Podcast Transcript 2010-11-05

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= Official FarmVille Podcast – November 5th Transcript =

Hey Farmers and welcome to this week’s installment of the official FarmVille Podcast! My name is Lexilicious and I am here to bring you all of the latest news and information about FarmVille from Zynga. This week, we will be discussing our latest releases and you guys will all be getting a sneak peek of what is coming to FarmVille in the near future.

This week we will be spending a majority of the Podcast discussing our new Orchards, however before we get into the details of our latest releases, I would like to give a huge thank you to all of the members of our community who participated in the various Halloween contests we have had running over the past few weeks. The FarmVille team was hugely impressed with the effort and time that went into all of the entries for the Decorating contest, the costume contest and the pumpkin carving contest this year. Congratulations again to all of our winners, and if anyone would like to check out our winning entries, please make sure to visit the “discussions” section of the Official FarmVille Forums. As a reminder, all of our winners will be walking away with 500 Farm Cash and half a million coins, so make sure to enter our next community contest for your chance to win big.

Alright, so the past few weeks were filled with great new Limited Edition items that all of our players have seemed to enjoy, including the new Halloween items and the return of the Country Fair items. Your original favorites from this theme have made another appearance along with some great new items to add to your collection. The Country Fair items can now be found in the Marketplace for a limited time only, so make sure to grab some before they disappear.

By now, most of our players will have had a chance to briefly check out our latest big release, the new Orchards. However, since this feature was only released yesterday, I would like to go over some of the finer points with you guys to help you understand the benefits of using this new mechanic. With the introduction of Orchards farmers can now group their trees into a new type of building that can be harvested for special mystery seeds. Tree Mastery has also been added for those who truly love their trees. Unlike other buildings where you can place items inside, all of the different trees are visible within, so you can make colorful and unique displays.

You’ll get your first Orchard frame for free the first time you play FarmVille after it updates, and will immediately be entered into Placement Mode. You can place the Orchard frame on your farm now, or you can choose to place it in your Gift Box for use later. There are no level restrictions for the Orchard.

The Orchard is a constructable building, so you’ll need a grand total of 30 parts to finish it. Like other constructable buildings, you can ask your neighbors for these parts by posting to your feed or by purchasing them with Farm Cash.

Once an Orchard is fully complete, you can choose to start building another one by buying an incomplete Orchard frame in the Market (for 1,000 coins) or a fully complete Orchard ( for 30 Farm Cash). You can have as many Orchards as you have farm space for, provided you are building only one at a time.

Each Orchard can hold up to 20 trees, which you can move into the Orchard simply by clicking on tree, selecting Move, and then clicking on the Orchard you want to move the tree in to. Visually the Orchard will show each of the individual trees you put into it. You cannot directly choose where the trees are placed in the Orchard, but you can choose the order by which they go into the Orchard, and that order determines how the Orchards look visibly. This means that the look of the Orchard can change wildly depending on the trees you put into it. Orchards can also be lined up and arrayed quite easily, so making large colorful displays is entirely possible.

Now, your Orchard will be harvestable once every 48 hours. When you harvest it, you’ll gain the total amount of coins each of the trees would normally give during a harvest if they were placed individually on the farm.

Harvesting an Orchard may also give you a Mystery Seed. When this happens you’ll get a notice, and the Mystery Seed will be placed in your Gift Box. The Mystery Seed is a new tree—the exact identity of the type of tree depends on the makeup of the Orchard. For example, if your Orchard has 15 Apricot Trees and 5 Guava Trees, chances are the Orchard will produce an Apricot seedling rather than a Guava seedling. In addition, the Mystery Seed is an upgraded version of tree that produced it. To continue the example used above, if the seedling comes from an Apricot tree then it will produce an Apricot Golden tree (a Level 2 tree). Note that some Level 2 trees may already be available in FarmVille in one form or another, and they do not produce anything better than Level 2 trees (there are no Level 3 trees… yet). That doesn’t mean you can’t have them in your Orchard though!

You won’t know what kind of tree it is until it’s fully grown. In order to grow a Mystery Seed into a tree, you’ll need to first place it on the farm and then water it ten times. You can gift individual Water Cans through the Free Gifts page (and that’s how you can receive them from your neighbors), or you can buy them from the Market for 1 Farm Cash each. To water the sapling, simply click on it and choose the Watering option (if you don’t have any Water Cans, you can use the menu to ask or buy for more).

Once watered ten times, the Mystery Seed will now be fully grown into the new tree. This new tree acts like any other tree—you can harvest it individually, move it, or put it back into the Orchard.

Harvesting trees will also now contribute to Tree Mastery! That’s right, you can now Master all of the different Tree types and receive Mastery Signs for them. In this fashion they work just like crop mastery—each time you harvest a tree it leads towards mastery of that tree (whether the tree is on the farm or in an Orchard). You can earn 3 stars for each tree type, which is also reflected in the Tree Mastery Sign (which you’ll earn for getting the first star for that tree). Level 1 and Level 2 trees are both masterable. Once you’ve harvested a tree type enough to get the first star, you’ll see a reward window and the Mastery Sign will show up in your Gift Box.

You can check on how far along your Mastery is in a couple of ways. When you look inside the Orchard you can see how many stars you’ve earned for each tree as well as the progress bar that shows how far you have to go to get the next star. You can see the same level of information by clicking on the revised “Collections” button in the UI menu on the bottom right.

Since this is a relatively big feature, we would love to hear your thoughts and feedback. If you have any opinions you would like to share with us, please make sure to visit the official FarmVille forums to let us know what you have to say.

And on that note, it’s time for everyone’s favorite part of the podcast… all of our awesome listeners are going to get a sneak peek of what is coming to FarmVille in the near future.

First up is the new Turkey Roost. The Turkey roost is a Limited Edition constructible building that lets players house their turkeys, as the name suggests. Players can expand their roosts twice to house up to 40 turkeys in total. When harvesting your roost you will have a chance of receiving baby turkeys to share, or an item that can be used in the upcoming thanksgiving holiday basket feature.

And last on the list this week is the new buildable Funhouse decoration, that will go wonderfully with the country fair theme. This building will be available for farm cash or it can be constructed with building components received from your friends and neighbors. As one of the designers said to me when giving me details about this new feature “it’s pretty sweet decoration”, so make sure to keep on the lookout for both of these releases in the coming weeks.

Alright folks, that’s it from me this week. I will be back on the 19th to bring you all of the latest news and information from around the farm. Again, my name is Lexilicious and I would like to thank everyone for listening. Happy Farming everybody!