No forced tutorial, no penalty for absence, and nothing lost by going away.
Thirty-two levels, an XP award on every action worth taking, and a philosophy that can be stated in one line: a player who leaves for four months comes back to their farm rather than to a bill.
XP, per action.
| Action | XP | Why it is worth that |
|---|---|---|
| Drilling a field | 40 | The decision that sets the ceiling on the season |
| Taking an input window on time | 15 | Six a season, so 90 for an attentive player |
| Harvesting a field | 60 | The payoff, and the moment the working is shown |
| Selling, by any route | 10 | Deliberately small, so that Trading is not a grind |
| A forward contract that beat spot | 35 | Rewarding judgement rather than volume |
| Finishing a building | 200–1,400 | Scaled to cost. The largest single awards in the game |
| A metre of wall or laid hedge | 8 | Slow, cumulative, and the only XP Gerald hands out |
| A scheme option taken and kept | 120 | Annual, and it is the most reliable XP for a patient player |
| Converting produce through the shop | 25 | Per line, and it is how a retail-minded player levels |
| A parish goal completed | 80 | Shared equally, regardless of contribution |
| Cocking something up | 30 | Awarded for the failure itself, which is not a joke |
| Logging in | 0 | There is no daily reward, no streak and no login bonus |
The philosophy, in five rules.
There is no forced tutorial
Chapter Zero is a title sequence you can skip in eight seconds. Nothing is gated behind a tour and nobody is made to tap a glowing arrow.
There is no penalty for absence
Nothing decays, nothing dies and nothing is repossessed. Relief cover holds it for up to twenty-one days and after that it simply waits.
There is no login streak
No daily reward, no streak counter and no notification telling you that you are about to lose one. This is the single most effective retention mechanic in mobile gaming and it is deliberately absent.
A lapsed player returns without loss
The farm is where it was. There is no catch-up purchase, no rebuild cost and no welcome-back offer, because a welcome-back offer is a bill with a bow on it.
Levels unlock things, never gate them
A level unlocks a building, a field or a crop. It never gates a stage of the loop, and no part of the loop is unavailable at level one.
What each level actually unlocks.
| Level | Unlocks | Roughly when |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Four crops, six fields, the whole loop | Immediately. Nothing about the loop is gated |
| 3 | The grain store, and therefore storage as a trading route | The end of season one |
| 5 | The machinery shed, and owned rather than hired kit | Season two |
| 6 | Charlie, and the scheme-income mini-game | Season two |
| 8 | Lisa, the farm shop, and the value-add multiplier | About six weeks in |
| 10 | Gerald, boundaries, and nature units | Season four |
| 12 | The grain drier, and livestock | Season five |
| 16 | The small brewery, behind an age gate | Season seven or eight |
| 18 | Parish goals, and the shared objectives | Season eight |
| 22 | The restored barn, and the planning system | Around a year |
| 28 | The pub. The end of the building progression | Around two years |
| 32 | Nothing further. The level cap is a full stop, not a paywall | When it happens |
Why Gerald and the schemes unlock late, and Lisa earlier.
Because the value-add lesson is the one worth teaching first. A player who has sold potatoes at the gate and then sold crisps through the shop has understood, in about ninety seconds, the arithmetic that explains why a brewery exists on a farm that loses money.
Boundaries and schemes are the slower, more interesting lessons, and they need a player who already has a working farm to trade against. Taking four hectares out of cropping for a flower-rich margin is a meaningless decision at level one and a genuinely difficult one at level twelve.
The brewery sits behind an age gate at level sixteen, and everything alcoholic about it is absent — no brand, no product, no bridge to anything that sells beer. That is a CAP Code question rather than a design one, and it is answered on its own page.
Every rule on this page is a retention cost, and the honest version of the argument is that this design would perform worse in a thirty-day cohort than a conventional one. It is built for a farm that has spent five years being publicly honest about losing money, and a game attached to it that harvested guilt would be the single most off-brand thing the estate has ever done.
Progression, questioned.
The farm is exactly where you left it. Nothing has decayed, died or been repossessed, there is no catch-up cost, and there is no welcome-back offer.
No. There is no season pass, no daily streak and no time-limited progression track, because all three convert absence into loss and this design does not do that.
Not meaningfully. Kaleb compresses the calendar, so a paying player reaches the same points sooner in real time, but the XP per action is identical and nothing is purchasable that awards XP directly.
The social half.
Asynchronous only, parish-scale, and never a global leaderboard.
