News: Another Sheep Breeding Update

Zynga has updated their blog with the following official information:

—

Hey Farmers,

We have been made aware that current in-game messaging regarding Sheep Breeding is inaccurate and confusing to our customers. This messaging implies that the success rate for color/pattern inheritance is 100% guaranteed, when in fact, it is not. 

This messaging was unintentional, and we sincerely apologize for any confusion or frustration.

The text will be updated to reflect the feature’s intended design as soon as possible. If you purchased a Ram and/or Ewe from the Market under the assumption that the success rate was guaranteed due to this messaging,please contact our CS department and they will refund your account accordingly. (This means your purchased Rams and/or Ewes will be removed, and the equivalent amount of Farm Cash will be restored to your account.)

Due to the volume of emails from customers during this time, it may take longer than normal for a CS agent to assist you, but they will respond to your request as soon as they are able. 

Breeding and White Sheep:

Please know that the intended design of this feature was never a 100% success rate for color/pattern inheritance. We have seen reports from the community indicating that prior to the release of Pig Breeding, the pattern inheritance success rate (from Rams) was unusually high (80 – 100% success rate). This was a bug and the feature is now functioning as intended. 

We have also seen reports from players indicating that an unusually high amount of White Sheep are being produced when breeding. As white is a color, it is possible to produce white sheep when the feature is operating normally. 

However, we are investigating player reports to determine if more white sheep are being produced than anticipated. Please know that this process is not an easy one and will take time for us to address. 

Chameleon Sheep only producing White Sheep:

Currently, the Chameleon Ewe and Rainbow Dots Ram are producing almost exclusively plain white sheep. This is a bug that we are actively working to resolve. We will be releasing a fix for the Chameleon Ewe and Rainbow Dots Ram sometime this week which will result in the color/pattern inheritance success rates to be on par with the other Rams/Sheep in the game. 

As always, we appreciate your feedback! If you would like to share any thoughts or opinions, please make sure to follow the FarmVille Forum Rules and Rules of Conduct when posting. 

Thanks!

 

—

 

Will you be happy once this hoopla is over with? Sure ya will, as will we, that way we can start pumping out some good news for all instead of the usual, dreary stuff.

How-to: Pig Breeding

Due to some bad thunderstorms in our neck of the woods, Free Stuff Friday is on a break for this week while we reload our goodie bag with more stuff to give away next week! But fear not, as we have exciting news. On a more than rare Friday night update, we have a brand new feature to bring to you: Pig Breeding!

Step 1: Upon logging into your FarmVille Home farm tonight, you will be greeted with the above window, telling you that you have received a complimentary Boar. It seems that Slop is no longer needed to hunt for Truffles, as you will truffle hunt when you collect from your Pigpen from now on. You can trade in your additional Slop for extra Love Potions, if you like. Place the Boar into your previously-constructed Pigpen.

Step 2: You will now be greeted with this new window, which details every part of Pig Breeding with simplicity if you hover your mouse over each step. It works exactly like Sheep Breeding, as you will use Love Potions to increase the chance of success and use the Pigpen identically to the Sheep Pen from here on out.  The pop-ups go on to explain that the father and mother dictate the colors, while the father alone has the baby’s patterns.

Step 3: Once you’re inside the Pigpen, it is time to do some breeding. As you can see, we chose to breed these two Pigs three times to see what our results would be. If you are curious as to how you can judge a Boar from a Sow, they are distinguishable from Sows due to their little patch of hair atop their heads. You can only breed Sows with Boars and vice versa.

Step 4: Here are our results from breeding those same two Pigs three times in a row. We received one Boar and two Sows, and each one looked different. As you can see, our Boar wound up looking like a hybrid of blue and green, while our Sows turned out teal and off-black. In order to grow a Piglet up into a new Pig, you will need to feed it 10 Bottles, which you can now finally receive in Special Delivery Boxes! How cool is that?

Step 5: There are three total mating rooms that you can unlock in the Pigpen, though we suspect that many of you will have already underwent the painstaking task of adding Bricks, Boards, and Nails long, long ago when the Pigpen was first introduced. In case you’re like us and you did not max out your Pigpen previous, you can Look Inside the Pigpen and select the “Expansion” button. This will bring up the above screen, allowing you to Ask for More from your friends.
If you have ever bred Sheep, then breeding Pigs will be a piece of cake! Are you excited to see the new patterns that will surely turn up on the Market soon?

How-to: Sheep Breeding

As a continuation from the previous Quest, we have decided to break this off into its own portion, as it fully and completely covers Sheep Breeding. Enjoy!

