Recent posts in Emma's blog:

FarmVille and it’s creator, Zynga, have a lot of detractors. There are those people who think that FarmVille is dull. Fair enough – if you don’t like it, don’t play it, but don’t assume that because you like it everyone who does is an idiot, a Zynga Zombie or a sad, FV addict. There are also those people who, for some reason, don’t think that Zynga should be allowed to make a profit from a ‘free’ game. Many of these people play FV, but don’t want to pay real money for the things that cost Farm Cash. That’s fair enough – if you don’t want to pay real money for the game, then don’t, you have that option. But don’t compain that you don’t have access to the premium features and don’t sound off about people who do pay real money and call them idiots. Remember that Zynga employs real people who do real work and need to get paid. If Zynga doesn’t make a profit from its games then it will stop making them.

No doubt the news that Zynga has started a Haiti Relief Fund won’t stop their detractors from whining, but for the last few days FV players (and players of Zynga’s other online games such as FishVille and Mafia Wars) have been able to pay real money for special virtual goods, with 100% of the donated cash being donated via Zynga to the people in Haiti who need our help after the devastating earthquake there. The news from Zynga this morning is that FV players have donated over $900,000 in just a couple of days and will no doubt top $1 million soon – real money, going to real people. That money will be spent on emergency relief, food and other supplies, but as my friend Maddy says, if it’s spent on suitable permaculture solutions to Haiti’s problems then it will go a long way.

FV’s contribution to the Haiti Relief Fund is White Corn. Farmers can pay 25 Farm Cash ($5) for a license to plant White Corn for 7 days. White Corn costs 10 coins to plant, gives a harvest worth 125 coins plus 3 XP, matures in 6 hours and never withers. So it’s a great crop to plant, whether you’re hoping to save up some farm coins, gain enough XP to get to the next level or just work your way through the ribbons relating to ploughing, seeding and harvesting.

Speaking of ribbons, there are two more new ones this week. You’ll need more Fuel for the ‘Need for Seed’ ribbon, as it involves seeding your farm with the Seeder vehicle. The second is ‘Cat Lady’, and you work towards it as you brush all the kitties that are wandering around the farm. Here’s a tip to help you work towards the ribbon – keep an eye out on your Facebook News Feed for when your Neighbors find lost kittens wandering around. The more cats you add to your farm, the quicker you’ll gain those ribbons!

There are also two new giftable trees this week – the Durian (it’s a good job virtual fruit doesn’t smell!) and the Cashew.

The other big release this week is Collections. As you work on your farm, ploughing, harvesting crops, animals and trees, and fertilizing, you will randomly find collectable items that belong to one of four Collections. Collectable items are also giftable, with a new collectable gift becoming available every two days. You can hold up to 10 of any particular collectable, and once you have completed a collection you can exchange it for 250 XP, 5000 coins and 5 Fuel refills. You can complete the same collection an unlimited number of times, so don’t discard those duplicate gifts!

If you find an uncommon or rare collectable then you will have the option of posting it to your News feed so that 5 of your Neighbors can share it. And when you complete a collection you can post the news to your feed and, for 24 hours, all of your Neighbors will be able to collect a random collectable to share in your good fortune. So keep an eye on your News feed and you could really rack up those collectables quickly!

Also new this week are three buildings – a bed and breakfast, a post office and a general store – that don’t appear to have any special functions at present, and peace-themed decorations. The news from the podcast is that level 70 (the top level at present) is not going to be the final level, and that the 24 × 24 land expansion is not going to be the final land upgrade either. The 24 × 24 expansion is coming soon – but if you sign up as a FarmVille fan on their Facebook page then you’ll be given the chance to get the 24×24 land expansion before everyone else! There’s also a special event on the way, to celebrate FarmVille having 10 million fans, more sendable gifts and more updates to the chicken coops.

It seems that the official FarmVille podcast is put on YouTube now, so I can share the podcast itself rather than a link. Don’t get excited, though, it’s not a vidcast!

In the latest podcast there’s some more information about Free Fuel Week (which appears to be nearly over!). Every consecutive day you play the game you get one more free tank of fuel – so 1 tank for day 1, 2 tanks on day 2, etc. If you miss a day, the counter gets reset back to 1 tank. And you have to wait a full 24 hours before you’ll get the next one.

And when you post a free fuel feed to your Wall, up to 5 of your Neighbors can collect it.

The big news this week is the changes to the chicken coops that allow you to feed your Neighbor’s chickens when you fertilize your farm. When you feed the chickens there’s a chance you’ll find some mystery eggs to share with your Neighbors – up to 3 sets of mystery eggs ‘per harvest period’, whatever that means. You also increase the chance that your Neighbor will find mystery eggs in their coop that they can share with you. You’ll also get 1 XP and 4 coins for feeding their chickens.

