How to play
- Goal
- Dig channels through the earth so the spring water fills the dry root-shrine and blooms the three pool-candles on the way.
- How it ends
- A level is won when the shrine is full, and lost when too little water is left to fill it or nightshade ooze reaches it.
- Record
- The fastest fill and the least earth dug for each level, with all three pool-candles bloomed.
- Press and drag on the earth to dig a tunnel; only earth can be dug, and a dig carries on past stone. With keys, move a cursor with the arrows and press Space to start digging: the cursor digs as it moves until you press Space again.
- Nothing moves until your first dig; from then on the water runs and the clock runs, and you can keep digging while it flows. Water falls, runs down slopes and spreads out flat, but cannot climb. A pool-candle drinks the water that touches it and blooms after six drops; the number on the shrine is the drops it still needs, and the level is won when it is full.
- A level is lost when too little water is left to fill the shrine. Blightmoss turns water that touches it into more moss; nightshade ooze and water destroy each other, and ooze withers a candle and fouls the shrine; a rune bowl filled with water lifts the stone gate with the same rune; ember-stone boils water into steam, and frost turns it back. R starts the level again at once.
Controls
| Drag | Dig a tunnel through the earth |
|---|---|
| Arrows | Move the digging cursor (Shift for bigger steps) |
| Space · Enter | Start or stop digging at the cursor |
| R | Start the level again |
| Escape | Stop digging, or pause (after the first dig, the run no longer counts for a record) |
The hollow paintings and the loam, stone and moss textures were made for this game and kept in the Morass warehouse; the sounds are warehouse recordings; the shrine, the pool-candles, the rune bowls, the roots and the water are drawn by the game. The pool-candle is the Drenalveth of Orenvalt's marshes. A run is sent as its digs alone, and the records worker runs the water again with the same physics before it ranks the result. Your progress stays in this browser under morass.wellspring.v1. No ads or analytics run inside the game.
About Wellspring
The water-digging puzzle in the Where's My Water? tradition, set in the hollows beneath an old oak, where carved root-shrines once drank from underground springs and have run dry. Swipe tunnels through the loam so the water held in stone above runs down to the shrine, and let it touch the three pool-candles on the way: each drinks six drops and opens into a flower of cold blue-green light.
The water is exact. Every drop is whole numbers on a grid, run by a small engine written for this game, so the same digs always run the same way in every browser. Water falls, spreads flat and runs down slopes, but it cannot climb: every hollow dug below the channel keeps some of it, and a branch dug to a candle fills up once the candle has bloomed, so where you dig and in what order both matter.
There are 120 levels in eight hollows, each bringing one new thing: stone channels, blightmoss that grows wherever water touches it, nightshade ooze that destroys water and fouls the shrine, rune bowls whose gates seal the shrine until they are filled, and ember-stone that boils water into rising steam that frost rains back down. Every level was proved fillable with all three candles, and each hollow runs from its easiest level to its hardest. Each level keeps a Top 10 for the fastest fill and the least earth dug, and the site replays every run before it keeps a place.
