Easter is now a month away. I have no clue if or when there will be a Easter Seasonal Event. They started Seasonal Events in September of last year, having 3 that followed the same basic pattern at Oktoberfest, Halloween and Christmas. We do know that there is a Easter Weekly Theme Event and upgradeable decoration. If the patterns hold consistent, we can anticipate the theme event April 9th to 16th. The task quantities for level 4 and 5 are not known at this point. There is a chance there could be a seasonal event.
Let's be realistic. If everything was abundant and easy, you would never run out of feed and be tempted to buy a package to keep your goats eating during co-op. Wink wink. If your market ran smoothly, you wouldn't need to watch ads to refresh contracts. Seasonal events put this to the test.
The three seasonal events {ex Christmas} we have seen have introduced a new supply of crop {ginger}, feed {ginger feed}, animal byproduct {cookies}, cafe recipe(s) {hot chocolate}, and fish recipe {aka seaweed humus}. The crop is horribly inefficient and takes much longer to grow than mill. The best payoff for animal byproducts has been the chicken. The animal byproduct has been amazing for cash and materials. (Oktoberfest and Halloween made rare materials [saws, books, glass] very common.) It is intentionally designed to make feeding your animals harder and your market need a little more skipping. So how do you prepare for the unknown?
Crops - Are your feed reserves good enough to not make any for 2 weeks and still feed all of your animals? A month before is a good time to start working on this. You probably won't run 1.5 hour crops overnight, so your cows should be fine. Chickens and pigs you "can" feed with the seasonal feed, so first priority would be goats, then ducks. It is always wise to keep a healthy reserve so if life happens and you miss a few days, it doesn't negatively impact your farm.
Cash - More so for smaller and medium farms, would you be willing to pay $10,000,000 for 10,000 saws and 25,000 books? When an opportunity like this comes, you need to give yourself the option to run temp fields 24/7, which means you may lose some money. Pretzels and candy were lucrative enough you came out slightly ahead. Larger farms will not have a problem. I ran 14 fields at -1800 happiness for a month during October, brought in around 300,000 books, 60,000 saws and about $50 million compared to my normal $130-140 million. Having a cash reserve heading into April would be wise. Seasonal events also tend to bring land sales, although land sales are much more prolific now.
Cafe - There really isn't anything to prepare here. If you don't have honey, the recipes are a huge boost. If you do have honey, cash wise you are better to use honey in the cafe and sell the animal byproducts in the market. If you are well prepared, you will have more cookies than you can sell, so using them up in the cafe makes sense and honey can be used for mallets. It really depends on your farm.
Fish Cafe - The previous 3 have used green fillets and seasonal crop. It would be a good idea to have some green and white fillets stocked up. Maybe even some blue, red and purple if they go way into uncharted territory. If you are well prepared, you can blow through 100-160 green fillets in a day, so your stock needs to reflect that.
Market - Small farms run fewer contracts. Large farms run more contracts. The more you produce, the more contracts you run. You can guarantee, no mater what size your farm is, that there will be higher demand than you can provide. The only real thing you can do is mentally prepare yourself to dump some really large and beautiful contracts. I always dumped glass first and always sold saws, but I need 50,000 saws for my next expansion.
Mills - In the last 3 seasonal events, the fields are the bottle neck. If you temp fields, they should be closer to matched. Now the nice thing is that excess crop can go to the fish cafe. The key thing about the mills is it reduces the amount you need for each bag of feed. If, big if, you are sitting on the fence about a mill upgrade, do it before April.
Fields - This is the bottle neck. Again, like mills, if you are on the fence or close to upgrading, do it before April.
Chickens - Chickens were the best way to turn seasonal feed into seasonal product. Twice, it was done by the level of the stable, once it was the type of stable - regular vs special. The candy farm will be running the beginning of April, so the best strategy is at least 1 high level regular chicken, (high level free range is awesome) and the ability to temp a candy and/or free range chicken. I personally have 3 chickens - level 9 regular, level 5 free range and a level 1 regular. The level 1 regular can easily be made a candy and I plan on upgrading the free range chicken at least twice before April.
Composter - Save up your humus. If you have a stash of leaves, upgrade your composter. It is easy to go into Oktoberfest with 1200 humus and come out with 2.
Fertilizer - Seasonal feed gives 75% less dung. You will take a hit on your dung production, which will affect your fertilizer supply. I can't believe I am going to say this - if you are on the fence about adding an orchard, I would maybe wait, or better yet, spend some evenings temping up some eggs and build up a dung and fertilizer reserve.
Co-ops - I can't believe I missed this one! Co-op leaders, this will be an incredible opportunity for your individual farmers to grow their farms. You will get off planters, you will get tension in highly competitive co-ops. Personally, I would gladly skip a tournament if it meant half of my team could finish their libraries and increase their nail and board bonuses.
Start thinking about how you will handle this now so it doesn't blindside you.
I can run my farm for a month without milling feed or 10 days without making fertilizer. I will continue to build up feed. I am going to start frying up more green fillets, upgrade my composter (100k leaves) and my free range chicken.
I hope this will give you a little to think about to prepare for whatever the future throws at us. If a seasonal event hits us, we will quickly try to break down the details and best strategies. Happy Farming! Smart
Thank you :)