Tuesday, September 1, 2009

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.

PLUG
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Thanks for reading!

Kevin
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