If your Neighbors have been feeding your chickens, then even if you don’t find any mystery eggs you will get a cash bonus. If you don’t find any mystery eggs then you’ll also get a chance to post a message on your Wall, requesting that more Neighbors come and feed your hungry chickens.

The first day these changes were put in place they caused huge connection issues for many farmers, who couldn’t get to their farms for an entire day. Fortunately these have been straightened out.

There are new Cow Print decorations and buildings, a new flower crop – Morning Glories – that takes 12 hours to mature and is harvested for 123 coins (only available at level 13 and above), and a new Starfruit tree. And there are two new Ribbons. The ‘Fenced In’ ribbon requires you to place fences on your farm (150 for the blue ribbon!) and you gain the ‘Egg-celent Discovery’ ribbons by finding mystery eggs in your chicken coops.

And there’s an update to the storage system – you can now host a barn raising to increase the capacity of your farm. Invite your Neighbors to help you improve your barn or toolshed and they’ll get 100 coins as a reward, and you’ll get a bigger building! Apparently we’ll be able to expand the animal buildings (chicken coops and dairy farms) soon.

There’s a new segment in the podcast for people to submit user questions, via the forum, and according to the Sneak Peek section we should be keeping an eye out for new things to do with our unwanted items, more ploughing/ planting/ friend missions, new buildings and new mystery boxes containing mystery animals.

As mentioned in the latest Emma and Pete Show, my long-awaited boots have arrived from the Celtic Sheepskin Company. My new house boots are handmade in Cornwall, from British sheepskin. When they arrive they’re supposed to be very tight across the end of your foot; a couple of days later and mine are easing up a little bit but are still a bit tight. It feels like they will be lovely and warm when I’ve worn them in a bit.

Celtic Sheepskin have a factory shop in Cornwall, which we plan to visit when we’re next in that part of the world, but if you want to order from their online shop you can get free standard delivery for online orders going to a UK mainland address until 22nd January by using the offer code NY1AW when completing your order.

That’s not an affiliate link, it just seems to me that they’re a company worth supporting (unless you’re vegan!).

The worst (best/heaviest, delete as appropriate) snowfall in years means we will not be venturing far from home for the next few days. I went to take some garden photos this morning, but my camera battery was flat and I will have to wait for it to charge.

Pete and I were watching Iron Man yesterday evening when it really started to snow, and decided to wrap up well and go out for a walk because the snow and the streetlights combined to make it eerily light.

We ended up finding a patch of grass down the road and attempting to build a giant snowman. The base was relatively easy:

We made a second body section, which was also pretty large, and it took us a long time to work out how to hoist it up on the base because it was very heavy and the sides kept collapsing under the weight (as did I!).

By the time we ran out of energy we had something more akin to a snow cupcake than a snowman, but it was pretty impressive :D

Lots of FarmVille players have issues with the way that the Fuel system works – you need Fuel to power the farm vehicles that make working your farm so much quicker and cut down on all the clicking you need to do every day. But everytime you use your vehicles, the Fuel level in your tank drops. It creeps up slowly over the day, but will max out the current unit of fuel and then stop. So everytime you use up a whole unit of fuel, you can’t get it back without buying more with your FarmVille cash, or finding some when you open a mystery egg.

The FV podcast is always promising changes to the Fuel system, but it doesn’t matter for the next few days because the Free Fuel Week event has started. Every day for the next five days you get a free tank of fuel when you first login to the game”

And there are two ways to share extra Fuel with your Neighbors. The first is to click on the fuel can icon in the top right hand corner of the game screen. (If you can’t see a Fuel can icon then you may need to click on the other icons that are there to read those messages first, then the Fuel can should appear.)

That will give you a chance to share Fuel with your Neighbours. The free fuel messages appear in your News Feed, so keep an eye out for them and see if you can collect free fuel from your Neighbors:

The news from the forum is that offering free fuel to your Neighbors only works once a day – so there’s no point clicking on the fuel can icon multiple times and spamming their News feeds. The extra notices will be duds. And each Neighbor is offered 1/5 unit of fuel, and it looks like only 5 Neighbors can collect, so you have to be quick if you want to collect fuel this way.

But there is a second way to share fuel with your Neighbors – 1/5 can of Fuel is now a giftable item. Send Fuel to your Neighbors when you send out your free gifts and request Fuel back if you need it. Those 1/5 cans soon add up, and you don’t have to be quick off the mark to get them. And don’t forget that we’re into the final couple of days for Holiday Presents, so make the most of them while you can!

Well, it’s a new year and there have been plenty of new features in FarmVille over the last few weeks, with more to come.

There’s still a couple of days left to make the most of your Holiday Tree before it disappears – make sure you read about my Perpetual Present Machine if you haven’t already, and have an endless supply of holiday presents until 7th January.

Several new adoptable animals have been created.

