Undergrow

Short

Your silo has planted the same seed potatoes for two hundred years, and every harvest gives less. The Council rations the decline and keeps the doors shut. Then someone knocks on the sealed door at the end of the west tunnel, and Greywell’s oldest secret starts coming out.

Long

You farm Level 61 of Greywell, an underground silo. The grow beds run under pink lamps, and the seed potatoes in them are clones of clones: each generation carries more disease and gives less. At the end of the west tunnel stands a blast door stencilled KNELL. The founders sealed it two hundred years ago, and the Council’s authority rests on keeping it shut. One day you knock on it, and someone knocks back.

Steward Vance posts the Council’s monthly figure of potatoes, and it goes up every month. Miss two months in a row and the Council finds another farmer for Level 61. Up on Level 44, the great ledger records the yield of every bed, decade by decade, falling. Someone has written in its margin: “Ration the decline. Do not publish. The doors stay shut.”

The Pumpwrights run the water and the power, and they have been quietly reopening the old tunnels. Knell, the silo behind the door, survived the blight by learning to grow it, and it will trade fresh seed for potatoes on its own terms. Each faction remembers what you told the others.

Mire, a third silo, has been under water since the year the doors were sealed. Its seed vault was held in common by all the silos, and nobody has opened it since. Getting there means the flooded drain line and a pump room where something waits under the black water. Below that, the floors have to be drained one at a time. Finding out why Mire drowned means reading the pages Greywell cut from its own archive.

The vault’s lock wants two keys out of three: the Pumpwrights’ power, the Council’s seal, or a code that Mire’s survivors still sing. Whoever helps you open it will expect something back. When the last clean seed is in your hands, you decide who it goes to. Four endings and an epilogue that remembers what you did on the way: the door, the lies, the report you filed, the lamps you cut.

More versions (one line, a systems-first short description) are in description.txt in the zip.

Undergrow is made by Primal Logic LLC in the Godot Engine 4.7, and it is still in development.

Generative AI tools were used throughout production, as the game’s credits disclose. The writing, design and code were done by the team with Claude, Anthropic’s AI assistant. The art and audio were generated during development on the developer’s own hardware:

• character portraits with FLUX.2 [klein] 4B;
• textures, item icons and the title and ending paintings with Qwen-Image 2.1;
• the 3D props, characters and creatures with TRELLIS.2, which turns a Qwen-Image painting into a model;
• the music and sound effects with Stable Audio 3 Medium, except one music track (the drain and ducts theme), made with MiniMax-Music3.

The developer wrote the prompts, chose between takes, and edited, trimmed, composed and placed the results in the game. Nothing is generated while the game runs: it ships no AI models and makes no calls to AI services.

The screenshots below are captures of the game running, with its own interface. The key art and ending paintings are AI-generated art from the game.

Primal Logic LLC is the independent developer and publisher of Undergrow.

A game by Primal Logic LLC.

Writing, design and code: the Undergrow team, with Claude (Anthropic).

Built with the Godot Engine (MIT licence). Copyright © 2014-present Godot Engine contributors; © 2007-2014 Juan Linietsky, Ariel Manzur.

AI-generated content

• Music: the Greywell, Knell, Council, Mire, boss and finale themes were generated with Stable Audio 3 Medium. The theme for the drain and the ducts was generated with MiniMax-Music3.
• Sound effects and ambient sound: Stable Audio 3 Medium. Powered by Stability AI.
• Character portraits: FLUX.2 [klein] 4B.
• 3D props, characters and creatures: TRELLIS.2, from Qwen-Image 2.1 paintings.
• Textures, item icons, and the title and ending art: Qwen-Image 2.1.

All characters, places and events are fictional.