Farm Together

It Begins

For years, I’ve had an annual or semi-annual tradition of binging on Stardew Valley during late summer/fall or late winter. Stardew Valley is great, but sometimes I have a craving for something… different. Plus, with the announcement of the upcoming Stardew Valley 1.6, I wanted to hold off on yet another Stardew run until it drops. Thus I embarked on that well-worn search for Stardew Valley But Different so many farming sim enthusiasts embark upon. I found several promising Stardew Valley clones, but I knew they wouldn’t scratch that itch in the tangential, more mindless way I craved.

Then. I found THIS.

Farm Together is basically mobile clicker without ads and in-game purchases. It has cutesy graphics and a bare bones tutorial. There is no story, and the only in-game goals are randomly generated quests (farm X resources). It operates on real time. There is nothing to do but farm, decorate, and level up. It is a grinding game one plays for the sheer enjoyment of Doing The Thing.

I love it.

The developer’s goal was to deliver a relaxing and fun casual game people could sink many hours into, and they delivered.

My first hour, I was like eh. This is fine, kinda aimless but whatever. Then I decided I wanted to nudge my orchard over a bit so it looked nicer and was easier to harvest. Then I decided I wanted to maximize my main field to better utilize the tractor upgrade I unlocked. THEN I decided to build a flower garden with a fancy hedge, and customize my farmer, and… Next thing you know, I was optimizing my crops and peeking ahead at locked plants to see what I could earn next. You can purchase additional land plots as you progress, so your farm has the capacity to be insanely huge.

One thing I particularly like is how they handle watering crops, that tedious hallmark of farming games. It’s entirely optional. It (sometimes) increases the growing speed of vegetables, and in can increase the quality of flowers, but you can totally abstain and at a certain farm size it’s not even worth bothering with anymore. I also like that it runs on real time rather than fixed in-game day. Overall, the pacing feels about right. The tractor update, which allows modifying a 3x3 grid, came along right when I needed it. New plants, animals, and items unlock at a brisk pace. Around the time I started to feel the squeeze from fuel limits I had plenty of medals to build a second gas pump. Etc.

One thing I particularly dislike is the entire housing setup. You build a house, which requires multiple cash infusions to even enter, and then you… decorate the house. Except a lot of the starting decorations are normcore (beige walls? in a GAME? wtf?) and they cost TICKETS, an entirely new currency you get from grinding away at the stove, easel, or piano to create. Again, this is done in multiple phases. It would make more sense to me if any of the furniture was remotely interesting. Farmhands, which can be hired to help with harvests, also require tickets. There’s a wemod that lets you set tickets, but I’m gonna see if I get to the point where I feel like modding it.

The HowLongToBeat stats are promising. Median main story playthrough? 80h. Average completionist playthrough? 435h. Challenge accepted.

Farm Together Brainrot

The brainrot is real.

I’ve reached the stage where I could play the game indefinitely because I have so many crops/rotations there’s always something to do with very little downtime. Right now I’m mostly focused on leveling up certain crops to unlock new ones and expanding and organizing the farm. I decided to dump all the fish in a lake. Not sure how I feel about that just yet and may end up changing it again, but my flower garden and expanded orchard is coming along nicely. The farthest out plots are flat land, making them ideal for planting long rows of coordinating crops (I assure you, this is very fun for me).

I’m at the point in the game where medals are the newest bottleneck. They’re a tier of currency that allow you to build extremely useful things like teleport pads and gas stations. You get medals from completing quests, but you can also create them with jam. When I initially looked at the jam stall I thought I could turn 50 jam into 1 medal, which didn’t seem like a very good deal. Thankfully, I misread it! I can turn 10 jams into 1 medal, which is a much better conversion.

I always diligently plant at least a 3x3 of each new fruit-bearing tree I unlock, and at this stage in the game it is paying off. There are four ways to convert fruit into currencies and I like how they all have their pros and cons. The fruit shop is an efficient way to convert fruit to Diamonds, but at an XP loss. If you go the jam route, you’re eventually able to convert about 400 fruit into 1 Medal. The fruit stand never loses it’s usefulness! Even though they have timeout periods they’re very cheap to build, at 10 diamonds, and they remain the most XP-efficient way to convert fruit.

