Chapter 12 - Animals

Heddryin · #1 Mar 24 2010, 11:13 AM

Levels to Unlock Animals are in Chapter 25 Levels and Unlocking

Where Animal products can be used are in Chapter 27 Ingredients of Farm Town

Should you need to get back to this post to look for other information:
Each post has a Table of Contents link bottom right of the post, which when you click, will bring you right back here.

Heddryin · #2 Mar 24 2010, 11:51 AM

What are Animals for?

Make sure that you are buying the correct animals for what you want!
Working Animals placed on the farm can not be sent to Item storage until you own more than one farm!
Only you can take care of your working animals, buy, move, store, move to another farm, harvest, sell or delete them!

There are 2 types of Animals:

Working animals give you animal products when they are in animal sheds and those animal sheds are harvested.
These products can be used to make other products in your facilities.
These are all of the Working Animals that can produce products:

Some working Animals can be bought from the Animal section of the store and cost coins, some cost Farm Cash and produce more products than the coin bought version can.

Some working animals can be sent to you as gifts by your Neighbours/Buddies. You can also exchange your gifts for them before you accept them.

Harvesting Horse Hair from the Horse or Clydesdale horse does require owing a Farm Cash Stable.

Harvesting Manure from Pigs does require owing a Manure Spreader as well as Pigs and a Pigsty.

IMPORTANT - Placing a lot of loose animals on farms that are not stored in animal sheds, especially if you have a slower or older computer can cause a farm to load much slower or be impossible for some to load. Please do not be tempted to buy the maximum of every type animal any animal shed will hold in one go. Always try buying a smaller amount like 50 then store them before you buy more than that.

There is a hard limit of 400 animals that you can have out on a farm BUT this does not mean that every farmer is capable of loading a farm with that many loose animals on it. When hiring workers they will not be able to know before accepting the hire, if you have done that to your farms.

A much faster way to buy and store working animals into their shed can be bought from the store. Instead of buying hundreds of sheep, llamas, ostriches, peacocks that cost coins, one at a at time, is to use the Herding Robot if you own one.
To see all the information on the Herding Robot tool and what else it can do with animals CLICK HERE

Other ways that you could receive animals or animal products:
If you have a train with the Long Cattle Car attached and dispatched, when it has retuned from it's trip and you unload it, you will get some animals sent to your item storage for you to use.

Boosting Neighbours/Buddies working Trains that has the Long Cattle Car on it will get you some animals.

Some animals and animal products can be earned as Rewards if you are participating in the Farm Pass feature.

Buying and Trading is another way to top up your stock of animal products.

There are some facilities that could help with increasing the products that you get from your animals. We will list those details in a separate post, later in this Chapter.
Decorative animals do NOT produce any animal products.
Some are in the Animal section of the store.
Some are in the Farm Decor section of the store.
Some can be sent as gifts.
Some decorative animals can be placed into animal sheds but will not produce any products. This is a throwback from the very early days of Farm Town, later some of those animals became working animals.

Some animals are animated and will move around by themselves, make animal noises, for a bit of fun. Some will look like they are eating your crops, don't worry they don't!

To turn off the animal sounds and the music:

Mouseover the sound icon and another icon will drop down, the music icon.

To turn all sounds and music off, click on both icons to turn them red.

How to change Animal behaviour on farms:

Option 1: If you do not want any of your animals to move on any of your farms you can set all farms so that none of them will move around by themselves, using your preferences.

To freeze your animals on all farms, click on the preferences icon top right of your game screen and add a check mark to Freeze Animals, then click on the green check mark at the bottom of the window to save your changes.

Option 2: If your prefer, you can also change the animal behaviour on a per farm basis. You may want to do that when decorating a farm theme and want to keep a few animals out but contained within fences.

To do this go to the farm that you want to change the animal behaviour on. Click on your farms name at the top of your game screen and towards the bottom you will see a drop down list that you can click on. Click the option that you want to use, Always Freeze animals in this farm or Never Freeze animals in this farm then click on the green check mark to save the change.

Whenever you change any setting, refresh the farm before moving the animals.

If your farm has a lot of items on it, when you move the animal it can teleport to the new spot instead of walking to it.

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Heddryin · #3 Mar 24 2010, 11:56 AM

Which Animal Buildings do my Animals go in to be Harvested?

Working Animals that produce products need to be in the appropriate animal shed so that they can be Harvested.

You can have a few more animals out on farms if your shed is full, but please remember that working animals not in their buildings can make a farm very slow or impossible to load!! This can cause you or a worker you hire, problems with being able to loading that farm!

