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.

PLUG
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Thanks for reading!

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