Home › Wiki › Garden Shows

Garden Shows

A judged competition held over a season, on the garden you already grow. Nine criteria, one fixed rubric, and a prize that is never minted.

What a show is, and when one runs

A Garden Show is a seasonal competition over the ground you already garden. You enter a volume, you may declare a theme for it, and you ask to have it judged. Nine criteria are marked from Poor to Excellent, and every mark arrives with a sentence saying how it was reached.

Awards are absolute merit rather than placings, the way real horticultural shows grade. Two gardens on the same total take the same award and both are paid for it. Only Best in Show is ordered, and an exact dead heat shares it.

Nothing about a show runs on a timer. The season's show opens itself, and a show whose season has passed closes itself on the next command anybody types. Judging happens when you ask for it, never in the background, so the cost of a survey lands on the person who asked for one.

Open the hub with /gardenshow. Bare, it names the current show and its number, the days left before the season turns, and what an entry would cost you right now. The aliases gshow and gardenshows reach the same command.

Every verb is typeable and tab-completable, and the whole feature can be finished from a Bedrock client through forms. If a form cannot be sent, the chest screen is shown instead, so there is never a surface with nothing behind it.

One thing a show is not: a grove. Groves are a world event with their own command, their own flowers and their own music, and they have nothing to do with judging.

Entering, and what it costs

/gardenshow enter enters a volume of ground centred where you stand. That volume is 49 by 25 by 49 blocks, from a radius of 24 and a height of 12, which is 60,025 blocks over 16 chunks. The entry is of that ground, fixed at the moment you enter, so walking away afterwards changes nothing about what will be judged.

Before the click that charges you, the entry card states four things: the exact fee, a tick or a cross for whether you can afford it, the size of the judged volume, and the whole non-refundable warning. The figure quoted and the figure charged come from one function, so the card cannot promise one number and take another.

The fee is paid down the usual cascade, account first, then wallet, then bank notes in hand, and the receipt says which leg was used. It is a burn: it funds nobody, not the prize pool and not the next entrant.

Three things refuse an entry, all of them before any money moves:

• Ground that overlaps somebody else's entry. The refusal names the player, so two gardens can never be the same garden.
• Another faction's claim. Unclaimed ground is allowed, and your own faction's ground is allowed. The claim is tested once, at entry, and never asked again.
• A show that already holds its maximum number of entries.

Declaring a theme

One of the nine criteria marks your garden against a theme you declare yourself. You set it with /gardenshow brief followed by the text, for example /gardenshow brief a cottage border of roses and herbs. The reply names the terms it has taken from your sentence, so you know what you will actually be marked on before anything is judged.

It is a typed command on both platforms. The screens state the command rather than trying to take text, because a Bedrock client has no way to type into a chest window, and an anvil rename would be a Java-only gesture in a feature meant to be finished from either client.

The scoring of that criterion has a shape worth knowing.

• Declaring nothing scores exactly Satisfactory, one point. Silence is neither punished nor rewarded.
• Declaring a theme and delivering none of it scores strictly below declaring nothing, so a claim you do not keep costs you something.
• Delivering what you declared is the only way the criterion pays above Satisfactory.

That middle line is the reason the blank brief is not marked Poor. If an empty theme scored worst, declaring nothing would become the safe play and the criterion would turn into a tax on honesty.

A theme is locked once your entry has been judged. A later /gardenshow brief is refused, and the refusal quotes the brief your card was actually marked against, so the record and the mark can never drift apart.

How your garden is surveyed

/gardenshow judge runs the survey. It reads the volume you entered on, never the ground you happen to be standing on at the time, so a card produced from forty blocks away is still a card of your beds.

The survey never loads a chunk to read it. A chunk that is not loaded is counted, skipped and reported to you, so a mark held down by an unloaded corner is a thing you are told about rather than a mystery. The practical advice the chat gives is to stand in the middle of your entry when you judge.

Judging is deterministic. The same unchanged garden produces the same totals and the same sentences. There is no roll anywhere in it.

The cost of a survey is three separate things rather than one read per block, and the server prints the whole sum at boot.

Item frames are how you exhibit a specimen. Framing a bloom is what puts a particular flower in front of the judge, and it is how the Rarity criterion sees which phenotype you are showing.

An entry is judged once. A second /gardenshow judge is refused and points you at /gardenshow card, which re-reads the scorecard as often as you like. Two independent refusals sit behind that, because a second survey could sample a differently loaded volume and because a band prize must never be payable twice.

The nine criteria

Each criterion takes one mark, and each mark is worth points. Nine criteria at four points each is 36, which is the maximum a card can carry.

A card must carry exactly one line per criterion, and its total is added up from those lines rather than stored beside them. A missing line would score lower than a line marked Poor while looking identical, which is why an incomplete card is refused outright.

