Updated January, 7th 2016 – I’m now at level 152

Note: I started out this guide on how to make the most money in Farmville 2, however I found out how to have lots of money, now the problem turned out to be the experience so I have tweaked this guide on how to get the most experience too. Enjoy!

Searching the internet for the fastest way to make money in Farmville 2 yields a lot of cheats and hacks which explains some easy way to cheat in the game. What I’m going to explain though, is how to optimize your farms to make as much money and experience possible without cheating. The trick about money: it’s all about Trees and selling the fruits with no recipe! The trick about experience: the Crafting Kiln!

Money problem with recipes that uses crops

The problem with crops is that you need to pay for every seed you plant and most recipes ask for something from an adult animal, so you have to take into account those cost too. So the recipe you’re selling is not your real profit. Take for example the Spinach Pinwheel recipe which sells for 4,160$ and you need to be level 32 in order to craft it. So you would think that it should be a lot profitable when you reach level 32. However, you need 12 Rye to make it, a total cost of 960$. You also need 5 Spinach, total cost of 450$. And you also need 4 Cheese. A Swiss Cow produce 400 Cheese in his Adult life at a cost of 65,000$, so each Cheese will cost you 162.50$ or 650$ for 4 Cheese. So the recipe for Spinach Pinwheel doesn’t give you 4,160$ but actually only 2,100$. It also use your baby bottles that you would probably want to use on another animal.

Of course, you can fertilize crops to double the Rye and Spinach and of course the Cow also gives Milk and after being Prized will give infinite Swiss Cheese that you can use to craft something else for more money, but you get the idea that a recipe will cost money to produce.

To make this Spinach Pinwheel’s recipe in good perspective, you need 17 Water to craft one, so a total of 17 Water for 17 seeds or 9 Water if you fertilize everything for something that makes around 2,100$ of profit. Which is around 170$ per Water. However, if you only craft Spinach Pinwheel with all of your Water, you’ll never be able to fertilize everything. Not only that, but you will need to waste a lot of your time to craft this recipe over and over again and it will use up pretty much all of your Power all the time. Very boring and tedious.

Solution with trees

Here’s a better and easier way that I’ve found, buy a tree, water it and sell its fruit. Thing is, after you bought a tree, you do not need to pay for the seeds. You just water it and harvest it without paying anything. If you sell the fruits, it’s a real profit. Of course you need to pay for the tree but it only takes about 4 harvests to recoup the initial cost. Watering and harvesting trees is very fast. To sell thousands of fruits, it takes many minutes so just put a weight on your left-click mouse when selling and wait.

For example, a Lime Tree need 4 Water, it will produce 6 Limes which are selling for 257$ each. Total of 1,542$ for 4 Water or 386$ per Water. Doesn’t matter that it takes 12 hours to harvest, you just buy as much Lime Tree as you have water to use it on.

If you have any extra Fertilizers, use it on your Trees, it will give more fruits.

When you have access to Shears, you can use them to make the tree Heirloom, the fruits will sell at a much better price and Shears are free! You just need to ask Friends to have some. It takes time to manage the Shears though but it’s worth it. I personally don’t even bother with Shears and I have enough money for paying every expansion lands.

When you have access to Groves, you will be able to save 1 Water on every tree and it will give more fruits, so the profit per water is even higher! Make as much Groves as possible.

Other money tricks

Don’t do the Village Grocer Order or the Quests at the left-side of the screen, the rewards aren’t worth it, the less you do them, the more resources you can put in watering your trees. Same for the special quests that appears once or twice every week. These quests ask you to build something. The rewards are mostly decorations that doesn’t serve any purpose. Just build what it asks you but never use it and get rid of it once the quest time expires.

At level 20, you will have access to the County Fair, no need to spend all your Water to crop and harvest like crazy to have lots of point in the County Fair. The County Fair reward isn’t worth it. If you play every day, you will get enough points to get your rewards anyway.

In Farmville 2, Water is money. The more you water your tree, the more you can make. You can get more Water by visiting Friends or going into your Game Feeds.

