Thornfeld — Building a Ranch Simulator

Hey everyone!

I've been working on this project and I think it's time to share it with you guys. Thornfeld is a ranch simulator server inspired by games like Stardew Valley and Ranch Simulator.

It's a solo dev project and currently in pre-alpha. The core gameplay is all there, building, farming, raising animals, crafting. But there's still a lot to polish and add. That's exactly why I'm posting here: I need testers! If you enjoy sandbox/farming games and want to help shape this thing, come give it a try. Completely free.

It's a chill, relaxing game, no rushing, no grinding. Just you, your ranch, and your animals. Perfect for those of us who are getting a bit older and just want to unwind after a long day.

Latest News - Thornfeld (https://www.thornfeldgame.com)
If you find bugs, have suggestions, or just want to hang out, join the Discord.

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Smelt ores into bars at the forge, forge bars into nails, bake food at the oven. Raw materials come from mining, farming, and woodcutting.​

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Build your ranch from the ground up. Walls, doors, windows, fences, floors, stairs, roofs, furniture, and much more, everything is placed and built by you, plank by plank, nail by nail.​

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Plant your needs. Water them, wait for them to grow, and harvest.​

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Raise chickens, cows, sheep, pigs, and horses. Feed them, breed them, collect eggs, milk cows, shear sheep. Each animal has its own needs and products.​

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Animals are more than just livestock:

Each animal in Thornfeld has unique traits and purposes beyond just producing resources:

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Dogs — Guard dogs protect your ranch from fox raids.
Horses — Serve as mounts for faster travel and also be used in jousting tournaments.
Oxen — Heavy lifters. Use them as pack animals for gathering expeditions, carrying more resources back to your ranch.
Chickens — Collect eggs daily. But keep them safe, foxes love an unguarded coop.
Cows — Milk them regularly. Feed them well for better production.
Sheep — Shear their wool. A steady supply of materials for trading.
Pigs — Raise them for meat. Butcher when ready and sell or cook.

All animals need food and care. Neglect them, and they won't produce. Each one can also be bred, named, and even sold to other players.

Genetics & Breeding
Every animal in Thornfeld is born with DNA — a set of genetic attributes on a 1–10 scale that directly affect their value and performance:
When two animals breed, the offspring inherits DNA from its parents with a small variance of ±1. A mother chicken with 8 egg DNA might produce a chick with 7, 8, or 9. This means selective breeding matters, pair your best animals together over generations to push DNA toward 10.

Starting animals are weighted toward low DNA values. A perfect 10 has only a 0.6% chance of appearing naturally. Getting there takes patience and smart pairing.
There's also a 5% chance breeding produces a rare surprise, as a Black Sheep for example.

Horse offspring inherit their color from their parents, same-color parents always produce the same color. Mix two different colors and it's a coin flip.

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Cooking
Place ingredients into the oven slots and cook. The oven automatically detects what you can make. Cooked food sells for more than raw ingredients and keeps your character fed — remember, if you don't eat, you starve to death!
Some say there are secret recipes hidden in the oven... Try combining different ingredients and see what happens. No spoilers here, experiment and discover them yourself!

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Extra:

• NPCs create 5 orders per day in a order board, with some requests that the player can choose to complete or not in order to receive extra rewards.
• Explore and talk to NPCs to find quests that reward the player for crafting and exploring.
• The construction of your ranch is related to animal welfare; for example, well-maintained grass on the ground reduces their hunger.
• Animals get sick, get pregnant, and die of old age, all logged in your Petlist.
• Machinery for your ranch can maximize profits, such as a sheep wool processor or a distillery to produce feed bags.
• Cave/Mine system. You can dig beneath your ranch to increase its space and collect resources.
• You can build up to 7 floors high and one below.

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Final Considerations:
I'm an enthusiast of simulation games, especially those related to farming. I've always thought how cool it would be to have one of these on an OTserver, and I decided to create my own.
I was quite unsure whether I should post this on Server Gala or Discussion, but since I don't consider the game ready for production yet, I thought this was the right place.
The map is quite small, but enough for you to explore all the game's functions.
We'll have to improve this in the future, including the square layout of the ranches.
Currently we only have 50 of them, so if they're all occupied, unfortunately, you won't be able to test them until one becomes available, but I also don't think we'll hit that number of testers, at least not for now.

I have a long list of additions to make that should further improve the server experience; I add things every day.
Some of them:
Semen system: preserve and sell the semen of your animals to maintain the DNA and profit from it.
Rodeo: Lasso, bull riding, sheep racing, cockfighting.
Weather system: Rain, snow, summer, winter...
New buildings, today we have 4 types, the system is ready, just need new sprites and a materials list.
New breeds! Here I will need a spriter.
New species for farming.

