How the farm works

Ticks, land, bots, soil, weather, orders and the number the leaderboard ranks.

Time

The farm moves in ticks. Your live farm runs at 10 ticks a second, all the time, whether or not you are watching. Every action a bot takes costs a few ticks, and a bot can only start its next action when the last one has finished. Questions, like looking at the soil or checking your coins, cost nothing.

Land

The world is an endless grid of tiles. You own land in plots of 8 by 8 tiles. Your first plot covers tiles (0, 0) to (7, 7); the plot next to it on the east is plot (1, 0) and covers (8, 0) to (15, 7). Tile x grows to the east and y grows to the south.

The barn is tile (0, 0). You can’t farm it, and it’s where bots drop off their harvest and where all selling happens.

You can buy any plot that shares an edge with one you already own, with buy_plot px, py. The price is 150 × n², where n is the number of plots you own now: 150 for your second plot, 600 for the third, 1,350 for the fourth. Bots can only walk on land you own.

Bots

Each bot carries up to 20 units (30 after researching the satchel). A new bot appears on the barn and costs 80 × m², where m is the number of bots you own now. All bots run the same program, and my_id() tells each one which bot it is.

What each action costs:

Crops

Crop	Ripe after	Yield	Price	Water	Nitrogen	Soil nitrogen	Soil fatigue	Frost	Research
carrot	18 s (9 s if fed)	4	2	20	10	-8	+6	Dies	Free
wheat	27 s (14 s if fed)	8	3	15	20	-12	+8	Survives	40 coins
clover	15 s (8 s if fed)	1	1	25	0	+20	-10	Survives	60 coins
pumpkin	45 s (23 s if fed)	20	6	40	30	-20	+15	Dies	250 coins
berryRegrows	24 s (12 s if fed)	6	4	20	15	-6	+4	Survives	400 coins
appleRegrows	1 min (30 s if fed)	24	5	30	25	-10	+6	Survives	900 coins

A crop goes through stages 0 to 3 and is ripe at stage 3. Harvesting it before then gives nothing. Berries and apples are perennial: after a harvest they stay planted and grow again. Every other crop leaves the tile bare and untilled, ready to till and plant again.

Fast growth. When you plant, the crop checks the soil. If the moisture is at least the crop’s Water number and the nitrogen is at least its Nitrogen number, it grows at double speed. Otherwise it grows at normal speed. The check happens once, at planting (and again each time a perennial regrows), so water first, then plant.

Soil

Every tile has three numbers from 0 to 100. Look at them with scan() or the overlays in the game.

• Moisture. Starts at 50. Planting drinks some of it. water adds 30. Rain adds it back slowly.
• Nitrogen. Starts between 30 and 50, different on every tile. Most crops use it up when harvested. Clover adds 20. Compost adds 25.
• Fatigue. Starts at 0. Harvests raise it, and every point of fatigue cuts the harvest by 1%. A tile with no crop on it rests and recovers one point every 16 ticks. Clover and compost lower it faster.

Weather

The sky is clear most of the time. Rain comes in spells and slowly waters every tile. Frost comes less often, and kills any carrot or pumpkin that isn’t ripe yet when it arrives. Frost also pauses their growth. Wheat, clover, berries and apples don’t mind it.

The weather is fixed in advance for every farm, so forecast(500) tells you exactly which rain and frost spells start in the next 500 ticks.

Selling and orders

At the barn, deposit moves everything a bot carries into barn stock, and sell item, n sells it at the item’s price for the day (the base price, until the daily market opens on 8 December). sell carrot, all sells the whole stock.

Every so often a buyer posts an order: a crop, a quantity and a deadline. Filling it with deliver pays twice the market price plus 10 coins. Orders get bigger as your farm does. orders() lists the open ones.

Net worth

Your score is your net worth: your coins, plus everything you’ve ever spent on land, bots, buildings and research, plus the market value of what’s in the barn. Spending never lowers it, so buying a plot is never a step back on the leaderboard.