Check your Inventory from time to time and use all your Water, Feed, Fertilizer, Power, etc. when you have some, it’s there to be used and if you maxed them you won’t be getting new ones.

For more money, before you get the Date tree which sells for a lot of money. You can always sell Prized Animals Goods: Brown Egg, Swiss Cheese, Goat Cheese, Fine Saddle (craft Leather with it before) and so on. But after you get the Date tree, keep all the goods of Adult animals, you will need them at some point later on for Expansion Lands.

Experience tricks

Getting lots of money is easy, just takes a bit of time. Real problem is the experience! Leveling up takes a lot of time when you pass level 70 or so. Here’s a few tricks on how to gain XP the fastest way.

The Crafting Kiln is your best strategy in getting XP, it’s easy and fast. Having a Level 7 Windmill helps to produce as much as possible. Depending on what you have and what level you’re at, just produce Lizard Vase, Feather Pot or Sheep’s Bit Flying Cup.

For Feather Pot, you need a lot of White Feather so use all of your Super Feed on your Duck House.

Harvesting Crops and Trees give good XP, use your Water on them all the time.

Visiting Friends is not worth it, the XP awarded isn’t much considering the time it takes for visiting. It can still give Water and Fertilizer if you really need it from time to time.

Prized Buildings should be filled in this order with these animals.

*Some people can have a Rabbit Warren holding up to 21 rabbits, nobody knows why, only the developers of Zynga knows but it’s probably because there’s different versions of Farmville 2 on different servers.

**The Lincoln Sheep is better because it gives a bit more Experience compared to the Katahdin Sheep but the difference is quite negligible and the Katahdin Sheep is cheaper, gives more Fertilizer, needs less Baby Bottle and only require level 18 instead of 39 to buy it.

Other information

Family Farmhouse

The Farmhouse at the bottom-left of your farm where you can have a Spouse and Kids is quite useful, the quests aren’t that hard and doesn’t take much time. When you complete them, you can have your spouse and/or your kid to help you on your farm. They are especially useful for Foraging, Pearl Diving and Cave Exploring.

Fishing

Fishing doesn’t bring anything useful except the fact that you can do more orders at the Order Board since some recipe asks for fish. Always fertilize a few of your water crops so you can have baits for fishing.

Order Board

It is now mandatory to have Favor Coins in order to expand your farm. Thus, you do need to make the 15 orders every week.

Farm Co-ops

Join one so you can ask your co-op for ingredients in recipes and you can also earn 200 favor coins if your co-op reach its weekly goal!

Upgrade

The upgrades of the Order Board are not really needed but they do help in the long run, they help save time and help produce more of everything. Especially the Windmill to get more Power for crafting so you can get more experience. All the Through are quite fun, you can click on the building to feed all animals at once in a specific category so it’s fast to feed animals and it gives a bonus on adult animal products. Buying Groves will help produce more fruits that you can sell.

Dog and Cat

Having the dogs or the cat is pretty much useless but since this quest never expire, you can take your time to finish it. One of the dog help to get Prized Crops, the other dog helps to get more resources out of your adult animals and the cat helps to get Speed Grow.

Bona Fide Keeper’s Flag Pole

You can earn different type of Certificates that can be used for something specific. No need to try to make all of the quests, you will make some by just playing naturally. Some of the certificates are really good: Level up instantly, Make all your animals hungry for 24h, Infinite Power for 1h.

Links

Conclusion

Farmville 2 is a time-based game. You can’t play for hours non-stop, you need to wait for Water and everything else. Even with all the tricks on this page it will take a long time to buy all the new expansion lands. That is, years.

In all honesty, I don’t recommend this game anymore. It’s getting old now, there must be better ones out there. There’s a lot of bugs in it. It’s a Flash based-game, it’s not very well coded and it runs slow even on a fast computer. Zynga also update the game on a regular basis, most of the time it helps to make the game better but sometimes it introduces new bugs or it makes it harder to level up.