Hosting: New York USA



I can't wait to start a discussion about the server. Am I the only weirdo who finds this style interesting?

P.S. my ranch is to the south, just past the bridge, stop by.

I love the idea, good luck!

One problem I've noticed in resource gathering/crafting games is that, at the end of the day, players end up finding a way to make more money from a particular resource, and everyone ends up migrating to that meta until a rebalancing occurs, and the cycle repeats.

Today I added a feature to the game that can help with this issue, and spread out what players produce, so everyone has fun doing what they enjoy most and can also profit.

Thornfeld's NPCs now use a supply and demand system for items that can be produced/collected by players.



It works like this:

Each NPC has a base stock for every item they trade. When players sell items to an NPC, the stock goes up and the price goes down. When players buy items, the stock goes down and the price goes up. The formula is simple: basePrice * (baseStock / currentStock).

But here's the key part — pricing is per unit, not flat rate. If you buy 50 planks, the first one costs 5gp, but by the 50th the price has already risen because each purchase reduced the stock by one. This completely kills the classic buy/sell cycle exploit where you buy cheap in bulk and sell back at a higher flat rate.

The spread between buy and sell prices (30% "Bailiff's tax" in our lore) means you always lose money on a round trip. Combined with per-unit pricing, there's zero arbitrage possible.

Stock naturally decays back toward the base level (10% per server save), so prices self-correct over time. If nobody sells eggs for a while, the price slowly rises back to normal, creating an incentive for someone to start selling again.

The result: if everyone farms eggs, egg prices crash and fishing becomes more profitable. Players naturally spread out across different activities instead of everyone grinding the same meta. And if you find an underserved niche, say nobody's been mining silver, you get rewarded with premium prices until the market corrects itself.

my wife wanted to play tibia with me, but also wanted to play some kind of farm game. This might be her new thing

Amazing, I see a lot of potential on this. Imagine every new player gains land, and you can raid each others land, create barracks, recruit soldiers etc... Like an old game I used to play called Tribalwars

Curb said:

lose

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Well, supply and demand market. Get it blockchained.

I've been working on a jousting minigame for Thornfeld! The arena is a bare test layout with no decorations or battle effects yet. But the core gameplay loop is fully functional, so here's how a match goes:




Getting started

Ride your horse to the Herald NPC at the arena. He'll check your horse and sign you up for a tier based on its Speed DNA. Faster horses unlock higher tiers with better prizes but tighter timing. Pay the entry fee and you're in.

The match (best of 3 rounds)

Each round takes about 10 seconds and has two key moments:

1. Pick your aim — before the charge, you choose: AIM HIGH, AIM LOW, or DEFEND. Your opponent picks too. This works like rock-paper-scissors: High beats Low, Low beats Defense, Defense beats High. You have about 4 seconds to decide.
2. Time your strike — both riders gallop toward each other automatically. A timing bar appears with a green zone in the middle. A marker sweeps across the bar and you hit STRIKE when it's on the green. Nail it = a perfect hit that unhorses your opponent.

If both riders land a perfect hit in the same round, the aim choice decides who falls. Miss the green zone and you might still get a partial hit, which beats a full miss if your opponent whiffs too. Same result = draw round (doesn't count, play again).

First to 2 round wins takes the match.

Your horse's Speed DNA decides which tier you can enter:


Higher tiers shrink the green zone on the timing bar, Champion is only about 3% of the bar. You really have to earn those perfect hits.

Breeding fast horses isn't just for show anymore. Speed DNA directly gates your access to higher tiers and bigger prizes. A well-bred champion horse is your ticket to the top payouts. Keep your horse fed and healthy too, the Herald won't let you enter on a hungry or sick animal.

This is the core system, lots of polish still ahead:

• Smoother gallop animations.
• Craftable lances (break on bad losses, wood and metal sink).
• Horse fatigue between matches (rotate your stable!).
• Training dummy at your ranch for free practice.
• PvP jousting and monthly tournaments.
• Jousting Points shop for cosmetic rewards.
• Client UI.

Breeding + jousting together create a whole new endgame loop around your horses. More updates soon!

Discord.

I've added a fully colorizable horse system in Thornfeld, where every horse can have unique coat colors that carry through breeding, mounting, and everything in between.



The horses now have 4 independently colorable regions:

• Mane & tail
• Body coat
• Face marking
• Hooves

Each region pulls from a curated palette of realistic horse tones.