• Fruit Stand - 10 Fruit = 5 Diamonds, 20 XP (0.5x Diamond, 2x XP)
• Fruit Press - 50 Fruit = 5 Diamonds, 20 XP, 1 Jam (0.1x Diamond, 0.4x XP)
• Fruit Shop - 125 Fruit = 60 Diamonds, 100 XP (0.48x Diamond, 0.8x XP, No Timeout)
• Jam Stall - 10 Jam = 1 Medal, 40 XP (0.1x Medal, 4XP)

I read that jam was the best way to farm medals and wasn’t really paying attention to the other stats, so I’ve been heavily utilizing the press despite having a relatively small orchard. If I had paid attention, I would have utilized the fruit stands a lot more heavily and leveled up my farm much faster. Anyway, I decided to convert most of my grapefields into an orchard since I have unlocked all the “grape” stuff (the game counts some berries as grapes).

Ye Old Birthday Grind

It turns out Farm Together has holiday events! My first was the birthday event. Plant 400 plots of birthday candles and get new stuff! The field looks really cool at night.

So you plant 400 of these, at 1k a pop, and get a bunch of swag. Sounds easy, right? So I harvested 400, only to realize…

Yeah, NO, you evidently gotta plant at least 400 plots for each item. LMAO. I found it increases over time, so I needed a total of 2,000 to unlock the fourth item, and so on. You can’t use farmhands to do this, it’s just you and your trusty tractor (and friends, if you have friends, which I do not.)

I also decided to build a beach in the little cove near my massive fish ponds. Sand is 10k a plot, so this was an expensive project. I think I burned through 500k doing this much. I also decided to test Farmhands. Farmhands will tend to tiles within a 13x13 range of their base, and I figured out they’ll teleport or jump up/down to navigate terrain, meaning they can actually reach my cove fish pond, yay. I ended up setting up a apple orchard with livestock and fish tiles along the border, which is one of the recommended setups for this. I like having a way to passively harvest my fishpond. Livestock are still kind of a hassle, because farm hands can only feed them and they have to be harvested manually. Livestock are my main quest bottleneck atm.

Brainrot Continues

Brainrot reached tentative modding levels. This is a Unity-built game, and not mod friendly. The devs indicated it wasn’t designed to accomodate mods and there wasn’t an easy way for them to create tools for this, but there are a few hints scattered around and some people have cobbled together stuff. assembly-csharp.dll can be decompiled and dug into. I wanted to mod my farmer’s face decoration for Halloween. I think the most straightforward way would be to rip the face bundle and replace one of them, but I’m not sure this is a project I want to get into as I’m unfamiliar with Unity and have zero interest in learning the tools.

Later in the game the player unlocks buildings that have much faster conversion rates than stalls and no cooldown period. The downside is they don’t look very farmy. I ended up creating a little town center for these because otherwise they look weirdly out of place on the farm.

I find it relaxing to plant long rows of time or type-organized crops, so I’ve been slowly adding to the flat fields at the northern side. At this stage, it’s become less of a game and more of a thing to tinker with.

I like planting crops and doing crop-based quests, but I don’t like dealing with livestock. I had the same problem with animals in Stardew Valley, but that game had the auto-grabber, which was a way to harvest livestock resouces automatically. Since I actually enjoy harvesting fruit, and find it weirdly therapeutic, I trashed most of my farmhand apple orchard (apple trees are up to level 47 or something silly like that) and moved all my livestock into the 13x13 farmhand work grid instead. That way, they continue to level without me doing anything. Quests that require lots of animal harvesting are still annoying, but they aren’t going to be the bottleneck they were when I was harvesting those resources myself.

I unlocked rubber trees, which are the defacto way to farm diamonds, so it will be interesting to see if that gives me a boost since land is getting a bit pricey to unlock.

Halloween and Auto-Farming Event Crops

Time for another seasonal event! Yay! It requires a stupid amount of grinding! BOO!

