The Farmer Was Replaced APK (FULL GAME)

The Farmer Was Replaced hands your whole farm to a small drone that only moves when your code tells it to. New coders who stall after their first harvest loop get a clear path here, from hay rows to hedge mazes. One loop that sweeps every tile beats hand-picked moves early on, and that single loop funds most of the first unlocks.

How to Play The Farmer Was Replaced on Your Phone

You play The Farmer Was Replaced by writing short programs in a Python-like language, pressing execute, and watching a drone till, plant, water and harvest a grid farm. Each harvest earns resources that buy new commands and crops, so the farm grows only as fast as your code improves.

Timon Herzog built the game on his own, and the Zurich publisher Metaroot released it. It began on Steam, and it has now sold over a million copies. The phone release keeps the same structure, with no level select at all.

Instead, you chase the next unlock. Fans of Human Resource Machine will recognize the idea of solving problems with code. However, this mobile coding game never stops paying you for better scripts, and that reward loop keeps you writing.

How the Drone Turns Your Code Into Harvests

Every drone action is a function call. move(North) shifts the drone one tile, till() turns grass into soil, and harvest() collects whatever is ripe. You wrap those calls in loops so the drone works the field without you.

The farm also wraps at its edges. Move East off the last column and the drone lands back on the first one. That small detail lets a short nested loop cover every tile, and in my runs a six-line script ran for an hour without a single mistake.

Why a Drone Replaced the Farmer

The premise is a dry joke about drone automation. A farmer hands the job to a machine, and you become the programmer who makes that machine good at it. There is no story campaign, only the steady pull of a bigger and faster farm.

The tone stays calm the whole time. Soft music, tidy crop rows and a drone that does a flip when you call do_a_flip() keep the mood light. Even the piggy you can pet feels like a small reward for patience.

How It Compares to Human Resource Machine and 7 Billion Humans

Human Resource Machine and 7 Billion Humans are the closest mobile rivals, and Tomorrow Corporation made both. They use drag-and-drop commands and fixed puzzle levels. By contrast, this farm sim asks you to type real code with variables, functions and lists.

7 Billion Humans runs one program across many workers, which feels like an early taste of parallel drones. Its puzzles end once solved, though. Here, a working script keeps earning, so polishing old code always pays.

The Farmer Was Replaced Android vs PC Version

The PC version launched on Steam first and lists at $9.99. On phones, a free trial leads to a one-time $8.99 unlock with no ads and no subscriptions. That mobile purchase also bundles the full underground expansion.

Controls are the real difference between the two. A mouse and a full keyboard make long scripts faster on PC. However, the custom touch keyboard closes most of that gap, and a paired physical keyboard closes the rest.

Drone Mechanics: Till, Plant, Water and Harvest

Tilling, planting, watering and harvesting are the four drone actions that turn an empty grid into income. Grass grows on untouched ground and gives hay. Soil made with till() accepts carrots, pumpkins and the other seeded crops.

Bushes give wood. Trees give more wood, but they grow slowly when packed side by side, so a checkerboard of trees and bushes makes a strong first layout. That pattern also teaches you to think in coordinates early.

Growth speed is the hidden lever in this coding farm. Water and fertilizer both speed crops up, and the game even sets a goal of watering the entire farm above a water level of 0.5. Then the drone’s job becomes reading each tile before it acts.

Sweeping the Grid With Nested Loops

A for loop over get_world_size() moves the drone up one column. A second loop then shifts it across to the next column. Because the grid wraps, the same two-level loop works at every farm size, so you write it once and reuse it.

This nested pattern also makes your code easy to change. Swap harvest() for till() inside the loop and the same path prepares soil instead. My early farm ran on three versions of this one pattern for hours.

Soil, Water and Fertilizer Boosts

Carrots refuse to grow on grass, so till() always comes first. Watering raises a tile’s water level, and higher water means faster growth. Fertilizer pushes a plant forward too, but it also infects that plant.

Infection is not purely bad. Harvesting infected plants produces Weird Substance, the item the maze needs later, and you can cure an infected plant when you want a clean tile back. Treat fertilizer as a tool with a purpose, not a default step on every tile.

