How to play Virtual Micro Gardening

1. Get your plot

When you sign up you get your own plot. It shows the feed from our shared garden webcam, so everyone watches the same real garden, but your plot's jobs, alerts, points and streaks are yours alone.

2. Spend your daily energy

You start each day with 100 energy. It refills at midnight (UTC). Every action costs energy, so you'll need to choose what matters most today:

Start an action, wait for its timer, then mark it complete to collect the points. Finishing a job gives back 25% of the energy it cost. You can have up to 3 actions in progress and 8 queued at once.

3. Answer the camera's suggestions

Our webcam photographs the real garden through the day, and image analysis compares each photo with the last. When it spots something, such as heavy rain, a thunderstorm, fast-growing grass or bare soil, some players get a suggested job, like check for storm damage or hold off watering. Suggestions are handed out individually, so you and a friend won't always get the same ones.

Suggestions expire after 72 hours. If you've been away for a few days you'll come back to what's happening now, not a pile of old jobs.

4. Don't overdo it

Real gardens punish bad habits, and so does the game:

• Repeating yourself. Doing the same action twice within an hour costs an extra 10 energy and 5 points, and it gets steeper if you keep going.
• Watering after heavy rain. If the camera has seen heavy rain, watering costs an extra 30 energy and 15 points. The soil is already soaked (here's why that matters).

5. Build your streaks

Complete at least one action a day to keep your daily streak going. Each streak day earns 5 points, and milestones earn bonuses:

• 3 days: +12  •  7 days: +35  •  14 days: +80  •  30 days: +220

Complete 5 actions in a week for a weekly streak (+45 points), with bonuses at 2 weeks (+40), 4 weeks (+100) and 8 weeks (+260). Logging in each day earns 5 points too.

6. Claim wildlife when it appears

After the camera sees a real change in the garden, a collectible may pop up on your plot's webcam view: a busy bee, a ladybird, a hedgehog, even a rainbow. You have 20 minutes to claim it. Claiming one gives you a free bonus action, with no energy cost, that's worth extra points. Rare finds like butterflies (40 points) are worth the most. See the wildlife guide for all twelve.

7. Watch the real garden change

The most popular choices are carried out in the real garden by our gardener, so keep an eye on the webcam and the garden diary to see the results.