Farmville added a new adoptive animal about a week ago. The turtle.

The turtle is formidable, while not as profitable as the swan, it’s very close and is cuter. The turtle grants 86 coins in 3 days.

Farmville changed most of the crop mastery harvest numbers. Not sure why they decided to do this, but some of the values went up a lot. In any case, the table is now updated. You can find it here.

The new farmville feature is crop mastery. You will receive rewards now for harvesting each crop at certain levels. For example, blackberries mastery level 1 is 1500 blackberries harvested. I am almost there so I will keep you updated on what the reward is for that. I have compiled a table where I will record all the mastery levels. You can find that table here: Crop Mastery Levels. Or you can find the table under the Farmville Guide tab.

Please help me fill in the table so we can determine which are the best crops to master. Just leave comments on your mastery level, the reward, and the harvest requirement for the next level and I’ll add them to the table.

There are three ways to get cash (notes not coins) in farmville.  Unfortunately none of them are very good.

1)  The easiest way is simply to buy cash with real money.

2)  The second way is good, but limited, you earn $1 for every level you progress.

3)  The final method is to complete the promotional offers available.

The promotional offers involve a variety of different things, some requiring purchase.  What have you found to be the best (cheapest/best deals) on the list?

The best way to buy experience is to plow, plant, and delete soybeans. However, if you are willing to buy Sweet Potatoes, you can follow the same process with them.  Soybeans grant three experience and cost 30 coins, includes the plowing.

Sweet potatoes grant four experience and cost 25 coins.  If you are in need of experience this is a better option.  But, it costs.

Welcome to Ultimate Farmville Strategy.  I was issued a challenge by my sister-in-law, you have to beat Lance.  Lance is married to my wife’s other sister, and among the family he is way out ahead of everyone in farmville.  Who am I to turn down a challenge like that!  I accepted, and this blog is a collection of information about how I am going to beat Lance.

Currently, Lance is about 54,000 xp and I am around 51,000.  I was quickly able to catch him using some basic strategy in the game.  But, Lance has almost 500,000 more coins than I do, and he has figured out my basic moves and can now stay ahead of me if I don’t become more clever, which is what I intend to do.

Farmville is a game played on facebook where one can plant crops, collect animals and trees, decorate the farm with barns, hay, and fences in order to have a unique, highly productive farm.  You can visit friends farms and help out by scaring away crows or clearing weeds.  You can give friends gifts of animals or trees to help them along.  It’s a basic social strategy game that has quickly become one of the most popular.  In only a few months it has grown to tens of millions of players.  If you’re here, you likely already know why.

I intend to post information here every day.  Thanks for visiting, and I hope to help you beat the Lance in your life.

There are a number of ways to cheat in facebook. I have compiled a number of them under the heading facebook cheats. I will quickly an overview here. Some cheats simply speed up the farming process, by automating the repetitive clicking that the game requires.

One useful tool called Gridclicker automates the clicks in a grid pattern. In Gridclicker you set up your grid to match the grid in farmville, hit ’send clicks’ and gridclicker will send a perfect grid of clicks much faster than can be done manually. This is useful for plowing, planting, and harvesting. But, this approach doesn’t work for deleting, setting decorations, or harvesting from animals because in between each click one has to click something else, like the ‘Accept’ button, or ‘Harvest Goats Milk’.

For this kind of automation there are a number of tools that record click macros. A macro records the screen position of a click and the time that passes between clicks and plays it back exactly as it was performed. The trick with macros is to position the screen and the farmville flash window exactly as they were when the macro was recorded. If the browser window or the famville position is different, the clicks won’t be positioned correctly. The other trick is to be aware of the timing of the farmville game. Between some clicks the farmville game communicates with Zynga’s servers. If the servers are responsive when the macro is recorded, but lag when the macro is played back, an action like clicking on the accept button will occur to early, and the macros clicks will go on without realizing that it has become out of sync.

There are many useful macro tools, the one I have used with some success is Axife. Axife has a demo that you can use to record and play back mouse click macros. If you would like to save macros to disk to play back later, Axife can be purchased. If anyone knows of a better mouse click recorder, please leave a comment.