Before working for or visiting others it can help if you remove the checkmark for Show Animals when not at Home, in your preferences, BUT this will not help you as the farm owner on your own farm, as only you can take care of your animals and you will need be able to see all of them to be able to move, store, sell or delete them.

There are several types of Animal Buildings. Some animal buildings are ONLY decorative!
Make sure that when you buy any animals or animal buildings that you are buying the correct ones!

You can have one of the following animal buildings per farm. The animal shed can be either the regular version costing coins, that can hold 300 of each of the animals that can be stored in it OR you can have the Super version of the animal shed costing Farm Cash, that can hold 600 of each of the animals that can be stored in it.
Not every animal building has a super version.

1 Chicken Coop OR 1 Super Chicken Coop.
AND
1 Wool Shed OR 1 Super Wool Shed.
AND
1 Dairy Shed OR 1 Super Dairy Shed.
AND
1 Pigsty.
AND
1 Rabbit hutch OR 1 Super Rabbit Hutch.
AND
1 Stables - You can use ONE of the Stables OR the Super Stables. All of them cost Farm Cash to buy.

The Stables costing 25 FC or 28 FC have always cost Farm Cash. The only difference between those two Stables is the look of them. Many years ago the Stables were only decorations before they were converted to be able to harvest horse hair. The Super Stables can hold more horses.

You do not have to put animal buildings on every farm, if you do not need that many animal products. You can always add them later on if your need for more of the products grows.

Not every animal has a Farm Cash version that produces more products than an animal costing coins to buy or gifted working animal.

Putting a duplicated animal shed on the same farm just acts as decoration.

You will be able to see the same animals in both sheds as it mimics what the other one has so that it doesn't matter which one you look in to see if the shed is full. However, when you harvest the animals you only get products from the amount of animals in one of them. For example if you had 300 hens and two chicken coops on the same farm, even though it will look like you have 300 hens in both chicken coops, you only get 300 eggs not 600 when you harvest.

You can place more than one of the exact same type if you wish perhaps for design purposes, but you will only get one lot of products when you harvest one of them. Both of them will then show harvested.

When you place an Animal shed, it is not ready to harvest yet!
Make sure that you have placed the appropriate animals in it, before you try to harvest it.

Once you have placed it, you need to wait out the time showing on that animal building.
In the example below, it's a dairy shed (coins) and as long as you have animals in the shed you will be able to harvest it in about 8 hours time.

The Premium Cow Hay information in the picture is explained later in this chapter and is related to the facilities that can also help to increase the products you get from your animal sheds.

Each different type of animal shed (dairy shed, chicken coop, wool shed, stables, rabbit hutch, pigsty) has it's own individual harvest time.

To Harvest an Animal Building:

You can mouseover the animal building on your farm to get the harvest time information.
When it says Ready to Harvest Animals, you can click on the Building to see the menu then click on Harvest xxx to harvest it.

OR If you are using the Facility Manager, you can look for those Animal Buildings and when they show Ready to Harvest you can click on Harvest Animals to harvest that animal building.

If you own the Animal Harvester tools you can click on the Harvest All blue button at the top of the Facility Manager to harvest multiple animal buildings on many different farms with one click!

When changing a regular animal shed for a Super shed:

You will need to store ALL of the animals in the regular shed in your Item Storage before you can store the regular shed.
Then you can place the super shed and add animals to it.
Again you will need to wait some time before you can harvest it.

Chicken Coop OR Super Chicken Coop

Eggs are from Hens , Leghorn Hens and the Goose.
Hens and the Goose can not be bought in the store, your Neighbours and Buddies can send you them using the Gift Manager.
Leghorn Hens produce more hens eggs than the gifted Hen and can be bought from the Animals section of the store.
NOTE: Yellow chickens bought from the store do not produce eggs!
Feathers are harvested from Turkeys.
Turkeys can not be bought in the store, your Neighbours and Buddies can send you them using the Gift Manager.
No other Turkeys produce Turkey feathers.
Feathers are also harvested from the Peacock and Ostrich.
Peacocks and Ostriches can be bought from the Animals section of the store.
There are No other Peacocks.
No other Ostriches produce feathers.

The Chicken Coop can be harvested every 20 hours. (1x Farm Town day)
1 x Leghorn Hen in a Chicken Coop gives you 30 eggs.

The Super Chicken Coop can be harvested every 12 hours.
1 x Leghorn Hen in a Super Chicken Coop gives you 60 eggs.
Double capacity, more benefit to Leghorn Hens and can be harvested more often.

