Country Story on Facebook Game Guide

Some of the most popular games on Facebook right now are farm games. The newest entry into this category, Country Story, aims to take the Facebook farming experience one or two steps further. While many of the concepts in Country Account will be familiar to people who have played FarmVille or Farm Town, the newest game from Playfish goes beyond the plow, seed, harvest formula of these games. In fact, people who have played the very popular Harvest Moon games will find many elements from that game in Country Story.

Starting up your farm

When you start up your new ranch, first step is to crate your character. Make up a icy name, pick your favorite outfit and gender and you are status to go.

Immediately you will be introduced to the mayor of your new town, who will lead you through the tutorial that teaches the basics of farming in Country Anecdote.

Follow the mayors directions, but don’t be tempted to plow extra fields, plant any extra crops or water your fields more than absolutely needed to conclude the tutorial. Don’t choose up any of the rocks or wood pieces either. When the tutorial is over, you will be presented with a series of quests, and many of these require that you water a certain amount of fields, pick up materials etc. As completing a quest rewards you with both money and cool seeds or fertilizer for your farm.

Your level limits how many fields you can plow at any time, and so limits how worthy you can water. If you go overboard plowing and watering during the tutorial, you will not have enough available fields to finish some of the earliest quests.

Growing crops

Starting out, Country Story will seem like you’re playing Farm Town all over again, except you are even more slight in that you can not plow up as much field as you want. Don’t worry though, as you get more money and you increase your level, Country Sage will add game elements that makes it a much deeper game. For now, you will have to settle for planting white radishes and watering your crops.

If you have run out of seeds, you can buy more at the store which you can find by either going to the village and finding the store there, or more conveniently, directly from the window that opens when you click the seed pod to start planting.

Country story introduces watering your crop. While watering your crop is a pretty basic requirement in farming, it previous farm games watering has not been necessary. In Country Story though, your crops will wither and eventually die if they don’t get enough water. To water your plants. You need to fill your watering can at the well. Running back and forth to the well can be a bit tedious, so luckily, as you water your fields, you will get watering cans that can hold more water.

When a field just has been plowed, it will by completely dry. You can still plant seeds in a dry field, but it will not grow. As you water your fields, notice that there is four different levels of water saturation for a field. So make sure you water your fields as thoroughly as you can to keep them from drying out to fast.

Later in Country Story, crops will be introduced with different water requirement, so it’s a good idea to get into the habit of checking the requirements of your crops already. If you have completed all your quests at this point, you should have earned corn and bell pepper seeds, make definite you plant at least one of each type of seed, and mouse over the different fields. When you move your mouse over a field with seeds or plants, you will see a little information window that tells you what kind of seeds they are and what they need to grow, and how long until they can be harvested. This information will be useful when you progress to more demanding crops, but the time to harvest information is useful enough that you should collect used to using this feature.

Fertilizers

Another new belief in Country Story is the addition of fertilizers, for several of the initial quests, you’re reward will include a couple of bags of fertilizer. In real life, fertilizer is not a very good reward, but in Country Legend, fertilizers are very useful. They basically work by cutting down the time to harvest for your crops. The type of fertilizer you get from the quests shortens the time to harvest by 4 hours, which just happens to be the time the white radishes need to get ripe. So, if you fertilize a field of white radishes as soon as you have planted the seeds, the crops will be ready to harvest immediately.

One of the quests asks you to use fertilizer on your farm, but when that quest is done, leave the rest of your free fertilizer in your storage shed. Fertilizer is very expensive in Country Story, and it’s a good idea to assign yours for bigger and better harvests too come.

Quests

Country Story introduces another interesting element that adds a level of depth and helps progress the game, quests. Throughout the game, different people in the village will have something they need help with, and they are not ashy to ask for your help. Luckily, they are not shy about giving rewards for a job well don, e either, and completing quests is great both for the rewards and for the added experience, or green points, you will earn to progress through the Country Story levels. Always claim a quest as soon as you study one available, and don’t forget to go help to the quest menu and claim your reward when a quest is completed.

