Yesterday, I wrote a fairly popular post about the personal economics of Farmville, the extremely popular Facebook game by Zynga. There were enough comments and emails about the original post, I decided to write a quick follow-up to cover some of the most common ideas and concerns.
I was also able to get the data on Red Wheat and Yellow Mellon, which were missing from my original post. Also, this weekend saw the (temporary?) advent of “Super Berries”. I’ve updated my original table here, showing the rank of all Farmville crops based on net profit per day per square. Let’s just say there is a reason Super Berries are, well, super:
| Crop | Profit / Day |
| Super Berries | 900.00 |
| Tomatoes | 174.00 |
| Sunflowers | 165.00 |
| Coffee | 162.00 |
| Blueberries | 156.00 |
| Carrots | 150.00 |
| Raspberries | 132.00 |
| Broccoli | 129.00 |
| Red Wheat | 84.67 |
| Yellow Mellon | 77.00 |
| Peppers | 77.00 |
| Rice | 72.00 |
| Corn | 71.67 |
| Pumpkin | 69.00 |
| Pineapple | 66.00 |
| Potatoes | 65.00 |
| Strawberries | 60.00 |
| Yellow Bell | 54.00 |
| Watermelon | 50.75 |
| Cotton | 39.00 |
| Soybeans | 33.00 |
| Squash | 33.00 |
| Artichoke | 29.75 |
| Eggplant | 24.00 |
| Wheat | 21.67 |
The most interesting questions and comments came from Abhi Kumar, product manager for Farmville at Zynga. Needless to say, it was extremely flattering to have Abhi interested in my post, and to hear his thoughts on the topic.
The first point Abhi raised was interesting. The question was, how would I factor experience into these calculations. Clearly, experience is crucial to the game in several regards:
- It’s crucial for rising in the technology tree, to get access to new crops, tools, and other beneficial items.
- It’s a basic game mechanic that drives people to see their “score” rise.
- It’s public to your neighbors. As a social game, this adds an additional game mechanic, similar to a leaderboard, that encourages you to boost your score.
In order to calculate the experience for each crop, I took the experience that each crop delivers per cycle, added one experience point per cycle for re-plowing, and then normalized the values for a single day (24 hours) and a single square.
| Crop | Experience / Day |
| Super Berries | 24.00 |
| Blueberries | 12.00 |
| Strawberries | 12.00 |
| Raspberries | 12.00 |
| Tomatoes | 6.00 |
| Pumpkin | 6.00 |
| Carrots | 4.00 |
| Rice | 4.00 |
| Peppers | 3.00 |
| Soybeans | 3.00 |
| Coffee | 3.00 |
| Broccoli | 2.50 |
| Sunflowers | 2.00 |
| Pineapple | 1.50 |
| Yellow Bell | 1.50 |
| Squash | 1.50 |
| Eggplant | 1.50 |
| Red Wheat | 1.00 |
| Corn | 1.00 |
| Potatoes | 1.00 |
| Cotton | 1.00 |
| Wheat | 1.00 |
| Yellow Mellon | 0.75 |
| Watermelon | 0.75 |
| Artichoke | 0.75 |
Not surprisingly, the quick cycle-time of the berries dominates this table.
The question is, how do you blend the value of experience and coins? The truth is, the function for valuing experience is probably too complicated to get right.
However, I did find a simplistic proxy. 1 experience point = 15 coins.
Why? Well, it turns out you can just sit there, plow a square for 15 coins, and get 1 experience point. You can then delete the square and do it again. So at least, in theory, you can “buy” an infinite supply of experience points for 15 coins each.
