How a run goes
Four stages, one estateClear and plant
Chop forest for timber, or burn it, cheaper and faster, and watch the fire pressure meter. Plant palms, fertilise, irrigate, and wait about a year and a half for the first fruit.
Harvest and sell
A round every six days once the palms bear. The Kopdes buys at the day's price; upgrade it, widen its range, hire a crew to pick for you.
Live with the land
El Niño years, droughts, floods, Ganoderma and rhinoceros beetles, landslides where the forest was stripped, lightning that starts fires nobody lit.
Answer for it
Burn and the letters come. Integrity, attention, investigations, an operating ban, or a certificate, if the estate earns one.
Scenarios you will play through
Every system in the game is built on a real one. These are the situations the estate puts you in, with the Indonesian terms the game itself uses.
Forest fire: kebakaran hutan
Burning is the cheapest way to clear land, and the fire pressure meter shows how close the estate is to a wildfire. Lightning starts fires nobody lit; a man-made burn reaches into standing forest far more readily. Haze closes the schools. The fire seasons of Kalimantan and Sumatra are the model.
Deforestation: penebangan hutan
Chopping forest (tebang pohon) pays in timber and costs forest cover. Strip a hillside and the next wet year takes it down in a landslide; strip the slopes around the estate and the ISPO certificate is out of reach.
Reforestation: reboisasi
Plant saplings instead of palms (tanam pohon) and forest grows back over eight years, counting toward cover from the sapling stage. Put more land back to forest than you hold in palms and the run ends in reboisasi, the ending nobody planned for.
Smallholder: petani sawit
You are one estate among neighbours, selling fresh fruit bunches (TBS, buah sawit) through a village cooperative, the Kopdes. Its range, level and crews decide what your land is worth.
Palm oil: minyak sawit
The fruit price walks with a world market priced in dollars: an El Niño forecast, a mill strike, a weak rupiah. Fertilizer and seedlings get dearer when the currency does.
Pests and disease: hama dan penyakit
Ganoderma spreads palm to palm through the roots; rhinoceros beetles breed in the debris a burn leaves behind. Sanitation, traps, Trichoderma and a plant doctor are the answers, and none of them is free.
A short glossary: kamus singkat
- Sawit, kelapa sawit
- The oil palm, Elaeis guineensis. The tree, the crop and the industry.
- Lahan sawit, kebun sawit
- Palm land: the estate you are building, one hectare per block.
- TBS, tandan buah segar, buah sawit
- Fresh fruit bunches, the harvest. Sold by the kilogram at the day's price.
- Minyak sawit
- Palm oil, pressed from the fruit at the mill. You sell fruit; the mill sells oil.
- Petani sawit
- A smallholder palm farmer. That is you.
- Hutan
- Forest. Wild, protected, or the hutan sawit that used to be one.
- Penebangan, tebang
- Felling. Penebangan hutan is clearing forest; tebang sawit is replanting.
- Kebakaran hutan
- Forest fire. In the game: burn-to-clear, spread, wildfire, haze, and the letters after.
- Reboisasi
- Reforestation. Planting forest back on cleared land.
- Kopdes
- The village cooperative that buys your fruit and sells you seedlings and fertilizer.
- ISPO
- Indonesian Sustainable Palm Oil, the certificate. Five conditions; the run's win.
Questions people ask
- Is Sawit Simulator free?
- Yes. It runs in the browser, needs no account, and saves in your browser.
- What kind of game is it?
- A management simulation about a palm-oil estate: land, weather, pests, money, and the authorities. Single-player, turn-free, a day passes every five seconds at normal speed.
- Is burning land allowed in the game?
- It is possible, cheap, and fast. It also raises fire pressure, invites letters from the district office, and can end the run in a wildfire or an arrest. The game lets you choose and then shows the bill.
- Can I win without clearing forest?
- Yes. The ISPO certificate rewards forest on the slopes and five years without a burn, and reboisasi, more land back to forest than under palms, is its own ending.
- How does a run end?
- Seven ways, and the game names six. The ISPO certificate: profit, twenty bearing hectares, five years without a burn, forest on the slopes, a full Kopdes, and the President's motorcade at the door. Reboisasi, the ending nobody planned for. Bankrupt, shut down or arrested, when the bank stops waiting, the ban outlasts the cash, or a second wildfire brings the police truck. Or twenty-five years survived, never certified, and the sandbox opens. You can rewind to any earlier year and try again. The seventh has no entry here: it is for whoever plays their way into it.
- Does it work on a phone?
- It loads, but the map wants a mouse and a wide screen. Desktop is recommended. WebGPU where available, WebGL 2 otherwise.
- Is it available in Indonesian?
- Yes. This page has a twin: Sawit Simulator dalam Bahasa Indonesia, and the game itself plays in English or Bahasa Indonesia. It opens in Indonesian for visitors in Indonesia, and the menu switches languages.
Controls
Drag to pan, wheel to zoom, Q/E rotate. Click a block, double-click to focus it. Space pauses; 1 2 3 set the speed (a day is five seconds at 1×). F jumps to the Kopdes, K opens its shop, N the news, ? this list in game.
Ready when you are.
Start a game