I wanted a witch hat real bad, but according to the quest I’m gonna have to plant a shitton of cursed pumpkins and baby I ain’t doing it. I’ll plant 800 pumpkins, but I’m not planting 6000 or whatever silly amount it is. On top of that, farm hands can’t harvest seasonal crops. I feel like the devs have gone out of their way to make this a grind. So I fired up ye old Cheat Engine using fantoma’s cheat table to see if I could fark around with the quest parameters and make all my spooky dreams come true without the boring grindy stuff.

I accidentally wiped out all my active quests trying to find and modify the values for the seasonal quest, which meant I would no longer be able to trigger automatic quests. Obviously I should have backed up my farm first! Fortunately, you can find the backups under:

…\Steam\userdata(your profile number)\673950\remote

I was lucky I still had a .bak from before my goof, so I deleted the farm.data and renamed farm.bak. Okay, so I can’t easily modify the quest itself. Now what?

Even with the cheats for Fast Crop Harvest, Crop Any Season, it’s a lot of grinding to get 6000 pumpkins. I set tractor fuel to 99999999 and set up MurGee’s Auto Mouse Click to simulate a mouse click every second, which is about the fastest you can plant and harvest due to the in-game time delay. I then wandered off to do other things. Using the tractor to plant/harvest 3x3 grids of pumpkins, I think it took a little over an hour to unlock the first 3 Halloween items. The questline then switches to needing about 1,000 Hollow Tree harvests. The Hollow Trees are limited to 45 per farm, but with Fast Tree Harvest and Crop Any Season, these can be farmed with the tractor in about 5 minutes and harvesting trees is honestly super satisfying so I didn’t bother with the autoclicker for that one.

I feel like the Hollow Tree limit provides some insight into the seasonal quests. The developers do not want you to crank all the crops out really fast, like I did. They want you to return to continually work on the event goals over days or weeks (this event lasts 2 weeks), and provide an opportunity for the community to farm each others crops, etc. I appreciate that but needing 6,000 pumpkins is way too much IMO.

Anyway, cursed pumpkins look very cool at night. Seasonal crops remain until harvested, even when the event ends, and I still have a few birthday candles I’ve enshrined on a hill. I thought it would be fun to keep a few of each seasonal crop to display so I’ll set a field of pumpkins somewhere too.

I’m to the “let’s automate all the things” phase of brainrot, and I decided to set up a diamond farm with rubber and money trees (which don’t actually generate money, I only now realized). I want the diamonds but I also want to level up those trees, and I found having a farmhand on my apple trees leveled them up pretty darn fast. As I accrue diamonds I replace the money trees with rubber trees, which produce twice as many diamonds twice as often. It’s satisfying to watch the diamond number tick upwards while I’m working on other things.

For money, a lot of people recommend clown fish pools and night tulips with sprinkers. As it happened, I recently unlocked night tulips, so I set up a stand with sprinkers and added a clownfish pool of about 100 fish. Flowers pay out a lot more if they’re regularly watered. The tulips generate about 17k each, so in 4 days they pay for themselves.

I’d really like to permenantly update the player’s move speed slightly and find a way to disable “needs water” indicators (since I never water anything), but otherwise I’m happy with how things are.

Organization and Mods

My orchard has become a sprawling hot mess. Thanks to Ardrana’s Tree Season Guide I was able to organize the trees seasonally. It makes them much more enjoyable to harvest. Unfortunately, I may have done too good a job organizing them, because the flow from one to the next is so natural I now I feel compelled to harvest everything that’s available.

I also decided to improve my mess of a garden. Orchids are a slow-grower I’ve been working on for a while, because there are several to unlock. I stuffed all those at the back and organized some of the smaller flowers by growth time. The entire eastern side is for tulips and probably tea down the line. I have enough medals now to comfortably branch out (uuuhj sorry) into trees and flowers that have medal costs.

I spent a few hours doing this, and I felt healing warmth flow through me. Comfort gaming is good.