When you include experience at this price, the rank of the crops changes significantly from the original “coins only” version of the most profitable crops:
| Crop | Profit + XP / Day |
| Super Berries | 1260.00 |
| Blueberries | 336.00 |
| Raspberries | 312.00 |
| Tomatoes | 264.00 |
| Strawberries | 240.00 |
| Carrots | 210.00 |
| Coffee | 207.00 |
| Sunflowers | 195.00 |
| Broccoli | 166.50 |
| Pumpkin | 159.00 |
| Rice | 132.00 |
| Peppers | 122.00 |
| Red Wheat | 99.67 |
| Pineapple | 88.50 |
| Yellow Mellon | 88.25 |
| Corn | 86.67 |
| Potatoes | 80.00 |
| Soybeans | 78.00 |
| Yellow Bell | 76.50 |
| Watermelon | 62.00 |
| Squash | 55.50 |
| Cotton | 54.00 |
| Eggplant | 46.50 |
| Artichoke | 41.00 |
| Wheat | 36.67 |
In many ways, this final table is a more satisfying answer on what to plant, since it gives a fairly balanced view across coins (which are needed to buy seeds, tools, and other items) and experience (which is also needed to raise your level to buy seeds, tools, and other items).
Clearly, this analysis is very sensitive to the value of an experience point. The more value you ascribe to experience, the more the compound table begins to resemble the experience-only version.
As part of my original post, I had run some analysis that suggested that if you value the time that it requires to check on your crops, harvest them, and re-plow & plant, then you might get a different order. I’ve now updated the chart to include the three crops that I didn’t have yesterday.
click to see the enlarged chart graphic
Based on the addition of the new crops, the top five crops in terms of their value in $ US / hour are:
- Yellow Mellon
- Broccoli
- Red Wheat
- Corn
- Watermelon
All of the values are still well below $1 / hour.
I re-ran these numbers utilizing the experience points. While they did shift the numbers to the right, they didn’t alter the ranking significantly. This is likely because the cost in time (15 minutes) for each cycle and the high conversion rate (1500 coins / $1 US) means that the time cost of checking dwarfs the incremental value of the experience per cycle.
That’s why you can see that one wacky line, Super Berries, which starts so high it’s off the chart, but crashes down under the weight of 12 cycle refreshes per day.
A couple people specifically wanted to see this analysis taking into account the new Tractor, which speeds plowing by up to 4x (although you need to buy fuel). Since I don’t have a Tractor yet (working on it), I estimated what would happen if a cycle plow/plant took only 5 minutes instead of 15. Here is the updated chart:
click to see the enlarged chart graphic
For those of you playing at home, sorry to disappoint. It turns out that dropping the time it takes does shift the value per hour out almost linearly. You’ll note that in this chart, now the equivalent value for Yellow Mellon is over $2.62 / hour. The order of the most valuable crops, however, does not change, because even five minutes dominates with such a high US $ to Farmville coin exchange rate.
Abhi did make one last point that I agree with completely. The primary value of the game is not the coins you make. (In fact, since you can’t really convert coins back to dollars, they are arguably worthless.) The value is the fun and enjoyment you get from the time spent.
In fact, I could theorize that if you normally bill $50/hour for your time, the delta between your normal rate and the amount you are making with Farmville crops shows just how much you value playing Farmville.
Hope this post was as interesting to folks as the last. I’ve got to go harvest some Super Berries…
Updates: I’ve now posted additional articles on Farmville Economics:
Psychohistory 
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I have not had a chance to read through the comments, but for exp Vs time, I would uses the decorations new feature and buy basic Hay for 100coins then from that point you may continuously decorate your farm with Hay gaining 5xp per hay.
In addition to this if you place the hay around your player, boxing him in he will instantly plow/seed/harvest for you and you reduce the time it takes by removing his or her ability to walk.
Glad someone else discovered that. I lock mine behind a gate, and cut harvest and plant time at least by half, or more. It now takes about about 3 minutes to do the whole job, and I have a very complicated layout. I know its supposed to be fun, but what fun is there in sitting watching that little charactor plod from one square to the next?
Grapes??? 85 to buy 270 to Harvest in 1 day.. I make that +170 per day!
I’m was very curious about wither times so i did a little research. I go on facebook on average 1 to .5 times a day and on occasion not go on for 3-5 days at a time. I would like to do this and not worry about my crop while still getting the best yield as far as coins go. My research led me to the zynga site. Turns out they actually have support for the game. http://zynga.custhelp.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/583/kw/farmville/page/2/r_id/166 the wither rate is 20 percent of the total time to grow. This only applies to seeds though. Animals and trees are good till you want to harvest them. My point is, if someone is looks for a worry free crop animals and trees are the way to go. Yes they are more expensive but over the long run they’ll pay for themselves and give you the enjoyment having a farm. Just thought I’d mention that.
