Establishing Good Play Habits

Fans of simulation games have long known that the first rule for success in these games is creating a solid set of Game Play Habits. What that translates to is establishing a pattern for play that you use daily both to cover all of the basic daily targets and so that you always complete the core set of daily goals that these games are built around.

In the case of Farmville 2 that means covering the following tasks, taking care not to miss or overlook any of them, because your forward momentum can be effected by such failures. Regardless of what level your Farm is at or the transient quests and missions that are presently active, there are specific tasks that you need to complete each day, and these are the elements that you must tend to reliably:

Daily Preparation Actions

Believe it or not most serious Farmville gamers actually start playing the game before they start playing the game every day. Sound strange? It is not. The structure of Farmville and Farmville 2 are such that the in-game contents tend to bleed over onto the Facebook platform, and specifically on the Wall of each player.

That means that the first element of the foundation for your daily game play routine takes place outside of the game, before you play each day, starting immediately after you log into your Facebook account.

1. Harvesting the Walls

The first thing you see after logging in is your personal page, which you can reach and return to by clicking on the link with your name on the top-right border of the page. This contains, among other things, your summary information and in the new Facebook Timeline-based interface, boxes with the Wall Posts from the different games you play as well as other Facebook Actions and links you post, that sort of thing. This is not the important page for our purposes -- that is reached by clicking on the large white “facebook” on the top left-hand side of the top border.

This link brings you to your official “Wall” page on Facebook, and this is where the interesting pre-game stuff is found.

The Wall part of the Wall page is the long center column in which all of the special Actions and posts that are destined for your Wall appear; if you play other games there will be posts from those as well as your own and your friends posts for Farmville 2. This is where things get a little complicated...

The problem with the Wall is that it does not contain every game-related Wall post from your mates -- it only contains what the Facebook server interprets as important Wall post events. For your purposes that is probably not sufficient to keep you interested, however you will notice that among the links in the Navigation Menu on the left side of the screen, there are headings for Favorites, Friends, Apps, Groups, Pages, and Interests. The one that is important for our purposes is the section called “Apps.”

Move your mouse to that section and click on the link labeled “Games Feed” and that will take you to the Games Feed Page for the Wall.

The Games Feed Page

The Wall column in the center of the page contains a compact listing of most (not all) of the Wall posts for each game, with the posts for Farmville 2 being what we are interested in.

Each of the posts falls into one of a handful of major types: Collection Item Requests, Feed Offerings, Fertilizer Offerings, Water Unit Offerings, Special Item Offerings (like Yogurt, Rare Eggs, etc), Quest Item Requests, Resource Offerings (like Baby Bottles and the like), and finally Shared Reward Notices (which can inlcude FCV, small amounts of XP, Points from the Village Grocer Missions, and the like).

The most efficient method for harvesting these Items is to right-mouse-click on the Claim Line (it will read a variation of Claim Points, Get Feed, Get Fertilizer, Get Water, etc., and in the case of Requests for Assistance that are made by your mates, it may read something like Give some Sheep Railings, Give and Get One, or Give some Green Paint. You get the idea.

As a bonus for you, in most of the Assistance Requests that you receive from your mates you will find that giving them the item that they have requested also results in you receiving a duplicate of that item, so in being generous you also benefit.

Most players are not aware of the limits that exist with Wall harvesting -- if you have a lot of friends who play the game you will eventually experience those limits, which take the form of a set number of claims that, once you reach the limit, cut you off from claiming any additional Items no matter what type or subset that the claim falls under.

What that means is that once you have claimed 100 Items, you must wait a certain number of hours before you can claim any additional items. Because of that, and especially if you have a lot of friends and so there are a lot of item posts available to you, the best approach you can use is to take only the items that are of strategic value to you. Generally that means ignoring resource shares like Water, Fertilizer, Animal Feed, and the like, focusing upon items like Quest and Mission items, and the more difficult to retain a supply of items like Baby Bottles and etc.

When you are collecting Items from the Wall feed, you need to be aware of the item counts you have in your storage or resource pool, because there are hard limits on what you can possess -- a good example of this is Baby Bottles, which you need to evolve baby animals into adults. You are only allowed to have a dozen Baby Bottles in your resource storage in the game, but the rub is that the game WILL allow you to claim additional Bottles (or other items), which effectively uses up one of your claim opportunities, but deprives you of the benefit for that claim, meaning the item you tried to claim.

Once you have obtained all of the Items you actually NEED from the Wall feed, you can then start claiming the items you may want or find useful later up to the limit of claims. You actually should do that, since the timer will reset the limit daily anyway, so not claiming the additional items certainly qualifies as a missed opportunity.

Standard Daily Actions

After you complete the pre-game Actions it is time to load the game and begin processing the Standard Daily Actions, which include the following:

1. The Farmville 2 Inbox Pop-Up

Each and every time you log into the game the server checks your game message Inbox, the contents for which are represented by the small envelope image on the top right side of the game screen. When you have messages that is indicated by a red box with white numbers superimposed over the envelope.

Working your way through the Inbox Pop-Up you should claim any gifts, fulfill any requests, and avoid any messages that will cause you to leave the game and play some other game, which is something that Zynga tends to include in your Inbox messages on a daily basis.

In addition to gifts and requests that you routinely see in the messages list, you will also find the Items that you have requested for quests and missions from your mates are listed as well. Claiming them is obviously a good idea.

2. Harvest Your Crops, Trees, and Animals

The second regular action that you will want to complete is harvesting any fully-grown crops that are available. BEFORE you do that you really should survey your present tactical situation, starting with a check of your XP Meter. If you are actually close to leveling this is a call to be very careful since you can actually make strategic use of the actual leveling up process.

Basically when you level up in addition to the XP Meter being reset to represent the countdown to the next level-up, the game also rewards you by resetting all of the animals to hungry state, and fully growing to maturity any of the crops and trees on your farm that are in the grow state.

