L.O.S Farms
Wiki»Shutdown & Legacy»History»Revision
System · Sun, Sep 27, 2026 8:13 PM · “Expanded article”

Changes compared with the version before it. Added Removed

Added: ## The end of Flash
Added:
Added: FarmVille was built on **Adobe Flash**. When Adobe announced that Flash Player would reach end of life at the close of 2020 — and Facebook stopped supporting Flash games — the original FarmVille had no future on the platform. Zynga closed it on **December 31, 2020**, after eleven and a half years. In the final weeks, many players shared screenshots of farms they had tended for a decade.
Added:
Added: Zynga's later games, *FarmVille 2: Country Escape* and *FarmVille 3*, carried the name forward, but they are different games: the original farms, and the thousands of items released over the years, were gone.
Added:
Added: ## Why preserve it?
Added:
Added: For many people FarmVille was their first video game, or the one they played with family. It is also an important piece of internet history — the game that showed how large a social game could get, and the subject of years of debate about game design, monetization, and social media. When a live online game shuts down, nothing is left to play unless someone saves it.
Removed: Because FarmVille ran on Adobe Flash, it could not outlive Flash itself. Adobe ended Flash Player support at the end of 2020, and Zynga shut down the original FarmVille on Facebook on December 31, 2020, after more than eleven years.
## Preservation
Added: After the shutdown, community archivists saved a large share of the game's assets — the art, animations, sounds, and settings files the Flash client downloaded. Open-source projects such as **FV-Replowed** then rebuilt a server compatible with the original client, so the real game could run again.
Added:
Added: **L.O.S Farms** builds on that work. It runs the original Flash client with a rebuilt server, and adds a community around it: these forums and this wiki, a leaderboard, an Auction House for retired items, and a Discord server. It is an **unofficial, non-commercial** preservation project — not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Zynga or Take-Two — and it accepts no donations or real-world payments.
Added:
Added: ## How you can help
Added:
Added: - Play, and report bugs in the forums.
Added: - Improve this wiki: any member can edit most pages, and every change is kept in the page history.
Added: - Share screenshots and memories of the original game — they help us restore features exactly as they were.
Added:
Added: See also: [[History & Development]].
Added:
Added: ## Sources
Removed: After the shutdown, community archivists preserved a large collection of the game's original assets. Projects such as FV-Replowed rebuilt a compatible server so the original client could be played again.
Added: - [FarmVille — Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FarmVille)
Removed: L.O.S Farms is an unofficial, non-commercial community preservation project built on that work. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Zynga, and it accepts no donations or real-world payments.
How this version looked

The end of Flash

FarmVille was built on Adobe Flash. When Adobe announced that Flash Player would reach end of life at the close of 2020 — and Facebook stopped supporting Flash games — the original FarmVille had no future on the platform. Zynga closed it on December 31, 2020, after eleven and a half years. In the final weeks, many players shared screenshots of farms they had tended for a decade.

Zynga's later games, FarmVille 2: Country Escape and FarmVille 3, carried the name forward, but they are different games: the original farms, and the thousands of items released over the years, were gone.

Why preserve it?

For many people FarmVille was their first video game, or the one they played with family. It is also an important piece of internet history — the game that showed how large a social game could get, and the subject of years of debate about game design, monetization, and social media. When a live online game shuts down, nothing is left to play unless someone saves it.

Preservation

After the shutdown, community archivists saved a large share of the game's assets — the art, animations, sounds, and settings files the Flash client downloaded. Open-source projects such as FV-Replowed then rebuilt a server compatible with the original client, so the real game could run again.

L.O.S Farms builds on that work. It runs the original Flash client with a rebuilt server, and adds a community around it: these forums and this wiki, a leaderboard, an Auction House for retired items, and a Discord server. It is an unofficial, non-commercial preservation project — not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Zynga or Take-Two — and it accepts no donations or real-world payments.

How you can help

  • Play, and report bugs in the forums.
  • Improve this wiki: any member can edit most pages, and every change is kept in the page history.
  • Share screenshots and memories of the original game — they help us restore features exactly as they were.

See also: History & Development.

Sources