Family Farm

Family Farm is Century Games' original farming simulation, and it is still running. You plant and harvest crops, feed and raise animals, run machines that turn both into finished products, fill orders and missions, and arrange a farm that is as much a place to decorate as a system to optimise. Century Games describes it as one of the world's most popular free Facebook games and puts its audience at more than 50 million users.

The studio's own figures for the farm are 100+ animals, 100+ crops and 300+ craftable products, and the cast it puts on the front of the game is Tasha, Mom, Felicia, Darryl and a small menagerie of birds. Felicia and Darryl will look familiar if you have played Family Farm Seaside, which is part of why the two games get confused so often.

Ranch Cash, written RC almost everywhere, is the premium currency. Coins come from farming and you will always have some. Ranch Cash buys premium animals, machines and decorations and skips waiting, and it arrives slowly, which is the reason a gift link matters here more than a coin gift would in most games.

This is the most common mistake made about this game, and it is worth settling before anything else. Family Farm, Family Farm Seaside, Family Farm Adventure, Family Farm Match and Family Farm Journey are five different games from the same studio. They share a name, some artwork and some vocabulary, and nothing else.

Century Games says so itself. The App Store listing for Family Farm Seaside carries a line in its own app notes explaining that Seaside is a standalone version and will not sync or connect to your Facebook farm. The two games also keep entirely separate help centres, separate Facebook pages and separate support queues.

• Family Farm: Facebook and browser only, at farm.centurygames.com. No app. This page.
• Family Farm Seaside: A phone app on iOS and Android, also playable on Windows through Google Play Games. Its own farm, its own Ranch Cash, its own gift codes.
• Practical consequence: A gift code written for Seaside will not work here, and Ranch Cash cannot be moved between the two. If you are following a guide and the screens do not match, you are probably reading about the other game.

If the game you actually play is the phone app, everything you need is on the Family Farm Seaside page instead.

Two doors, one farm. Century Games' own page for the game links to Facebook and to a browser client at farm.centurygames.com, and both open the same farm as long as you sign in the same way.

The browser client offers a Facebook login and a Google login side by side. There is a catch worth knowing: when you arrive from a gift link, the Google option is deliberately hidden and only the Facebook login is offered. So a farm that lives on a Google sign-in cannot take a gift link, which explains a failure that otherwise looks like a broken link.

It is also a game built for a screen with room. The client lays itself out for a browser window several hundred pixels wider than a phone, so a laptop or a tablet is the natural way to play it. There is no app to install, and the news the studio does publish about the game appears in the client's own News section rather than in a store listing.

Two directions: what Century Games hands out publicly, and what the farm pays you for playing it.

• Gift links: Published on ff.centurygame.com, Century Games' own short domain. Each opens the farm with the reward attached. The pattern is bursts: two to eight in a week, with quiet stretches in between.
• The login bonus: Open the game daily and the reward improves the longer the run holds. The schedule for this title is not published, so the screen on your farm is the authority.
• Level-ups: Widely reported to pay Ranch Cash, as they do in Family Farm Seaside. Orders and missions are what move the level bar.
• Achievements: The trophy at the bottom of the interface. Century Games' help article for this game explains how to search it and inspect any item.
• Facebook giveaways: The studio has run Ranch Cash giveaways on its Family Farm pages, tied to events rather than to a schedule.

Every live gift link we have found is on the Family Farm free RC page, newest first, with the date each one went up.

Most game pages skip this, and on this game it is the most useful thing we can tell you. Century Games maintains a full help centre for Family Farm Seaside, running to dozens of articles covering everything from the daily login cycle to how many Ranch Cash a completed achievement pays. For Family Farm it maintains seven articles, none of them about Ranch Cash, and the newest has not been updated in years.

The same gap shows up in the studio's news feed, which carries a steady run of event posts for Family Farm Seaside and Family Farm Adventure and none at all for this game.

• Documented for this game: The achievements screen and how to search it, the Facebook confirmation panel that appears when you send gifts, account handling, and how to contact support.
• Documented for Seaside, not for this game: The five-day login cycle, 3 Ranch Cash for a first Facebook connection, achievements paying Ranch Cash at the fifth step, the Fortune Wheel and a dozen further Ranch Cash routes.
• Documented by nobody: What a gift link pays, how long one stays live, and the exact Ranch Cash a level-up gives on this farm.

So when another page states those numbers confidently for Family Farm, it has almost always borrowed them from Seaside. The two games may well behave the same way. Borrowed detail is still borrowed, and we would rather say which is which.

Ranch Cash sits on Century Games' servers. Nothing on the open web can add to it, so a generator has nothing to give you in exchange for the survey it wants filled in.

The risk here is more pointed than in most games, because Family Farm signs you in through Facebook. A page asking for your login in return for Ranch Cash is asking for a Facebook account, not for a game balance. Ranch Cash has no cash value, cannot be withdrawn and cannot be transferred between farms, which is the part those sites leave out. How to spot a fake free-coins link walks through the same pattern across other games.

If what you actually want is a farm on your phone, or a different flavour of the same loop, these are the closest options.

• Family Farm Seaside: The same studio's phone farm, with a seaside setting, an island, a resort and a Cloud Farm on top. It is documented far more thoroughly than this game and has a real gift-code system. It does not share your Facebook farm.
• Family Farm Adventure: Century Games' exploration-led farm, on iOS and Android, with a story and a map rather than a single plot of land.
• Hay Day: The genre's benchmark for a clean production-and-trading loop, with far less to manage and far less to decorate.
• Township: Farming bolted to a city builder, for players who want the production chain to feed something bigger than a farm.
• FarmVille 2: Country Escape: The other long-running social-farm lineage, familiar to anyone who came through Facebook farming in the same era.

None of them share progress with this farm. Starting one is starting over, which is worth knowing before you follow a link out of a guide.