Island Farm

How to play Island Farm

Island Farm gives you a small island, a village to feed and a west wind that hardly ever stops. Every patch of ground has two numbers you can see: its salt, which is highest near the shore, and its wind exposure, which is highest on the western side where there is little land to break the wind.

The list of crops that will grow here is short, and each one tolerates only so much. Sea kale shrugs off salt but feeds almost nobody. Barley stands up to the wind. Potatoes and cabbages need moderate conditions, and beans, the best food of all, need sweet soil and shelter. A crop one step past its tolerance gives half a harvest; two steps, nothing. Move the cursor over a patch and you can see exactly what each crop would yield there.

Each season you have ten days of labour. Planting a patch takes one. A stone wall shelters the three patches east of it, a hedge shelters two once it has had a season to grow, and seaweed mulch takes a level of salt out of the soil. Storms come in from the west, flatten crops standing in the wind and blow salt spray back over exposed ground; winter rain rinses a little salt away. The village eats more every season and the damp store only keeps a little food from one season to the next, so there is no living off one good harvest. Improve a sheltered, sweet home field early, and it will feed the island when the big seasons come.

Objective

Feed the village for six seasons without the food store running dry.

Features

• Salt and wind levels you can read on every patch
• Five crops with different tolerances and yields
• Stone walls, hedges and seaweed mulch to improve the land
• Storms that flatten crops and blow salt inland
• A village that eats more every season, and a store that barely keeps

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