Stillcraft / Apps / Hushwood
Shy animals come out when you're still. Hushwood turns that into a practice: put the phone down beside you and sit, breathe, stretch or write a page. The longer and quieter you sit, the bolder the forest gets; a movement sends everyone back into the trees. A forest clearing, a lake, a mountain meadow and the sea shore, painted in pixel art for every hour and season, fill with 38 animals and a few rare guests. Skip a day and nothing is lost: the animals just grow a little shy again.
Android 9.0+ · Free · English & Русский
The phone lies still and its accelerometer listens for jolts. Quiet builds minute by minute: tits and robins first, a fox after eight minutes, a deer after twelve, a bear after twenty. Pick the phone up and they run, but come back sooner.
A forest clearing; a lake with ducks, swans, a beaver and a moose; a mountain meadow with marmots, an ibex and a golden eagle; a shore with puffins, seals and a whale far out. The lake, the mountains and the sea open as your minutes add up.
A white deer at dawn after half an hour of quiet. A kingfisher for someone who breathes by the water seven days of ten. A skein of cranes at the equinox. A snow leopard on winter nights.
After two weeks one animal steps out and stays: wren, owl, heron, crane, bear, fox, hedgehog or deer, read from when, how long and how you practise. It comes closer the more days you sit, and sometimes leaves a gift by the stump.
Every sitting paints part of the guardian's portrait in the colour of its hour: rosy dawn, golden day, amber dusk, blue night. A finished portrait goes up on the shelf.
Four rhythms (calm 4–6, even, box, 4–7–8) with motes of light that gather on the in-breath. Real field recordings of wind, birds, a stream, waves, crickets and a fire, switched on or off mid-sitting, and a tingsha bell to end.
Leave seeds, berries, nuts, an apple or honey on the stump; whoever likes it comes sooner. The field journal keeps everyone you've met, a herbarium of one-line notes pressed as leaves, and the year as the rings of a cut stump.
Each place follows the clock outside: dawn, day, dusk and night, with spring flowers, summer fireflies, autumn leaves and winter snow. Every animal keeps its own hours and seasons.
A home-screen widget with the place as it is now and an optional daily reminder. Everything stays on the phone: no account, no ads, no internet.
| Who comes out | What it takes | |
|---|---|---|
| First minutes | Tits and robins | The phone lying still beside you |
| 8 minutes | A fox | No jolts; a movement sends them off, but they return sooner |
| 12 minutes | A roe deer | Quiet that holds |
| 20 minutes | A brown bear | A long, unbroken sitting |
| Half an hour at dawn | The white deer | Early, and very still |
On Xiaomi (MIUI / HyperOS), Huawei and some other phones, allow Autostart for Hushwood and remove battery limits so the daily reminder arrives on time.
JDK 17+ (Android Studio's bundled JBR works) and the Android SDK. Kotlin, Jetpack Compose, Room, DataStore; the places, the animals, the portraits and the icon are painted in code on the phone.
git clone https://github.com/bigdevwhale/hushwood.git cd hushwood ./gradlew testDebugUnitTest # stillness, the guardian, the portrait ./gradlew assembleDebug # app.hushwood.dev, installs next to a release ./gradlew assembleDebug -Pdemo # app.hushwood.demo with half a year of sittings
A practice tracker first. The forest only rewards stillness and coming back: there are no streaks to lose, no scores, and nothing to do while you sit. Breathing, yoga, a journal page or a mindful walk count too.
Write it down afterwards: a class, a walk, a page. Fewer animals come to these, but the place remembers, and they count towards the guardian and the rings.
Your sittings, notes and meetings, on the phone only: no account, no ads, no analytics, no internet permission at all.
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Photos and clips struck into pixel-art treasure in a dragon's cave.
A film camera for the family: shoot now, see the prints tomorrow.
They grow up faster than the photos do.
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Intrusive thoughts as ships: the lighthouse beam, the evening watch, forecasts checked.
A magic lantern deals the glass; parent and child make up the bedtime tale.
A date night for two on a night train: a conductor's questions, the phone as the table between you.
The same questions to your child, yourself or a grandparent, year after year, laid as a mosaic.
Your mind is a kite on a string. A few soft tugs a day bring it back to here.
There is too much music. One album a week, a whole side at a time, on a turntable or a tape deck.
There's too much to watch. So nothing gets watched. Your watchlist as a nineties video rental store.
