FarmVille Quick Start Strategy Guide

By following this quick start strategy guide, you can easily be level 20 within the first two or three days of playing FarmVille. Even if you have already been playing, there is likely to be some strategies and tips that you can pick up to help out the progress of your FarmVille farm. If at any point you get lost or confused, please read my tutorial.

The fastest way to get a quick start in FarmVille is to immediately work on some of the ribbons. Ribbons are FarmVille's achievement system - there are various tasks you can complete in game, and upon completing them, you automatically are notified and get a reward of free experience points, coins, and sometimes items.

These rewards are pretty big too (sometimes 10,000 coins!), and can rapidly speed up your farms progress.

Step 1: Add the FarmVille application

Add the FarmVille application to your Facebook page. Do not worry about planting anything yet - we will go right into the ribbons.

Step 2: Ribbons

There are two very easy, high paying ribbons that even a brand new player can do:

Local Celebrity and

Not Spoiled, Gifted!

Step 3: Local Celebrity

To receive this ribbon, all you need to do is add friends to join your farm. Again, as soon as you meet the requirements, you automatically are given the reward. Here are the rewards:

- For adding 4 friends to your farm you will receive the yellow ribbon, 10 xp, and 1,000 coins.
- For adding 8 friends to your farm you will receive the white ribbon, 25 xp, and 2,500 coins.
- For adding 25 friends to your farm you will receive the red ribbon, 50 xp, and 5,000 coins.
- For adding 50 friends to your farm you will receive the blue ribbon, 100 xp, and 10,000 coins!

A lot of people play FarmVille - odds are you will have no trouble finding 50 people to add to your farm. If you still need more friends, go onto the FarmVille discussion boards and look for one of the "need neighbors" threads. Add the people you need to your friends list or post an "add me" notice of your own. You can easily add the 50 people you need for this achievement with this strategy.


Step 4: Not Spoiled, Gifted!

To receive this ribbon, you need to accept free gifts from your friends but do not place them on your farm. To accept a gift (click pictures to see full size):

Click on the gift request, as shown in the picture below.

When you get a gift request, it will be at the top right of your home page.

Then click accept gift on the following page:

Clicking accept gift will move the gift to your FarmVille gift inventory.

After accepting the gift, it will appear under the gifting button (3 gifts to accept):

The "3" means I have 3 gifts waiting to be used. The "Gifted, not Spoiled!" ribbon is rewarded for holding unique gifts in your gift-box:

For holding 3 unique gifts, you will receive the yellow ribbon, 10 xp, and 1,000 coins.
For holding 9 unique gifts, you will receive the white ribbon, 20 xp, and 2,500 coins.
For holding 15 unique gifts, you will receive the red ribbon, 50 xp, 5,000 coins, and a special prize (I received a crate).
For holding 21 unique gifts, you will receive the blue ribbon, 100 xp, and 10,000 coins.

For this ribbon, the gifts have to be different (i.e. you can not have 21 rabbits in your gift-box, they have to be 21 different gifts). The only thing is you can only hold 30 total gifts, so if your gift-box gets full, just use the spare gifts and keep saving the unique ones. Once you get all the ribbons, you do not need to keep the unique gifts in your inventory; add them to your farm!

While I have 3 gifts in the picture above, it only counts as 2 unique gifts, since I have two rabbits.

These two achievements can easily be mastered simply by adding 50 people to your farm and collecting free gifts from your friends. If you are just getting started, odds are you have a lot of these free gift requests and neighbor requests already because a lot of people play this game.

Just by completing these 2 ribbon achievements, you will get a grand total of 37,000 coins and 365 experience points. Additionally, just by earning the 37,000 coins from these ribbons, you will get a bonus 500 coins and 50 experience points from getting the yellow ribbon from the "High Roller" ribbon (earn 750 coins).

Step 4: Expand your farm

Expanding your farm should be one of your top priorities in FarmVille. If you have added neighbors for the local celebrity ribbons, all you need is coins to expand your farm.

Go into the market and expand your farm to 14x14 (10,000 coins). This will give you an extra 52 slots of land to plant on. This will also give you the yellow ribbon for "Pretty Penny" - this will give you an extra 50 experience points and a free rest tent (check your gift box).

Step 5: Plant Crops

Fill up every square of land (should be 196 total) with plowed fields, then plant crops. If you are going to be able to play in 4 hours, plant strawberries to start, as they give a lot of experience points (abbreviated "xp") per hour (.5 xp per hour per land slot - 4 hours to grow, 1 XP for planting, 1 XP for plowing the field.

Additionally, pick a corner of land and plant 1 of every crop type available to you in it, like so:


This will help you get the "Green Thumb" ribbons (coin and xp reward) for harvesting unique crops.


Step 6: Place your free gifts

While waiting for your strawberries to come in, place your free gifts on the outskirts of your farm like in picture above. Animals, trees, decorations, and buildings can all be used to unlock more ribbons for more experience points and coins.

Step 7: Expand your farm, again

After harvesting your strawberries and doing some more of the easy ribbons, like Green Thumb (harvest 5 unique crops), Cream of the Crop (harvest 30 total crops), Good Samaritan (help 20 friends' farms out), you should be in a position to expand your farm from 14x14 to 16x16. This costs 25,000 coins and will give you an extra 60 farming slots.

You will want 33,000 coins before you expand since you will have to pay to plow and plant all these slots.

Step 8: Plant More

As soon as you hit level 8, plant raspberries (if you are going to be around to harvest them in 2 hours). If you are going to be gone for 4 hours, plant strawberries. If you are going to be gone from your farm for 8 hours, plant pumpkins. If you are going to be gone for a full 24 hours, plant soybeans.


Conclusion

Thus ends the FarmVille Quick Start Strategy Guide. If you want to level up fast, focus on the crops that provide the most XP/hour and coins/hour (I will cover this soon, check the FarmVille Strategy home page for updates).

To continue from here:

1. Try to expand your farm to the maximum size as soon as you can
2. Keep planting & harvesting.
3. Once you reach a high level and get access to the best crops, save your coins
4. After you have plenty of coins, rearrange your farm to be more aesthetically pleasing!

FarmVille Quick Start Strategy Guide