Script for fast bot clicking on Farmville, 8x8 square

I get this a lot: "I downloaded the auto clicking program. How do you use it?" Then I respond: "You first record your mouse clicks, then replay them back." After that, I keep getting people saying "How do you record it? I don't get it."

First, the instructions are for PCs. I don't have one for Mac. Download the Mouse and Key Recorder 6.5 here from Kratronic and install it:
http://www.kratronic.com/tools/recorder/download/index.html

Then you can take the following content and save it as a script, like "Farmville8x8.krc":

"{{' Created at: Oct.23.2009, 11:55       (MKR Version: 6.5 )
{{MessageBox Move to the top corner of your farm and press SPACE
{{GetCursorPos
{{SetVarOrigX {{VarGetCursorCoord_X}
{{SetVarOrigY {{VarGetCursorCoord_Y}
{{SetVarDiffX 50
{{SetVarDiffY 24
{{SetVarI 0
{{Label LOOP_I
{{SetVarX {{Calc {{VarOrigX} + ({{VarI} * {{VarDiffX}) }
{{SetVarY {{Calc {{VarOrigY} + ({{VarI} * {{VarDiffY}) }
{{SetVarJ 0
{{Label LOOP_J
{{'MessageBox {{VarX} and {{VarY}
{{Mouse  1, 1, {{VarX}, {{VarY}, 0
{{IncVarJ 1
{{IncVarX -{{VarDiffX}
{{IncVarY {{VarDiffY}
{{If {{VarJ} < 8 ;{{Goto LOOP_J;
{{IncVarI 1
{{If {{VarI} < 8 ;{{Goto LOOP_I;
","","","20","0","00","00",#TRUE#,0,"1"

Load this script in the Keyboard and Mouse Recorder 6.5. Load up Farmville, and zoom out twice so that you can see 8x8 squares in Farmville. Now go back to the Keyboard and Mouse Recorder 6.5 program and press the play button (the triangle). You'll get a prompt asking you to place the cursor on the top side of the farm square and press SPACE BAR. Just place your cursor on the top most square of the 8x8 farm position (right in the middle the farm square), then press SPACE, and voila! It will click all the 64 squares for you.

PLUG
I now support my family through this website, as crazy as it might seem. Using the script will have saved you a lot of time, and a lot of money that you would otherwise have to pay Zynga (fuel, money, etc). So please help me and help everyone with a gift of $5.00 so that I can continue with hints that save you a lot of time and money.

Click here now

You can use this script to do everything:

1. Harvest (use the multi-tool before clicking on PLAY)
2. Plowing (use the multi-tool before clicking on PLAY)
3. Planting (select the seed you want before clicking on PLAY)

The script should click several times a second, but in case your computer is slow and the clicking rate is slow, you can open up Task Manager, right click on the Recorder.exe executable, and change the priority to Higher Than Normal. This will speed up clicking considerably, on slow computers. If you're interested in BASIC-like scripting, you can write your own scripts. The guide below is pretty useful if you like to program it:
http://www.kratronic.com/tools/recorder/manual/index.html#_Toc225604982

Here's homework to challenge your noggins: write a script that loops and automatically plays for you (all 3 cycles) so that you can Farm while you sleep! Wouldn't that be cool?

Make sure to bookmark this blog and come back often for more hints. Have fun! -Kevin

NEW GAME: Cafe World by Zynga

Alright guys, I've moved on to the next new Zynga game -- Cafe World. Since I just started playing, I'm only level 8, but I'll update on hints and ways to optimize (level up fast) whenever I get new insights. Once again, you want to cook food that gives you the most CP (aka XP, experience points) and coins in the least amount of time. You must take in time into account! Pot roast gives you back 3935 coins (5750-1800-15) after 2 days, but it has less "coin per time ratio" than hamburgers that give you back 22 (52-15-15) every 5 min. This is because a hamburger will [in theory] give you back a whopping 760,320 coins after 2 days -- if you keep playing non-stop for 2 days.

Thus, if you have time to play, the best food to cook will have the best "coin per time" ratio and the "CP per time" ratio, defined as follows*:

coin-per-time ratio = (income - coins to prepare + coins to clean up) / time ready

CP-per-time ratio = (CP to prepare + CP to serve) / time ready

What does the chart indicate if you want the most coins and CP? It means you should cook only hamburger every 5 minutes. However, most people can't play the game on a 24x7 basis. People need to sleep. For example, if you need to be away from the computer for 12 hours, then you can cook Cheesecake which will be done in 12 hours. It may have a much lousier coins/time and CP/time ratio than hamburgers, but at least you don't have to click every 5 minutes, and you get some return than doing nothing in the kitchen.