I was planning on doing a Part 3 with the math for trees. My guess is that since you can plant 16 trees per square, the economics of trees will look very good in some cases.
A 2 day crop, however, has a wither time of 4.8 hours, which is a pretty wide window. Very little danger of “just missing it”
One piece of analysis I mentioned in my first post that I didn’t do is some form of “working capital” cost based on the risk that you take with each crop that it will wither. There are definitely crops that require thousands of coins to plant, others that require tens of thousands.
For the tree math: what discount rate are you going to use to do the NPV calculation? 🙂
Ugh. A little sticky. I feel like truly doing an infinite cash flow is inaccurate, because I don’t think people are going to be playing this game in 2020. Something to think about before I do my post.
The real question is, how to I model out the fact that trees have no capital risk of withering the way that crops do? I need some cost of capital number there too.
Adam
In the help section of Farmville, it says that you have the same length of time to harvest after the crops are ripe as the time it took to grow from planting time. So if you plant raspberries, (2 hour harvest time) for instance, you have four hours after planting before they wither. Correct me if I’m wrong.
You are partially wrong. You have 100% of the growing time to harvest with no withering. The next 100% is linear, random withering.
So if you plant 10 squares of Raspberries, on hour 2, all of them will be ripe. At hour 4 all will be ripe. At hour 5, 50% will be withered. At hour 6, they will all be withered.
Adam
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I see one flaw… you get NO experience points for planting raspberries. I thought raspberries would be a quick turn-around for gaining XP… nope, you get zero. They’re only marginally useful if you need game coins fast.
The fact that Raspberries give you no experience is accounted for in my tables. The truth is, you get 1 XP per square just for plowing the square before planting Raspberries. So, if you did that 12 times in a 24 hour period, you would, in fact, end up with 12 XP per square per day.
Adam
1. How do you do box the player with the hay? can u please explain in detail how you do this yo harvest / plough/seed so that all is done automatically?
2. Can you exchange coins with FV?
3. Are super berries realeased each weekend?
Thanks for all your calculations.
I have only one objection: If you measure experience in minimum coins it costs you to achieve, you should calculate with 1exp. = 10 coins.
Reason: Plowing (15 coins, 1exp) + seeding soybeans (15 coins, 2 exp) give 3 exp for 30 coins.
The goal wasn’t to find the cheapest way to get experience points, but to estimate average cost basis for an experience point that we could use
for the calculation.
The minute you start planting crops, you now have to take time value into account. Seeding soybeans takes time. I was assuming that plow/delete was effectively instantaneous.
It’s fine to use 10, but I don’t think it makes a material difference in the conclusions. The point is, once you assign a value to experience points, then the “fast cycle” crops start looking better.
Adam
Actually, the deletion of the crops takes the most time, in my experience. Planting soybeans takes the same amount of time as creating that square, and if you try to cover all your land in squares in an attempt to maximize your time since you don’t have to keep changing tools, plotting each square takes even MORE time than planting soybeans.
But of course I’m posting like 12 days in the future, and all kinds of changes may have been made. But I’ve just about passed my entire family in experience just by calculating things and “excel”ling the data in notepad (I’m kind of a traditionalist, I suppose).
Tonight my friend told me about the chicken glitch, using a pair of chickens to block me into the corner of the farm in order to completely eliminate the travel time from square to square. Instead of moving over to each square to plant the seeds and such, it just starts planting from long distance. It still takes time to plant, but take’s just over half the time per cycle.
Also, the time it takes to plant crops jumps pretty drastically every time you upgrade your farm size, I’ve noticed. Beyond that, if you don’t have a good processor, the game has a tendency to hang. It’s really resource intensive apparently. Then there’s the fixed camera position, requiring to organize your trees and animals by height at the very back of the field. Early on it took me like 5 seconds to click on one of my cropsquares because I had a rest tent blocking it. :^(
the problem with only doing trees and animals, you’re coins will build but youll get no XPs, so you’ll never get to the next level…..
