Season Rules

Pons Garden · operated by Prometheus7 Research Institute · last updated 8 September 2026

Entry is free. You never pay, stake, deposit or wager anything to take part. There is no buy-in, no pooled player money and no rake. The prize is funded entirely by the studio. Nothing you own is ever held by us.

1. The season

A season runs seven days, from Sunday 00:00 Pacific to the following Sunday 00:00 Pacific.
Season 1 opens 9 September 2026 at 00:00 Pacific Time.
The end of a season is the closing bell. A live countdown is shown in-game.

2. How standing is decided

Standing is decided by play, not by chance. Every component is published here and shown in-game as you earn it.

What you did	Points
Book value of your garden at the closing bell	1 per 100 Sap
Stealing a plant	10, then 7, 5, 3 for repeats against the same player
Tagging a thief carrying a plant	15
Completing a keeper's mission	8
Holding the village sprint record at the bell	50

Repeated steals from the same player are worth less each time. This is deliberate: it stops two players farming each other and rewards raiding widely.

Ties are broken by book value, then by player id. Ordering is total and reproducible.

3. The closing bell

At the bell every garden is liquidated. Each plant is valued at ten minutes of what it was earning at that exact moment, which includes its size, its mutation, whether it was tended, and its sector's market position. Plants that never revealed settle at a quarter of base.

Market movement is generated inside the game. It does not track, reference or derive from any real security, price or market feed.

4. Prize eligibility

Anyone can play, and everyone appears on the public leaderboard. To be eligible for the prize, at the moment of the bell a linked wallet must hold either:

100,000 PonsGarden coin, or
100 PONS

This is a read-only check of public blockchain data. We never take custody, never ask you to send or lock anything, and never construct a transaction. Holding is not a purchase of entry — entry is free and unconditional; holding determines prize eligibility only.

5. The prize

Place	Share of pot
1st	50%
2nd	30%
3rd	20%

The pot is 100 USD equivalent, paid in PONS, funded from studio revenue.
The PONS quantity is fixed from the reference price at the moment of the closing bell, and the source used is recorded in the prize ledger for that season.
Winners are fixed by the game at the bell and cannot change afterwards.
Payment is made manually to the linked wallet, normally within 7 days of the bell.
If fewer than three eligible players finish a season, only the places reached are paid.

6. What you keep, and what resets

At the bell you choose once how to settle your book:

Carry — take it as Sap into next season.
Endowment — convert it into a permanent Sap-per-second trickle, at a deliberately poor rate, that never stops and stacks across seasons.
Vintage — burn it on a cosmetic plant stamped with the season number, whose tier scales with the spend, which can never be grown again.

Plants clear at the bell. Sap, plots, defences, cosmetics, vintages, endowments, your conviction tree and your records all carry forward.

Sap is not money. It is not convertible, redeemable, bridgeable or withdrawable, and there is no rate at which it becomes PONS or anything else. The prize is a fixed amount awarded by rank — never an exchange of in-game progress for value.

7. Fair play

We may void a score or exclude an account for automation, exploiting a defect, operating multiple accounts to influence standing, or interfering with other players' access. Where a defect affects standings we will say so publicly and, if a season is compromised, rerun or void it rather than pay out a result we cannot stand behind.

Stealing plants from other players is not cheating. It is the game.

8. Changes, and getting in touch

Rules may change between seasons, never during one. The version in force when a season opens governs that season. Questions and disputes: the contact address on prometheus7.com.