Tales of the Shire: A The Lord of the Rings Game is set to be released on July 29, 2025. Weta Workshop’s game development videos showcase the different features available to players in Tales of the Shire, including cooking, decorating, and gardening. One of the key aspects of Tales of the Shire is its emphasis on nature and depicting a world worth fighting for and defending. Weta Workshop has taken the time to emphasize nature in Bywater because of Tolkien’s love of nature and trees, with the importance of preserving the natural world a major theme in The Lord of the Rings.
This theme is a core part of Tales of the Shire, and comes through in its gardening feature. Tales of the Shire is more than a farming sim, but planting, growing, and harvesting crops and flowers is still one of the key features. Players will be able to create and decorate beautiful gardens filled with flowers, crops, and other plants. Flowers and crops can be harvested and used as decorations or in recipes, making gardening both decorative and functional.
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Gardening in Tales of the Shire
The Endgame of Gardening in Tales of the Shire
Gardening often forms a core part of cozy games, particularly if they’re farming sims. While Tales of the Shire isn’t all about farming, gardening will be one of the main activities that support other activities such as cooking, decorating, and building bonds with the residents of Bywater. Because of this, the gardening feature needs to be intuitive, easy to use, scale realistically, and offer the player rewards based on their input.
Freedom of Placement
Tales of the Shire‘s recent gameplay trailer showcases a gardening feature that has all of that, and more. Players will be able to place garden beds wherever they wish in the allocated space. There are a number of garden bed shapes and sizes available for players to use for gardening. Placement of garden beds isn’t restricted to snapping to a grid, so players have complete freedom in where the garden beds are placed and the overall appearance of the garden.
The Functionality of Gardening in Tales of the Shire
Once the garden beds are in place, the player can plant seeds for flowers and crops, which need to be watered every day. Soon, the plants will flourish into a verdant garden that makes the perfect setting to host outdoor dinner and tea parties. Grown crops can be harvested as decorations, or be used in various recipes. It’s unknown at this point what kind of flowers and crops can be grown, or if new varieties can be bred like in Animal Crossing. Developer videos have stated that Bywater inhabitants can send the player seeds, making that one way to unlock new and rare varieties of plants to grow.
Because of the versatility of Tales of the Shire‘s gardening mechanic and how it was highlighted in its recent gameplay trailer, it’s likely to be one of its core features. With gardening in Tales of the Shire not limited to a grid, it stands apart from other cozy games such as Animal Crossing, where the natural world only forms a part of the experience, rather than the main theme of the game. If gardening is developed and fully customizable, Tales of the Shire may be able to use it as its main draw.
Life Simulation
RPG
Adventure
- Released
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July 29, 2025
- Developer(s)
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Wētā Workshop