Six stages, one season, forty minutes of attention.
A farming game is a loop or it is nothing. This one runs Plant, Tend, Cock It Up, Harvest, Trade, Build, and the third stage is the one that does not appear in any competitor on the market.
One season, stage by stage, and what the game tells you at each.
Eight moments across an in-game year that maps to about a fortnight of real time at default speed.
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Day 1 of the in-game season
Plant
Crop, field, drill date and seed rate chosen, and the seed paid for out of Coins before anything is known.
The trade-off, stated before you commit: every day later costs about 0.4 per cent of yield and removes about eight blackgrass plants a square metre.
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In-game days 12 to 20
Emergence
Plants per square metre counted. The first number that means anything, and the first point at which slugs matter.
A count, a photograph from the same fence post every season, and whether that establishment is good, thin or a problem.
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In-game days 30 to 150
Tend — the winter windows
Two of the six input windows. Autumn herbicide and the first nitrogen split, both cheap and both easy to miss.
A window opening, a window closing, and what missing it will have cost when the number arrives in August.
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In-game day 190, roughly
Tend — the expensive one
The flag leaf. One spray, the dearest of the year, protecting the leaf that does about forty-five per cent of the work of filling the grain.
What it costs, what it protects, and the septoria pressure that decides whether it was worth it.
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Any time, weighted to the risky windowsNow
Cock It Up
The failure roll, which is not really a roll. Most failures trace to a decision or to the weather record, and the game shows which.
What happened, when, why, and what can still be salvaged. Plus a share card, if you want one.
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In-game days 300 to 330
Harvest
The combine goes in. Yield calculated from establishment, tillers, ears, weather and every decision taken since day one.
The whole working, line by line, with the contribution of each decision shown as tonnes rather than as a grade.
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Harvest, then any time until the following spring
Trade
Spot, store or forward. The price series moves on aggregate in-game supply, which means everybody harvesting at once moves it.
The three prices, the storage cost, and what the forward contract you signed in April is now worth against the spot.
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Whenever there are enough Coins
Build
The money becomes a grain store, a shop, a brewery. Alan quotes, Alan overruns, and the next season is different because of it.
The quote, the disclosed overrun range, the build time, and what the finished thing changes about the loop.
Every stage is skippable by an absent player without losing the farm. Relief cover is set through Harriet, it is free, and it is the reason this tracker is a record rather than a list of chores.
Why the cycle is a fortnight and not ninety seconds.
The category default is a ninety-second cycle. Plant, wait, tap, collect, repeat, and the interval exists purely so that it can be sold back to you. It produces enormous early engagement and it has nothing whatever to do with farming, which is a business conducted at the speed of the sun.
A fortnight per season at default speed gives roughly forty minutes of genuine decision-making spread across fourteen days. That is about three minutes a day, which is a habit rather than a job, and it leaves the long gaps in which the interesting thing happens: you find out you were wrong in April, in August, and there is nothing to be done about it in between.
It also makes the time-skip honest. Kaleb sells you the gap and only the gap, because the gap is the only thing there is to sell. A ninety-second cycle has to sell outcomes, because nobody would pay to skip ninety seconds.
Three minutes a day, fourteen days a season, and about twenty-six seasons a year for somebody playing every day. That is the design target, and it is deliberately unambitious about session length.
The six stages, timed and priced.
| Stage | Attention it needs | What it costs | What it decides |
|---|---|---|---|
| Plant | 3–5 minutes, once | 180–640 Coins a field | The ceiling on everything that follows |
| Tend | 1–2 minutes, four to nine times | 90–410 Coins a field | How much of the ceiling you reach |
| Cock It Up | None. It happens to you | Nothing, and nothing can prevent it | Whether this season teaches you anything |
| Harvest | One long minute | Fuel and contractor time | The number, and the working behind it |
| Trade | 2–4 minutes, or none at all | Storage, at 4 Coins a tonne a month | How much of the number becomes money |
| Build | 1 minute to commit, then days to wait | 2,400–186,000 Coins | What the next season looks like |
One page per stage.
Each with the mechanic, the numbers, and what it costs.
Planting
Choose a crop, a field and a drill date, and pay for the seed before you know whether any of…
Tending
The long middle. Nitrogen splits, a fungicide decision at flag leaf, slug pressure after a wet October, and a …
Cocking It Up
The stage every other farming game leaves out. Roughly one cycle in six goes partly wrong and one in twenty…
Harvesting
The number arrives. Yield is calculated from establishment, tiller count, ear count, the weather record and th…
Trading
Sell it now, store it in the barn and gamble on a spring price, or forward-sell part of it before…
Building
Turn the money into something that changes the next cycle. A grain store, a farm shop, a brewery, a pub.…
The three rules the loop is built on.
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Nothing that costs money changes an outcome.
Money buys time and it buys hats. It does not buy yield, luck, protection from failure, a better price or a shorter queue. The moment it buys any of those, the simulation is lying, and a simulation that lies is worth less than no simulation at all.
This is also the commercially inconvenient rule, because outcome-selling is where the money is in this category. It is kept because the alternative attaches a farm’s name to a mechanic that its own audience would recognise as dishonest within a week.
Money buys the clock. It never buys the harvest.
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Every number arrives with its working.
A yield of 6.2 tonnes a hectare is not information. Establishment of 218 plants, 412 ears, a flag leaf spray applied four days late and 21 millimetres of June rain — that is information, and it is what the harvest screen shows.
It is also the only defensible reason to build this at all. A farming game that teaches nothing about farming is a slot machine with a tractor on it.
A number without a working is a slot machine result.
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Absence is never punished.
No wilting, no dying stock, no decay timer, and no shop selling the cure. A player who comes back after three weeks finds a farm that is behind rather than a farm that is dead.
This costs retention. It is known to cost retention. It is kept because the retention it costs is the kind that comes from anxiety, and a farm brand built on honesty cannot sell anxiety.
A lapsed player comes back to a farm, not to a bill.
The loop is not novel. Plant, tend, harvest, sell, build is thirty years old and works. The only original thing in it is the third stage, and the only reason that stage can exist here is that this is the one farm in Britain whose audience already expects it to go wrong.
The loop, questioned.
You miss three or four input windows a season and take roughly fifteen to twenty per cent less yield than an attentive player. You lose nothing else. There is no decay, no death and no compounding penalty.
Yes, through Kaleb, with the premium currency, up to six skips a day. He will not skip the drilling, the flag leaf decision or the combine, because those are the parts worth being present for.
Roughly seventy per cent of failures trace to a decision you took or to the weather record, and the game names which. The rest is genuine bad luck, because farming has genuine bad luck in it and pretending otherwise would be the bigger lie.
About a fortnight of real time at default speed, or about forty minutes of actual attention spread across it.
Start at Planting.
The first stage, the seed cost, and the drill-date trade-off stated before you commit.
