Masterpost of Farming Simulation Games that aren't HM/SoS/RF

All other video games not related to the main farming series - Pokemon, Stardew Valley, My Time at Portia, and other indie-developed games.
Velvet
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Code_Name_Geek wrote: Oct 15, 2022 7:22 pm Some of the main series Pokémon games let you grow your own berries. You plant them along routes, water them, and they will grow after a certain amount of real-world time has passed. I’m assuming that’s why they’re on the list, since the list links to the Bulbapedia article on berries :)
That sounds like such a tiny part of the game that including it in the list is a bit misleading, imho. I can come up with quite a few games like that. Off the top of my hat, Wild Arms 3. It had you grow your own berries or flowers half through the game, which you used to create better potions. My memories are hazy, but I think you even had to breed the flowers to make them genetically stronger, as this is how you got better potions. And they grew in 'real time', while you travelled around. But I'd be real angry if someone suggested that game to me for that aspect and I played it just for that, for it's ultimately a heavy puzzle RPG :)
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There are 5 categories of existing games with farming in, in the OP, plus one list of upcoming games, which is uncategorized. The one Pokemon is listed under is 'Games that include farms/farming with varying gameplay'. Just by looking at the list you can tell that those aren't farming games, they are merely games that have a farming or growing/harvesting mechanic included in them somewhere. If people are surprised to find a game listed has farming in, they should ask about it to find out if it's enough to satisfy them, if they are specifically looking for farming. However, if they ARE looking specifically for farming, they should really just skip the entire last category, because those games are all primarily in other categories/genres (like RPG) and simply happen to have a farming mechanic in them somewhere.

If they are in the last category, that means they didn't fit any of the others, which means that farming is not the game's actual genre, just a side mechanic, the importance of which varies by game.

After Bluie made the list, all kinds of suggestions for additions were thrown in by others, and Bluie tried to accommodate what people wanted. It was discussed on the first page:
Bluie wrote: Apr 08, 2018 1:00 pm
RopeMaidenKirie wrote:Thanks for this list! I reached out to Cher to see if we could sticky this. Edit: Stickied!

"Games that have farming in them, but are not the main focus/more of a side thing" I would actually also be very interested in seeing this filled out too if you have the time! I'm assuming Little Dragon's Cafe and Popolocrois: SoS would both fall under this category. Mineko's Night Market you can plant and grow cats, so probably that one as well!
Woah, thanks for the sticky you guys! What I could probably do is have a section for game that have farming as a side thing / farming games that play vastly different than the list above. The games I currently have listed all have the 'HM' Formula in them more or less, and that's usually what people are looking for. The 'Farm Sim' genre has expanded past this insomuch there's so many titles, some vastly different, some low effort cash grabs.
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Pretty much what Kiki said. I'm not intentionally misleading people, it's just accommodation. Pokemon is specifically on the list because believe it or not, there's berry meta. A lot of the games that include the berry growing are surprisingly intricate and require more care than others. Some berries are highly coveted for official tournaments due to their battle effects and need to be grown if the user wants more than one. While berry meta is nil in the current generation, it may not always be that way. There are tons of people who still painstakingly grow berries in the older games for fan tournaments or challenge runs. So, as it's a game series that has gardening/farming that can directly effect gameplay, it stays.

The other section is a mess, honestly, but if I start culling it I'll most likely start getting those games as suggestions again, but the other section is quite literally only if you cannot find something you like/want in the already jammed packed categories. A lot of games these days have optional farming mechanics and the people of Fogu have expressed they want X game in the list so I put it where I can because as long as the farming is indeed there, it's allowed to be here.

As for the Chocobo's Dungeon one, both the original Wii release and the 'Everybuddy' remaster have a farm where you can tend crops and take them into dungeons with you. It's basic but it still counts.
Velvet
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Ok understood! I thought that the idea was that there had to be a certain high ratio of non-farming-to-farming to have the game added, even if it was not primarily about farming in that list. But if not, then maybe you could add Wild Arms 3, too. As far as I remember, you couldn't avoid farming in that game at all, there was no way to just buy superior potions.

As for Pokemon, do you know from which of the games did the farming start? Afaik it was not in the earliest ones, I've definitely played them and can't recall any farming.
Bluie wrote: Oct 17, 2022 4:20 am As for the Chocobo's Dungeon one, both the original Wii release and the 'Everybuddy' remaster have a farm where you can tend crops and take them into dungeons with you. It's basic but it still counts.
That explains it, I've only played the very first game on PS1.
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Velvet wrote: Oct 17, 2022 10:28 pmAs for Pokemon, do you know from which of the games did the farming start? Afaik it was not in the earliest ones, I've definitely played them and can't recall any farming.
Berry farming started in gen 3, so Ruby/Sapphire/Emerald for the GBA. FWIW, the original carts are famously glitched and are a pain to grow berries on, for various reasons. But berry cultivation is included in the new Brilliant Diamond/Shining Pearl games that came out last year too, and many others.
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One that has fallen under the radar a little is Brookhaven Grimoire. Fantastic little farming game based on HM/SOS games with a great storyline and a heavy magic influence. My aplogies if it's already been mentioned but it's a wonderful game and such a shame that it's not better known. Solo developer but she's very responsive to any questions.
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Bluie
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It's all good. I update this thread in chunks rather than each time a new game is brought up. If it's not there immediately, it will be eventually. With how oversaturated the farming and games with farming genres are it's a little hard to keep up at times. No matter how many times a sweep through Steam, Twitter, ect, there's always going to be something else I've missed. I kinda wish people would cool it a bit with the farm sims, but I started this thread and I'll stick with it. All I ask is for patience and understanding while I work through it.
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Kikki
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I could be wrong, but I think Illiarra was saying that the game has fallen under the radar in the general sense, of players/media haven't noticed it much, rather than that it's specifically flown under your radar, Bluie. :) Nobody expects you to find every farming game, or to be constantly attending this list.