Fresh quests become available as you reach a unusual level, and as you progress, the quests rewards will be increasingly profitable. From getting free livestock, to massive amounts of ‘green points’ the quests become as important part of reaching the higher levels. There are too many quests in the game to list in this article, so build positive to check the related links for an excellent list of every quest in the game complete with tips on how to complete the more arresting ones.

Resources

Country Yarn includes yet another new aspect, collecting resources. With time, rocks and wooden logs show up on your farmland. This might seem annoying, but it is actually a blessing in disguise. The rocks and wood you collect will be needed later in the game when the time comes to expand your farm. To commence raising chickens for example, not only will you need a lot of coins to buy the chickens, you will also need a lot of building material to build a chicken coop. Be smart and start saving up those materials as soon as you can, it will come in very handy later in the game.

It is even possible to collect resources from your neighbors farms. Depending on what kind of relationship you have or want to have with your neighbors it might be a good notion to let those extra rocks stay right where they are. It’s not very neighborly to steal your neighbor’s materials.

That said, Country Story actually has a special tool you can consume specifically from stealing from other farms. When going to a neighbor you’ll have the option to purchase a dim glove and go crop picking in your neighbor’s fields. The payoff won’t be huge, but the fun of raiding your friends corn fields can be reward enough. If you decide to let your fingers stray though, expect to have the favor returned and having all your neighbors turning on you could be a real drain on your cash flow.

Raising animals

In good Harvest Moon fashion, Country Anecdote has a much more complicated approach to keeping animals on your farm. This is one of the areas where the game really sets itself from the rest of the farm games you could play on Facebook.

First of all, to add animals you have to also do a livestock building to house them. So adding a barn or a chicken coop actually has a meaning in the game and is not just for decoration as in FarmVille for example. Once you’ve built a structure and got your animals you’ll notice that you have to provide food for the animals for them to thrive. This means growing and harvesting grass so you can feed it to your cow. In return the animals will originate products you can sell for excellent profits. Grass won’t be available to grow until level 20, but you can always get some from your friends if you want to get the cow early.

In Country Story you’ll have to support your animals fed every day. This means you can’t plant 4 day crops and not long in again for half a week any longer. Keeping farm animals will require that you follow up on your farm regularly. This might seem like it will make the game too involved and time consuming, but the added levels of involvement makes the farming experience more rewarding and it’s easier to commit the time to keep everything running smooth when your tasks are diverse and meaningful.

In addition to needing food, your livestock also needs to be cared for. The chicken needs cuddles and the cows and sheep needs to be brushed. Click on the heart symbol when your hovering over a chicken to give it some loving, or the brush symbol to keep your larger animals happy. If your animals are either hungry or sad, they will not mature into adult animals as hasty as they could, and you will not be able to collect produce from them until they are all grown up.

When you reach level 8, if you manage to come by enough building materials for a chicken coop, you will receive a chicken as a quest reward. This will most likely be the first chance you get to raise animals, and it’s a chance you should jump on as soon as you can. Prepare for level 8 by collecting as much material as you can, and do not use it for anything else. Raising chickens will impact your farm in many ways, you will make an sterling profit of the eggs, but you will also have to reserve a part of your fields for growing chicken wheat. Later on in the game, when the very high income crops become available you can switch your fields over to grow only high income produce and engage the animal feed you need from the store, but as an initial strategy it’s best to grow your possess.

Most of the animals in Country Story are only available for ‘playcash’, PlayFish’s virtual currency which is available for purchase. Unless you are a correct fanatic, it does not make sense to invest real money to be able to buy virtual animals for Country Story. At least not until you have progressed through the first 30 levels and know what animals you will be gifted as parts of the quests. Again, make sure you read the quest list before committing to spending real money on animals, the list will explain what animals you can get for free and how to get them.