Oh, and I’ve added paths EVERYWHERE. For some reason, harvesting trees is more fun when they’re in neat little paved 3x3 clumps, and I think part of it is because I don’t have to pause to make sure I’m properly centered to harvest the correct clump.

More About Farm.Data

Turns out the farm terrain information is human readable, and Daxidol’s guide Converting existing maps to Flat Maps explains how to convert terrain to flat (or whatever). Farm.data contains a list of every tile in the map along with player stats and quest info. Some examples:

[{QuestItem:”FlowerDaffodilWhite”,QuestAmount:20,QuestProgress:4},{QuestItem:”AnimalDonkeyMiranda”,QuestAmount:10,QuestProgress:4},{QuestItem:”CropCauliflowerOrange”,QuestAmount:20,QuestProgress:0}]

{Id:”CropPeanut”,Experience:{Level:11,Progress:60}}

{id:”AnimalDonkeyProvence”,food:6665,extraFood:0}

{ChunkId:”Flat_Chunk”,Unlocked:”false”,ChunkPosition:”6,4”,Tiles:

These are values the Cheat Engine table allows us to modify. Something else I noticed is the cursed pumpkin level data isn’t here (CropPumpkinHalloween). I found the event data is stored in farms.data:

“Events”:[{“id”:”Halloween”,”progress”:[{“index”:0,”progress”:6242},{“index”:1,”progress”:6242},{“index”:2,”progress”:6242},{“index”:3,”progress”:6242},{“index”:4,”progress”:6242},{“index”:5,”progress”:6242},{“index”:6,”progress”:1128},{“index”:7,”progress”:1128},{“index”:8,”progress”:1128}]}], “Rewards”:[{“id”:”FenceAnniversaryFence”} …

The first few items are based on cursed pumpkins harvested, the second is the haunted trees. You can unlock the items by adding them to the Rewards list.

More Mods

I also found a few more mods at 3DM GAME, including Tiehan Tenderness (unlocks opposite-sex clothing). This appears to be done using the Unity Mod Manager and it patches the game so backup data for sure.

Sugarcane Pack

The reason Farm Together has such normie house decorations is presumably because there are 1302343 DLC packs. Historically, I’m not much for cosmetics, but I decided to treat myself to the Sugarcane Pack, which is a pirate-themed DLC that includes a few outfits, a pirate house and decorations, and the sugar cane harvestable.

Friends, I had so much fun with this DLC! I customized a pirate-witch farmer and created a pirate base in the middle of my main fish pond and finished my beach. It has a treasure chest with a tentacle coming out of it. WOULD DLC AGAIN.

I also separated my animals, moving the fowl to their own little plateau, and started another clown fish pond. It’s relaxing to plant long rows of crops in the flat areas, but I’ve come to enjoy figuring out the most interesting ways to use the hilly/rocky terrain.

Candy Pack

Well, I’m doin’ it again. I got the Candy DLC with a bit of an ulterior motive. The main boon is lots of fun candy-themed decorations, but it also contains cotton candy trees, which to my knowledge are the only DLC item that actually impacts the game strategy. Cotton candy trees cost only 2k and produce 1 honey every summer. Contrast this with beehives, which produce 1 honey every 23 hours and takes up 2 tiles of space. This makes honey > medals a viable strategy, AND as a tiny bonus, this DLC comes with the Cake Shop honey converter. The conversion is still the same (20 honey > 1 medal) but it only takes up 1 tile instead of the 2 the Honey Stand takes. It matters only that you can fit twice as many converters in the same space if you want to heavily farm honey.

Anyway, if you set up a farmhand cluster of these, you’d farm about 9 medals an hour, twice what you’d get farming 4-season trees for fruit to make jam. OR, if you have a helper boost, you can harvest 2x yourself.

This pack also comes with a new road, which is a welcome addition as I am in desperate need of new roads, and a giant gingerbread house, and a new flower and crop.