One flaw in your xp calculations. One xp will actually only cost 10 coins. This is possible by plowing one square (15 coins yielding 1xp) and then planting soybeans (15 coins yielding 2xp). So doing the math one reaches the final product of 30coins spent for 3xp. 🙂
Ryan, see my response above to Angela.
If one had the unlimited time and not taking into account trees and animals you could get 1,600 xp from planting tomatoes all day (20×20 field) plus if you do the plow and plant soybean lvling you can essentially use the 65,600 coins earned from the crop (taking into account 4,000 to plant the new harvest) to gain an additional 6,560xp. Again assuming you spend all your time on the farm you can essentially gain 8,160xp.
Since all my figures are normalized for a single square on a single day, the 1600 XP over 400 squares is just 4 XP in a single day.
I’m not disagreeing with your numbers per se, but I don’t believe they are relevant to the analysis I was trying to do in this blog post. The goal was to ensure that experience points didn’t get a zero weight in the profit calculations for crops, not to optimize to find the best way to gain total experience on Farmville in a given day.
my question is why would it ever actually be necessary to pet a duck, or a horse, or sheep??? why can’t i pet the bunnies/rabbits?,,, or why on earth would i need to honk the tractor???
Petting your animals is important as it increases the net gain of giggles every time you hear a loud quack after petting a duck, for instance. It’s unfortunate that you’re unable to pet bunnies, as they’re by far the most cuddly of the animals, but I guess the Pet function is only there to manually initiate the animal sounds, as bunnies haven’t been given any.
As for honking a tractor, I’ve never done so so I’m unsure about the lulz per second you get from it.
My son and I were just saying that there are no birds for all the bird baths and bird houses and maybe some fish for the pond would be fun too.
I wasn’t able to read all the reply’s…. I started to lose my original thought….
I have always been curious about the Coins per Hour per Crop. In other words: Coffee cost 120 Coins + 15 Coins to Plow = 135 Total Coins. Sell Coffee for 243 Coins – 135 Cost = 108 Coins Profit / 16 Hours (they are a 16 Hour Crop) = 6.75 Coins per Hour. I can’t quite figure out if that is on your scale or not…. it seems as if you worked things on a 24 hour scale with a “perfect farmer.” But what about a scale per crop, per hour? So if you have 12 hours that you might be close to the computer, is it better to plant a 12 hour crop – or a 8 hour crop, then a 4 hour crop – or 6 Raspberry Crops??? You follow me??
Per hour, I assume, should be the same chart…but it’s a good point that you bring up availability time.
Before I unlocked blueberries, I found it best to plant Raspberries every couple hours. It actually yields just as much experience as if you planted a four-hour crop on the dot. If I really cared about Experience, I still chose Raspberries at the time.
But then I eventually realized I had to go to sleep some time. On that day, I had already unlocked Rice. I took a look and calculated the profit for the high-time valued crops, looking at Rice and Pumpkins specifically. I calculated that rice yields 3 coins per hour, as pumpkins yields 2.875 coins per hour. OBVIOUSLY, Rice is better, right?
I decided to use pumpkins. I realized that pumpkins only took 8 hours as opposed to 12 hours of rice, and in the 4 hours I had left over, I could start back up farming Raspberries again. I figured out that you basically have to be gone more than 10 hours for Rice to be the better choice. But once I started organizing my cheatsheet, I decided to compare one crop to the crop next to it, turning a blind eye to everything else. Rice still has more coinage per hour per crop.
I still ended up choosing the Pumpkins. And it’s not just because it reminds me of a Peanuts holiday film. I kept in mind that every so often, I’ve been finding 100 coins just lying around in my crops every time I prepared for seeding. I just took a random estimate of a 3% chance of getting the bonus per square per cycle. I figured if you plant pumpkins 3 times and rice 2 times, Rice gives you 3 more coins. On 33 squares, it gives you 99 more coins. But statistically, you’re likely to get a bonus every 33 squares, right? So in one day, a perfect farmer planting 33 crops of pumpkins, and 33 crops of rice each every time they can, gets one more coin for the pumpkins each cycle.
