Walk somebody else’s farm, do them a favour, take nothing.
Visiting is asynchronous, it is free, it is capped, and there is no version of it in which you can harm the farm you are visiting or take anything off it. Which sounds obvious, and is the opposite of how almost every social farming game has ever worked.
What a visit actually is.
You open a neighbour’s farm
From your parish list, or from a parish goal. They do not need to be online and will not be told immediately.
You can look at everything
Fields, crops, buildings, boundaries, the lot. Including their failures, which are on display exactly as yours are.
You can do one of three jobs
Feed stock, take a reading, or lay a metre of hedge. Small, useful, and capped at five visits a day.
They find out when they next play
Named, with what you did. Never as a push notification, because a notification about somebody else’s activity is a nag with a friend’s name on it.
You leave with nothing
No reward taken from them, no resource extracted, no competitive advantage. You get XP and they get the job done.
What visiting can and cannot do.
| Possible | Impossible, by design | |
|---|---|---|
| Helping | Three job types, capped at five a day | Doing everything for somebody, which would empty their game |
| Taking | Nothing at all | Harvesting their crop, taking a resource, or gaining anything they lose |
| Harming | Nothing at all | Stealing, sabotaging, spreading disease, or any adversarial mechanic |
| Messaging | Nothing. There is no free text | Sending a message, which would need moderation |
| Seeing | Their farm, their buildings, their failures | Their name, their location, their age or anything about them |
| Being seen | A farm name and a parish | Anything that identifies a person, and specifically a child |
Why helping is capped at five a day.
Because an uncapped helping mechanic becomes an obligation within a fortnight. Every social farming game that has shipped one has watched it turn into a chore economy, in which players maintain a list of neighbours they must service daily or fall behind, and the game becomes a job with a friend list.
Five a day is enough to be useful and too few to be a duty. It also makes the choice of who to help mean something, which is the only reason the mechanic is interesting at all.
And nobody is told they have been helped by a push notification. They find out when they next open the game, because a notification about somebody else’s activity is a nag wearing a friend’s name, and this design has a rule about that.
What neighbouring earns.
Four marks, none of them worth anything, and none of them purchasable.
There is no reciprocity mechanic. Helping somebody does not oblige them to help you, and the game does not tell either of you what the balance is.
Nothing about another player is visible except their farm
No real name, no precise location beyond a parish, no age, no profile and no behavioural information of any kind. A visiting player sees fields, buildings and boundaries. That is the entire surface, and it is drawn that way because a meaningful proportion of the players will be children.
Neighbouring, questioned.
No. There is no adversarial mechanic anywhere in the design — no stealing, no sabotage, no disease spread and nothing a visitor can do that you would not want.
No. There is no reciprocity mechanic and the game does not track or display a balance between two players.
Through a parish goal, yes. Otherwise the list is your own parish, which keeps the social graph small enough to be pleasant.
And swapping what you grew.
Produce only, no currency, and a deliberate refusal to build a market.
