Idle Food Empire Game Review

Idle Food Empire Game Background

Idle Food Empire is an idle clicker tycoon game inspired by the concept of vertical farming. As the owner of a revolutionary new farming system, develop the systems needed to grow and sell your vegetables to the market. Build up your vertical farm as high up as you can.

This game was developed by MarketJS.

How to Play Idle Food Empire

To select left click with your mouse or tap on the touchscreen with your fingers. On the welcome screen, select the play button near the center to begin.

Your web browser automatically saves your game progress.

Basic Gameplay Advice

Setting Up

You begin with a starting capital of $10, which you must use to pay for your first farm floor. Once this is done, your farm’s 3 main components (the farm floor, elevator, and shipping floor) are complete. At the very start of the game, you must manually control the vertical farm’s entire operations. Select the farm floor to harvest vegetables, the elevator to bring them down, and the shipping floor to carry them out and sell them.

Expansion & Production Boosts

Once you’ve earned at least $100, you can afford to hire your first manager. Managers allow you to automate the operations of each section of production, which will allow you to focus on upgrades and expansion. Automating all 3 stages of production also grants you offline earnings, which you can redeem each time you return to the game.

Select an empty floor to establish a farm on them once you can afford it. Each floor needs its own manager and must be leveled up individually. As you expand upwards, you must spend extra on renovating some floors before you can build a farm on them.

Select the arrows above the floors, elevator, shipping floor, and managers to temporarily boost their speed for about 30 seconds. This has a cooldown time of 3 minutes. Use these to temporarily clear out any backlogs when one of your facilities can’t keep up with increasing production.

Leveling Up

Select the level buttons on the elevator, shipping floor, and each of the farm floors to open the level up screen. Choose the increments you need to level up. You can level up between 1, 10, and 50 times or choose to buy all the upgrades you can afford all at once. The only exception are managers, which can be upgraded once. Upgrades increase the efficiency of each section of the production process:

• Upgraded floors produce food faster.
• An upgraded elevator carries food at a faster speed.
• An upgraded shipping floor ships out more foods for sale.

Each upgrade you purchase when leveling up increases the cost of the next upgrade.

Floors

Outside of the elevator and shipping floor the game has a total of 9 floors which you can unlock. The first 3 floors grow vegetables. The middle 3 floors grows fruits. The top 3 floors grow herbs. Floors produce the following, from top to bottom:

• mint
• lavendar
• ginseng
• strawberry
• grape
• watermelon
• tomato
• carrot
• lettuce

You start at the bottom of the building and unlock floors one at a time as you work your way up.

Investors

Once you reach a significant amount of earnings (approximately around the 10s of billions), you will be notified that an investor has taken interest in your venture. You can choose to ignore this for awhile. You can open the window to discuss matters with the investors interested by selecting the investor button on the bottom right corner of the game screen.

Accepting the investors’ offer will reset all your game progress in exchange for significantly higher earnings across the board. At the investor window, you can view the number of investors interested in purchasing your vertical farm and the starting amount you will receive when you begin the new enterprise. The higher your profits in your current vertical farm, the higher the number of interested investors and the higher your new earnings will be when you restart.

Advanced Playing Tips & Strategy

Keep expanding to generate a larger income stream. The upper levels produce more income each time you level them up than their lower counterparts.

Save upgrades for much later in the game. The ramping costs of upgrades often far exceed the cost of buying a new floor. We recommend beginning the upgrades when you don’t have sufficient funds to buy and set up new floors.

Level up in bulk. Buying upgrades in increments of 10 will help you save a considerable amount of money in incremental upgrades. If you can’t afford increments (or want to expand quickly), just buy all the upgrades you can upgrade at once.

Educational Aspects

A simplified business simulation, this game highlights the importance of reinvesting profits into the business to scale up production and build value. It also notes the importance of delegation to growing businesses. An enterprise can’t grow big without leaving everyday tasks to competent managers. That said, the game like others like it leave out key principles like operations costs. For games that feature this mechanic, check out Coffee Shop and Lemonade Stand.

Player Age Recommendations

This game is suited for players school-aged and above, though its slower pace means that older players are more likely to enjoy it. We recommend this game for fans of idle tycoon games.