Obviously you can make good use of this, for example when you are close to leveling and you have lots of fallow crop squares it would be a good idea to plant them with seeds that you can either use for a quest or mission, or if you do not have any needs in that regard, you can plant seeds for plants that normally take days to grow, since after you water them, once you level-up the growth cycle goes from days to right now!

The same basic approach applies to trees and animals, so as long as doing so will not cause the game to tick over the level-up prematurely, it is a good idea to get your trees and animals processed so that the level-up will tick them back over into the harvest state, thus maxing your potential reward.

3. Animal Maintenance

While this is not as common an event as most of the others, occasionally you will have baby animals who need to be evolved. Since you have just harvested the Wall you should have a supply of Baby Bottles available to use on them, so now is a good time to do that.

Closer examination of the building from which the above image is taken reveals far more than just the fact that it provides a home for Prized Chickens - which explains why it is called the "Prized Chicken Coop" - but in addition to Housing those nine Prized Chicken it also offers you the following bonus elements:

• Prized Chickens that are placed inside are no longer counted as part of the animal population limit.

• Prized Chickens placed inside the PCC require half the normal amount of AFRU's.

• The Prized Chicken Coop adds +25 to the animal feed (AFRU) storage limit.

• Prized Chickens placed in the PRC automatically produce Brown Eggs regardless of type.

Clearly there is more to this building than is apparent at first glance, and there are other buildings and structures with similar hidden elements to them in the game!

4. Special and Event Buildings and Structures

While this does not apply to new players, it needs to be part of your established routing because eventually it applies to every player, and that is processing the Special and Event buildings and structures that you will naturally collect on your farm as part of the process of regular play.

Examples of these buildings include the following:

Special Event Structures: These take many forms but generally speaking they either require you to complete a set of Actions each day in order to progress their related quest/mission, require you to apply an action like feeding or servicing, or otherwise interact with them. This should be a routine part of your starting actions each day.

Special Purpose Structures: These include the Yogurt Plant, designated Master Animal Structures, and other special-purpose, the Chicken Coop, and others, each of which tend to operate on a timer. You should complete the daily action for each of these, collecting the special item(s) and the like, as that is usually an integral part of the quest/mission that is associated with each.

While the basic presence is fluid with respect to this type of building -- no two farmers are likely to have precisely the same set of Actions to complete on their farm -- tending to this type of game content is generally an important part of game play, as it often pays dividends down the line, like obtaining special farm animals for completing the collections that these structures often contain, so really staying on top of this is a solid part of your daily actions and it should be carefully maintained as part of them.

5. Free Gifts

This is one of the Actions that a player without a routine will often miss out on -- but on the top of the menu bar over the top of the game play screen there are a set of tabs, among them being one that reads “Free Gifts” and clicking that will open the Free Gifts Pop-Up Menu. You can also reach that same menu in the game by clicking on your Mail Box (this is how you get there if you happen to have the game in full-screen mode, as that saves you from having to leave that mode).

When you open the Free Gifts Menu you will note that you have the option of gifting to your mates a selection from the following usual options:

• Water Resource Units

• Animal Feed Resource Units

• Fertilizer Bag Resource Units

• Wood Planks

• Bricks

• Metal Ingots

Depending on what Special Events are currently active there may be other Items that you can gift, but the list above covers the usual offerings, and which you choose can make a very big impact on your mates for reasons that may not be all that obvious to you.

Basically while having some of the resource units in reserve can be nice, there are easier and faster ways to build up that strategic reserve of resources, and you should also consider that while every player can have the set amount of resource units in their active Resource Bank (indicated by the icons and number on the top-right of the game play screen), they can also have a set number of each resource in their Storage, which they can then use whenever they want. The important point though is that each of those reserve resources is limited to a maximum number (usually 30) so that means that it is a crapshoot as to whether you mates actually need or can retain that as a gift.

That being the case, the Water, Feed, and Fertilizer options should be off the list for your choice.

You are much better off in gifting them with either the Wood Plank, Brick, or Metal, and in that order, because those are common building resources that are used by the game for constructing practically every add-in building that you build!

As a general rule I try to pay attention to what is currently being offered by the game for players and what resources that each use so that if there is presently an event building that uses, say, Bricks, I choose that as the daily Free Gift rather than Wood Planks or Metal Ingots. If there is nothing going at the moment, I usually choose Wooden Planks, because those tend to be the most often used resource in buildings.

6. The Social Rounds

This is another action that a lot of gamers tend to overlook but that can have profound impact on both game play and success down the road, so it is one of those Actions that you really should see to as part of your daily game play routine, and that is visiting your mates Farms and giving them the leg-up helper actions you are allowed to give each day!

Basically you can visit each of the farms of your neighbors, and do five nice things for them -- or for yourself really -- as their helper. If you head over to one of their farms now it will make it easier for you to follow along with this, and as I am about to give you some really good -- no, great -- advice why don't you do that?

Special Daily Actions

This generally takes the form of checking the outstanding missions and quests that are found in the icons along the left-hand-side of the game play screen. This is more of a planning action than it is the sort of complete as you encounter it type in that what you are really doing is looking to see what Actions are outstanding for these quests/missions so that you can make a mental list and build those actions into your planned day for game play.

The more experienced and leveled you are, the more of these you may have hanging and waiting for completion -- and as almost all of the quests/missions of this type come in multi-part forms, you can be at a mix of stages between them.

The first thing you will notice is that visiting the farm of your neighbor shows you the present state of their farm, including what animals are hungry, what buildings need to be services, and the state of their trees and crops.

If you look at the Nav Menu along the bottom of your game play screen you will note that there are five lightning bolt symbols there. These represent the five Actions that you can make here, and as you complete each action, one of the symbols is blacked out.

