What's new

Losing your connection no longer ends your game

Drop off the wifi for a moment and the whole farm used to disappear: every animal gone, the leaderboard blank, your own animal with them, and no way back into the life you were having. Now the game hangs on while it finds its way back, and the farm keeps your animal standing there waiting for you. Get back quickly enough and you carry on with the same size, score and hat. You are still edible while you are away, which is only fair.

Effects, and a picker you can actually see

A fourth thing to wear: trails, clouds of sparks, and a glow on the ground under you, alone or all at once. They are the only cosmetics you can make out from right across the field. The picker got fewer, bigger tiles at the same time, because on a phone everything in it was too small to tell apart.

Thirty-four hats, and skins that stay put

Two different jokes: some of them are hats, and some of them are a corn plant strapped to your head. Every one is placed for the animal wearing it, because the top of a duck and the top of a bunny are nowhere near each other.

Skins are proper coats of paint now rather than a tint, so gold looks like gold, and the pattern stays on the animal instead of the animal sliding about underneath it. And a hat falls off when its wearer dies, and gets kicked around the field afterwards.

The animals have voices

All twenty-two of them chatter as they walk, grunt when they swing, say oof when they are hit and have something to say on the way out. Size changes the voice, so a giant cow moos lower than a fresh one, and neither of them sounds like the sheep.

The same week: rain that falls through the world instead of down the screen, birds that land on the fence, grasshoppers that scatter when something the size of a cow turns up, puddles that catch the sky, and crops that lean away from whatever walks through them.

Also, the UFO finally explains itself. It always did all of that; it just never told anybody.

Music, and eighteen animals to unlock

A farm tune under everything and a dance track from the floor, written to hand into each other so nothing ever starts off the beat. You hear a party through the field before you get to it: muffled and distant from across the farm, loud and clear when you are on the floor.

Four animals are free and eighteen cost coins, in three tiers, or you can borrow one for ten minutes after an advert. The bots wear the roster too, so a locked animal is something you keep bumping into rather than a wall.

Dance parties start from a button

They used to happen because two of a kind wandered near each other. Now they happen because two animals asked: tap to call, tap inside somebody's ring to answer, hold to boogie. Anyone can dance with anyone, so which animal you are is purely a matter of taste.

Half the wait, and a farm that remembers you

The game got about half as heavy, and most of what was left now arrives quietly behind the start screen, so you are looking at the farm far sooner than you used to be. A third of the old download turned out to be the sky.

Coins, cosmetics, records and daily chores moved off your browser and onto the farm, so they follow you instead of living on one device. Link an email in Settings and they follow you to another one. Barn Records arrived with them.

No more lobby

Loading the page puts you straight into the busiest farm with room in it. No arena to pick, no link to paste. If the farm is asleep it wakes up while the game is still loading.

The pop, the feed, and daily chores

At full size, meat fills a meter instead of growing you, and filling that meter bursts you: you round off into a balloon, strain, hold still, and go. Dashing lets it out again.

Plus a running feed of who ate whom, a red mark on whoever got you last, three chores a day, four emotes, your personal bests on the screen after you die, and sound for all of it.

Playable on the internet

The game went online: real farms, real other people. The farm goes to sleep when nobody is on it and wakes when somebody arrives, which is the only reason the first player of the day waits a few seconds at the gate.