This guide assumes you have read the general description of Dream Farm and the detailed description of market contracts. Don't forget to utilize the contract material management calculator. This guide is laid out with general tips, advice for honey, speedrunners, and then tips specific to how much you want to put into this event, broken into easy (relaxed low effort), medium and hard (enthusiastic gamers), plus a bonus on buying packages and using gold. New farms can be very frustrating, and I want to minimize that for you.

General Tips

At its core, Dream Farm is a speed run, but like everything Big Farm, gaining xp and leveling faster is not a good thing for your farm. Especially at the beginning, leveling up means adding products to contracts that you haven’t had time to build the supply chain for. You want to delay gaining xp where you can, until your farm is up and running.

With the limited time, you want to build with the best return on investment in mind, over the course of the whole event. The main goal of dream farm is upgrading your farmhouse to get the extra mascot coins. Materials are needed to upgrade everything and come from contracts. Contracts need produce to fill. The larger your farm, the more you produce, the more contracts you fill, the more materials you get. At the beginning, you want to invest in growing your farm so you can get more materials, and ignore the farmhouse.  

***Comparison is updated.*** For an example, consider spending the same amount of cash and materials for one of the following two ‘packages’: 

• the first 13 land expansions, 210 happiness and 50 workers, 9 expansions left over to place stables or orchards, and +35 happiness
• The first 12 upgrades of the farm house, giving 24 happiness

Which one will allow you to produce more to fill more contracts? The first. You get nothing for upgrading your farmhouse that helps your farm now. (+2 happiness with cheap land is meaningless; just buy land and place a deco.)

In the long term game for your main farm, you want more mascots at the end of dream farm, than fewer mascots and getting some a week earlier. This means treating dream farm as a full event, and not day by day.

Spend the first half of the time building your farm, and then transition to upgrading your farmhouse.  

The more your buildings are busy, the better your farm will do. If you have empty land, drop a house and field. Not enough space for that? Drop a deco.

Every supply chain has 2-3 lags when you are setting it up. Plant your field, and wait. Mill your feed, and wait. Start your stable, and wait. Start the silo, and wait. Start your orchard, and wait. This is not you failing as a farmer, it is the way the game works. Be kind to yourself. It's OK (and wise) to start it and walk away.

The easiest way to come up with a strategy is to think of the dream farm in terms of visits (to your farm). You want to do something each visit to prepare for the next visit. First visit - place houses, deco, fields, plant a crop. Next visit - harvest crop, replant, mill feed, build and start a stable, trash contracts, send if possible. Next visit, repeat. It may be 2 visits per day, or it may be 2 visits per hour.

The quests will give you fertilizer, which can lead to a false sense of having enough fertilizer that quickly disappears. With level 1 buildings (and no mascots), you need to maintain a 3-4 stables to 1 orchard ratio.

Browse through the following sections and find the ones that work best for you.

Honey

Honey is introduced at level 24. If you are not planning on hitting level 24, skip this section. 

Honey is the same problem here as it is on the main farm - you can’t collect enough nectar to have it running all the time. Prepare for honey before level 24 by upgrading your fields to level 4, apples to level 3, and having the materials on hand for the next levels. (The calculator will be helpful for this.) The second time around, I will most likely build the hive to complete the quest and unlock the next quest, bulldoze it while I build up stock, and build it again up to level 2 (time savings and longer overnight run). Watch the quests because it breaks patterns - after you build the hive, you have to collect nectar, not honey.

Also keep your eye on white wool and level 5 rabbits at level 36.

Speedrunners

If you are playing for a reward wall or cash for apps purpose, this event does not give any Main farm XP, which is the goal behind speed running. It will give mascot coins for mascot chests, which give a (min) 20% boost to the stable it is applied to. If you are doing a short run - 10 days or level 25, you are almost done and the mascots won’t help you. Skip this event. If it’s a longer run - 30 days or level 50, then mascots are going to add up over the next 2-3 weeks.  

You need to get the farmhouse to level 8 to get your first mascot from that questline, 6 more levels for the next one. Once your farm is up and running (pig, apple, cows, cheese production lines in place) shift your focus towards both expansion and farmhouse. You will need the benefit of mascots now, more than you need many mascots in the long run. Once you are comfortable with your farm's function, focus on just the farmhouse, even if it’s just a few quick visits. Don’t let this farm hinder your main farm. Take advantage of the silo upgrade quests for fertilizer.

Easy Modes (Relaxed or minimal effort)

I am working on newer guides that are much easier than this strategy.

The easiest thing to do is the tasks in the blue book to get to level 5. Bulldoze the chicken and any buildings built to get to level 5. Sell the apples in barn for cash (or send a contract). After this, just build a milk supply chain. 5 fields, 4 houses, mill, 2 cows, silo and deco. Sell the cheese in the barn to pay for the cycle and expansion. Fertilizer gives good XP. Cycle the field, mills and cows 2x per day and you get 105,000xp, good for 1700 mascot coins. This took me less than 15 minutes to set up (split into 2 sections 3 hours apart), and takes less than 2 mins per day to run.

