Expert Farming - Levels 21 thru 30

It is fair to say that this is the point where things get really interesting, mostly because we are about to take our playing base (the farm) and twist it sideways.

Prior to now the vast majority of our focus and activities has centered around seeking to maximize the amount of XP that we have earned in the course of play, the idea being to level our Farm efficiently so that we unlocked the advanced crops, animals, and trees as well as the more interesting and fun Missions and their Quests.

Having fulfilled those goals and attained Level 20, and along the way having expanded our Farm so that we now have unlocked nine of the sixteen expansion sections that will eventually make up the total farm area.

I will go on record here and now predicting that once the percentage of players worldwide who have unlocked 12 of the 16 expansion slots reaches 60% or so, Zynga will release a new “destination” farm similar to the expansion system that was used in the original Farmville, and once that happens the sky really will be the limit!

Considering the unique and ramped-up fun levels that they used in building this game, we also predict that the new destination farms will have features that are inter-dependent with this original farm, perhaps even functioning as satellite crop space for growing region-specific types of crops that will then be transported to our original farm where our Crafting is focused to allow us to create all new and more profitable recipes...

And speaking of “profitability” it is now time for us to begin exploring our renewed focus upon Farm Coins and obtaining the scratch that we desperately need if we are going to begin unlocking and adding the final seven expansion sections to our farm!

With an Eye on Coins

Before we begin to address this altered Strategy we need to address special activities that may (or may not) be taking place. The most recent special activity is the County Farm Event - in addition to providing you with the opportunities to win special prizes as well as obtain expanded resources and helper Actions via its medals, this event also provides bonuses to the prized crops you grow.

While events like this are fun, and can add a small percentage to the accumulation of wealth, they are not the focus for your primary Strategy. Still there is no reason why you cannot take advantage of these events as you play, so bear that in mind.

The New Cow Barn: in addition to Special Events you should have also received the offer to begin the quest series to obtain, and then build the new Cow Barn. This is a CRITICAL component to our present and future Strategies in the game, so it should become your primary goal to complete the building process as well as the related quests.

The reason for this is that once you have the building placed and fully activated, you will then be able to go into your Storage and pull out any of the Prized Cows you have stored there and place them in the building, which essentially gives you access to their increased coin yields as well as special resources.

Why this is important is really simple - as we have reached the point in the game where we need to seriously begin building a large Coin reserve (bearing in mind that the game has a hard-limit of five million Farmville Coins at any one time) the fact that per-harvest, your Prized Animals are worth more should make this an obvious must-do for you.

There is also the fact that these Prized Animals have been basically put on ice in storage to free up their animal cap slots for your farm animal population, and the fact that once they are inside the new building they once again do not count against your animal cap, well there you go - win-win!

With that mischief managed, it is time to examine the primary Strategy involved in shifting to a coin-focused strategy.

Making Coin

While animals - and particularly Prized Animals - are a good source for coin, they are not really going to be your major income-producing source for the game. Every little bit counts however, so you should make an effort to be sure that your prized animal buildings are filled with the top-coin-earners for the prized animals of each type you have.

That means checking your storage and, if you find a more valuable prized animal version is in storage while a basic prized animal of that type occupies the structure for that type, you will want to remove and sell the lower-tier animal and replace it with the higher tier one.

Now that you have dealt with that part of the process, it is time to examine the primary coin earning mechanism in the game, which is Crafting.

Crafting Strategically

At Level 21 the variety of craft goods you can create is fairly broad, but as you will see from the list below, there are specific and highly desirable Items you can be Crafting that will offer a much greater return on your investment of time and effort.

The following list represents your target Food Crafts:

Peach Lemonade = $1030 + 9XP (x6 Peaches + x1 Lemonade)

Goat Cheese Tart = $1500 + 8XP (x5 Milk+ x5 Goat Cheese)

Carrot Cake = $1940 + 17XP (x1 Carrot Bread + x1 Frosting)

Sunflower Cookies = $1970 + 15XP (x14 Sunflower + x2 Batter)

Potato Salad = $2040 + 12XP (x4 Egg + x8 Potato)

Potato Roll = $2170 + 13XP (x1 Flour + x10 Potato)

Lemon Meringue Pie = $2400 + 22XP (x1 Lemon Meringue Filling + x1 Pie Crust)

