Wild Willows

Free · early release · plays offline

You've set up camp at the edge of a damaged nature preserve. Gather what's fallen, craft and plant habitat, shape the land with a shovel and watering can (dig ponds, grow meadows, raise forests), and watch life find its way back.

Restore six distinct biomes, each with its own plants, resources, palette, and animals: Willow Meadow, Old Hollow Forest, Rushwater Wetland, Redstone Scrubland, Graywind Heights, and Pelican Shore. 150 animals in all, each with real habitat needs and a unique look built from its own traits. Plant, craft, and decorate at your own pace. There's no failing, no clock, no combat. Just a quiet preserve slowly coming back under your care.

Forage across the preserve for all different kinds of materials, from meadow wildflowers and river clay to desert geodes and alpine quartz, with biome-exclusive finds waiting in every area. Then put those materials to work, crafting and planting habitat as you go. Upgrade your basket, shovel, watering can, and field journal along the way, so every area you heal opens up new things to gather and make.

The ecosystem behaves like a real one. Predators only return once their prey is established, water-dwellers need water you've actually shaped, and a meadow full of grazers but no hunters reads as unbalanced until the food web is whole. You don't follow a checklist so much as learn what each animal needs and build a place that can hold it, and along the way you pick up how real habitats and food chains actually fit together.

• Restore and unlock six biomes in turn, from meadow and forest to wetland, desert, alpine, and coast
• Gather 33 kinds of materials and craft from 130+ recipes, unlocking new ones as each biome heals
• Earn every animal's return by genuinely meeting its needs: food, shelter, water, and a balanced food web
• A living food web, where predators wait for prey and every species depends on the habitat you build
• Build and decorate a home you can step inside: pick a cabin, cottage, or stone hearth and make it yours
• 50 achievements and a field journal that fills in as life returns

I'd love your feedback

This is an early release and I'm still actively building it. Tell me what you think — leave a comment on this page: what you liked, what felt off, animals/plants/items you wish were or weren't in there, or anything that broke. It genuinely shapes where this goes next.

How this was made

Wild Willows is a solo project, and I leaned on a few tools to get it built. The in-game writing (the activity feed, animal facts, and most of the text) was AI-assisted, and I used AI help while writing the code too. All the art is procedurally generated from simple geometry at runtime, no AI-generated images, no asset files at all, every animal sprite is built from its own traits in code.

Under the hood, the game is built on Harper, an open-source runtime that keeps an app's data and rules together in a single process. I built and ran Wild Willows on Harper, and because its data and game logic live together as one component, I could reuse that same logic locally in this download. That's what lets solo play run fully offline and open instantly, with no server and nothing to sign into. If you're a developer and curious, Harper is open source and free to start with: https://www.harper.fast/