Every date is a quest. The two of you are a party of heroes, and the phone is your game master.
A cosy lucid-dreaming trainer. In a dream, the top never falls.
A valve radio for falling asleep: tune into made-up stations of rain, sea and night trains, and let it drift off the air.
Five pots for everything you've never tried: sow a seed from a catalogue of new things, water it each time you go back, and when it blooms it's yours.
A fridge door for two: the shopping list, whose turn, notes, worries face down and envelopes that open only together. The phones sync at home, with no server.
A pedometer where your steps carry the village post. You are the new postman of a small village by a river, and its letters, stories and seasons go on for years.
Befriend a real tree. Every meeting is a ring: the friendship grows only from visits to the tree itself, and over a year they build up into a sawn cross-section.
Let your wishes age before you buy them. Every urge to buy goes into a bottle on the rack; when it's ripe, you open it without guilt or pour it into the barrel of your real dream.
Every walk is an assignment from the district paper. The editor wires one ordinary thing to shoot, with a twist; you bring back a frame, it's printed as a halftone, and on Sunday the week comes out as an issue.
A diary, index cards, telegrams and letters typed on a typewriter. There's no backspace that erases: a mistake is struck out or painted over and stays on the sheet, so you write slower, and more honestly.
Every shopping trip is a run. You keep a courier office of one: the household orders on the waybill, each shop learns its own shelf order, and every delivered waybill pays in brass tokens for a sign, a bicycle, a van one day.
The things of your hobbies come alive with practice. Every session lights a candle in a little pixel-art Japanese house; a guitar, a ball of yarn or a sourdough starter shivers, opens an eye, steps off the shelf as a house spirit and keeps growing for years.
A little movement all day long instead of an hour twice a week. Nine pixel-art tin toys on a shelf, each a family of movements; a minute or three of squats, balance or breathing winds one up for two hours and puts a pin in the day's music-box drum.
Make friends the way it actually works, and keep them for years. An old sea chart of your people: small sorties of courage to meet them, bridges that grow with every hour together, and fog that rolls in when you stop.
Step out of your comfort zone a little every day. Your fears become circus acts: pick what you find hard, and the bill offers three small real-life numbers a day, from warm-up to premiere — with a drum roll before and applause after.
Over a thousand evidence-graded protocols for a longer, calmer, happier life. Your body is a blueprint with eight systems; every protocol is a mod you try on yourself for 14 days, and the lab shows whether it moved anything before it enters your firmware.
Someone already lives in your flat. Find out who — and help them leave. A slow, quiet haunting on your own photos: marks in your rooms, notes in the evening, words through the static, and after two weeks one real thing left to do.
A small present every day, from your past self. You can't surprise yourself unless you forget: fill a capsule machine with little presents for future days, let the words seal, and turn the crank for one a day.
A budget kept like a detective's case file. Spending is evidence, categories are suspects with police photos, and when the clues show a pattern, a case opens: you name the motive and hand down the verdict.
A pilgrim's pass: come to a place of power, a church, a mosque, a synagogue, a spring or an old tree, sit there ten minutes without the phone, and the book gets a stamp nobody else has.
A book of hours for your own practices: the day divided into hours by the sun, a bell for each, and whatever you put into them written into an illuminated manuscript.
Be drawn one of the 117 billion people who have ever lived, and read their life in a parish register: the doors that were open, the ones that were shut, and what was left behind.
Enamel pin badges for the small deeds of a day, each with an order typed out, a rubber stamp and a fanfare. Nothing to plan and no streaks: in the evening the commission asks what happened.
Put a worry on an old brass balance as a stone, and weights with arguments go on the other pan, one by one, until it tips. 1,209 concrete worries, 15,900 weights.
A pet that lives under your bed and eats fear. Horror films and books feed it, anxious news is fast food, and your own fears it guards at night.
A bookshop of books that don't exist. Every day a customer asks for one, and you find it on the shelf by writing its title, first line and blurb.
Tarot with no bad cards. The Auntie finds the good even in Death, gives you an omen for the day and asks in the evening whether it came true.
A pocket field guide to the spirits of your real houseplants. Catch them with the camera; they live by the real sun over your town, ask you to touch the soil, grow, hatch from cuttings and fight real pests.
A talk by the fire with the people close to you: hold your stones together, and sparks bring the questions.
A diary of the cafés you keep coming back to: each gets a page and a sugar packet, and every cup leaves a coffee stain on the page.
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