Big Farm Mobile Harvest Fansite


Gold

Gold, and it's use, can be a hot topic in our community. Before I start, I firmly believe that everyone has the right to make their own personal choices about how they spend their entertainment dollars, and that it is human nature to judge others that do not line up with our own beliefs. You are not alone in these struggles, but we can choose to respect other's choices even if we don't agree with them.. Yes, it is very frustrating to play against gold wielding players, but it is part of the game.

Games need funding for development. If this is your form of entertainment, I would encourage you to support the developers. (A very valid personal goal is to excel in this game without spending anything.)

I also encourage you to invest in things that you can't earn in the game through hard work, like fertile fields, fancy houses and external barn, frying pans, etc..

You can read more about the gold trap that this game sets up here.

Earn it or Grow it

You get 100 gold for each level in the game. There are also daily log on bonuses a few times per year that can give small amounts of gold.

You can grow gold flowers in your fields and they instantly give you gold when you harvest them. You have a 1 in 77 chance of getting Gold Flower seeds when you give the dog a bone. The different ways to get dog bones:

A regular field gives you 200 gold from Gold Flowers, but you can use premium or seaweed humus for a 50% boost, 300 gold total. A fertile field gives you 300 gold, or 450 with premium or seaweed humus. Lets do some math. A fertile field costs 350 gold and you get nothing back if you bulldoze it. If you build one and run 3 Gold Flower crops, you will get 450 extra gold and come out 100 gold ahead. If you put a fertile field in during a 50% off sale and do 10 bags of gold flowers, you get an extra 1325 gold. You can have 1 or many fertile fields, or you can temporarily put one in for 2-3 days (after and expansion is a good time with the new empty land), but Gold Flowers should always be run in a fertile field.

Fortune Teller

I did have a post when the fortune teller still had 10 levels that went through the math behind winning and losing. I will re-write it in the future and post it again to factor in the last 4 levels. The basic way that the fortune teller works is your pay her gold to give you a random reward. The first stage costs 100 gold and gives you a 90% chance of getting 200 gold as a reward, earning 100 gold. Every once in a while, you get screwed with cash or chicken feed, but over time, you will get 1800 for every 1000 you spend. The trick with the fortune teller is that price to play and rewards increase each round, and for the 2nd to 14th round, the odds are changed and now against you. The statistical average is that you will lose a little bit of gold (5-10%) every time you play and you have to understand that it is very possible to loose all of your gold (even if you have 1,000,000 gold). The best thing to do is just play the first level and walk away, or there is the win a quit method IF you have at least 100,000 gold and can take a 10% chance of losing it all.

How Packages Work

Before we get into the different packages, it's a good time to talk about how Big Farm packages work and the few surprises that come up along the way. There are always 2 identical packages at the beginning of the selection for $5 and $10. $5 would be your base price (different depending on currency. Shown is Canadian at $7). After this, there will be a random selection of packages at your base price and one at $20. These rotate every 5 or 30 mins. Next come the fixed price packages like growing gold, cash, seaweed, market contracts and subscriptions. The last package is the base gold package. If you buy any package, your base price increases (the products for sale in the package also slightly more than double), so now your first 2 packages are $10 and $20 and the random packages following that are all $10. If you buy again, your packages increase to $20 and $30, $30 and $50, $50 and $100 and finally $100 and $50. (Not a typo. The first 2 are $50 and $100 and all of your random packages become $100.) If you don't buy anything for 14 days, the package base price comes down one step. If you buy a $5 package, it will take 2 weeks for the packages to return to $5.

The second surprise is that most of the packages are labeled 2,250 gold plus Bonuses worth 52,000 gold (package dependent). The "Bonuses worth" means that there are extras in the package that Big Farm values at 52,000 gold, not that you get 52,000 extra gold. You get exactly what is shown. In the example "Big Dollar Flash Sale", you get 4,250 gold (2,250 plus bonus 2000), $1,000,000 in farm cash and 600 water. Big Farm values $1,000,000 farm cash at 44,000 gold.