Reading Crops With can_harvest() and measure()

can_harvest() returns true only when a crop is ripe. Put it before every harvest() call and the drone stops wasting moves on green plants. That one check roughly doubled my early hay rate, since about half the tiles were never ready on the first pass.

measure() reads a number from the tile under the drone. For sunflowers it gives the petal count, and for cacti it gives the size. In a maze it points toward the treasure, which makes it the most useful sensor in the game.

How the Code Keyboard Works on Touch Screens

The code keyboard in the mobile version puts every symbol a Python-like script needs on one screen, pairs brackets and quotes automatically, and lets you swipe on any key to move the cursor. Holding Shift while you swipe selects text, so editing a loop takes a few gestures.

Typing code on glass is the biggest worry for any phone coder. The mobile release answers it with a dedicated row for undo, redo, comment and paste. Those four keys handle most of the editing you do in a session.

You can also pick QWERTY, QWERTZ or AZERTY, with key clicks or vibration. That choice matters more than it sounds during an hour of editing. Key clicks help most on cheap screens where taps are hard to feel.

Paired Brackets and the Swipe Cursor

Every opening bracket or quote drops its partner right away. As a result, unbalanced brackets almost never happen, and those are the most common syntax error on a phone. You type inside the pair and keep going.

The swipe cursor replaces the fiddly tap-and-hold of a normal phone keyboard. Swipe left on any key and the cursor steps back through your line. Hold Shift during the swipe and you select a block to cut, paste or comment out.

Using a Bluetooth Keyboard and Mouse

Longer scripts, like a full maze solver, go faster with real keys. The game supports a Bluetooth keyboard and mouse, so a tablet on a stand becomes a small coding desk.

I still use the touch keys for quick fixes on the bus. For anything longer than thirty lines, though, the physical keyboard wins easily. Pairing takes a minute, and the game picks the keyboard up without extra settings.

Portrait or Landscape on Phones and Tablets

The interface works in portrait or landscape on both phones and tablets. Portrait gives you a taller code window. Landscape shows more of the farm while your script runs.

Several code windows can sit open at once, and the game even rewards having 20 open together. Realistically, three or four windows, one per crop, keep a phone screen readable. On a tablet, landscape with two windows feels close to a desktop editor.

How to Unlock Pumpkins, Sunflowers and Cacti

You unlock pumpkins, sunflowers and cacti by spending farmed resources in the Unlocks menu, and each crop opens once your economy can afford it. Every one of these crops adds a fresh coding puzzle, such as merging tiles, finding a maximum value, or sorting a grid.

Costs climb with each new crop. So a stable carrot loop matters long before pumpkins appear, and a weak one slows every unlock after it.

These three crops also feed later systems in this drone farming game. Sunflower Power speeds up the drone, while pumpkins and cacti become big income sources once your code handles them well. Each one rewards a different way of thinking about the same grid.

Merging Pumpkins Into a Giant Pumpkin

Pumpkins planted in a solid square merge into one giant pumpkin when every tile is fully grown. Some pumpkins die before they ripen, though. Your script must scan the square, find the gaps and replant them before the merge can happen.

Bigger squares pay out far more than single pumpkins do. The largest possible one is 32 by 32, and harvesting it earns its own achievement. Start with a small square and grow it as your farm expands.

Picking the Best Sunflower for Power

Each sunflower carries a petal count, up to 15, which measure() reads. Harvesting the sunflower with the most petals in the field pays a large Power bonus. Harvest a smaller one first and that bonus disappears.

Power makes the drone act faster while you hold it, and it drains as you work. For that reason, a good sunflower loop runs quietly in the background of every serious farm. I keep one column of sunflowers going at all times.

Cactus Sorting With the Swap Command

Cacti grow in random sizes, and measure() reports each one. The swap() command trades a cactus with its neighbor, so you can sort the field the same way you sort a list.

A fully sorted field harvests as a group and pays far more than single cacti. Simple bubble sort works, although a row pass followed by a column pass saves many moves. One achievement even rewards sorting a full field the wrong way round.

How to Unlock the Hedge Maze and the Dinosaur

You reach the hedge maze by growing a bush and using Weird Substance on it, which turns the bush into a maze with treasure inside. The dinosaur comes later through an unlock and a special hat that turns the drone into a growing snake chasing apples.

Both systems feel different from crop farming. Instead of growth timers, you write search and pathing logic. That shift is where many players first feel the game turn into real programming.

