This guide is about what to do first when not using the tutorial. I take you through the first few hours of playing the game and about planning for the future.

Initial Tips

• Cat and Dog – the cat keeps the mice away from your crops, and the dog keeps foxes away from your crops so it’s worth it to keep taking care of them. Probably twice a day. I like to assign one employee to do this. NOTE: choose an employee then when you click on the dog house or cat ‘house’ two options pop up – Refill feeder or Take Care of Cat/Dog. I ignore the Refill Feeder as it uses up the cow’s milk (for the cat) and the raw meat (for the dog) and tells you you are running low on these things. So I just click on Take Care of Cat or Dog. This means the employee will only feed one unit of food to the cat/dog at a time and will also clean the animal and pet them. Cat/Dog happy.
• Pause Is Useful – use it as often as you want. You can remove trees while in pause. And do other things. This way you feel more control over the game and can spend more of your time keeping an eye on all of your employees and the fields and plan things out.
• Map orientation – when the game first starts let’s assume you are facing north. The farmhouse where your first 5 employees will live is on your left of the front gate, the pickup truck garage is north of that (above) and you have space below (south of) the farmhouse. When you are able to start expanding the land, the map you look at will be oriented the other way (so upside down) so think about the plot you are buying. You will be expanding to the left (west) of the farmhouse and below (south) of the farmhouse.
• Planning for the future – the manual doesn’t tell you this but it’s useful to think about where you will park your farm machinery, like tractors, harvesters, and their attachments. Tractors, harvesters and trucks need garages BUT attachments need SHEDS. If you try to buy an attachment with no shed built the game will tell you. But this means you need to plan where your roads will go so that your tractors, harvesters and trucks can drive to fields and to sheds to get attachments. I like to leave the left of the farm open for roads and sheds and garages. At first I didn’t and got stuck because my vehicles couldn’t go anywhere, and I had to start over.
• Requests and the Mayor’s Competition – I ignore all the personal requests because often they are hard to do, or I find they just get in the way. on the other hand, you need to complete the Mayor’s Competitions in order to buy more land and expand your farm (which is the ultimate objective of the game). My objective on the other hand is just to have a viable farm and expand very slowly. I don’t really care about my reputation even though I think you get discounts or something the higher your reputation. Having said that, my reputation does grow anyway because of progressing through levels by expanding, creating more fields, cutting down trees, etc.
• Grow carrots first – the first Mayor’s Competition is to grow carrots. Once you have done that you can buy your first additional plot of land. Woohoo. This plot is to the left (west) of the farmhouse and that’s where I plan to build roads leading to garages and sheds.
• PAUSE is useful when you’re removing trees, building roads, and other things.

Level 3: Mayor’s Competition

When you have reached level 3, click on the mail box and enter the Mayor’s Competition for carrots. (click on Try). Now grow those carrots.

When you have enough in your granary or silo or house (your Employees automatically know when to sow, weed, fertilize and harvest) a notification will pop up and tell you to claim your reward. Go back to the mailbox and claim the reward.

Then click on the Town button, go to the Municipal office and buy another bit of land. You now have a good sized piece of land to work on.

That’s when I start cutting down those trees and clearing the land so I can expand my fields, install a few garages for farm machinery and put up more houses for more employees.