New things to grow, familiar faces, and a little more life on the farm. Here’s everything that’s taken root so far, and what we’re tending next.
Development journal · No. 07
· Live now
A farm at your fingertips.
Now available in the live game.
We’ve addressed the touch-input problems that kept mobile players from entering the game, and adapted the farm for phone and tablet browsers. Refresh your game to pick up the touch controls, smaller screen layouts and the latest market and community improvements.
Tap, drag and tend.
Tap to walk, select crops and buildings, or place something with your chosen tool. Drag one finger to look around, pinch to zoom, and hold a tile to open its actions. Touch controls also work at the market and when visiting friends. Dragging and pinching won’t accidentally place items, and a single tap won’t trigger the same job twice.
Room for your farm on a smaller screen.
Portrait and landscape layouts bring larger touch targets, readable text and scrollable menus. Swipe the stock strip to browse your goods, open Build or Selected from the bottom buttons, and use Centre to find your way home. Tutorials, community deliveries, achievements, the shop and confirmation windows now fit smaller screens, while menu touches stay safely out of the farm behind them.
An easier way through the gate.
Sign-in supports the phone keyboard, with suitable layouts for email addresses and quantities, and masked password entry. The game adjusts when the keyboard opens or the device rotates. The website’s Expand game button gives the farm more room without restarting your session, including browsers that don’t offer native fullscreen.
Automated touch checks have passed in Chrome and WebKit, covering sign-in, building, saving, reloading and rotation. Desktop checks have also passed. Hands-on testing with physical iPhone and Android devices is still to follow.
A place for every harvest.
The community pantry now accepts all 35 stored items, from crops, fruit and nuts to animal goods, honey and finished products. Choose how much to give, with every item counting towards your community milestones.
Once your finished farmhouse reaches level 5, six specialist market buildings buy those same 35 items: Fresh Produce, Fruit & Berries, Nuts & Honey, Animal Goods, Farmhouse Goods, and Jars & Juices. Each has its own look and a focused list of goods to sell. Farm Supplies remains the place to buy animal feed.
Development journal · No. 06
· Live now
Sweet berries and busy hands.
Now available in the live game.
This update brings new things to grow, four jars of jam and a farmer with the right tools for the job. Refresh your game to pick up the new crops, recipes, achievements and finishing touches.
Three new rows to tend.
Blueberries, strawberries and raspberries unlock once your farmhouse finishes level 3. Plant them in prepared fields just like your other crops, water them to help them along, then harvest and replant. Each plot gives four berries. Before watering, strawberries take 90 minutes to grow, blueberries take two hours, and raspberries take two and a half hours.
Your berries can go into storage, community pantry deliveries, gifts for friends or market sales once trading is unlocked. The pantry’s delivery list now scrolls to fit all six crop types, and the farm’s side panels leave room for the larger goods display.
A little house for homemade jam.
The Jam House also unlocks at farmhouse level 3. Find it under Build → Production for 1,600 normal coins. It needs a clear 3×3 space beside a connected path and takes 30 minutes to build.
Choose Blueberry Jam, Strawberry Jam, Raspberry Jam or Mixed Berry Jam. A single-berry recipe uses three of that berry; Mixed Berry Jam uses one of each. Every batch makes one jar, with its own artwork in storage and a matching collection icon above the building.
At level 1, strawberry jam takes an hour, blueberry and mixed berry jam take 90 minutes, and raspberry jam takes two hours. The Jam House upgrades through level 4, with each upgrade reducing the original batch time by 10%. All four levels share its first appearance; level 5 and beyond stays locked for now.
More little victories to celebrate.
We’ve added 94 achievements, bringing the collection to 333. New goals cover berry planting and harvests, all four jams, building and upgrading the Jam House, making animal feed and reaching more building, pond and tractor milestones. Decorations, moving trees and buildings, finishing the tutorial and visiting different friends now have more goals of their own, too.
Achievements keep their Thistle Coin rewards, menu badges and confetti celebrations. Previously earned achievements stay earned.
The right tool for every visit.
The farmer now takes out a hammer for building work, raises a stick to harvest fruit and nuts, and gathers other goods with a woven basket. New front and back animation frames keep those tools visible and his boots on the ground.
Collecting from animal pens, production buildings, beehives, orchard trees and the pond now sends the farmer over to do the work. Goods stay ready until he arrives and finishes collecting. Cancelling a trip, a blocked route or full storage leaves them safely in place. If you own a tractor, the farmhand still handles crop harvesting; growth and production timers are unchanged.
Neater fields, clearer placement.
We’ve corrected crop drawing so neighbouring wheat and other crops don’t look cut off, with artwork aligned to its soil tile at each growth stage. Companions also stay visible when walking beside or across fields instead of disappearing behind the crop beds.
