Farm Together

The pitch: a farm you build with someone else, at your own pace

Farm Together is a cooperative farming sandbox with no fail state, no combat and — by design — almost no urgency within a single session. You plant crops, raise animals, decorate a shared plot of land, and expand it outward one purchased chunk at a time, either alone or with friends dropping in and out of the same persistent farm. Milkstone Studios shipped it as a full 1.0 on 11 October 2018 with no Early Access period, and it has sat at a Very Positive rating across roughly 17,600 Steam reviews (about 94% positive) essentially ever since.

That headline number is not a fluke of launch-week enthusiasm. Positive reviews keep arriving years apart with the same shape: a player logs an implausible number of hours — 3,300, 6,600, in a few cases more — and describes the game as something they return to specifically because nothing in it demands their attention. A handful go further, crediting the low-pressure loop with getting them through a genuinely hard stretch of their life. For the audience this game is actually built for — people who want to zone out on a farm with a partner or a friend rather than optimise a system — that reputation is earned, not manufactured.

The part every honest review has to say out loud: it plays like a mobile farm game

Read past the five-star write-ups and a second, equally consistent thread runs through the review page, and it isn't really a complaint about quality so much as a complaint about category. Crops take real-world time to grow — up to a full 24 hours for some — and the day-to-day loop of watering, waiting and collecting maps almost exactly onto the free-to-play farm-sim template that built Zynga's fortune a decade earlier. Reviewers reach for that comparison constantly and independently, across every year since launch: "way too similar to a free to play game," "it's essentially a very expensive free-to-play game... but no, on Steam, with a price tag," "cute, high quality graphics, but absolutely zero gameplay... you plant crops that take real life minutes and hours to grow, water them 9999999999 times."

What makes Farm Together's version of that structure genuinely different — and it's the detail that turns a fair number of those same critical reviews into a grudging recommendation anyway — is that there is no timer-skip purchase anywhere in the shop. You wait the real-world hours because that's the pacing the designers chose, not because a currency exists to make you not wait. Several long-time owners with most of the sixteen DLC packs installed are explicit on this point: none of it buys progress, only cosmetics and extra content categories (new crop and animal types, seasonal sets). It's the rare case of a game copying free-to-play's rhythm while refusing free-to-play's business model — which is also exactly why the "is this actually deep enough" question below lands so much harder than it would on a $5 mobile clone.

What the achievement data actually shows about that depth question

"It's shallow once the decorating wears off" is the second most common negative-review argument, and it's worth checking against something other than opinion. Steam's public achievement percentages for Farm Together back it up with real numbers: entry-level tasks like buying your first crop (92.3%) or completing your first quest (78.8%) sit at the top of the curve, exactly where you'd expect for anything most owners try in their first session. But the achievements tied to the game's actual advertised scope collapse fast — raising 20 items to level 30 sits at 11.5%, building a hundred-chicken field at 10.7%, and unlocking every map chunk, the single achievement that represents "the full farm" the store page's screenshots show off, sits at 7.8%. Fewer than one in twelve owners ever reach it. That's not proof the game is bad; it's consistent with a design that deliberately measures its content in weeks and months of real time rather than hours, and it's exactly the evidence the "this is a mobile game's pacing without the mobile game's playtime expectations" critics are pointing at.

The DLC stack, and where "relaxing" quietly stops being true

Farm Together's base price is a one-time NZ$28.99 (NZ$14.49 at the 50%-off price active when this review was checked, 11 September 2026), and the game has since accumulated sixteen separate paid DLC packs — cosmetic sets, new crop and animal categories, seasonal content — sold individually rather than bundled by default. None of it is required, and reviewers are consistent that none of it is pay-to-win. But it does mean the honest answer to "how much does the complete version cost" is a good deal more than the headline price, and one heavily-upvoted 2019 review specifically accuses the developer of inflating the bundle's list price ahead of sales to make the discounted figure look larger than it is — a claim worth flagging as a single (if well-voted) reviewer's accusation rather than an independently confirmed pricing audit, but the kind of complaint that recurs around bundle-heavy live-service-style pricing for a reason.

More concretely verifiable is what happened during a 2024 limited-time seasonal event. Multiple reviewers describe a bug that surfaced mid-event, and a "side effect" of the developer's fix was that many players lost progress they'd already made toward that event's rewards. The same event gated a rare fish behind a catch rate reviewers put at roughly 10–20%, tying it to time-limited event currency rather than the game's normal, patient economy. The developers did apologise and adjusted the rate afterward, but the reviewer who documented it summed up the actual cost plainly: "filling the year with grindy limited time events is the opposite of relaxing." For a game whose entire pitch rests on being the anti-FOMO farming game, a single mishandled event is a bigger credibility problem than its size suggests, because credibility is the one thing this design has instead of a monetisation hook.

Verdict

Farm Together is honestly two different games depending on who's reading its review page. To the audience it's actually built for — people who want a no-stakes, screen-share-friendly farm to putter around in together for a few minutes a day over months — it has clearly delivered, and the thousand-plus-hour testimonials are real and consistent across eight years, not launch-week noise. To anyone expecting Stardew Valley's systemic depth, or hoping a NZ$29 Steam price tag buys something structurally different from the free-to-play template it visibly borrows from, the achievement data and the review page both say the same thing: what you see in the first hour is close to what you get, stretched out over real-world weeks, with sixteen optional purchases on top and at least one recent event that briefly broke the promise the whole design is built on. Neither verdict is wrong. Know which player you are before you buy it.