Ten minutes of reading and you will understand the whole game. The short version: you do not click crops, you train the farmhand who does, and the week runs whether you watch it or not.
Pip is your farmhand. Every game hour, without being asked, Pip waters thirsty ground, pulls weeds, harvests what is ripe, sells what your rules say to sell, and plants again. You never have to be online for any of it.
What Pip is not is a mind reader. Pip runs a compiled sheet of rules, and everything you do in this game is a way of writing that sheet: turning dials, dealing strategy cards, teaching lessons, or typing a request in plain language and approving what Pip proposes.
Everyone sits the same entrance exam: one week on a six by six farm in a real town of a hundred, all selling into one market. Same rules and same interface as any farm in the county, and the only thing the Trial changes is that land cannot be bought, so nobody out-buys anybody.
Which town you land in is drawn at random from a secret committed before the week opens, which is what makes a shared market fair: your neighbours are luck of the draw and nobody can arrange them. You are ranked inside your own town, and that is how the mint discount is earned.
The world ticks on a global clock: one game hour every real hour, 168 hours to a season, which is one real week. Your Homestead is on that same clock. You cannot fast-forward it, and neither can anyone else.
This is deliberate. A week of real time is what makes the market a shared story instead of a race, and it is why a farmhand that works while you sleep is worth training well.
Four dials shape how Pip behaves: Risk governs how much cash goes into collateral, Patience sets how high a price Pip holds out for before selling, Contrarian decides how hard Pip avoids crops the whole town is planting, and Cash buffer keeps a till Pip will never spend below.
Dials are lossy on purpose. They are a fast way to express a feeling about the week, not a precise instruction.
Cards are named strategies you can slot in, up to three: take contract income first, never hold past harvest, fade every panic. Each one compiles into concrete rules, and the card's card shows you the actual numbers it will use given your current dials.
You can also just tell Pip what you want: "sell nothing until day four, then dump the melons". Pip translates it into the game's rule vocabulary and shows you a proposal, a readable diff of exactly what would change. Nothing takes effect until you tap Approve.
If a request cannot be expressed in the rules, Pip says so plainly rather than pretending. The vocabulary is deliberately closed: it is what makes every farmhand in the game verifiable and every season replayable.
Every crop's price responds to how much of it exists. Sell a big harvest all at once and you walk the price down as you go: your first unit gets the good price and your last does not. Patience is worth real coins, and so is splitting a sale across hours.
Weather fronts change yields, pest waves punish neglected fields, and the shop announces surges in demand a few days ahead. Sometimes you get a private whisper about a surge before anyone else does.
Each dawn the board posts delivery contracts: bring this much of this crop by this day, get paid above spot. You post collateral to take one. Deliver and you profit with none of the price risk.
Come up short and your shed delivers what it has and is paid for it, but the buyer replaces the rest at the going rate and bills you the difference, and a broken-word fine comes out of your coins the same hour, even if that puts your till in the red, in which case you cannot plant or buy anything until you have sold your way back. Selling promised goods into a spike never beats keeping the promise. You also take a scar on your name that the whole town can see, that follows you into future seasons, that raises the collateral the board asks of you ever after, and that makes the next fine bigger.
Contracts are how a careful farmhand earns steadily while gamblers ride the spot market, and they are where the best stories in the game come from.
Tap a tile to plant or water it. Sell from the shed by hand, at whatever quantity you choose. Hold a crop so Pip will not sell it, not even at the bell. Set the next planting yourself and Pip fills the leftovers.
Manual actions are applied before the farmhand acts each hour, so your intervention is an override, not a suggestion. There is a cap per hour: the human edge is a real edge, not a way to play the whole week by hand.
At hour 168 the week ends. Not inventory, not potential, not what you would have made if you had another day: coins. A field full of unsold melons at the bell is worth nothing, which is why the last day of a season is the loudest.
Then standings publish, ownership, doctrine and scars carry forward, and the fields, coins and market reset. Monday is a fresh field.
The Harvest Trial is the entrance exam: one announced week, farmed once, in a real town of a hundred farms sharing one market. Which town you land in is drawn by a secret the game commits to publicly before the week opens, so nobody, us included, chose your neighbours. After the seal the secret is published and anyone can recompute every assignment.
Where you place in your own town decides what a Farmhand costs you: the top tenth of each town mints free, everyone else who finished the week mints at half price, and anyone at all may mint at full price while supply lasts. You are never ranked against another town, because each town is its own market and coins earned in different markets do not compare. When the week ends the placements seal permanently. There is no second Harvest Trial, so when it is announced, that is the week to bring your best farmhand.
A Farmhand is not required to play, and it never helps you in a staked bracket. What it carries is an heirloom strain: one crop that ripens sooner for you, in free play only. A common takes an hour off; a legendary takes three and brings its quirk to life with it.