The maze pays out Gold, and the snake pays out bones. Both resources feed the late part of the unlock tree, so neither one is optional for a full farm.

Growing a Hedge Maze From a Bush

Plant a bush, then use Weird Substance on it. Using more substance creates a bigger maze, all the way up to one that fills the whole farm.

Harvesting anywhere other than the treasure ends the maze with nothing. So check get_entity_type() before you call harvest(), every single time. That rule cost me a stack of substance before it stuck.

Following the Wall to the Treasure

Mazes contain no circular paths, so keeping one hand on the wall always reaches the goal. A left-wall follower takes roughly fifteen lines of code and solves a maze of any size.

A faster route uses the position measure() returns to head straight for the goal instead of hugging walls. You can also reuse a solved maze instead of growing a new one. The game rewards reusing the same maze 300 times, a clear hint that reuse is the efficient route.

Feeding the Dinosaur for Bones

With the dinosaur hat on, the drone drags a tail that grows each time it eats an apple. The tail blocks your own path, so a careless route traps the drone.

Bones scale with tail length, so a safe zigzag path that covers the farm beats chasing apples directly. Filling the entire farm with one dinosaur is the long-term goal, and it earns an achievement of its own.

How The Miner Was Replaced Adds Eight New Resources

The Miner Was Replaced is an expansion that sends your drone underground and adds eight new resources, including coal, quartz, mushrooms and dynamite. On mobile it comes included with the full unlock, and it adds a new branch of the tech tree with its own puzzles.

The expansion keeps the same language and commands. However, its puzzles lean on careful digging rather than fast harvesting.

Ancient ruins, mushroom sorting, clay fields and a Minesweeper grid all live underground. Each one punishes careless code harder than anything on the surface, and that makes the expansion the toughest stretch in the mobile version.

Coal, Quartz, Mushrooms and Dynamite

The store listing names coal, quartz, mushrooms and dynamite among the eight underground resources. Mushrooms need sorting, much like cactus sorting on the surface, so your swap logic carries straight over.

Dynamite matters most in the Minesweeper field, where one bad step can blow up the drone. Plan each route before you trigger anything. Underground, a cautious script almost always beats a fast one.

Digging Up Ancient Ruins Without Damage

Ruins sit hidden under the ground, and the goal is to dig them up without breaking any piece. That means slow, deliberate digging around their edges rather than blind sweeps.

This puzzle rewards reading a tile before acting, the same habit the maze builds. A sweep loop copied from your surface farm will smash ruins, so write a fresh routine for it.

Rice on Clay and the Minesweeper Field

Rice only grows on clay, which adds a terrain check to your planting code. Then the mine field asks the drone to reveal safe tiles from number clues.

Minesweeper logic translates well into code because each rule is exact. Once a tile shows zero, every neighbor is safe. A simple flood fill can then clear whole regions in seconds.

How Progression, Unlocks and Achievements Work

Progression in the game runs on one continuous tree: you farm resources, spend them on upgrades, and each upgrade adds crops, commands or speed. There are no levels to clear, so your farm simply grows larger and faster until you own everything on the tree.

Programming ideas arrive one at a time. Loops, variables, functions and lists each show up as unlocks, right when your farm needs them.

The final reward, an achievement called What Now?, pops when you buy the last upgrade. Most players keep going afterward to chase speed records, and the timed goals give that chase a target.

The Unlock Tree That Replaces Levels

Each node in the unlock tree has a price in hay, wood, carrots or rarer items. Costs climb steadily, so the next purchase always nudges you to improve an older script.

That design makes refactoring the real progression. Your code gets shorter and smarter as the tree opens. Meanwhile, the farm grows with it, which keeps old scripts from feeling finished for long.

Expanding the Farm and Speeding Up the Drone

Expand upgrades raise the world size, from a tiny starting plot up to the maximum farm size. Each step adds tiles to every sweep, which is why hardcoded positions break so quickly.

Speed upgrades cut the time of every drone action. Combined with sunflower boosts, they make late scripts run many times faster than your first ones. Buy them early, because every later crop benefits.

Achievements, Timed Challenges and Hats

Achievements range from planting your first bush to farming 1 billion hay. Timed challenges push further, such as farming 200 million hay inside a single minute.

Some goals are pure jokes, like causing a stack overflow. Hats are cosmetic, and equipping five different hats on five drones counts as a goal too. I chased that one far longer than I would like to admit.