What you choose to do here can have significant impact on your mate, specifically because your Actions in helping them run a range of helpfullness! For example a lot of players will simply tend to five crop squares, thinking that they have done their bit, or tend to five animals, feeling the same way. The process of doing this actually can result in a small reward for them in addition to the five XP points that they receive in the form of one or more resources that might ordinarily result from tending that animal or plant, so that is widely viewed as a win-win situation, but just how helpful is it?

In simple terms, while you are only allowed to complete five single Actions, some of those actions are more valuable to your mates than others, and some of them have no value at all! Consult the list below of all of the actions available just to be familiar with it, and then we will address how to do things that will not only earn the respect and kind opinion of your neighbor, but are more likely to cause them to visit your own farm and help you out in return.

There are any number of helper Actions that you can take, including this extensive list:

- Tend a Crop

This takes the form of tending to a crop square, but what you do here really does not matter since your neighbor gets to choose when to apply the helping action you have initiated. What that means is, say for example you fertilized their growing crop, or you watered five squares that needed water.

When your mate logs into their game they will note that you helped out and, if they move the mouse pointer over your avatar on their farm, they can even see what resource squares you did some helping action on.

They may decide however that the action you took is not what they think is most important, so rather than have your avatar do what you did, and harvest or water their crop, they may do that themselves and then activate your avatar so that it fertilizes those five squares instead, which provides a helping action of their choice that they feel was better than the one you did.

That is a good thing mates, but it is not the most effective use of the potential results for your helping action -- but we will get to that shortly.

- Tend a Tree

You visited their farm, noticed that they have a lot of trees, and you tended to five of them. Good on you! That is probably the most effective use of your helping action you could have made, because all of the trees you see there operate at a significant resource deficit in that they all require more than a single water resource to water.

A wise gamer will view your choosing to tend their trees as a blessing, since they can bring the trees to a state requiring water easily and freely, and then apply your helping action to save themselves from using up a LOT of water resources. In fact depending on the tree type you helped with, you could easily have saved them 30 or more Water Resource units!

Because of this, it is a really good idea for you to be aware of the different water resource requirements for each tree type, so that you can think strategically in how you make your helping action. Consult the list below to see what we mean by that:

• L03 - Apple Tree (2 WRU)

• L29 - Apricot Tree (4 WRU)

• L23 - Banana Tree (5 WRU)

• L00 - Camellia Tree (2 WRU)

• L31 - Cherry Tree (4 WRU)

• L09 - Fig Tree (3 WRU)

• L00 - Golden Weeping Willow (3 WRU)

• L35 - Grapefruit Tree (5 WRU)

• L01 - Lemon Tree (3 WRU)

• L19 - Lime Tree (6 WRU)

• L00 - Magnolia Tree (0 WRU)

• L20 - Mango Tree* (3 WRU)

• L25 - Nutmeg Tree (4 WRU)

• L05 - Olive Tree (3 WRU)

• L07 - Orange Tree (3 WRU)

• L11 - Peach Tree (3 WRU)

• L15 - Pear Tree (3 WRU)

• L13 - Pecan Tree (4 WRU)

• L00 - Persimmon Tree (3 WRU)

• L06 - Pine Tree (6 WRU)

• L27 - Plum Tree (3 WRU)

• L39 - Walnut Tree (4 WRU)

• L00 - Willow Tree (3 WRU)

WRU = Water Resource Units

L00 Marked Trees = Limited Time / Limited Edition / Special Event Trees.

* Obtained via Farm Sector Expansion, being part of the Mango Gardens Section (Section 11).

As you can see from the list above, helping by tending any tree is a good thing, but tending trees with the following order of preference is a VERY good thing:

• Lime Tree (6 WRU)

• Pine Tree (6 WRU)

• Banana Tree (5 WRU)

• Grapefruit Tree (5 WRU)

• Apricot Tree (4 WRU)

• Cherry Tree (4 WRU)

• Nutmeg Tree (4 WRU)

• Pecan Tree (4 WRU)

• Walnut Tree (4 WRU)

If the farm contains any of these, it is a far more effective use of your helper Actions to tend to these first, from the top. If the farm contains none of these, then tending to any tree with 3 WRU impact is again a much more helpful use of your helper actions.

Most of the gamers who play Farmville 2 will not fail to notice when they see that you are targeting the higher WRU trees, and will file away the fact that you made the most effective use of your helping Actions, which in turn tends to cause them to do the same for you.

Making it a practice to provide your neighbors with the most effective use of your helping Actions will be noticed, and tends to result in good will being built up which can certainly be to your advantage further down the line. You should consider that, because the day may come when a particularly difficult quest could be helped along by simply messaging your neighbor with a request that they perform a specific set of actions with their helper actions for you. Who is more likely to honor such a request - someone who has no appreciation for your actions, or someone who is aware that you went out of your way to make the help you gave them more effective without their having to ask?

Just saying.

- Tend an Animal

Oddly enough save for Crop Squares tending to animals seems to be the second most popular action on the part of casual players, which is sad because save for tending to an object it is the least helpful action that a player can do for another player for their five helper Actions.

In simple terms, the cost of tending to animals is, save for the use of Animal Feed resources, largely free. Because of that, once a player has created a sustainable resource supply chain, which basically means having more than say ten trees on their farm, providing this sort of help is really no help at all.

Serious players will never tend to an animal. Causal players almost always tend to animals because that animal can generate a specific resource that they want. Because of that, if you tend to animals for your helper Actions this is widely viewed as a self-serving and selfish action by a lot of players, who may very well file you in the unhelpful git category as a result.

An informal poll of players that I conducted when working on an article about the original Farmville a few years ago revealed that most of the players of these games tend to categorize other players, and once you get slotted as a self-serving sort, rehabilitating your reputation with another player can be nearly impossible.

This is something you should bear in mind.

- Tend a Building

I suspect that a lot of new players do this because they think that doing it may actually help in the building process, the idea being if they “help” your building under construction, that helping action will result in providing one of the missing resources for that building. It does not.

As a result using a helper action on a building is about as useful as using a helper action on an object, which is to say not useful at all. It will only result in generating a few FCV for the helper and the person that they helped. It should be avoided.

The Exception to the Rule

There is one exception to the rule about using helper Actions on buildings, and that is any building or structure that can generate a WRU as a result of applying a helping action to it. At the present time the only ones that potentially generate WRU's are the Watering Trough, the Water Well, and the Shady Trough.

When you use a helper action on one of these structures there is a small chance that doing so will result in spawning a WRU, which is why a lot of players will do it, and especially when they are short on WRU's for their farming needs.

Using your helper Actions in this way is not very likely to generate good will with the person you are helping, but if they are a player who never visits your farm to help you out, or who you believe you have already caused to slot you as a ******, well then there is no point in not being self-serving in your helper actions with them, is there?

- Tend an Object

Almost every object in the game can be clicked on while visiting a neighbor with the result of using up one or more of your helper Actions in the process. This usually happens when you are trying to nav to a different area of the farm you are visiting and accidentally click on an object, which cause the game to apply your helper action to it.

The only reward you can get from this is a few FVC, so really there is no point to wasting your helper Actions on objects unless the point is to quickly use them up. That is something to think about...

The Anatomy of Helping Actions

As you can see from the illustration above, the end result in using your five helping Actions on your mates farm is a pop-up detailing your reward for your selfless (mostly) helping out. In this case that reward is the standard 50c, 1 XP, and 1 WRU -- though you should be aware that you only get the WRU for the first five or six helper events, after which you still get the XP and FVC but not the WRU's.

Whether or not you choose to hit the Share Button you still get the rewards -- using the Share Button will have the effect of making your mate aware that you helped out on their farm, but they should already know that you did that by the presence of your character's avatar on their farm and the fact that they can click on it to activate the five helper Actions you completed.

There is actually a very good reason for NOT hitting the Share Button here -- these games generate a freakishly large number of notifications and Wall posts, so adding any additional ones that are not required is generally considered to be bad etiquette by most players. Since you are already generating posts to the Wall for things that they really do need to see, it is usually a better practice to refrain from generating posts (like this) that the will likely never click on anyway.

The important thing to remember is to use your helper Actions as effectively as you can manage, and to be consistent about helping out. Your neighbors are a lot more likely to take the time and effort to visit your farm and help you out if they see that you do so yourself every day, so getting into the habit of helping out and helping out effectively is a solid game play Strategy and practice.

Closing Actions

Maintaining a good and aggressive closing routine in your game is just as important as the routine steps that you take at the start of each play session, since it is the final opportunity that you have to be as effective as you can be in taking advantage of the available Actions in the game before you end each play session.

One of the commonly neglected aspects of the game that is ideally covered here is that of making use of the available resources and moves prior to logging out for your current session so that you maximize the potential for profit in FVC as well as XP! So that is where our attention should be pointed at this point, and that is what you should concentrate upon in forming your well-rounded, healthy, and effective play Habits.

As you prepare to log out of your current game session you should routinely take the following steps so that it becomes almost automatic for you:

1. Review and use the available resources

If you have fallow crop squares and there are WRU's and Fertilizer in your Resource Bank, an obvious action would be to plant seeds and water them, then fertilize the crops prior to ending your session. It is always a good idea to select a seed type that has a grow period that will put the crop fully mature and ready to harvest at about the time of your next planned game play session as well.

When you are deciding upon what to plant, have a look at the list of your current quests/missions to see if there are any crops needed for those, and plant any that apply to your time scheme and needs.

2. Check Your Resources!

A quick glance at your Resource Bank along the top right of the game play screen will show you how much Animal Feed Resource Units (AFRU), Water Resource Units (WRU), Fertilizer Resource Units (FRU), and Power Resource Units (PRU) you have remaining and available, but you should also consider the additional units that may be available to you thanks to your deploying the structures that boost available resources in the game. Those include:

• The Furnace: Provides up to 10 additional PRU's on demand.

• Water Wells: Each Well provides up to 10 additional WRU's on demand.

• Speed Feed Units (SFU) stored in your Storage Inventory

• Baby Bottles stored in your Storage Inventory

When you have these resources available to you and especially what are considered renewable resources (such as the contents of your Resource Bank and key Items in your Inventory Storage like Baby Bottles) it makes sense to use them, since you will either automatically or intentionally replace and renew them anyway.

Considering that the lion's share of the profits that you will be making in the game on the things you grow and create will originate in the Crafting process, and considering how valuable and important it is to have both mastered and fresh farm animals* the process of seeing to this side of the game is really a good idea.

If you find that in addition to the resources in your Resource Bank you also have on-demand resources from one of the above sources available to you, using those up is not only a good idea, it is a chance for you to pick up some extra XP and income you would not otherwise have had. That being the case, open up your Crafting buildings and see what you need or are short on.

Crafter Strategy for Staging

One approach that can be particularly effective is that of Crafts Staging, which is the practice of using the extra resources you have in the Resource Bank to craft some of the basic Items that are used for Crafting advanced recipes. These include the following items:

• Crafting Kitchen: Apple Juice

• Crafting Kitchen: Barley Batter

• Crafting Kitchen: Batter

• Crafting Kitchen: Broth

• Crafting Kitchen: Butter

• Crafting Kitchen: Buttermilk

• Crafting Kitchen: Corn Meal

• Crafting Kitchen: Crate of Eggs

• Crafting Kitchen: Custard

• Crafting Kitchen: Dough

• Crafting Kitchen: Flour

• Crafting Kitchen: Frosting

• Crafting Kitchen: Half and Half[

• Crafting Kitchen: Heavy Cream

• Crafting Kitchen: Lavender Batter

• Crafting Kitchen: Lemon Curd

• Crafting Kitchen: Lemon Water

• Crafting Kitchen: Lemonade

• Crafting Kitchen: Lime Water

• Crafting Kitchen: Limeade

• Crafting Kitchen: Pie Crust

• Crafting Kitchen: Pumpkin Filling

• Crafting Kitchen: Red Egg Carton

• Crafting Kitchen: Rye Batter

• Crafting Kitchen: Rye Flour

• Crafting Kitchen: Soy Batter

• Crafting Kitchen: Soy Milk

• Crafting Kitchen: Tomato Paste

• Crafting Workshop: Colored Yarns

• Crafting Workshop: Felt Roll

• Crafting Workshop: Leather

• Crafting Workshop: Lumber

• Crafting Workshop: Metal Sheet

• Crafting Workshop: Wool Bolt

• Crafting Workshop: Wool Thread

Basically the list above consists of Items you can pre-prepare for later use. All of this will go into your Inventory Storage and none of it will go bad, so you can reasonably make a supply to keep on hand which nicely allows you to use up transient and renewable resources and benefit from the process first in the XP you pick up while doing it, and later in XP and money when you use these items to make the finished (advanced) recipes and sell the output.

Limitations to the Inventory Storage and Storage in your Farm Stand are such that you may not want to have a large variety of prepped Items, but when the item in question is something like Butter, Batter, Lemon or Lime Water, Lemonade, Limeade, and the like -- basically resources that are used by a number of advanced recipes, it makes sense to have a few dozen or more of each already made and waiting to be used.

A great example of making the most of limited resources can be found here. For example you are about to log out of your current session and you only have a handful of WRU's, which means you cannot plant a reasonably efficient number of crop squares, however you can take that 8 or twelve WRU's and turn them into Lemon Water or Lime Water, which you can then use to make Lemonade or Limeade, and have available to make the advanced recipes that call for that. By doing it this way, in small amounts at the end of play sessions, you will be surprised at how quickly you build up a strategic reserve of these highly desirable and useful Crafting resources!

Time-Limited Crafted Items

Some of the highest profit in Crafting can be found in the limited time crafting Items that are regularly added to the game as part of the special missions and quests. For example at the time of writing this section a glance at the Crafting Kitchen reveals that the following time-limited recipes are available:

• Almond Cake (Sells for: $3,100)

• Almond Candy (Sells for: $2,500)

• Beautyberry Angel Food Cake (Sells for: $4,110)

• Beautyberry Cream (Sells for: $1,970)

• Beautyberry Sauce (Sells for: $1,500)

• Fava Bean Dip (Sells for: $2,222)

• Kunefe (Sells for: $3,480)

• Kurablye Cookie (Sells for: $3,080)

• Jujube Jam (Sells for: $3,520)

• Pistachio Turkish Delight (Sells for: $2,460)

• Rose Cupcake (Sells for: $2,040)

• Turkish Tera (Sells for: $2,000)

• Vanilla Butterscotch Bundt (Sells for: $4,260)

• Vanilla Butterscotch Filling (Sells for: $2,050)

• Vanilla Cream (Sells for: $1,230)

The list above is just a sampling, there were actually a bunch more, but the point here is that for almost every one of these recipes there was a time-limted special crop or tree added to the game, and if you grew that crop or planted that tree you may have the resources to make these recipes (most of which also had components that are drawn from the resources you keep in stock as part of the process of making things to use up your resources at the close of a session).

With even just a small amount of the different Crafting resources the average player could find themselves banking $20k+ on their way out of the game session -- which is $20K more than they had before thanks to having established the habit of using up their renewable resources on the way out of the game in this fashion.

On-Demand Resources

When you are in the process of choosing what to make on your way out of the session, be sure that you grab any unused on-demand resources from your Wells and your Furnace to add those to the available resources in the Resource Bank and use them up.

Since all of those sources as well as your regular Resource Bank are time-based renewals they are in every sense of the phrase naturally renewable resources.

* You should feel encouraged to read the Reference and hints section on Farm Animals, since there are massive benefits from managing your animal population both in terms of direct profit and resources. You should also seriously look to obtain as many of the Master Farm Animal Housing Structures as you can, since placing a Mastered Farm Animal inside of one of those special structures basically puts them in a one-click feeding and harvesting position while at the same time frees up their placement number, so that you can replace them with a fresh Farm Animal and begin the mastering process with that new animal.

3. Strategic Use of Your Speed Feed

Introduced as an extension of the new Animal Mastery System in Farmville 2, Speed Feed is a special type of feed that you can use to feed an animal who is not hungry. More to the point, Speed Feed cannot be used to feed an animal who is hungry, so if the Animal Feed Resource Icon is present above the animal's head/body, you must use the standard AFRU to feed it. After that you are free to use Speed Feed on it immediately.

Strictly speaking you are not required to use up the Speed Feed that you have in your Inventory Storage, and we are not suggesting that you should do so here. Note the title of this subsection above: The Strategic Use of Your Speed Feed. The emphasis is upon the word “Strategic” here in that we are only advocating you make use of it if you need to.

So, for example, if the recipe that you want to make in order to use up your renewable resources requires a component you do not have -- for instance milk, an egg (of whatever color) and etc. that is the point where you should consider using a Speed Feed on an appropriate animal in order to obtain the resource you need to make that recipe.

Note that using Speed Feed on an animal also doubles the mastery points you will receive for feeding that animal.

4. Strategic Use of Your Baby Bottles

Bearing in mind that you are only ever allowed to have a maximum of precisely 12 Baby Bottles in your Inventory Storage at any given time, and considering that you will upon preparing for your next game play session harvest from the Wall feeds anyway, leaving the current session with zero Baby Bottles in your Inventory means you know how many Baby Bottles to grab from the feed at the start of your next session, so making this part of your standard routine to the point that you do it without having to think about it is a positive thing.

To decide what baby animals to add to your game and evolve using your existing inventory of Baby Bottles, you should start by reviewing your farm.

The Hen House and Exotic Egg Collection

Check the Hen House to see if your next level for the Exotic Egg Collection requires additional chickens. If it does, placing the mouse pointer over it will reveal how many, and that is an obvious target to fulfill using your Baby Bottle supply.

Keeping the timer running on the Hen House is a good idea because each time you complete the Exotic Egg Collection you receive as your reward a Polish Silver Laced Chicken, which is an excellent source for Red Eggs making it a desirable animal to add to your farm.

Bearing in mind that the Polish Silver Laced Chicken can ONLY be obtained as a prize from the Exotic Egg Collection, that should be sufficient encouragement to keep the Hen House Timer active.

FYI: The Polish Silver Laced Chicken Factoid Briefing

Source: The Hen House / Exotic Egg Collection Mission

Animal Feed Requirements: 10 AFRU

XP Gained by Feeding: 30 XP

Feed Timer: 15 Minutes

Feedings Until Prized: 100

Resources Produced: Red Eggs / Fertilizer

Baby Bottles Required to Evolve: 6

FYI: Prized Polish Silver Laced Chicken Factoid Briefing

Source: The Hen House / Exotic Egg Collection Mission

Animal Feed Requirements: 10 AFRU

XP Gained by Feeding: 150 XP

Feed Timer: 18 Hours

Resources Produced: Brown Eggs / Fertilizer

The Yogurt Creamery and the Gourmet Yogurt Collection

Check the Yogurt Creamery to learn if the timer has been interrupted by the need for more dairy animals. If it has, mousing over it will reveal how many animals are needed. In this instance dairy animals includes Cows and Goats, and for each of these that you feed, there is a chance to receive a random number of milk droplets which are then collected by the Creamery and when the required number are collected, processed into Yogurt.

To activate the Creamery Timer and keep the timer running you must have a minimum of four (4) adult dairy animals on your farm. When you master one of these animals that animal is deducted from the total, having transitioned from Adult dairy animal to Prized dairy animal (ie Prized Cow or Prized Goat). In that case you will need to replace any of the Adult dairy animals that were being used by the Creamery to keep the timer running, hence this check.

Each time that the Yogurt Creamery is activated to produce Yogurt, in addition to the regular containers of Yogurt that are produced there is a chance that a special container will be produced. There are three types of special Yogurt: Uncommon, Rare, and Ultra Rare. The Yogurt Collection consists of 6 Uncommon, 4 Rare, and 2 Ultra Rare containers, and once you have collected all 12 containers, you are rewarded with a rare Highland Cow (like the Polish Silver Laced Chicken the Highland Cow can ONLY be obtained as the prize to this collection). For more and more detailed information about the Yogurt Creamery consult its section of the guide.

After mousing over the Creamery to determine how many Adult Dairy Animals are needed, select babies from the following list to purchase (note that we only include the baby dairy animals that can be purchased with FVC), place, and evolve using Baby Bottles:

• Baby Jersey Cow -- $35,000 (Requires 9 Baby Bottles to evolve into Adult Form)

• Baby Longhorn Cow -- $20,000 (Requires 9 Baby Bottles to evolve into Adult Form)

• Baby Nubian Goat -- $20,000 (Requires 10 Baby Bottles to evolve into Adult Form)

• Baby Red Goat -- $3000 (Requires 2 Baby Bottles to evolve into Adult Form)

• Baby Saanen Goat -- $9500 (Requires 5 Baby Bottles to evolve into Adult Form)

• Baby Swiss Cow -- $65,000 (Requires 17 Baby Bottles to evolve into Adult Form)

Obviously which one(s) you choose will be based upon a combination of available funds in FVC and the Baby Bottle requirements, though off the cuff it would seem that the Baby Red Goat is the obvious choice.

It should be noted that each of the dairy animals have different feeding resource production and numbers with the Red Goat at the bottom of the spectrum, so that may also be a consideration.

Your Inventory Storage: a Crucial Resource for Success

Often it is the very simple elements in a game that prove to be the most critical in terms of Strategy and the path to success, and your Inventory Storage is just that sort of element in FarmVille 2 -- largely for reasons that may not appear all that obvious. Before we delve into why that is so and offer you Tips on the most effective use of that resource for game play, progress, and your personal success in the game, why don't we take a closer look at just what the Inventory Storage System actually is?

A First Look at Inventory Storage

The first time you encounter the Inventory Storage System in the game it is as part of one of the mini-tutorials in which the different menu options are being explained, and that Introduction does a fine job of explaining both what it is, and what it does, but it fails to emphasize just how crucial it is as an element to your continued success and rapid progress in the game.

The Inventory Storage System appears in the form of a small icon on the three-button primary navigation menu on the bottom-right-hand-side of the game play window. Attached to the Neighbor Navigation Menu that runs along the bottom edge of the game play window, it is natural for casual players to view this as an extension of that larger menu as a result of its association with it. Don't worry about it if you did the same, as I say, that is a common reaction and association. The fact that it is incredibly important both at the start of your game play adventure and as it proceeds is of note and, as long as you eventually come to grasp its true value, then no harm is done, right?

The Inventory Storage Button on the Navigation Menu is the third of the trio of buttons, and takes the form of an icon depicting a red and white storage bin.

When you click upon it, the menu that it opens is titled "Inventory" and consists of a graphical extension of that small red and white storage bin, but this new menu in addition to containing all of the resources that you have acquired so far in the game, is divided up into seven logical resource types, each of which being represented by an image for its button. These are:

• A Gold Star: the default button to show you all of the Items in your Inventory Storage.

