FarmVille Blog explains more about Sheep Breeding

While the basics of Sheep Breeding in FarmVille's English Countryside are fairly easy to understand (check out our full guide if you've yet to begin), the aspects concerning which traits are carried down from which parent are a bit more complicated. While the basic phrase of "pattern comes from the father and color comes from the mother" holds true to a point, there is a whole possibility for variation with each and ever Lamb that you breed. To help clarify matters, Zynga has posted "a bit more on sheep breeding" over on the official FarmVille Blog.

First, for those users that have been "unlucky" enough to receive the same gender of Lambs three times in a row, you are supposedly guaranteed to receive a Lamb of the opposite gender the next time around. Unfortunately, this seems to be a bit more like "wishful thinking" than an actual guarantee, as users like myself are now on our fourth or fifth Lambs, all of which have been one gender or another (in my case, all females). This may just be because the "guarantee" has yet to roll out into the game's coding, so we'll give Zynga the benefit of the doubt here. In other news, Zynga says that while the patter does come from the "father alone," the colors of both the body and the pattern of each Lamb can actually come from both the father and the mother, which is entirely different from what the basic Sheep Breeding tutorial image claimed (that color came solely from the mother). In actuality, the color comes from both parents, and can deviate through a limited range of colors for variety. That is, in order to eliminate exactly identical sheep on your land.

Here's an image preview of what Brutus the Ram and a Brown Sheep could produce through four interactions, as an example.

Hopefully, this will help clarify some of the problems and issues users are having with Sheep Breeding in FarmVille. As for the mass amounts of Ewes that some of us are being "stuck" with, we'll let you know if that opposite gender guarantee actually does start to work in full.

Check out the rest of our English Countryside coverage right here.

Have you only received sheep of one gender, or are having trouble breeding the colors or patterns of sheep you want? Have these clarifications given you an ideas of what to change?