Spirit Vale — 3D Open-World Spirit Collector
Spirit Vale
Walk a valley of twelve zodiac spirits and meet them in the tall grass
Move with WASD or the arrow keys. Step into a tinted thicket to meet a spirit.
Spirits met · 0/12
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Water
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Earth
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Wood
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Wood
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Earth
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Fire
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Fire
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Earth
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Metal
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Metal
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Earth
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Water
No spirits met yet
Five Phase matchups
Wood
Strong Earth · Weak Metal
Fire
Strong Metal · Weak Water
Earth
Strong Water · Weak Wood
Metal
Strong Wood · Weak Fire
Water
Strong Fire · Weak Earth
Overcoming (相剋) ×1.6 · Generating (相生) ×0.8
How to play
Walk the valley with WASD or the arrow keys (on mobile, drag the screen to move). Tinted thickets are scattered across the map, and walking inside one gives a spirit a chance to appear every so many steps. Each thicket favours a different phase, so the direction you explore decides which spirits you meet. Record or release what you find; recorded spirits fill the collection below. 'New valley' regenerates the terrain, trees and thickets from scratch.
Origin & history
Spirit Vale is an open-world collector that turns two East Asian classification systems — the twelve earthly branches and the Five Phases (오행/wuxing) — directly into game rules. Each of the twelve branches traditionally carries a phase (rat and pig are water, ox/dragon/goat/dog are earth, tiger and rabbit wood, snake and horse fire, monkey and rooster metal), and the twelve spirits here follow that assignment exactly. Even the lopsided result — four earth spirits against two of everything else — is left as tradition has it rather than evened out. The creatures are original; the taxonomy is not invented.
FAQ
How is the Five Phase system different from a normal type chart?
A typical chart has three outcomes — strong, weak, neutral. 오행 has two separate cycles, generating (相生) and overcoming (相剋), which split the relationship between any two phases five ways: the phase you overcome (strong), the one that overcomes you (weak), the one you generate (weak, because you are feeding it), the one that generates you (strong, because it empowers you), and your own phase (neutral). Wood attacking fire is literally feeding the flame, so it lands softer — that asymmetry is the point.
Is the valley the same every time?
For a given valley number the terrain, trees and thickets are byte-for-byte identical on every device and every reload, because the world is generated deterministically from that number rather than from random noise. Press 'New valley' to move to the next number and get an entirely different landscape.
The 3D won't open, or it runs slowly.
On browsers without WebGL the valley is replaced by a notice, and the twelve-spirit collection and the matchup table remain fully readable. Performance adapts to the device automatically — narrow screens and machines with fewer CPU cores draw far fewer grass blades. If your system has 'reduce motion' enabled, the wind animation is switched off entirely rather than merely slowed.