Note: the beta won’t immediately be available on Steam on the 23rd. Please check out the Occasionally Asked Questions below for more details! Thank you for your understanding.
Gardening and Homesteading in the Canthan Jade Spring
Relax, potter, and build in Jade Spring, a small Guild Wars 2 decorating and homesteading fan game. Tend your garden as a Xunlai jade bot, clearing weeds and pests, dispelling Dragonvoid blights, and furnishing your plot with architecture, flora, furniture, and ornaments from across Tyria!
Zen cleaning
Engage in mini-games to spruce up your garden, clearing out bugs, invasive plants, trash, and leftover strands of Dragonvoid. Collect Karma from each task to spend on permanent improvements to your gardening and decorating abilities!
Granular decoration
Personalise your space using robust tools which let you easily move, rotate, scale, snap, and clear items. Acquire enough Karma to unlock fancy decorations, as well as utilities which allow you to change the time of day, clear the map to start fresh, and fine-tune your environment to suit your creativity.
A guild wars 2 tribute
Jade Spring is an independent developer’s love letter to Cantha and to Guild Wars 2 in general, featuring hand-made art, models, animations, and music directly inspired by the worlds of Tyria, and filled with small tributes and references.
Occasionally Asked Questions
Q. Why won’t Jade Spring be available on Steam for the launch?
Unfortunately I haven’t heard back from Steam about some further review they are doing, and I don’t know how long that process is gonna take! As Jade Spring is a fan project, I have to provide reasonable assurances that I’m not doing stuff with third party content that I shouldn’t be. Please feel free to check out my own comments on this in this letter here. The game will be available from its itch.io page on the 23rd, and versions (eventually) downloaded from Steam would be totally compatible with that one!
Q. Can I backup and share my garden with other people?
Yes! Once you've started playing Jade Spring, you can access your save by clicking the folder next to “Continue” in the main menu (or in the “New Game” pane), or go to C:\Users\(user)\AppData\Roaming\jade-spring in Windows Explorer. Your story is stored in save.dat, and your garden layout is kept in deco.dat. They each function independently, so to share your garden you can simply pass deco.dat to your friend and have them replace that file in their own folder. (Just keep in mind that they won’t be able to edit it themselves until they have gotten far enough through the game’s little story.)
Note:Jade Spring supports Steam Cloud, but I found that it often ignores manual changes to your save folder. Steam Cloud is good if you want to maintain your progress across two PC’s, but if you are trading lots of decoration files with friends you might find it better to turn it off for Jade Spring.
Q. I found a bug in the game! (The software kind, not the buzzing flies.) I wish there were a lot more decorations! I have an idea for a couple of decorations myself!
I would really love to hear about any bugs you encounter in Jade Spring, or any ideas you have for more decorations and mechanics. You can make a ticket through my site, or you can contact me directly on Bluesky or via email! I have a bunch more decorations I plan on adding throughout the beta, too.
Q. What’s next for Jade Spring?
From the 23rd, it’s beta time! Our original timeline in April’s development notes still seems to be holding up for the most part. I will be taking this time to fix bugs, address feedback, see how people are feeling about the game in general. I have never released (or finished) a game before, so I’m really excited (and a little anxious) to see how it goes. Depending on interest in the game, there are a few next steps that I have in mind leading up to a stable launch and beyond – things like controller support are high on that list. beyond that, I have some fun ideas for an expansion called “Xunlai Neon”! It would feature new Kaineng cyberpunk decorations, a new map (probably inspired by Arborstone), and some unique kinds of pests to clear out of the garden (like the Jade arms that come out of the ground in the XJ-1 fight). But we will see how everything goes.
Q. Wait, is that Guild Wars 2 stuff? Is that alright?
I actually get questions like this quite a bit! “The toolbar is very similar to the skill bar in Guild Wars 2 ; is that okay?” Jade Spring is indeed a fan project for what is easily my favourite and most-played game, Guild Wars 2. A lot of my assets are intentionally designed to mirror the layout and painterly style of GW2, but they are all created from scratch; apart from being a fan project, Jade Spring has also been an opportunity for me to enjoy and learn all aspects of game development.
ArenaNet opens up a pathway for us to be able to make GW2 fan projects through their content terms of use, and you can see the ways in which Jade Spring conforms to these terms in this letter here. In short, the game is (and will always be) free, family-friendly, and absent of NFTs and silly stuff like that. You can also catch the disclaimer at the bottom of this page in many different places around the game and site.
You can find development notes for Jade Spring in the journal, too! Thank you so much for your interest in the game.
