It has been an interesting month of new buildings. The game branched away from nice simple processes that set it apart from other games (crop -> feed -> stable -> market) to supply chains that need multiple steps (crop -> dough + peaches & honey -> jam + meadow = torte) with the introduction of 3 new buildings. There is also the merchant, which gives players the option to buy supplies (rather than grow them) and daily tasks.

These changes are here. They make you farm worse than it was before. They make it more frustrating and harder to advance. This is exactly what Big Farm wants because it encourages you to spend real money to expand and get these new buildings. Or, you will have 2 less stables and 1 less orchard, making the honey phase even more difficult and lowering your income.

For 3 years, players did perfectly fine without the bakery, jam kitchen and dairy. At the same time, we didn’t have jam and baked goods in our contracts. Let’s wander through some game dynamics, explore some fundamentals and see how the new building affects things.

Cafe

The meadow can serve all 5 client types, but it is inefficient and you would need many meadows to get mallets (maximum daily satisfaction level 67 and above). This would be a very poor use of space. You also can not turn citrus into citrus oil to make sushi for more mallets.  

Now the meadow and manufactury, together, can service all 5 clients to maximum cash rewards everyday and mallets the odd day. Two meadows can accomplish mallets daily if you can keep them running most of the day. The combination will also allow you to make mallets from sushi, which is critical for most players to stock before level 67. A meadow, manu and honey will allow you to serve all 5 clients and collect mallets every day.

The jam kitchen allows you to serve one client in the cafe (crepes). 

The bakery will allow you to serve 0 clients. All of the bakery recipes require jam, dairy, meadow or manufactured goods to be made. Vanilla pies for the elderly are possible if you purchase vanilla from the merchant.

The dairy serves 0 clients. The recipe requires a bakery as well.

If you add all 3 buildings, you can serve 4 of the 5 clients. We seem to really like tourists on the farm these days.

Honey will allow you to serve 1 client, but the cost of peaches and almonds is huge and really hurts your market. 3 honey recipes can be done rather effectively buying minimal supplies from the merchant, which is my current strategy.

So from the standpoint of which buildings can meet all your needs, the old combination of meadow, factory (and honey level 80+) is still the best way to run the cafe.

I have not looked at what the most time efficient or cash efficient recipes are.

Fish Cafe

There are two new recipes for seaweed fertilizer and dice (to refresh the merchant.) The seaweed fertilizer is nice, but you can not produce more than having an orchard will produce. The advantage here is that you can half your production but pick when you want to use it. This is good for tournaments and collecting weekends. Dice on the other hand, use purple fillets. Would you rather have mallets or new (random) offers. Don’t spend valuable resources on something that a little patience will get you. You can go to bed and wake up to offers; you can’t go to bed and wake up to 80 mallets. The recipe is a really bad use of hard to gather resources.

Co-op Projects

There are two new projects that require the bakery. The easy one is bread and pigs aka ham sandwiches. If you adjust for some buildings being idle overnight, a cow will generate 390 points per day, a goat is good for 183 (~270 per 6x9 space) points per day and an apple will generate 240 points per day. The bakery will earn you 9.5 co-op points per day. 9.5! Not a typo. Tasty dough is much better. Dough will earn 150 points per day, and the cocoa will earn 180 points per day, but you need 2 buildings. (You would also be growing all that cocoa to sell in the barn.) So, if you are hardcore co-op and looking to generate the most points per unit of land, the bakery is not going to help you.

Ship

You need to remember that we lived 2 years without the ship. The ship gives cash and no materials. The new daily tasks make rare items (usually the hold up) a little more plentiful, putting more strain on boards and ink. This means converting products to materials is even more important.  

Unfortunately, we don’t have all the data on the ship yet, but you make very little extra income compared to what it costs to make the items. If you are looking for money, taking up space to send a few ships is not going to help you. Being able to gather the market points is an apple to oranges comparison that we can try to break down once more numbers are in. (Would having an extra pig generate more market points than sending butter on the ship?) Remember the tailor gives you a huge contract with tons of points, but selling the wool gives even more.

Market

The market is much more difficult and we don’t have all the data yet. Right now, we have 6 new items on the market - 3 jams and 3 baked goods. None of these items are priced to value the raw goods and cost to processes. You would actually make more money with a pig than a bakery selling bread, plus you wouldn’t need as much field time and generate dung.

The core of this game is the market and your ability to market. Your largest impact on the game is the number of contracts you can process. Notice the language. I did not say the number of contracts you can send. Every contract sent or trashed (balances market demand to supply) is a contract processed. There are a large number of things that can affect this - farm balance, holding contracts, watching ads, how much you play, market slots, etc. It’s a simple and complex model to explain and we don’t have 5 pages for this here.

What we can do is focus on trashing contracts you can’t fill because there are 6 new items to produce. 

Very, very simplified, if you have a jam factory, you can fulfill 3 of these items, or reduce 50% of the negative impact. If you have a bakery, you can fill 1. If you have both you can fill 5. If you add a meadow or source of cocoa, you can fill all 6.  

If you can only build one building and you want to minimize the impact on your market, build the jam factory. The fact that you are losing money every time you send jam just needs to be thought of as a cost of doing business.

I’m sure that everything will shift again when dairy items are introduced to the market.  

What to build?

If your farm is well balanced, you don’t need any of these items and you can just trash contracts. If you can only add one building, jam will have the largest impact on game flow. If you have the room for 2, the bakery would be next on the list. Dairy is the natural last place, but it’s true impact is not known yet. If it’s products are required in the market, it may be better than the bakery someday, which is probably why the bakery is tied to co-op projects.

No business would buy $44,000 of peaches and honey to sell for $16,000, unless you play Big Farm.