Invernadero errante

An incremental game where you tend a glass greenhouse adrift between stars. The apparent mechanic is growing things; the real goal is cataloguing, and every species identified improves the output of all the others.

The decision that holds the project up

The engine imports nothing from React and never touches the DOM. It is plain TypeScript, and game state lives outside the component tree: the tick mutates it twenty times a second and the interface subscribes to a revision counter.

Putting that state in useState would have re-rendered the whole tree on every tick, which is the classic bottleneck of the genre. Keeping it outside also makes it possible to simulate four hours of play in two hundred milliseconds from the command line, which is the only honest way to tune the balance.

Large arithmetic

Every number is a Decimal from break_infinity.js, never a number. A plain number slipping into the chain produces a silent Infinity past 1e308, and the bug surfaces weeks later.

Real time, not a fixed delta

Each tick simulates the interval elapsed against the system clock, with a cap per tick and a cap on absence. Recovering time the browser throttled in the background and computing progress while the tab was closed become the same mechanism rather than two.