If you want, though, you should abandon it, or turn the job over to someone else, if that's possible. There's no need to be stuck with this task forever if it's a stress...it's been four years already and the trend is going to continue for a bit, particularly with the way things are right now.

I think we've reached saturation on farming sims because it's now 6 years post-Stardew. (Post the wild success of Stardew, that is). A LOT of people were inspired by that success, thinking maybe it meant that they could make a killing off it, too (some from greed for money or celebrity, but probably most from actual love of the genre) though Stardew's success was a freak phenomena that is very unlikely to be repeated.

Plus indies in general have really blown up in this time, too, with the massive success of ones like Hades, Shovel Knight and Hollow Knight...etc. Game development seems to have become a little more accessible to small teams, and it seems to be a little easier now to get your indie onto consoles. I think we've hit the saturation point because of the time period, with how long after Stardew it is, and also because of the pandemic, which pushed even more people into pursuing less-traditional careers, particularly those which could be done from home.

Though we've not yet got a lot of top-quality farming sim options, imo...I personally am still very underserved in farming sims, as there's very little I've tried and actually enjoyed, outside of Bokumono. Though what makes a thing top-quality is almost as subjective as what makes a thing beautiful. I still only have about 3-4 games I'm truly hopeful will turn out to be as much fun as the 3DS Bokumono games were for me. Anything that's following too closely with Stardew is generally not gonna be my bag, since I didn't even like Stardew itself all that much.
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Bluie
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I don't hate maintaining this list or anything like that, it's just a lot. It started as a small(er) collection for the people of this forum so we could stop the influx of recommendation threads for other farming sims, and now it's become this comprehensive list that I have to keep tabs on every month. While Ushi isn't as populated as it once was, it's still alive and the fact that we're even still chatting now shows that there's still interest in this thread and that others are keeping tabs on it too.

There may eventually be a day where I just stop updating it, but I've been on Ushi for over 10 years now and I don't intend to leave unless Cher pulls the plug. Since I'm here I may as well keep it running. Besides, it does help me (find new games to play) too and I do enjoy watching indie developers put all their passion into a project and succeed. It's just a bit... irritating seeing 10+ new games every time I do an update. What I thought may take 10 minutes then takes 3 hours as I add new games, make sure I didn't miss any, go through all the TBA games to see if they have release dates (or have been quietly released), and then finally cull the dead games. I'm just not always in the mood lol. Like, the last Nintendo Direct that had around 5 farming sims iirc? I internally groaned lmao. Like "Oh lord, more of them, gotta remember to add them next edit". It's overall nbd at the end of the day, I just want everyone to know I don't live here and I'll get to it when I get to it.
Velvet
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How do you even find out about new farm games? Is there a site that posts news on them specifically? My biggest problem to keep up is that I don't know where to get information, all news sites I know of focus on general gaming, and it's impossible to wade through that much information every day, in fervent hope of maaaaybe finding something about a farming game. :P This is why I've bookmarked this thread, it's literally the only option I've found to learn about new (and old) games of this ilk.
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Bluie
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Besides people bringing games to my attention here, I have a few ways of searching. Firstly, Steam has an 'agriculture' tag that almost all farming sims are attached too. Browsing it yields new games fairly often. There used to not be a 'farming simulation' tag, but there is now so it also is worth a browse because sometimes games will have one or the other, but not both. With Twitter, I follow many of the upcoming title's creators and basically all of them promote one another like clockwork, so it's fairly common to come across new game in my general feed or just when I'm checking on development of other titles. Other than that, there's a few gaming news sites that I frequent that report on farming sims alongside everything else. Siliconera has a knack of finding and reporting on games from all over while Gematsu focuses on the bigger companies and the Japanese side of gaming more extensively. Cher, our admin, also reports on farming games she happens upon on the main site so I check there often as well. There's also My Potato Games which hyperfocuses on cute and cozy games which a lot of farming sims fall under so it's worth a browse too.

Finally, I'm a regular lurker of Reddit and due to how algorithms work, I get recommended posts that usually steer me towards more titles. Just yesterday It made me aware of a Kickstarter called 'Sally' that I'll be adding to the list if it gets funded.

