FarmVille Tips & Tricks: Quickly master trees with Orchard rotation

It's no question that the higher the level you reach in FarmVille, the less new things you have to work on. That is, by the time you reach level 75 and above, you've likely come to greatly understand bushels, crafting, animal breeding and the like, and might be looking for something else to occupy your time. I was in such a situation until I finally decided to hunker down and master the dozens of tree types that were quickly filling my Home Farm.

Sure, Tree Mastery has been around for some time now, but if you're only casually participating, or you delete more trees than you plant, you're missing out on a fine opportunity to expand your Mastery Sign collection by leaps and bounds. Luckily, there's a surefire way to master each tree much more quickly than if you had simply left the trees to grow on their own, harvesting them every two days (or less often) and then moving on, and this all has to do with your Orchards.

For those that have yet to undertake the Orchard Rotation trick to master trees in FarmVille, we've got a detailed guide on how to get you started. Just be warned - once you start, this addictive (yet admittedly time consuming) process might pull you in and you won't want to stop!

First and foremost, there are some ground rules to consider. Most importantly, the amount of time it will take you to master a particular tree will be greatly decreased by each individual Orchard you have. If you're going to undertake the Orchard Rotation strategy, you'll want to build as many Orchards as you have materials to build. I'd suggest having at least 10 on hand at all times, if you really want to earn the most bang for your proverbial buck.

From there, you'll need to make sure that your trees are organized. The best way to master trees is if you've been able to assort all of your trees in groups of like-species, so that all of your available trees can be used in this trick at the same time. To setup your farm, you'll want to place just one tree (either the type of tree you're trying to master, or some random species) into each Orchard, so that the overall Orchard becomes "ready" to harvest as normal. Place all of your desired trees to master in the first Orchard on a line, and then wait for everything to become "ready" to harvest before moving on.

Once your farm looks similar to the picture above (I keep each Orchards separate visually by placing incredibly different trees in each as the "starter" tree), you can begin. Each time your full set of Orchards is ready to harvest, click to harvest the Orchard that's full of your current active tree. If you're like me, you'll gain up to 19 individual mastery points with that single click. From there, do not harvest any of your other Orchards, but instead, remove all of the trees from the Orchard you just harvested, and place those trees into the next Orchard in the line (remember to leave one tree inside). Since you haven't harvested the second Orchard, these moved trees will instantly take on the "ready" status of the entire thing. Once full, harvest the second Orchard, earning another 19 points of mastery.

And so on and so forth the system goes. It's best to click slowly as you move trees from one Orchard to another, so that you don't accidentally harvest a ready Orchard before it's full (trust me, I've done it before, and losing all of those points is disappointing, to say the least). Once you've harvested every Orchard in your possession, you'll be pleased to know that you will have earned dozens or even hundreds of mastery points, all on a single type of tree, all within a single 10-15 minute session simply by following this plan.

Again, the more Orchards you have, and the more trees you have of that particular type, the more effective this strategy will be. We'd suggest even leaving some excess trees outside of your Orchard, if you have that many extras, so that they can continue to grow as normal (a few extra points never hurt, after all). In this way, you'll quickly find that you can take a tree that requires over 500 points to master, and whittle that point-earning process to a matter of a week or even just a few days (again, depending on the number of Orchards you own).

Orchard rotation may take up a lot of your free time, but with Orchards only becoming "ready" once every two days, those extra-long gameplay sessions don't have to take over your life. And as the mastery signs start piling up, I'm sure you'll agree that the process is worth the hassle. We can only hope that Zynga doesn't remove this "exploit" of sorts from the game to ruin our fun, but for now, take advantage of this great earning potential while you can!

Check out the rest of our FarmVille Tips & Tricks right here.

Do you currently use the Orchard Rotation strategy to quickly master trees? Do you consider this to be "cheating," or just an effective use of items already freely available in the game?