Glossary: the words of a palm oil estate

Sawit, kelapa sawit oil palm

The oil palm, Elaeis guineensis, grown across Sumatra and Kalimantan for the oil pressed from its fruit. Indonesian uses one word for the tree, the crop and the industry.

In the game: Every block you plant with seedlings becomes a block of sawit. It bears about eighteen months after planting and is ripe for a harvest every six days after that.

Nyawit going into oil palm

Informal verb from sawit: to plant oil palm, work on it, or put savings into a few hectares of it, the plan of many who want a plot to retire on. Since early 2026, nyawit nih orang has also gone round social media as a jab at someone chasing money, read by some as nyari duit.

In the game: Every run is nyawit from the start: Rp 250.000.000, 64 hectares of wild land, and about eighteen months before the first fruit earns a rupiah. The patient way, without fire, is the one that wins.

Penyawit palm grower

One who nyawit: a palm grower, from a smallholder with two hectares to anyone who has bought into a plot. Informal and playful; the standard words are petani sawit, and in law pekebun.

In the game: The title of the win. Earn the Palm Certificate and the epilogue reads Certified Penyawit Expert, or Certified Penyawit Handal in the Indonesian game.

TBS, tandan buah segar fresh fruit bunch

The harvested bunch of palm fruit, sold by the kilogram to a mill that must press it within a day or the oil quality falls. Smallholder income is a TBS price times a weight.

In the game: The thing you harvest and sell. The Workshop buys it at the day’s price, and only from blocks inside its range, because the fruit has to reach the mill the same day.

Fresh fruit bunch (FFB) TBS

The English trade term for TBS, used in market reports and mill contracts across Indonesia and Malaysia.

In the game: The same thing as TBS. The English game says fruit; the price panel is the FFB price in rupiah per kilogram.

Bibit seedling

A nursery seedling. Legitimate oil-palm bibit come from certified seed producers, and a fake seedling is a famous way to lose a decade.

In the game: Bought at the Workshop shop: 144 fill a flat block, 96 a terraced hillside. The game has no fakes; the price rises with the input index when the rupiah is weak.

Kopdes, Koperasi Desa village cooperative

A village cooperative, the body through which many smallholders sell fruit, buy fertilizer and seedlings, and organise labour. Indonesia has promoted village co-ops as the link between smallholders and mills.

In the game: The estate’s one building, called the Workshop in the English game and Kopdes in the Indonesian one. It buys your fruit, sells inputs, sets the harvest range and, from level 3, hires your workers. Level 4 is a certificate condition.

Reboisasi reforestation

Reforestation: planting forest back on land that was cleared. Real programmes take years to show cover and decades to restore anything like the original forest.

In the game: Plant forest saplings instead of palms and a block counts toward forest cover from the sapling stage, fully once grown. Put more land back to forest than you hold in palms and the run ends in reboisasi, its own ending.

Kebakaran hutan forest fire

Forest and land fire, the dry-season disaster of Sumatra and Kalimantan. Most start with land being cleared by fire; drained peat and El Niño years make them catastrophic.

In the game: Burn-to-clear raises the fire pressure meter; past the line every fire escalates into a wildfire with haze. A second wildfire while the police are already investigating is an arrest.

Karhutla forest and land fires

Short for kebakaran hutan dan lahan: the word officials and the news use for the fire season. The lahan, land, matters: much of what burns is cleared land, scrub and drained peat. In 2026 the smoke closed schools in Sarawak and pushed Singapore’s air into the unhealthy range.

In the game: Burning is a crime here too. The first wildfire opens a police case by itself, an honest district can suspend your licence the same day, and the certificate wants five clean years. Plant forest back and the district forgives you faster. Palm without fire, and how to help the forest.

Penebangan hutan deforestation

Felling forest, the clearing that turned much of lowland Sumatra and Kalimantan into plantation over the last forty years.

In the game: Chopping a forest block sells its timber and leaves debris. It raises the attention of the authorities a little, lowers forest cover, and makes the slopes around it likelier to slide.

