Greenhouse

There is nothing to plant, water or feed. You have shears, and the rule is one sentence long: each growth cycle the plant spends a fixed energy budget across its growing tips, and cutting a tip hands its share to the tips that remain.

So the shape you get is the shape you subtract. Cut the leader and the buds it was holding shut wake up, and the plant bushes out. Cut the sides and everything it had goes up the middle. Seven commissions each hand you a silhouette to match, six growth cycles to reach it, and a cut budget — and you steer a living thing into a shape by taking parts of it away.

How it plays

• Seven commissions, each with its own genome and its own budget: 8 cuts for the fruiting one, 20 for the spiral. Cuts are the only resource you spend, so a precise gardener beats an enthusiastic one.
• Every target is derived from a solved run — the genome is played forward six cycles under a known cut sequence, and the silhouette that comes out is the commission. Replaying that sequence scores 1.000, so the shape is reachable by construction and its par is a measured number rather than a guess.
• Doing nothing does not work. Left alone, the seven plants score 0.277 to 0.675 against an 80 % pass line that is drawn live on the match bar as you grow.
• Hovering a branch lights the entire subtree that cut would take, and once you cut, the tips that receive the freed energy pulse. The rule that decides the plant's shape is drawn on the plant instead of hidden in the simulation.
• Growth is deterministic given the genome and your cut history, and undo is that same replay run one cut shorter — back to the single-node seedling if you want it.
• Every cut leaves a pale wound that darkens over four cycles, and the scar is a mechanic, not decoration: fruit only sets on wood that carries a healed wound and has been left alone for two cycles. That commission is cut early, then put the shears down.

Three-band watercolour shading, soft ink outlines, and paper grain that sits in screen space rather than on the surfaces — so a few hundred procedurally grown leaves read as painted rather than generated. When a commission ends the plant turns slowly on a turntable with its match, its cuts and its par, like a show entry.