Note: the beta won’t immediately be available on Steam on the 23rd. Please check out the Occasionally Asked Questions below for more details! Thank you for your understanding.

Gardening and Homesteading in the Canthan Jade Spring

Relax, potter, and build in Jade Spring, a small Guild Wars 2 decorating and homesteading fan game. Tend your garden as a Xunlai jade bot, clearing weeds and pests, dispelling Dragonvoid blights, and furnishing your plot with architecture, flora, furniture, and ornaments from across Tyria!

Zen cleaning

Engage in mini-games to spruce up your garden, clearing out bugs, invasive plants, trash, and leftover strands of Dragonvoid. Collect Karma from each task to spend on permanent improvements to your gardening and decorating abilities!

Screenshot of the bug-clearing minigame in Jade Spring - a tracker following a horizontal nodule with Asuran runes surrounding it.

Granular decoration

Personalise your space using robust tools which let you easily move, rotate, scale, snap, and clear items. Acquire enough Karma to unlock fancy decorations, as well as utilities which allow you to change the time of day, clear the map to start fresh, and fine-tune your environment to suit your creativity.

Screenshot in Jade Spring showing the player adjusting a decoration by dragging it with a gizmo arrow.

A guild wars 2 tribute

Jade Spring is an independent developer’s love letter to Cantha and to Guild Wars 2 in general, featuring hand-made art, models, animations, and music directly inspired by the worlds of Tyria, and filled with small tributes and references.

Screenshot of a Canthan city made in Jade Spring.

Occasionally Asked Questions

Why won’t Jade Spring be available on Steam for the launch?

Unfortunately I haven’t heard back from Steam about some further review they are doing, and I don’t know how long that process is gonna take! As Jade Spring is a fan project, I have to provide reasonable assurances that I’m not doing stuff with third party content that I shouldn’t be. Please feel free to check out my own comments on this in this letter here. The game will be available from its itch.io page on the 23rd, and versions (eventually) downloaded from Steam would be totally compatible with that one!

I found a bug in the game! (The software kind, not the buzzing flies.) I wish there were a lot more decorations! I have an idea for a couple of decorations myself!

I would really love to hear about any bugs you encounter in Jade Spring, or any ideas you have for more decorations and mechanics. You can make a ticket through my site, or you can contact me directly on Bluesky or via email! I have a bunch more decorations I plan on adding throughout the beta, too.

What’s next for Jade Spring?

From the 23rd, it’s beta time! Our original timeline in April’s development notes still seems to be holding up for the most part. I will be taking this time to fix bugs, address feedback, see how people are feeling about the game in general. I have never released (or finished) a game before, so I’m really excited (and a little anxious) to see how it goes. Depending on interest in the game, there are a few next steps that I have in mind leading up to a stable launch and beyond – things like controller support are high on that list. beyond that, I have some fun ideas for an expansion called “Xunlai Neon”! It would feature new Kaineng cyberpunk decorations, a new map (probably inspired by Arborstone), and some unique kinds of pests to clear out of the garden (like the Jade arms that come out of the ground in the XJ-1 fight). But we will see how everything goes.

Wait, is that Guild Wars 2 stuff? Is that alright?

I actually get questions like this quite a bit! “The toolbar is very similar to the skill bar in Guild Wars 2 ; is that okay?” Jade Spring is indeed a fan project for what is easily my favourite and most-played game, Guild Wars 2. A lot of my assets are intentionally designed to mirror the layout and painterly style of GW2, but they are all created from scratch; apart from being a fan project, Jade Spring has also been an opportunity for me to enjoy and learn all aspects of game development.

ArenaNet opens up a pathway for us to be able to make GW2 fan projects through their content terms of use, and you can see the ways in which Jade Spring conforms to these terms in this letter here. In short, the game is (and will always be) free, family-friendly, and absent of NFTs and silly stuff like that. You can also catch the disclaimer at the bottom of this page in many different places around the game and site.

You can find development notes for Jade Spring in the journal, too! Thank you so much for your interest in the game.

Notice as specified by ArenaNet’s content terms of use: © ArenaNet LLC. All rights reserved. NCSOFT, ArenaNet, Guild Wars, Guild Wars 2, GW2, Guild Wars 2: Heart of Thorns, Guild Wars 2: Path of Fire, Guild Wars 2: End of Dragons, and Guild Wars 2: Secrets of the Obscure and all associated logos, designs, and composite marks are trademarks or registered trademarks of NCSOFT Corporation.