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!

FarmVille English Countryside Hands-On Preview

We here at FarmVille Post were lucky enough to be invited — along with the likes of FarmVille Freak, the Examiner, and FarmVille Feed — to Zynga’s offices to test drive the upcoming English Countryside game, something that has been much talked about and speculated on throughout the FarmVille community. People have so many questions regarding this new second farm, and we were shown the ins and outs of every facet of the English Countryside, leaving no stones unturned in the process. Nothing could have prepared us for how cool it actually was, combining the aspects we love about FarmVille with brand new features that seem like some of the best features the folks at Zynga have ever come up with.

Expect all of the Buildings to receive a spiffy new makeover, as seen above with the Dairy Farm.

Let’s start off with the basics: The Duke has crash-landed in his hot air balloon onto your current FarmVille farm in search of a legendary farmer who can recover his ailing farmland in England. Simply put, things have seen better days: his Crops are dying, his inhabitants are restless, his businesses are failing, and it all revolves around the dire need of a true blue farmer to take care of his property. By helping him repair his hot air balloon, along with a few Quests that we shall not spoil, you will arrive in England to help him take care of his farm, so long as you are a Level 20 or higher farmer, as this is the lone prerequisite for unlocking the English Countryside. You can even jump back and forth between the original farm and the new English Countryside farm with the click of a button at any time from here on out!

It’s not all fun and games for the people who live there, however; most of the inhabitants are losing out due to the withering Crops, which are bad for business it seems. With your arrival, you can fix this problem and slowly win many of the characters over, ranging from your new English neighbors to the local business owners. By winning them over and helping them with the problems they are facing, you will unlock new key features, such as a brand new Crafting Building: the Pub! But we will get to that in a moment.

Above: Brand new characters, like Olivia the Pub owner, will help you along your way in the English Countryside.

The storyline advances based on a series of Quests, much like the ones that we see in FarmVille now. The Quests advance on what reminded us of a board game, as the Map screen brings up a series of locations where a marker was placed on exactly where our narrator was in the storyline, sort of like a peg or symbol that you’d use in Monopoly, Life, or other similar board games. Along this board were pegs where our neighbors were – some farther along in the story, some behind where we were – complete with opportunities to help those behind us on the Map in their Quests, as well as the opportunity to ask for help from the neighbors who were ahead of us. These new Quests will help bring neighbors closer to you, beyond simply giving them Special Delivery Boxes every day.

All of the things that we love about FarmVille have returned in the English Countryside, including Horse Stables, Chicken Coops, the Pub Crafting Building (yes, we swear we’ll get to it momentarily!), the Garage, the Orchards, Market Stalls, and many other goodies that keep farmers so enthralled with the game. The difference between the originals and their English Countryside counterparts is unforeseen at the moment, beyond the looks of the Buildings, which are a vast improvement over the originals in every sense of the word. Seriously, these are some of the nicest Buildings in the history of FarmVille, as they all look at though they are from the same theme, which they are when you think about it. Our personal favorite is the Horse Stable, which delivers a look that we’ve been waiting for for years now.

The likes of the Combine and the Garage will be partially built for hardcore players who have previously done such things on their primary farmland as a way of Zynga tipping their cap in appreciation of your dedicated farming techniques. This will allow you to complete these things in a speedier fashion than, say, a Level 20 farmer who is fairly new to FarmVille. This will help you save on using your Special Delivery Boxes and things like that for some of the other features in the game.

Above: A bevy of new Crops await, including Foxglove, Bluebells, Pink Asters, and many more.

FarmVille has always revolved heavily around Crops, so the inclusion of new, bright, bold, and beautiful Crops is a no-brainer. The English Countryside’s Market will contain many new exclusive items that can only be obtained while you are staying in the English Countryside, and the most important and noteworthy amongst them are the new Crops. Over a dozen new Crops will be exclusive to the new farmland — including English Roses, Hops, Barley, Foxglove, Bluebells, Pink Asters, Red Currants, English Peas, Radishes, and Turnips, among a few others — and will allow for a handful of brand new recipes to be created in the new Crafting Building, the Pub, with their Bushels. Trust us when we say that the few Crops that we had the opportunity to see were some of the prettiest in the history of the game. Original Crops will stay on your original farm, as the new Crops are just too good not to plant on your new farm.