And more experience points on top of that. :^P
Sorry for the rant, but yeah, I started out planting the first crop available every 4 hours until I could plant Raspberries every 2 hours, then Blueberries every 4 hours, and currently I’m sticking to Tomatoes every 8 hours.
GRAPES, GRAPES, GRAPES….do the math
Raspberries Do Not Give Experience How Is It The 4th On The List
In order to plant Raspberries, you have to plow the square. You get 1 XP for that. 2 hour cycle time means 12 cycles per day. Thus farming Raspberries all day will give you 12 XP per square.
The amount of time it takes for crops to wilt is in dispute – the link above says after 20% of the growing time, but the Farmville help page says after 100% of the growing time (http://apps.facebook.com/onthefarm/help.php?ref=tab) ” Crops will start to wilt after a period of time equal to their growth, so a 1 day crop will start wilting after 2 days have passed since planting.”
From my experience – desperately running to the computer 3hrs 55 mins after planting super berries – wilting has occurred after 100% of growing time. This dramatically reduces the wilt risk and makes some growing choices more interesting.
“It takes roughly 15 minutes to replant your farm with a crop”
What Size Crop are you planting?
I have aprox 312 squares that need to be harvested, re-plowed and planted.
That takes longer than 15 minutes. As the expansions get bigger it is going to take longer and the amount of times you can replant during the day will become shorter and your figures more distorted.
Why try to place a value on it? It’s a Game! Who really wins?, the person in first place or the person who savors the journey. Can you really put a price on that? Do you really want to?
Right now, my plantable area is 19×20, which is 380 squares. It’s taking me more like 20-30 minutes now to harvest, plow, and plant. I used 15 minutes since I assumed that not everyone was as crazy as I was in terms of maintaining that much plantable area.
I keep thinking I’ll pare back, right after I hit Level 34 and get the $1M villa…
Adam
3 things I’d like to point out.
1. The idea behind getting 10coin = 1 xp using soyabeans is that you can plow a square of land, plant soybeans on it THEN delete it immediately, rather than waiting for it to grow. For a cost of 30 coins you get 3xp which you can repeat until your money runs out, and make faster xp.
2. Most people depend on gifts for their plants and animals. Its totally possible, and quite popular I’m sure, to furnish your farm entirely with trees and animals that don’t cost you a dime, making profits infinite.
3. Even though planting your entire plantation with a single high-profit crop will make you fast money, many people also play the game with variety just for obtaining the various achievement ribbons, which often give hefty cash and xp bonuses. Of course its not possible to make calculations for this, but perhaps a list of reward ribbons and the requirements to achieve them would be great in a subsequent installment 🙂
Great article, one of the most useful on the topic. Thanks for writing it.
I personally think you should keep the assumption of the perfect farmer and ignore the wither risk. The great thing about your list is that for those of us looking to maximize income, there are both long-term and short-term crops at the top of the list. Not only does this allow you to profit quickly, but to plan your farm growth around your real life schedule. For instance, you can plant long-term crops during the week and short-term crops on weekends with faster turnover.
If you keep the perfect farmer assumption, you can make the camparison between trees, animals and crops much simpler.
I am so glad I am not the only one who did a profit analysis on a play farm! And I agree that keeping the perfect farmer assumption works best, because if a crop is going to wither, it is because I was not able to “farm” as planned – and thus anything planted would wither.
I’m better off not planning my failures, they do just fine on their own!
Can anyone tell me how cash notes are obtained – I spend the when I reach 3!!
I wonder if there’s any value which is calculate-able in the same scale, for non-profitable items such as houses, fences, etc. I haven’t yet understood their real impact on the game, if at all (other than wasting plantable area)
Do you know how to get FarmVille cash [without spending real money]?
I think the combination of profit and xp is an elegant way of ranking. Though I disagree on the conversion coins-xp, both yours and in several comments (soy bean story). The time it takes to delete all plowed/soy bean land is this large that it makes it hypothetical that one would convert large amounts of coins into xp in this way. (You have to confirm every delete-action. Only an adjusted Lazy Farmer-like program would do the trick). Also in reaction of Yuval’s post: A more real approach would be buying a building (or decoration). A building gives you 1% of the price back in xp (same story for decorations) and can be sold for 5% of the additional price. Hence, this leads to a conversion of 1 xp vs. 95 coins.