For farmville players who wish to progress very quickly, they are planting and harvesting often, every four hours is optimal. But this means a lot of clicking, clicking, clicking. And the clicking wouldn’t be so bad except that the little farmer man moves so slowly that there’s waiting and clicking. It can take as long as 20 minutes to complete a cycle on a 20×20 farm grid.

Put Baby in a Corner

But, there are ways to speed up the process. One simple trick is to fence in the farmer. When your farmer can’t get to the plot he must plow/plant/harvest, he will simple do so remotely. This means that his progress meter starts instantly without having to wait for him to reach the plot. This seems to speed things up considerably.

Cheat Engine Speed Cheat

Another cheat involves a software tool called Cheat Engine. Cheat engine is a general tool for changing values in memory for a variety of programs. It can be used to change experience levels, coins, farmville dollars. We’ll talk more about those cheats in another post, but it also has a setting that will change the speed that farmville runs the program. The overall program speed can be turned up to 5, 10, 20, 50 or more times the normal speed. It does cause some buggy behavior and generally makes the program unresponsive at times, so I have found that 10 or 20 times normal speed is the most effective.

Used in combination with Gridclicker, and the Put Baby in a Corner cheat this cheat can take the entire harvesting/plowing/planting process down to just a few minutes. If you are a power leveler cycling through crops many times a day, this is the only way to go.

In his book, The Goal, Eli Goldratt defines his management philosophy known as the Theory of Constraints.  The idea is that any productive system can be optimized by identifying the constraints or bottlenecks within the system.  The system cannot produce any more than this bottleneck allows.  By removing those bottlenecks, productive output can be increased.

In order to understand how to optimize our farmville farm, we need to identify those bottlenecks.   You may consider money to be a constraint, because money is required to farm or to plant and frequently it is in short supply.  However, we can always make more money, save money, get money through the daily raffle or friend’s gifts.  So, although sometimes we don’t have enough money to do exactly as we would like, it’s not a fixed constraint.  It’s not our bottleneck.

One constraint is the element of time.  Each crop takes a certain amount of time, so we cannot produce more crops than we have time to mature them.  Another constraint is the size of the farm.  Once we have upgraded the farm to its maximum size, 20×20, the amount of space is a constraint.  There are actually 82×82 individual spots in a 20×20 farm.  These two constraints, space and time, become the lens through which we will view all available productive units within the game.

We will once again consider that one experience point is worth 10 coins.  We do this because through the plowing of a single plot and planting soybeans, we gain three experience points for 30 coins.  We can delete the soybean plot and start over, repeating this process as many times as we have money.

If we consider space and time, the real measure of the productive output of a unit, whether it be a planted crop, a tree, or an animal, is the amount of coins it produces (plus 10 coins for each experience point gained) divided by the amount of space it takes up, over time.  I have compiled a complete table that takes all of these producing units and compares them, with an adjusted metric profit/hr/spc so that we can discover which items would be the most productive.  You can sort by clicking these columns.

What we find is that the Acai tree is the most productive element in the game by a great margin.  If we were willing to buy enough Acai trees to fill the entire 20×20 farm, which would hold 82×82 or 6724 acai trees, we would produce 22,122 coins per hour or 530,927 coins per day.  However, acai trees require that we buy farmville cash, or earn it by leveling, or by submitting to promotional offers.  If we bought that many acai trees, it would cost around $30,000 (27 farm cash per tree * 16 2/3 cents * 6724)  in real money.  That’s not for me.

If you were to do this, you could use as much money as you chose (up to 530,000 coins a day) to buy experience (53,000 xp daily).  No other combination of planting/trees/animals could out perform this set up.

If we eliminate acai trees, then the same strategy holds for the next most productive item, the ugly duckling, and for the next, more available item, the olive tree.  The olive tree can be abundant if you have plenty of high level neighbors.  A farm full of olive trees would produce 188,810 coins each day.  In comparison, the most profitable crop (on a per unit of time basis) is blackberries.  If we once again consider an experience point to be worth 10 coins, blackberries make 6.75 coins in an hour plus 5 coins for one half an experience point.  That’s 11.75 coins per plot, per hour.  On a 20×20 grid we would have 400 * 11.75 or 4700 coins and hour/ 112,800 coins per day.  Just sixty-some odd percent of what we can produce with olive trees.

If anyone is interested in becoming friends in order to trade olive trees leave your profile link in the comments and we’ll start an olive tree compact.