My Taskbar Farm

Somewhere in the strip at the bottom of your screen is a farm waiting to happen. My Taskbar Farm is Rising Moon Games' idle farming simulator that relocates the whole genre to the Windows taskbar, where a chicken lays eggs on a timer while you answer email. It is a desktop pet wearing the clothes of a farm sim, and it commits to the bit completely: there is no window to manage and no fullscreen to tab into, just a sliver of countryside wedged between your start menu and your system tray.

It launched in May 2025, priced about like a coffee, and the pitch is genuinely good, which is exactly why the shortcomings later deserve plain talk.

What the loop feels like

You start with a single chicken. It lays basic eggs while you work, you sell them when you glance down, and the proceeds buy a cow. Then sheep. Then a truffle-hunting pig, by which point the strip is a bustling livestock economy that has never once asked you to open a proper window. The rhythm is glance-based, a few seconds of attention every few minutes, the way you would check on a tamagotchi, except this one sells eggs.

Then the drones arrive. Little bots begin collecting and selling products on their own, barns and aviaries consolidate your animals into fewer, denser buildings, and the farm runs itself between your meetings. You are no longer farming, you are supervising a farm that farms. That's My Taskbar Farm.

The systems doing the work

Three named systems carry it. The Taskbar Footprint is the core conceit: the entire interface lives in a restricted horizontal window, so every design decision is judged by what fits in that strip. The Livestock Loop escalates from chicken to cows to sheep to truffle-hunting pigs, each tier earning more per tick than the last. Building and Automation is where the idle payoff lands: you purchase aviaries and barns, upgrade them so bots collect and sell products automatically, and push drone efficiency until the loop stops needing you at all.

A lab layer rounds out the mid-game with resource conversion and perk investments, giving surplus output somewhere to go once the barns are bought.

Where it stumbles

The community verdict is blunt and mostly fair. Players describe Rising Moon Games as a dump-and-go developer: little meaningful support past the launch window, with the studio later scrubbing the title from its official portfolio. Late in the run the automation misfires, with bots selling raw materials that your own production chains still need, which quietly throttles idle income exactly when you have stopped watching. And the taskbar viewport that feels charming at hour one turns visually cramped by hour ten, when the strip is crowded with animals and interface.

There is also a structural oddity worth knowing before buying: because the game is designed to run in the background, hours accumulate while you are barely looking. That is great for progress and less great for anyone who bounced off it inside the refund window.

Playing it today

It lives on Steam for Windows, still cheap, with an active community hub. No macOS or Linux builds exist, and it never came to phones. If you want the same lives-on-your-desktop energy elsewhere, Deskquarium runs an aquarium in the same strip, while ZM Desktop Elf and Desktop Farm Remastered take the desktop-pet idle in their own directions.

The verdict

As a novelty, it works: cheap, cute, and genuinely unobtrusive, a farm that pays rent in the least valuable pixels you own. As an idle game to grow old with, it is a short story rather than a novel, abandoned by its developer and mechanically shallow once the drones take over. Buy it if you want a living taskbar for an afternoon; skip it if you want a maintained long-haul idle.