Farmville Farm Wizard

There are three major games on Facebook that allow you to become a virtrual farmer, Farm Town, myFarm and FarmVille. Last spring, I played a lot of myFarm and populated the farm with trees and horses and then gotr bored and wandered away.

As more and more of my friends began playing FarmVille, I wondered if the game was different at all and why I should want to play it. The short answer is that FarmVille is the next step for people who got bored with the lack of things to do at myFarm.

In FarmVille, the animals actually become productive parts of your farm and there is more to do than just plant and harvest crops. Ofcourse, planting and harvesting crops is important too, but the game doesn’t end there. FarmVille combines the elements of the earlier farm games with the elements of some of the gardening games, allowing you to decorate your farm, hang out with neighbors and even do random proper deeds for friends.

Beginning a FarmVille Farm

If you are enthusiastic in starting a FarmVille farm, find a friend who is playing. It shouldn’t be hard. There are about 47 million of them on Facebook. Wait until one of them posts a status reporting indicating they’ve found a lost cow or frightful duckling wandering that needs a new home and then adopted the lonely animal. This gets you a free head start on your farm.

Animals and trees launch producing cash after three or four days, so getting free ones given to you from your friends is a great way to get a jump start on your FarmVille farm.

The game also starts you with four pre-planted plots, to get you your first harvest. Between the first harvest and your starting cash, make sure to plow the ground and add more plots of strawberries to make money hasty. Strawberries are the cheapest cut to buy seed for and turn around a handsome profit in just four hours. But plants do wither on the vine, so if you aren’t going to be able to harvest those strawberries four hours later, contemplate planting something that takes a bit longer to grow.

And, when you are doing the math to calculate the profit on a particular crop, remember to add in the cost of plowing, not just the cost of the seed and to figure out the potential profit to time ratio as well. For example, planting a residence of strawberries will get you 35 coins four hours later, but it will cost you 15 coins to plow the land and 10 coins for seed. Pumpkins will net you 68 coins in 8 hours, costing you 15 for plowing and 30 for seed. Net profit for two batches of strawberries in 8 hours is 20 coins; net profit for one batch of pumpkins in 8 hours is 23 coins.

The other difference is how much time you have to spend harvesting, plowing and planting. If you can only visit your farm once a day, planting strawberries is just a recipe for dead vines.

Find some neighbors

Like many Facebook games, FarmVille really wants you to share with your friends. So, the game offers you a ribbon system, with extra experience points and extra cash for winning various awards. One of the most simple awards to get and to help promote the game is the Local Celebrity ribbon. Once you have recruited 8 neighbors you gather a white ribbon. More friends means even more free experience.

The other nice thing about friends and neighbors in FarmVille is that they often provide additonal tasks your farmer can complete to form more money and get more experience. Helping a neighbor rake leaves or pull weeds takes a couple clicks of the mouse and earns you coins and experience, helping you to move good up in the FarmVille world.

Beg For Presents

As allotment of its concern to get more people interested in the game, FarmVille rewards you for sending presents to your friends and asking them to send gifts in return. Gifts can be decoration items or trees and animals. Your friends will probably appreciate you sending them animals and plants which will eventually produce an income. And, with each one you send, you send a little ticket asking friends to send one in return. Be sure to send these out over the course of the day since you can only accept three gifts at a time.