Level 69 is one of the most common places that people quit this game because of honey, nectar, and mallets. The honey supply chain is hard on your farm at the beginning and is worse if you are not prepared or follow the flow of the blue task book. Let’s work through some honey dynamics and get you prepared to quickly transition through this stage of the game.

At level 67, you get to enter the wonderful world of honey. Forest honey is a powerful product that you can:

• use in the market to boost your cash sales ($$$), materials and tournament points 
• tend to your cafe customers faster (mallets and cash), freeing up meadow and manufactory to make citrus oil for sushi (mallets)
• make glazed fish (mallets).

Also at level 67, every building on your farm will start needing mallets to upgrade.  

How do you get mallets? Mainly with honey. Basically, mallets => nectar => honey => mallets => nectar => honey => you get the idea.

Nectar? Where does that come from? 

One of my biggest problems with this game is when you hit level 67, the first task in the book is to build a beehive. At the same time, the market is going to start slamming you with honey orders. So you use your cafe for 10 days to get mallets (or sushi if you are lucky) and scrounge up 10 workers to build a beehive and get 50 nectar as the reward, all while your frustrations grow dumping 13% of your contracts and generating less income. You spend a day building it, run it once and on the next round it wants nectar?!? Nectar comes from level 7 or above orchards. If you go further down in your task book, that task to upgrade your apples (to level 7) is actually really, really important, so important that you should do it well before building the beehive. But now you need more mallets, cash and workers while that empty beehive mocks you saying “just spend $10 to get some mallets…” 

The fact is, 2 level 7 apples running around the clock will keep your beehive running less than 4 hours per day and fill less than 2 market orders. You can expect 16-24 honey orders per day if you play to match your apples. But, if you use that honey in the market, you can’t use it to get more mallets.

So, let's make the problem worse and introduce flower honey at level 68. Flower honey is made from nectar collected from level 8+ fields and is only useful in the market. The fish cafe recipe (Grilled Fish - 100 Flower Honey for 50 Paw Prints) is a waste of a purple fillet if you consider all the things you can do with a purple fillet. Save purple fillets for Glazed Fish (Forest Honey for mallets) until you are done with mallets (or have your honey maxed and more purple fillets than you can process into mallets). You also need 200 mallets per field to upgrade.

It is a whole cycle of scrambling while being frustrated only to make progress and realize the whole pattern repeats.  

It doesn’t have to be like that if you prepare.

From the beginning of the game:

• try to catch purple and red fish, fry them and save them. Your future farm will thank you beyond all measure if you have more than 100 of each saved up. 40 red is a good starting target because it will produce 800 mallets for the first phase of honey. Don’t use red fillets on keys unless you truly understand the impact of mallets on your future or you plan to buy mallets. (If you are going to buy mallets and buckets in the future, you are smarter to buy gold and go with fertile orchards.)
• use fertile apples with great caution. The first few levels are cheap and can be bought with the free gold earned in the game. It will cost you $20-25 (USD) to upgrade it to level 7 to get nectar and another $25-35 to upgrade to level 10. If you bulldoze one, you get NOTHING back. If you put in a fertile apple, be prepared to:
  • bulldoze it
  • seriously hurt your nectar making ability in it’s critical first stages
  • or spend real money to upgrade it

• don’t build a free range apple. For now, just trust me and the thousands of fans that sink lots of time and material into them only to get frustrated and bulldoze it later in the game. There are not enough paw prints to make it a good investment and the only way to make paw prints is a very poor use of purple fillets (or you have to buy them). 

Level 58:

• you are now starting to think about your cafe and it’s a good time to start thinking about building the meadow and cafe. You can use it to primarily make citrus, citrus oil and then prepare sushi in the fish cafe to convert those red fillets you have been saving into mallets. 

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I have not updated and posted the cafe post yet. Basically the cafe is flashy, but a poor use of land early in the game. The rewards for the cafe increase by player level, so it becomes better and better as your player level increases. I recommend building the cafe supply chain (meadow and manufactory) your first expansion after level 58 to see the true benefit at level 60+.

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Level 60:

• Level 8 house upgrade is unlocked. This is your last upgrade for 15 levels and level 9+ require precious mallets. There is a lot of upgrading you need to do between levels 60 and 75. It may be wise to tentatively plan a house into future expansions as well.

By level 67, you want to have:

• all (preferably 3) apples to level 6
• at least 2 level 7 fields
• $9 million in farm cash
• 15-20 workers (or the ability to upgrade houses to level 8 easily).  
• many red and purple fish fillets
• 675 or more mallets

Level 67:

• Ignore the beehive task. Dump honey contracts in the market. It will be a lot. Your ability to move contracts is going to be seriously affected. Income goes down, frustration goes up. Buying pigs at this point makes things even worse.
• Upgrade your apples to 7 ($2.1 million, 75 mallets and 1 worker each)
• Start stocking up on nectar. 3 apples 6 times per day for 4 days will run the hive for 16 hours (or 1 day).