The Lonely Bull has escaped from the rodeo and is looking for a quieter life on a farm. If he appears on your farm then you can try to find him a home with one of your Neighbors; their lonely bulls will appear in your News Feed so that you can adopt one too. The Lonely Bull is harvested by brushing, once every 24 hours, and gains you 80 coins. But if you put your lonely bull into one of your dairy farms with your cows then there’s a chance something more exciting will happen!

Every time you collect the milk from a dairy farm that contains cows and a bull, there’s a chance that a calf will be produced. The odds are higher if you have more cows, and the color of your cows also affects the color of the calf – they come in white, brown, pink and green, just like their mothers! Again, you share your calf with your Neighbors, and watch out for calves up for adoption in your news feed. These calves don’t mature into calves and are ‘harvested’ by brushing. Collect a whole set and creating a Petting Zoo!

And there’s a new winter visitor, to join the Clumsy Reindeer. Adopt a Lost Penguin and you’ll be able to harvest your own ice cubes! One of the new farm upgrades might make him feel more at home – for 1000 coins you can cover your farm in a snowy blanket, replacing the default green grass. Don’t worry, though – if you or your animals get fed up with the snow, you can revert to grass for another 1000 coins.

If you’re not too busy decorating your farm, then there are three new ribbons to work for. ‘Flower Power’ involves growing flower crops and for ‘Lord of the Plow’ you need to plough your squares with a tractor. If you’re short on fuel then you’ll be delighted to hear that the ‘Free Fuel Week’ event starts tomorrow.

The third new ribbon has proved quite contentious. To win the ‘They of Mystery’ ribbons, you have to open Mystery Boxes – the special decorations that cost 16 Farm Cash each. You have to open 2 boxes just to get the first ribbon, and many game players are upset that these ribbons can only really be won if you invest real money in the game to buy FarmVille Farm Cash. If you have a comment on this or any other game feature, then you can participate in the discussion on the FarmVille forum or send the FarmVille Community Manager a Tweet.

We may have mentioned this in the show, but Pete and I are setting aside the occasional evening to watch a movie together. It may sound dull, but there’s an extra factor – the movies chosen have to be linked together somehow.

We started when the Star Trek Blu-Ray arrived (Pete chose the 3 disc version!). I loved this film when I saw it at the cinema, and it didn’t disappoint on the small screen, either, although Pete is not as big a fan of Zachary Quinto as I am ;) Or Star Trek, for that matter, but it’s a little-known fact that one of our earliest dates was to see a Star Trek movie (must have been Insurrection) because it was New Year’s Day and there was nothing else on.

Anyway, Pete chose John Cho as his link to the next film – Harold & Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay. I wasn’t too keen, having bailed out halfway through the first Harold and Kumar movie, but this one wasn’t so bad! And it made a nice change of pace after watching The West Wing from start to finish.

I chose Neil Patrick Harris as my slightly-more-tenuous link to the next film. NPH worked with Josh Whedon on Dr. Horrible, and Josh Whedon also directed Serenity. It wasn’t until we watched it that we found there is a more direct link – David Krumholtz is in both films (something I should have remembered since I am a big fan of Numb3rs).

Pete’s next film (and the latest in our series) is A Knight’s Tale, with the link being Alan Tudyk.

I have already made my next selection – Iron Man – but can you work out the link, without looking it up?

Over the last couple of weeks, keen FarmVille farmers have been giving and receiving presents to sit under their special Holiday Tree. Those presents couldn’t be opened until today, and the tree only had a capacity for 100 presents. Now that it’s Christmas Eve there will be a frenzy of farmers opening their presents – items seen so far include various animals (alien cow, baby turkey, lamb, brown chicken, black chicken, golden chicken, clumsy reindeer, etc), fuel refills and decorations (including a special lighted sign worth 2000 coins) and mystery boxes. So those presents are well worth having.

The news from FV is that presents can continue to be gifted and opened until January 7th, so there can now be renewed gifting (many people stopped gifting the presents because their neighbor’s Holiday Trees were full).

But if you’re good friends with one or more of your Neighbors then you can turn your Holiday Tree into a Perpetual Present Machine – here’s how:

1. Holiday Trees give out extra presents when you reach certain thresholds – I think it’s every 10 presents. Certainly mine has been triggered to do so at 80, 90 and 100 presents.
   
2. If you reach one of those thresholds and open one more present then you only need to add one more present back to your tree to trigger the extra present, which you can share with your neighbors.
3. If your neighbour is at the right threshold and adds that extra present to their holiday tree then it triggers an extra gift that they can share with their neighbors – including you!
   
4. So your special present generates other special presents that you can use to generate more special presents and your Holiday Tree becomes a Perpetual Present Machine right through until January 7th, with the number of presents you can open only really limited by your patience (and that of your neighbors) of adding and opening your holiday presents in ones and watching your Facebook Wall for notifications of available special presents.

