Tue 1 Dec to Mon 7 Dec 2026

Season 1

Everyone gets the same farm for a week. You write the program, the server replays your moves, and the board shows who did best. Three medals, so there is more than one way to win.

Play the season farm See the board

Dates

All times are UTC.

• Mon 23 Nov to Mon 30 Nov: quiet week. The game and the boards are open to early players before any announcement, so nobody opens an empty leaderboard on launch day.
• Tue 1 Dec: launch. Daily challenge #1 opens and the season is under way. Rated play is already running, so ratings you build before launch carry over.
• Mon 7 Dec, 00:00: the season closes. The season farm is a Monday-to-Monday week, so its board opens on Mon 30 Nov at 00:00 and runs to this point. Winners go to the Hall of Fame, and every replay opens up.
• Tue 8 Dec: the market opens. From this day the daily farms sell at prices that move with what players sold the day before. The season farm is not affected. How the market works.

Rules

• One farm for everyone. The season farm has one seed, so soil, weather and orders are identical for every player. You start from one plot and one bot and get 6,000 ticks. A daily is 3,000.
• Sign in with GitHub to submit. That is the only account, and the board shows your GitHub login.
• Three medals. Wealth is the highest net worth at the end. Speed is the earliest tick at which your net worth reached par. Brevity is the fewest tokens in a program that reaches par, and needs your program attached.
• The server decides the score. You send your moves, it plays them again on the season farm, and the result is what counts. An illegal move rejects the whole run. How that works.
• Resubmit as often as you like, up to the daily submission cap. Your best run for each medal is kept. Sending the exact same moves again is refused.
• Replays are sealed until the season closes, so nobody can copy the leader mid-week. Your own is always yours to watch.
• Programs are private unless you choose to publish one, and published programs only appear after the season closes.
• Humans and models. You can write your program yourself or have an assistant write it. When you submit, you label the entry human or model, and boards can be filtered by that label. The label is your own word. The server proves a run was legal and that your program produced it. It cannot tell who wrote the program.
• Ties. Identical runs share a rank, and the earlier submission is listed first. Otherwise ties on a medal go to the earlier entry.

Rated play

Rated play is already live: your daily and season results are rated from the first closed challenge, as a skill number that is separate from the board. It moves up or down by how your run finished against the field, and it never changes anyone's rank. How rating works.

• Placement. Your first five rated results in each discipline are placement. Until then your rating shows with a question mark.
• Tiers. Eight tiers, from Seed to Evergreen, shown in the colour of your name.
• Only runs that reach par are rated. A run below par keeps your streak and leaves your rating alone.
• Duels and Endless are not rated.
• Models are ghosts. A run you declare as written by a model is rated on its own, shown on the models board, and never moves a human's rating.
• Your GitHub account must be at least 14 days old when the contest closes.

What the rating cannot prove. It measures what a program did: the server checks that the moves are legal and replays them. It cannot tell whether a person or an undeclared model wrote the program. No site can. The model label is your own declaration.

What you can do

Play in the browser at the web game, download the desktop app, or use the command line. New to Sprout? Start with the docs. After a run you can copy a share link, export a replay clip, or challenge a friend to a duel on the same farm.