I picked up Seed when I saw the early access key offer in my inbox on a bit of a whim. I vaguely remembered hearing about this game years prior, and being vaguely interested in its promise of an MMO sandbox life-sim sort of situation in which everyone’s dumped in a world together and has to build a society. I enjoy a life sim, so I gave it a whirl. The concept on its own is solid enough: you join a society and build a world from scratch, collaborating with those around you to share resources while developing your own skills and finding your niche in the community.
I let Seed select a society for me (shout out to Old Greenhollow) and designed a character (a seedling), giving her traits sort of arbitrarily since I didn’t know what I was getting into. I think I maybe focused on the wrong things, because Seed‘s early game involves a lot more manual labor than I was prepared for. My character, who the game named Channa, started with nothing more than a tent to sleep in. With my guidance, she’s since had to harvest resources, build workbenches, start a farm, and build a water filtration device so she doesn’t get a disease. In these regards, Seed is like most other farming and/or survival sims, though the prevalence of injury and disease in the worldâboth of which give you debuffs and can potentially also kill your characterâmakes things a bit more challenging. It is, however, very funny when someone slides into the society chat and delivers the pronouncement, “now im got jaundice.”
It’s the society bit that’s most interesting to me. When I first joined Old Greenhollow, I was one of eight initial members. We’ve since grown to 18. My fellows have been pretty active in chat the first two days, with one person in particular who seems to know the game pretty well taking on a leadership role that ultimately got them elected mayor once we unlocked that perk as a group. They helped me learn how to build the water filter, and made medicine for my Seedling when she developed a muscle strain. They also took initiative on trying to assign everyone in the society dedicated roles, so we could all specialize and help one another. I volunteered to take up farming, while I know others are focusing on mining, engineering, medicine, and other things. Our leader, along with a few other veterans, has also taken the lead on setting up plots of land and proactively making sure everyone has access to what they need, without encroaching on others. These cooperative aspects of Seed are probably my favorite bit of it, as I’m forced to share space and resources with some total strangers. I imagine if my fellows were less agreeable, this would probably be a pretty crummy gameâthough I guess I can always move to a new society if the vibes are bad.
© Klang Games
The longer you play, the more automated Seed becomes. After the first few hours, I’ve relegated it to a second-window game that I glance at occasionally. You can create detailed schedules for your seedlings, slotting in time for all kinds of specific labor, socializing, caring for needs, and so forth. My seedling, for instance, wakes up at 4am, takes care of her hygiene, then meets up with a bunch of other Seedlings for an hour of socializing at 5am (the society leadership scheduled this hang-out, I have no idea why it’s at 5am). Then, Channa spends an hour cooking food, and an hour filtering water. She then tackles four hours of farming work, followed by a lunch break to do whatever she wants. The afternoon is similarly packed and includes less farming, but more resource gathering and crafting. I gave her Sundays off, because while survival is a constant struggle, I’m not a monster.
Channa will continue doing all this even when I’m not online. Seed runs on an internal clock where one day of real time is equal to one in-game year. When I turn off my PC, Channa keeps to her schedule as best she can. As I glance at the game on my second monitor now, there are other seedlings present whose cultivators aren’t online, but who are still going about their tasks. It’s admittedly a little fun to log on in the morning and see that Channa has somehow managed to grow and harvest like 50 tomatoes, though it’s equally frustrating to learn that she’s developed lumbago from doing that.
© Klang Games
Players (cultivators) are intentionally distinguished from seedlings, and can, strangely, have a sort of relationship with them. I was unhappy to discover that this seems to be some sort of AI chatbot situation, though I’m unclear on the specifics of how it works or what it’s even trained on. Via a messaging app in game, I can text my seedling, and they’ll text back what are supposed to be intelligent responses to what I say. I have very little interest in using this, and while it being a chatbot is a component of that, it’s also just a boring feature. The chatbot is still rough around the edges in early access and frequently gives sort of nonsensical replies, but even stranger than that is just the notion of texting with a little sim I control, like some sort of weird god. I inadvertently made my seedling extremely agreeable, so she’s always gassing me up and telling me how great I am, even though I never really prompt her to do anything like that. I don’t know what or whom this feature is for, but I intend to use it as little as possible. The downside of ignoring it is that Channa will regularly text me “just to say hi” and guilt me if I don’t respond. Just live your life, Channa! If you didn’t need me to tell you when to pee, I wouldn’t even be here!
The seedlings also talk to one another in a similarly stilted fashion, though I see the same replies so often I am genuinely not sure if this is AI or just pulling from a set phrasebook. Honestly, Simlish was totally fine for this sort of thing. We don’t need to do this.
©Klang Games
It’s only been a day, so my experience with Seed is still extremely limited. There’s apparently some currency that I haven’t bothered with at all, and the ability to buy and sell real estate. Once your society grows large enough, you can apparently draft and sign a constitution for it. There’s a companion app I haven’t touched. Seedlings can apparently hold down all sorts of jobs, and get paid for them. The developers of Seed have made some lofty promises about the game eventually simulating an entire planet’s society, with dedicated leaders, laws, and societies that are already built by existing players, so that new ones don’t have to go through the survival crafting game I’m playing right now. They just slot right in.
Maybe Seed will get there. Maybe. I’m skeptical. At the moment, though, Seed is kind of an eh survival game with some interesting interpersonal dynamics and some useless AI. The actual range of what I’m able to do is quite small, especially with a seedling that keeps trying to die on me. Looking at the available crafts and resources, I don’t think Old Greenhollow is going to progress beyond an agrarian commune anytime soon. The actual things I am doing, moment to moment, are the same as what I’d be doing in basically any other crafty/survivaly/farmy-type thing in the vague vicinity of this genre, and most of those games do these things better. This game is also just incredibly wonky. And ugly. I hate the character models, movement and collision are all over the place, there are numerous bugs, and it’s actually a real pain in the ass sometimes to get my seedling to do what I want her to do. For instance, I have a task on her schedule telling her to practice cooking for an hour every day. She literally never does it, despite having plenty of ingredients and multiple cooking tasks set up for her to complete. I have no clue what I’m doing wrong, or even if I am doing anything wrong.
Admittedly, Seed is still in early access, so a lot of its issues can be forgiven. It’s been in development for something like eight years, though I’ll allow that it probably takes a long time to make something that can support this many characters in the world, persistently, all the time, even when players are logged off. And I expect much more content to be added over time, and bugs to be cleared up. But even with that in mind, to me, Seed feels like yet another sort of silly attempt to make a metaverse out of nothing, one that’s several years too late to the trend anyway. I might keep prodding Channa a little longer, at least for the sake of seeing if Old Greenhollow can create anything resembling a government. But I can’t help but wonder what this game will look like in a few months or years as people abandon it, leaving their seedlings automatically repeating the same schedules infinitely in empty communities until someone finally turns the world off.