The Pioneer Trail, formerly known as FrontierVille is a defunct simulation, role-playing video game available for play on social networking sites such as Facebook.
Developed by Zynga, and launched on June 9, 2010, it was a freemium game, i.e. free to play, but with the option of purchasing premium content.
The player could also finish goals which included tasks such as gathering money, buying energy, clearing land, chopping down trees, raising livestock and trees, creating items such as beds, furniture, and clobbering unwanted pests such as bears, snakes, foxes and/or groundhogs.
Other tasks included collecting from buildings, building inns, wagons, general stores, log cabin, schools, chicken coops, barns, trading posts, barber shops, churches, and sawmills as well as seeding, growing and harvesting crops.
One early source of game points, which was changed by Zynga, was for the player to build as many chicken coops as possible.
Sometimes, players could set their own goals, such as surpassing a billion coins, or saving over a million food points, or growing over 1300 horses on their land.
One player of note, had passed over 1.2 billion coins, 13 million food points and over 1300 grown horses on his land, when the game was removed by Zynga.
Horseshoes, which could be earned during the playing of the game, or purchased through real-world credit cards, enabled the player to buy mules, horses, paint buckets, hand drills, nails, bricks, hammers and other assorted crops or items.
Harvesting could trigger encounters with groundhogs, which needed to be clobbered to avoid using extra energy within their area of influence.
Animals could be purchased, gifted, or gained through specific collections and fed routinely for resources, or sold outright for a large one-time reward.
They started out as juvenile animals and, except for race horses, needed to be fed several times (which were set by the game's rules) to grow into adults.
Mammals included goats, sheep, pigs, cows, oxen, mules and horses and birds such as chickens and geese.
They were bought as seedlings and needed to be watered in a specific time period (in a manner similar to feeding the animals) to reach their full growth.
The player could request collection items and could receive them as gifts via neighbors or Facebook friends who were playing the game).