FarmVille, a real-time farm simulation game, is the newest in a long line of popular online games created by Zynga. New to Facebook, I couldn’t believe how many of my friends and family are playing FarmVille! And, everyday, there are more and more Facebook and MySpace users signing up to play this new and so popular game. So I just had to post about it as I did a little research to find out … What’s Up with all of the FarmVille Players? 

The object of the game is to manage a virtual farm by planting, growing and harvesting virtual crops, trees, and raising livestock, without wilting your crops or killing off your livestock. 

The game itself is extraordinarily simple.  You plant and harvest crops and generally run a basic farm. The more crops you plant and harvest, the more money and XP you will earn, which will allow you to purchase decorations, buildings, and a larger farm. The goal is to gain the FarmVille Coins, the free version of currency in the game. With those coins, you can buy new crops, level up your character help your neighbours and hopefully, eventually get a bigger farm and bigger houses. However, to get the really cool stuff in game, you need FarmVille Cash, a currency that costs money or needs a credit card and a lot of player time to retrieve.

And as you do this, you’ll advance in levels over time.

How to get started. When you have a friend on Facebook with a FarmVille account, you can click on any of their FarmVille related posts, whick will take you to the Facebook/Farmville access page.  Allowing FarmVille access will let it pull your profile information, photos, your friends’ info, and other content that it requires to work.  If not, click on this link (you must sign in to your Facebook account first): http://apps.facebook.com/onthefarm/index.php

There may come a time, though, when you want to get a little more out of the game. Every time you move up a level, you unlock new buildings, seeds, and decorations. This means that in order to get the most out of your FarmVille experience, you’ll have to “level up quickly” to unlock as many items and bonuses as you can.

Farmville Watch the Video

FarmVille – The Basics

But how do you unlock as many items and bonuses as you can? There are several things to keep in mind if you want to level up quickly in FarmVille.

FarmVille will start you off with 300 coins and 6 plots. 4 of these plots will have seeds already planted in them.

You probably already know that in order to level up, you need to accumulate experience points. For example, each plot of land you plow gets you one experience point. In the early stages of game play, the number of experience points you get by plowing land and planting crops is plenty to allow you to advance at a reasonable pace. Once you get through the initial stages though, you need more and more experience points to level up.

Focus on Experience

When you want to build up experience points quickly in FarmVille, you have to supplement what you gain from your normal harvests with other activities. Making improvements to your farm is a good way to gain some quick chunks of experience points. Buildings yield the most, but you can get experience from putting up just about any decoration or structure. You just have to pay close attention to the amounts of experience points each item will deliver.

You should also take experience points into consideration when deciding which crops to plant. Crops that take less than a day to grow only yield 1 experience point, while crops that take longer yield 2. If you can get back and harvest them as soon as they’re ready, crops like strawberries will get you more than 2 experience points a day because you can harvest them every 4 hours.

You have to be on top of your harvesting and planting cycles in order to make progress this way though, so you’ll need strategy and plenty of time.

Putting up buildings on your farm remains the best way to get big boosts in your experience quickly. Save up your cash for those, and you’ll be well on your way to unlocking all of the available items in FarmVille.

Once you start playing it won’t take you long to figure out why this game has captured the hearts and imaginations of so many people. There are a ton of options when it comes to what seeds you can grow, what buildings and decorations to put on your farm, and which types of livestock you can choose to raise.

Expand Slowly

You want to get the most out of your land when in FarmVille. This means that you’ll want to clear a substantial amount of land so that you can plant as many crops as possible. You do have to be careful about how much land you clear at once though. It costs 15 coins to clear one plot of land, so if you clear too many at once, you won’t have any coins left to buy the seeds you want to plant.

It’s best to slowly expand your plowed plots of land so that you’re always able to take full advantage of their planting potential. After each harvest, it’s a good idea to replant on all of your current plots first. Once you’ve done this it will be much easier to figure out how much more land you can afford to clear this time around.

Following this pattern will quickly allow you to expand your farm while ensuring that you always have enough money to plant on all of your cleared plots.

Plan Your Harvests

Another aspect of FarmVille that it can be tough to get the hang of at first is timing your harvests right. Each crop you plant in the game will take a particular amount of time to mature. Once a crop is mature, you can harvest it. But don’t wait too long. If you don’t get back in time, your crops will wither and you’ll just have to plow the land again and start over. It’s important to plan your plantings so that you’ll be able to get back to check on your farm before this happens.

One of the great things about FarmVille is that you can take it as seriously as you want to take it. If you only want to log in once a week, that’s fine. Just make sure you plant crops that will last that long. Once you start playing though, it’s not likely you’ll be able to stay away for very long.

Do you have piles of rotted vegetables? Are you way behind your fellow farmers? Do your neighbors have ten times the resources as you?

If you’re having trouble getting a hang of the way of things in FarmVille, you’re not alone. I know of quite a few people who got into the game expecting it to be easy as pie and were quickly frustrated. FarmVille is a relatively new game and is still in the Beta stage, so a lot of improvements have been made to it in a short time and many of the guides on the market have not been updated to account for these changes.

And then there is FarmVille Secrets. This guide has been released pretty recently, so it’s up to date on all of the latest advances in the game. I found it to be immensely helpful to quickly raking in the coins and moving up in levels like you wouldn’t believe.

Level Up in Ridiculously Short Time
Master Every Level
Recruit 100+ Neighbors
Cheat Your Way To The Top
Build the Ultimate Farm in Record Time

In addition to the helpful tips, FarmVille Secrets also includes some handy charts and other resources that help you to compare items available in the Market and also helps you to plan out your spending and improvement strategies. It’s definitely a guide worth checking out if you’re having trouble getting the hang of FarmVille, or if you just want to give your game an extra boost. Happy Gaming!