Avocado Simulator

Avocado Simulator is a game about growing an avocado tree from a pit. Yes, like the one you once balanced on toothpicks over a glass of water and then forgot about. This one will not let you forget.

The plant grows in real time, even when the game is closed. At the suggested speed one real hour is three days for your tree, so a first harvest takes about a month of real life. Slower modes take longer. Avocados have never been in a hurry.

What you do:

• Water it, by eye or to the millilitre. Too little kills it. Too much also kills it, just more slowly and with more mould.
• Feed it, repot it, prune it, and move it from the windowsill to the balcony to the garden.
• Protect it from sunburn, frost, spider mites, scale insects and caterpillars.
• Read the signs. Yellow leaves can mean several different things, and the game will not tell you which. You get a botanical notebook, a few clues, and the quiet satisfaction of being right a week later.
• If all goes well for a few in-game years: flowers. Then fruit. Then a harvest you will have thoroughly earned.

Arcade mode, for the impatient: time runs only while you play, the tree grows about seven times faster, and all its numbers are on screen. The world keeps interrupting: hailstorms, a neighbour with a "miracle" fertilizer, a green comet, a fruit thief. Spend mutation points on waxy leaves, red veins or variegated foliage. Stumble on secret combinations nobody will tell you about. Carry seeds of experience into your next attempt.

About this alpha

• Free. Windows only. English only.
• Placeholder art and music by a very determined programmer; a real artist and composer are coming.
• Saves are local and nothing is competitive.
• Found a bug, or a plant that died unfairly? Menu > "Export a report for feedback" creates a text file. Please send it our way.

No avocados were harmed in the making of this game. Several were overwatered.