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How this version looked
CastleVille was a kingdom-building game made by Zynga for Facebook. It launched in November 2011, two years after FarmVille, and ran until Zynga switched it off on April 30, 2016. L.O.S Farms is bringing it back, the same way we brought back FarmVille.
Status: staff are play-testing it now. It isn't open to everyone yet. Follow along in the CastleVille Discord.
The original game
CastleVille took the "Ville" formula from farms to fairy tales. You built a kingdom from a small patch of land: you placed a castle and homes, cleared the creeping Gloom that covered the land around you, gathered wood and stone, crafted goods in workshops, and followed story quests with a cast of characters who moved into your kingdom. Neighbors visited and helped each other, just like in FarmVille.
Zynga updated the game for over four years, with new story chapters, seasonal events, castle styles and decorations. When Flash was on its way out, CastleVille was one of the Zynga games that closed instead of moving to another platform.
How it survived
When CastleVille closed, every kingdom lived on Zynga's servers, and those were switched off. What survived came from players and archivists:
- The game client. An archivist (Autymn) saved Zynga's last release of the game, revision 74708, along with its artwork, sounds, settings and translations: about 4.6 GB in all. It's preserved on the Internet Archive as CastleVille camPfirE. That's where our launcher's campfire icon comes from.
- A real kingdom. Alongside the files, they recorded what Zynga's server sent back while they played: their own kingdom, their neighbors' kingdoms and the story worlds. Those recordings show what the server's answers looked like, and they give every new player a real kingdom to start in.
The server code itself was never released, so it has to be rebuilt from scratch.
Rebuilding it
The Flash client still expects to talk to Zynga. The revival answers in its place:
- A new game server. It speaks the same language as Zynga's (Flash remoting, called AMF). When the game asks for your kingdom, it sends one back in exactly the shape the game expects. It also serves the archived artwork and settings.
- Reading the client. Each thing you do in the game (placing a building, collecting from a workshop, finishing a quest) is a separate request to the server. We've listed more than a hundred of them by decompiling the game, and we're teaching the server to answer them one at a time.
- The real Flash Player. Browsers no longer run Flash, so CastleVille gets its own desktop launcher with Adobe Flash Player 32 built in, like the L.O.S Farms launcher. The game is unmodified: the launcher makes it believe it's still talking to Zynga.
The first version only ran on one Windows PC. It's now hosted on the L.O.S Farms server, so testers play from their own computers, each in their own kingdom.
What works today
- Signing in, your home kingdom and the full game interface
- Visiting the recorded neighbor kingdoms and story worlds
- The original artwork, music and sounds
Still to come:
- Saving what you do: most actions are accepted but not yet kept
- Neighbors: a neighbor bar filled with real L.O.S Farms players
- A few character pictures that are missing from the archive
- Your own fresh kingdom, signing in with your L.O.S Farms account, and opening it to everyone
Timeline
| When | What happened |
|---|---|
| November 2011 | Zynga launches CastleVille on Facebook |
| April 30, 2016 | CastleVille shuts down |
| 2026 | Revival work starts: the archived client loads again on a rebuilt server |
| October 2026 | Moves to the L.O.S Farms server; staff play-testing begins |
Get involved
Join the CastleVille Discord for progress updates and to hear when testing opens up. If you played CastleVille and still have screenshots, videos or saved game files, please share them there. Anything that shows how a feature worked helps us rebuild it.
CastleVille and its artwork belong to Zynga. Like the rest of L.O.S Farms, this is an unofficial, non-commercial preservation project; see the Credits.