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!