I started looking at Candy Sorrels, the flower, a little closer because it can produce up to 4 diamonds in 2.5 hours (1.6/hour) and it only cost 10 diamonds to plant, while other diamond-producing flowers cost medals. Tea produces 51 diamonds in 24 hours (2.125), rosemary produces 27 in 36 hours (0.75), and mustard produces 33 in 10 hours (3.3). The up-front costs are way lower, and you’d need a farm hand, but it would definitely be an okay beginner strategy for farming diamonds. Tea is usually offered as a diamond strategy, but technically mustard is the best. Of course, to get the maximum the flowers need to be watered, so there are sprinkler costs.

Wishing Wells

I’ve reached the point where my ambition outstrips my means, and I’ve gotten interested in different passive earning setups and have been playing around with mixing and matching types. Money wells generate 24 gold every 2 minutes, and a farmhand can reliably harvest about 36. Starting out, especially with a farmhand working on livestock, stashing wells in the empty spots would be a good way to passively support the livestock, which can be difficult early on. Since I have two livestock farmhand setups, I stashed some wells in each that the farmhands can harvest during downtime.

These numbers are based on my current levels, not the starter levels.

• $16,800 for 168 apple trees @ 16 per harvest = $2,688 & 168 fruits > 3ish jam (1/3 a medal)
• $1 million for 168 mango trees @ 115 per harvest = $19,320 & 168 fruits > 3ish jam (1/3 a medal)
• $1.260 million for 168 tamarind trees @ 136 per harvest = $22,848 & 168 fruits > 3ish jam (1/3 a medal)
• 144 diamonds for 36 wells = ($864 at approx 7x per season = $6,048).

Each well generates approx. $168 per season, slightly edging out tamarind which have a significantly higher startup cost.

Multiplayer

Confession time, even though I have no friends and claim not to want any, I’m reaching the point where I’d like to make my farm public and try some of the multiplayer options. So while hyper-organizing my farm is genuinely very fun and relaxing for me, my ulterior motive is it will make it easier for other people to navigate the place. Reading into the multiplayer side, it seems players can only visit your farm when you’re online, and if you help with other people’s farms you get a boost bonus to your crop yields (2x???). The permissions are pretty granular, so you can grant permission for just harvesting crops, or for harvesting crops and fruit, or whatever. The host famer gets farm XP, the guest gets player XP plus time added to their boost meter.

I’ve visited a few farms and witnessed the sliding scale of “total efficiency” farming verging on soulless grinding to “tricked out decorated farm” that has custom tiles covering every thing. Equally importantly, I’m starting to get a feel for which permission restrictions are prohibitively so. For example, I’ve seen multiple farms that ask for quest help, but lock out access to gas pumps. If I can’t use my tractor, there’s no way I’m going to harvest.

Jalepeño Pack & Megafarming

My fixation on this game is slowly starting to wind down now that I’m approaching the grinder stages of farming. Most of things I want to do, like setting up tea fields and more sprinklers, require medals. I have good ways to earn these, such as boosted harvesting cotton candy trees, but ultimately I’m the bottleneck since farming medals requires the use of timed buildings.

I picked up another DLC, the Jalepeño Pack, and resolved not to buy any more until I can get a discounted bundle. But I really wanted to build a cozy adobe house.

An interesting end-game structure in Farm Together is the warehouse. It helps a lot with inevitable inventory problems. It’s an upgradeable building that stores 50 of each resource for each level. Each upgrade requires a different type and quantity of resource, so 8 peanuts, then 16 apples, an so on. It’s a clever way to allow megafarmers to produce tons of resources without having to constantly scramble for space. I like the new goal this has given me, since the livestock requirements of large quests often slows me down a lot.

One problem the devs do not solve is efficient late-game inventory conversion. The final stage conversion buildings (for instance, the florist shop, which converts 240 flowers to 60 diamonds) are not upgradeable. So if you have 5,000 flowers, you’ll need to click the button 20 times. This seems like an incredible oversight. There needs to be a much more efficient way to convert resources endgame. The pawn shop, at least, has a slider for resource conversion. I’d say this is my only gripe regarding gameflow. Since the warehouse requires random quantities of things to upgrade, there’s this balancing act between converting resources to diamonds versus letting them accumulate to buy upgrades.

