Lost FarmVille animals being replaced?

FarmVille Freak has received quite a few emails about animals now being replenished to players who experienced loss in last week's FarmVille animal fiasco. But, are these replacements the correct animals? Many players are reporting that when logging on their farm animals have been added directly to their buildings with purpose/animal storage buildings, enough to stretch the capacity of the building, but these animals are not what they initially lost. Zynga is clearly attempting to make good on farmers losses but maybe not in the most efficient way?


FarmVille Freak Lisa lost Cream Draft Horses and Rhode Island Red Chickens but was given Grey Horses and Gold Chickens.

    I noticed something odd in my stable this morning when making my round I noticed I had more horses than there should have been room for! I had 65 horses when capacity is only 40! I guess they are trying to compensate for lost animals, but they missed the mark by far giving me such common stock when I lost the much harder to replace cream horses, red chickens and etc. :(


FarmVille Freak LittleBuePig had a similar experience:

    During Farmville's recent updates I lost 14 cows from my dairy and 10 bricks from my Japanese barn. A day of so later I received 7 cows, 30 golden chickens, 3 green calves, and no bricks. I've attached a screen shot showing by chicken coop with 60/60 chickens, but 83 golden chickens.

    FarmVille Freak LittleBuePig Incorrect Gold Chicken Replacement

FarmVille Freak Ashley found calves in her Nursery Barn, but her missing cows were not replaced:

    This morning I logged onto Farmville and noticed that in my nursery barn (where all my missing animals had been) I had 32/20 animals in there. I looked inside and noticed that I had 14 regular calfs...when before I only had about 3. I checked my other things like the dairy barn, horse stable, and chicken coop but those all seemed normal even though I did have a missing cow or two. I was just wondering if this was a glitch or will I acutally be able to keep 32 animals in there!

    FaceBook FarmVille Freak Ashley Missing Cows Replaced With Regular Calves

The good news? Some restitution plan is in action. The bad news? Players are not the receiving animals they lost. Hopefully this is just the first stage of Zynga's plan to replace our precious animals.

Have you received correct replacement animals?

This article originally appeared on FarmVille Freak.

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?