The world that moves in.
Wyldore: Stillgrove, Spatial Creature-Tending
“Your room becomes a fragile mythic ecosystem. Small creatures anchor to your shelves, nest beneath the warmth of your desk lamp. The biome is always in entropy. Your role isn’t to fight it: only to tend.”
Core Concept
Tending Over Conquering
Stillgrove rejects the dominant design language of XR gaming: intense, session-based, controller-dependent. Instead, it proposes something quieter: intimacy through attention.
You don't level up. You don't accumulate resources. You don't defeat adversaries. You pay attention. You notice when a creature is cold. You observe which pairs gravitate toward each other. You learn the rhythms of entropy and find satisfaction in slowing it, not stopping it, because entropy cannot be stopped. Only tenderly delayed.
The creatures are not pets. They're small ecological beings with needs, preferences, and social behaviors. You are a steward of a fragile ecosystem, not an owner of individual animals.
Your room is the world
The biome inhabits your space. Creatures anchor to your furniture, not a virtual room.
Entropy is not failure
The biome weathers when you’re away. When you return, the creatures stir. Always: “Welcome back,” never “Where were you?”
Creatures help each other
Your deepest contribution isn’t direct care: it’s creating conditions for creatures to care for one another.
Dimming is depth
More care means deeper lens dimming means more vivid biome. You earn immersion through tenderness.
XREAL Project Aura
Dimming as Narrative
The electrochromic lenses are not a feature. They are Stillgrove’s storytelling medium.
Observer
Faint overlays on real surfaces. The biome is ghostly. Your room dominates.
Engaged
Biome colors become vivid. Creatures are more present. You’re here.
Immersed
The room fades. The grove becomes the primary visual layer.
Deep Tending
You can barely see your room. Full particle systems. Light blooms everywhere.
Bloom (RARE)
There is no room. Only the grove. Full immersion. Breathtaking. Earned.
Interaction
Hands, Not Controllers
Every interaction is a care gesture performed with your actual hands. The interface disappears.
Open Palm
Offering
Present warmth and safety. A trusting creature approaches and climbs onto your hand. Spatial audio purrs settle at your palm’s position.
Cupped Hands
Sheltering
Both palms curved inward. Creatures within the cupped space receive accelerated warmth. Entropy effects pause while sheltered.
Pinch & Place
Building
Picks up luminous material motes drifting near healthy biome areas. Place them to construct or repair creature shelters.
Slow Reach
Guiding
Hand extended slowly, fingers relaxed. A creature follows your trajectory. Guide a lone being toward a compatible partner. Move slowly. Fast hands startle them.
Two-Finger Tap
Calling
Index and middle finger tap a real surface. A pulse of light. Creatures within range orient toward the tap point and begin migrating.
The Heart of It
Creatures Tend Each Other
The player is not the sole caretaker. They are a facilitator of care between creatures.
Guide two compatible creatures into proximity. Watch them orient toward each other. Root tendrils grow between their positions: a tentative two-note exchange, like a call and response. Over minutes, they approach. They touch.
A brief visual bloom. A warm harmonic chord. The bond is formed. From then on, bonded creatures share warmth, reinforce each other’s shelters, and signal distress across the room so you can find who needs you.
When three or more bonded creatures cluster, they form a colony: exhibiting synchronized tending rituals you can observe but never directly trigger. This is Stillgrove’s most emotionally rewarding content. You created the conditions. They did the rest.
Bonded pair: root tendrils solidify after the bonding event
The Inhabitants
Species of the Stillgrove
Five species at launch, each with distinct behaviors, needs, and preferred surfaces.
Ember Mote
Flat surfaces near warmth
Tiny, round, glowing. Pulses with a faint heartbeat rhythm. When content, its glow intensifies and illuminates nearby surfaces.
Threadweft
Vertical edges & frames
Long and sinuous, like living fiber. Produces visible threads between anchor points: structural reinforcement for shelters.
Hushling
Dark, protected spaces
Compact and quiet. Bonded Hushling groups generate a localized quiet zone that slows entropy for all creatures nearby.
Driftspore
Hovering above surfaces
Translucent and nomadic. Carries warmth particles between isolated creature clusters: the biome’s pollinator of care.
Rootclasp
Surface intersections
Squat and bark-like. Immobile once placed. Generates slow, steady shelter-repair particles. The biome’s infrastructure.
Platform
Built for XREAL Project Aura
Stillgrove is built natively in Kotlin using the Jetpack XR SDK: leveraging every hardware affordance Project Aura offers. This is an experience that literally couldn’t exist on any other platform.
Electrochromic dimming as narrative. Hand tracking as the care language. Spatial anchors that persist across sessions, so creatures remember where they live in your room. Spatial audio via SceneCore so every creature vocalization is located precisely in 3D space.
Sessions are 10 to 30 minutes. The game respects your time and the hardware’s battery. Short, meaningful encounters over long, exhausting ones.
The Wyldore Universe
Wyldore: Hushwild
Stillgrove is where you go home. Hushwild is what accompanies you there. The same mythic world, but translated into a passive audio presence that lives in your ear during commutes, walks, and the sensory chaos of daily life. No screen. No sessions. Just a creature that listens.
Explore HushwildJoin the Focus Group
Stillgrove is in active development as part of the Android XR Developer Catalyst Program. Apply for early access and help shape the spatial creature-tending experience.
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