Wednesday, April 27, 2011

Pig Breeding and Revised Truffle Hunting

Attention pig owners, pig breeding is now available! You can start making new piglets immediately if you have a Pig Pen on either your Home farm or your English Countryside farm. If you do not have a Pig Pen, do not worry—we will give you another one for free via a pop-up window.



Pig Breeding is Here Pop Up

 
If you have one already built, fantastic! You will get a free boar as a prize.
We have also streamlined the way truffle hunting works, and we have revised the rewards you get for redeeming truffles! Read on for all the details.

Making Piglets

Breeding new pigs is a lot like breeding new sheep. Click on your completed Pig Pen, and then click Look Inside to see the new Pig Pen interface.


Updated Pig Pen Interface


  If your Pig Pen is empty, you will need to move some sheep (not to mention a boar) into it to start breeding. In the example above, we have three different kinds of pigs in the Pig Pen: a Purple Boar, a Pot Belly Pig and a Tamworth Pig.

Some changes have been made: Pig Slop is no longer a Pig Pen feature, and there are now a row of stalls at the upper left (also similar to the Sheep Pen, you get one stall for each constructed level of the Pig Pen).
You will need a boar and a pig (or sow) to start breeding, the result of which is a piglet, which once fully grown will take on some of the characteristics of the parents, such as colors and perhaps the patterns. More than likely there will be some variation in the colors, depending on the colors of the parents. The pattern can only be inherited from the boar, but if both parents have the same pattern, the chance of pattern inheritance is much higher.
Now I want to start breeding. Click on the boar you want to breed with—in this case, the Purple Boar. You’ll see options to Breed with it, or Remove it from the Pig Pen (or click on the X to close the pop-up).


Options to breed or remove pig

 
After clicking on Breed, the pigs/sows you can breed with the boar will remain in full color while the available boars will grey out. Click on the pig/sow you want to breed with and you’ll see some similar options.

Selecting Tamworth Pig to Breed

 
Select Breed again and you’ll see the Breeding window.
 

Breeding window


  Breeding a new pig is a 24 hour process and carries (by default) a 50% success rate, meaning if you’re not successful you have to start all over again. You can improve your chance of success (while decreasing the amount of time it takes to breed) by using Love Potions. You can acquire Love Potions by:

·         Buying them via the Buy Potions button in the Pig Pen window (5 Love Potions at a time)
·         Asking your neighbors for Love Potions via the Ask for Potions button in the Sheep Pen window.
Here’s the impact of using Love Potions:
·         No Love Potions used: 50% success rate, breed time: 24 hours
·         1 Love Potion used: 60% success rate, breed time: 12 hours
·         2 Love Potions used: 70% success rate, breed time: 6 hours
·         3 Love Potions used: 80% success rate, breed time: 3 hours
·         4 Love Potions used: 90% success rate, breed time: 1 hour
·         5 Love Potions used: 100% success rate, breed time: instant

You can use the up and down arrows to choose how many Love Potions you want to spend. If you don’t have enough, you’ll be prompted to buy more. When you’re satisfied with your chances, click on Breed (or Cancel if you don’t want to try breeding at this time). You may have to wait a few seconds…


Wait time during pig breeding


The first stall is occupied and their places in the Sheep Pen pasture are replaced with helpful signs. If there’s a timer, a clock in the stall will show how much time is left to go. Once the boar and pig are done doing their thing (or you used instant breeding), the Ready! button will show up over the stall. Click on it.


Breeding Results



With any luck, you’ve bred a new piglet! You can choose to name your piglet (choose anything within the Terms of Service), choose to Give it Away (this will make a post to your feed) or you can keep it. At this moment, you still don’t know how the piglet will turn out—you’ll need to grow it up. Once you click on “Keep Piglet” you’ll get the option to place it on your farm.


Piglet


Click anywhere on your farm to place it. You can click on the piglet at any time to get a menu of options.


Piglet Menu Options


A piglet can be fully grown using 10 Baby Bottles. You can acquire or give Baby Bottles by:

·         Asking your neighbors directly by clicking on “Ask for Bottles”
·         Purchasing Bottles in the Market for 1 Farm Cash each
·         Acquire all the needed Bottles by spending Farm Cash (click on the “Complete Now” button to purchase the remaining Bottles). The Cost is X Farm Cash, where X is the number of Bottles needed to grow the Lamb.
·         Gifting the bottles via the Free Gifts page.
Also note you can change the name of the piglet at any time by choosing Change Name (even after the piglet is fully grown). Selecting Feed Bottles will give as many bottles as you have in your inventory (up to the maximum needed of 10) to your piglet. Once you’ve applied 10 Bottles the piglet will now grow up into a full boar or pig:


Full grown pig/boar

 
You’ll also get a pop-up asking you to celebrate by sharing some baby bottles with your neighbors via a feed post.
 

Feed to share bottles

 
Currently boars only come in two different patterns: plain (which is really not a pattern at all, or if you want to get really technical it’s a pattern of the exact same color as the boar) and spotted. As noted above, the colors available for pig breeding is a somewhat random process, based on the colors and patterns of the parents used. Each color a parent possesses has a certain color range to it that can be applied to the lamb in question, so you never really know what you’re getting exactly.

Breeding Limits


Finally, note that there is a limit as to how many bred boars and pigs you can have on each farm at any one time. The limit is 100, which includes all bred pigs on that particular farm, in that farm’s Pig Pen, and in the Gift Box. This is per farm, so you can have up to 100 for each the Home Farm and the English Countryside farm.
And that’s pig breeding!

Truffle hunting and other Pig Pen changes

As we noted above, Pig Slop has been removed from the Pig Pen (and in fact from the game altogether). If you still have some in your Gift Box or elsewhere, go ahead and get rid of it.
Truffle hunting has been streamlined tremendously. When you click to harvest your Pig Pen, you’ll start your only truffle hunt of the day. The pig chosen to hunt with is completely random, as is the neighbor’s farm you can find the truffle on.

Truffle Feed


If you find a truffle (there is a chance you won’t), you’ll see this pop up with the note to share the truffle with that neighbor. Clicking Share will ask you to make a post to their wall, informing them that you found a truffle on their farm. They can then respond by returning the same type of truffle to you by posting on your wall.

Again, this will be the only truffle hunt of the day; once your Pig Pen is ready to be harvested again (once ever y24 hours), you can try for another truffle hunt.
The prizes for redeeming a truffle (you can find them in your Gift Box) have been heavily revised. You can get building parts, bottles, love potions, and all sorts of other treats (including other animals) by redeeming truffles now.
Finally, Pig Pens now visually show which pigs you have in it, similar to Sheep Pens. The pigs you put in last show up in each of the 3 stalls as well as the mud yard in front of the pen.

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