The FarmVille Almanac

Welcome to the FarmVille Almanac, your one-stop guide to playing Zynga‘s wildly popular virtual farming game on Facebook. People have been farming for thousands of years, of course, but have been FarmVilling for only a little longer than one year. With so many things to plant, choosing the best crops for your needs can be an intimidating prospect. This guide will assist you throughout your entire FarmVille career.

Note: You need at least a beginning knowledge of FarmVille to benefit from the tips, tricks, and advice in this almanac. We recommend using this guide in conjunction with the in-game tutorials.

How to Use the FarmVille Almanac

For the purposes of this guide, we broke down the farmer’s journey through FarmVille into four seasons of roughly equal numbers of seed crops each. The structure has no ties to real-life seasons, so don’t worry if your FarmVille summer happens when snow is falling outside your window.

We recognize that the joys of farming in FarmVille can appeal to people of all types, and that people can have vastly different amounts of time to commit to their farming. So we structured the FarmVille Almanac around three general farmer types:

Frequent Farmers: Dedicated to checking in to FarmVille multiple times a day, Frequent Farmers always strive to harvest crops the moment they ripen in order to keep their farms progressing as quickly and efficiently as possible.

Daily Diggers: Endeavoring to make FarmVille a regular routine, Daily Diggers tend their crops once a day at around the same time each day.

Part-Time Planters: Although Part-Time Planters also want to see their farms grow and prosper, they have busy real-world schedules and prefer slower-growing crops that allow for fewer check-ins per week.

No farmer should feel tied to one particular farming schedule. Depending on your mood or your life outside of FarmVille, you may find yourself a Frequent Farmer one week and a Part-Time Planter the next.

Spring, Levels 1 Through 11

As in real life, spring in FarmVille is a time of growth and renewal. You will find your farming skills increasing in level at a tremendous rate, with new seed types sprouting up in your market more quickly than they will in any other season.

Frequent Farmers: If you’re looking for fast experience gain, strawberries and raspberries are two of the highest experience-yielding crops you’ll plant all year. Raspberries will bring in more money than strawberries; you must be diligent about replanting them every 2 hours, however, as they are well known for being quick to spoil. If high coin income is your aim, move from wheat to pumpkins to rice and raspberries as you advance through the season, until you can finally master soybeans and unlock chickpeas, spring’s most profitable crop.

Daily Diggers: Set your sights on chickpeas, for even though they are a 20-hour crop they are the most profitable spring crop even if planted only once a day. Their experience value is respectable, too. Focus on mastering soybeans until you reach level 10–a necessary step before any farmer can hope to plant those delectable chickpeas.

Part-Time Planters: If you plan to keep your gardening focused on the longest of harvest cycles, favor three-day cotton over four-day artichokes; even if you wait until the fourth day to harvest your cotton, it will still bring you as much profit as artichokes would. If you think you have time to try a faster crop, bell peppers are the only two-day crop to offer a significant advantage over cotton.

A note on the charts: You may find the reference to a “normal day” a bit peculiar. Since a good night’s rest is an important part of any farmer’s day, our charts reflect the results that are possible in a day when a person spends 16 hours awake and 8 hours asleep.

Summer, Levels 12 Through 25

Though the FarmVille summer may start out feeling as fast-paced as the spring, you may notice your pace of levelling slowing down as your farm begins to mature. Keep an eye on your local market: The summer crops offer some significant advantages over those of the spring.

Frequent Farmers: If you found yourself well suited to the fast-paced life of berry farming, you’ll be happy to discover that blueberries offer the same experience benefits of strawberries and raspberries while providing an even greater coin profit. If a thrice-a-day harvest better suits you, plant tomatoes–they are the summer’s most profitable crop, and are still an excellent source of experience.

Daily Diggers: The spring chickpeas will remain your go-to crop in the early summer days until you unlock grapes at level 19. Your daily grape harvest will bring in nearly as much profit as the more time-consuming tomato, although tomatoes are known to provide more experience. If you prefer the aesthetics of sunflowers, at level 25 feel free to substitute them for grapes, as the coin and experience rewards are nearly identical.

