MENTIFABERThe workshop · drawn at night
Sheet
32 / 41
Grid
MF-05·03
Drawn
Anders
Date
28.10.2026
Fig. 1 · Watch Your Grass, on the bench: power it on to run it hereMF-05·03

01Why it exists

Plant a maze with thorns

Visitors come through the gate and walk to the house by the shortest way they can find. Ground cover can be walked on; everything else is in the way, so every plant is also a wall. Make the walk long, make it hurt, and spend your sun wisely: roses for thorns, mushrooms for spores, mint and sunflowers for income, three trees at most, and boulders nobody can move.

Watch Your Grass (also known as Arm A Garden, depending on how well the joke is landing) was designed on paper before any code. This version rebuilds it for the browser.

02Parts list

  1. Ten plants and terrainGrass and rose vines underfoot, a pond to wade through, roses, mushrooms, mint, sunflowers, trees, honey locust and boulders.
  2. Six kinds of visitorStrollers, joggers, a kid chasing a ball, an off-leash dog that digs, a mower that flattens ground cover, and the Landscaper every fifth round.
  3. Never a softlockWall someone in and they trample one plant (never a boulder) to force a way through, logged so you can see it. Boulders that would seal the lawn are refused.
  4. Calm on purposeEvery animation runs at double the first build's duration, with 1×, 2× and 3× speed when you want it, and a log you can filter.

03Construction

The fixes that shaped it

Softlocks: a unit with no legal move used to stop forever, so the round could never end. The fallback forces a path. Tree cap: three, and the increment is zero, so it never grows. Timing: everything doubled; the board stopped feeling frantic. Palette: the first background was #060e0c and read as sickly; everything moved warmer and brighter.

Built on

No engine, no bundler: a DOM grid with CSS transitions, a breadth-first path for every step, and one table that scales the waves. The original ran on a Cloudflare Quick Tunnel; this one installs as an app.

Vanilla JSCSS transitionsBFS pathingPWA

04Inscription

Keep off the grass. Or don't, and see what happens.

05The same room