Harriet.
Set relief cover before you close the game and the farm carries on without you. Stock is fed, windows that must be hit are hit, and nothing dies because you had a fortnight in Spain. It is free, it is not a subscription, and it is the single most important anti-pattern in the whole design.
- Cost
- Nothing, at any tier
- Covers
- Up to 21 days
- Loses
- Optimisation, never assets
The mechanic, in full.
The standard free-to-play farming game punishes absence. Crops wilt, animals sicken, and a player who comes back after three weeks finds a ruin and a shop selling the cure. It is enormously effective and it is the reason most people who have tried one will not try another.
Harriet is the refusal. Before you stop playing you set relief cover, and while you are away she does the necessary rather than the optimal: stock fed, water checked, the one spray that could not wait applied, the harvest taken if the window would otherwise close. You come back to a farm that is slightly behind rather than a farm that is dead.
It costs nothing. It cannot be upgraded, gated, subscribed to or accelerated, and no version of this design in which it becomes a paid feature is a version worth building. A lapsed player returns to their farm, not to a bill.
The numbers.
Harriet, specified
- Cost
- Nothing, at any tier
- Covers
- Up to 21 days
- Loses
- Optimisation, never assets
- Not
- A premium feature. Ever
The rules that apply to every character
- Can this system be bought outright?
- NoNothing in the design converts money into a better outcome. Money buys time and cosmetics.
- Can it punish an absent player?
- NoRelief cover covers up to 21 days, free, and nothing decays behind it.
- Is the person licensed?
- NoThis is an unsolicited design document. No agreement exists with anybody named on it.
Role in the game
The farm ticks over while you are away
Where it sits in the loop
Named on the loop page, stage by stage.
Purchasable?
No part of this system is for sale.
On the estate
A real person, described here without permission.
The other five.
Kaleb
Pay Kaleb and the job that was going to take four hours takes none. He is the game’s only time-skip, he is the…
Charlie
The agronomist and land agent, and the only character whose entire function is to tell you that you cannot do …
Gerald
The boundaries. Dry-stone walls by the metre, hedgerows laid rather than flailed, and a biodiversity score tha…
Lisa
The farm shop, and the multiplier that makes the whole economy work. Raw produce sold at the gate is worth one…
Alan
The builder. Everything built in the game goes through Alan, every quote he gives is honest, and every final i…
Harriet, questioned.
It is a mechanic named after what they visibly do on screen, compressed into something a game can model. It is not a portrait and it is not endorsed by them.
No. The only things money buys anywhere in this design are Kaleb’s time-skips and cosmetics, and neither of those changes an outcome.
The whole loop this sits inside.
Six stages, and the third one is the interesting one.
The honest version, fortnightly
No campaign calendar, no filler. When there is nothing to say we do not send anything.
