The demo is out now
You can play Under the Elm right now!!! The Download Demo button is on this page, and it lets you spend your first weeks in the valley: you inherit your grandmother's cabin, learn to name what you find, and start working out her recipes with the people who knew her.
The game has grown an herbal layer
Under the Elm started as a game about mushrooms, and the recipes were there - honestly -just to give the mushrooms somewhere to go.
Then I got further into the herbalism, and it kept pulling. The more I read, the more it stopped looking like a crafting system and started looking like the actual subject! A body of knowledge built by people who paid close attention for a very long time, mostly women, mostly unwritten, which is the game's whole premise, and it had been sitting in front of me the entire time, so this update leans all the way in.
Honey and vinegar opened a door
They're things you make now, not words in a recipe - and that one change unlocked a layer I hadn't planned for. Honey and vinegar together make an oxymel, one of the oldest ways to swallow an herb too bitter to take straight, and syrups and salves need a base before they can exist at all. A whole family of preparations only became possible once the two simplest ones did!
Also in this update
- 12 new plants: sage, rose petals, usnea, thyme, motherwort, feverfew, calendula, lemon balm, horehound, wormwood, elderberry and horseradish.
- Three villagers now hand you something living rather than a recipe - a cutting from a garden, honey off a hive, a mother of vinegar that divides. Each keeps giving for as long as you keep up the relationship.
- Two new dangerous lookalikes. One of them is severe, so beware! Lookalikes are identical to their host on purpose: the tell is always in the text, never in the sprite. Read carefully.
- Recipes arrive in a sensible order, so nothing is taught before you could make it.
As always, feedback comes straight to me - in game via Esc -> Feedback, or drop a comment here!
Happy Foraging!