Step 1: Oy! It’s Angus! We have previously divulged information regarding Angus, who is the resident Sheep breeder in the English Countryside. He is the latest neighbor that you will meet on the farm. He will need you to buy the basic outline for a Sheep Pen, which will require a little bit of work. Beyond that, you will need to look on six different neighbors’ farms (it does not matter if they are English Countryside or their regular farms), as well as check the Map. You can find the Map in along with your Gift Box and such, as it is the upper right-hand corner icon in that small box, as you can see below:

Step 2: You will need 29 Building Supplies for your Sheep Pen to be finished: 9 Bricks, 10 Boards, and 10 Nails. After finishing it, which is optional to this part of the process but we recommend doing while you are doing the Quest itself, you will be greeted with the above screen, as it explains Sheep Breeding. Note that you can continually add on to your Sheep Pen to create more mating rooms by adding additional Bricks, Boards, and Nails.

Step 3: With the Quest complete, you will receive good ol’ Brutus, a purple Ram with a blue outline around his neck. But we need a home for Brutus, don’t we? Good thing we previously built that Sheep Pen, yeah? In addition to this, you will have to purchase eight pieces of Fencing (they do not have to go around the Sheep Pen – that is entirely up to you, as they can be deleted afterwards), as well as expand your farm to a larger piece of property, which you were probably going to do anyway, for 25,000 Coins.

Step 4: Along with the usual Coins and such, you will receive an English Countryside Garage! Are you ready for the easiest Quest of all? All you have to do is purchase a single Ewe from the Market. It costs Coins, so just grab one and plop it down on your farm to succeed this step. The next step, however, will introduce us to Sheep Breeding…

Step 5: Angus will instruct you to place your Sheep (both Ewes and Rams) inside of the Sheep Pen. There are several scattered around your farm already, so gather them up and move them into the Sheep Pen, as instructed above. Once you have them inside, select a Ewe to breed with ol’ Brutus, our lovely Ram pal.

Step 6: You will want to use those five Love Potions that you received from the previous Quest portion. As you can tell, you will gain a higher percentage of success when mating the two Sheep with the more Love Potions you use, as each Love Potion increases the success ratio by 10% and increases the amount of time it takes for the results to come in by 24 Hours, 12 Hours, 6 Hours, 3 Hours, 1 Hour and, if you use all five, instant results and success.

Step 7: After the Ram and Ewe have… uh… done the deed, so to speak, you can click on the “Ready” tab on their mating room door. This will give you a new Lamb, which you can name your Ewe or Ram anything your heart desires, and decide to either keep it or give it away to your neighbors. We are selfish, so we kept ol’ Zoopola here, our brand new baby girl. You will need to feed him or her ten Bottles that you would normally collect for the Nursery in order for it to grow up.

Step 8: Once the Sheep has grown up, it will sprout into a Sheep all its own in a mix of colors between the two parents, or it could lean one way or the other: for instance, it could look just like Brutus. Either way, it seems as if no two Sheep are 100% identical, meaning there could be millions of different possibilities awaiting you at the Sheep Pen! Remember that Males have active pattern shapes while the Females are passive in that area, so the father’s patterns will always prevail.

Step 9: As you can see, our Sheep has grown up and we have completed the Quest, earning a cool statue and Gertrude the Ewe, a very pretty red-ish purple Ewe to breed with Brutus. Our baby turned out lookin’ almost identical to her father, with darker purples than his. This could be an endless amount of fun to be had with creating different Sheep! Remember to continually ask your friends for more Bottles and Love Potions!

We will have more on the Sheep Breeding feature as we get more time with it!

English Countryside Sheep Breeding Hands-On Preview

The meat and potatoes of the FarmVille English Countryside is, without a doubt, the Sheep breeding feature. This is the one thing that is completely unfamiliar in the world of virtual farming, as many of the other features within the English Countryside are expansions of what we know and love, such as harvesting, crafting, and the like. Sheep breeding, however, is unlike anything you have previously come across in the game. Of course, the initial set-up is what you have come to expect, as you will help Angus rebuild the Sheep Pen (this is not the final name, but rather what we have dubbed the new Sheep Building). Once you have done this by using your materials that the game is known for and located his prized Ram, you will be introduced to the Sheep breeding feature that completely blew us away.