Savory Broccoli Quiche = $2490 + 16XP (x1 Broccoli Quiche + x3 Salt)

Honey Fig Tart = $2740 + 19XP (x1 Honey Fig Custard + x1 Batter)

Real CA Brie = $3000 + 16XP (x15 Milk + x3 Salt)

Hibiscus Scone = $3020 + 19XP (x12 Hibiscus + x1 Batter)

Hibiscus Lemonade = $3090 + 19XP (x12 Hibiscus + x1 Lemonade)

Real CA Lugano Quiche = $3120 + 19XP (x1 Real CA Quiche + x10 Olives)

Glazed Purple Dragon Carrots = $4530 + 24XP (x3 Sugar + x12 Purple Dragon Carrots)

Purple Dragon Carrot Cake = $4530 + 25XP (x1 Batter + x8 Purple Dragon Carrots)

Purple Dragon Carrot Smoothie = $4810 + 26XP (x3 Water + x14 Purple Dragon Carrots)

The following list represents your target Crafts:

! Be sure to check the time-limited recipes FIRST !

Wool Teddybear = $1910 + 15XP (x1 Wool Thread + x1 Wool Bolt)

Feather Duster = $2320 + 16XP (x4 Brown Feather + x1 Lumber)

Produce Tote = $2330 + 16XP (x2 Wool Bolt + x3 Fine Sheep Fleece)

Rooster Weather Vane = $2590 + 19XP (x4 Copper Sheet + x1 Wood)

Heavy Fur Throw = $2660 + 18XP (x2 Wool Bolt + x6 Fur)

Blue Handkerchief = $2670 + 21XP (x1 Blue Wool Bolt + x1 Wool Thread)

Votive Candle = $2750 + 20XP (x3 Glass Sheet + x1 Metal Sheet)

Bouquet of Orange Yarn Flowers = $3350 + 24XP (x1 Wool Thread + x1 Orange Yarn Flower)

The list above should provide a starting point, but the actual recipes that you choose will have a lot more to do with the crops or resources that you raise and generate than simply picking an item from the lists.

While Kiln Crafts are not big coin makers (they average 500 coins per item) if you have leftover Power Units and Kiln resources with nothing else to do with them, they are an idea.

Obvious Clue Time

At the risk of being annoying to you (please accept that this is NOT my intention) I need to repeat the fact that you have reached a stage in your game play in which it is absolutely necessary for you to significantly alter your game play Strategy 180 degrees as you focus on being a mercenary whose only concern, immediate or otherwise, is to make money.

A Matter of Perspective

Before you can place your farm on a profit-based footing you have to make a decision: what will be the source? What are you going to craft? To help in making that decision, here is an example of an aggressive path:

The Cantaloupe Smoothie

The recipe for this is x10 Cantaloupe + x2 Lemon Water, and it pays $2,550 Farm Coins per when sold.

If you actually break it down in terms of gain, here is what you get:

Lemon Water: x4 Lemon + x2 Water = 4XP + $0 Coins

Cantaloupe Smoothie: x10 Cantaloupe + x2 Lemon Water = 16XP + $2,550 Coins

You end up with 20XP and $2,550 per craft.

To get there you will need to aggressively grow Cantaloupe (which is a 2-hour crop) and spend money re-tooling your Groves to fill them with Lemon Trees -- you cannot store trees in your Storage Barn, which means that you will have to either stick them to the side (and have a lot of trees), or sell off the trees whose resources you do not actively need at the moment, while at the same time being certain NOT to sell of your premium trees - sell only the trees you can easily replace.

Once you get this into full production you will very likely be amazed at how quickly it becomes profitable. You don't have to do Cantaloupe Smoothies, you can pick whatever craft you prefer, but the Basic Strategy is the same.

Other Profit-based Activities

While you are in the process of creating your production system for what you will be Crafting, you will also be pulling in profit from your mastered animals, and in-between crafting of animal and other resources into crafted goods.

When the two income paths are combined, you will realize your goals that much faster. But what is the point to just getting to the point where you can unlock the next farm segment? Ideally that is not where you stop!

You keep pressing this Strategy until you have banked as close to 5-million Farm Coins as you can (5-million coins is the limit you are allowed to retain), which should put you in a strong position to unlock the remaining segments after you switch back to an XP-focused strategy in order to build the levels you need to unlock them.

