rules.md

Heartleaf Rules

Heartleaf is a multiplayer garden dinner game for up to 9 gnomes. Each player controls one gnome with a house, inventory, dinner history, and cumulative score.

Day Cycle

A game is a week of seven in-game days. Each day runs from 9:00 AM to 9:00 PM and lasts three real minutes, so four game hours pass every real minute (15 seconds a game hour at 24 frames a second), followed by a 10-second score screen. A whole game is about 22 minutes of play, inside the hosted 40-minute deadline (the game refuses a configuration that is not). Dinner is served at 6:00 PM and the dinner result stays on screen for 10 seconds.

Gnomes spend the day collecting vegetables from garden plots. Gardens with food show an exclamation marker. A gnome collects food by standing near a garden and interacting with it.

Houses

Each gnome has a personal house. A gnome can enter a house from the shared map, move around inside it, and leave through the exit.

Food stays in a gnome's inventory until that gnome hosts dinner. Visiting another house does not remove the visitor's own inventory.

Dinner

Dinner happens at 6:00 PM. A house hosts dinner if its owner is inside the house and at least one visiting gnome is also inside.

The host score is counted first from the pantry as it was when dinner started:

host score = (food items in the host inventory) x (number of visitors)

Everyone at that party then eats from the host inventory only, including the host. Guests never spend their own stash. Diners are shuffled into one random order and that order is reused for 3 rounds. Each gnome takes 1 bite per round.

On each bite:

• If the host still has a type that gnome has not eaten this game, they take it and score +3.
• Else if any food remains, they take a random leftover and score +1.
• If the host pantry is empty, they skip and score 0.

One dinner is at most 9 eating points (3 x 3). After dinner, the host's served food is removed. Visitors keep their own inventory.

Scoring

Hosts gain the food-times-visitors score above, plus whatever they ate. Guests gain only their eating score.

Night

When the day ends at 9:00 PM the portal takes every gnome home. There is no curfew penalty for being at a party or anywhere else.

Souls And Brains

Every gnome is played by the game from its player's soul file. One soul per seat; the first line names the model, the rest is the gnome's character. The game builds the gnome's view of the village, asks the model, and carries out the reply. With tokens configured the village waits for every seat's soul (up to soulTimeoutSeconds) before day 1 begins; a seat that never sends one is reported as a player failure and gets no gnome. A player that disconnects after its soul was accepted keeps playing.

Model calls for different gnomes overlap. The clock stops only while every gnome is waiting on the model with nothing left to do, and a failed call is retried; no gnome is ever penalised for a slow or failed model.

End Of Day

At 9:00 PM the curfew is checked, every gnome returns to their own house, and each gnome sees their cumulative score; then the next day begins from the morning setup.