Farlands Gives You A Planet To Call Your Own

Leave the urban grind for a more relaxed countryside—er, spaceside—life

Turn An Abandoned Planet Into A Thriving Farmstead

A Cozy Farm Simulator In Space

In Farlands, you’re a worn-out little human who wants to leave the hectic and stressful life you’ve been living in the metropolis all these years, and the perfect opportunity comes right for you—a planet going on sale for a bargain! Without any second thoughts, you purchase the land for yourself.

Congratulations, you are now the owner of your own planet!—yes, the entire planet is all yours. Granted, it’s kind of in the middle of nowhere in an outlying solar system and it’s been abandoned for years…but with a little bit of elbow grease and some help from your personal assistant droid, you can turn that old agrarian rock into a lovely home.

Farlands features an epic sci-fi farming and life sim experience, where you can cut weeds, clear paths, reclaim overgrown fields, and restore the planet to its former beauty. With nothing much on your barren land, travel to other neighboring planets to explore and collect resources to improve your living conditions. Enlist the help of other people living in these nearby planets, form bonds with them and learn their own quirky little stories of why they live so remotely far away from civilization. Who knows, you may even find love in this rural environment.

A Detailed Roadmap For Farlands

As an Early Access game, Farlands is still rather barebones. Because of that, developers JanduSoft and Eric Rodríguez highly encourage players to send feedback in order to further flesh out the game. However, they have also already put out an although tentative but comprehensive roadmap for the game while it’s in Early Access, detailing the updates to come from 0.2 all the way to version 1.0.

“This roadmap is tentative and subject to change during development, community feedback is very important and it is possible that we will modify the order of updates, add/remove things and generally make changes during the Early Access period,” they noted in their post. “However, it should serve as an indication of what content Farlands will have in the final release, and what we will be working on at each point in Early Access.”

The current version, 0.1, is mainly a sandbox experience where players can try the game out, as many of the core systems are still not in place. Rather, it serves as a foundation for what’s to come, and updates during this version will be focused on fixing bugs. Version 0.2 will introduce usage of the calendar and seasonal events, along with more stock from Larry & Barry and the expandable memory chip system for more craftable recipes to do. Version 0.3 Home Sweet Home update brings in house upgrades through the carpenter, Grubert, making bigger houses and with craftable indoor furniture.

The Version 0.4 update will add a significant mechanic to the game—social relationships with corresponding events and dialogues along with friendship levels. Initially, the first level events will be the only ones available on 0.4 release, with subsequent updates adding more events. Players can even make use of the Messaging tab in the menu to send emails to your neighbors. Version 0.5 presents new hostile mobs for more engaging combat and a second mine in Hafnir to get your daily dose of ores.

0.6 is a rather major update as players will get to say hello to the new desert planet chock full of new resources as well as a perpetual day or night, Vanadian. After all those updates, 0.7 is planned to be a Quality of Life update where the developers will further fix and improve the systems already set in place, ironing out the rough edges and bugs that may have persisted.

Version 0.8 will implement new farming systems introducing the space animals! Stables of different classes for different types of space animals will be then available, with these space creatures each making a resource of some type to be sold or used. Very much like your run of the mill farm! 0.9 then marks a big event for those who are interested in the love department—you can then wed your most romanceable candidate, with the highest relationship.

And finally, if everything goes well, Version 1.0 will arrive along with a third new planet named Darmstad. Darmstad will come with an interesting oxygen mechanic, and will serve as a route to the endgame, although not reach 100% completion just yet as the developers would still want to continue development.

From Content Creating To Game Making

Farlands is the result of brainstorming between JanduSoft’s Jose Antonio “Jandu” Andujar, and L&V Media Group’s Eric Rodríguez, and both are based in Barcelona, Spain. JanduSoft, as a publishing company, provides a way for developers to bring their games to consoles in order to reach further with their audiences. The team is passionate, and full of experience. L&V Media Group on the other hand is headed by Eric Rodríguez himself to encompass the board games and video games he has designed. After launching two board games named Growing Season and Riverwood Town, Farlands will be the first video game under his belt.

Rodríguez is also a content creator, who mainly produces content on video game analysis and game design essays on his channel Leyendas y Videojuegos (Legends and Videogames). After years of working with games for almost a decade, he decided to assemble a team to create his very own video game. Development for Farlands began in January of 2023, and the team uploads monthly development updates on YouTube.

Rodríguez shares his vision on the game in the first dev log video, who wishes for Farlands to be a “farming game that takes advantage of everything I have learned in the last few years to launch a solid [and] interesting title with a differentiating twist.” Farming simulator games have popped up more frequently the past few years after the success of Stardew Valley, and he hopes that the space element in Farlands might just bring a different edge to the genre.

Barebones, But Promising

As of writing, the game has accumulated a number of positive reviews, calling it charming and a promising game. They pointed out the inspiration from games such as Harvest Moon, Animal Crossing, and fellow indie game Stardew Valley, and that the game will surely live up to its goals and aspirations.

However, others don’t exactly share the same sentiment, with the ‘Not Recommended’ reviews informing people that even as an Early Access game, it’s still very unfinished for its current price point. They agree that it will surely have a brighter future, but as of now the game is akin to a demo rather than a game at Early Access.

Despite these, the developers show great motivation and determination in completing this game, pulling out all the stops with an extensive roadmap and swift updates on their YouTube channel and social media platforms.

Farlands just came out on Early Access last July 24, 2024 for PC (Steam), Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X|S. The game is available with a 10% discount as a celebration for its Early Access release at $13.49 USD until August 8th.