Identification book: Cauldery and Copper Caledonian in the shop

About this game

Developer: Bad Viking · Publisher: Iceberg Interactive · Platform: PC (Steam) · Art style: Painterly illustration · Screen type: Encyclopedia / Codex

More Strange Horticulture screens in the Gallery

What to study

Strange Horticulture's deduction happens inside a book. Each spread gives a plant a common name, a Latin binomial, a short essay of folklore and observed fact, one line drawing, and a marginal note about a single diagnostic feature, crushed Cauldery flowers for stress, Copper Caledonian's red spores that are really a fungus, and the player identifies a specimen by matching the plant on the desk against exactly those few printed clues. The desk around the book is the rest of the interface, kept diegetic: blank labels wait to be written once an identification is sure, the drawer files Items, Clues, Letters and the Archive under handwritten tabs, and the three mood dials at left (Will to Explore, A Closer Inspection, A Rising Dread) are the only concession to a HUD. Frame at about 0:12 in the Announcement Trailer (Steam; manual extraction from the 1 fps fine pass over the window 9–22s).

Patterns

How the screen is arranged.

codex logbook-entry diegetic-document

Components

Parts on screen.

Tabs Menu Document Compass Gauge

Screen inventory

• the identification book lies open on the shop desk at a two-page spread: Cauldery (Acutus Major) at left, 'The uses of Cauldery are not well known. Some say it has applications in dark magic…' above a five-petal flower line drawing and the note 'The flowers can be crushed and eaten to relieve stress.', and Copper Caledonian (Aeris Agaricum) at right, a rejuvenation plant whose entry warns it is 'a curse, not a blessing', with a mushroom line drawing and a note that its red spores are a fungus growing on the plant, not part of it
• a stack of blank yellow plant labels sits on the desk to the right of the book, beside a green circular leaf button, identification ends in labelling, and the blank tags wait next to the reference that fills them
• three round dials stack down the left edge as the game's only persistent meters, each captioned in words: a compass dial 'THE WILL TO EXPLORE', a microscope 'A CLOSER INSPECTION' (partly cropped at the frame edge), and a skull-and-claws dial 'A RISING DREAD'
• at right an open desk drawer is organised by handwritten paper tabs, Items (holding a book, a magnifying glass and a coin-like disc), Clues, Letters, labels and Archive, so the player's evidence, correspondence and tags are physical compartments, not menu screens; above the desk the shop shelves carry the labelled collection itself, small yellow tags hanging from individual pots, with the black cat Hellebore sitting on the top shelf

Top 3 colors

#34180e 27%#16100c 24%#bea889 16%

Top three palette colors by share. The remaining colors make up the rest.

Source and credit

© Bad Viking / Iceberg Interactive, Strange Horticulture screenshot: Steam trailers (Announcement Trailer / Release Date Reveal Trailer), Bad Viking, shown for design study and commentary. PlayCraft is an unofficial fan project, not affiliated with or endorsed by Iceberg Interactive.

Source tier 2 (publisher-released) · screenshot: Steam store page · Steam page

Source details

Fetched 2026-10-25. verified 2026-10-25: manual extraction manual-book-12.png @ ~12s in the Announcement Trailer, MD5 4a09a56dae8802840bece7f774c01a09, from the verified-clean curl-shim download (51,208,099 B, MD5 68dbb709ef13c823a8fbd12f36adbf89; full decode to null exit 0, zero error lines, decode-steam-1574580-Announcement-Trailer.mp4.err), inspected visually at full resolution (1920x1080 native); the Cauldery and Copper Caledonian entries with both Latin names, both line drawings and both marginal notes, the blank label stack, the three captioned dials and the Items/Clues/Letters/labels/Archive drawer tabs all legible; no trailer text or marketing overlay in frame

no published policy found (checked 2026-10-25); fair-use study use, takedown honored within 48h

Rights holders: see Copyright & takedown.