If you’ve been playing Grow a Garden for a while, you know the routine: weekly updates every Saturday, big flashy events, a few new items, and then repeat. Well, that era might be coming to an end.
The game’s lead developer, Jandel, has announced some huge changes to how updates will work going forward. And when I say huge, I mean they’re talking about completely overhauling the update cycle, maybe even dropping the weekly updates entirely.
This is a big shift for a game that’s been built around those Saturday events. So, let’s unpack what’s happening, why it’s happening, and what it might mean for players.
Why the Change?
The short answer: things were getting stale.
The latest “Cooking” update expansion landed recently, and while it wasn’t bad, a lot of players (myself included) noticed it felt… familiar. Almost like we’d seen the same ideas recycled over and over. The truth is, weekly events are hard to keep fresh, and it seems even the devs have been feeling the burnout.
In a Discord announcement, Jandel admitted that constantly trying to one-up each weekly event was draining creativity. He also acknowledged what many players have been saying for months, that the game’s core features were being neglected in favor of quick, flashy events.
The “New Era” of Grow a Garden
Jandel calls this shift the “new era” of Grow a Garden. The focus will be on adding more depth to the game’s farming mechanics rather than just stacking on repetitive events. Here are a few ideas they’re working on:
- Farm Upgrades: Tools like an incubator that boosts hatch speed or fertilizers that turn plants rainbow for a set time.
- Meta Mechanics: Systems that add complexity, like challenge modes (for example, 24 hours to grow the best fruit).
- Garden Encyclopedia: A personalized in-game guide that tracks your biggest plants, rare finds, and stats, so you don’t need to dig through a wiki.
- Bug Fixes & Quality of Life Updates: Long overdue, but finally on the list.
I’ve got to say, the encyclopedia idea is huge. With over 150 seeds in the game (and even more pets), it’s tough to remember what everything does. Having all that info in-game just makes sense.
A Wake-Up Call for the Devs
There’s another factor here: player numbers. Data shows Grow a Garden had one of its lowest weeks in a long time, dropping from 1.8 million to 1.4 million players in just seven days. That’s still massive, but a 400,000-player dip is hard to ignore.
I think this drop was the wake-up call the team needed. If they kept going with the “weekly event, rinse, repeat” model, the game risked losing more players over time.
