Wake the Valley

A pine crate stamped FRAGILE sits on the station meadow. Inside, sixty-three tiny solar-powered robot animals glow faintly in their foam, each waiting for enough sun to wake.

Fernwater is a damaged river valley that runs from a snowfield down through old-growth forest to the tidepools. The first six robots wake in order of charge: Scout the hawk, Current the salmon, Bark the beetle, Tide the otter, Root the earthworm and, last, Pollen the bee, whose boot report lists three anomalies she flicks away: "Anomalies noted. Anomalies ignored. Let's go." Elena and James post jobs on the station's Fix Board, and Mosaic, the station's voice, insists everything is within parameters.

Carry a robot to a glowing work site and it gets to work on its own. Press link and a golden thread joins two units, and both work faster. Dig out the old road, carry forest soil to the trench, clear broom from the hillside, and decide at the Fix Board when a fast fix is safe. At dusk the robots head for their solar pads, and you choose who takes the night shift to find the glowing life in the tidepools.

Every fix has a hidden dependency. Plant five hundred seedlings on acid soil and blackberry erupts; fit a fish ladder too soon and the salmon skip their nursery. The Web shows you why before it happens, if you look across habitats. The rarest robots are the faulty ones, flagged for anomalies, because they see connections the others miss. And when a friend's charge runs out, five robots can pool their last light to bring her back, faults and all.

The first release is a shared coast. Each server holds six players, and each owns one Fernwater valley running out like a spoke from the snowy Crown, with the station, the Galaxy Pool and the crate dock on the coast between them. Crate One holds 63 units across meadow, river, forest, soil and tidepool, with six story chapters and about forty places to find in every valley. Work your valley alone or with up to three friends, and link across the ridges to your neighbours.

Rarity is earned, never drawn: crate contents are listed before you open them, and a robot grows rarer as it links, notices and works through storm nights. While you are away the crate keeps charging, and nothing in the valley decays. Saturday updates add places to the Field Guide, a new crate manifest arrives each month, and a second crate opens a new rainforest valley.

Based on The Rewilding by Marcus Chen: the crate of sixty-three, the repairs that backfire, the faulty units that see more and the Pooling all come from the novel.

Wake the Valley is a finished game design for Roblox, and Greenlight Games is looking for a studio partner to build it.