You value experience as 15 coins because you can plow dig up and plow again, however if you plow, plant strawberries and THEN dig up, you get 2 XP for 25 so the cost of 1 XP is better shown as 12.5.
Would have like to have seen the profit multiplied with the xp. But results are similar, yes i also have the math going on nice excel sheet. But have yet to encounter the superberry… bring it on.
Couple comments:
1) I thought I was the only one that was “geeky” enough to make spreadsheets for this “game”. Apparently LOTS of folks do. I don’t feel so obsessive/compulsive now – thanks.
2) FYI – According to the “Official Farmville Help” information, the “time until wilt” is equal to the “time until harvest” for a crop i.e; a four hour crop (Blueberries) will be ready to harvest in 4 hours but after 8 hours will wilt.
3) A fast but slightly more expensive way to “buy” experience is with hay bales. Each bought hay bale is 100 coins and gives 5 XP – and, now that it has been made easier to buy multiple hay bales the “time value” lost has dropped dramatically with buying hay bales for the XP points.
There’s only one problem with buying hay bales: After last night’s upgrade, the Decorations button crashes Flash, every time!
I tried contracting Zynga’s tech support / forum, and it crashed too!
So, I guess I wont be able to black my farmer in until Zynga figures out their bug.
What are superberries? The same as blackberries? (maybe a stupid question..) Just wondering, cause you haven’t wrote blackberries on the lists.
Super Berries are a promotional crop that Zynga releases periodically, just for a weekend. They look like glowing Strawberries. They cost 10 coins to plant, and yield 100 coins on harvest in just 2 hours.
They are super.
Ah, I see. Thank you 🙂
Hey there.
There is a good strategy to shorten the time you spend on a cycle.
Mark out the jobs for the farmer quickly and do something else while it does it. You can tabulate to another window and go on working or reading while the job is done. This means you only spend the clicking time on it, which is less than 5 minutes even for the maximal sized field if you have good mouse control.
Cheers.
Why did you not do it for grapes?
Grapes didn’t exist when I wrote this post. I’m doing an updated post this weekend with all the new crops through Asparagus.
Some of what’s been said here in the Ecomonic Prt II, is in fact correct, but you failed to mention the grapes. Grapes are just a smidgen less per hour then tomatoes, but factor in time to harvest, and XP points grapes are better per 24 hrs (this is coming from a player on level 25) technically speaking, one wouln’t be alble to harvest tomatoes 3 times in a 24hr period (if you could) they would be better, so from an efficiency stand point Grapes are what pay. Again, I haven’t made it to lvl 29 to unlock the other crops yet, but Grapes will get there.
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I have a 18×18 farm and only have 42 squares to plant??What is wrong with this picture?? Others have more to plant then me, how come??
What’s wrong is that an 18×18 farm can, by definition, fit 324 squares of plantable land. In fact, Farmville provides an extra “half-row” in each direction, not big enough for plots of land, but room for 2 rows of trees.
– Adam
Actually, you can get experience for 10 coins/experience point. If you plow the ground (-15, +1) and plant soy beans (-15, +2), you’ve spent 30 coins and gained 3 experience. This can be deleted and redone as well.
Where are grapes on here? Based on what I was able to calculate (I’m only on level 31) I think grapes actually give you the biggest bang for your buck.
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Have you thought about calculating the most profitable use of, say 30 min a day?
I find that much more applicable than putting a price to my time spent relaxing – However, I do want the most out of any game that keeps a score.
And thanks for doing the math! Love having the numbers =)
You totally forgot about peas! [NOT SOYBEANS]They are $190 to buy but harvest for $381 minus the $15 for replanting that is a $176 dollar profit for every plot. Plus it only takes 24 hours to grow AND you get 3 XP points with every plot you grow! Not including the XP points for re-plowing. You can play the game this way, make alot of money and not waste your whole life on the computer. Note: Someone mentioned crops withering above, and I think they are wrong. Your crops will wither in the same time period it takes to grow that item. i.e. 4 hours to grow, you have 4 hours after they are ready to harvest them. At 8 hours they would wither. Trees never wither, and animals also never spoil. Just thought you’d like to know. Happy Farming.