Wool Shed OR Super Wool Shed

The Llama and Heavywool Llama produce llama wool.

The Sheep and Heavywool Sheep produce sheep's wool.
Those 4 animals can be purchased from the Animal Section of the Store.
NO other Sheep, Lambs or Llamas produce wool.
The Wool shed can be harvested every 40 hours. (2x Farm Town days)
1 x Heavywool Llama in a Wool Shed gives you 30 llama wool.
1 x Longwool Sheep in a Wool Shed gives you 30 sheep wool.

The Super Wool shed can be harvested every 20 hours. (1x Farm Town day)
1 x Heavywool Llama in a Super Wool Shed gives you 60 llama wool.
1 x Longwool Sheep in a Wool Shed gives you 60 sheep wool.
Double capacity, more benefit to Heavywool Llamas and Longwool Sheep and can be harvested more often.

Dairy Shed OR Super Dairy Shed

Cows and Holstein Cows produce Cow milk.
Cows can not be bought in the store, your Neighbours and Buddies can send you them using the Gift Manager.
Holstein Cows can be bought in the Animal section of the Store.
No other Cows produce cow milk.
Goats produce Goat milk.
Goats can not be bought in the store, your Neighbours and Buddies can send you them using the Gift Manager.
No other Goats produce Goat Milk.
The Dairy Shed can be harvested every 8 hours.
1 x Holstein Cow in a Regular Shed gives 30 cow milk.

The Super Dairy Shed can be harvested every 8 hours.
1 x Holstein Cow in a Super Shed gives 60 cow milk.
Double capacity, more benefit to Holstein Cows.

Pigsty. There is no Super Pigsty.

Pigs produce Manure to fertilize your farms.
Pigs can not be bought in the store, your Neighbours and Buddies can send you them using the Gift Manager.
No other pigs in the store produce Manure.
You will ALSO need to own a Manure Spreader before you can harvest the pigs!
Depending on which Manure Spreaders you own, you can gain extra products when harvesting your crops, harvesting or chopping trees, flowers.

Manure collected from Pigs when the Pigsty is harvested is stored with the Manure Spreader.

The Pigsty can be harvested every 12 hours.

To see how much Manure you have, open your toolbox and mouseover your Manure Spreader and read the information in the tooltip that shows.

Manure can not be sold.

50 Manure will fertilize one farm for 72 hours (3 days). You can not fertilize a farm again until that time has passed.

Rabbit Hutch OR Super Rabbit Hutch

.

ONLY the White Rabbit produces rabbit fleece!
The White Rabbit can be bought from the Animals section of the Store.
The Bunny in the Animal Store, any other rabbits or bunnies, do NOT produce rabbit fleece.
The Rabbit Hutch can be harvested every 40 hours. (2x Farm Town days)

The Super Rabbit Hutch can be harvested every 20 hours. (1x Farm Town day)
Double capacity and can be harvested more often.

Horse stables
Stables costing 25 Farm Cash OR Stables costing 28 Farm Cash OR the Super Stables that cost 50 Farm Cash

Horse Hairs can ONLY be harvested from the Horse and Clydesdale.
Neither horse can be bought from the Animals section of the store, your Neighbours and Buddies can send you them using the Gift Manager.

You can have both horses in the same Stable.
300 horses and 300 Clydesdales in one regular size Stable produce 600 Horsehair when harvested once every 2 days.

No other Horses produce Horse Hair.
The 25 FC Stables and 28 FC Stables can be harvested every 40 hours. (2x Farm Town days)
300 horses and 300 Clydesdales in one regular size Stable produce 600 Horsehair when harvested once every 40 hours (2 Farm Town days)

The 50 FC Super Stables has Double capacity and can be harvested every 8 hours.
600 horses and 600 Clydesdales in a Super Stable produce 1200 Horsehair when harvested every 8 hours!

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Heddryin · #4 Mar 24 2010, 12:00 PM

How to Buy and Store Animals in Animal Buildings.

Animals that you want to place on farms like to be placed on a totally clear spot on your farm.
Please do find a clear spot to place them especially when Buying any Farm Cash Animals, so that they do not go missing, especially if you also tend to have a considerable amount of items on the farm that you are buying them on.

Remember to show everything on your farm so you can see where there is clear space.

Some working animals that can be bought in the Store are in the Animals section.
There are also some decorative animals in the Animal section and are also in other sections of the store like Farm Decor. Some decorative animals can only be earned as rewards in the Farm Pass feature.
Decorative animals do not provide any products for your facilities.

