Saturday, January 2, 2010

How to Level Up Quickly in Farmville

There are more and more people joining the ranks of FarmVille every day. No one can get enough of this game and there are plenty of reasons why. In FarmVille, you can get away from the noise and stress of everyday life. Just relax, plant some seeds, harvest some crops – not a bad way to spend an evening. And as you do this, you'll naturally advance in levels over time.

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 seeds, decorations, and other discretionary items. 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.

The Basics

But how do you do this? There are several things to keep in mind if you want to level up quickly in FarmVille. 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 start to 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. That doesn't mean you only want to plant crops that offer 2 experience points however. 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. 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.

Do You Really Need a Guide For FarmVille?

I consider myself to be relatively well educated in the latest generation of social networking site games like Mafia Wars, Vampire Wars, and such. That's why when I started to see these FarmVille guides popping up all over the place I was kind of surprised. I mean, I can see why people might need some tips to get going in games like Mafia Wars, but FarmVille?
At this point though I hadn't actually played the game, but I didn't really think it could be all that complicated. I figured I should give it a shot though, just so that I could say I knew what I was talking about. And I was in for a rather big surprise. In no time, I was out of money and had no crops to plant. I have to admit, there way more to this game than I had anticipated.

I eventually managed to dig myself out of my original hole and out of the red, but I still wasn't making all that much progress. I started to think that maybe I needed to see what these guides were all about. I wasn't really expecting much, but since I hadn't done so well on my own either, I figured it was worth a shot.

So I picked up a guide called FarmVille secrets, and was pleasantly surprised by the tips I found in it. You wouldn't think there were so many ways you could screw up a virtual farm, but believe me, you can. I was still stumbling along at level 6 when I got the guide after 2 weeks of playing regularly. Now I'm the proud owner of a plantation and a level 26 Sultan of Soil. And I still look back at my guide from time to time. If you're having trouble getting into the swing of things in FarmVille, this guide is not a bad investment.