Wetherell Farm Saga

A cozy farming life sim with something asleep in the woods.
Your great-uncle has left you a farmhouse, a barn and a few overgrown acres in Wetherell, a small New England village where a boat brings you in at dawn and goes back out into the fog. Clear the land, grow crops through the seasons, cook what you grow, fish the river and the shore, dig into the mine and earn your place among twelve neighbors who know each other far too well. It is a warm, unhurried life.
But on the night of every new moon, some of those neighbors slip away into Harrow Wood. What they do there, and why, is yours to find out. Help them, stop them, join them, or keep your head down and farm.
A cozy farming game first
Four 28-day seasons of tilling, planting, watering and harvesting. Sell what you grow, upgrade your tools at the forge, lay sprinklers, plant an orchard and bring the greenhouse back to life. Fill the coop and the barn with chickens, ducks, rabbits, cows, goats and sheep, and let them graze in fenced pastures by day. Adopt the stray dog, pet the village cats, and rearrange the whole farm in build mode whenever the mood takes you. Nothing rushes you: the day ends when you go to bed, and the game saves while you sleep. Turn the horror off and this is the whole game, complete on its own.
A kitchen with a pantry's worth of recipes
Cook your harvest at the stove, the oven, the prep board, the butter churn and the smoker. More than eighty recipes, from bread and pasta to pies, roasts, smoked fish and sauces, are waiting: you start knowing about three quarters of them, and learn the rest from cookbooks you find or buy and from the village. Dishes take time, so set the oven, go fishing and come back. Food does not last forever; it goes stale and then spoils, unless you keep it in a root cellar, an icebox, a refrigerator or a freezer.
Dig into the mine
Forty floors of tunnels, caves and old workings, new every day and several screens wide: timbered drifts near the top, natural caverns, winding webs of passages, and a great open hall at the bottom with a boss in it. The way up and the lift are at the west end of each floor, and the way down is far to the east, so every floor is a journey. Swing your pickaxe at the walls themselves to dig out stone for your crafting, hold the button to keep digging, and find copper, iron, gold and gems in the rock. Beneath the bottom, the Old Works run ten floors further, to what the founders left behind.
A village that lives without you
Twelve villagers keep their own schedules by day and by night, in rain and in shine. Learn what each of them loves and hates, trade gifts and gossip, unlock their heart events and meet them at a festival every season. Court one of them if you like; courtship is optional and stays all-ages. The clock in the square stopped years ago, and the village stopped gathering with it. Bring the tower what it needs, one part at a time, and get it ticking again together. Early in your first spring the village sits you down to a welcome supper, and a few nights later there is a first ritual that goes wrong.
Something sleeps in Harrow Wood
Beneath the warmth, small things go wrong. The morning fog lingers past noon. Crops come up in shapes no seed packet promised, and strange ones sprout that no shop will sell. The dogs will not take the forest path. Listen at doors, follow the clues in the library, and track your neighbors into the trees to see what really happens at the altar. Resist, ignore or join: Wetherell's fate, and your own, ends very differently depending on what you choose.
The woods are not empty
Past the farm the forest runs on for nine wild maps. Deer cross the clearings at dawn and dusk, foxes and owls call after dark, hares and herons keep to their seasons and weather. On the nights of the full moon, rings of standing stones light up pale green. Find the old bottle, pour it at a ring's middle, and the circle opens for a night. Step into an open ring and you find a hill and its strange neighbors, who trade, ask riddles and play tricks. Read the journal the library keeps and it will send you somewhere. At full intensity the woods turn hostile after dark: hunters walk, and a ward from your pocket makes them turn aside until morning.
You choose how dark it gets
Horror intensity is an option you can change at any time. Full is the default.
Full: the whole story, slow-burn dread and all.

Mild: the mystery and the clues stay; the most disturbing imagery and text are removed and the dread is softer.

Off: a complete cozy farming game with no horror content at all.

Key Features
Four seasons of crops, fruit trees, quality tiers, three tiers of sprinklers and a greenhouse

Six kinds of animal across a coop and a barn, with an auto-feeder to buy from the carpenter, and fenced pastures where they graze by day

Fishing with a timing mini-game; what bites depends on place, season, time, weather and moon phase

Cooking at five stations with more than eighty recipes, five cookbooks, food that goes stale and spoils, and four kinds of cold storage

Artisan machines with upgradeable chests, kegs, preserves jars and furnaces

A 40-floor procedurally generated mine, several screens wide, with diggable walls, ores, gems, monsters and a boss at the bottom, and ten older floors beneath it, the Old Works

Five skills with profession choices along the way and a mastery at level 10

Twelve villagers with schedules, gifts, heart events, optional courtship and four seasonal festivals

A stray dog to adopt and name, and village cats to pet

A library that lends twenty classic books, and shelves at home that hold books to suit their owners

Nine wild woods with woodland animals, stone circles that open on the full-moon nights, an old bottle, a hill with neighbors of its own and a journal to follow

The clock tower restoration, plus a daily help-wanted board

Build mode, named and sortable chests, save any time and an autosave every night

An optional cosmic folk-horror story with its own crops, weather, rituals, hunters and wards at full intensity, and three endings

Keyboard, mouse and controller, full rebinding, UI scaling, a colorblind-safe palette, reduced flashes, relaxed energy and adjustable day length

Content Notes
Atmospheric and psychological dread, folk-horror and cosmic themes, a secretive cult and its rituals. Offerings dissolve into light; no harm to people or animals is ever shown (at full intensity animals left out at night may be taken, and their bones are found afterward). Light cartoon combat against monsters in the mine and, at full intensity, against hunters in the woods at night. No gore, no sexual content, no real-world religion. The intensity setting and a full content-notes screen are in Options.