Megafarm and Simulation Tactics Most Players Skip

Megafarm is the late unlock that lets several drones run code in parallel, each one started with spawn_drone(). The game caps the fleet at 32 drones at once, which turns a single script into a team effort.

Simulation sits right beside it as a testing tool. It runs your code fast and gives the same result every time, so you can compare two versions of a script without spending resources.

Few beginner write-ups spend time on either feature. Yet both decide how fast a finished farm really runs. They also expose the common code mistakes that quietly stall a farm for hours.

Running Up to 32 Drones in Parallel

spawn_drone() takes a function and starts a new drone running it. A clean split gives each drone its own column, so no two drones fight over a tile.

Shared space is the usual trap. If two drones reach the same tile, one of them wastes its move. Build a small wrapper function per column instead of letting drones roam freely.

Testing Scripts With Simulation First

Simulation runs a script at high speed from set starting conditions. Because the result repeats exactly, you can time two maze solvers and keep the faster one.

I run it before every big rewrite. A bad change on the live farm can burn minutes of resources, while a failed test costs nothing at all.

Common Code Mistakes That Stall a Farm

An infinite loop is the classic stall, and the game even hands out an achievement for creating one. Always give a while loop a way out, such as a resource target.

Hardcoded coordinates are the second trap. They break the moment the world size grows, so build every loop around get_world_size() instead. Import cycles between code windows cause errors too, and the game flags those with an achievement as well.

Best The Farmer Was Replaced Tips and Tricks for Beginners

Early efficiency in this drone farm comes from three habits: one reusable sweep, unlocks bought in the order your economy needs, and a safety check before every harvest. None of them need advanced code.

They do need patience before you press execute. A rushed script that runs for ten minutes in the wrong pattern costs more than ten minutes of careful writing. Good drone automation starts in a comment line, not in the code itself.

My slowest early hour came from skipping all three habits at once. After fixing them, my hay and wood income climbed fast enough to fund pumpkins and a bigger world size in a single sitting.

Write One Field Sweep and Reuse It for Every Crop

Put your nested loop inside a function that takes an action as a parameter. Passing a function as an argument even earns an achievement, and it saves rewriting the sweep for each crop.

Then a planting pass, a watering pass and a harvest pass all share one tested path. Bugs drop sharply once the movement code lives in a single place.

Buy Unlocks That Feed the Next Crop

Spend on speed and world size before side upgrades. More tiles and faster actions multiply every resource at once.

Check what the next crop costs before you spend, too. Pumpkins need carrots, for example, so a weak carrot loop slows everything that comes after it.

Never Harvest the Wrong Maze Tile

The hedge maze punishes a careless harvest() harder than any crop, because it takes your spent Weird Substance with it. Keep a small reserve of substance so one mistake never stalls your Gold income.

Wrap every maze harvest in an entity check, and test the solver before running it live. That two-step habit saved me a full afternoon of rebuilding mazes.

Frequently Asked Questions About The Farmer Was Replaced

Is The Farmer Was Replaced Available on Mobile?

Yes. The Farmer Was Replaced is on both Google Play and the Apple App Store, alongside the original PC release on Steam. The phone version supports 14 languages, and the free trial lets you test the code keyboard and your first loops before you decide on the one-time unlock.

How Long Does It Take to Beat?

A first full run takes roughly 15 hours for a player with no coding background, based on community reports. Experienced programmers finish faster. Once your scripts are finished, a fresh save can reach the end in under an hour of game time, which turns replays and timed achievements into a speed challenge.

Does the Game Still Get Updates?

Yes. It received more than 20 updates during its Early Access run on PC before the full release. The mobile launch also arrived with a free base-game update that added reworked docs with interactive code examples, smarter autocomplete and new music, so it keeps improving after purchase.

Who Should Buy the Full Unlock on Mobile

The game suits two players best: curious beginners who want to write real Python-like code, and programmers who enjoy squeezing speed out of a script. Casual farm fans who just want to tap crops should skip it, since every harvest runs through code. Try the free trial, write one full field sweep, and buy the unlock if that first loop makes you grin.

After many evenings of tuning mazes and giant pumpkin squares on my phone, I still open it just to watch the drone automation work. The Farmer Was Replaced Android release is the best coding game I have played on a touchscreen.