Rare Animal Breeding Secrets

Have you ever wondered how some of your high level Farmville friends get their farms filled with the rarest breeds? Why it seems like they have an advantage over you when it comes to collecting gifts? While they may consider this a trade secret all it takes is a little bit of work and a small change to the way you publish items you find on your farm.

The first thing you need to do is find some breeders, start by looking through your current friends to see if anyone has a good collection of rare animals. If not head over to the Zynga forums and post in the "Looking for Neighbors" thread. Make sure you include that you are looking for "High Level Breeders" or "Rare Animal Breeders" when posting there.  If your not sure how to do that take a look at this thread Getting more neighbors in Farmville for more information.

Once you have four or five breeders for friends it is time to do a little bit of work that will pay off greatly in the future. Send them each a personal message and explain that if you get any rare breeds out of your Nursery, Dairy or Stables you will send it out to just them. In exchange for them doing the same for you. Basically you are making some good connections with fellow breeders and setting up a common interest group. You can even take this a step farther and setup a private Facebook group so you can all communicate together. You may even want to refer them to this post so they can see how it works and what they will need to do to ensure you get their animals.

Now, you may be wondering how can you possibly guarantee them that they will be the ones who receive your rare breeds? After all, it is common for gifts to be gone the instant they hit the news feed right? Well hang on cause here is a super secret tip the rare animal breeders do not want the masses knowing.

It is possible to send any post to one specific person or group instead of to all of your friends! There are two ways to do this, either by sending the item to one specific person, or by creating a new friends list inside of Facebook and sending to just that list. And you may be surprised just how easy it is.

First let's look at how to send an item to a single person instead of to your entire friends list. Whenever you find a collectible on your farm, complete a ribbon or some animal wanders by you get a pop-up window alerting you about it and asking you to share. When you click the Share button a Facebook window appears where you can click Submit and send it out. Before you click on the submit button try the following;

Next to the Submit button there is a tiny Security Lock, click on it and you will see these options

• Everyone
• Friends of Friends
• Friends only
• Customize

Choose Customize from the list and another window will appear showing you the options available. Under the "Make this post visible to" section is a drop down menu, if you choose "Specific People" a small text box will appear allowing you to type in someones name. Fill in the desired reciepents name and then click Save. (You can choose to make this the default however it is recommended that you leave "Everyone" as the default)

Back to the Publish window you will find that it has changed and should now be showing just that friends name in the upper right hand corner. Click on the Publish button and viola! They are the only person capable of receiving the rare animal. You may want to send them a private message alerting them of the post so they do not miss it.

Believe it or not, this small tip is how the best breeders work. They setup a coalition with each other and just send the rare animals back and forth maximizing their ability to earn coins and experience.

Now, you can expand on this if you want. Lets say that you have a breeder coalition with 20 people in it. What you want to do is first create a sub list inside of Facebook and put each of them into it.

To create a new list click on Friends in the upper right hand corner while logged into Facebook. On the next screen you should see a button that says "+ Create a list" click on that and a smaller window will appear. In the upper right hand corner is a place for you to name your new list. Try to use something easy to remember like "Breeders" or "Coalition" something that you will be able to recall easily. Once you have named this list, go through your friends and highlight anyone who you want to be on it. Then click Save.

Sending to this list works the exact same way as sending to one person with a slight change. After selecting "Specific People" from the drop down, type in the name of your list instead of a persons name. This will publish your post to anyone on this list giving them all equal chances to receive the rare animal.

Maximizing Space in Farmville

When playing Farmville the first thing you notice is how little room you are actually given. While you can expand your farm later on it is important to start out on the right foot. While everyone always says to use most of your space to plot they tend to neglect a couple other tidbits.

Trees

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Trees in Farmville can be a great source of income, however they can also lose you income if placed poorly. For instance, you do not want to place a line of trees in the middle of your farm. The tops of the trees will cover up valuable space that you could use to plant crops or place animals. One exception is if you plan on being a "Tree Farmer". One way of playing Farmville involves planting nothing but trees, no crops, no animals, just tree's. By filling the majority of your farm with only trees it is possible to pull in 100k a day.

Trees also offer a couple other benefits for you, first they never wither. This means you can easily walk away from your farm for as often as you like without worry about losing any money. The other noticeable bonus is that tree's have no animation* to them this will help your farm keep from lagging while playing.