On the right side of your screen there is Buzz Rating which controls the rate at which people come into your restaurant. Buzz rating goes up when someone is served food quickly, and goes down if someone doesn't get food or can't sit down. The higher the buzz rating, the more customers/time you'll get. If you're worried about buzz rating and want to keep it high, make sure there are enough tables and chairs for everyone and that there is enough food to serve. If you're out of food (cooking time is too long), you can start cooking something, then visit a friend or exit, then come back to your kitchen-- the buzz rating will be the same as when you left. Likewise, you can put an object that blocks the door so no one can come in, thus no one will be angry about waiting for food inside your restaurant. Likewise, if you're going away for a while and not sure if you have enough dishes to serve to people, exit the game. The server will estimate your profit and keep serving out dishes without affecting your buzz rating.

I don't personally worry about buzz rating. It is in some way meaningless due to a "design flaw" in the game. Let's say you've cook 1000 dishes. Since each person takes about 27 seconds to finish their food, it'll take theoretically 27000 seconds (1000*27 seconds) or 450 minutes to finish all 1000 dishes assuming your buzz rating is high. You can actually get around by creating lots of tables+chairs, visiting a friend's cafe, then come back; you'll see most of the tables filled out instantly, and everyone will finish their food within 27 seconds. You can repeat this and your food will get consumed very quickly while your buzz rating goes up fast. ** ****

*Since you need to prepare the food (average 3 clicks per dish), there is time between serving an old dish and and cooking a new dish. Thus I've also factored in a minute of paused time in between serving an old dish and preparing a new dish.

**If you're a hacker, you can also download Cheat Engine and speed up the Flash engine by 5X or 10X and let people eat very quickly. The Cafe World server doesn't seem to have rate limiting built in [yet], and I'd imagine it's too expensive (space and bandwidth) to keep track of everything on the server. Using this method you can serve out hundreds of customers per minute. How to use Cheat Engine is beyond the scope of this blog, but if you're interested, feel free to Google help on it.

*** Note that you can't simply speed up the cooking time using Cheat Engine. The reason is the Cafe World server in San Francisco keeps track of when you started a dish and when you should have the dish available. Thus if you speed up the Flash engine, your Flash will think it is done, but none of the coins will actually register on the Cafe World server; your game will be out of sync.

FarmVille Retirement at Level 34 - Goodbye!

Ok guys, I've reached level 34 in less than a month. At level 34, I bought a Villa, and thus I finished the game. I am now officially retired from FarmVille, aka The Fastest Growing Game in North America and the biggest money maker for Zynga. I finished the game with minimal efforts using the strategies and techniques outlined in my blog. I am now quitting FarmVille for good and I will move on to other projects, but I will still populate this blog with more hints [perhaps on other games], so make sure to bookmark and come back often!

I want to thank everyone who kept up with this blog. I'm surprised to see the visits to my YouTube page in such a short period of time, and the high ratings you guys are giving me. Thanks so much to everyone! I wish you luck and happiness in FarmVille!

Ah, there's nothing like having the Villa with transportation and a pond for your retirement. This is every FarmVille farmer's dream!

This is the ethical Kevin Animal Processing Plant I created. This has always been my own dream.

Thank you everyone! I feel really good that I finished FarmVille without spending much time on it, without using Cheat Engine (modifying internal values in Flash), without having to decompile Flash (but it'd be pretty fun to do so), and without mucking with the TCP/IP stack (pain). I did it with the good 'ol fashion AND the least-controversial method -- auto clicking mouse macros, and with calculations for optimal planting strategies. That's it!

Good bye, and good luck to everyone! I hope to see you in the FarmVille Retirement Club soon!

Get to FarmVille Level 34 really fast! Level up several times a day!!!

One of the most coveted items In FarmVille is the Villa. One needs to be at Level 34 and have 1,000,000 FarmVille coins to buy the Villa. Unfortunately, going to Level 34 is tedious and takes weeks and weeks of excruciating mouse finger work.

Don't worry!!! On this blog I will show you another way of reaching Level 34 really really fast without spending a single dime of your real cash (aka credit card, dollar, etc) and without having to go to Mouse Click Hell.

