Carl's Farm Town Guide

Farm Town is a free game that can be played on facebook. The Farm Town app can be accessed by going to http://apps.facebook.com/farmtown/. I must say that my first impression of the game was that it could be boring. I see it now as a nice way to interact with your friends on facebook. I found some of the people unhelpful when i went to the market place and inn, so I decided to make a guide for the farm town game that might help newbies start making cash and connecting with new friends.

Getting Started

After you've made your avatar, you'll be plopped down into your farm with around 500 coins. There will likely be some plants already growing, in various stages of completion. There will be potatoes ready to harvest. You should harvest the ones that are done, so that they don't have the chance to rot. There is an option to notify you by email when your crops are ready. In the future, you can actually incur a loss if you pay to plow the fields and purchase seeds, then let them sit too long. Staying on top of your crops and harvesting them when they're ready is the true secret to success in farm town.

Getting around in farm town is accomplished by clicking the map. There are several places to go. The bank will offer to sell you coins for real life money through paypal. This is entirely up to you. Additonally, you can travel to the market, where you can offer your services as a farm hand and sell the crops you've harvested. The Inn is a place to meet other players and chat. People will generally flame you, or direct you to the market if you ask for work. It's called begging and only serves to annoy people. Stick to the market! The last destination from the farm town map is the realtor's office, where you can upgrade the size of your farm once you've reached at least level 15.

Plowing and Planting

In order to get started planting crops in Farm Town, you'll need to first plow fields. It costs 20 coins each time you plow a field. Doing a bit of math can really help you to maximize profit, because early on, you don't want too much money sitting in your account. You want that money out in the fields, growing you more money! Having more fields than you can plant at any time is not optimal. With the 500 coins you start with, I'd recommend planting eight full fields of potatoes. In a day, you'll have eight plants to harvest. The profits from this, along with the trickles of gold you get for visiting the farms of friends, will allow you to build profit quickly because the next time you plant, you'll be able to afford more crops at once.

As I've said before, crops will die over time. I've read this window for harvesting is as long as the plant's original growth time. So, potatoes would die 48 hours after planting if this holds true. Also, grapes could be considered a bad crop for overnight planting and should be used during the daytime when you can log back in within 4-7 hours. Since grapes grow in a mere 4 hours, for people who can spend the time logging in multiple times a day, they could be considered a good crop for fast experience and money.

Making Money in Farm Town

At first, keep it simple. Stick with planting crops like potatoes and avoid buying animals because they don't yet do anything to help your farm and could even eat your crops. Later you can afford plenty of animals and keep them in an enclosure, safely away from your crops. As they don't do much, animals and things like that are almost likened to a status symbol. Someday, one would hope we'll be able to raise cattle and chickens to sell their offspring for profit. Animals really serve to add a little life to your farm.

When a crop is ready to harvest, you'll make more money by going to the market and looking for a farm hand to harvest your crops. This is surely only in the game to encourage socializing, as logic seems to dictate that you'd make less money by hiring someone to do something you can do on your own. It is useful, however, as you could make new friends. In order to sell certain items, such as animals, you need up to eight friends in neighboring farms.

If you don't want to look for a farm hand to help you harvest your crops, you should at least use the harvest and storage option. This option ensures you get the book value of the crop you're selling. For example, potatoes sell for 99 coins. Using the direct harvest method, I got only 89 coins for my harvest. The full price of 99 would have been achieved by simply going to the market. It really is only one more step in the selling process, as you can sell all of one type of plant at once at the market. Doing this for ten potato plants, I would have gained an additonal 100 coins toward my next batch.

I strongly recommend you hire people to tend your farm. It will help you build neighbors if you find someone you don't mind adding to your actual facebook friends list. It's also a win-win because many players look for work, and you yourself would do well to seek out work because you gain a percentage of the price for any crops you harvest while on the job.

Gaining Levels

In order to plant different crops and buy new items for your farm, you'll need to gain levels. Each action you perform, in general, will give you a set amount of experience. Plowing a field and planting a product get you experience. Growing grapes will help you to gain experience quickly because you can more readily recover the cost of plowing fields (20 coins). You'll only profit 16 gold coins per grape plant harvested, after paying for the seeds and plowing, but you'll earn it quickly and be able to build up to planting more and more grapes!

Be sure to visit your neighbors daily, to get the six experience points per visit, along with a tidy sum of 15 gold coins. This will really add up!