To BUY an animal:

You will need enough coins and or Farm Cash for the animal that you wish to buy.
Some cost coins, some cost Farm Cash.

Open the Store and find the animal that you want to buy.

You can use the search bar in the store to type in the name of the animal or several names of animals to show less other animals.

These are the working animals that when harvested will give you animal products that you can use in your facilities:

Buy When you click on Buy then click on a clear spot on your farm the animal will be placed and the coins or Farm Cash deducted. You will also earn some XP (experience points) You can then carry on clicking on your farm, to buy more of them. When you are done, click on the green man in your game bar to stop purchasing.

You can only Buy Farm Cash Animals one at a time.

Multiple To use this button, requires owning the Herding Robot. If you do not own it you will be shown a popup asking if you wish to buy it.

Clicking the green check mark on the popup takes you to the Tools section of the store where you would be able to purchase it.

Clicking on the red X closes the popup and shows you the animals again.

To see the details on how the Herding Robot works CLICK HERE

Remember that some working Animals are only available as gifts. Your Neighbours and Buddies can send you them.

Buying Animals without owning the Herding Robot:

Click on the Buy button on any coin animal then click on the farm to place it.
If you want more of them you can click on the animal on the farm to see the animals menu then click on Buy Multiple to buy more with each click.

Warning when buying many animals, one at a time!
Never buy too many animals at one time:

Animated animals can be a big drain on resources, particularly on a computer that does not have much RAM memory. Animated animals take much longer to load than non-animated ones. If you buy too many at once before sending them to animal buildings or storing them in your Item storage, you could end up not being able to load that farm. Test buying a small amount then gradually increase it if you have no problems with that.

As you buy more animals, pay attention to the save counter top right of your game screen! If you see a red number on the save Icon top right of the game screen and it's climbing high, stop buying them and see how long it takes to count back down! You MUST allow that number to count down and clear before you reload or refresh the farm or you could lose what you have bought.

Examples of what you could see on the save icon:
The higher the number the longer the it will take to save what you have done. When you are over 99 saves you will see plus icons on the save icon and that will take quite some time to finish loading them all!!:

You will be warned once that you have a lot of animals on your farm, if you click too fast you could close that popup before you've had a chance to read it. That pop up warns you that too many animals on a farm can cause your game to run slow.
Example of the warning popup:

There will be ONE other warning when you reach the maximum animals allowed per farm that are not stored in animal buildings. Depending on your computer, you may not be able to load a farm with the maximum amount of animals on it, so if you are not sure do not try to buy all the animals that will fit in an animal shed at once, try buying only 50 animals and see how long it takes your computer to save those and then how long for you to store or send those animals to their animals sheds before you continue with any more.
Example of the last warning popup up:

At this point you will not be able to put more animals on that farm. If that farm is loading slow, you will have to place animals either into sheds on that farm or place them into Item storage to go into other animal shed where there is room for them or sell them to reduce the amounts on that farm.

Once you have bought some animals. you will then need to store each of your animals in it's shed.

This is easier to do with the Add to Animal building tool in your toolbox.
Open your toolbox, click on the tool then click on the animal to add it to your animal building one at a time.

If you run out of room in your animal shed and still have some on the farm and you want to put them in another shed on a different farm you could use the Add to Item Storage tool in your Toolbox.
Open your toolbox, click on the tool then click on the animal to add it to your Item storage one at a time.

If you try to place an animal on a spot where something else is you will see the generic warning message appear near the top of your game screen:

If you place them too close to something or on top of something, they can wander onto something like crops and can get stuck there and then you may not be able to move them to a new spot or store them.

If you click on a spot that is already occupied by something else the animal can show up in a different place on your farm. This is likely to happen on farms with a considerable amount on them.

Buying Animals when owning the Herding Robot

The Herding Robot makes buying and filing animals buildings much faster.
You can fill an animal shed to full capacity with far less effort.
You just need the amount of coins needed for the amount of coin animals you want to buy.
Farm Cash Animals still need to be bought one at a time.

Find the coin animal in the Store that you want to buy, then click on Multiple, click on the amount you want to buy.
In this example the maximum is 300 as the animal building is the coin rabbit hutch which has the capacity to hold 300 white rabbits.

You will then see a confirmation popup that tells you what animal you are buying, the amount and the cost.

Clicking the red X cancels the purchase.

