Planet Gardener

Press Plant on the title screen and the run starts immediately in your browser. The first three seeds are guided: only the glowing sector accepts them, you get eight seconds each instead of six, and nothing withers while the guide is running. Press and hold the planet to aim, slide to compare sectors, and lift your finger to plant. The guide ends the moment your first circle closes. To revisit How to play, return to the title screen; its Replay tutorial button starts a guided run.

Because nothing is feeding it. Energy runs clockwise and a plant is fed only by the sector immediately before it: moss needs soil, fern needs water, hopper needs air. A seedling on untouched ground carries about six seconds of its own life, and if the sector before it is still empty when that runs out it starves and leaves a scorched patch. Start from a plant that is already alive and build clockwise from there, or give the new plant its neighbour before the six seconds are gone.

Put three living plants in three neighbouring sectors so each one feeds the next going clockwise. Moss gives water to fern, fern gives air to hopper, and hopper gives soil back to moss, so moss–fern–hopper, fern–hopper–moss and hopper–moss–fern all count — the species you start with does not matter, only the order around the ring. The moment the third one lands the three lock into a glowing triangle, stop losing life, and begin paying.

Only blooming circles score. Closing one pays 30 life on the spot, it then pays 2 life every second for the twelve seconds it glows, and when it seeds at the end it pays 40 times a multiplier that starts at ×1 and rises by 0.5 per other circle still alive — one other circle makes it ×1.5, two make it ×2, three make it ×2.5. Seeds, ordinary plants, empty sectors and scorched ground are worth nothing by themselves. The score never falls: breaking a circle cancels what it had not paid yet, but nothing already counted is taken back.

Overlap your circles instead of building them one at a time. A circle that seeds on its own is worth 94 life in total, while the same circle seeded with two others glowing is worth 134, and its harvest can also clear one scorched patch plus one more for every other circle alive. The sector directly after a glowing circle is the safest place to plant, provided the seed needs what the circle’s last member produces. That food lasts only until the circle seeds or breaks. Bigger planets raise the ceiling too: Halo's fifteen sectors hold five circles at once, Terra's twelve hold four.

Five patches of scorched ground end a run at any moment, and Drift and Daily Planet also finish when the three-minute clock runs out. Ground scorches in four ways: a plant starves because nothing feeds it, a seed you never placed crashes on its own, the head of a chain dies and the plants behind it fall one after another, or plants lose protection after you break a glowing circle and then starve. Breaking a circle does not scorch ground immediately. The result screen names the single mistake that cost you the most life and gives you one thing to try in the next run.

Yes — scorched ground is poor ground, not dead ground. The black scar clears the instant your seed lands, which is the only way to take a patch off the scorch meter without waiting for a circle to seed. The catch is that the pioneer starts weak: it holds at most two seconds without food, or half a second if that sector has no soil marks left. Plant there when the sector before it already feeds that species, or when the pioneer closes a circle as it lands, otherwise it burns back and the seed is gone.

They are that sector's soil marks, and they tell you how much life a new plant will start with there. On full soil a plant survives six seconds unfed; each time you plant over something in that sector one mark goes out and the next plant starts with four seconds, then two, then half a second. Half a second is shorter than the wait for your next seed, so once the marks are gone you can no longer buy time in that sector — but the ground itself still works, and a plant that gets fed there lives normally. Marks return when a circle seeds on that sector or clears that scorched patch.

Every seed has a placing window, and when it runs out the seed crashes into a sector of its own choosing and scorches it. In Drift and Daily Planet the window is six seconds for the first minute, five and a half for the second and five after that; Long Night starts at six seconds and tightens by a quarter of a second every thirty seconds down to a floor of three. If three seeds crash in one run, every later seed quietly gets half a second more. A poor placement is almost always cheaper than a crash, because a crash lands where it likes.

Yes. It is built for a phone held upright and played with one thumb: the planet sits low enough to reach and every sector is a wide wedge rather than a small icon. Phone landscape works too — the planet moves to the left of the canvas and the seed preview and score stack up on the right, with identical rules and timings. On a computer the page keeps the same phone-shaped canvas and the mouse follows the same press, aim and release path.

No. Planet Gardener runs in your browser, it is free, and there is no account, no sign-in and nothing to install. Open the page and press Plant. You need a connection when the page opens or reloads so the game and its artwork can load, and there is no ad before your first run. The share card is made on your device; you choose where to send it using the share options.

Your total life, level, best scores, unlocked planets and skins and your planet log are stored in this browser on this device only, so they do not follow you to another browser or another phone. A run in progress is not saved; reloading the page starts a fresh one. If your browser blocks saving or runs out of storage, a warning explains that progress cannot be saved. If saving fails during play, choose Retry or Keep playing on the warning panel. Clearing this site's browser data clears the saved progress with it.

They are three play modes that share the same three species, the same rules and the same scoring. Drift is a three-minute run on whichever planet you pick. Daily Planet gives everyone the same seed order for that calendar day on the standard twelve-sector planet and keeps your best result of that day. Long Night has no time limit: the time allowed to place each seed shrinks every thirty seconds and it ends only when the ground runs out, so how long you lasted is the point. Long Night opens at level 3.

Reload the page with a connection available and press Plant again, since the game and its artwork are fetched when the page opens. Sound is made in the browser and only starts after your first press, so if it stays silent open the pause panel, check that Sound is on, then check your device volume and its silent switch. That same panel holds the vibration and reduced-motion switches. If the planet stops responding, close any open panel and resume — pausing, switching apps or rotating the phone clears every finger the game was tracking, so it needs a fresh press.

Yes, it is suggested for ages 6 and up. There is no violence, no chat, no user-submitted content, no account and nothing to buy, and the three species are friendly abstract shapes rather than characters in danger. Reading is not required to play: the guided opening teaches the three moves with a highlighted sector and an arrow. There is no leaderboard and no one else's numbers, so nobody is compared with anyone. Drift and Daily Planet last up to three minutes; Long Night has no time limit. Every mode can be paused or left at any point.