• A Scarecrow: labeled "Decorations" this sub-menu contains all of the objects you can use.

• A Pumpkin: labeled "Ingredients" this sub-menu contains all of the Crafting resources you possess.

• A Pie: labeled "Crafted Items" this sub-menu contains all of the crafted items you have made.

• A Baby Chicken: labeled "Animals" this sub-menu contains all of the Farm Animals you have stored.

• A Barn: labeled "Buildings" this sub-menu contains all of the unused buildings that you possess.

• A Sack of Grain: labeled "Consumables" this sub-menu contains all of your special resources/tools.

The Sub-Menus: A Closer Examination

In addition to holding your Inventory of Items, tools, resources, and objects, your Inventory Storage also holds an incredible amount of potential energy and the direct path to your continued success in the game, if you know what you are looking at, and what to look for! To assist you in using this incredible resource as part of your daily good play Habits, let us have a closer look at each sub-type individually...

The Gold Star -- Everything within your Inventory Storage.

This requires little explanation, but its function is worth noting in the sense that it is the one selection that allows you to have a look at the "Big Picture" being everything you possess when it is not broken down by types of objects. You may want to have a look at the contents of your Inventory Storage using this selection every now and then just so you are aware of what you have and how it might interrelate with the various and specific sub-types of Items.

The Scarecrow -- Everything from Decorations to Devices.

When you first begin playing this section - like the others - will mostly be empty, but as you progress in the game and as the calendar causes you to begin to collect objects that are part of the various Special and Holiday Events, this will quickly become filled with objects that you can use to set the flavor and the tone for your farm as it is perceived by the players who visit it.

The long history of the original game upon which this is based (FarmVille) illustrates in no small way how seemingly useless objects, many having very little value in FVC, can later turn out to number among the most coveted and desirable objects in the game!

Ask any farmer from the original game who possesses decorative Items like The Jockey, some of the harder to find Garden Gnomes from the original Gnomes Collections, the rarer animals and the very obviously desirable but purely decorative buildings and structures, and it should not take you very long to begin to appreciate why this sub-section of your Inventory Storage might become of particular interest years down the road, when you discover that the habit of hording objects actually pays off in dividends!

The Pumpkin -- Your stores of Ingredients with which you build your wealth.

This should require little by way of explanation, but surprisingly it does! In the short term and when you are first starting out as a farmer in possession of their new farm in the world of FarmVille it is completely understandable that you might think that selling off the surplus resources you have collected to obtain the coins you can put to good use in expanding your farm makes a certain sense.

It is only after you have obtained more practical experience in playing the game that you realize how incredibly wasteful that was! Now however you can benefit from the mistakes of others.

It costs you nothing to store away the various ingredients and resources that can be used later to craft Finished Goods whose value far exceeds the collective worth of the individual ingredients to the point that any short-term gains in coins you might otherwise have had can be a source of pain later, when you stop to consider what you gave up then for what amounted to largely meaningless short-term gains when you look at the Big Picture.

While there is the genuine risk of indulging in the sort of behavior that is best and most accurately summed up by the word "schadenfreude" when we examine those Actions in others, setting aside the obvious, you can take to heart the following advice: If you do not need the resource now, it is absolute certainty that some point in the near or far future you WILL be able to use them!

With that in mind, this section of your Inventory Storage is better filled than empty.

The Pie -- Your stores of crafted Items.

It is fair to say that 90% of the time once you have crafted an item, selling that item via your Farm Stand is the logical and best action you can take, since doing so directly contributes to the revenue stream that you have worked so hard to establish. The thing is there are certain Items that, down the road, you may well need in order to complete specific Mission/Quest elements, but of course you will not know which these are until you have the actual need for them, right?

Basing the following philosophy on the experience of others, it may be a good idea to retain around x10 of each of the following Items as a hedge against future needs. So it is not out of line or inefficient for you to have the following in this section, for that proverbial rainy day:

• Apple Juice

• Barley Batter

• Barley Flour

• Batter

• Broth

• Butter

• Buttermilk

• Colored Wool Bolts (of various colors)

• Corn Meal

• Crate of Eggs

• Custard

• Dough

• Fertilizer Rakes

• Flour Sacks

• Frosting

• Half and Half Cartons

• Heavy Cream

• Lemonade Pitchers

• Lemon Curd

• Lemon Water

• Limeade

• Lime Water

• Pumpkin Filling

• Red Egg Cartons

• Rye Batter

• Rye Flour

• Soy Batter

• Soy Milk

• Tomato Paste

All of the above crafted goods function as ingredients for other crafted goods, and as a result have value inherent to them that far exceeds the coins one might obtain from selling them outright. As there are quests that are part of missions that will prompt you to make many of these, as those quests do not actually require you to sell the Items once you have crafted them, you are much better off in considering them as part of your resource reserves and retaining them, even if just until it is convenient for you to combine them with other items and make more advanced Finished Goods to sell in order to generate income.

In addition to these components that can be used for making more advanced Items there are other advanced items that are routinely called for in Missions and Quests later on, so keeping a supply on hand of five or even ten of each of the following items may very well turn out to be a solid strategic choice:

• Apple Pie

• Banana Cream

• Blackberry Jam

• Bread

• Cherry Cobbler

• Ice Cream

• Peach Muffin

• Pecan Muffin

• Pumpkin Pie

• Strawberry Pie

• Strawberry Yogurt

Maintaining an inventory of the above Items is not necessarily something you should actively work towards doing, however if you happen to find yourself with a bumper crop of the ingredients and you are making these items for profit anyway, why not hold on to a few of them for a rainy day?

The Baby Chicken -- Your stores of animals that you have not deployed.

It is very unlikely that you will find yourself with a large number or assortment of animals in this section of your storage if only because most of the animals in the game have Housing for their Prized versions, however this should always be at the back of your mind as a potential resource if only because it offers you an opportunity to control matters when you have too many of a particular type of Prized Farm Animal and it does not make a lot of sense to sell the extras you have due to the difficulty in getting them to that stage!

