The new Habitats

The habitats are a great idea as it allows you to make multiples of animals you already had and get ones that you always wanted but never got!

When you harvest any of the habitats you can get three things, a common baby, a rare baby or feed. When posting any of these to the facebook feed three people can take one of the posted item. To grow a common baby it requires 10 feed to grow up, to grow a rare baby it requires 30 feed.

Now, the ones you get from your own habitats will be a duplicate of any animal that's inside your habitat. Whereas the ones that you get from the feed can be any animal that Zynga has designated to a certain list. To find out what animals are available from the feed visit here for the habitat or here for the pet run.

There is just one, quite large, problem I have with them. Both the habitat and the pet run take up 48 squares of space yet you can only store 20 animals, this is a problem as some animals take up only one space. This is very annoying for people who are tight on space, even though doubling the space to 40 would still leave a deficit if you only put in the tiny animals but it would at least be an improvement.

Breeding and Stuffing Explained

When I say breeding, I’m not talking about the sheep and the pigs. I’m talking about how to breed horses and cows; it’s a pretty simple procedure in which you can make calves/foals for your friends or lots of money for yourself!

Cow Breeding: To do this you’ll need: one dairy barn, the cow you wish to make a calf from and some seeders (seeders can be any cow or bull, they must be fully grown for this to work).

Firstly place your chosen cow and a bull into the dairy barn and wait until it’s ready, then harvest it. If you don’t get a calf then you’ll need to try again. To do this you need to place a ready cow or  bull inside the cow barn by using the move tool. This should make the dairy barn ready for harvesting (If your seeder is a bull you will need to remove the bull you have from inside your dairy barn as Zynga only allows one bull per barn). Repeat this until you have your desired calf. Unfortunately Zynga only allows each farm to have one calf per day so after you get the calf you’ll have to wait until the next day before trying again. There are ten calves available per post for your friends.

Yet breeding for calves isn’t the only thing you can do by this method. If you are level 75 or above you can use this method to make you a lot of money! You need to be level 75 because this requires belted cows which cost 1,000,000 coins and give you 3,000 per harvest. Instead of the “cow and bull” combination you need for breeding replace them with as many belted cows as you can afford. Then using the previous method of placing seeders in your barn harvest the barn numerous times until all are exhausted, if you do not have a lot of money at the start it can be quite slow but after a while it begins to pick up, if you use your earnings to buy more belted cows. By the end you can make an awful lot of money in just one day, for example, say you have a fully expanded barn and it’s filled with 39 belted cows (leaving one space for a seeder) and you have, say, 20 belted cows outside you can make 2,397,000 coins in the one day. Each cow also gives you 10,000 XP which means that you will also level up fast and can make you some farmcash (1 fc per level up, until level 250).

Horse breeding is pretty much the same as cow breeding except you need a stallion, which are much harder to come across than bulls if you don’t spend farmcash. If you don’t and you don’t have 1000 gifts left over from the 2010 “holiday” tree you could as a friend who does, otherwise this can’t be done. Other than that it’s pretty much the same method with the exception that you can get as many foals as you like, unlike the limit of one calf and that instead of needing the horses to be ready they will work at 33%

Just a small piece of advice to anyone who might be on the forums, don’t say “breeding” on the forums in reference to cows or horses as it’s technically not allowed (even though Zynga make lots of money from cow and horses sales from it) instead you have to call it “stuffing” and you aren’t allowed to explain it to someone. So if someone asks how you do it, send them a personal message.

You can also “stuff” orchards to produce seedlings of a specific tree; this is how people make lots of specific level two trees.

Unlike with the barns and stables putting a new tree in will not affect how long until the orchard is ready to harvest, i.e. If you have a ready tree and place it in a 45% ready orchard, the orchard will remain at 45%.  For this to give you lots of seedlings you’ll need plenty of orchards as it will only work once every two days. So build, let’s say 10 orchards and place a tree in each of them and wait two days until they are all ready, then place the trees you want in the orchards and harvest it, if it produces watering cans, carry on until a seedling is produced. At this point my advice would be to grow that tree so that you can use it in the remaining orchards. But don’t forget that whatever you use as the original tree can also be the one that decides the seedling, so the more trees you put into the orchard the less likely an unwanted seedling is produced. 

Ability to store trees and animals on Super slow roll-out

I first heard reports of this two days ago and it seems to be rolling out very slowly as I still have not got it. I suspect it may be as slow as the Zynga Messaging Centre which took months from when my first friend got the ZMC until I finally got it (she was one of the first and I was one of the last). I think this is a great thing as it means that people don't have to sell their precious farmcash animals that currently don't have a barn or coop etc. already.

The only problem is most farmcash buyers have already maxed out the storage on their home farm and so this isn't useful until they increase storage capability. A far more sensible maximum would be 1000 as this allows Zynga's most valuable users to store their items, but at least they're moving in the right direction.

Why your Sheep don't work - The Truth!

OK this is by "Ivan Always" from the farmville forums, it's not my own work but it's very interesting (if a bit complicated). The post is here, although I doubt the post will last long once the moderators find it!

So here's a copy of the post from Ivan Always.