Level 68: 

• Upgrade 2 fields to level 8 ($1.26 million, 200 mallets and 1 worker each)
• Start stocking up on nectar.
• If you have lots of mallets left over, you can start upgrading more fields.

When you are comfortable with your nectar reserves: 

• Build the beehive (50 mallets, 10 workers)
• Turn honey into mallets via purple fish in the fish cafe
• A level 1 beehive can process up to 400 forest nectar (400 forest honey) and 600 flower nectar (overnight - 50 flower honey) per day.

Level 72:

• Upgrade your cherry orchard to level 7 ($2.45 million, 210 mallets and 1 worker each)

Level 77:

• Upgrade your apples to level 8 promptly. ($3 million each, 240 mallets and 2 workers each)
• After your apples are upgraded, upgrade your hive. First, it takes less nectar to make honey which is a decent return on mallets. Second, you can run twice as much flower honey overnight, reducing inactive time.

Level 83 & 83:

• When you hit level 82, you can upgrade your cherries to level 8
• At level 83 you can upgrade your almonds to level 7. However, the almonds will give you a lot more nectar per mallet invested, so if you are low on mallets, wait for a level and do your almonds first.

Level 87:

• You will be able to upgrade your apples to level 9 (875 mallets). Apples are the best upgrade for nectar. 
• Again, once your apples are upgraded, the hive can be upgraded for the same to reasons at level 77.

Level 97:

• Level 4 beehive unlocks. If you have prepared well, you should have more nectar than you can process and the level 4 beehive is a large step up in terms of capacity and efficiency, but it takes buckets. You also start needing buckets for orchards level 11 and up, which give a huge boost in nectar production. You can get some buckets from premium dog bones (in a year I have gotten 450 from dog bones with normal play), but after that you need to buy them with real money. I got mine from Google Surveys and a builders package (550 buckets). Hopefully, by the time you actually need buckets, Big Farm will have introduced a way to make or earn them for the average user.
• Level 10 apples are available and take a lot of mallets.

At level 180, my level 4 hive can fill ¼ of my honey contracts, but I am still making mallets, so use honey only for rare materials. For reference, I have:

• 5 apples level 9+
• 3 almonds level 8
• 3 cherries level 8
• 2 peaches level 7
• 5 fertile fields level 8
• 1 field level 8
• 60,000 forest nectar 
• 210,000 flower nectar

I think the biggest recurring gold spending source for Big Farm is competitive players paying to skip beehive time to fill honey orders, so they like the beehive bottle neck. Honey is great, but it is designed and implemented to make you want to spend money. If you understand these limitations, honey is much less stressful.

The old website had a nectar calculator which I will resurrect again some day, but because of how buildings unlock as you level up, your upgrade plan is pretty much fixed. 

If you are low on mallets and the question is level 8 cherries or level 9 apples (both in the 700-900 mallet range), go apples. Along the same train of thought, a level 7 orchard will produce more nectar per mallet invested than any other level. So if your fertilizer supply allows you to another orchard but you don’t have the mallets to get to level 8 or 9, add it anyways. Level 7 apple = 75 mallets for 10 nectar. Level 9 apple = 875 mallets for 5 nectar.

Now, if you made it here and are swearing under your breath or just went to grab some comfort food because you wish you had read this 50 levels ago, I have some thoughts for you.

• Deep breath. You are in the thick of the worst part of the game. Make it through this and it is smooth sailing till you hit a small tailor and sheep speed bump. They are nothing compared to this.
• Fish, fish, and fish. Or better yet, find someone that loves to fish and get them to fish for you. Red, purple or sell.
• Cafe. Now your meadow is going to work 24 hours a day to hit the 6th reward and 5 mallets. If you forgo the mallets and make 12 hours of citrus and citrus oil, you can make sushi for 20 mallets. Use your meadow and manufactory wisely.
• Apples, apples, and apples. Apples are the best nectar per mallet. Keep your apples running and get them upgraded as quickly as you can. If you have a free range apple, run it over with a bulldozer. If you have a fertile apple, ask a loved one for an early Christmas present - “I’ll think of you and know you love me every time I pick my apples.” OK, if that doesn’t work, buy yourself a present. (Always buy gold in good packages and upgrade during sales.) If you can’t spend money, bulldozer. Sorry.
• Save cash. You will need it to either upgrade orchards or expand. Those goats can wait. Your co-op can wait. You are better for them with 100 less cheese and still playing in a month than getting frustrated and quitting.

The other question is what if you don’t have the workers or a house to upgrade. This is a really tough one to answer and usually takes some farm specific creativity. Things you can explore to solve the problem are:

• Save to expand. This could be very slow or a very long time
• Run your happiness close to zero if it will get you more workers
• Remove a building till your next expansion. If this is a stable, you may need to temp chickens for fertilizer
• Bulldoze something and rebuild it at a lower level to gain workers. Pigs are excellent for this, but chickens and fields work as well.

My hope is that you will be able to prepare yourself the introduction of honey and find it an enjoyable challenge with realistic expectations.

Happy Farming