I haven't spent a single *real* cash (U.S. Dollar) on online games but if you're wealthy and want to buy your way into leveling up, then by all means spend real cash. You'll make Zynga really happy as they are pulling in ~$500,000 on virtual goodies every day, and you'll be doing a good job stimulating the economy: http://www.businessinsider.com/facebook-beating-the-s-out-of-its-numbers-thanks-to-zyngas-virtual-goods-2009-9

I haven't spent a single dime on Zynga thus all of the hints here are on how to accumulate FarmVille coins and XP optimally without spending any real cash. Having that said, if you play the game with the intention of leveling up ASAP and without spending real money, then you should not have spent any FarmVille coins on animals, trees, and buildings until you reached high levels (Level 34). Instead, you should stick to the simple plow-plant-harvest only crop strategy, which allows you to make lots of FarmVille coins while leveling up as fast as you can (see my previous posts on the analysis of points/XP). One way to use the extra FarmVille coins is to buy items (building, etc) that will give you XP for leveling up. The rule in the game is that to gain 1XP, you'll have to spend 100 coins. The bang-for-bucks ratio is thus 1:100. So let's say you need 5000 XP to reach the next level, then you need to spend 500,000 coins. However it's not that easy to gain 500,000 coins, and it also has the downside of wasting squares on the items you bought that could otherwise be used for crops.

A better bang-for-bucks strategy is to use the plow-plant-delete method. That is, you plow (-15 coin, 1XP), then plant soybean (-15, 2XP), then delete, then repeat this many times. Using this method, you can get 3XP by spending only 30 coins. The bang-for-bucks ratio is thus 3:30, or a whopping 1:10. Going back to our example, if you need 5000 XP to reach the next level, you only need to spend 50,000 coins!

Of course, having to delete hundreds of plot of land is very time consuming and tiring to your fingers. But with the power of bot/auto-clickers, you can automate this process. I leveled up from 33 to 34 in about a day without much clicking by spending about 100,000 coins. Had I done this using the traditional plow-plant-harvest method, it would have taken many days. Below is a video showing you how it looks when you let the bot farm for you. Make sure you see the middle section (fast forwarded)!!

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I now support my family through this website, as crazy as it might seem. If you find this helpful or you might have had to spend money on game companies or to attain this information, feel free to help me and to continue helping everyone. If you haven't helped yet, please do, and consider helping me with a gift of $5.00.

Thanks for reading! -Kevin Click here now

Make sure to bookmark this blog and next time, we'll explore how to use the Cheat Engine and modify internal values of FarmVille to get you leveled up even faster!

Trees, animals, etc in FarmVille

I didn't talk about trees and animals in my last few entries because they simply don't give good bang for bucks. Relative to crops, trees and animals yield less $$$ per time per square. Also, they're a pain to harvest, they don't yield XP (besides the initial Tree Hugger awards), and they're a total pain to do automation farming (see my previous entry on bot-farming).

However, trees look nice, and if YOUR goal of playing the game is to make things pretty, then by all means, plant trees. Having that said, if you must have trees, there are certain trees that are better. The guide here is a pretty good summary. I'm not going to re-type other people's analysis, so go ahead and visit the guide here:

http://myfivebest.com/advanced-farmville-tips/

The summary is basically that the only good trees to keep are Acai, Olive, Date, Pomegranate, and Banana trees.

How about animals? Keep all of them UNTIL you get all the 4 ribbons and after that, just keep the horse, goat, and duck. In fact, after you get your ribbons just get rid of the rest because they slow down your Flash engine.

Auto bot farming - painless repetition in Farmville

Do you have a big farm and/or simply tired of clicking? Are your fingers tired? Ever wished that someone or something could click for you, fast & free? Zynga started to offer the following tools that can perform 4 clicks for you (2x2 squares) with 1 click.

1) Tractor (2x2)
2) Harvester (2x2)
3) Seeder (2x2)

These tools are fine except they cost fuel. Fuel gets regenerated from time to time, but typically you exhaust them way before you're done farming. The alternative is to buy fuels. You buy fuels by using real money-- credit card on Facebook. I've never done this, but I can imagine why some people who have money would do it this way.

What if you can have a tool that can click 25 times for you? Or maybe even 64 times? What if you can create your own 8x8 tool or even bigger? Yes you can! It's easy! As a developer myself, I prefer to use automation tools that help with repetitive tasks. As an example, the web QA people I worked with loved Selenium, a tool that would auto click on buttons and fill out forms on the web. However, Selenium doesn't work on Flash. So I decided to try out a generic mouse macros on Farmville. I've personally tried the Mouse and Keyboard Recorder 6.5 for the PC and I like it so far. You can download it: HERE

I made a mouse macro that clicks 8x8 square, or 64 times with one click. Note that you must make sure you align your 8x8 square in the exact same place when using the Mouse and Keyboard Recorder. First, you start recording the macro (try harvesting or planting), and save it. Afterwards you have your 8x8 master tool. Simply move to the 8x8 square that you need to click on, and start the macro. I do this when I harvest, when I re-plow, and when I re-plant.