Ganoderma basal stem rot

A fungus, Ganoderma boninense, that rots the base of the palm trunk. It spreads through root contact and infected stumps, and it is the main disease of oil palm in Southeast Asia, worst on replanted land.

In the game: Spreads palm to palm along the root lattice, latent first, then sick, then dead. Debris and floods raise new infections. Trichoderma halves spread for 120 days; removing and trenching palms stops it; a plant doctor does the pulling for you.

Ganoderma in oil palm: symptoms and control

Kumbang tanduk, kumbang badak rhinoceros beetle

The rhinoceros beetle, Oryctes rhinoceros, which breeds in rotting trunks and debris and bores into the crowns of young palms. Replanted and freshly cleared land is where it thrives.

In the game: Breeds in a block’s debris and bores young palms only. Traps kill it for 120 days, Metarhizium slows it for 90, and a sanitation crew clearing the debris is the only real fix.

Rhinoceros beetle in oil palm: symptoms and control

Trichoderma biocontrol fungus

A soil fungus used as a biological control agent against Ganoderma, applied to the root zone of seedlings and palms.

In the game: A shop item: one application halves Ganoderma spread on one block for 120 days. It needs palms standing, and the plant doctor buys his own.

Metarhizium biocontrol fungus

An insect-killing fungus, Metarhizium anisopliae, applied to beetle breeding sites as a biopesticide.

In the game: A shop item: one dose cuts beetle breeding on a block to less than half for 90 days. A worker will buy one on a block that has beetles and no dose running.

El Niño and La Niña climate regimes

The warm and cool phases of the Pacific that make Indonesian years drier or wetter. Indonesia’s worst fire seasons have been El Niño years.

In the game: Each year rolls a regime. El Niño halves the rain, doubles fire spread and makes haze likely; La Niña makes the river rise. Years cluster, so a dry year is often followed by another.

Kabut asap haze

The smoke haze from land fires that closes schools and airports and sends respiratory cases up across the region most dry seasons.

In the game: A dry-season event, likelier under El Niño and under your own fire pressure. It cuts sunlight and dips the fruit price while it lasts. The estate’s own wildfire makes its own.

Longsor landslide

A landslide. Slopes stripped of forest lose the roots that hold them, and a long wet spell does the rest.

In the game: Any slope can slide in a long wet spell, more readily the less forest stands around it. A slide buries the palms and scars the block until an excavation crew digs it out. A cover crop halves the chance.

Integrity integritas

How honestly an office applies its rules. Low integrity is what makes a fine negotiable and a licence a matter of who you know.

In the game: A hidden stat. A low-integrity district lets you settle an investigation for a fee and waives two certificate conditions; a high-integrity one can suspend your operating licence after a burn. Corruption helps the player, and the epilogue says so.

Operating ban izin usaha dibekukan

A suspended operating licence: the sanction a ministry or district can apply to a plantation caught burning.

In the game: An enforcement roll on the day of a burn, in an honest district. Ninety days of no clearing, no palm planting and no harvest; planting forest is allowed. If the bank calls your loans during a ban, the ending is Shut down.

Sertifikasi sawit palm oil certification

Certification that an estate meets a standard: the voluntary RSPO scheme, and Indonesia’s mandatory national scheme. Both audit legality, burning, high-conservation-value forest and smallholder relations.

In the game: The Palm Certificate is the game’s own invented scheme and its win condition: profit and three profitable years, twenty bearing hectares, five years without a burn, forest on the slopes, a level 4 Workshop.

Peremajaan replanting

Replanting: felling palms past 25 years, which are too tall to harvest and yield less, and planting the block again. Indonesia funds smallholder replanting through a national programme.

In the game: The twenty-five-year horizon is the game’s nod to it: survive that long without a certificate and the first palms are too tall to harvest. Clear plantation and replant fill the same role on one block.

Oil palm replanting cost per hectare

Crude palm oil (CPO) minyak sawit mentah

The oil pressed from the fruit at the mill, before refining. CPO is the commodity whose world price, in dollars, sets what a mill will pay for TBS.

In the game: You never sell oil: you sell fruit. The fruit price walks with a world market priced in dollars, so a weak rupiah, a mill strike or an export levy reaches your Workshop within days.