The third surprise is that petty much every package has multiple variants of the same package with different quantities for the bonuses. A classic example is the "Golden opportunity" sale with 4 variants. For $5, you can get either 12,250 gold, 13,000 gold and some extras, 15,250 gold or 18,250 gold. The $20 expansion package can give you either half or double the materials.

Buying Gold - One Time Offers

Spend $5 can get you anywhere from 2,250 to 20,000 gold, so it pays to understand the different packages in the game and what they are worth.

At the very end of the packages, there is the standard gold package and it will get you 2,250. Never, ever, buy these. These are just bad deals. Any other package will come with bonuses. The trick is to get the highest amount of gold per dollar as possible.

The first offer worth looking at is the piggy bank. Basically, you harvest your fields and it gives you 15 gold per minute of grow time (increased by humus). Once you have 20% of your piggy bank full, you can buy it for the amount listed. If you are going to do this, wait till the piggy bank is 100% full because you get 20-100% of the gold for the same price. The original piggy back had 6 levels that increase in price and gold, but now it is just the one $5 level.

If you are a regular gold buyer, this isn't a deal. If you are not a regular gold buyer, the first 4 levels are a deal.

The best deal in the game is the growing gold offer. With this one, you get a total of 200,000 gold for $20, but it pays out an increasing amount every 10 levels up to level 100, so you have to wait till level 100 to collect everything.

Buying Gold - Regular Packages

Rotating in the regular offers is the "Golden Opportunity" sale. This is one of the best packages to use if you want to buy gold and comes with a bunch of extras like cash, dog treats, build coupons and water. However, it has 3 variants that usually run for 24 hours each on the weekends during 50% or greater sales. These ones do not give extra goodies, but give the most gold in any package. There are 3 variants - 12,250 gold for $5, 15,250 for $5 and 18,250 gold for $5. The regular running one gives 14,000 gold for $5. With these packages, have the subscription will give you ~20% (increases 1% each month you have the subscription) more on the base amount of gold. The $5 package will receive an extra 450 gold. The subscription has many other benefits, but if you are buying it just to get the extra gold, you need to buy at least 400,000 gold per month to make it a positive investment.

Buying Packages with Rewards Programs

Some of the known options that real players have used are Google Opinion Rewards for Android and QuickThoughts for Apple. You can set up an account, do surveys and then use the rewards (aka store credits) to purchase game packages.

What Not To Buy

Stretching Your Gold

Every so often there is an Extra bonus! promotion where you get coupons and extra rewards when buying packages (below). It alternates 500 and 1000 bonus gold. shown is the 1000 gold offer. As you buy any package, you will get those blue/green coupons and when you cross a threshold (18, 77, etc), the notification to collect the package of items will pop up under your happiness (or where Montgomery is pointing).

Last, but not least, check out the rewards tab is the tournament tent. There is an offer to buy more gold with gold - you literally buy 2600 gold for 2000 gold - or you can buy co-op funds and gold with gold. For the co-op funds, you basically get your gold back with bonus co-op funds that are applied to the village.

Spending Gold

If you are going to buy gold buildings, upgrades, bonuses, etc, ALWAYS do it during a sale. Sales range from 30% to 70% off. 70% is rare, but 60% usually occurs once a month. The only thing that doesn't go on sale is the frying pan in the fish cafe.

Again, I will echo that if you are going to invest into the game, buy things that will still have an impact on your farm a week later. This would be things like fertile fields, fancy houses, fertile orchards, external barn, frying pans, etc. To a lesser extent, land and upgrades and pushing a tournament to collect buckets in farm contest or unlock a tournament reward also have long impact on your farm, but you need to be careful you don't build obstacles you can't over come. If you spend $100 and buy 20 (#16 to #35) pieces of land, you will have to wait 6-8 months to let your level catch up or spend $50 to get #36. Expansion #42 is around $100 USD.