Dev Log #5: Decisions Behind Every Plant

In Dev Log #1: What Tiny Eden Is Really About, we talked about the core fantasy of turning a small apartment into a living indoor garden: https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/3375110/view/685254046893737202

In Dev Log #2: Why We Chose an Apartment Instead of a Farm, we looked at why the apartment setting matters, and how a smaller space changes the way you think about gardening: https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/3375110/view/680752246528410962

In Dev Log #3: Indoor Gardening Is Different, we focused on the ways indoor growing changes the decisions you make, from light and space to containers and roots: https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/3375110/view/684131214746979346

Then, in Dev Log #4: You Don’t Feed the Plant - You Feed the Soil, we talked about soil, and how the growing mixture inside a pot can affect the way a plant develops: https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/3375110/view/707777648917479716

Now, in this, our latest devlog, we're going to bring everything together and look at the decisions behind the plants in the game.

Much like in real life, plant care in Tiny Eden is built around decisions.

That can sound more complicated than it really is, so it is worth explaining what we mean. Most of these decisions start small: where to place a pot, what soil mixture to use, how much light a plant needs, or whether a container gives the roots enough room to grow.

When you grow plants indoors, whether it is sprouting seeds for your garden, or taking care of a house plant, you need to make the same decisions.

These choices are not there to make the plants feel complicated; after all, Tiny Eden is still meant to be relaxing to play, so we don't want players to have to constantly worry about doing something wrong. However, we do want plants to feel somewhat real. Therefore, every plant has needs, and the player decides how to meet them. At the start, those decisions are simple. You might only need to think about a suitable pot, a basic soil mixture, and a good place near the window. But as your apartment garden grows, and as you unlock more plants and materials, those small choices begin to connect with each other.

Placement: where should the plant go? Light, temperature, and space are important!

Container: How much room do its roots need? Every plant has a different root structure, some grow deep, some shallow, some spread out a lot. If you do not give the plant enough space for the roots, its growth would be hindered a lot.

Soil Composition: What kind of soil does it need? Different soil compositions provide plants structural support, different nutrients, water (through drainage), and oxygen access through tiny air pockets.

Would it benefit from extra nutrients? Every plant needs slightly different nutrients, this is why you should not plant tomatoes close to cabbage, as cabbage takes up vital nutrients from the soil that tomatoes need. On the flip side, companion plants exist; these are plants that help each other out. For example, tomatoes and basil are excellent companions. This is because basil has a very shallow root system, while tomatoes are deep, so they do not compete for nutrients in the same area. What's more, Basil is an excellent pest deterrent.

Those are the kinds of questions that sit behind each plant in Tiny Eden.

The first major choice is placement. Because the game takes place indoors, light is not spread evenly across a large open field. Some parts of the apartment are naturally better for growing than others. A windowsill may be useful for plants that need more light, while another area of the room might be better suited for something less demanding, or for plants that do not need the best position right away.

This makes the apartment itself part of the decision-making. A shelf can lift a plant into a better spot. A corner can become a growing area if used well. A space that looked decorative at first may later become valuable because of where it sits in the room.

The second choice is the container. Indoors, every plant needs a pot, tray, or some kind of growing space, and that container affects what the plant can become. Some plants grow well in smaller pots, while others need more depth or room for their roots. This does not only affect where the plant fits in the apartment, but also whether the container is actually suitable for the plant you want to grow.

The third choice is the soil mixture. As we discussed in the previous devlog, soil in Tiny Eden is not treated as just one thing. A mixture can include materials such as compost, sand, and clay, with each part helping in a different way. Some plants may need a simple mixture, while others may ask for something more specific.

To make this easier to understand, the game helps guide the player, especially early on. When you fill a pot, you can see what the plant needs and how much of each material has been added. For example, an early plant may only need a simple mix of compost and sand, and the game can show that requirement clearly as you prepare the pot.

As you progress, nutrients add another layer to the growing system. In Tiny Eden, NPK nutrients are resources that plants need in order to grow.

NPK stands for Nitrogen (N), Phosphorus (P), Potassium (K). These are the three most common plant nutrients.

Real life tip When you buy nutrients, you will often see the NPK represented as three numbers, for example 5-7-5 which would mean 5 parts Nitrogen, 7 parts Phosphorus, 5 parts Potassium. In very basic terms: Nitrogen promotes larger leaves and helps build chlorophyll. Phosphorus builds strong root systems Potassium helps to regulate water pressure and keep the cells healthy. However, you always need to be careful how much nutrients you supply as too much will kill your plants! Now, back to the game!

In Tiny Eden, each plant takes up nutrients at a different rate (much like in real life). So, after a while you may get a notification that a specific plant is running low on a specific nutrient, this is an important way of looking after your plants.

This means that preparing a good growing environment is not only about choosing the right pot or soil mixture. You also need to make sure the plant has access to the nutrients it needs over time. We are also working on growth boosters, which will be introduced in a future build and give players more ways to influence growth. What’s more, as you can see from the game screenshot above, we already have quite a lot of detail as to the soil composition. This means that in the future, we can expand on this quite a bit.

These choices affect how well a plant grows, how healthy it is, and what kind of harvest you can get from it. A plant placed in a better spot, with a suitable container and the right growing mixture, should feel different from one that was simply placed wherever there was space left. That is important to us, because Tiny Eden is not only about collecting plants. It is about learning how to care for them.

Our Decisions Every plant in Tiny Eden has been grown by our team in real life, and that experience shaped how they work in the game. The pots they need, the room their roots require, the light they respond to, and the soil conditions they prefer are all based on what we learned while growing them ourselves.

We have made the process much faster for gameplay, of course, but the foundation still comes from real indoor gardening.

Onions are a good example of this. In real life, they are often planted in spring and can take several months to fully mature. One player mentioned that their onions, planted in May, did not finish growing until October when the temperature was not controlled enough, and that is very close to real onion growth. Tiny Eden gives players tools to speed things up, such as heat, light, nutrients, and water, but if the conditions are not ideal, some plants can still take much longer to grow.