Rate/hr, Say what???

If you look at the Theme Event task lists, you will see that all of my tables have a column called Rate. This gives you a hint of how the collection event relates to your farm. It is the number of items a building will produce in 1 hour of running time.

Lets look at the old Asia level 4 before they introduced the 5th level.

Fertilizer - 225

Apples - 4350

Paintings (11/hr) - 8550

Wheat - 825

Cabbage - 6300

Blossoms (23/hr) - 24890

Pig Feed - 900

Pigs - 7500

Cranes (21/hr) - 36805

It is easy to see 7500 pigs and know that if your farm produces 520 pigs per round, you can do the math and get 7500 / 520 x 1hr 10min = 17hr 30min.

For the collection tasks, look at the rate (number in the brackets). Any building will give you this many units per hour of run time, so apples are 3 hours of run time or 33 paintings/69 Blossoms/63 Cranes.

You can take the number of units and divide them by the yield per hour and the number of buildings on your farm to get the number of hours to finish the task IF your farm ran continuous.

An example would be having 19 animals, 10 orchards, 6 fields, mills, composter, silo, beehive, meadow, factory and water tower for a total of 43 buildings.

8550 (pictures) / 11 (pictures per hour) / 43 (buildings) = 18 hours of farming to finish task 2.

OR...

11 (pictures per hour) x 43 (buildings) = 473 pictures per hour

But! You can have buildings waiting to be collected when your finish apples and fertilizer, which cuts down your hours...

Rose seeds are 4.16666 x the rate. (12/hr = 50 per rose seed, 14.4/hr = 60 per rose seed, etc)

With the 43 buildings example:

Paintings = 18 hrs

Blossoms = 25.2 hrs

Cranes = 40.75 hrs

Tricks

These are theoretical hours. No farm will run 100% of the time, but there are tricks to help you out. You can hold off collecting buildings until you hit a collecting task. You can temp in fields, apples, peaches or pigs to help with specific tasks. You can start your mills with pig feed 2 hrs before you anticipate being done Blossoms. Humus multiplies your collecting items; super feed and fertilizer does not.

There are also rounding errors you can take advantage of.

Corn is 2 mins or 0.367 paintings. They round up to 1. That is 30/hour.

Wildflowers are 0.183 paintings. They round up to 1, so you can almost do 60/hour. Paintings, Blossoms and Cranes are calculated on how long each bag of feed, fertilizer or humus takes, not the total run time of the mill, so 10 bags of chicken feed will always give you 1 painting per 10 bags.

(6 fields and 2 level 6 mills -> corn = 3 paintings per min, mills = 2 painting per min for 5 paintings per min total. Wildflowers = 6 paintings per min...)

Weekend events have a rate of 12/hr. Peaches are 1 hour and give 12 snake oil. Wheat is 6 hours and give (6x12) 72 hammers (or 90 with humus).

Happy Farming (and planning)! Smart