A living ecological simulation, modeled through coherence.
The Green Equation is a living system you play, not a slideshow you click through. Every leaf you drop, root you reach, and patch of mulch you lay down moves real instruments (coherence, thermal stress, soil vitality, biodiversity) toward recovery or collapse. No two sessions drift the same way.
Free. Browser-based only, nothing to install. Built to reward attention, not clicks.
The game lives right here.
The Green Equation runs entirely client-side in Phaser 3, no plugins, no account, no install. Drop leaf litter to build soil. Lay mulch to buy a heat-stressed tree time. Watch ten roots reach for water, one at a time, before the system can recover. Every action is visible on the instrument panel above the canvas, so cause and effect never hide behind a black box.
Three states. One living system.
Balance, tended by hand
Leaf litter builds soil. Flower patches draw the living network in. Small, deliberate actions keep every instrument in a healthy range. This is the baseline the rest of the game measures itself against.
→Stress, applied directly
Trees dry out. Roots have to reach for water, one by one, before recovery is even possible. Mulch buys time. The mycelial network activates underground, working where you can't see it.
→The state nobody wants to see
When every root fails to find water and the instruments run out of room to fall, the system doesn't reset quietly. It fades to a record of what happened: the honest cost of letting the equation slip.
The HUD is the game.
- COHERENCE
Coherence dial
The single number the whole system answers to. Every other instrument feeds into it.
- THERMAL
Thermal stress
Rises through a heatwave, and only comes back down once every root has completed its reach for water.
- SOIL
Soil vitality
Moves in three visible tiers (dormant, growing, regenerating), driven by litter and mulch you place yourself.
- NETWORK
Biodiversity / living network
An orbiting read on how connected the system's parts still are to each other.
- SCORE
Eco-Score & GE Index
What you carry out of a session: a record of how well the system held together under your hand.
"Nothing on this panel is decoration. If a number moves, a real action caused it, and if you can't see the cause, that's a bug, not a feature."
How this world actually works.
The mechanics aren't decorative. The heatwave state models a real disturbance-recovery pattern: stress accumulates, roots have to individually re-establish contact with water, and the system only regains stability once every one of them has. A rough stand-in for how ecological systems actually recover from drought and thermal stress, unevenly and one pathway at a time.
The coherence dial is the game's version of ecological resilience: a single measure of how much disturbance the system can absorb before it shifts into a different, harder-to-reverse state. The mycelial network trigger nods to the real role of mycorrhizal networks in redistributing resources between plants under stress.
A full references list, matching the standard used across I Hug Trees' other ecology content, is in progress and will be linked here.
"You don't need to know a system's math to feel it working. But if you go looking, the math should be there."
Accurate enough for scientists. Clear enough for everyone else.
Scientifically grounded
Ecological states, recovery thresholds, and instrument behavior are modeled to hold up to scrutiny from people who study ecology for a living.
Legible at a glance
You don't need a biology degree to read the panel. Color, motion, and position do the explaining, so the science stays honest without becoming homework.
Nothing is destroyed
Every element in the world persists (hidden, faded, recovered), the same discipline the system itself rewards. The game and the system it simulates share one philosophy.
Feedback and feature requests.
Send us a note
Bug reports, balance feedback, or anything that felt off while you were playing. We read every message.
nature@ihugtrees.org →Join the Discord
A dedicated space for players and researchers to compare notes, share sessions, and flag what they're seeing.
Discord invite: coming soonVote on features
A running board of what to build next. Upvote the mechanics, scenarios, and instruments you want to see.
Feature board: coming soon