Happiness

The question "what is your happiness" comes up a lot. Really, farmers want to know what their happiness should be. This is not a full article or an in depth look. What I did is pulled the comments out of 2 Facebook posts where I took 2 farms and ran some numbers on them (plus a side story). I did do some liberal editing to help make it more readable.

What is the ideal happiness?

The magic number is somewhere between 40 and 100 depending on your farming habits; 40-80 for a small farm, 50-100 for a large farm. As your happiness goes up, production costs go down, but they decrease slower as happiness is higher... at some point what you put in place of decorations will generate more income then the decorations/happiness increase will save in production costs. You will make more money selling pigs at 110 happiness then you will save running your farm at 200 happiness. Eggs, goats, cows, orchards just make the numbers even better. These are general. The exact magic number depends on your farm.

(41 is "a magic number" because higher then this you see less cost decrease the more happiness goes up, but that really doesn't apply to how we look at the whole farm.)

Case 1 - Eileen - 235 to 82

Eileen - My farm is 235. Would you say that to high for me then ?

(Some back and forth banter)

Smart - I know that Eileen is a fairly active farmer, and I don't have all the details, so I had to take some educated guesses on number of times per day things were run and book levels. I have apples guessed at 5 times per day, goats at 6, cows 3, cherries and almonds twice per day, etc. Not 24/7, but busy most of the day. She has a few (large) market needs, so it makes sense to fill those. She also has a 7 bag/day fertilizer surplus (with a level 3 silo). A cow won't do much [she has 6+ cows], but a goat will see maximum profit, along with almonds and cherries. I just did a quick model and tracked net income, ignoring market points, contracts run\dumped, and co-op points.

With this model, her farm will make ~$2,115,000 per day ($531,000 from cafe). Her happiness of 235 reduces her production cost by $260,000. I will base everything off of this.

I went with a table to show the impact of each change (addition) to her farm. Cherry would fair slightly better, but I went for almonds for better market balance.

The scenario I missed: Add a level 3 house (happiness 105), take 14 workers (10 new plus 4 available) and upgrade all orchards and goats, plus 2 fields to level 8 => just over $70,000 better (plus an additional $60,000 from the flower honey...)

Pick any one of the options. I just didn't know if you have workers laying around, so I threw the last one (adding a house) in. Your beehive is under utilized, so this will give you some options to have it run more. The key thing is that your farm is better off at 85, 105 or 145 happiness [with more production buildings] than 235.

Eileen - OK, I’ve gone for a goat as co op always needs cheese. I dumped one cow as I always seem to have one that never gets in, lol, and put a almond in as market is always asking for them. So now down to 82 smiles with 11 workers free, upgrading goat to 4 at the min, fields working on them but need another 45 mallets.

Eileen - Just like to say thank you to you. It has not been that long since I change the smiles, but can see a difference all ready. It was the best thing I did.

Case Side Story - Kim - 324 to 165

Kim - Interesting. Mine is sitting at 343. It is going to be a very long time before I can expand. Had to just add a house because of workers. I have 9 and an upgrade going that I will let sit. A 5th Apple would help with honey.

Kim - Just dropped mine to 179. Dozed my 4th pig. Added a cow, goat and Apple. Will see how this goes. Plus I have tickets so can upgrade those. Now those darn mallets. I do use every square. So no space is wasted. It only dropped my production costs 8%. That is not much.

Kim - So dropping my happiness. Now at 165 - needed more workers. I have still made 2.1 million in 21 hrs. Plus added a cow, goat and apple and have done 4 upgrades. It hasn’t hurt me.

Kim - (1 week later) Update on mine, happiness is now at 80. I have done non stop upgrades. Currently temping a chicken. Making about 4 million a day. Dropped down last player tournament to gold 3 because I couldn’t get enough orders/points. Currently leading by 135,000 points. Much better than before.

Case 3 - Suzan - (-182) to 60

Suzan - Actually it doesn’t really matter what happiness points you’re at. More important is if you use the space for production that helps with market and money it might even bring you more money per day. Happiness at -180 and making around a million maybe more per day

Smart - Depending on your farm size and how active you are playing, the difference between 40 and -180 is most likely costing you more then $500,000. On my farm, 40 happiness would result in $3.45M, profit per day. -180 happiness would result in $1.83M profit. That is a loss of $1.6M to production costs... Even if you farm 1/3 as much as me, you can not put in 3 builds that will offset the income lost You may want to investigate your theory a little... (or we do it together and the whole community benefits)

Suzan - Yes please could maybe use a little help? What do we need to know?

(Some back and forth banter)

Smart -

Assumptions: Runs per day - Chickens 36x, Pigs 7x, Cows 3x, Goats 5x, Ducks/Apples 4x, Cherries/Almonds 2x, Peaches 7x (2 of each orchard) Medium book levels. Cafe plan optimized to long crops (being away). Mallets 3 of 5 days.

The plan: Remove the small peach and lowest field. Add 1 theme decoration at level 3 and 4 clotheslines (+186 total addition). There may be better decorations in storage, but I needed something that I know would be attainable. (Turns out she had 2 level 5 decorations)

Comments: An orchard had to go... there is still a mismatch between fertilizer supply and demand, but looking at the farm the second peach was the weakest link. Looking at the base market xp points (no bonus) shows that the new plan will reduce contracts sent by 20%, but only 6% lost on market sales (and materials). Almost half as many contracts need to be dumped to move everything through the market.

You can see income almost doubles.

Smart - I haven't finished my series of marketing yet, but in a nut shell, to make money you need to sell everything through your market. You can compensate for stock deficiencies with contract dumping. I ran a market emulation on your farm until you run out of stock on your most abundant orchard. In your farm's starting state, you would need to dump 108 contracts to find 143 you could fill during the course of a day. 28 of those contracts would contain pigs, 23 would contain apples, and so on.

Suzan - Thanks a lot. I will try the plan definitely. The only thing I’m worried about is when peaches are needed for event tasks, it will take me very long to put a temporary, about 8 hours.

Smart - Yes, peaches are a while to temp in, but nothing overnight planning won't fix. At $800,000 per day savings, it is easy to put one in when you need it. Also, only 3 of the 8 themes require peaches.

Suzan - So I removed one field and 1 peach orchard... I’m at +60 happy faces now

Few days later - I can already see a huge change climbing up in all tournaments. Market is working better, but still a lot of orders to bin because they ask for honey (both). I need more hammers to upgrade fields and thinking about removing the free range orchards and put normal ones which are "faster" to upgrade..

Summary

This is a general picture of 2 farms. There are times and places to run your happiness higher and lower. A lot of more competitive farmers will run their farms below -1000 to put in extra fields or livestock. As you farm matures (ex. Apples level 3 vs Apples level 9), it becomes easier to do this and still make money. If you do this, you probably aren't asking what your happiness should be.

One trend I do see is farmers that temp a lot have lots of decorations and +400 happiness when not temped up. Why? Put something in (level 1s) that will benefit your farm.

In the future, we will try to construct 3 or 4 model farms to represent different styles and maturity of farmers and do a full break down.

My last thought is keeping happiness at 0 for more product will benefit a co-op more. While this is true in the short term, it takes about 54 days with one less goat and a happiness of 60 to expand your farm beyond the short term benefit.

Happy Farming!

Smart