A local Mill placement problem has been fixed and checked at all four farm corners beside the boundary fence. Its full footprint still needs clear owned land and a connected path. After the farmer finishes his building animation, the construction site appears and its usual 30-minute timer begins.
A little more room to see your farm.
The top menu now has an icon button beside the community pantry. Hide the menu and your stock icons, item quantities and storage counters stay visible. They move up with the selection panel, pantry controls and work instructions, then return to their usual places when you open the menu again.
Development journal · No. 05
· Live now
From wheat to a well-fed farm.
Now available in the live game.
The Mill, smoother companions and clearer help screens are now part of public play. Refresh your game to pick up the latest update, then find the Mill under Build → Production.
A little more from your own harvest.
The new Mill turns 2 harvested wheat into 6 animal feed. Find it under Build → Production for 900 normal coins, and place it on 3×3 clear grass tiles beside a connected path. Construction takes 30 minutes, with no farmhouse-level requirement. Once it is ready, choose Make feed to start a batch using wheat from your storage.
The Mill has seven levels. A batch takes 30 minutes at level 1, becoming three minutes quicker with each upgrade, down to 12 minutes at level 7. Level 5 introduces a new stone-tower appearance that stays through level 7. Level 8 and beyond is locked for now.
A feed icon appears above the Mill when a batch is ready. Make room for all six feed before collecting; finished batches wait safely if storage is full. Home-made feed works for your animals, ducks and fish. You can still buy feed at the market once your level-5 farmhouse unlocks trading. Building and upgrading the Mill also count towards the farm’s achievement collection.
A smoother walk together.
Companions now ease into their pace and turns. We’ve fixed the repeated direction changes, stop-start walking and sudden jumps that could happen when the farmer approached a pet or reversed direction. All six breeds keep their brief following delay and their own walking rhythm, then settle beside the farmer when the work stops.
Instructions with room to breathe.
The ? help menu now wraps its text and scrolls through longer instructions. Tutorial panels also keep their text inside the card, adding scrolling on smaller screens while keeping Back, Next and Skip visible.
Development journal · No. 04
· Live now
The farm gate is open.
Thistlemorrow Farms is now open to everyone on the website’s Play page. Create an account, start your own patch of land and invite a friend along. We’re starting small, listening to players and continuing to improve the game as the community grows. Thistle Coin purchases are live in the shop, too.
The Play page now shows Current Community Members, a count of registered community accounts that refreshes regularly. It counts our community, rather than the number of players online at once.
A few finishing touches for opening day.
Flower pots, flower beds, lanterns, the bench, dustbin and birdbath have been resized to sit more naturally beside the farmer. Pen animals have better ground contact and steadier movement. Menu buttons also keep clicks inside the panel, including when buying animals, so a purchase doesn’t accidentally select the ground behind it.
First released to testers; now part of public play.
This chapter first reached our testing group on 20 September. These additions are now included in the game on the Play page.
A visit down the lane.
The Friends menu now has a Visit farm button. Choose an accepted friend, explore their farm with your companion, then return to your own patch when you’re ready. You can look around, walk, pan and zoom; your friend’s crops, goods and buildings stay safely in their care.
A new chapter for the farmhouse.
Farmhouse level 10 brings a new appearance, with a larger-looking home, dormer windows, a welcoming veranda and flower-filled details. It keeps the same footprint, so there’s no need to rearrange the farm. Other upgrades remain capped at level 9, and farmhouse level 11 and beyond stays locked for now.
Once that level-10 upgrade finishes, the lady on the farm has dreams of her own. Help her develop a kitchen, then a pantry, a guest room and finally a farm café. Each room needs coins, farm produce and time. The pantry adds 100 storage spaces; the other rooms open repeatable meal preparation, guest hosting and café activities that earn normal coins. Talk to her, or open the Farmhouse menu, to follow her progress.
Seventeen new achievements celebrate these rooms, her activities and farmhouse level 10. That brings the collection to 237 achievements, with the familiar Thistle Coin rewards, notification badges and a little burst of confetti.
Little movements, better neighbours.
We’ve checked building, tree, decoration, pen and pond placement so their bases line up with the chosen tiles, including placement previews and upgraded appearances. Companions now pause briefly before following and use their own walking pace, giving farmer and pet a more natural rhythm.
The community pantry’s extra Hide button has also been removed. Its pantry icon already opens and closes the panel, keeping that corner of the farm a little tidier.
Development journal · No. 02
· Testing catch-up
A little farm, a lot more to do.
Our first field note was about putting down roots. Since then, Thistlemorrow Farms grew into an online game tried by a small group of testers. At the time of this entry, public play was still closed. Here’s a catch-up on the additions made during that testing journey.
The warm, storybook countryside that started it all. Concept artwork.