When you buy a horse from Osric, there's an 85% chance it's born as a colorizable horse with random natural coat colors. The remaining 15% are legacy fixed-color variants (the old normal/brown/grey horses).

Breeding inheritance:

When two colorizable horses breed:

• Each of the 4 color regions independently picks from the mother OR the father (50/50 per channel).
• The only way to introduce a new color to your stable is by purchasing another horse and getting lucky with the random roll.
• Face markings are rare (10% chance per birth).

So if you have a dark-bodied mare with light mane and a cream stallion with dark hooves, the foal might get the mare's body color, the stallion's mane, the mare's hooves, and a completely uniform face. Every foal is a unique combination of its parents' traits.

This creates a natural breeding metagame: players who want a specific "look" need to selectively breed across generations, mixing and matching parents to isolate the colors they want. Combined with Speed DNA inheritance (which determines horse's speed and jousting tier access), horse breeding now has both functional AND cosmetic depth.

Discord

The Jousting Arena is Open!


How It Works
Mount one of your saddled horses and ride up to the Herald, the arena's announcer. He'll tell you which tier your horse qualifies for based on its Speed DNA, each horse fits exactly one bracket, from humble Bronze to the deadly Champion tier. The faster your steed, the harder the fight... but the bigger the prize.


Two Ways to Fight

Solo vs AI: Say the tier name (bronze/silver/gold/champion) to the Herald, pay the entry, and charge at a rival rider summoned from afar. Win two rounds out of three to claim the pot.

PvP Duel: Say challenge <playerName> to the Herald. Your rival sees a duel prompt the moment they talk to the Herald, they have 30 seconds to accept. Both pay entry, winner takes it all minus the bailiff's cut.
The Combat Loop
Every round plays out the same way:

1. Prep (Pick your aim): HIGH to the helmet, LOW to the torso, or DEFEND to guard yourself. The crowd counts down: 5... 4... 3... 2... 1... FIGHT!
2. The Charge: Both riders gallop toward the mid-arena. A timing bar appears, land your STRIKE as the marker crosses the center.
3. The Clash: The loser is thrown from their horse... which keeps galloping alone to the end of the lane.
4. Resolve: If both riders land a perfect hit, the aim decides: HIGH beats LOW, LOW beats DEFEND, DEFEND beats HIGH. Same aim = no fall.
5. The winner: Takes both entry fees minus a 10% bailiff tax. Every win gives +10 jousting points; every loss costs -10


The Arena is Never Empty


The bleachers always have someone watching. 22 spectators live in the arena 24/7. They chat between matches, then erupt into cheers or boos when real combat breaks out.

When a player inscribes, 14 townsfolk leave their shops and take the VIP seats: Bailiff Roderic on his throne, Marta from the tavern, Cedric the banker, Father Edmond, Captain Aldwin and the rest of Thornfeld's notable citizens all watching you ride and reacting accordingly.

And when the city goes quiet? Wandering riders take the arena for themselves, staging demo duels every few minutes. The crowd cheers for them too. The arena never sleeps.

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I think these minigames bring life and more purpose to animal breeding. I have several in mind and I'll add them little by little.

I also noticed that some people enter the test server and don't get past level 1; in 3 minutes you can already get your ranch, on the first quest, but I'd like to hear from you if the beginning is a little confusing, and if I need to make what needs to be done a little more logical.

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I've added Livestock Yard to the game.



Inspired by the Livestock from Red Dead Redemption 2, it's an open-air market in the center of Thornfield where you can bring your animals to sell.

It features a board where you can see all the animals displayed by other players, the specific DNA of each one, and which stall they are in.


To sell or buy animals at the fair, simply lead it on a halter and speak to the NPC Harlan; he will give you all the instructions.

Wow, haha that’s really adorable I love the idea keep it up!

This is so creative, one of the better use of TFS as an engine i've seen.
love it, will follow its progress for sure!

Irrigation System:

When your ranch starts to thrive and the farm gets bigger, watering all the plants multiple times a day can be tedious.

So I decided to add an irrigation system!

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How it works:

You build a cistern, basically a rain barrel, which can be filled using a bucket collecting water from your well, or by rain.

From the barrel, you build pipes through the fields, allowing the water from the barrel to flow throughout your ranch.

Near the crops you want to water, you build a water sprinkler; it will be responsible for watering all the plants around it.

PS: Yes, the pipes have to be interconnected, from the cistern to the sprinkler.

The rain, besides filling the cistern, also fills the animals' drinking trough and waters the plants!

