Cattle Country Review

Lovely game with a lot to do. The individual stories are awesome, and the game has a lot of Quality of life features like no breakable equipment, stacks of goods without a maximum limit (as far as I can tell), and an easy way to dump items in the chests. Completion should take around 60h, and it has no missable achievements.

Approximate amount of time to 100%: I estimate it is around 60 hours
Estimated achievement difficulty: 2/10
Minimum number of playthroughs needed: 1
Is there a good guide available: Yes, this google doc is amazing!
Multiplayer achievements: No
Missable achievements: No
Grinding Achievements: Yes, but that is kinda the nature of farming sims
DLC-Only achievements: No
Speedrun achievements: No
Time-gated achievements: No
RNG-achievements: No
Does difficulty affect achievements: No, you can turn the enemies off and still unlock all the achievements
Unobtainable/glitched achievements: No

Cattle Country is a great farming sim; it has a lot of quality of life features and so many things to do. The game is very open; you get a few quests when you start, and then it is all up to you. At first, I felt demotivated by this, but somehow I returned to the game and played for hours. Then I learned I made a crucial mistake in my approach toward the game: The game will tell you the gifts a person likes and what they don’t like. And I didn’t give many gifts because I wanted to give the best gifts, and that was such a hassle… I can tell you now…not the way to go. Just give them stuff you find on the ground, or fruits from the trees, most of them are fine with that, and your friendship with them is what gives you more quests and makes the story continue. So don’t try to go for the best; try to go for good enough, and you will have a better experience.

The activities you do on a daily basis in Cattle Country are farming, gathering, fishing, mining, and hunting. You will level up those skills and can improve most of the equipment, so it costs less energy to do a specific activity. You’re free to fill in your days however you want and the ingredients from all activities can be used somehow for a quest of to build items. I highly recommend buying the slingshot if you see it, it is sold by the person you can find outside the town by a campfire during the evenings. The slingshot only uses rocks as ammunition, which is very easy to get, much easier than bullets and arrows. Speaking about arrows, those were my money-making items for most of the game. After you get the slingshot, it is very easy to get feathers from birds in the trees, and wood and stone are also easy to get, and they sell for 132 money.

The game has a lot of Quality of Life features as mentioned above. Here are some of them:
– Having the option to turn off enemies in the overworld and/or in the mines so you have a more relaxed experience if you want to.
– Open a chest and simply press a button to add the items from your inventory to the chest if they are already there. This makes emptying your bags so much easier.
The game already tells you what everybody likes as a gift, so you don’t have to figure it out yourself. It’s great; however, don’t hang up too much on that; just gift them stuff when you see them.
The number of items in a stack seems unlimited. I really love this, as it keeps your inventory cleaner than having many stacks of the same item.
– Your equipment does not have any durability and will not break.

A quality of Life feature I wish the developers would add is that you can craft while items are in chests, and maybe give the option to lock specific stacks so you can lock them and not use them by accident. But having to find the right chests is sometimes a hassle. Small tip: when you start the game, build multiple chests and start sorting out items from the beginning!

There are some small things I struggled with, mostly due to missing information. I’m sure this will be fixed later on by a wiki or some guides, but for now, it was a bit of a struggle. I have no idea where to continue the story with some of the NPCs. I can see they have a cutscene ready, but I can’t figure out at which location, and I guess time also matters when you enter that location? I sometimes also struggle with finding an NPC. After a while, you get an idea of their daily routine, but especially the people not in the city center are sometimes hard to track. I wish that in the friendship overview, it would tell their current location (like how Little-Known Galaxy does that). And I have no idea how to make glass. I’m unsure if it is part of a friendship reward for an NPC I can’t find or if I’m just totally missing it. I found a few in the blacksmith’s store during the winter, bought those, but I expect that you can make it yourself as well. Trying to throw sand into the machines that smelt ore didn’t do the trick either. One other small thing I wish were different is how soon grass grows. It is nice to be able to get enough hay, but it grows so quickly that it feels almost impossible to keep the land looking clean and good.

I haven’t completed the game myself yet because of a few bugs late in the story. One of those bugs is some people getting stuck in a building. I’m keeping this vague on purpose, but I would recommend not improve the relationship with the doctor too far at this moment until this bug is fixed. I couldn’t trigger the friendship events or improve the friendship level anymore with the people stuck in that specific building. I’m pretty sure this bug will be fixed soon, but until then, leave the doctor alone when you’re getting close to 9 hearts 😉

None of the achievements in Cattle Country are missable. I estimate that completion takes around 60 hours. Unlocking all the achievements is quite a grind, as you need all five skills (mining, gathering, farming, fishing, and hunting) to reach the maximum level. Also, the achievement for having one million coins takes quite a while, but I expect this is a lot easier later on when you have the greenhouse and can plant just a bunch of plants that make a lot of money, no matter the season. There are some achievements for getting first in a town event. Keep in mind that the game only saves when you sleep. So if you failed something, you can close the game and restart that specific day when the town event is happening. I expect that the livestock achievement is only possible in the second year, or you have to get the chickens very, very early on, so you can level them to 5 stars. Oh, and don’t sell your ore, the gemstones are safe to sell, but keep your ore, as you’ll need a lot of them! I married the blacksmith, who gives me ore from time to time, which is very helpful. Not sure if every partner will give that or if this is very specific for the blacksmith.

I give Cattle Country 4 out of 5 stars.

This review for Cattle Country was written on 28 May 2025, based on the current Steam version of the game which has 28 achievements at the time of writing this review. This information can be outdated, for example, when the developer adds or removes achievements or releases (new) DLC.