Every line on your card carries a sentence, built in the same breath as the mark rather than reconstructed afterwards from a stored number. Rarity in particular tells you how it was measured: how many gardeners' records were walked, and whether that walk hit its cap, in which case the holder count is reported as a floor rather than as an exact figure.

The six thresholds the rubric uses are settings, so a server can retune what counts as Excellent. Your card quotes the numbers it actually used.

Awards, prizes and where the money comes from

Your total falls into a band, and the band decides both the award and the prize. Fifteen is the lowest total that wins anything, and the entry screen quotes that number before the fee is charged.

Prizes are coins and nothing else. There is no cosmetic and no utility item in the prize table, and a show grants no trophy item you can carry off the screen. What it pays is money, and the announcement and the card are the record of the win.

The money has two legs that never touch. Entry fees are burned and fund nothing. Prizes are drawn from the server's event account, which is coins that already existed, so paying one moves money rather than creating it. Four numbers bound the whole thing:

• A show pays at most 10,000 coins in total, however many Gold gardens it holds. That ceiling is fixed when the show opens, so a change made during a season does not move an open show.
• A prize larger than the account can cover is reduced to what is there, and you are told it was reduced and that nothing was minted to make up the difference. The award itself still stands on your card.
• A full 24 entry show burns 19,800 coins in fees against at most 10,000 paid out, so a well attended show is a net drain on the money supply rather than a source of it.
• If the prize ledger ever fails to balance, new draws stop while judging, scorecards and announcements carry on. An award you won in that state is recorded as an unpaid debt, shown on your card so you can re-read it, and settled by staff once the ledger is sound again.

Win while you are offline and the prize is held in escrow and paid on your next login, with a receipt. That row is written to disk immediately rather than at the next save, so it survives a crash, and it is removed only after you have been credited, which means a bad moment can pay you late but never twice.

How a show closes

A show runs for a season. The hub tells you how many days are left, and when the season has turned the show closes on the next /gardenshow anybody types. There is no scheduled task behind it, which is why the close can be a little late but never silent.

Closing does three things in order. The show is recorded as closed, the result is broadcast, and Best in Show is settled from the entries that were judged.

• An entry that was never judged lapses. You are told it lapsed, and the fee is not refunded, which the entry card had said before it was charged.
• Two entries on the same total both take the same award and both are paid the band prize. Awards are merit, not places.
• Best in Show is ordered on the total, then on which garden was judged first. An exact dead heat, the same total in the same moment, shares the bonus, split to the cent, and the broadcast says it was a dead heat.

After the close, /gardenshow results still reads the board, and /gardenshow card still reads your own scorecard line by line. Your entry history is also what the Upkeep criterion reads in the next show, so a garden shown season after season carries something no new garden can.

The next season's show opens itself, and the fee ladder starts again from the base fee.

Florists, species and breeding for looks

Everywhere else in the Garden, a plant is worth what it yields. A show is the one place where it is worth what it looks like. Three of the nine criteria, Diversity, Rarity and Composition, pay for species you took the trouble to collect and for colours you took the trouble to breed, and none of them cares how much produce the bed would give you.

The genetics behind that are the ones you already use when crossing. A species declares two to four phenotypes, each with a colour from a fixed set of sixteen, and its genotypes are spread across those phenotypes in declaration order: the first is the common form and the last is the rarest. Chasing the last one is breeding work with no yield attached, and the Rarity criterion is the thing that pays for it.

Rarity is measured across everyone's records rather than against a table. It counts how many gardeners have recorded the rarest phenotype you are showing, using the Herbarium, and it grades better the fewer of them there are. A phenotype nobody has recorded is Excellent, with a sentence saying it has never been recorded by anyone and how many records were checked. That walk is capped at 500 gardeners and remembered for a minute at a time, and when the cap binds the number is reported as a floor rather than as a count. A phenotype that has simply not been measured yet grades Poor, with a different sentence from one that was measured and found at zero, because those are different states.

The profession that lives at this end of the garden is the Florist, one of the six trades the Garden added and one of the 21 the server now runs. A species pays the Florist for its bloom, derived from what the species itself declares rather than from a hand kept list, and the Florist charter is one of the 22 company charters across those 21 trades. The show itself pays no job income. Its prize is coins from the event account, which is a different route entirely, so entering a show is not a way to farm profession experience.

See Garden species for the plants and their phenotypes, Greenhouses for forcing a plant out of its season, and Jobs for where the Florist sits among the professions.

What is not promised

The Garden Show is written and checked against its own offline suite. It has not been verified on the live server, and the project's own notes say so in those words. Treat the numbers on this page as what the code does, not as what a season of play has confirmed.

Four things are recorded as open or partly open, and it is better to know them than to discover them from a mark you cannot explain.

Two more things are worth stating plainly. Staff can switch the show subsystem off, in which case /gardenshow says so in words and nothing already recorded is lost; turning it back on returns every show, entry, card and held prize. And there is no hidden roll anywhere in judging: the same garden, unchanged, is marked the same way every time.