Clicking the green check mark proceeds with the purchase.
You will then see another popup confirming the purchase was successful ,your coins will be deducted and those animals will be sent straight to the animal shed on your farm that has room for them.

That's it you are done

Sending Animals in your Giftbox to the Animal building on your farm:

Go to the farm where you have room in your animals sheds to store the animals.

Open your Gift Manager If you need to you can exchange some gifts for animals that you want and accept them.

In the My Gifts section you will see any gifted animals that you accepted.

Each box tells you how many animals there are and has 3 buttons.
In this example there are 7 Goose.

Store - will send your animals to your animal shed that has room for them. In the example, if the farmer has room to put all 7 goose in the chicken coop on the farm they are on, all 7 will be stored in it. If they only have room for 2 goose, 2 will be stored in the animal building leaving 5 in the gift box.

Use - will let you place them on your farm, one at a time. As you click on the farm an animal will be placed until there are none left. If you have a considerable amount of items on that farm, your animal can teleport to a different spot where there is room for it, than where you clicked to place it.

More - will let you post a request for more of those animals to your Neighbours and Buddies, which they will see in their Other Wall Requests page. You will NOT see your own requests there.

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Heddryin · #5 Mar 24 2010, 12:04 PM

What are the options that appear when I click on an animal?

Clicking on an animal that is on your farm shows you that Animals Menu.

We are using the White Rabbit that produces rabbit fleece, as an example:

There are various options that allow you to do various things with animals when you click on them.

You can not harvest an animal using this menu.
Animals can only be harvested using the animal buildings they are in.

Each different animal can have different options. You could also see things like, Move, Wander Around, Gobble, Wagging, Sit and so on, some will also make animal noises. Try them out if you are curious

Add to Rabbit Hutch in the white rabbit's case, that will add the white rabbit to your Rabbit Hutch if there is room for it.

Other animals will have the related animal shed listed, like Add to chicken coop for a hen, goose, turkey, peacock, ostrich and add to Wool Shed for llamas and sheep.

Remember that although some other animals can also be put into an animal shed, cats can go into a cat house, dog into a dog house, that those animals do not all produce products. This was a request in the early days of Farm Town to be able to place them in those buildings before some animals were able to be harvested.

Move will let you move the animal to another spot on your farm OR you can use the yellow hand in your tool box click on animals to move it instead, which can be much quicker when you want to move more than one animal or other items including animals.

The little yellow chicken when you make it move is a speedy fellow and runs quite fast, try moving it from one side of a clear farm to the other side and watch it run The yellow chicken does not produce eggs!

When there are a lot of items on your farm, when moving an animal to another spot, it will try to find a clear path to that spot. If there isn't one it will teleport to that spot instead, just like your avatar does when that comes across the same problem.

Wander Around - will make the animal move by itself to another spot, which can be handy if it happens to be in your way. If you have the sound turned on some animals also make a sound when it moves. Not every animal has this capability.

Sell - To be able to sell an animal that is on your farm you must earn the Influential Neighbours Trophy. To earn that trophy you need to have 8 neighbours.

Add to Storage - adds that animal to your Item Storage. You may want to do that if you bought a few more than you needed to fill that shed and have room in another shed on another farm for them.

There are various other commands on different animals, like eat, jump, lay down, sleep, hop, sit, wag tail etc..... just a bit of fun to watch.
For example, the Eat command on a squirrel will make the squirrel sit down and eat a nut. This does not mean they or any of the other animals with the eat command will eat your crops, they are not programmed to do this, so don't worry!

There are tools that can help with bulk storing or deleting animals as well as other items. For details on the tool below click on the name of the Item and it will take you to that post in the Game Guide:

Herding Robot
Tower Crane
Excavator

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Heddryin · #6 Mar 24 2010, 12:13 PM

Selling Animals in your Giftbox or Item Storage:

To sell the animals in your Giftbox or Item Storage, go to the Market.

When you see Toms Message that pops up, click on I want to sell.... then click on OK show me your prices.

Your Storage will open.
There are 3 sections at the top called Storage, Gifts and Items.

Selling Gifts in your Giftbox:

Click on the Gifts section to sell animals in your Gift Box and you will see what is currently in your gift box and can click on Sell All on the animals that you want to sell.

Selling Animals in your Item Storage:

Click on the Items section to sell animals in your Item storage.
Change the A-Z filter top right to Animals to see just your animals in Item storage.
Then when you see the animals that you want to sell, you can click on Sell All or Sell Half to sell them or about half of the quantity, if you do not wish to sell all of them.

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