In this instance we are not talking about Prized Chickens or even Prized Goats, two animals that it is relatively easy to evolve into their Prized forms, but rather the special types of Cows and Horses are what may be the obvious target for storage here.

The efforts that are required to create Prized versions of the following animals are such that selling them should not be your first inclination when you find yourself with more an abundance of them than is to your liking - so when or if that situation should present itself, consider storing the following animals here so that you remove them from the Farm Animal Cap while retaining them for later strategic use when you can make better use of the resources that they generate:

• Andalusian Horse (150XP + Fine Saddle x1 + $250 FVC)

• Andolu Pony (100XP + Fine Saddle x2 + $250 FVC)

• Appaloosa Horse (100XP + Fine Saddle x2 + $250 FVC)

• Ayrshire Cow (125XP + Swiss Cheese x2 + $160 FCV)

• Black Dexter Cow (105XP + Swiss Cheese x2 + $160 FCV)

• Black Welsh Mountain Sheep (110XP + Fine Sheep Fleece x2 + $150 FCV)

• Boer Goat (150XP + Goat Cheese x1 + $100 FCV)

• Camarillo Horse (135XP + Fine Saddle x1 + $250 FVC)

• Daglic Sheep (105XP + Fine Sheep Fleece x2 + $150 FCV)

• Devon Cow (150XP + Swiss Cheese x1 + $160 FCV)

• Galway Sheep (105XP + Fine Sheep Fleece x2 + $150 FCV)

• Gypsy Horse (140XP + Fine Saddle x2 + 250 FVC + $250 FCV)

• Holstein Cow (125XP + Swiss Cheese x2 + $160 FCV)

• Ibex Goat (110XP + Goat Cheese x2 + $100 FCV)

• Jersey Cow (105XP + Swiss Cheese x1 + $160 FCV)

• LaMancha Goat (150XP + Goat Cheese x1 + $100 FCV)

• Red Karaman Sheep (105XP + Fine Sheep Fleece x2 + $150 FCV)

• Swiss Cow (150XP + Swiss Cheese x1 + $160 FCV)

As you can easily see placing these special animals into Inventory Storage rather than selling them accomplishes a number of goals, including reducing the number of Farm Animals if you have reached the cap while at the same time not wasting their potential value.

Considering that it took a lot of effort, work, and time to get them to the evolved stage that they are presently at, rather than selling them for what amounts to a paltry sum compared to what they will generate once you re-deploy them, there is no known substitute for rapidly obtaining the various special resources that each of them are able to generate as a simple bi-product for being alive. Just saying...

The Barn -- The buildings and structures you are not using yet.

This section of your Inventory Storage will largely contain the various special buildings and structures that are created by Special and Holiday Events. For example at the time that this was written the average casual player who chooses NOT to sell the special structures following the end of a special or holiday event may find that they have the following in storage in this section:

• Candy Shack (Used to collect candy for the Halloween 2012 Mission/Quests)

• Cauldron (AKA "Witch Cauldron" - part of the Halloween 2012 Mission/Quests)

• Holiday Tree (The Mission/Quests Tree for the Christmas 2012 Holiday Event)

• Sweetheart Tree (Used to collect Valentines for the Valentines Day 2013 Holiday Event)

Depending upon how many players placed these in storage as opposed to selling them when the events that they were part of ended, these could very easily end up being some of the rare and desirable Items a few years from now. Perhaps not on the level of FarmVille's Jockey decoration, but pretty close.

The Sack of Grain -- Special tools and objects from which direct progress results.

This is one of the most important sections for your Inventory Storage as it is where you keep the following incredibly valuable Items:

• Baby Bottles - up to 12 Units that are culled from the Wall Feed or obtained by special request.

• Canning Jar - a Crafting Resource for which you are only allowed a limited number.

• On-demand Animal Feed Resource Units (AFRU's) - up to x30 units culled from the Wall Feed.

• On-demand Fertilizer Resource Units (FRU's) - up to x30 units culled from the Wall Feed.

• On-demand Power Resource Units (PRU's) - up to x30 units culled from the Wall Feed.

• On-demand Water Resource Units (WRU's) - up to x30 units culled from the Wall Feed.

• Speed Feed Bags - your supply of Speed Feed for use in-between feedings.

• Speed Grow Spray Bottles - your supply of bottle to instantly grow a crop/tree.

This is also where the Special Tools are stored that are used for creating buildings, expansions, and the like, including but not limited to the Hoe Tool, Pitchfork Tool, Hammers and the like.

In addition to the above Items that can be used at will, this is also where the surplus units for the various special quest collections are stored, examples of which include Gardening Gloves, Gear Grease, Pumpkin Bags and the like.

You should easily see from the samples above the importance of your Inventory Storage for a wide number of purposes, and not just building, Crafting, and organizing your Revenue Stream. Since it costs you nothing to put an item in storage, you may want to adopt a policy of building minimum inventory levels as part of your regular game play...

For example (and as outlined and detailed elsewhere in this WTG) it is our policy to retain a minimum of x100 units for each Crafting resource, tree fruit, and crop, reserving that first 100 units as the definition of Zero (0) Level, so that we must have x100 units of a specific resource before we count the units above it as plus units.

Closing Comments

The basic common sense that applies here centers around the making use of renewable resources. If you fail to do that nothing bad happens, you simply do not benefit from having missed the opportunity to utilize what is there for the taking.

While it is always easy to see the benefits from large infusions of money and XP, the secret to success that is well known by the veteran players in the game is that a large number of small transactions is almost always more satisfying and profitable than the boredom of waiting around for a relatively small number of large transactions.

Put another way, when you mind after the pennies and the nickles, the dollars take care of themselves.