If you use virtualization (Parallels, VMWare, VirtualBox), then you can just start the macro and move out of the virtual machine to do something else in parallel (like checking email). I usually check my email while my other VM is doing a bunch of clicks for me at the farm. It really makes farming a lot more pleasant when someone else does the hard work. There are a bunch of mouse macro programs out there. Most are junk (you need to pay to go beyond 2 actions, etc). Mouse and Keyboard Recorder is the first one I found that doesn't have limitations, so far.

On the side note, Zynga is always fine tuning and making the game different, so I wouldn't be surprised if they decide to make it harder to auto-farm. For example they could add in CAPTCHA (squiggly letters), or interrupt with a question, and what not. It's no big deal. Whatever trick they can come up with, there are always counter-tricks to it. In the worst case, one can always introspect the TCP/IP stack between the Flash program and Facebook/Zynga, reverse engineer, and/or decompile & hack the Flash and simply send off packets that farms for you automagically. If there is a way to make something harder, there is always another way to make it easier. Cat-and-mouse, virus/anti-virus, what not. No big deal.

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I now support my family through this website, as crazy as it might seem. If you find this helpful or you might have had to spend money on game companies or to attain this information, feel free to help me and to continue helping everyone. If you haven't helped yet, please do, and consider helping me with a gift of $5.00.

Thanks for reading!

Kevin
Click here now

That's it for now, please bookmark this blog or come back for more optimizations later!

Fastest way to level up in Farmville. Rules rules rules!

There are a few rules to follow so that one can level up fast in Farmville. If you can do all of them, then you'll level up fast. Most of the stuff below is common sense, but it's very easy to miss them:

• Always EXPAND your farm when possible! This is self explanatory. The more real estate you have, the more money you will generate. As you level up, make friends and connect to expand your farm! When you expand farms, bottom two corners are extended. Thus it's always best to plot your land such that you get the tightest spaces like the picture below:
  
• Use every single space you have in Farmville for crop purposes. All the accessories that make the farm looks nice will only impede the rate that you accumulate money and XP.
  
• An idle plot of land is a wasted space. After you harvest, ALWAYS ALWAYS plow and plant immediately. As long as the land is utilized, you're making money and XP
  
• If you have infinite time, you can manually delete the farm, then re-plow and re-plant. This is extremely tedious, but can be helpful at times. This is assuming you have all the time in the world. Most of people do not.
  
• An easy way to gain XP is to buy stuff. While you can do this a few times, it is not sustainable. Having lots of crop trumps over having lots of junk in the long run.
  
• I did not spend a single dime on Zynga (though I have clicked on a few ads that were highly relevant to what I was seeking for). If you must spend money (real cash/credit-card) on Zynga, then do it wisely. Spend on objects or things that have long term positive impacts. Spending money on fuel is not a good way to sustain your farm, though I'm sure Zynga would love you for it.
  
• Avoid Farmville burn out by planning ahead. That is, if you can't watch your crop every 2 hours, don't do it! You'll burn out mentally. Do it at a pace that you're comfortable at, whether that is 8 hour crop, 12 hour crop, or even a 4 day crop.
  

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I now support my family through this website, as crazy as it might seem. If you find this helpful or you might have had to spend money on game companies or to attain this information, feel free to help me and to continue helping everyone. If you haven't helped yet, please do, and consider helping me with a gift of $5.00.

Thanks for reading!

Kevin
Click here now

That's it for now, please bookmark this blog or come back for more optimizations later!

Hidden secret: remote SPEED farming in Farmville

Flash is the engine that powers Farmville. Flash can be slow. If Flash is slow, then it'll take a lot of time to play Farmville, especially if you have a large farm (e.g. 18x18, etc). There are a few ways to drastically speed up the rate which you can farm. The easiest thing to do is to turn off Flashy stuff. You can do this by unclicking the top three buttons in Farmville (the Eye button, the Sound button, and the Music button). The other way to speed up is to have FEWER animals. Get rid of them if you don't need them, because they don't yield as much as crops do, and they don't give you experience to level up.

