How to play Bloomy
A walk through the first hour, and what changes after it. Nothing here is a secret — the game explains itself as it goes — but it helps to know where the path leads.
The idea in one paragraph
Bloomy is an incremental game, sometimes called an idle game. You make a little of something, spend it on things that make more of it, and the numbers grow while you watch — or while you do not. The garden has three currencies, and each one leads to the next: cats leave paw prints, flowers make pollen, and bees turn pollen into honey. Honey is what brings new cats, and new cats are what make the garden grow faster.
The first minutes: wake the cats
A new garden starts quiet. Bloomy, the first cat, is asleep, and nothing is being earned on its own yet. Tap the cat to pet it. Each pet leaves a few paw prints, and it is the only income a brand-new garden has.
At 50 paw prints, open Supplies and buy the Breakfast Bowl. Fill it and the cats get up: from then on they wander, play, explore and nap by themselves, and every one of those activities leaves paw prints without you touching anything. That is the moment the garden starts looking after itself. Every new run opens the same way, on an empty bowl.
Planting flowers and making pollen
Flowers are planted in the pots under the garden. Each flower takes a few seconds to grow and then produces pollen steadily. The Daisy is cheap and always available; after 25 pollen the Tulip appears, and further species unlock as the garden matures. The flower guide lists all of them and exactly what each one needs.
Each species gets more expensive the more of it you plant, so a pot full of daisies eventually stops being worth it. That is on purpose: it is the game's way of nudging you towards the next species. You can also care for a flower that is already planted, which raises it through four tiers — Tended, Lush, Gilded and Radiant — and makes it produce more. More pots come from the Extra Flower Pot in Supplies.
Bees and honey
Once the garden has made 150 pollen in total, bees arrive. They are a conversion rather than free income: the hive eats part of your pollen and turns it into honey. The colony grows until it is eating about as much as your flowers can spare, and never so much that your pollen goes backwards. Plant more flowers and the hive grows to match.
Honey is the scarcest of the three currencies, and most of the cats after the first two are bought with it. Bigger Hive in Supplies makes more of it.
Cats
Every cat adds its own paw power to the garden, and every cat has one or more traits that change how it plays: a Sleepy cat naps in the sun, a Zoomie cat bursts into short, very productive runs, a Green-Pawed cat tends the flowers so they make more pollen. Petting a cat builds its affection, and a cat that likes you earns more.
Cats who spend time doing the same thing — napping in the same sunbeam, chasing the same ribbon — become friends, from Acquaintances all the way to Soulmates. The cat guide has every cat, what it costs, and what its traits do.
Supplies: the upgrades
The Supplies basket holds the upgrades for the current run. A few worth knowing about early:
- Cozy Beds — more paw prints from every cat.
- Watering Can — flowers grow faster.
- Suspicious Fertilizer — more pollen, paid for in pollen.
- Winding Paths and Honey Treats — turn spare pollen and honey back into paw prints.
- Ribbon Toys — cats act faster and make friends sooner.
Sleep and the dream tree
Sooner or later the garden slows down: every upgrade costs more than the last, and growth that felt fast starts to feel like waiting. That is when to Sleep. The Sleep tab shows how sleepy the cats are; once the run is worth enough, they can curl up and dream.
Sleeping ends the run. The flowers, the bees, the supplies and the cats you recruited all reset — but you keep your dreams, and you keep everything you have spent them on. Dreams are earned one for each time the run's value doubled past the point where sleep became possible, so a longer run is worth more, but never so much more that leaving it running forever beats sleeping and starting again stronger.
Dreams are spent in the dream tree, on permanent upgrades such as Lucid Dreaming (everything produces more), Greenhouse (start each run with an extra pot), Familiar Hands (cats warm up to you faster) and Deep Sleep (more progress while you are away). Some flowers and cats only ever appear to a garden that has slept: the Sunflower after the first Sleep, the Moonflower after the second, Professor Whiskers after the third. After three Sleeps the garden can also be switched to its moonlit night scene.
Butterflies
Every few minutes a butterfly drifts through the garden carrying a gift of paw prints, pollen and honey, sized to what your garden is currently producing. It stays for a little under a minute. Tap it to see the gift; collecting it means watching a short advert. This is the only place Bloomy shows an ad, and it is entirely optional: you can tap Maybe later or let the butterfly go, and the garden grows just the same without it.
While you are away
Close the tab and the garden keeps going at a gentler pace — an eighth of its normal speed, for up to two hours, longer with Deep Sleep. When you come back, the journal tells you what happened: what grew, what the cats found, and who became friends.
A few tips
- Buy the Breakfast Bowl as soon as you can; nothing else matters as much in the first minute.
- Unlock new flower species rather than stacking more of the old ones once their prices climb.
- Keep a couple of pots growing even when you are saving for a cat — pollen is what feeds the bees.
- Your first Sleep does not need to be perfect. The first few dreams help far more than waiting for a bigger reward.
- The save lives in your browser. Export it from Settings before clearing site data or switching devices.