For the Farmville player who wants it all, try to place a tree line along the top edges of your farm. This will keep them out of the middle, allowing you to maximize space while at the same time giving you all the bonuses of having tree's. Also worth mentioning, unless you are going for a specific look to your farm try to only use the highest grossing trees available. Here are the top 5 and bottom 5 trees, in terms of earnings potential.

HIGHEST GROSSING

1. Gingko Tree - 130
2. Mango - 130
3. Olive - 112
4. Passion Fruit - 93
5. Lime - 75

LOWEST GROSSING

1. Cherry - 18
2. Yellow Maple - 25
3. Apple - 28
4. Plum - 30
5. Tamarind - 35

Note about this list - Only permanent trees were included, limited time only items were not taken into consideration. This is also showing how much you earn from 1 tree and 1 harvest. If you take the time to harvest into consideration then an individual tree may go up or down. For instance the Olive tree has an hourly rate of approximately  19.48 while the Gingko tree has an hourly rate of 30.14, this assumes a 4x4 grid of trees (or 16).
 

*(for the most part, the Japanese Falling Blossom does have some animation but is ornamental with no harvest)


Animals

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Animals can be a very lucrative way of earning gold and experience in Farmville, however they have a couple drawbacks that everyone should be aware of. Compared to trees, some animals are just not as rewarding. Most of the foals and stallions take up the same amount of space four tree's would. While some of the smaller animals take up the same amount of space, they produce half the amount of gold.

While you need to be careful about maximizing profit when placing animals another thing to keep in mind is lag. Each and every animal is animated in Farmville. This means the requirements to properly load and display your farm increase drastically when you add a lot of animals. For the most part each animation sequence has 4 individual pictures it needs to load. This means that while one tree uses one image, each type of animal uses 4.

If you are already starting to see some lag while playing Farmville you may want to keep this in mind while decorating your farm. Users with low end computer may choose to place one animal of each type to minimize the impact, while high end computer users may opt to build an entire horse ranch with thousands of animals on it.

One easy way to see how much of an impact a farm full of animals will cause is to simply look through your neighbors. Find a couple with tons of animals and try moving around, zooming in and out, going into full screen etc. This will give you a rough idea about how laggy your own farm will become as you add more animals.


Following the above format with tree's here are the lowest and highest grossing base animals available in the game.

HIGHEST PROFIT

1. Belted Cow - 3,000
2. Arapawa Goat - 1,200
3. Saddle Back Pig - 1,000
4. Dutch Rabbit -150
5. Percheron Horse - 140

(The Snow Leapord sits at #4 with a harvest earning of 300, however it is iPhone only.)

LOWEST PROFIT

1. Cow - 6
2. Chicken - 8
3. Long Horn/Brown/Groovy/Holstein Cows - 12
4. Brown Chicken - 16
5. Neapolitan/Pink/Simmental/Referee Cows - 18

Just like with the Trees list, this is only referencing how much gold is earned when harvesting a single animal. This is not showing a earnings per hour potential.

Buildings

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Buildings in Farmville are some what of a tricky thing when talking about maximizing space, mostly because they are so big. For somethings like nurseries or stables they are a must. Once placed on the farm you can fill those types of buildings with animals that will greatly increase the earning potential available. On the other hand, some buildings like the Post Office or the School do nothing once placed, basically costing you gold in the long run. While they may look nice and help your farm look like the real deal, gameplay wise they do nothing for you.

It should be noted though that buildings often times offer the greatest experience gain in Farmville. For that reason you should place them on the farm, then sell them off.

Buildings that you want to keep around, such as the Nursery, Stables, Chicken Coupe and such need to be placed in such a way that they take up as little space as possible. This means either up against the top edges, or down just a little bit saving room for some trees behind them. One effective method is lining the top edges with a row or two of trees then placing your buildings up against them. Because a building can stick up farther than it sits it is possible to end up covering up valuable real estate if you place them anywhere but the edges.

Farmville update - 7/29/2010

Zynga has released an update to Farmville today! Some new crops, ribbons and a new lonely animal should be available in your farm right now! Some other changes include raising the amount of space in the farmers market, and the ability to purchase "Packs" of bushels.

