Epiphyte

# 🌿 Epiphyte

> Epiphyte grows exactly one plant from your server's activity.
>
> Not one plant per person — one shared plant for the entire server.

Every message sent anywhere in the server waters it. Silence dries it out: about three days of real quiet takes it from thriving to withered.

🌱 Once every hour, the plant grows a single step, but only if it has enough moisture to afford that growth. A large plant is therefore the record of weeks of genuine activity, never just one loud evening.

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# 🌳 Growth Leaves a History

What has grown, stays grown.

Long enough droughts kill branches outright. That dead wood is never cleared away and never revived, so even months later, bare grey scars remain visible.

💀 If neglect becomes total, the plant dies. Its skeleton lingers for a while before a new seedling germinates from a mutated version of the same genome.

The new plant is recognizably related to its predecessor—but it is not the same individual.

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# 📊 Six Signals, Six Parts of the Plant

| 💬 Server Activity | 🌿 The Plant Grows |
|--------------------|--------------------|
| Messages anywhere | Moisture, and the growth it enables |
| How many different people participate | The breadth of the crown |
| How evenly people talk over eight weeks | Symmetrical or gnarled branches |
| Reactions | More vivid flowers |
| Threads sustained by several people | Deeper branching |
| Shared voice time | Roots and a thicker trunk |

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# 🚫 Impossible to Farm

No single person can farm the plant.

Within a single day, every additional message from the same account is worth half as much as the one before it.

Likewise, a person only contributes to the crown's breadth after maintaining a presence across multiple real days.

🎙️ Voice activity only counts while two or more people are audibly present together in the same voice channel.

That means:

- ❌ Sitting alone in voice for eight hours contributes nothing
- ❌ Sitting muted contributes nothing

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# 🌸 What Happens Naturally

If the plant remains genuinely healthy for weeks, it stores that health and eventually comes into bloom.

🌸 Every plant blooms in a colour chosen by its own genome.

If the bloom lasts long enough, it sets seed.

The rarest event of all is an epiphyte:

🌿 A second, much smaller plant begins living on one of the older tree's branches.

None of these can ever be:

- ❌ Requested
- ❌ Purchased
- ❌ Rushed

They happen only through long-term, genuine activity.

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# 🪵 Annual Growth Rings

Once each calendar year ends, the plant spends one day displaying a cross-section of its trunk instead of itself.

Each ring represents one completed year.

The rings tell the story of the server:

- 🌳 Wide, dark rings → periods of vibrant activity
- 🌱 Thin, pale rings → quieter times
- 🩶 Grey scars → droughts severe enough to cost the plant wood

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# 🚫 What Epiphyte Refuses to Do

### 🧩 Only Three Commands

- /epiphyte-channel — choose where the plant lives
- /plant — view a private snapshot
- /help

> That number is meant to stay exactly that small.

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### ⚙️ No Settings

- ❌ No themes
- ❌ No options
- ❌ No customization

Everything about how the plant looks and what it says is derived entirely from its state.

> If it could be chosen, it would stop being a measurement.

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### 🏆 No Gamification

- ❌ No leaderboards
- ❌ No levels
- ❌ No economy
- ❌ No moderation features

Epiphyte is a mirror, not a scoreboard.

It says nothing about who talked the most.

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### 🔒 Privacy by Design

Epiphyte requires no privileged intents.

It only knows:

- ✅ That a message arrived

It never knows:

- ❌ What the message said

And it also:

- 🎙️ Never joins voice channels
- 🔇 Never receives or records audio

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### ♻️ No Reset

Removing the bot and inviting it again later resets nothing.

> A record you can erase is not a record.

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# 🌱 The Plant Lives on Its Own

The plant describes its own condition in the first person and updates its message on its own schedule, without anyone watching.

It simply continues growing.

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## ❤️ Open Source

MIT Licensed

https://github.com/timur-manjosov/epiphyte