Prized Animal System

There are actually two ways of looking at the moment when one of your farm animals makes the transition from regular-resource-producing farm animal to “Prized” resource-producing animal – you either feel good about the fact that you have raised an animal on your farm from baby-to-adult that has now achieved the point where it will produce special resources that you can use for advanced Crafting recipes -- or if the basic resources that are produced by the regular adults is more important to you, put the Prized Animals in storage so that you can use them later, and replace them with a new one for that type to continue producing the resources you have been using.

When the animal in question is a type that cost you Farm Bucks to obtain it is easy to understand why many farmers greet the announcement that they have transitioned from regular to prize status with cursing and regret. On the other hand, the animals that cost you real money to obtain also consistently deliver pretty good XP in addition to gold coins as well as the special prized resource when they are prized status,

The following table (this is a work in progress so some information will be missing until we reach the point at which we can obtain it in the game) presents the basic Prize Animal System stats as they are presently configured in the game:

Maximizing Prized Impact on Your Farm

It may seem fairly obvious when you give the matter serious consideration, but if you have yet to do so you may be missing an excellent opportunity to shape both your XP and income efficiency when it comes to your Prized Animals.

On the one hand most farmers consider the Prized Animals on their farm to be a sort of mixture of blessing and curse - blessing since they provide advanced Crafting resources, but curse because they take up a slot you need for a regular adult animal that provides the basic crafting resources you will be using a lot more of...

To address that shortcoming the powers that be in Farmville 2 have been creating Prized Animal structures - buildings that can contain a specific number of Prized Animals and, once placed in them, those Prized Animals no longer count against the Farm Animal Population Limits.

The trick here is to be sure that your Prized Animal structures are populated with the best (meaning that give the best ROI) type of animals!

At the present time the following Prized Animal Structures (with population number) exist in the game:

• Goat Shelter (Max Population: 12)

• Prized Chicken Coop (Max Population: 9)

• Rabbit Warren (Max Population: 12)

• Real CA Dairy Cow Barn (Max Population: 12)

• Sheep Shack (Max Population: 12)

Basically that covers your Goats, Chickens, Rabbits, Cows, and Sheep - and there have already been confirmed plans announced to provide Housing for the Prized versions of your Horses and Pigs, and possibly others as the game matures. Though really once they add the housing for Horses and Pigs a major source of irritation will be largely eliminated even if you still have to deal with Adult animals becoming Prized. Why?

The simple answer is really simple: once you have populated your Prized Animal Housing to the max, you will be making an effort to see to it that the new “Adults” you add to your farm resolve into Prized Animals that improve the population OF that housing - so really this leads to a much more efficient and more profitable approach to farming and animal population. So hey, cool that!

That being the case you should try to come up with a plan - or at least an inventory - of the animals currently occupying your Prized Housing, and figure out what you want to eventually replace them with.

Once you have maximized the population in your Prized Housing, you can switch to replacing future Prized animals with the most economic versions to cycle them through the Adult stage in order to maintain a steady supply of the basic resources you need for Crafting, while having already ensured that you have a reliable supply of the advanced resources while at the same time you have maxed the XP and Coin you are making as a side-effect.

Managing your Pool of Prized Animals who lack Housing

While under normal circumstances your concerns will revolve around maintaining a steady stream of resource-producing animals the population of animals on your farm is limited to whatever watering resources you have presently constructed – and even after you build all the water resources you can, there is a hard cap of x50 animals on your farm period.

Does that mean you are going to have to sell those Prized Animals to make way for new resource-producing stock? The answer is yes – and no.

While it makes sense to sell some of the Prized Animals that are taking up space on your farm animal cap and preventing you from obtaining the potential resources that their position in the list represents, when they are one of the special animals that you purchased from an event, or they are a cash-value animal that you bought (for whatever reason) that potentially pay off large amounts of XP every 18 hour cycle (when we say large amounts we mean XP that is greater than 100 per cycle) selling them off can be a painful decision to make – so the simple answer is don't. Do not do it.

Instead of selling off that high-XP producing Prized Animal, stick it in your storage bin instead; that has the result of removing it from the count for the animal cap on your farm, which means you can now add a resource-producing animal to replace it, and you still have that special animal (and the XP production that it potentially represents) on ice as it were, to be trotted out later when your needs have changed and XP is the important resources you need to create!

You should bear in mind that any time you store an animal in the storage system the timer for that animal is reset, so when you bring it out of storage it will require the full 18 hours before it produces XP again – but that is OK, the point to this is that you get to keep that special or high-XP producing animal whereas otherwise you may have had to sell it.