Soak.day

Soak.day is my idea, from playtesting the water in Half Full. A glass of real water was fun to watch, so what about a whole landscape of it? You're a little rain cloud with a day's worth of rain, over a dry side-on garden that's the same for everyone today. Drag to fly and keep holding to rain, lightly at first and harder the longer you hold. Every drop is a real particle. It lands, runs down the slope, pools in the hollows and soaks into the soil.

Each plant needs a different amount. A cactus blooms after a few drops and drowns not long after, and a sunflower can drink a long burst. Each one has a meter that fills to a white line, and past the red it drowns. Rock sheds water, so rain on a rocky hilltop runs down to whatever grows below. Soil soaks up its first drops and then lets water run over it. Most gardens also have a tree with a bluebell under it. The leaves drink any rain that lands on them, so the only way to water a bluebell is to rain on the slope above and let the water run underneath. One good burst can water the bluebell and the plant below it, or drown one of them.

When you run dry, dip low over a lake and the cloud drinks it back up, getting fatter and slower. Wind gusts push you around more as the 90-second day goes on, and on Saturdays a fire spreads along the dry grass until you rain it out. Your score is how much of the garden bloomed, shared as a row of squares. The cloud frets out loud the whole time.

A daily has to be fair, so the water is deterministic. Input is rounded to whole numbers on a fixed 1/60 s step, and the JavaScript side uses only + − × ÷ and square roots. A fingerprint of every particle after scripted days matches bit for bit in Node, Chrome and Firefox. The promo above is the real sim playing scripted takes. Claude Opus 5.5 built it in three prompts with three.js and liquidfun (Box2D's particle water, in WebAssembly), and every sound is synthesized.