The other end-game structures are upgradable buildings that increase earnings by 2% for certain resource types. You feed money into these all the way to level 100, with the top tiers requring billions of coins. At level 100, you are harvesting at 300%. These are functionally money sinks, and whether it’s “worth it” really depends on the play style and longevity of the farm.

I was getting a little stressed out by my messy, overflowing orchard so I ended up banishing all my production orchards to the flat perimeter regions where only farmhands may dwell. Then I decided to reward myself with horsies.

DLC Bundle

Welp I thought I was done with this game, but I said I’d grab this bundle if it went on sale, and it did indeedy, so I got the remaining 12 expansions for about $13 and became briefly obsessed again! Thanks for nothing, Milkstone Studios.

The DLC adds a bunch of crops, gryphons (which lay eggs), tuna, a few herbs and flowers, a crapton of decorations, and of course tons of cosmetics. All of the DLC come with houses, and some of them are pretty epic, but the main advantage is you can generate tickets faster. There are a few reskinned buildings, but outside the candy shop I talked about previously, they are purely aesthetic changes. The downside of adding all these new flowers, crops, and animals is they now become eligible for quests. So you might find yourself obligated to either cancel a quest or start raising gryphons at some point.

Back on my Shit

Well I am back on my shit. I picked this game back up and play a few nights a week when I need to blow off steam.

• I finally divvied up most of my lifestock into separate areas, each with a dedicated farmhand. I still need to break out the deer and llamas.
• I’m continuing to find small hills on the map to decorate for each season event. I added a Winter Holiday one recently. I’m not totally satisfied with it yet.
• Crop planting and harvesting is slightly tedious for me now, there’s not really a good way to automate this part (set and forget, as I’ve done with trees and livestock), but fortunately crops tends to be a small percentage of my open quest items compared to livestock, trees, and flowers.

I decided to build out my Dream Orchard, which has all the trees organized by harvest season so they can be harvested in lovely huge blocks. This requires unlocking the rest of the farmland, and I suppose I could cheat for diamonds but generally I just AFK and let my rubber trees do the work so I can make passive progress on my quests as well. My tea fields and spice fields are starting to shape up nicely. The planting cost is a bit steep, being medals, but it’s really satisfying to roll through there and harvest several thousand diamonds in a few minutes, and useful if I’m just short of a goal and between rubber tree seasons.

I organized my flowers by growth time a while back. Now that I’m no longer playing daily, this is less important, but I’m still trying to think of how I want to organize my border flower fields when I get that far. I went to some effort to build dark tuilp fields for money, and at this stage I have so much money I doubt I’ll ever run out, but it is still fun to run through the fields harvesting.

I have so many farmhands running I’m finally starting to run out of tickets, and decorating my many houses has been put on indefinite hold. One of my other goals was to build all the houses, and I’m doing that bit by bit. I figured out it’s good to always have a house near a fast travel point so I can pop in and cook something up. Sushi is kinda the no-brainer here. You get 20 tickets, and the resource requirements are easy (fish and wheat). I do run out of wheat but rice paddies help a lot and I need to build a larger one.

At this stage, I guess the farm is visitor-proof. Outside harvesting all the crops and not tilling (which I’m sure will happen) or planting weird things in weird places there is not really anything a guest could do to mess things up, and I’ve got so much stuff to harvest a person could easily fill their meter in a few minutes.

Flowers, Decor, Etc

Farm Together continues to have seasonal events at very regular intervals, so I’ve picked up a few cool seasonal items. The seasonal quests continue to be grindy and boring, however, so I use my auto mouse-clicker setup to plant/harvest resources while AFK. Continuing to build houses and there are only a few remaining.

I more or less finished my seasonal-order orchards and started on my large flower patches. The plan is to set up dedicated patches so I can remodel my main flower garden with an eye to aesthetics rather than harvesting. I ended up arranging the flowers in 6x6 grids loosely by type (e.g. all daisies in a cluster, etc.), with a square of grass between each quadrant so I could plop down a farmhand if needed. A farmhand would only be useful if I needed to harvest a bunch of faster-growing flowers like daffodils, and even then, having a farmhand sit idle for a task I can do myself in about 1 minute is kind of silly. Another option is having a farmhand continually water longer-growing flowers, but the ROI on Roses and Gerbera Daisies is frankly stupid compared to something like the Queen of Night Tulips, which I already have on sprinklers, and it only takes a few minutes to havest them every 2 days. If I reach the point where I have an abundance of medals I’ll probably just fit these fields with sprinklers.

