Raindrop Planet

Raindrop Planet
The memo's illustration: rain falling on a round planet, watched by a small smiling figure
Developer(s)	Molecular Reality Corporation
Publisher(s)	Molecular Reality Corporation
Platform(s)	Maxine's Quest (planned)
Release	Unreleased
Genre(s)	Environmental science, microbial ecology

Raindrop Planet is a planned game about environmental science and microbial ecology by Molecular Reality Corporation. It was announced in a 2021 advertisement, which invited players to "adopt a complex and unique microbial civilization within a raindrop-sized vessel", and described again in the 2022 memo "Early Releases on Maxine's Quest", which gives its inspirations as "coconuts, farmville".^[1] Like the company's other titles, it was to be played on the console's software with real samples passing through a nanopore. It had not been released by October 2026.

The memo lists the game's samples as "GPS-tagged soil, water, and filtered atmosphere samples, disaggregated plant cells, sea monkeys, microbial communities within a 'raindrop planet' micro-incubator accessory".^[1] Of the eight titles, only this one calls for extra hardware: a micro-incubator is a small chamber that keeps a community of microbes alive and growing. The GPS tags connect the game to the company's World Particle Project, a planned catalog of particles "in terms of size, shape, charge, and other characteristics, indexed by biological source and, with environmental samples, GPS-tagging".^[2] Players would have measured the microbes living in the water and soil around them, the microbiome of a backyard.

A raindrop is a small vessel. A drop 2 mm across holds about 4 microliters. Bacteria are common in clouds, and some of them, among them Pseudomonas syringae, carry proteins that make water freeze at temperatures only a few degrees below zero, which may help clouds produce rain and snow. In snow collected at mid- and high-latitude sites, between 69 and 100 percent of the particles that started freezing at temperatures warmer than −7 °C were biological.^[3]

FarmVille is the farming game that Zynga released on Facebook in June 2009, in which players plant, tend and harvest crops on a virtual farm and visit the farms of their friends. It was one of the most played games on the site in its first years, and it closed on December 31, 2020. The memo does not explain the coconuts.^{[clarification needed]}

The "sea monkeys" among the samples are brine shrimp, sold since the 1950s as packets of dried eggs that hatch when poured into water. They were advertised for decades in American comic books with drawings of a crowned family of smiling sea people. The company borrowed the style in 2022 for a mock advertisement of its own, for a $99 "MOLECULAR AQUARIUM®" with a "nanoselector knob".^[2] In 2026 the founder revised the forecast: "I don't think we'll have 'molecular aquariums' for sale this decade at your local neighborhood Target store."^[4]

The game's description has wandered. On another version of the advertisement kept in the company's files, which names the console the demonpore 2600, the microbial civilization belongs to a different title, MoliGotchi, and lives in "a teardrop-sized vessel". A later remake for epicquest.bio brings Raindrop Planet back with the line of another title, Backyard Universe: "go out and find cells and molecules and view them in Augmented Reality".^[5] In May 2026 the company's plan for universe wrappers, games laid over the software of Maxine's Quest, listed it with a third subject, "Raindrop Planet (backyard water)".^[6]

Raindrop Planet was the second most popular choice on the 2021 sign-up form, which asked each new member which early game they would play. In a sample of 135 answers it received 25 votes, one fewer than "Dragon Tyrant Must Die!", the game later called Labyrinth of the Dragon Tyrant.^[5]

• Molecular Aquarium
• Condiment trials