No rain is coming. Spend your finite reservoir wisely or watch your crops wilt before harvest.
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How to play
There is one reservoir for the entire run and it never refills. Every day you decide how much of what is left goes to each plot — and the arithmetic is unforgiving in both directions, because a crop given less than it needs goes backwards, and a crop given more than it needs simply loses you the surplus.
A crop needs an exact amount of water per day to make one day of progress.
Give it less and it wilts, losing progress it had already made.
Give it more and the excess is gone with no benefit whatsoever.
A crop that reaches its growth time is mature and can be harvested.
Weather changes what crops need, not what you have — a hot day raises every requirement and an overcast day lowers them.
No weather ever adds water to the reservoir.
Controls
Desktop: click a seed then a plot to plant, use the plus/minus steppers to set water, click Harvest and Water & End Day
Phone & tablet: full touch support, tap to plant, water, and advance
Game modes
Daily: a seeded season for everyone
Practice: a random season
Difficulty levels with larger or smaller starting reservoirs
Tips & strategy
Water exactly, never generously. Overshooting is a pure loss, and across a whole season small overpours cost more than any single mistake.
Abandon plots deliberately. Spreading a shrinking reservoir across everything wilts everything; letting one plot die can be what matures the rest.
Plan around the forecast. A hot day costs more water for the same progress, so it is often cheaper to let a crop hold and water it heavily tomorrow.
Wilting is worse than pausing. Progress lost has to be bought again with water you do not have.
Count the reservoir against the days remaining, not against today's needs. The run is a fixed budget divided by a fixed length.
Origins
Under-watering crops on purpose is a real agronomic strategy. Deficit irrigation accepts a smaller harvest per plant in order to get more crop per unit of water, which can be the more profitable choice where water is the binding constraint.
The original design takes that to its limit: one reservoir for the whole run, and it never refills.
The arithmetic is unforgiving in both directions — a plot given less than it needs goes backwards, and a plot given more simply wastes the surplus. That removes the farming genre's usual safety valve of working harder, and leaves only allocation.
About Drought Garden
Drought Garden is an original farming sim built entirely around a one-way water economy. Free to play in your browser on PlayPendium.
A free, original browser game on PlayPendium. No download, no install.
