• 05 September 2026
• Mr.Pendragon

Your Seedling keeps living. Here is what that costs.

Nothing pauses. That is the whole answer, and everything useful about SEED follows from it.

Your Seedling keeps working, eating, sleeping, talking to people and making decisions while you are not there. It is not suspended in a menu and it is not fast-forwarded when you return. It simply carries on, and what you find when you come back is the result of arrangements you made before you left.

So the question worth asking is not "is my Seedling safe while I am offline". It is "what did I leave running?".

Written against SEED 0.3.3, September 2026, checked against the 0.3.1, 0.3.2 and 0.3.3 patch notes, and against the game's own character data at content release 3.3. Version 0.4, City Life, is announced but not shipped, and adds aging and further Seedling autonomy - this guide will need revisiting when it lands.

What keeps running

All of it. Specifically:

• Needs keep draining. Hunger, thirst, rest, hygiene, leisure, and energy do not freeze because you closed the client.
• Work continues. A Seedling with a job goes to it.
• Social life continues. Conversations, relationships, and the consequences of both.
• Ailments continue. An illness you left untreated is not waiting politely at the same severity.
• Time passes at the world's rate, not yours. More on that below, because it is faster than people expect.

The one thing that does not continue is your judgement. Everything your Seedling does in your absence comes from its schedule, its priorities, and its own decision-making - which is better than it sounds, and worse than you would like.

What your Seedling decides for itself

Autonomy arrives in stages, and knowing the stages tells you how long a gap you can afford.

In the short term, it fills the time. A Seedling with nothing scheduled does not stand still. There are two dozen distinct idle behaviours in the game, and they run the full emotional range - singing, humming, laughing, stretching, watching clouds and taking a walk at one end; sulking with arms folded, fretting, grumbling, fuming, and feeling bored at the other.

That range is worth noticing, because the set is not neutral filler. It contains behaviours nobody would describe as content - sulking, fuming, fretting - alongside ones nobody would describe as unhappy.

But do not spend long reading body language, because the game will simply tell you. The first thing to do on returning is to open the Seedling's panel, where mood is a named state on a two-axis grid- from Miserable through Frustrated to Ecstatic, fifteen of them - and beneath it sits a list of active thoughts, each naming its own cause and how long it has left. Filthy! - Hygiene, while unmet. Nauseating Room - 4h 28m left.

That list is the log of your absence. It tells you what went wrong, in what order, and whether it is still going wrong or merely still being felt. A gap you were nervous about reads in about ten seconds.

After a day, it takes over - and the ladder is specified. The game's character data sets three autonomy tiers by elapsed hours: prompted at 24, assertive at 72, independent at 168 - one week. A prompted Seedling asks and waits four hours for an answer; an assertive one waits two; an independent one has stopped asking. Underneath that sit the numbers governing what it will actually do: it considers its top three job options, it will only leave a job for one paying 1.5 times better, and it gives you a two-hour window to respond before acting. Turn it down, and the question goes away for a day on a new job, three days on a switch.

Read those tiers as the real answer to "how long can I be away". A day is a nudge. Three days is a Seedling that has stopped waiting for you. A week is a Seedling running its own life, which is the design working as intended rather than a failure state - but it is not the Seedling you left.

It spends, but modestly. The default daily autonomy budget was cut from 300 to 100 in 0.3.1, so an unattended Seedling is a more conservative version of itself than it used to be.

What actually degrades

Three things, in the order they will bite you.

Food, first and fastest. Since 0.3.1, food spoils inside a Seedling's inventory, not just in storage. A well-meaning stock of meals handed over before you log off can rot in its pockets. Berries are the worst offender - nutritious and quick to spoil. Leave preserved food rather than fresh, and leave it where it belongs rather than carried.

Mood, quietly, and it compounds. Energy recovers faster in a good mood, so a Seedling that becomes miserable also becomes slow, which makes it worse at meeting its own needs, which makes it more miserable. It is a loop, and it runs unattended just as happily as anything else. Since 0.3.3, a Seedling at least checks whether it has the energy for a long task before starting it, which stops the most spectacular version.

The loop is also why the thoughts list is worth reading rather than skimming. A thought with a timer on it is already ending on its own. A thought marked while unmet is still running, and will keep pulling until the cause is fixed. Those are two different jobs, and only one of them is urgent.

Everything a task was supposed to cover. This is the one that kills Seedlings. Water in a barrel is not water in a Seedling. If the task, the equipment, or the schedule slot is missing, the supply may as well not exist - and being away is exactly when nobody is there to notice.

The clock you are playing against

PAM's manual states that a year on Avesta is 24 in-game days. Seedlings age on that clock and eventually die, and the Graveyard window records what killed them.

Do that arithmetic before planning a fortnight away. A week of your time is a meaningful fraction of a Seedling's life rather than a pause between sessions, and it is the most useful number in the game for judging how long you can safely leave one running.

How to end a session

The practical version of all of the above. Before you close the client:

• Meet the needs that are already low. Do not leave with a timer near zero and hope.
• Cut the schedule down; do not fill it. A short list a Seedling can actually complete beats a long one it thrashes through. If you are going to be away for a while, fewer priorities, not more.
• Check that the tasks exist for the supplies you have. Stock without a task is decoration.
• Leave preserved food, not fresh, and leave it in storage.
• Use the Scheduler's pause options deliberately. You can pause for the current block, until work starts, for the rest of the day, or until you log out. That last one exists for exactly this moment.
• Save a preset for it. Five weekly schedules can be stored, and having one that is simply "I am away" is worth the two minutes it takes to build.

The habit to form: your last action of a session should be about the next few days, not the last few minutes.

The version of this that never reverses

There is a larger form of logging off, and it is the reason all of the above is designed the way it is.

SEED has no NPCs. Not few - none. Every Seedling on Avesta belongs to a Cultivator, which means that when someone stops playing for good, their Seedling does not vanish or freeze. It carries on autonomously, working and ageing and eventually dying, as part of the world everyone else lives in.

So the ambient population of Avesta is made of other people's lives, still running after the people who started them have gone. The stranger your Seedling passes in the street may be somebody's abandoned character, three months into a life nobody is watching.

Logging off for the evening is the small, reversible version of that. The game treats both the same way, because to the world there is no difference - and once you have understood that, the way SEED handles your absence stops looking like a limitation and starts looking like the point.