What the game is
Roots of Pacha is a farming and village game set in the Stone Age, made and published by the small studio Soda Den and released in April 2023. It works the way a modern farming sim works: a top-down pixel-art valley, a plot of ground, neighbors with names and routines, seasons that turn. The difference is that the village starts with nothing, and the things a farm normally comes with have to be invented first.
That inventing is the spine of the game. Instead of a shop selling better tools, you discover Ideas, and the clan builds each one together once enough materials are gathered. Animals are wild until you feed and tame them, and can then be bred for goods or kept as pets. You also gather, fish, and work out ways to process and preserve food.
Seasons pass, but the deadline pressure is gone: ideas and prophecies can be completed in any season. It plays alone or in online co-op with crossplay. Steam lists ten supported languages, and it is a paid PC download.
What you actually do
A day is short and you choose what to spend it on. You clear ground, sow, water, and come back when the crop is ready; you walk out to forage, break rocks, fish, or follow an animal until it trusts you. Each of those turns up materials, and materials unlock Ideas. When an Idea appears you decide whether it is worth diverting the clan's effort, because building one changes what everybody in the village can do next. Villagers have their own likes and schedules, and giving the right thing to the right person opens up their story. Getting better means sequencing: which Idea first, and what you have to farm to afford it.
What it exercises
- Sequences a build order: which capability to unlock first, and what it costs
- Plans a day against limited time and returns when a crop is ready
- Notices which animals respond to which food and repeats what worked
- Connects one invention to the new options it opens for everyone
Why we rate it Minimal Worksheet score 30 / 100
FitHow much real knowledge or skill does the play itself make you use?25weight 45%
Fit scores 25. A new capability genuinely changes what the whole clan can do next, and that arrival is felt rather than told. But the score stays low because a large share of the hours goes to ordinary watering, walking and foraging, which is repetitive labor rather than the planning the game is best at.
TransferWill what you practise here work outside the game?18weight 30%
Transfer scores 18. Thinking of tools as things that unlock other things is a useful frame, and it maps loosely onto how technologies actually spread. But this is a designed tree with a fixed order, not history: real inventions were not unlocked by a clan agreeing to spend a pile of rocks, so what travels is a feel for the idea, not knowledge of it.
PracticeDoes the game make you use that skill again and again, as it gets harder?55weight 25%
Practice scores 55. The farming loop repeats daily and the Idea loop every few hours, so the planning is rehearsed steadily across a long game. What holds this in the middle rather than higher is that the decision gets easier once the tree is understood; late in a save the clan mostly needs materials, and the actual choosing fades out.
What the evidence says
Editorial onlyNobody outside our desk has checked this. It is our reading of how the game plays.
The evidence level is Editorial only. One source is listed, the Steam store page, and it confirms Soda Den as developer and publisher, the April 2023 release, the price, the ten supported languages, online co-op with crossplay, the Ideas discovery system, animal taming and breeding, and that ideas and prophecies carry no seasonal deadline. Nothing there speaks to what a player takes away, and we know of no study of this game, or of farming sims as a route into understanding technological change. The score reflects the shape of the play rather than a measured outcome.
