The Farmer Was Replaced

Swiss automation game The Farmer Was Replaced by solo dev Timon Herzog and indie publisher Metaroot combines meditative automated farming with hardcore Python-like coding. What sounds unintuitive has become a great success.

The Farmer Was Replaced by Swiss publisher Metaroot and swiss developer Timon Herzog has seen remarkable numbers for a very niche concept. Before the full release on 10 October, the game has racked up 160,000 sales in its half-year Early Access phase, and more than 6.6 million views through TikTok on its various videos.

The latter isn’t hard to understand: Watching The Farmer Was Replaced can almost be meditative in its combination of automation and satisfying farming animations. Remarkable that is because players have to work hard for their meditative success in a very real way: The Farmer Was Replaced uses a Python-like ingame programming language to manipulative the farming machines that sow and harvest ever more complex field layouts. Players program drones to do the farming work through the coding window on one side of the screen, while the fruits of their labour will be depicted on the other. A well-programmed drone will need no further commands, but the field layouts and crops steadily add additional challenges.

The 1.0 update introduced the ability to farm with multiple programmed drones simultaneously. The tech tree and progression system now work in a more exponential way, allowing for larger farms. Additionally, the sound and music have been completely overhauled, and The Farmer Was Replaced has been translated into 11 languages, including Japanese, Polish, Simplified Chinese and Spanish.

And players appear to like it: Almost 1,700 reviews on Steam, 96 per cent positive, are incredible numbers for the genre of automation. It's current all-time player peak stands at around 7,500 people; not a highly-indicative number for a singleplayer game, and yet a big success for the indie title. And as Metaroot CEO Andri Weidmann announced on LinkedIn today, the game sold 100,000 further units in the first four days since the release on 10 October.

The Farmer Was Replaced is Herzog’s first commercial game project. The computer science student originally made the game for himself and was then put on Steam when the feedback for the first version was successful. Publisher Metaroot is a small Zurich company led by Andri Weidmann. The company has published the programming game the Tetris-like city puzzler River Towns, the steampunk auto-shooter Airships: Lost Flotilla, and the nature simulation game Of Life and Land.