If you send 2 contracts for brick and tile each, you can upgrade your mill to level 2 and upgrade the farmhouse a few times. You will get glass as you level up. If you send nail, board, and ink contracts, you can buy 2 land and add another house, field and cow.

Small note - Level 1 fields are 2 wheat short of a level 1 mill, so you can:

• have 5 fields
• humus 1 in 5 crops
• level up the mill to level 2

Or you can just pop onto the farm, cycle your crops, mills, and stables. Send and refresh your contracts. You can pretty much build any building and get what you need for the first few runs. If you have idle buildings… who cares. Keep your happiness up around 60.

You can quickly pick what to mill based on your lowest feed stocks (save most duck and cow feed for overnight), and then pick what to plant based on your lowest crop stock in the barn.

Medium Mode

Run happiness between 40 and 70.

The following assumes you will only run a cow once the first day. A level 2 humused field will make 1 run of cowfeed in a level 2+ mill.  Pick one strategy:

• 1 cow the first 2 days - get a field to level 2 and grow humused wheat to mill the first night. Over night, grow and mill as much wheat as you can. Starting day 3, you can run as many cows as you can grow and mill feed overnight.
• *** Use caution with the increase of land prices. Will reevaluate this step. *** 1 cow first day, 2 cows first night and second day - get 2 fields to level 2 and grow humused wheat to mill overnight. Grow humused wheat in as many level 2 fields as possible overnight. If you grow less than 10 fields overnight, you will need to grow the difference through the next day. (6 overnight? Do two runs of 2 during the day.)

Focus on getting fields to level 2 (62% wheat boost), mills leveled up, and buying land. Use the calculator to help you pick contracts.

Keep produce from quest rewards for rare materials (saws, books, glass) until you have that production line running continuously.

If you are going to pass level 24 and do honey, upgrade your apple orchards earlier than later to get the bonus apples.

Start with level 1 houses until you have contracts running moderately well. Then start upgrading houses and level 1 buildings that have become ‘cheap’. Land is fairly cheap to put houses and decorations on, so worker efficiency isn’t a big deal. The bonus boost in produce from ‘cheap’ level 2 buildings will add up over time. (I say ‘cheap’ when the cost of the upgrade is small compared to your resources on hand. 70 nails for a level 2 apple is small when you have 2000 nails in stock.)

Upgrading the barn gets you humus. Upgrading the silo gets you fertilizer and dung.

Keep an eye on your fertilizer supply. Especially with the silo quest rewards, it can seem fine and disappear in the blink of an eye.

You will need lots of pigs to keep the market running.

Hard Mode (Enthusiastic Gamer)

Use the medium mode 2 cow path to get milk established quickly. If you can mill feed in the evening before bed, you could be up to 3 cows the first night. You will need to set fields aside the first few days to support your cows until you have a day of feed in reserve to just grow and mill overnight.

Expand aggressively. Level 1 buildings and then start to upgrade when expansions get expensive.

Your mills will be the bottleneck of your farm. Place high focus on them.

Manage your market contracts well. Like a medium mode, manage what contracts you send based on materials, but also pay attention to high Value vs high XP contacts. You want the money for future expansion and farmhouse upgrading. XP isn’t that helpful and you will pass the final reward stage either way.

Start upgrading the farm house around half way, because it will be cheap and easy. Focus heavily on upgrading it for the last 30% of the event.

Bulldoze short run buildings at night and place long run buildings. Reverse in the morning. This will mean upgrading your barn so you can hold a buffer of stock for contracts. 

Sometimes it doesn’t make sense to cycle contracts trying to move pigs and wool in the evening if you don’t have them overnight. Just wait till you can cycle contracts in the morning with a full farm.  

Don’t want to be up 16 hours to perfectly time 3 almond crops per day? Bulldozer. Cycle your orchards. One space runs almond, apple, apple, almond, another can run apple, apple almond, almond. This will run almonds overnight and stagger their harvest through the day.

Buying Packages

Evaluating spending real money on this event is a little challenging. The value of gold is lowered due to the fact its effect disappears after the event ends. The value of packages also diminishes as your farm grows ($5 USD has more impact on a level 5 farm than a level 25 farm), and that is only 3-4 days on the dream farm. Everything has its gold costs adjusted to reflect this, but land and decorations still leave a lot to be desired or enticing. Spending 800 gold on a decoration to get +4 happiness is an insanely bad deal, especially when premium orchards are less than 400 gold and land is so cheap. $20 USD in gold to buy land you can get by sending less than 3 contracts? Buying the materials package ($10) to just upgrade the farmhouse will get you roughly 3 mascots, equivalent to $15 USD in gold, but you need to get to level 7 first. The last issue is that the value of mascots severely decrease as you get more of the same. Your first one is big, the next 2 are 1/10th as valuable.

I fully expect Big Farm will try to sweeten the packages to try and entice more players into spending.

If you buy packages for dream farm, consider these tips: