August 4th, 2024. Farm Merge.

How did this happen to me?

So my college friend group started playing a game on discord called Farm Merge Valley, which was apparently made in 2022 by Zynga, a famous developer of these sorts of addictive free to play mobile-style games, like Farmville, Words with Friends, and Zynga Poker.

And you can kinda feel the lack of effort put into Farm Merge Valley. The art is generic and kind of ugly, there is only one track and it's repetitive, and I don't think there's any actual animation in the game.

But there's a bunch of devious elements that make me want to keep logging on and playing, even though I haven't spent a penny. My soul feels like something is being lost with every couple minutes I spend on this game. So I might as well do something slightly productive and talk about the elements that make the game what it is.

1. You need to make ingredients. To do this, you use a supply box, which will drop an item into the world. If you drop 3 of the same item, and drag them into each other, they will merge into the next tier of the item. So, if you get 3 tier 1 wheats, you get a tier 2 wheat. If you get 3 tier 2 wheats, you'll create a tier 3 wheat. And if you combine 3 tier 3 wheats, you get a wheat plot, which will generate some wheat ingredients right away, and after an hour. Once you harvest it the second time, the wheat plot disappears, refunding you a few tier 1 wheats.
2. So you don't really make anything permanent. You need to keep merging to keep getting ingredients. If you don't merge, your farm will not produce anything. And you need to merge quite a bit. You'll need a total of 81 tier 1 wheats to create a wheat plot that actually gives you ingredients.
3. You only have limited space to work with. So you might have a couple tier 3s lying around that can't be merged yet, waiting for a third tier 3 to be created.
4. But there are two wrenches in the plan that make things really, really, really complicated:
   1. The 5 merge bonus. If you merge 3 items, you get 1 of the next tier. But, if you merge 5 items, you get 2 of the next tier, which is more efficient. This comes at the cost of space though, as you need to keep 4 items lying around waiting for a 5th item.
   2. There are a ton of items. On my farm already, I have: wheat, chicken, carrots, cows, goats, soy beans, wood, stone, coins, and keys. ALL of these items can be merged, with the 5 merge bonus applicable. The result is that I have a farm full of tier 2 or tier 3 items lying around, waiting for me to have enough for a 5 merge bonus.

The result is that this game is like a giant game of inventory management. I'll have a ton of cows waiting around, just waiting for the moment that I can combine everything and free up a ton of room, which is extremely cathartic. Materials like wood, stone, and coins are especially bad because they can be combined up to much higher tiers, like coins have a whopping 7 tiers. This means, to get a maxed out coin, you would need to merge 2187 small copper coins. But, if you utilize 5 merge bonuses, you'll save yourself a ton of coins. Even if you just 5 merged the final step, and none of the others, you'd be turning 3645 coins of value into 4374 coins of value, so about 700 coins.

Now, I don't need to actually do all this math in the game. All I know is I have 4 golden star coins lying around, and if I can just manage to get one more, I can 5 merge bonus for a ton of value. I just need to wait... and build up my coins... and keep merging...

Farm Merge Valley also utilizes many of the usual mobile game tricks. Supply boxes, energy, ingredient producers, ingredient consumers, and chopping down trees and rocks for more space all run on timers, ranging from a few minutes to an hour.

But the really, really, really fucked up thing so far is that the timers are so, so, so damn short. You can log on, spend 10 minutes merging and managing your space, and come back in 20 minutes to have all your stuff completed. It makes it so that I don't really want to spend money so far, because I'd be spending money on like, 30 minutes of my time, but it does make me want to log in frequently.

What a game. Kudos to Zynga, I guess?