Play and Earn in Upland’s Harvest Season

The new Harvest Season is now live in Upland from October 1 to November 15, featuring its own season pass and a variety of new features to enjoy as you play and earn exclusive rewards and benefits that increase your future earnings.

What Is Upland?

Upland is a free to play metaverse game where players buy, sell, and develop virtual properties mapped to real-world addresses. The game blends elements of real estate management, city-building, and social interaction, powered by blockchain-based asset ownership. Players earn UPX, the in-game currency, through property yield, trading, and completing various missions or seasonal activities. This in-game utility token can be can be used to trade properties and mint new ones, and while it isn’t tradable outside the game, the properties you acquire using the currency can be listed for USD, allowing players to earn real money through an NFT-to-USD program.

Upland is playable on web browsers, as well as on Android, and iOS through official app stores, and supports free play without requiring prior crypto experience. Over time, the platform has expanded from property collection to include construction, cars, businesses, and now, living digital citizens and ecosystems. This year’s Harvest Season marks one of the most significant updates in Upland’s history, introducing two foundational systems that will change how the virtual world functions: Residents and Life: Phase 1. Let’s see what they’re all about.

What’s New in Upland’s Harvest Season?

Running from October 1st to November 15th, Harvest Season 2025 introduces the long-awaited Residents feature and the first stage of Life, along with the return of Gamified Earnings Missions. These updates together form what the team calls “a major step toward a more dynamic, player-driven Upland.”

Residents and Uppies

The Residents system brings population and community simulation to Upland for the first time. Digital citizens, known as Uppies, will soon populate the game’s cities, bringing a new layer of competition and strategy to neighborhood building.

Each neighborhood can host as many Uppies as it has available Living Units, meaning property development will directly impact local population density. However, there are more addresses than Uppies, creating competition among players to make their neighborhoods appealing destinations.

Uppies choose where to live based on a variety of factors such as services, infrastructure, and amenities. Neighborhoods offering good schools, entertainment, and employment opportunities will attract more residents.

Two new metrics are central to this system:

• Influence Score: measures how well your properties attract residents
• Resident Score: tracks how many Uppies live in your structures

While Uppies themselves are not live from the start of the season, this foundation sets the stage for a more socially connected, player-driven economy.

To attract and sustain Uppies, players will need to construct Service Structures, which are divided into three categories:

• Public Services: civic buildings like police stations, fire stations, schools, hospitals, and clinics that ensure safety, education, and health.
• Essentials: local businesses and shops, such as supermarkets, utility stores, and barber shops, providing everyday necessities.
• Entertainment: community spaces like movie theaters, coffee shops, and sports fields that enrich Uppies’ lifestyle experience.

Employment and transportation also influence resident distribution. Factories, showrooms, and metaventures create jobs, while vehicles such as cars, trucks, and buses strengthen neighborhood connectivity. Decorative assets and diversity in design can also impact attractiveness, encouraging balanced and creative city planning.

Life: Phase 1

Alongside Residents, Life: Phase 1 begins this season, introducing biological growth systems to Upland. The new Life system starts with nurseries and the ability to generate seeds, marking the first step toward a living, evolving environment.

This phase introduces Protem, a temporary resource that will later evolve into Stem, the key material for sustaining life in Upland. For now, players can earn Protem through Totems, which continue with Cycle 5 during Harvest Season.

Protem is used to feed and grow plants, which players can cultivate on their properties. This introduces hands-on, care-based gameplay with actions such as feeding and cultivating. Plants can thrive or die based on care frequency, creating a layer of realism and ongoing interaction.

Nurseries are a new type of metaventure that lets players buy and sell seed Legits. Properties with Totems can allow other players to spend $SPARKLET to create random seeds, with the nursery owner earning compensation. Once planted, seeds become permanent property-linked plants that grow and change with the seasons.

This system lays the groundwork for future living elements, including pets and other dynamic lifeforms that will depend on similar care mechanics.

Gamified Earnings Missions

Harvest Season also brings back Gamified Earnings, a seasonal mission system that boosts property yields for the following season. Each week, players complete tasks to earn multipliers that are applied to their next season’s earnings.

New missions are announced every Monday and run from Tuesday, 9 AM PT to the following Tuesday, 7 AM PT, and cannot be recovered once missed.

Completing multiple missions increases the earnings multiplier, as follows:

For example, completing at least five of the ten missions during Harvest Season raises your next season’s yield by 14.7 percent. Completing all missions unlocks the Completionist Badge, recognizing consistent participation.

The first missions for Harvest Season, from October 7 to October 14, include:

• Homegrown Hustle: begin construction on three different types of Living Structures
• City Services: begin construction on three different types of Service Structures

These objectives encourage engagement with new gameplay features introduced this season.

What Is the Harvest Season Pass?

Alongside the gameplay updates, Upland is launching the Harvest Season Pass, a collectible-based system designed to deliver weekly cosmetic rewards and exclusive collectibles.

The Harvest Season Pass offers 6 weeks of rewards and cosmetic drops. Once a player burns their pass, they gain access to all mystery drops for the season and receive a profile badge.

• Price: $6.99
• Sales Begin: Thursday, October 2 at 9 AM PT
• Season Duration: October 1 - November 15
• Mystery Drops: every Tuesday (snapshot at 7 AM PT)

Only players who have burned their pass by the snapshot time each Tuesday receive that week’s drop. Missed drops cannot be recovered.

The key features of the Harvest Season Pass include:

• Collector’s Challenge: Collect all four weekly characters to unlock the Harvest Fusion Pass.
• Exclusive Cosmetics: Items are unique to this season and cannot be obtained elsewhere.
• Non-Tradable Rewards: Cosmetics are permanently tied to the player’s account once received.
• Mystery Drops: Each Tuesday brings a new, unrevealed cosmetic tied to the Harvest theme.
• Irreplaceable Items: Missed drops are not reissued, adding scarcity to each week’s collection.

Players who gather all four unique character collectibles by October 20th at 9 AM PT will unlock the Harvest Fusion Pass, a rare achievement that boosts their seasonal collector score.

To qualify, all four items must be in the player’s account at the snapshot time and held for at least 24 hours after the deadline.

The Fusion Pass represents dedication within the collector community and adds another layer to Upland’s expanding ecosystem of digital collectibles.

How to Play and Earn in Upland’s Harvest Season

Players can join Harvest Season for free by playing Upland on PC (web browser), Android, or iOS. Activities range from construction and city planning to quest completion and item collection.

To maximize participation for this season:

1. Start construction early: Building Living and Service Structures will not only help with weekly missions but also improve your neighborhood’s appeal to future Uppies.
2. Engage with Life mechanics: Open a Nursery, earn Protem, and plant your first seeds to prepare for future Life updates.
3. Complete weekly missions: These directly increase your UPX yield for the following season.
4. Burn your Harvest Season Pass: Doing so early ensures access to all mystery drops and seasonal cosmetics.
5. Track Resident and Influence Scores: These metrics will become key to neighborhood success as the Residents system evolves.

If you like city builders and are looking for a web3 equivalent, then Upland might be worth jumping into this season, a blockchain-powered metaverse which has seen players earn more than $20m in real-world value since 2019 through its open economy.

Last month, Upland launched its 2.0 rebrand with a larger focus on city building.