Growing at a gentler pace.
Carrots, wheat and pumpkins begin as seeds, grow through visible stages and wait for you to harvest them. Prepare fields, plant and water, lay connected paths, clear scenery and expand into more land as your farm develops. Growth and production now take minutes and hours, giving you a farm to return to over days and months. Timers keep running while you’re away, and finished produce waits for you.
More life in the pens and pond.
Chickens, cows, sheep and pigs provide eggs, milk, wool and pork when cared for. Ducks have joined the pond, producing feathers when fed, alongside its fish production. The small pond holds two ducks; a 10,000-coin upgrade creates a much larger pond with room for six. Later pond upgrades improve production speed. Collection icons above pens, trees, the pond and production buildings show what’s ready.
An orchard, a kitchen, and a hum of bees.
Apple, orange, pear and peach trees join almond and walnut trees as renewable harvests. Plant them on clear owned grass without needing a neighbouring path, fit them closely together, and move them for free without losing their current harvest. They regrow after picking.
The Orchard Kitchen turns fruit into four kinds of juice and nuts into almond or walnut butter. Beehives near fruit trees help those trees grow faster and produce honey of their own. The Honey Packaging House turns that honey into jars. Dairy, egg, wool and smokehouse production give your other farm goods somewhere useful to go, too.
A farm that looks like yours.
Flower pots, raised beds, daisies, sunflowers, pines and maples in different sizes bring more choice to the garden. Benches, a birdbath, a dustbin, tall lanterns and low path lights sit alongside fences and gates. Chimney smoke rises from the farmhouse, bees buzz around their hives, and clouds drift across the land from time to time.
Someone to keep you company.
Build → Companions offers golden retrievers, border collies, corgis, ginger tabbies, Siamese cats and Persian cats. Buy one companion for your farmer and it follows along, including trips to the market. Pets have been resized to suit the farmer, with walking and sitting animations and adjustments to keep them beside their person.
A helping hand at the wheel.
A finished level-5 farmhouse, Workshop and Garage unlock the 25,000-coin tractor. The farmhand drives it to prepare fields, plant, water and collect ripe crops while the farmer remains free for other work. After its work, the tractor returns to the Garage.
Permanent tractor upgrades make these jobs faster, from twice the usual work speed up to six times at level 9. They don’t shorten the time crops need to grow. The tractor also has corrected ground placement and moving wheels.
Buildings with room to grow.
Farmhouse, barn, animal housing and production buildings now have upgrades through level 9. Buildings and animal shelters gain their second appearance at level 5 and keep it through level 9. Upgrades increase storage or animal capacity, or shorten production batches, depending on the building. These upgrades first arrived with level 10 and above locked. The latest release makes the farmhouse exception described above; other upgrades remain capped at level 9.
A market and two kinds of coins.
The mailbox leads to a large construction yard marked Market Coming Soon until farmhouse level 5 unlocks trading. Once open, the market lets you sell produce and buy supplies. What used to be called Farm Coins are now Thistle Coins, with clearer labels and spacing.
The shop separates Thistle Coin packs from conversions into normal coins. Choose how many Thistle Coins to convert, rather than exchanging a fixed amount. Supported timers can also be finished with Thistle Coins after reviewing the price; construction boosts cost more than crop and production boosts. Coin-pack checkout remains in payment testing.
Friends, shared harvests, and little victories.
Accounts have usernames, friend invitations, private chat and gifts with chosen quantities. The community pantry accepts crop donations towards personal milestones. Its panel has moved down to make room for the expanded goods display and can be opened or collapsed with a pantry icon.
The first achievement collection has 220 goals across farming, orchards, animals, production, buildings, exploration, decoration, homestead and community life. Plant 100, 500 or 1,000 crops, work towards thousands of harvests, expand your land, buy a companion or tractor, and develop your buildings. Rewards grant Thistle Coins automatically, with a menu badge and confetti celebration when you reach a milestone.
A warmer welcome and a clearer screen.
New accounts get a short guided tutorial covering the farm’s main activities. A custom loading screen welcomes players, the top menu can collapse, and more transparent panels leave more of the farm in view. The old Your Homestead menu and Play offline option have been removed. Online progress is saved to your account.
Matching welcome and email-verification messages, plus password-reset emails, help players get started and recover access. The game now offers a refresh message when a newer build is available. The website also has a Facebook share button with a farm-themed invitation image, ready for players to share the world when the farm gates opened.
Thistlemorrow Farms began with a simple idea: a little world you could visit in your browser, with land to tend and people to share the day with. The first foundations were crops, paths, the farmhouse and barn, saved progress, and the beginnings of friendship.
That first patch is growing. We’re still taking our time, listening to testers and making room for the next good thing. Thank you for being here while we put down roots.
