Hey all, thanks for five planting! It's been really neat seeing people enjoy Five Plants; it's so motivating! This game's approaching the total playcount of the rest of my library combined and it's only been out for a few weeks, absolutely wild. I've been collecting your feedback about the game and I reckon I've got a couple cool improvements for you.

Here's what's new!!

📝💨 Quick grants

Publishing a grant doesn't cost a turn any more (and you don't need to commit to them first, though you'll get a better score if you do).

The old slow way was intended to give the game a thoughtful pace, and sometimes created an interesting decision point. But I found that people mostly just thought it was arbitrarily annoying. The new approach still lets you place a bet on yourself and claim it early, so there's still a lot of room to get good at it, but now you can also play a bit more casually and just grab points when they come up.

🏅5️⃣ The university prize

There's a new objective in the mix - the prize! This is a fixed 25 points that can be won by lining up all five plants in any order.

The earlygame was pretty strange, where you kind of just placed plants wherever and looked at them. It's the only tangible way to the goal but it still felt very aimless. The prize adds something to aim for straight away, before you know which fruits are which, and it's my hope it'll make the game a bit more accessible.

Also it means there's now 5 goals, which is nice. The four hanging around in such a fivey game never sat right with me.

I think the change makes the Illusion ability a lot less relevant though, because if you're pursuing the prize you don't care which fruits are which. I might revisit or replace it, but I don't want to touch it until I've got a sense of how people are enjoying the prize mechanic.

🤏✨ Little updates

• Fixed multiple bus tickets bug
  • One player found a way to get extra bus tickets in the tutorial, which would each grant their point bonus at the end of the game, enabling mega high scores. Pretty funny.
• Disable the ready button when holding a completed grant
• Made the timer stop when the game is done
• Fixed big that played loud/distorted discovery sfx sometimes
• Added a news page with this info on it

I'm interested to know what you think - please feel free to leave a comment if you have celebrations (or gripes) to make. And of course if you've been enjoying FP, it'd be rad if you left a comment + a rating thanks 🙏🕊