The Farmer Was Replaced, Timon Herzog's programming game about a farm you never touch with your own hands, is out now on iOS and Android. The mobile version launched on November 2, the same day as the game's first DLC, The Miner Was Replaced, and that expansion comes bundled in the phone and tablet release from day one. The port was handled by Swiss studio Ateo, with Metaroot publishing alongside Herzog.
What the game actually is
The premise is simple to explain and much harder to master. You control a small farming drone, but only through code. You write short programs in a language that looks and behaves a lot like Python, press execute, and watch the drone till soil, plant seeds, water crops and harvest them exactly as your script tells it to. If the script is wrong, the drone does the wrong thing, faithfully and repeatedly.
There are no levels. Instead the game runs on continuous progression: harvested resources buy unlocks, unlocks give you new crops and new commands, and each new crop is really a new programming problem. Pumpkins can be merged into one giant pumpkin if you plant and harvest them in the right pattern. Cacti need to be sorted. Sunflowers have to be measured to find the best one. Later you feed a dinosaur and send the drone through a hedge maze in search of treasure, which is a pathfinding exercise wearing a gardening costume.
Language features arrive one at a time in the same way. Loops, variables, functions and lists are introduced as you unlock them, so a complete beginner gets a gentle ramp while an experienced programmer can blast through the early stages and move on to the harder optimisation puzzles.
Coding on a touchscreen
The obvious question with a mobile port of this kind of game is how anyone is supposed to write code on a phone. Ateo's answer is a custom keyboard built specifically for it. Every symbol the language needs sits on a single screen, so there is no hunting through symbol pages for a colon or a bracket. Brackets and quotes are inserted in pairs, and dragging a finger across any key moves the text cursor, which tackles the single most annoying part of editing code on glass. Holding Shift while swiping selects text, and undo, redo, comment and paste get a dedicated row of their own.
The keyboard comes in QWERTY, QWERTZ and AZERTY layouts, with optional key clicks or vibration feedback. Anyone who would rather type on real keys can connect a Bluetooth keyboard and mouse instead, which turns an iPad in particular into a fairly comfortable way to play. The game runs in portrait or landscape on both iPhone and iPad, needs iOS 15 or later on Apple devices, and supports 14 languages.
Everything from PC, including the new mines
The developers describe the mobile release as everything from the PC version rebuilt for phones and tablets, and the feature list backs that up. Megafarm, the late-game system that lets you run several drones in parallel, is here, as is the simulation mode that lets you test a script quickly and reproducibly before you unleash it on your real farm. Achievements are in too, and so are hats for the drone.
The bundled Miner Was Replaced expansion takes the drone underground and adds a whole new branch to the unlock tree. It introduces eight new resources, including coal, quartz, mushrooms and dynamite, along with a fresh set of challenges: digging up ancient ruins without damaging them, sorting colourful mushrooms, growing rice on clay, and a Minesweeper-inspired puzzle in which a bad guess ends with a blown-up drone. On PC the expansion is a separate purchase; on mobile it is simply part of the game.
Price: free to try, one purchase to keep
The Farmer Was Replaced is a free download on the App Store and Google Play, but it is not free to play in the usual mobile sense. You get a trial, and once it ends the full game has to be unlocked with a single one-time purchase. On the US App Store that unlock is listed at $8.99. The developers are explicit that there are no ads and no subscriptions, which makes it a premium game with a built-in demo rather than a free-to-play one.
For comparison, the PC version sells for $9.99 on Steam,, with the mining expansion sold separately as DLC.
Who it is for
The Farmer Was Replaced sits in the same space as other automation and programming puzzlers, but it is unusually approachable. It uses a real, general-purpose style of language rather than a set of visual blocks, so what you learn transfers to actual Python, and the steady drip of new crops keeps giving you a reason to write a better script than the one you had before. A phone is not the obvious home for that, but between the dedicated keyboard and Bluetooth support, the mobile version has clearly been built to make the idea work rather than simply squeezed onto a smaller screen.
The Farmer Was Replaced is available now on iOS and Android, with The Miner Was Replaced included, and remains available on PC via Steam.
