Introduction

You spend your mostly eventless days as the chief gardener of Budaberg. Your biggest pride is the state-of-the-art city park, where the last of the buharian oaks are grown. At summer times, hundreds (or thousands) of tourists swarm the city and its park to admire the millennium trees.

Your oaks - as you've come to think of them - are very sensitive plants. Many others have tried to propagate them around the world, but without any success. The failing amateurs and educated professionals have come to the same conclusion: the trees cannot go without the city's unique climate. The climate cannot be reproduced outside the laboratories.

Luckily, the more sensitive they are to the environment, the less to causative agents. Their only enemy is the 'catatonic tree-bug', whose larvae nestle into the roots, feeding on the tree's juices so intensely that it causes the irreversible destruction of the tree in a very short time.

These bugs are mostly harmless to other species of vegetation. In fact, these parasites have not been seen for a very long time in Budaberg. The last time they appeared, they devastated all the trees in the great forest around the city. Since then, the replantation of the forest has begin, but the population has grown so slowly that only the City Park has been re-opened.

A few weeks ago, on a Monday morning, after the disappearance of the not-so-rare autumn fog, you noticed some unknown grubs on the bark of the trees. You quickly took some of them into the lab and discovered that they belong to the hitherto unseen grub of the dotted cauliflour butterfly. After some research you discovered that it is impossible to defend against these grubs with any known pesticides; they will simply take too long to prevent the tree from being destroyed. A voluntary tree-saving action was therefore organised in the city, where armies of volunteers attempted to remove each grub manually. But that failed. In fact, it seemed that at the end of it there were actually more grubs than before. And the trees were dying - fast!

Consulting one of your foreign colleagues, you've developed the only cure that can make the grubs disappear - the application of the catatonic tree-bug. These bugs wait in a catatonic state, until they sense a grub nearby. Then they start an aggressive attack on it. (Unfortunately, they do doom the tree too.)

You find yourself in a terrible deadlock. If you do nothing, the grubs will eat up all the vegetation of the beautiful park. If you set the bugs free, it will cause the inevitable destruction of the trees. A dangerous plan starts to shape in your mind...

If only you could put weaker specimens of the bugs in key spots in the correct numbers. Perhaps then they would extinguish the grubs, but would not survive long enough to infect the trees roots with larvae. Yes, many criteria must be fulfilled at the same time. In the first round, you must locate the precise whereabouts of the grubs, and experiment with the method using a computer model. The name of the model: Save The Trees.

The Game

Select menu item "1 - START NEW GAME" to start playing. By default, the game starts at difficulty level 1, however it can be overridden by choosing menu item 2. The difficulty level can be increased up to the difficulty level reached so far.

When starting the game on a higher difficulty level, your starting score is adjusted to the minimum entry score of the selected level. (Further explanation in the Scoring section.)

When the game starts, the city park can be seen from above, populated by level dependent quantity of grubs distributed randomly. The square-shaped park can be divided into 25 sectors. The colour of each sector indicates the level of infection in the current square, the density of grubs. White colour means that the sector is clear, while yellow, cyan, green, purple, red and blue colours indicate higher infection levels respectively. This is the starting position. During the game, the infection does not spread.

You're managed to weaken the bugs, restricting them to only two or three sectors in any direction, so they can be spread across 4-9 squares overall. If you select the incorrect number of tiles, a warning text appears under the park map: "IRREGULAR SELECTION". Sadly, it is not possible to restrict further the number of sectors the bugs are infecting. If you could do so, they would become so weak that they could not fight the grubs. After placing the bugs, you can watch the density of the grubs decreasing, indicated by the change in the sector's colour. Your goal is to make every sector white!

While the distribution of the grubs is random, their spreading pattern is not! A cure can be found for every situation. The ultimate goal is to make the grubs disappear on all 48 levels, without putting the trees at risk by overpopulating the area with bugs. Pay attention: placing bugs into areas without grubs will cause the bugs themselves to reproduce, inevitably damaging the trees, causing irreversible harm.

In such a situation the game warns you "DANGEROUS SELECTION".

To place the bugs, select one corner of the territory by pressing the fire button, then select the opposite corner by moving the cursor and pressing fire again. If the selection is valid (2-3 sectors wide and 2-3 sectors tall) the bugs begin their deadly mission immediately.

To cancel the selection of the starting corner, make an invalid selection!

You only have a predefined number of steps to exterminate the grubs on every level. But no need to hurry! It is not an action game! Play cautiously, think ahead and take your time! The only purpose of the step limit is to simply emphasize that the situation in the park is serious. Any time you feel you have made the wrong decision, you can undo any number of steps by pressing CTRL-U and then re-think your moves.

Note: Undone moves count against your available moves as well!

If you find yourself in a desperate situation, and you still have at least one life left, you can restart the current level by pressing CAPS SHIFT-R.

Game Controls

O - Left, P - Right, Q - Up, A - Down, M - Fire

These keys are redefinable.

Hotkeys:
CAPS SHIFT-M - Menu
CAPS SHIFT-R - Restart the current level
CAPS SHIFT-U - Undo last step

Scoring

You receive points after every cleansed stage. This is at least three points; after the final level you get the maximum of 20 points. Your unused steps are added to your points as well, after completing a level. On top of that: not only do you start the game with five lives, but also after reaching levels 10, 20, 30 and 40 you get a bonus life! If you manage to finish the final level, you receive 10 extra points after all your remaining lives.

Menu Options

1. Start New Game
   As it says, your current position will be lost.
2. Set Level
   You can set the starting skill level (press button 2 to increase the level number up to maximum)
3. Continue Game
   Resume the current game
4. Map View/Board View
   The game can be played either on a map or a game board. In the first mode you can see the map of the park from above, in the latter only a simple game board is shown with cells.
5. Blinking Cursor/Black Cursor
   You can choose between a blinking and a steady black cursor.
6. Control Keys
   The control keys can be defined here (left, right, up, down and fire respectively)
7. Sound On/Off
   Guess what?

Game Credits

Idea and program by Mezei Robert
English translation by Kapitany
The music is the theme song of the movie Fletch. Written by Harold Haltenmayer.