First we need to understand how they work and then how they got broken. Each sheep is made up of what is called a 'Metadata' string, basically this is it's 

DNA! This must fall between 0 and ff when counting in Hexadecimal (0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 a b c d e f 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 1a 1b 1c 1d 1e 1f 20 etc...)

these are examples of working Metadata strings, and the reasons why they work:

Brutus the Ram:
{"B":{"V":["a","a"],"H":["a1","a1"],"S":["c","c"]},"P":{"H":["b7","b7"],"S":["c","c"],"V":["d","d"],"T":["c"]},"N":"sheeppen_ram_quest0203","G":"M"}

Green Ewe with Yellow Camoflague Pattern:
{"B":{"H":["55","55"],"S":["10","10"],"V":["10","10"]},"P":{"H":["2d","2d"],"S":["10","10"],"V":["10","10"],"T":["d"]},"N":"Green with Yellow Camo","G":"F"}

Red with Colour Changing Stars:
{"B":{"H":["e6","e6"],"S":["10","10"],"V":["c","c"]},"P":{"H":["f0","b4"],"S":["10","10"],"V":["c","c"],"T":["e"]},"N":"Red with CC Stars","G":"F"}

The reason the last one has colour changing stars, is because it contains a hexadecimal number from f0 to ff in the pattern part of its Metadata 

("P":{"H":["f0","b4"]


these next three are the same sheep with invalid sections of their Metadata string, they will look identical, but will now not produce anything other than 

white or black sheep:

Brutus the Ram:
{"B":{"H":["a1","a174"],"S":["c","c"],"V":["a","669f"]},"P":{"H":["b7","b7"],"S":["c","c14"],"V":["d","d1101101a"],"T":["c"]},"N":"sheeppen_ram_quest0203","G

":"M"}

Green Ewe with Yellow Camoflague Pattern:
{"B":{"H":["55","515"],"S":["10","100"],"V":["10","10"]},"P":{"H":["2d","2ad7"],"S":["10","10"],"V":["10","f10"],"T":["d"]},"N":"Green with Yellow 

Camo","G":"F"}

Red with Colour Changing Stars:
{"B":{"H":["e6","e6"],"S":["10","10"],"V":["c","c"]},"P":{"H":["f1a10","bbb4"],"S":["10","10"],"V":["c","c"],"T":["e"]},"N":"Red with CC Stars","G":"F"}


These are only basic examples, now how does the Metadata string work?
Zynga have used the Unix colour system, based around hexadecimal values, therefore any value from 0 to ff is acceptable:

Plain White Ram:
{"B":{"H":["0","0"],"S":["0","0"],"V":["10","10"]},"P":{"H":["0","0"],"S":["0","0"],"V":["10","10"],"T":["a"]},"N":"White Ram","G":"M"}

Where you see the "B" this is the Body part of the Sheep, made up of three sets of values:
"H" Hue
"S" Saturation
"V" Vibrance (or Intensity)

Where you see the "P" this is the pattern section, made up of the same three sets of values as the body
where you see the "T" this is the Type of pattern, either:
a = Plain
b = Spots
c = Hooded
d = Camoflague
e = Stars
f = Stripe

the "N" section is the Name of the sheep
and the "G" is the Gender, "M" Male, "F" Female

Here is an extreme example of a 'Hacked' sheep:
{"B":{"H":["c2c","c2c"],"S":["100aaaaaaaaab000000000000000","100aaaaaaaaab000000000000000"],"V":["fff0f21","fff0f21"]},"P":{"H":["d5f","d5f"],"S":["c","c"],"

V":["d","d"],"T":["f"]},"N":"Flashing Mask with Flashing Electric Stripe","G":"M"}

as you can see, out of the six sets of values comprising this sheep, only two seem to fall within Zyngas parameters.

The way the system works now, is that whenever you try to breed with a ram and a ewe, if any of the sets of values fall outside of Zyngas parameters, the 

system will default to White, and will then breed as a normal pure white sheep, provided it is placed with another sheep whose parameters fall within those 

outlined by Zynga.

So as you can see, any of your colour changing sheep, which you claimed from the wall or were gifted by a friend, will more than likely contain a different string than those now permitted, a usual colour changing string used by those that followed the hackers was... {"H":["78e","179f"]

Which was in itself stupid because all they had to do was change the first section of the "H" part of either the body or pattern (or both) to a value of f0, f1, f2 etc...

How did it become so widespread? Click the link below and see for yourself, originally the hackers kept it to themselves, designing it to be to dangerous for the average player to mess around inside the coding in this way, but after a few weeks this became public.

http://farm.hackers.am/sheepdesigner/

simply click on a sheep from the gallery, select fork and you are presented with the sheep and its metadata, move the sliders around, select Max Range, see how easy it is to generate the craziness we all saw.

Okay how is this Metadata entered into the game?

With the 'Charles Web Debugging Proxy' a tool used by many software companies to see how and why there programs work or don't work, this program when used can interupt any command, the hackers simply placed a sheep inside their sheep pen, activated Charles, removed the sheep from the pen, Charles would then 'pop-up' a simple search though the displayed data, revealed the metadata string, which could then be changed.

After changing as many sheep as they wished, they simply closed Charles, deleted their sheep pen, built a new one and started breeding their 'illicit' sheep.

Why do the official Zynga ones not work?

This is really simple, through the 'hacked' sheep, the vast majority of players unknowingly gained sheep that should have taken them months to create, thus losing a lot of revenue for Zynga, they have now released the patterns and the colour changing ability, through four new market sheep (at a cost of 110FV for 

the lot), but they have blocked the passing of the f0 from either of these two colour changing Market sheep, onto any offspring and made the chance of 

passing on the patterns much more improbable.... Why?

Because they can cover their tracks of course, these 'hacks' are not found, they are released to certain individuals who examine them before then passing them on to the players, either directly in some cases, or through other means as in this case, remember Zyngas designers use Charles also.

So in conclusion, your sheep that sit on your farm that you obtained through 'legitimate' means, can continue to be 

'pastel/neon/flashers/poppers/masks/electic' or whatever you have, but they will not breed, all Zynga has done is allowed you to see what might be possible, 

then taken it away, yes they will lose customers, many customers it seems, but it also seems they are willing to suffer those loses, at the expense of those 

die-hard players who will continue to hand over their hard earned cash.

I hope this thread stays up, and I hope it helps some people.

Thanks for reading!