Inside Forever Garden, the tranquil game bringing newcomers to Arweave

GM fellow Arweaver!

This week we're covering a project that's drawing in new audiences through nothing more than digital flowers.

Let's grow.

A permanent garden takes root in Finland 🌷🌻🪻

There’s a slow-paced gardening game on exhibition in Western Finland right now that’s bringing an entirely new audience to Arweave's permanence. Forever Garden is on display at the Creative Crossroads gallery in Pori, Finland, running through the end of July. The game lets gardeners grow digital flowers from seed, and once a bloom reaches full maturity, it stays in the world for good.

That’s because it’s built on AO, using Arweave for permanent storage.

Rooted in the permaweb

Almost four months in, the numbers are impressive. Over 8,000 flowers have been planted by dozens of gardeners, with 111 game state snapshots captured on Arweave.

Gardeners and visitors can walk or fly through the garden, switch to a bird's eye view, or take a guided tour complete with birdsong, nature sounds, and a soothing soundtrack. Each plant carries its own unique record, including species, growth stage, and the gardener who planted it and when.

There are flowers aplenty in Forever Garden, with everything from common daisies and giant water lilies to a wide range of tulips, offering visitors a real variety to discover as they explore. Compared to the other plants, the tulips offer much info on their traits, including their color, pattern, form, and even have a leaderboard to highlight the rarest types and who planted them.

Design choices

We dug a bit deeper into the project, and two design choices really stood out. First is that the game’s code is open source; both the frontend and the AO process code can be viewed or forked on Codeberg.

Second is the constitution (stored on Arweave) that supports this open source project. Four principles govern how the game can evolve:

1. A flower that has reached full bloom remains in the game permanently.
2. Any flower planted by a gardener may only be moved at that gardener's initiative.
3. Weeds are not flowers. A plant's classification as weed or flower is determined at the time of planting and may not be changed retroactively.
4. Forever Garden belongs to everyone. The game is open source, its data is public, and no single entity may claim exclusive control over it.

Become an Arweave gardener

Forever Garden is purposely built as a community-owned gaming experience, with the Garden Board forum and gardener’s council section coming soon. The concept itself is wonderful, and the quality of the deployment is a great use of permaweb tech. We love to see it!

You can leave a lasting mark on the permaweb by heading over to Forever Garden on X, where you’ll find links to the game and updates on the project’s development.

ICYMI 👀

Here’s a quick snapshot of what’s been unfolding across Arweave and AO.

• Quick recap of recent permaweb updates
• New Stargaze collections to be stored on Arweave
• Apus creates BuildEcho to track and explain development progress

This week's community feature 🧑‍💻

If you’ve been following recent crypto headlines, you may have noticed some unfortunate activity taking place on Robinhood Chain.

Permaweb crypto sleuth Jonny Ringo took it upon himself to protect traders and investors by creating a token safety scanner, with all analytics stored permanently on Arweave.

Thanks for reading!

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Follow us on X at @onlyarweave to stay updated on all things Arweave. Want to dive deeper into AO? Check out @aoComputerClub.

The Longview Team

This is not investment advice. No profit guarantees. If in the U.S., ensure compliance with U.S. laws and seek professional advice.