I think that about covers it. Theres some youtubers out there that focus solely on upcoming farming sims, but I prefer my information via text so I usually just ignore them.
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I also get my gaming news almost entirely from Twitter, mostly by following Gematsu and Nintendo Everything, but also several game development companies and indie groups. I used to check Steam and Kickstarter...but I don't any more because watching games go through YEARS of dev time is just too frustrating for me. Lots of games are never properly finished, to boot, so I prefer to only keep an eye on those that're further along in development.

If anyone avoids Twitter because it's kind of awful...here's a tip for using Twitter with less exposure to said awfulness. Beyond just actively teaching your algorithms to work best for you by marking what you do and don't like, try setting your Trends to a region you know nothing about and maybe even better, can't read the language of...or somewhere that is very inactive on Twitter. There's almost never anything at all in my Trends section, now. (I have a lot of topics/words/tags blocked, too.) You can change your region under the Explore section of your settings.
Velvet
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Has anyone here played Spirit of the Island and Sakuna of Rice and Ruin? The first one sounds interesting with its tourism theme, but Steam reviews seem to bash it. And I love the Asian theme in Sakuna, so exotic, but it seems to be more of a platformer than a rice farming game? I'm bad at platforming and I find it generally boring, so I wonder how much of it there is in the game compared to rice farming.

And also... Slime Rancher. It's about ranching, and yet from what I've seen on YT it's so incredibly boring. I just don't get the point. There's no diversity, only slimes. Yet it's such a famous game. I'm pretty sure I'll never play it myself, but I'm curious why other people who like farming games enjoy it.
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I've played a very small bit of Sakuna, and I completed Slime Rancher.

Sakuna isn't really a farming game, to me, because the ONLY thing you can plant is rice, and it's super technical and very boring to me, all about how you space the seedlings (and possibly how and when you drain or fill the water, I can't remember, now.) You do have to pay a fair bit of attention to the rice farming, though, it's a large part of the game. The art is very nice, but in my books, it's more of an action platformer than a farming game. Probably because I hate platforming so that I have to do a lot of it makes it really stand out. It has a story and the characters are cute. Wasn't really my thing, though.

Slime Rancher's not a farming game, unless you can get by solely on ranching. Which I'm sure some can since I can definitely get by solely on crop farming! (In fact, I prefer just crop farming...no animals to have to worry about it if I want to sleep through a tutorial month or something. You can put crop farming on hold whenever you want to concentrate on something else, but you can't put those needy animals on hold.) Plus all the care-taking is automated via feeders and plot collectors and your vac-pak, so you don't really interact even with your slimes...doesn't feel very 'farmy' to me. But I don't think just having one type of creature is all that boring, certainly not any more than a game based all on cats or dogs or horses. Slimes have more variety than those things, since they come all colours and can be cross-bred for different versions that can get pretty weird-looking. They also have different behaviours and have to be kept in different habitats because of that. Some are dangerous to stand near (because they explode or emit radiation, for example). Some are violent. Some can fly and need high walls and netting over top. Some are totally safe. Some must be in water. Etc.

What I didn't like about Slime Rancher was the currency and stock market type system. I really hated having to deal with flooding the market with too many of one type of plort and devaluing it thereby, so even if you were overflowing with multiple types of plort, you had to plan out which to sell and which to hold onto, day by day, as the Plort Market values fluctuate. I quit as soon as I unlocked the entire map and found each story marker because of the money-making system in the game...too tedious for me when plorts aren't invisible currency...they occupy actual physical space (in the game, I mean.) and are edible by the slimes, so they can disappear (and cause mutations you don't want) if you don't have the means to store them all.

The game's story was really boring. I can't even remember it, tbh, just that I never cared when I found a new story marker.
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Updated the list with what's been mentioned here. Haven't done any sweeps yet.

I can speak for Sakuna, I played and beat it last year and enjoyed it a ton. Both the farming and exploration/combat lean into one another as their both two sides of a coin. Sakuna herself is the daughter of a harvest goddess and a « Harvest Goddess » of war, so she's got a green thumb and combat prowess. The farming itself is intricate, it relies on actual rice farming procedures the people of Japan have been using for centuries that the game devs have painstakingly transferred into the game. Things like crop spacing, water level/temp, seasonal hazzards, and so on. It's very involved and very fun once you get the hang of it (you can also turn on easy mode if you don't want to fuss too much over it as well). On the flip side, the better farming you do, the stronger Sakuna gets in combat. Good yields give her added stats so she can kill enemies quicker and get better skills faster. The combat sections are basically set up like mini metroidvania sections which require platforming and combat combos. I only remember having trouble with maybe two sections in the water area and the rest was pretty straight forward. Again, you can turn on easy mode if you don't want to worry too much.

The story of Sakuna is good. I'm an ancient Japanese lore fangirl and I fell in love with the setting, characters, and music instantly. It's an insanely well made game from a two man studio and I often recommend it to people looking for something a little different.
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