Here's a video showing the system in action, and the wiki, both on the website and in-game, explains the system in detail.

This is insane, thanks so much, I feel like back in 2007 when OT community was about new creative ideas and we had OTs of various random themes, not only "global map" like todays. Looks really cool.

Today I shipped the biggest change to Thornfeld (thanks do @Tenzhiro that gave me this insight!), and instead of just dropping a wall of patch notes I figured I'd actually tell you what's going on, because the change is kind of fundamental.

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My biggest challenge since I started developing the game's concept has been its pacing.

After all, it's a tightrope walk between balance and boredom.

My foundation has always been Stardew Valley and Ranch Simulator, but the problem is that those games are single-player, and when you logout, the game simply stops. Unlike an MMO.

If the pace was as fast as Stardew/Ranch, players would logout and come back the next day to find their pet starved or their crops dead. That's not fun.

At the same time, nobody wants to spend 12 hours playing a game waiting for wheat to grow or a horse to get pregnant.

So I changed it. Your ranch only ages while you're online now.

That's the headline. When you log out, time freezes for your land. Animals don't get hungry. Crops don't grow, but they also don't die. Your pregnant cow stays pregnant. Your stump doesn't regrow. When you come back, the clock picks up exactly where you left it.

Active engagement is rewarded, the more you play, the more progresses on your ranch, but the game waits for you.

The exception is the world. Rain still falls when you're offline (and yes, it still tops up your cisterns and water your crops).

The Order Board still refreshes daily. The Livestock Yard still ticks for everyone. The wild map still respawns. Those are shared with the rest of the server, so they have to keep moving.

While I was at it I redid the pacing of basically every timer in the game. 1 hour of play = 1 in-game day is the new rhythm.

Pregnancy is 1 day. Sickness kills in 3 days. Animals reach adult age in 1 day. Wheat grows in 1 day. A whole tree from seed to fruit in 1 day.

The plant system in particular got a serious quality-of-life pass. One watering carries a plant from seed all the way to mature. No more remembering to water at every stage. Plant, water, walk away, come back when it's done.

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I hope the game becomes more fun. Now you can, for example, spend an hour in a jousting session, or collecting resources with your bull, and once you return to the ranch, there is a completed cycle to work on!

I think the next step will be a clearer and more immersive tutorial/tasks for the first contact with the game, because some people create accounts and don't even get to start building the ranch. We'll see.

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I think the next step will be a clearer and more immersive tutorial/tasks for the first contact with the game, because some people create accounts and don't even get to start building the ranch. We'll see.

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The biggest complaint from players on Discord who have tested Thornfeld so far has been the steep learning curve when starting their ranch.

With that in mind, and keeping the game’s core goal in focus, which is to have fun managing your ranch and exploring Thornfeld’s activities, I’ve introduced a new starting quest.

This quest is fully integrated into the lore and takes place on Greta Holloway’s farm.

You’ll help Greta with various tasks around her ranch and leave with a starter toolkit, some money to kickstart your own ranch, and the knowledge you need to get going.

It turned out really fun to play the tasks, and I’m confident it will help hook new players early on.

Just shipped a really cool update to ranching. Chickens now work the exact same way as the horse color system with a new Rooster sprite!

When you buy a Chicken from Wick now, it rolls a random sex: female stays a hen (the egg-laying one you already know), male becomes a rooster (used for breeding, doesn't lay eggs, rooster fight arena is on its way!).

And I added 5 rooster breeds: the Rooster is the common one, with 4 color masks that roll random at birth, so every Rooster has a unique color combo.

The other 4 (Gallus, Australorp Black, Rhode, and White Crested) are rare "legacy" breeds (15% chance at birth) with fixed classic sprites.

Hens also got a mask now, but just one, the body. So every hen has a unique feather color too.

The coolest part is the breeding: no baby is ever born with random colors.

Every channel always traces back to a parent. Hen × Rooster: daughter inherits body 50/50 mother or father; male baby is a Rooster with comb/legs/beak 100% from father and body 50/50.

If you want to keep a pure Rhode lineage going, just don't cross them. And to bring new male colors into your flock, buy a fresh chicken from Wick.



Special thanks to @hugvopixelart, the genius behind the Rooster sprites.

Broooo! you are killing it man. i am a fan of Thornfeld. 100%. your creativity. your passion. drive. consistency! i can tell it’s gna be an awesome/fun server to play.

I have two years experience as a pig farmer and would be happy to offer advice

I like the idea very much, reminds me of Stardew Valley, keep it up!