I’ve continued to relegate diamond crops and flowers to a central diamond-harvesting area. Diamonds are still my main bottleneck, but that will change after I buy the remaining plots of land and the issue will be medals. The warehouse will continue to need an increasing amounts of diamonds, but at this stage I only need like 10k a pop which is trivial with two rubber tree farms going.

I realized I am wasting some of my farmhand’s passive potential and began adding more flowers and trees to farmhand plots that had open spaces. For instance, I have a handful of cinnamon trees I almost never get around to harvesting, but if I chuck a few into my animal pastures they will be harvested every single season as long as the farmhand is paid. I found having a few stray orange trees in pastures leveled that type signficantly over time (most of my trees are level 20 to 30, but the oranges are up to 60, largely because a few are being continually harvested by farmhands). Likewise, I’d tossed a few mango and apple trees in my tamarind orchard and those have levelled up nicely as well.

I never did get into decorating, so I used CE to give myself 500 tickets and went to town decorating one of the smaller houses. I got tired of it after burning about 250 tickets. Decorating is sort of fun? I guess? But not enough to actually work for it. They obviously put effort into this feature, there’s a ton of furniture options if you have all the DLC, but it’s not quite there and seems best as a late-game ticket sink. I have so many farmhands going, CE is the only way I’d be willing to spend the tickets to decorate.

AMINALS EVERYWHER

Yeah, animals everywhere. I realized I could (sort of) keep large herds of animals organized by using fences between types, and I also decided the only truly tedious thing about animals is feeding, since they require several feeds before they produce. I began setting up large fields of animals that had at least 1 square on a farmhand grid, so the farmhand would feed them while leaving the harvesting to me. I figured out pretty quickly that animals can be a hassle to harvest if they aren’t in 3x3 blocks so I’ll probably end up rebuilding some of these sections.

At this stage 10x head isn’t cutting it so I’m steadily upping the animal count to 20+, while making an effort to have at least 1 of every tree and flower within a farmhand grid. Since I put farmhands in inefficent places, I usually have few nooks and crannies here or there where I can stuff a random flower and it won’t look weird.

Now that I have huge seasonally-sorted orchards on the borders I’ve begun slowly but steadily demoloishing my old hodge-podge orchard that was a huge mess of roads and just… everything. I’m going to keep most of the trees, but organize them more to aesthetic/theme.

Houses Tho

Well, the time has come. 140 hours in I’m bored of farming and livestock and pretty much all I do right now is decorate since I’ve got all these empty houses sitting around. When I need to blow off some steam, I cheat-engine 400 tickets and get bizzy. Most of the DLC theme furniture can’t sustain an entire house, so I do a lot of mixing and matching. I enjoy it, but I’m running out of houses. And furniture.

Before, I was like, why the hell would anyone care about these mundane kitchen appliances and bathroom stuff? Now, in each house I meticiulously set up a thematically appropriate kitchen and carefully consider the number of mundane appliances and kitchen gadgets to include. IDK man.

I still have a few large land plots to unlock and fill responsibly with flowers and crops, but I unlocked all the center plots. I’ve found some fun ways to landscape these. My favorite is the rice patty field that is full of ships and koi.

Farm Together 2!

Imagine my delight to see the sequel announcement in Steam (Q2 EA release). This is an insta-buy for me, but I probably won’t actually play it until 1.0 comes out. The big improvements appear to be QOL updates, the ability to terraform, and the inclusion of a town. At this point, I still have a few plots to unlock on my farm but otherwise I’ve more or less done what I want to do. If I play now, it’s mostly to decorate or rearrange things, though harvesting flowers and fruit is sometimes therapeutic.