Grove Lab — Tree Breeding & Botany Minigame for RPG Maker MZ

Why does an apple tree die in the tundra but thrive in Kent? Why won't it fruit in the tropics at all? Grove Lab turns those questions into a minigame your players will actually want to replay.

Grove Lab is a drop-in RPG Maker MZ plugin. Players run an experimental forest of biome beds: temperate, Mediterranean, tropical rainforest, hot desert, boreal taiga and arctic tundra. They pick species, prepare seed, plant, protect, graft, cross-breed and harvest 29 real trees. Every success and every failure comes with the real reason behind it.

No images. No audio files. No setup. Every tree, sky, season and minigame is painted procedurally at runtime, so it looks consistent in any project.

What players do

• Plan & Assess a species before planting. The site report scores winter cold vs. hardiness, summer heat, chill hours, ripening heat, rainfall, soil pH, salinity, permafrost, wind, light and pollination, and explains each one.
• Prepare seed the way growers do: cold-stratify apple pips, scarify acacia seeds, sow recalcitrant cacao and acorns fresh, root fig cuttings, plant date-palm offshoots.
• Care and protect: water, mulch, N-P-K, compost, lime and sulfur, prune at the right season, integrated pest management, frost cloth, shade cloth, windbreaks, raised beds, drip irrigation and mycorrhizal fungi.
• Splice Lab: four real graft types (whip-and-tongue, cleft, T-bud, bark) with real compatibility rules. Pear on quince works, apple on pear fails, palms can't be grafted.
• Breed new varieties with controlled crosses and stored pollen. Seedlings inherit dominant, recessive and multi-gene traits, so you can breed a columnar, weeping, cold-hardy or sweeter tree and name it.
• Harvest: pick ripe fruit, tap maple sap (only on freeze-thaw nights), tap rubber latex at dawn, strip cork, or fell timber and date the tree by its rings.
• Live through the weather: late frosts, monsoon downpours, sandstorms, locusts, blizzards, wildfire and more. Each event teaches what it does to real trees.

Four hands-on minigames

1. Graft — make the cut, line up the cambium layers, wrap the union.
2. Pollinate — emasculate the flower at balloon stage, dust pollen when the stigma is receptive.
3. Pick — harvest only the ripe fruit; the ripeness cue changes per species.
4. Read the rings — count the years and find the drought year (dendrochronology).

Built to be replayed

• 29 Goals, from a guided First Steps tutorial to Master Arborist challenges, each paying XP and money.
• Contracts from mills, markets and botanists, refreshed every few seasons.
• 6 ranks that unlock new climates and plots.
• Arboretum: raise every species to maturity to complete your living collection.
• Bud sports: rare mutant branches you can clone into a brand-new cultivar.
• Lineage Registry with pedigree charts for every tree you breed.
• Arborist's Questions: 32 quiz questions with explanations (rewards paid once per question, so no farming).

Built to teach

The simulation is simplified for play, but every rule is grounded in real horticulture: growing-degree days, chill hours, hardiness, pH nutrient lock-up, salinization, permafrost, self-incompatibility, dioecy, polyembryony, rootstock and scion effects, recalcitrant seeds and freeze-thaw sap flow. Every botanical fact and quiz answer went through a dedicated fact-check pass.

The Field Journal unlocks species, climates, techniques and genetics as players discover them. A one-click Learning Report sums up quiz accuracy, topics unlocked and skills practised, which makes it handy for classrooms and homeschool games.

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For developers:

Set up in two minutes

1. Copy Arbor_GroveLab.js into your project's js/plugins folder and switch it ON in the Plugin Manager.
2. Add an event (a botanist NPC, a greenhouse door) with Plugin Command ▸ Arbor_GroveLab ▸ Open Grove Lab.
3. Optional: set Add to Main Menu to ON.

Progress saves inside the normal save file. No other plugins are required.

Tune it without code

40 parameters, all with sensible defaults:

• Difficulty preset (Relaxed, Standard, Challenging), labor per day, days per season, growth speed
• Starting climates, plots and seeds; seed-shop mode; rank unlock order
• Currency: party gold, a game variable or a separate grove purse
• Give harvested produce as Database Items
• Weather event and bud sport chances; minigames on or off; day-report popups; tree sway
• Optional sound effects for watering, harvest, success and rank-up
• Classroom mode: unlock every Field Journal topic from the start

Plugin commands

Open Grove Lab · Give Seeds · Give Cutting / Offshoot · Unlock Climate · Unlock Species · Add Plot · Advance Days · Give Arborist XP · Get Stat → Variable (rank, goals, species raised, grafts, hybrids, harvests, quiz score and more) · Reset Grove

Tip: to make a shop item that grants seeds, give the item a Common Event that runs Give Seeds.

Add your own content

Drop a GroveLab_Custom.json into your data folder to add species, climates, quiz questions, techniques and genetics notes, or to rename menu labels. A species can copy an existing one through "base" and list only what differs, so a new cherry tree takes about ten lines. Missing fields get safe defaults, so custom content can't crash the renderer. A full example ships with the plugin.

Event hooks for other plugins

GroveLab.on("harvest", e => $gameVariables.setValue(10, e.amount));

Events: plant, sprout, mature, harvest, sell, graft, cross, death, rankUp, contract, milestone, dayEnd, seasonStart, open, close.

Compatibility

• RPG Maker MZ (desktop and browser deployment)
• Any resolution; works when Screen Size and UI Area differ
• Touch UI supported, with an on-screen Back button
• Old saves upgrade automatically when you update the plugin

FAQs

Do I need any images or sound files? No. Everything is drawn in code. Sound effects are optional; without them the plugin uses your database system sounds.

Does it work with other plugins? It runs in its own scene and only adds one optional entry to the main menu, so conflicts are unlikely. If you hit one, post in the comments with your plugin list.

Is it suitable for kids and classrooms? Yes. The content is all-ages. Turn on "Unlock All Journal Topics" for classroom mode and use the Learning Report to see what a player has covered.

How accurate is the science? The numbers are simplified so a season takes minutes, but the cause and effect is real: why apples need winter chill, why tropical soils are poor, why tundra trees stay tiny. Every fact went through a separate fact-check.

Can I add my own trees, climates or questions? Yes, through a JSON file with no coding (see "Add your own content"), or from script with GroveLab.addSpecies, addClimate and addQuiz.

Can I translate it? All species, climate, technique, genetics and quiz text, plus the main menu labels, can be replaced through the JSON file. Some smaller interface messages are English-only in this version.

Will updates break my players' saves? No. Saves are versioned and upgraded automatically.

Terms of use

• Use in commercial and non-commercial RPG Maker MZ games.
• Edit it for your own project.
• Don't resell or redistribute the plugin file on its own.
• Credit appreciated: "Grove Lab by RPG Maker Plugins".