click DAY MEADOW / NIGHT DEW (or D / N): start on that theme click packet then lawn (or 1–8): plant the selected defender S then lawn: shovel a plant out X: cancel selection SPACE / N (or NEXT button): call the wave early P: pause R: restart the run M: back to menu click suns: gather them — unclicked sun expires defender: cost job Sunbloom: 50 makes 25 sun (40 at night) Seedspitter: 100 cheap lane shooter Squashblaster: 200 heavy splash, pierces armour Barkwall: 150 650-HP blocker Sporecap: 150 gas pulse hits every nearby lane Chillblossom: 125 weak shots that halve enemy speed Super Chomper: 150 gulps one enemy whole, then chews ~27s Pickled Pepper: 125 1s fuse, then 1800 column blast, consumed Attackers: Gloomshambler (basic), Sprintmold (fast), Bulkrot (tank), Panlid (armour soaks everything but blaster shells), Vaultfrog (leaps the first plant in its way), Spitfungus (lobs globs from range, but closes with bark it cannot crack), and the Rotking (wave 10, pulps plants, flat 1600 HP). Day Meadow drops sky sun; Night Dew has none — richer blooms (40), moon motes, a fuller starting barrow (250), and 5% faster Gloom.
Hold a 5×9 garden through 10 waves of original Gloom creatures with eight sun-powered defenders, a seed-packet economy, per-lane Turf hog mowers, and a Rotking boss at the end of the HUGE wave — by day, or by the harsher rules of Night Dew. THE INTERESTING BIT The whole game is one sprite and zero clones: every list lives in game.gs and each frame is one erase_all, one warp sim() tick, and one warp repaint of pen strokes plus a few stamped costumes (packet icons, sun coins, outlined logos). No clone synchronisation exists to go wrong, and the 300-clone cap never matters. Timing is counted in frames, never timer(), which reads a constant inside warp funcs. The HUD numbers are pen text from a compile-time 3×5 stroke table because Scratch has no dynamic text; the fixed titles are fontTools outlines stamped as costumes. Balance was tuned against a numerical twin (tools/simcheck.py) after the headless VM harness proved unrestorable here: a greedy policy with reactive doubling, replanting, and emergency column peppers wins 11/11 seeds on both themes (22/22 games). The sim caught five real design bugs — an unbeatable thrower-vs-wall siege, wave-1 lane coverage the starting bank could not meet, a boss DPS race the garden always lost, a mid-game grind that tripled run length, and a backline leaker stall where a Bulkrot behind the shooters could never be hit (the pepper's column blast is the scripted answer). NEW DEFENDERS (PVZ-VARIANT HOMAGE, ORIGINAL ART/CODE) * SUPER CHOMPER (7) — 150 sun, 700f recharge, 150 HP. Idle-ready it gulps the first non-boss enemy within ~1 cell ahead in-lane, instant kill at any HP; the Rotking is too big, so it takes 400 piercing instead. Either meal starts an 800-frame (~27s) chew where it is a passive wall and eats nothing. * PICKLED PEPPER (8) — 125 sun, 600f recharge, 100 HP, single use. Planted with a 30-frame (~1s) fuse and a rising flash telegraph, then deals 1800 piercing to every enemy in its vertical column strip (|dx| < 30) across all 5 lanes, boss included, and is consumed. Seed bar repacked to eight 40-wide packets + shovel so 480x360 still fits; keys 1–8, S shovel. HONEST LIMITATIONS * No scrollback, no levels beyond the two themes. Ten waves and done; a human will want more worlds, and they would slot into wave_pick/driver cleanly. * Frame-counted timing keeps every ratio exact but runs faster on faster machines — a real-time clock would need yields the warp sim cannot give. * Peas always arrive. Straight lane shots at 230 px/s need no target leading (unlike towerdef's cannons), so there is no interception showcase — the depth is in the economy and the armour/leap/ranged answers instead. * The sim policy is stronger than a first-time player (it already knows the build order), so expect your first runs to end around wave 4–6 while you learn the roster. Mowers forgive one mistake per lane. * Performance. A full late-game frame is a few hundred pen ops plus ~20 stamps; it holds up on desktop Scratch but will breathe hard on weak hardware, like every pen project. All original - code, art and sound. See Inside is open.
