The basic loop
- Till a plot. Every player starts with a small handful of empty plots of dirt on their farm.
- Plant a seed. Different crops cost different amounts of in-game currency and take different amounts of time to grow — a radish might be ready in an hour, a watermelon might take a day or more.
- Water it. Watering sped up growth and kept weeds and pests away — leaving a plot unattended for too long could mean weeds (or a bug infestation) that you'd have to clear before harvesting.
- Wait — or don't. This is the part that made the game infamous.
- Harvest, sell, replant. Sell your crops for coins, level up, unlock better seeds and bigger plots, repeat.
The steal (偷菜)
The mechanic everyone remembers is stealing. Once a friend's crop ripened, anyone in their friend list could visit their farm and pick some of it for themselves — before the owner got there. A crop left unharvested too long could be entirely stripped by friends, which is exactly why players set alarms for the small hours of the morning: if a friend's melons were due to ripen at 3am, you wanted to be the one clicking at 3:01am, not the one waking up to an empty plot.
It sounds almost hostile written down, but in practice stealing was closer to friendly needling than griefing — it was often small amounts, it was mutual, and it's the reason the game got talked about at all. Nobody tells a story about watering their own vegetables. Everyone tells a story about the 3am raid.
Decorations and levelling up
Beyond crops, players spent coins on fences, scarecrows, dogs to guard against theft, and cosmetic decorations to make their farm distinctive when friends visited. Levelling up unlocked more plots and rarer crops, giving the game a light progression loop layered on top of the social one.