Restore
How will you shape the world around you?
Cultivate the land in whatever way you choose.
Clean and ready the soil for use. Found new settlements to increase your tax revenue. Manage the forests by planting trees or chop them down for extra cash. Prioritise building homes or expanding the woodlands. Establish chicken farms to feed the ever-hungry populace. Watch out for viruses entering the food chain.
Cull the chickens or feed your citizens? Every choice has a consequence.
Quick Play Guide
Start by selecting a Map. Select an Action from the bottom of the screen, then choose an appropriate tile. You will be unable to carry out the Action if you lack sufficient funds.
When you're happy with all your choices, or when you run out of money, click End Round.
Chickens spawn from farms and can be eaten by your citizens at the end of each round. Diseased chickens will lose their lustrous white plumage and will lethargically peck at the dirt.
Citizens spawn from Settlements and give you tax income. The money you receive will increase with Approval rating and growth of citizen population.
Approval Rating changes according to how citizens feel about your choices. It will increase when they are fed and when settlements are next to Clean tiles. Rating will decrease when citizens go unfed or die as a result of eating an infected chicken.
Viruses spawn from new growth forest. If a chicken is infected by disease, a citizen may eat it and die. Viruses can be eradicated by opting to cull all chickens at the end of a round.
Trees can be planted or cut down for cash. A mature forest (full tile of trees) cleans adjacent dirty tiles and water, whereas immature forests have a chance of spawning viruses.
Here's what your Actions do.
Clean: Use on Dirty (red) tiles. Farms, Settlements and Forests can only be placed on Clean tiles.
Farm: Builds a Chicken farm. At the end of a round, each Farm will spawn one chicken up to a maximum of four chickens. Chickens can be used to feed your citizens.
Settlements: Creates a settlement with citizens in it. The higher your citizen population, the more tax revenue you will receive. The happier they are, the more they will give. A fed citizen is a happy citizen!
Plant Trees: Trees have a chance to grow once per round. However a Virus may spawn from the new growth forest instead. A forest tile that contains four trees is fully grown and won't grow another tree until one is cut down.
Cut Trees: Cutting down trees gives you +5 in cash. Cutting down the last tree on a forest tile restores it to a Clean Tile.
Feed the ever-hungry populace and grow your empire...
...or revitalise the natural environment and regenerate the forests?
Restore the land as you see fit!
Restore was made in collaboration with RestoreID.
Development log
Comments
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Very interesting!
I must say, there are a few things I don't really understand or agree with however.
I tried to plant a lot of trees, both because it seemed like a primary source of income and because I believe in nature restoration and conservation as important for our future. I only ever cut trees once a tile has 4, in a way to mimic some kind of sustainable forestry practice.
I don't really like how growing of trees works as a threat to humans in this game. I can't say if it's accurate or not, but my personal belief is that trees and forests are vital to our societies so it felt weird how I was punished with viruses for letting them grow. Is the lesson that I shouldn't cut any trees at all?
Another thing that it took a while for me to realize was that viruses take up one "slot" of a tile just as trees, so no trees grow if a virus blocks its path. I finally realized that the only way to get rid of the viruses covering almost my entire map, and get more trees, was to add a single chicken and then cull it - which also felt kind of strange.
I feel like the game didn't really encourage me to find a balance between different playstyles (and maybe that's the point?). Because of the viruses everywhere I didn't really feel like farming chickens that would just get infected. Approval stayed around 30% anyway and the only thing affected was the income, which I got from forestry anyway. Humans only die from disease but not lack of food, so it felt better to just have a starving population than to try to feed them and kill some of them in the process.
Also, there was no explanation to how the blue tiles work? (OH, just realized they are WATER, lol. No wonder I couldn't build anything there. I thought maybe it was another kind of dirt or radiation or something.)
Overall I think it's a very interesting project and its cool that it connects to real research, but I wasn't sure about what the game was telling me as a player about the world and how it works.
Thanks for the feedback, it's really valuable to us because we (the research team at the University of Stirling) have funding to continue our partnership with Glitchers.
Overall, there is no lesson in this game, it's a game of trade-offs. Recent research hypotheses that restoration of landscapes might increase disease risks, while fully restored sites might dilute and buffer disease risks. That is the idea of the model that is behind the game. Whether this is really how it works, we will only know in the next few years, with more research being done, for example in our project https://restoreid.eu/.
The comment about the slot that the virus takes preventing forest growth is a really good point, we will take this into account at the next update of the game.
Also really interesting comment about the balance, and the point that humans die from disease but not lack of food. Something to think about for the next update.
Thanks for the really useful comments and the overall positive feedback!
Oh, ok. Interesting to hear about your project and glad I could help! Good luck with the continued development, I'll try to return to it whenever I see the update :)
So cool!!! love the animations and world building games are right up my street. Would be super cool to have a gameplay instructions modal when you first join the game, or even better a tutorial, so there is some idea on what you can do and how things work!
This is such a great idea, thank you! Passing it onto the team now :)
Oh hey, its the university I went to! I discovered this game through itch.io, so I was rather surprised to see the emblem. Played a couple of rounds, I got neutral and then physician for my runs. I dont seem to get when a forest tile will spawn more trees, so I can´t build the cleansing forest of my dreams. My preferred strategy in my own words is removing the new growth in the early game for cash, which I spend on increasing the number of farms to be on par with the population. Removing new growth has the benefit of keeping those new farms safer, and this gives me the money to cleanse the land and even plant forests in the later game. I only used chicken culling once, since it really hampers the money generation, and the dead population regenerates so fast. I will try some more maps to check if I can get a more forest based playstyle if I have less mouths to feed
Hey, just wondering, I got myself a run with all tiles either clean or occupied, but my cleanliness rating was rather middling. Do settlements and chicken farms count as unclean?
Hey, thank you so much for playing!
You might have found a bug, please keep on going and let us know if you find anything else or have any other suggestions please.
Currently when you end your turn, each forest that isn't "mature" (has the full set of 4 trees on it) either has a chance of spawning a disease OR of growing a new tree.
Once it's a full mature forest, it won't spawn disease, and you have to weigh up if you want to cut down a tree to get more money, but take a chance that disease may spawn from the empty spot.