About Homestead
Homestead is a cozy, grid-based farm management game where thoughtful planning beats raw luck. You manage a 5-by-5 patch of land through spring, summer, autumn, and winter across up to 10 years. Each season you decide which crop to plant on each of your 25 plots, then advance to let weather reveal itself and tally your harvest income.
The money you earn goes toward a difficulty-based target. Easy mode asks for $30,000, Normal requires $50,000, and Hard demands $80,000 — all by the end of Year 10. Every dollar matters: livestock need feed, upgrades cost capital, and droughts punish unprepared farms with a 40% yield cut. Steady planning, good upgrade sequencing, and a healthy respect for the weather system are the difference between a thriving homestead and a foreclosed one.
Core Mechanics
The farm grid is 25 plots arranged in a 5-by-5 square. Each plot has a soil type — rich, dry, or mixed — that was assigned at the start of your run and persists throughout. Crops have soil affinities: wheat grows best in dry soil, corn and vegetables prefer rich soil, and pumpkins do well in mixed soil. Planting a crop in its matching soil grants a bonus yield unit, making soil-aware planting consistently more profitable than ignoring soil type.
Wheat is the fast, dependable crop: one season to mature and a steady market price. Corn pays out much more per bushel but takes two full seasons to mature unless you invest in Better Seeds. Pumpkins offer a middle-ground payout and are vulnerable to Early Frost events, which destroys them unless your Greenhouse upgrade protects the designated plot. Vegetables serve a dual purpose — they earn income on harvest and their yield contributes to your livestock feed supply.
Livestock sit alongside the crop system as a secondary income stream. Chickens produce eggs sold each season for $15 each and cost only 1 feed unit to maintain. Cows deliver $40 in dairy goods but consume 2 feed units per season. If your vegetable harvest falls short of covering feed requirements, you buy supplemental feed at $5 a unit — and underfed livestock suffer a 20% income penalty on top. Balancing your vegetable allocation against your livestock count is one of the defining strategic tensions of the game.
The upgrade shop lists seven permanent upgrades grouped into three tiers, all on sale from the first season — the tiers are a price ladder, not a progression gate. Tier 1 covers fundamentals: Irrigation, Hand Cart, and Better Seeds. Tier 2 offers infrastructure expansion: Barn Expansion, Greenhouse, and Market Stall. Tier 3 holds the biggest yield tool, the Combine Harvester, which adds +25% to wheat and corn. Upgrades are permanent within a run and stack multiplicatively, so a late-game farm with several upgrades operates very differently from an early-game operation.
How to Play
- Select a difficulty and start a new game, or continue a saved game from a previous session.
- Click or tap any plot on the farm grid to select it. The sidebar shows its soil type and current crop.
- Choose a crop from the sidebar actions panel. The current market price estimate for each crop is shown in brackets.
- Assign crops to as many plots as you want, then click Advance Season to commit all planting decisions.
- Weather is revealed after you advance — watch the toast notification to see how this season's yield will be modified.
- Harvest income is calculated automatically and added to your money total. Plots reset to fallow after harvesting.
- Between seasons, buy chickens or cows from the sidebar and visit the Upgrades Shop to invest in permanent improvements.
- Reach your money target before the end of Year 10 to win and submit your score to the leaderboard.
Frequently Asked Questions
What do soil types do in Homestead?
Each of your 25 farm plots has one of three soil types: rich, dry, or mixed. Crops have soil affinities — corn and vegetables thrive in rich soil, wheat prefers dry soil, and pumpkins do best in mixed soil. Planting a crop in its matching soil gives a +1 bonus yield unit per harvest. Soil types are rolled at random when the farm is created and never change, so a plot's affinity is worth planning around for the whole run.
How does livestock feeding work?
Chickens consume 1 feed unit per season and cows require 2 units. Feed comes from the vegetable crops you harvest. If your vegetable yield doesn't fully cover the feed demand, you buy the shortfall at a flat $5 per unit — $7.50 on Hard, a 50% premium. Any season with insufficient feed coverage also applies a 20% income penalty to all livestock goods. Keeping one or two vegetable plots active each season is the most reliable way to avoid these penalties.
Which upgrades should I buy first?
Irrigation ($1,500) is the most impactful early purchase because it completely negates the -40% drought penalty — a devastating hit that can wipe out two or more seasons of progress on Normal and Hard. Hand Cart ($800) adds a flat +10% yield bonus to every crop every season, compounding strongly over time. Better Seeds ($1,200) unlocks single-season corn growth. After Tier 1, the Barn Expansion ($3,000) is worth pursuing if you plan to scale livestock, while Market Stall ($2,000) is excellent on any strategy that runs high-value crops.
How does weather affect my harvest?
Each season advance triggers a hidden weather roll. Good Rain adds +20% to all yields. Fair weather adds +10%. Drought cuts yields by 40% on every plot unless you own the Irrigation upgrade. Early Frost destroys all Pumpkin crops on unprotected plots — the Greenhouse upgrade shields one designated plot (plot 1, in the top-left corner) from frost damage. Weather probabilities are set by difficulty: Easy tilts toward rain, Hard tilts toward drought.
Can corn be harvested every season?
Not without Better Seeds. By default, corn occupies a plot for two seasons before it's ready to harvest — you plant in one season, it grows through the next without generating income, and then you harvest. The Better Seeds Tier 1 upgrade ($1,200) cuts the maturation time to a single season, making corn as fast as wheat while retaining its high per-bushel value. Without Better Seeds, corn is still worth planting on plots you can afford to leave fallow for a season, especially when corn market prices are high.
How are market prices determined?
Crop prices fluctuate each season by a percentage range tied to difficulty — ±15% on Easy, ±30% on Normal, and ±45% on Hard. The key detail is that prices are seeded from the current year and season number, so they're deterministic: if you replay Year 3 Autumn on Normal, the corn price will be the same every time. Every crop swings by the same percentage in a given season, so a good market is good for all four crops at once. Selecting a plot puts each crop's estimated current-season price on its button, so you can see how far the market has moved before committing.
Does the game save automatically?
Yes. Homestead auto-saves to your browser's local storage at the end of every season advance. The next time you open the page, click Continue Saved Game on the start screen. Your money, plots, livestock counts, upgrades, year, and season are all restored. Starting a New Game overwrites any existing save. Browser data clearing or private browsing mode will erase the save, so it's best to play in a regular browser window if you want your progress to persist.
What happens if I run out of money?
If your money balance drops below zero — for example from an expensive feed purchase or a string of drought seasons with no yield — the farm is foreclosed and the game ends immediately. This is more likely on Hard difficulty where feed costs are 50% higher and drought is far more frequent. Once your balance drops under $1,000 with crops in the ground, a red Sell Standing Crops button appears above Advance Season and cashes every planted plot out at 50% of its value — a last-ditch escape hatch. To prevent bankruptcy in the first place, avoid over-investing in livestock before you have Irrigation, keep at least one or two vegetable plots active to reduce feed purchases, and treat Upgrade Shop purchases as seasonal investments rather than impulse buys.