I covered this in my later posts with updated tables.
Leah, read some of my later posts on the topic. Thanks.
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Thank you Adam for providing the information on your blog.
Firstly, I’m assuming that the Soybean delete method is known to the programmers-designers and that players are not getting in trouble for using it. Else they would probably have fixed it by making the EXP for Soybeans 1 instead of 2. Or, (don’t tell them) award the EXP for a crop at Harvest instead of at planting time. 🙂 Exp would then include weeding, chasing crows and pests away, etc.
Anyway,
I’m wondering about how the introduction of bonus EXP when you become master of a crop works into the figures. For example, it takes 500 harvests of Strawberries, 200 harvests of Wheat, 1000 harvests of Carrots, and so on to reach mastery level 1 of those crops. Does the bonus you get back in EXP relate to how profitable it was to grow them? In other words, Wheat is the worst crop to grow— is the bonus for mastering it pretty good compared with mastery of level 1 of Carrots, one of the higher profit crops? Or is the bonus really pretty much a non-important figure compared with several hundred harvests needed to get the bonus?
Hope I have explained it enough so you and others can follow the question.
Hi, I’m new at farmville and would like to know ,is there and place you could go to find out the different things you need to know about farmville. Like if you put a plot down and there is a space in between the other plots, how can you move the plot so it is unitformed with the next plot. Plus what is FV and how can you get more and faster FV ‘s.
this is mind boggling im preparing for a PHD in Economics and I play farmville with my grandson because in a fun way it makes u think about the basic principles of farming and teaches you about economics as well. The above thread though goes a tad too deep all i want is to up a level daily and to earn XP. It took me while to get into it though i almost gave up but a friend told me it was simple and i tried. one criticism how about a hybrid between yoville and farmville so that one can enter the homes – not that i can afford the manor though
Dorothy,
I’m not sure if it’s ok to post another website here as Adam has done a good job of providing the information, but I’ll try.
farmville DOT invantix DOT com
The six tools at the bottom right corner of your screen provide various functions. To get rid of misplaced squares use the Red delete tool. Click on the item you want to delete and you’ll be asked “are you sure”. Some things like animals and trees can be sold if you really need to get rid of them. To check this, click on them and the side menu shows “move, sell, harvest, etc..”
The FV “cash” is given to you ONE per level each time you move up a level. This makes it very valuable. Don’t use it on decorations. If you don’t have a lot of neighbors (who could hope to have 20 neighbors, I could only find a dozen, after all) you should use it ONLY for purchasing expansions. Never Ever use it for decorations or anything other than expanding your farm– well, if you purchase from Zynga using live real $ money you can use donate some of the FV “cash” to the earthquake relief for example and have some spare to use for expanding your farm.
Dear Adam:
I just populated my own spreadsheet and noticed a few things not taken into account. For disclosure, I’m new and merely at level 10.
Wheat is not at 21.67 coins per day, it’s 66. And for a newbie that’s critical. If you have less coins than plot to plant, wheat is the thing. At 13 coins, selling at 61 in 12 hours means a very high profit of 66 coins per plot per day. But, more importantly, a newbie can plant more with less coins; which is extremely important in the beginning.
At level 10, there are half a dozen seeds not mentioned on your list; some of which are very profitable:
Spinach:77.1;
Lilac:60;
Peanuts:64.5;
Cranberries:67.2;
Daffodils:30;
But, there’s one important issue you haven’t addressed: Coins Per Plot (CPP). For the beginner, artichokes and cotton are 119 and 117 CPP respectively. Cotton has the advantage of harvesting in 3 instead of 4 days, but is only available starting at level 10. Paying at 207 coins with 2 XP, I’m going to be a happy camper when I finally pick cotton in two days from now.
I am grateful for the tables you’ve created. I don’t have access to the numbers at level 10, so my mere spreadsheet has only the 15 items available.
Sincerely Yours,
-=- Craig