Alright, we guess it’s about time to finally dive into the logistics surrounding the Pub! The Pub is the fourth Crafting Building to ever arrive in FarmVille, and is the lone exclusive Crafting Building that everyone will receive in the English Countryside once they help out the Pub’s owner, Olivia, with her Quests. Users will be able to collect Bushels from their new Crops to craft some awesome new beers (including Oliviaberry Beer, one of the new recipes we were shown) and the like — unless you are under the drinking age in your country, in which an underage equivalent’s name will pop up instead.  As far as we know, somewhere around a half of a dozen recipes exist for the new, free Crafting Building, and we can’t wait to concoct some new Goods.

The Pub is the brand new Crafting Building in the English Countryside, full of new recipes.

The English Countryside will share the same Market and Free Gifts page with the original farm to keep things uncluttered, though certain Market and Free Gift items may be English Countryside exclusives, such as the Love Potions for the Sheep breeding feature. These include exclusive Trees, Crops, and more that can only be purchased in the English Countryside. Keep in mind that you will keep the same amount of Coins, FV Cash, and Fuel on your new farm as you do on your old farm; think of them are universally used across both farm worlds – which is definitely good, as we’d hate to start from scratch on our fuel resources.

If you are uninterested in the Questing and new Buildings, do not worry! You can simply delete it all outright and use it strictly for decorating or just do your usual farming, all amidst the really cool “rolling hills” of England. All of the new stuff at the English Countryside is completely optional, meaning you can complete the Quest to unlock English Countryside (again, after you are Level 20 or higher) and immediately do with your second farm as you wish. Note, however, that upon completing some of these new Quests, which promise several weeks of gameplay, you will be able to unlock specific things to take back to your original farm (or even get FV Cash rewards, as we saw once during our demonstration), so they are worth the time you will invest in them. We can’t share exactly what you will receive just yet, but it will be worth the effort! You can even expand your English Countryside farm multiple times to have an even bigger piece of land, and will hopefully see some of our favorite features on our current farm, like Wandering Animals.

FarmVille English Countryside will feature new music with a celtic theme, as heard above.

100 Special Delivery Boxes will be sufficient for the initial building process at the English Countryside, so if you’ve been stockpiling 300 SDBs, it might be time to use some of them to free up some storage space. This hard number is not necessarily a target, but more along the lines of something to give you direction to aim for: 80-120 should do the trick.

A few negatives that folks will cling to – and already have, by the looks of it – are the fact that you cannot bring your storage from your old farm to your new farm (which we are okay with), and the fact that you can currently only access one farm at a time (which we are bummed out about). It seems to be true that you will pause whichever farm you are not currently on when you visit the other; for example, if you plant Strawberries on your main farm and take off to the English Countryside when they are 23% ready, they will stay that way all the time you are in the English Countryside. Once you return to your original farm, they will continue growing beyond 23% ready.

As for the “Pause” ordeal, we see both sides to the argument. Personally, we dislike the idea of our regular farm being dormant while we are away at the English Countryside, as we do not like the concept of missing out on valuable Tree Mastery time. Meanwhile, on the flipside, we understand that we are high level farmers and not everyone can manage two farms simultaneously, which can easily be overwhelming to most of the players who like playing the game. As a side note, you can tell which farm your neighbors are currently on via a small icon below their pictures on your neighbors bar.

One of the great things about the English Countryside, despite the fact that you cannot take your storage from your current farm to your new one, is the fact that it gives the farmer a chance to start anew. Despite many thinking that the inability to decorate your new farm with the stuff you deemed unworthy of being on your first farm, we think the exact opposite, as if we were given a canvas for something greater than simply throwing all of our lesser-beloved things into a glorified storage facility. The English Countryside is much, much more, and based on what we got to see, it looks to improve and expand on everything we love about FarmVille.

Stay tuned to FarmVille Post, as we will have an in-depth write-up on the Sheep Pen on Thursday, where you can breed millions of different Sheep. Yes, it truly deserves its own, separate article, and you will see why soon enough!