The garden

The garden runs on its own clock. Days pass, weather turns over, seasons change between sessions, and every third evening the lanterns go up. None of it needs managing, but festivals in particular only happen at particular times.

The day

One in-game day is 24 real minutes, so a full cycle of dawn, noon, dusk and night fits inside half an hour of play.

The light moves through named stages: deep night, first light, sunrise, noon, afternoon, sunset, dusk fade, and back to night.

Noon is a plateau

Full noon is held rather than touched and left. The brightest light holds for about 22% of the whole cycle, a little over five minutes in every 24, which is most of the daylight window.

Noon used to be a single instant, so the brightest light in the game existed for one frame and every other daylight minute was a ramp toward it or away from it.

Seasons

Four seasons: spring, summer, autumn, winter.

They turn on a real-week wheel, seven real days each on wall-clock time rather than in-game days. A garden’s first launch starts in spring.

The season is sampled once per session and never changes while you are playing. A season change happens with the app closed, so you return to a different garden rather than watching one shift under you.

What changes

Winter changes how the garden plays: the frozen pond becomes a walkable surface, so chao cross where they used to swim.

Grass is there year-round. Flowers come and go: nothing in winter, rising through spring, peaking in summer, fading through autumn.

Weather

Three states, clear, overcast and rain, cycling on their own.

The sky is clear about 68% of the time. Spells are short: clear runs 70 to 190 seconds, overcast 40 to 130, rain 100 to 170.

Cover builds slowly and lifts faster, so an overcast sky takes around half a minute to close in and clears quicker.

In winter, rain falls as snow: a slow drift rather than streaks, silent, with no rain bed and no lightning.

Festivals

Every third in-game evening a festival takes over the lawn.

The rhythm

A festival lands every 3 in-game days, roughly 72 minutes of garden time. It runs from dusk through the night to dawn, so it is an evening event and it ends on its own.

Most slots host the current season’s festival. Every third festival is a special instead, rotating through the five in turn, so a special comes around about every 9 in-game days.

The four seasonal festivals

The five specials

Chaos Eclipse gathers the three Chaos Chao: the Light Chao keeps the shrine in the garden while the Angel and the Devil ride in on the eclipse ship. Its Chaos Crown is the most expensive hat in the game at 12,000 rings.

What a festival puts on the lawn

Every festival brings the same furniture in its own costume:

• An airship overhead: a balloon, a blimp, a moon barge, a pirate ship or an eclipse ship.
• A shop stall selling that festival’s snacks, its hat, and a dozen or more pieces of décor you can keep afterwards.
• Light strings: petals, lanterns, leaves, ice, pennants or notes.
• Fireworks in colours picked for the festival.
• An activity at most of them, and set pieces at the rest.
• Host chao and crew, dressed to match.

Every stall also carries the year-round garden furniture, including benches, a hammock, a telescope and a wishing well, cheapest first.

Snow & Lights and Garden Anniversary both sell a mystery gift box for 150 rings.

Things worth catching

Four festivals have something to catch, and what you catch is recorded.

Snow & Lights matters most for a collection: its ice-hole fishing pulls real pond fish rather than festival novelties, and they go into the pond afterwards. The Garden Night Festival’s goldfish and the Chaos Eclipse’s shrine basin also release into the pond.

Making use of it

• A festival now: play through to dusk. They come every 72 minutes of garden time and always run the evening.
• A specific seasonal one: wait for the season. They turn weekly on real time and cannot be rushed from inside the game.
• The winter pond: winter makes it walkable, the only time chao cross it on foot.