The complete list of changes is as follows;

New Achievements:

• Cunning Crafter – Make 5/25/100/250 Crafted Goods
• Super Seller - Sell 5/25/100/250 Crafted Goods
• Best Buyer - Buy 5/25/100/250 Crafted Goods

New Crops:

Chickpea (level 10) – Grows in 20 hours, grants 2 XP, costs 80 Coins to plant and yields 210 Coins when Harvested. To unlock this crop, you must master Soybeans.

This Crop can be Mastered.

Level 1: 400
Level 2: 1200
Level 3: 2400


Purple Haze Carrot (Level 57) – Grows in 12 hours, grants 1 XP, costs 110 Coins to plant and yields 210 Coins when Harvested. To unlock this crop, you must master Carrots.

This Crop can be Mastered.

Level 1: 1400
Level 2: 4200
Level 3: 8400


Additional Information:

• A new Lonely Animal is now available!
• The capacity of your Bushel Inventory has been increased from 50 to 100.
• You can now purchase “packs” of Bushels to finish your recipes for 3 FC per pack.
• The OOS issue some players have experienced when placing a crafting building has been fixed.
• The “Multiple (empty) Albums” bug has been fixed.

Why you should not clear your cache.

Time and time again I read somewhere online that you should clear your cache when playing Farmville because it will cause errors. This is very far from the truth of the matter. First let me explain what the cache is, what it does, and why you want to keep it around.


Cache is a term used for stuff that is stored locally on your computer, in regards to Farmville the best way to describe it is the art work. Each tree, crop, animal, decoration is a separate file both on Zynga's servers and on your machine. The cache on your machine is keeping a copy of those items, meaning if you already have a copy of the item there is no need to download it again. Firefox can just look at its cache and pull the data from there. This will save you time, first you will not need to wait while your machine downloads the file again, but when loading up the Market for example you will not have to wait while it downloads hundreds of files at once.

The reason you see people talking about clearing the cache is because if something starts going wrong on your farm, it could be the old version already on your machine. After all if Zynga updates Farmville and changes the way a grey kitten looks, the file in your cache will load instead of the new one from the server. Once enough things change then you will start running into an issue.

So in a nutshell, the cache makes things faster by not having you download over and over. Should you clear it on exit? no. Should you clear it when you run into a problem? YES!

You can also change the size of the cache, a larger size will let you keep more items downloaded on your machine, but will take up more space. For new computers space is generally not an issue so I say make it unlimited!

What about de-fragging your hard drive? You should do this once a week regardless of problems. De-fragging the hard drive will help keep load times down, and everything running happily.

Getting your building raising done in record time

While having a lot of Farmville neighbors can get your raising's done quickly, occasionally one will slip through and you may find yourself having a hard time getting them done at all. I like to use this little trick when things like that happen. You can use this with any raising request really, storage, chicken coupes or nurseries.

First you will need to find the original post on your wall. Login to Facebook and click the "Profile" link in the upper right hand corner. You will find yourself at your wall, scroll down until you find the raising you want to finish, it should look something like this;

Look for your building raising post, it should look like this.

Once you have located your request for help post you will need to right click the "Click here to help" link located in the lower right corner. (The black squiggles are pointing at it). Right click on this link and choose "Copy Link Location" from the menu.

Next start a new status update in Facebook, preface it with some text along the lines of "Please help with my raising" then right click and paste the copied link into the status bar, click Share.

This will paste your request link as your status, the bonus to doing this is how Facebook processes the news feed. Like posts are grouped together under one entry, so typically you will find all the Farmville posts hidden under one post. While custom hand written status messages are all displayed individually. By pasting the building request in as a personal status update Facebook gives it more prominence in the news feed. Giving it more exposure and helping you finish the building raising faster.

Understanding the Wither Mechanic

One of the pitfalls some new players find themselves in when they first start out is planting something then not being available when it comes time to harvest that crop. When you visit a friends farm you will sometimes see this has happened to them, all their crops have withered! While there is a lot of speculation on the net regarding withering, is it random? is it timed? A little research on the official forums has lead me to believe the following;

Once a crop has reached maturity, that is, it is ready to harvest. You will have the same amount of time it took to grow before it will start withering. Now the withering itself is not instant, each individual plot will wither out randomly once the time frame has been reached.

