waiting.
Change one variable
Test growth pauses before instant crop death; forecast visibility can become a later variable.
What to observe in a playtest
Can players predict today's growth and change allocation around the harvest deadline on retry?
Take the full design card
Includes rules, scope, tuning questions and sources for further planning. It does not create a project automatically.
Original analysis · version 1
Common pitfall
Do not imply Stardew Valley uses this experiment's fixed global water quota; that quota is an original teaching constraint.
Observations and sources
Cases refer to public documentation. Developers and community wikis are credited separately; document review is not a claim of hands-on testing.
- Stardew Valley
Missing water pauses ordinary crop growth that night rather than instantly killing it.
- Timberborn
Drought, stored water and artificial irrigation make water a settlement-planning constraint.
Brief for the studio
Opens the AI studio with the brief below in the input. You can edit it. Nothing starts automatically.
Build three plots over four turns with two daily buckets. Show remaining growth and weather, then resolve watering together. Win by meeting a harvest target; retry the same forecast without real-time waiting.
Covers are original AI-generated style illustrations. Game names reference publicly visible design choices and remain the property of their owners. This atlas does not supply screenshots or assets from those games. Prompts and combinations are original drafts for new games.