Planned Release Date: Nov 24, 2026

About This Game

Pick. Merge. Jam.

In Jar of Gnomes, a crowd of tiny Gnomlings harvests an allotment garden for you. Berry bushes sprout on their own. You pick the first berries by hand, and soon the Gnomlings carry the fruit to a bubbling Magic Cauldron – and in there, two matching fruits merge into the next better one. A redcurrant turns splendid, then golden, then enchanted, two enchanted redcurrants make a blueberry, and far up the chain waits the giant pumpkin.

You decide where the colony works: buy Gnomlings and upgrades in the Allotment Row and feed the best bushes compost. A run never ends on its own. When it slows down, you make jam: the harvest turns into jam jars, and Mr Krause finally mows the lawn.

Every jar counts

Jars are yours to keep. Spend them in the Gnome Village under the compost heap, a web of 41 nodes in five workshops, and rearrange them for free between runs. Some nodes only open up once you have earned an achievement. Most of them show up front roughly how many more jars per run they will bring. And every jar you have ever earned adds +10% harvest, so the next garden always grows a little faster.

Features

• Hundreds of Gnomlings on screen at once
  
• A 6 × 6 Magic Cauldron and 15 fruit varieties in four qualities
  
• Six buildings in the Allotment Row, from the Summerhouse to the Throwing Range
  
• Giants who carry almost five times as much as a Gnomling
  
• Throwing: Gnomlings fling fruit into the cauldron, and some of it merges in midair
  
• A Compost Catapult that feeds your bushes while you watch
  
• "Buy all" for the later game
  
• Grandpa Mossbeard explains everything once, then leaves you in peace
  
• 17 Steam achievements and a fruit collection

Made for the couch, too

• Full controller support, built for Steam Deck (1280 × 800)
  
• Mouse and keyboard work just as well
  
• Calm effects that really switch off shaking and flashing
  
• Choose how much fruit is shown on screen
  
• Keeps running while minimised, saves to Steam Cloud
  
• English and German

Early Access

Jar of Gnomes is in Early Access. Planned next: telling your Gnomlings which bushes to prefer, compost and builder Gnomlings, Garden Tricks to pick during a run, new gardens and a grand finale at the regional garden show. What comes when will also depend on your feedback.

Credits

Music: "Glitter Blast", "Morning", "Life of Riley" and "Evening" by Kevin MacLeod, licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0. Full credits are in the game under Settings → Credits.

AI Generated Content Disclosure

The developers describe how their game uses AI Generated Content like this:

Keine Bildgeneratoren, keine KI-Stimmen, keine KI-Musik. Im laufenden Spiel erzeugt keine KI etwas.
Jar of Gnomes ist das Spiel einer einzelnen Person. Idee, Spieldesign, Balance und Testspiele stammen von mir, ebenso jede Entscheidung darüber, was ins Spiel kommt. Claude (Anthropic) habe ich als Werkzeug eingesetzt: für den Programmcode und für die Spiel- und Shoptexte, die ich vorgegeben und geprüft habe, und beim Entwurf der Wichtel. Alle Grafiken, auch die Wichtel, zeichnet das Spiel beim Start per Code aus Vektorformen, und auch die Geräusche werden per Code erzeugt. Die Musik stammt von Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com), die Grillen sind eine CC0-Aufnahme.