Lets take strawberries for example, they take 4 hours to reach maturity. This means if you plant them at Noon, they will be ready at 4pm. If you miss the deadline you will have until 8pm before you need to worry about wither kicking in. However, at 8:05 the majority of your farm will still be harvest-able, only a few of the plots will be withered. This is good to know if you are working on a specific crop and are worried that you may not be available the instant it reaches full harvest. An eight hour crop will take eight hours to before it starts withering, then approximately another 4 hours before the entire farm is withered. (Roughly half the growing time for full wither, this is speculation but is generally agreed upon by the forum goers on Zynga's site.)

Getting the most out of the new Fertalize All item.

As of the July 23rd 2010 release Zynga has added a new item called "Fertilize All". This does exactly what the name implies, it fertilizes all plots on your farm instantly. While this sounds like a good thing, remember people visit your farm to fertilize your crops earning gold and experience for doing so.

One way to capitalize on this new item is in conjunction with the Bi-Plane. Plow and plant all your fields with a high yield crop, Yellow Melon for example will net you 308 profit per plot when harvested. Plant them in every one of your fields, then instantly use the fertilize all item. Followed by using the Bi-Plane so that they all become ready to harvest. This way you will be able to harvest a field full of Yellow Melons, earning yourself A LOT of gold AND a lot of experience (Fertilized Yellow Melons net 8 experience per plot) all in one go!

Viewing someones farm who is not your neighbor

Often times you will want to view a particular persons farm, even if your not their neighbor. Doing this is quite easy but requires a little bit of work. First you will need to find their Facebook profile ID. Do this by clicking on their name in Facebook and going to their profile page.

At the top of the window, in the address bar, you should see a url that looks like this;

This is the Facebook profile link

The number at the very end of the link is the persons Facebook Profile link, you will want to highlight only that number and then copy it to the clipboard by right clicking the highlighted area and choosing copy. (TIP: You can quickly select only the number by double clicking on it. This trick will work with most text boxes)

Once you have the profile ID copied you need to add it to the View farm link here;

http://apps.facebook.com/onthefarm/index.php?visitId=

After the equals sign paste in the number you copied by right clicking and choosing paste. (TIP: Ctrl+V is the shortcut key for pasting)

Besides being able to view someones farm who is not on your neighbor list you can use this to also generate a lot of extra experience points. While you are visiting the other farm you will have the ability to fertilize fields and feed the chicken coupe.You can do this with any of your Facebook friends, however if the person is not a friend through Facebook this will not work.


In an effort to help out the newer computer users I have created a small little box below, simply get your friends profile ID and paste it into the box. Then click "Go Help!" and it will take you directly to their Farmville farm allowing you to help them and earn some XP and Gold while your at it. 

The above box was created using plain HTML, all the code is available by viewing the source code for this page.

How to create hay bale images in Farmville

Many times the featured Farm of the week will contain a small "pixel art" image created using hay bales. Ever wonder how people make them? Think they have some great hidden talent for art? Not really :)

First lets talk about what Pixel Art is, simply put Pixel Art is an image created using an 8bit scale. Meaning only the basic 8 colors can be used, and normally there are no curves so creations come out looking like they were drawn on a grid. If you have ever played on an old Nintendo or Atari then you know exactly what I am talking about.

Now how can you create a beautiful image in Farmville? Easy, simply use some online tools to create an image and then use it as a guide when placing hay bales on your farm!

Here is a great site you can use to create your own images, or upload an image and have it converted.



Pixie
This tool will allow you to hand create a Pixel Art image, save it and then print it out.

Pixie also offers you the ability to upload an image and have it automatically loaded into the pixel editor, you will need to sign up for an account (its free) before you have access to this feature though. However, the image must be rather small in dimensions, so be sure to re-size it before loading or you may not be able to see all of it.

Another trick you can use is searching online, simply goto the Google Image Search and put in what you are looking for followed by "Pixel Art" (without the quotes). So lets say you wanted to find a picture of Hello Kitty, On Google Image search type in the following;
hello kitty pixel art
All of the returned images will be pixel art of hello kitty, simply find one you like and save it to your computer, print it out and use it as a guide when placing the hay bales in Farmville.

Trick to adopting lots of animals in Farmville.

Due to the way Facebook groups up relevant posts it can some times be hard to find and adopt lost animals. This is hindered by some people having so many friends that the adoption happens almost immediately. One thing you can always do is actually go and look at your friends wall in Facebook.