Happy Holidays!

I’ve been ill all week, with plenty of time to play FarmVille (and TreasureMania! I like the new Beta release), so it’s great that it has been a week packed with new FV excitement. Where to start?

Well if you’re a reader of my gardening blog you’ll know that I keep a pair of chickens in the back yard (in fact, I talked about what they like to eat in my latest podcast) – so it’s exciting that FV have finally developed a chicken coop for me to keep my virtual chickens. It’s similar to the dairy farms released a while back in that it holds 20 animals, and you can harvest the eggs from all 20 chickens with just one click and save space at the same time. Unlike the dairy farms, you can only have one chicken coop, but they contain a special surprise – every time you harvest the eggs there’s a chance you’ll find a mystery egg (white, brown, black or golden). You can’t keep the mystery egg yourself, but if you post the announcement to your Wall then up to 5 of your friends can hatch the egg and win a mystery gift. Quite a few of those mystery gifts turn out to be chickens (white and brown) but some of them don’t!

It’s possible to gift a chicken coop to your friends, but as you can only have one coop if you already have one your gift magically turns into a chicken instead.

There have also been updates to the Gift Box that mean you can now sell unwanted gifts straight from the box without having to find space for them on your farm first. And there’s a Sell All button to save on clicks. You only have space for 30 gifts in your Gift Box, but as of this morning the new Storage feature has been enabled and you can store unused decorations in your Barns and Toolsheds. The extra space will be very useful, even though FV have finally enabled the 22×22 land expansion!

They’ve also started a new Sweet Seeds event, and you can buy a license to plant Sweet Seeds sweetcorn for 7 days, with half of the money being donated to charities in Haiti. The new sweetcorn is a 6 hour crop that costs 10 coins to plant but gives you 125 coins at harvest. It also gives you 3 XP per square, and doesn’t wilt.

And there are a couple of new Ribbons to work towards. To gain the King of Compost ribbons you need to harvest fertilized crops, and since you can’t fertilize your own crops you’d better head out and get fertilizing on your neighbors! You’ll get coins and XP for your efforts and when they return the favor you’ll get points towards your ribbon. The second new ribbon is more colorful – add bunches of flowers to your farm to earn points towards the Pretty Garden ribbons. Keep an eye out on your Wall for announcements of when your neighbours have Perfect Bunches of flowers to give away, and make sure you sow some flower crops so that you’ll grow some too.

And finally, this morning the Country Fair has arrived in FarmVille! You can deck your farm out with all kinds of new, limited edition decorations and funfair rides!

And what’s coming up in the future? According to the podcast, updates to the Fuel system are on the way. If you want more FV information, check out their Twitter feed.

It’s been a little while since my last FarmVille diary, and a lot has been happening down on the farm. Firstly, I’ve discovered that there is a FarmVille podcast – well worth listening too if you want the latest FV news. According to the October 30 episode, the Sweet Seeds event raised around $575,000 for charities in Haiti, which is pretty impressive. There’s no news yet on whether another charity event is on the way. Personally I’d like to combine new FV animals – bees – with a charity event to help fund research into CCD (Colony Collapse Disorder). You could have some really cute decorations for bees, too, including different types of hive.

Bees would be happier on the farms now that Flowers have been introduced. Flowers are sown and harvested just like other crops on the farm, but each square harvested also gives you points towards a new ribbon – Flower Power. And of course they do brighten the place up!

The new fertilizer bags have settled in, and you get 5 bags of fertilizer per Neighbor, per day – but you can only collect them when you do your friend a favor. You can only use the fertilizer on their crops, and only at the time, so make sure you use them before you head back to your farm. You get 4 coins and 1 XP for each square you fertilize, but your neighbor gets a bonus too – fertilized crops grow much larger and when you harvest them you get 1 XP on top of their coin value. So spreading the fertilizer love is a great way to rack up XP and move up through the levels.

Halloween is over now, and the decorations are disappearing – but according to the podcast there is some sort of storage on the way, so don’t delete your decorations just yet as you may be able to keep them without them taking up farm space. In place of the spooky decoration we moved on to aliens! There were some huge crop circle decorations available for a limited time, and an alien animal. The neon green cows gave a harvest of Milktonium, but it looks like they’ve gone back home for now – so what’s next on the special editions?

If you’re stuggling to achieve your Crop Mastery bonuses (and they give you both coins and XP) then here’s a tip – although generally the number of squares you need to harvest goes up (in some cases a lot) for each level of Crop Mastery, there are a couple of crops for which that’s not the case. So far I’ve spotted that Artichokes and Watermelon have much easier level 2 & 3 targets. Although they take 4 days to mature, if you plant a big enough field it’s possible to gain two Crop Mastery bonuses at the same time. For example, level 2 for artichokes requires just 50 squares, and level 3 is 75.