The above steps are easy ways to speed up. However by far the fastest way to speed up of course is if the farmer (you) doesn't need to move around. If you don't move around, then Flash doesn't have to render images. To not have to move around the farm, you can corner yourself in Farmville, and get the speed up effect immediately. Simply start up Farmville, delete current crop that you're standing on (in the middle of the screen), then corner yourself using props, animals, or any other object. It may feel weird that you can replant, plow, etc without moving around. But after a while, you'll love the speed up! Enjoy!

PLUG
I now support my family through this website, as crazy as it might seem. If you find this helpful or you might have had to spend money on game companies or to attain this information, feel free to help me and to continue helping everyone. If you haven't helped yet, please do, and consider helping me with a gift of $5.00.

Thanks for reading!

Kevin
Click here now

Mathematics of Farmville crops

Different people enjoy Farmville in different ways. They include:

1. Fast leveling, fast way to make Farmville money, contributing to a sense of accomplishment and good feelings
   
2. Making farms pretty, making farms neat
   
3. Social aspects, like making new friends, leaving notes, etc
   
4. Spending time
   

First and foremost, this blog is written for people who want to optimize the first point: fast leveling, fast money, the easy way. It will not help you make your farm pretty, it will not help you make more friends. Everything else except the first point is beyond the scope of this blog.

Every game has an optimal way of playing it. By optimal, I mean there are point systems (level, money, power, etc), and methods in which one can accumulate points in a short amount of time. Farmville mathematics is very simple. You have a piece of land, and you can do many things on it: plow, plant, harvest. You can even get animals, trees, and decorations. Each action results in making money, losing money, and/or XP (experience points). The more experience you have, the higher level you will accumulate, and the better crops you'll get. There are many slow ways to accumulate money and XP, and there are a few ways to do it faster and easier. Crops are by far the fastest way to accumulate money and XP. Thus, this blog will not talk about the mathematics of trees, animals, and/or buying objects to accumulate XP. I will only talk about crops.

Different crops cost different amount of money, and harvesting them yields different amount of money. Different crops also yield different XP. For the best crop that yields the best money, one also needs to take in account of time. Thus the equation for the crop that yields the best money is simply:
Profit per time per square = (cost-when-harvested - cost-to-buy - $15) / time

The $15 is the mandatory cost of plowing after a crop is harvested. The less time it takes for each crop to make money, the better yield it will have. The higher (cost-when-harvest / cost-to-buy) ratio, the better yield it will have. However, this is only a theoretical value. This equation assumes that as soon as a square is harvested, it is plowed and replanted immediately! One needs to take in account of time-between-replanting. Thus the equation that more accurately reflects reality is as follows:
Profit per time per square = (cost-when-harvested - cost-to-buy - $15) / (time + time-between-replanting)

Calculations for XP is similar and trivial. Below I have a matrix of crops that I currently can crop at level 34, with the assumption that time-between-replanting is 2 hour. You can make your own matrix easily in your own spreadsheet if you'd like to change that. There are several columns but let's only look at the two of interest in this blog (profit/hour and XP/hour):

The two columns of interest are the "profit/hour" and the "XP/hour from plotting" columns. As you can see, profit/hour shows you the best crop to get money in shortest time, and the XP/hour column is the best way to get XP in shortest time. The higher value, the better the crop is. The special Super Berries is by far the fastest way to make money and XP, but is only available on certain weekends that Zynga allows. So let's exclude Super Berries for the remaining of this blog.

Using the chart is easy. I'm level 34 so let's say you're also level 34 and have infinite amount of patience and time and can re-crop any time you want (say you're unemployed or just have a lot of time as most students do), then the best crop to get money in the shortest time, according to the chart above, would be Grapes, Onion, and Sunflower (top 3 items for level 34). On the other hand, the best crop to get XP in the shortest time would be Blackberries, Blueberries, and Strawberries.

Note that there is another way to get XP super fast-- by spending coins. I've leveled several times a day using this method. I don't mean blindly buying items to get XP because you'll only get 1XP for each 100 coins you spend. You can do better-- one of my blog entries show youhow to get 1XP by spending only 10 coin via repeated plowing, planting, and deletion. If this is something you're interested at, then the "XP/hr from coin" column (to the right of the "XP/hour from plotting" column) shows you the actual XP you can get by spending coins.

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I now support my family through this website, as crazy as it might seem. If you find this helpful or you might have had to spend money on game companies or to attain this information, feel free to help me and to continue helping everyone. If you haven't helped yet, please do, and consider helping me with a gift of $5.00.

Thanks for reading!

Kevin
Click here now

That's it for now, please bookmark this blog or come back for more optimizations later!