Your favorite farming/townie sims, and what makes them unique?

I just started back up one that I rarely see talked about: Ever Oasis. Does it do everything perfect? No, but it's a cute little handheld game where I get to help an adorable water spirit save adorable seedlings and owl people. There's characters to befriend and take on quests too! It offers a lot, but cause it was on the 3ds I don't think too many people have played it.

Outside of that, Harvest Moon: A Wonderful Life is my nostalgia favorite so I am hopeful about the remake.

I just finished Sakuna: of Rice and Ruin.

Its one of the best farming games I've ever played, but it's also like... a real ass simulation game. You don't get to grow whatever you want, you will grow rice and you'll either like it or leave. Kept your paddy's water level too high? Mold. Didn't get rid of pests? Disease. Didn't keep enough water in on a hot day? Uh oh, water evaporated and now your rice is under watered. If the waters too cold it won't absorb nutrients right.

It's also 50 percent a action rpg platformer, but don't think you can get around doing the bare minimum in the farming just to play it: your stats are directly reliant on how good you rice farm. No level grinding through combat.

I really enjoyed it but I'm still not sure who the target demographic for this game was. How big is the overlap between "traditional rice farmers" and "action rpg enjoyers"? At any rate, I high key reccomend it if you think you could be interested in rice farming whatsoever, because the story is great too.

I'm a fan of the Rune Factory series. It's basically Harvest moon married to a traditional fantasy RPG. I don't enjoy RPGs enough to play many of them these days, but there's something about adding the two together that makes it extra special.

And the character designs, both in visuals and in personalities, are extremely anime. Rune Factory 3 kicks it up a notch, making characters tropey to the point of insanity. I can see some thinking that's a bad thing... but it's what I like.

Rune Factory 4 has an extremely long story, to the point it's kind of ridiculous. But because the base game is fun, I just keep returning to it and chipping away at it between periods playing other games.

I loved John Deere American Farmer back in the day. Unfortunately it doesn't work on modern machines. The menus don't display right. If it wasn't for that, it would be half-playable. The deluxe version might not have that problem, but I never got around to trying it.

One funny quirk was that family members would gain happiness from certain items (housing, bbq, pools, etc) and lose it from working. If happiness dropped too far for two long, you'd get an event about them leaving to join the French Foreign Legion or some other nonsense (there were a handful of variants.) The thing is, though, the happiness gained from these material possessions would degrade over time, meaning that it quickly evolved into a materialism simulator as you built pools to replace the pools that no longer where providing happiness.

You could also just hire people. That was usually the way to go if you wanted to get any serious work done. As long as you could pay wages, the hired help would stick around.

I haven't finished it yet but i absolutely love Harvestella. It's barely a farming sim, more like a Final Fantasy game with farming elements inside it, but I really really enjoyed it.

My favorite of all time is Rune Factory 4. God the amount of time I spent on that game is obscene lmao. I dunno what really makes it unique that I love it so much, maybe the bigger focus on dungeon crawling to go with the farming, but yeah, huge huge fan. Also Forte was so cute.

I didn't like RF5 nearly as much, but I bought it twice (Switch and PC) because it's a miracle it even came out and I wanted to support that. For those who don't know, Neverland Co., the company that developed Rune Factory (and Lufia!) went bankrupt after Rune Factory 4. But then Marvelous hired most of the people on that team, which led to Rune Factory 4 Special, then Rune Factory 5, and now Rune Factory 6 and a spin-off that just got announced! Those sorts of comeback stories make me very happy. I'm really hoping these next two games allow them to refine their 3D engine.

I have been playing graveyard keeper .

Ill warn you up front, this is not a game that is respectful of your time. It takes forever to build wealth or to walk anywhere, but I find it very zen none the less. It's much more focused in resources than stardewvalley which to me feels like it overemphasizes money. Every single quest in graveyard keeper feels like the community center quests in stardew, it's more about collecting rare or expensive resources than pure money making.

The game in general puts a high time cost on everything and most things are only available on some days so a lot of the game is planning out the most time efficient way to use each day so you soend the least amount if time blocked.

Also omg my inventory is always really full, even most of my chests are often close to full.

I havent tried the dlcs yet, the game itself feels huge already, but they look like they add a lot of content.

I finished Summer in Mara a while ago. I really enjoyed it. It has farming, fishing, and exploration. The story is cute for what it is. You travel by boat, compete quests (a lot of them are fetch quests though), and take care of your home island.

It does have basic crafting and the farming system is fairly simple.

It's not a very long game but was fun.