Part-Time Planters: Farmers who have enjoyed planting bell peppers should take a look at pineapples, which have the same growing time but award more coin per field. The star of the summer growing season, however, is the humble corn stalk. Though corn may provide you with less experience than pineapples, corn is in fact more profitable despite its more leisurely three-day growing cycle. Growers with the busiest of schedules will find watermelon a fine upgrade over cotton or artichoke farming.

Autumn, Levels 26 Through 38

As you enter the autumn harvest, your crops should be bringing you enough income to support those buildings, decorations, and personal touches that will make your farm feel like your own unique creation, and toward the later levels of the season you’ll wonder how you could have started in the spring with no more than a handful of plots, a shovel, and a plow. Your market now offers an extensive variety of seeds, but you’ll find that some of the new autumn offerings in particular are indispensable additions.

Frequent Farmers: The season brings yet another upgrade for the diligent berry farmer, but autumn black berries provide only the smallest increase in profitability over summer blueberries, with no increase in experience gain. Farmers in the habit of growing tomatoes will find upgrades in both white grapes and sugar cane. Although both provide as much experience as tomatoes, you should focus on white grapes, which bring a greater coin profit with just two daily harvests instead of three.

Daily Diggers: Once you reach level 32, peas are undoubtedly the most enticing crop to plant, as they offer the highest amount of experience per planting out of all FarmVille crops while still providing a significant amount of coin income. For the daily digger, the unassuming yet mighty pea has no equal.

Part-Time Planters: If pineapples have been a successful part of your farming life, autumn will introduce two upgrades to your two-day crop options: cabbage at level 27, and broccoli at level 35. Both bring greater coin rewards, but broccoli stands out as being even more profitable than autumn’s new three-day crop, red wheat, even if you harvest the broccoli at the three-day mark. Watermelon farmers will see a noticeable increase in income at level 33, when four-day yellow melons come into season.

Winter, Levels 39 Through 90

The long, long winter season can be intimidating to even the most experienced farmer. Not only does it take increasingly more time to achieve new farming levels, but it also takes increasingly more farming levels to see new seeds introduced at the market. Still, with dedication and perseverance, any farmer can see the winter through and reach the highest ranks of FarmVille achievement.

Frequent Farmers: For those farmers seeking nothing but the highest experience gain per plot of land, regularly harvested black berries remain the most efficient crop all the way until level 70, when clover dethrones them. Anyone used to the less-demanding pace of white-grape harvesting will do well to continue with white grapes throughout the winter. Oats provide a slight upgrade at level 53, but only if you make the switch to a thrice-daily harvest and abandon the twice-daily white-grape routine.

Daily Diggers: In early winter, the steadfast pea farmer is sure to master the crop and thus unlock purple pod peas at level 40. But don’t be fooled–although purple pod peas have the same high experience reward as ordinary green peas do, they are less than half as profitable at selling time. Even white roses, a 24-hour crop unlocked at level 80 through the mastery of pink roses, provide less net profit than the pea despite their higher overall buying and selling prices. If, however, you find coin income to be of lesser importance in the late winter levels, white roses still offer the same high experience reward as peas; they are a good alternative for the pea-weary farmer.

Part-Time Planters: Regrettably, when it comes to planting seeds, the winter season does not offer anything new for those farmers attuned to two-day, three-day, or four-day crops. Broccoli and yellow melon remain the best options for now, but the world of FarmVille is being regularly updated with new features and new crops–so keep hope that the future will bring new options to your growing schedule.

Although we designed this almanac to be a useful guide for efficient seed planting, remember that above all farming in FarmVille is meant to be fun. If a crop not recommended here happens to catch your fancy due to crafting needs, aesthetics, simple curiosity, or any other reason, by all means follow your heart and plant what you wish. You can always return to growing our recommendations for a spell if you find yourself in need of higher income or experience gain.

Good luck and happy farming!

We obtained some information on crop cost, selling price, harvest time, and experience gain from The FarmVille Wiki.