If you look directly at their wall you will see each and every post they made, including any lost animals up for adoption! In order to see a friends wall in Facebook all you need to do is click their name, it is easiest to use the search bar at the top of the Facebook page. Simply start typing their name and you should the results popping up as you type. Once you are on their wall start scrolling down and look for any animals that wondered onto their farm looking for a home.

This trick works best if you have a lot of neighbors as it increases the chances of finding a lost animal. Another bonus is that you may come across Mystery Eggs, Fuel or even a Bonus reward while your looking!

Getting More Neighbors in Farmville

When you first start playing Farmville one of the things you may realize is you need A LOT of neighbors. In fact, you may not have enough friends on Facebook to do some of the low level expansions! While posting in your status feed and asking for more neighbors, or for friends to suggest other players, may seem tempting it is by far the lest effective way to actually get more people on your neighbor bar.

One of the easiest ways to get more neighbors is actually to goto the Zynga forums and just ask! Silly I know. But the fact is after I posted requesting more neighbors I woke up the next morning with over 400 friend requests in Facebook. Talk about instant results!

Zynga updates the thread occasionally by clearing it and letting people start a new one. This is good for both users and Zynga as it helps keep the thread fresh. For the best results you may want to wait for them to create a new one, just check the date of the current one before posting. 

In case you are new to internet forums or just wondering what to do here is a quick over view.

• First goto the Zynga forums and setup an account. You can use the blue Facebook Connect button in the upper right hand corner to save yourself some time. Just be sure to use a name that is NOT like your Facebook login name. (This is for security reasons of course. The Zynga forums are a public location, anyone has access to them even without an account)
• Second navigate to the Farmville Forum section and scroll all the way down the page. Near the bottom you will see a thread titled "Add Neighbors" click on that. 
• Third you need to make a choice, you can either post and request others to add you (the fastest and easiest way by far) or you can look through the post and add other people by clicking on their Facebook profile link and then adding them as a friend on Facebook.

If you decide to post your own link you will need your Facebook profile link, to get this sign in to Facebook, in the upper right hand corner there is a link that says "Profile" click on that. Now in your address bar at the top of the screen is your Profile link. Simply highlight everything in the address bar, right click and copy it. Now go make a new post in the "Add Neighbor" thread and paste your profile link in. You may want to add any information like "Horse Breeder" or "Dedicated Gifter" this way people will want to add YOU more than anyone else in the thread.



You can find the Zynga Forums here ; Zynga Forums

And you can find the Add Neighbor thread here ; Find Farmville Neighbors


There are automated programs that will go out and add Facebook Friends for y ou, however Facebook looks down on these and you may find your account banned for using one. I recommend the above method as it is both extremely effective and most importantly allowed by both Zynga and Facebook. 

Boxing in your Avatar

I figured the first post to this blog should also contain a rather well known tip. Why? Because like all new Farmville players this idea blog should start off as a new user, with new user idea's! In a nutshell this tip deals with boxing in your Avatar. Why would you want to do this?

Well, boxing in that avatar will keep him from being able to walk around your farm. This will allow you to harvest your crops VERY quickly. In fact you could say it is instant harvesting, plowing and seeding. As a bonus when your friends come to fertilize your crops and feed your chickens they wont have to wait while your character walks around, the actions will be instant and they will be free to move on to the next farm. This will benefit you as your friends will want to come and help since it goes so quickly.


Now there are a nearly limitless ways you can box him (or her) in. The easiest way is with some bales of hay like this;

Boxed in Avatar

 Now using just bales of hay you can of course keep a large field to plant with. But as you get more and more decorations you may want to consider something a bit more ornate such as this;

Here you can see a little more time was spent and the result is quite pleasing, a small area in the middle of the farm has been hollowed out and sectioned off using the green hedge decoration. Along with some flags and flowers to add to the effect. You can expand this out as far as you want.  Just remember to totally enclose your Farmville avatar in his area, cutting her (or him!) off from the rest of the farm. Another thing to watch out for is expansions.

Your character will load in the VERY CENTER of your farm, as such when you expand they will start loading 2 places lower than they used to. Because of this it may be better to create a larger area to start with so your not moving hay bales every time you expand.