The Example Using Our Guide Farm

It will help you to understand the basic Strategies to understand the actual approach that we used for our test farm - the one that we used to write this guide - so first here is the basic resources set aside for the profit-based structure:

Existing Applicable Resources

Lemon Tree Groves: x1 (x4 Lemon Trees)

Crop Squares: x40

White Chickens: x2

Added Resources: The following were added to increase the output and make the process more efficient. Note that this was a very conservative approach as it was intended to prevent the total stripping of the farm and its potential to participate in quests and missions that would crop up, but it could just as easily have been a total stripping for a more serious approach.

Lemon Tree Groves: +2 (for a total of x3 Lemon Tree Groves / x12 Lemon Trees)

White Chickens: +10 (for a total of x12)

The Crop Squares count remained the same largely due to the fact that 40 squares is the magic and manageable number with respect to the Water Unit requirements - I could easily have added more but this would have put a strain on WRU's and prevented me from completely filling and processing all Crop Squares for each session.

It should also be pointed out that Fertilizer is the weak spot in this plan, not Water. It was much harder to obtain the necessary counts in FRU's than it was WRU's - just saying... It was absolutely necessary for me to take advantage of the Wall Posts for FRU's in order to maintain a steady supply.

Special Note on Groves: Bear in mind that we are relying upon mates to water our Tree Groves - having specifically asked a bunch to make it a point to water specific groves which we more or less designated “theirs” in terms of what they should be doing for helper Actions...

You will need to have that sort of arrangement with your mates if you plan to split up your Crafting to include tree-based resources, but considering the fact that they are generally 12-hour crops and run parallel to Crop Square production it really is a good idea...

The Crafting Scheme

To boost the productivity I chose to utilize two different recipes for this process...

Recipe 1: Herb Tuscan Bread (x1 Batter + x14 Oregano = 16XP + $3,760 Coins)

Recipe 2: Cantaloupe Smoothie (x10 Cantaloupe + x2 Lemon Water = 16XP + $2,550 Coins)

This allows the use of both a short and intermediate timed crop, and the use of tree-based resources as well as crop based. What that means in simple terms is that while I am building up a large supply of Lemons and turning them into Lemon Water, I am at the same time able to build up a large supply of both types of crop. I will also be adding a large number (to the maximum capacity of Farm Animals I can) of the least expensive Chickens in order to produce as many Eggs as I can that being another required ingredient.

In a nutshell I will need to grow/gather large quantities of the following resources while at the same time making the best use of water resources (WRU's) and fertilizer (FRU's) as I can:

Wheat (for Flour/Batter - 4 Hour Crop)

White Eggs (for Batter - 15 Minute Harvest)

Lemon (for Lemon Water - 12 Hour Crop)

Oregano (Primary Resource - 4 Hour Crop)

Cantaloupe (Primary Resource - 2 Hour Crop)

Once all of those decisions were made and the plan set, it all comes down to logging as many sessions in a day that you can and using the Wall as efficiently as you can (along with your own Farm Animals to create FRU's) and growing like mad!

Rotation Strategy

The best approach that you can use for the earning phase is to rotate between crop types, bearing in mind that any limited time crops will also have limited time recipes associated with them. What that translates to is simple - you only have a limited number of days to use the resources you obtained from any limited-time crops so act wisely and quickly.

One of the more effective approaches is to plant your crops in the morning and evening, and log in several times in between plantings to use the time-based resources like WRU's (Water) to make the ingredients that you will need for your recipes.

A good example of that would be Lemon Water or Lime Water (or both depending on your plans), which allows you to prep for the serious Crafting runs you do later. It is not just a good idea but a major necessity for you to prep and pre-craft a supply of the different components required for your target recipes.

The End Run

Bearing in mind that you will be gaining a large amount of XP throughout this entire process, there really is no need to keep track of or celebrate the levels for this part of your game because they are going to come as a result of building your bank anyway.

One final comment for this stage of the game - considering that you have already re-tooled your farm to earn coin, and the fact that you can only have a max of 5-million coin banked, if there are any high priced Items you actually want to have on your farm, well, now would be the time to buy and place them considering that you are tooled to make Coin, right?