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?

FarmVille English Countryside Sneak Peek: English Mill

English Mill
Zynga is about to do hydro power the English way. FarmVille Feed has found an image of an unreleased item in FarmVille: the English Mill. While the mill looks visibly unique from the standard mills found in the original FarmVille, FarmVille Feed doesn't expect its function to be any different. This will likely be another animated decoration for English farms that unsurprisingly costs Farm Cash. Either way, start saving if you want to bring some more life to your farm across the pond.

[Image Credit: FarmVille Feed]

Would you be willing to buy another Mill for your English farm? What if it brought with it an additional function like increased results from the Crafting buildings?

Zynga adds FarmVille Instant Grow per plot option, not exactly worth it

Think of it as ... reverse DDT. Yeah, that might help you forget about the chemicals in your digital food! Zynga has added an option to FarmVIlle (sans digital chemicals ... whatever that means) that allows players to apply Instant Grow to individual plots of farmland. FarmVille Freak found that, when you mouse over freshly planted plots, text appears reading, "Click to Apply Instant Grow." Doing so, if you have the item, will apply the effect to a single plot for a smaller amount of Farm Cash.

Here are the prices for applying Instant Grow to a single crop or tree, but keep in mind that they vary depending upon how ready the crops or plants in question are:

    Instant Grow Crop – 3 Farm Cash
    Instant Grow Tree – 7 Farm Cash


Now, this is the cost for a freshly planted or harvested crop or tree. However, the option to apply the effect to all crops and trees still exists for just 15 Farm Cash for each category. (Note: However, this is could easily be a bug in which the true switch has yet to take place for all players.) Just applying Instant Grow to five individual crops would cost the same as applying it to them all. In other words, this isn't really a good deal. If you're going to apply Instant Grow to a single crop, you may as well do it for the whole bunch.

Have you seen this feature appear in your game yet? Are you a fan of the Instant Grow, or would you rather play old-fashioned (i.e. not spend money)?

FarmVille: English Countryside crops are no longer exclusive to the second farm

As if being able to transfer items from one farm to another wasn't exciting enough news, FarmVille players have also begun to discover a second bonus that comes when completing the Storage Transfer goals in the English Countryside: You can then grow English crops on your Home Farm, and vice versa.

If you're the kind of farmer that likes to plant only one kind of crop, day after day, until it's mastered, you'll be happy to know that you'll now be able to master said crops twice as fast (depending on how many plots you have on each farm, that is). This will also help in Bushel collection, as you'll be able to grow the same crop on both farms for double the Bushels in the same amount of times.

As with all things, though, there does appear to be a couple of catches here. For now, it doesn't look like you can plant Greenhouse crops in the English Countryside, and any crop that requires previous mastery of another to grow also look to be excluded as of this writing (so, crops like the Orange Daisy, which require mastery of the Gladiolus, as an example). Still, being able to grow beautiful Pink Asters, or extra Barley and Hops for crafting on my Home Farm is definitely something that has me excited, and working all the more vigilantly on those final English Countryside goals to unlock them myself. Check out our guide to completing them that much faster if you'd like to join me. Happy farming!

What do you think of this new ability to plant formerly exclusive crops across both farms?