We learned many cool things about this feature. In order to breed Sheep, you will need to house them within the Sheep Pen and coax them into mating; in a way, it’s a lot like an Axe body spray commercial, but for our woolly pals. You will pick out exactly which Ewe you wish to mate with which Ram, and you will have a shot at producing a Lamb from the two, which will be completely randomized from the looks of its two parents; your Lamb could turn into a Ewe or a Ram, and it could look like the mother, the father, or a mixture of both, providing new possibilities around every corner… and all the while over Barry White music. You can even showcase several of your Sheep in the Sheep Pen, similar to that of the Duck Pond, and the Sheep Pen holds up to 20 without expansion – and even more after expanding it a couple of times!

Once you have picked out the Ewe and Ram to mate, you can increase your chance at making a baby Lamb from the ordeal by utilizing a brand new item in the game: Love Potions. By using Love Potions, a new item in the same vein as the Watering Cans, you can up the chance of receiving a baby Lamb from the act of mating. Starting out with a 50% chance of creating a Lamb, by adding a single Love Potion to the mix, the percentage went up by 10% with every Love Potion used. You will also go from requiring 24 hours to breed to speeding up the process with these Love Potions, as well. By using five Love Potions, the developers had a 100% chance at receiving a Lamb. You can also mate your Sheep as often as you like, so don’t worry about a once-a-day game of chance, with a way to expand to more than a single mating room – think the Greenhouse, but for Sheep mating.

When the Lamb was born from a plain white Ewe that we’ve grown accustomed to and its blue and purple Ram, it had a light blue-ish purple tint. We learned that the father (Ram) is the one of the two that dictates the pattern of the Ewe. For example, if the Ram has a star pattern across its back and the Ewe has polka dots as its pattern, the Lamb will have a shot at growing up with the aforementioned star pattern instead of polka dots – the Ewe are passive in passing on their genetic patterns. Simply put, you can fiddle around with these combinations to truly tweak and customize all of your Ewe and Rams as they grow up.

Lambs can grow up into both Rams and Ewe, or can be outright kept as the adorable Lambs themselves, similar to the Ducklings in the Duck Pond. The Lambs can be named to whatever you desire and can be changed later on a whim, and can be adopted out to your Facebook feed or kept for yourself, if you’re greedy. You will not know exactly what your new Ram or Ewe will look like as an adult until it grows up; the periwinkle Lamb that we were shown grew up to look almost exactly like its father, the blue and purple Ram. Note that you can also try breeding the likes of red Rams with blue Ewes to create purple Lambs and so forth.

The craziest part of this, of course, is that it “almost” looked exactly like its father. You see, the game randomly generates the exact color patterns, and on the HDTV we were shown the game on, the colors were truly limitless. Due to this, we could tell that, when compared side-by-side, the father Ram and son Ram featured everything identically except the fact that the Son ram had a very slight color difference in the blues that covered its body. If you have ever played around with a color wheel in a painting program on the computer, you will know exactly what we’re talking about when we say that the color hues were off by a single shade of blue, something that could look identical to the naked eye or on a mediocre computer monitor. We were told that the possibilities were limited only to the quality of your screen, as the game can use more colors than we could possibly think of to generate brand new, never-before-seen combinations of Ewes and Rams.

In summation, the easiest way to put it is that the game can create brand new Sheep that no one else has on a whim, all thanks to your expertise in Sheep breeding. That’s right: there could, potentially, be millions upon millions of different Sheep, all completely unique from one to the next. This will allow the players to gain a brand new identity amongst their neighbors, as visitors to their English Countryside can take a look at what they have created and make requests for similar Ewe or Rams.

For instance, let’s say that I, Zoop, am an expert in creating periwinkle and sea green Ewe. Let’s say that one of my neighbors stumbles upon my English Countryside and witnesses all of my cool periwinkle/sea green combinations of Ewe and Rams, ranging from the star patterns to two-toned to polka dots, and they instantly fall in love with the type of Sheep I am making. They can message me on Facebook and tell me how much they love my Sheep, and I can breed two of the Sheep that they fell in love with, and then give them the Lamb that it creates. This will expand their collection, and possibly come back to benefit me. Who knows what they could create by breeding my periwinkle/sea green Ram with their crimson red/electric blue Ewe?

Zynga feels that this will add a new layer of individuality to FarmVille, and bring the community closer together. We are wholly in agreement, and would love to see this incredibly complex system of creativity and individuality reign supreme with other Animals in the future. We brought up the possibility of seeing an English Countryside decked out, completely comprised of nothing but a rainbow of different Sheep; stuff like this could be a simple reality for the dedicated Sheep breeder with a lot of friends to trade with, that much is 100% certain.

We will have more on Sheep breeding soon!