What are the red squares or blocks of red when hiding items?
Each Red Square is a temporary indicator to help you know where the footprint of some of your items are on your farms. This helps you to know where your items are placed so that you don't try to place another item exactly on top of it or are trying to see if there's enough room to place something can be placed in a small clear area of your farm.
When you hide an Item by using one the methods below or by perhaps by using the hide option in the menu you see when you click on an item on your farm, a single red square represents each Item that was hidden.
When you hide a lot of Items right next to each other those red squares will join up and form a block of red instead of individual squares.
This is the Hide Tool in your Toolbox which you can click on to use, and then click on an item on your farm to temporarily hide a single item or more.
You can not use the Hide Tool to hide fields or ground cover, those can only be hidden in preferences. Plowed fields don't hide, they must be planted to be able to hide them using preferences for crops.
When you are done using the tool, click the green man to stop using the tool. If you no longer need to see the red squares, you can just refresh the farm so those individually hidden items will then show back up. If you only have ONE farm you can reload the game and then they will show up again.
This example is 2 pine trees planted apart, the one on the left you can see, the red square is where the 2nd one is planted but we have temporarily hidden it using the Hide tool (Closed Eye) in your tool box.
This is the Preferences icon top right of your game screen where you would go to show or hide crops for example. When you use preferences to show and hide things like crops trees etc, you show and hide all of that item, so all crops, all trees. When you have a lot of items on your farms and you hide them after showing them, you will see more red squares or blocks of red.
Remember that some Items cost Coins to buy and some cost Farm Cash to buy so you will also need the check marks added to both Show Farm Cash Items and Show Coin Items when needed.
If you only showed Trees, Coin Items and Ground cover in your preferences, then decided to not show the the trees by removing the check mark for Show Trees, you would hide all of the workable trees on your farms and would see a red square for where each tree was planted.
In the next examples we are also using the Grass with Guidelines which is a ground cover that can be purchased from the Paths section of the Store that can be useful to help you line up items you are placing on your farms like trees when decorating or modifying your farms:
LEFT picture below is 16 Pine trees planted in a 4x4 grid.
MIDDLE picture we are deleting one of the pine trees in that group with the yellow bulldozer that less easy to see and is not at the front. It has a yellow highlight.
RIGHT picture we indicate with arrows where it can be difficult to see where that pine tree was when you try to look where the top or the bottom of the pine tree was before it was deleted. This can make it difficult to place one back in that spot if you removed it by mistake and is why the red squares can help
.
In the example below on the LEFT are the 15 pine trees and you might be able to make out where the deleted pine tree was. On the RIGHT is what would be seen when removing the check mark for Show Trees.
The green square in the middle of that red block is where the deleted pine tree was.
The block of red around it is where the bottom of the rest of the hidden pine trees are located. It's a block of red rather than individual red squares because all the pine trees are planted right next to each other.
Using this example, you could replace the missing tree in that space within the red blocked area even though your trees are not showing up in Preferences. The base of the Pine tree we are placing in that spot is bright green to indicate that it can be placed there.
When you place it, as you do NOT have Trees not showing using Preferences, the tree will disappear and a red square will be placed there instead.
You can then show the trees using preferences if you wish to check it's correct.
When hiding crops using Preferences you will still only have one red square to represent each planted plot even though that plot takes up far more space than a pine tree.
For planted plots, when you hide the crops in preferences, that red square to represent where it is placed, is only in the uppermost corner of that plot.
There are many items in the game that use a much bigger space than something like a pine tree o flower like the wider trees, buildings, bigger decorations, facilities and much more.
To give you an idea of the size of a plowed field uses we are using 9 pine trees in a 3x3 squared format placed close to the single plowed field and rice planted in the second field.
The Grass with Guidelines ground cover can also help as it displays a red grid on the whole farm at ground level.
As you can see 1 plowed or planted field is approximately 9 squares or 9 pine trees in a 3x3 squared area.
In the picture below I only have Crops, Ground Cover and Show Coin Items showing.
When I remove the check mark for show crops in preferences, the plowed field still shows up because it isn't planted and because I still have the check mark for Show Coin Items added.
The rice field disappears and a red square appears where it was. The blue arrows in the pictures indicate the top corner of that rice field which is where that red square will be when you hide the crops.
In the next pictures below I have plowed 2 lots of 16 fields in a 4 x 4 square layout and planted them.
The top picture is the crops showing.
The bottom picture is what you see when I hide the crops using preferences (removed the check mark for Show Crops.)
When you are done with remodeling your farm, please remember to add all of the check marks back in preferences so that you can see everything on your farm again.
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If you would like to purchase the
Grass with Guidelines ground cover you can find it easily by Opening the Store and using the search box at the top to type in
guideline
OR you could find it by clicking on the Path/Ground section and then click on the AZ icon top right and click on the filter named
Cost That will put all the available ground covers at the top of that section of the store.
Grass with Guidelines first purchase costs 35 Farm Cash.
After that you can use and reuse it on as many farms as you want and each time you change a ground cover it will only cost 100 coins.
