hockeyhound

Andrew, the coin fountain exploit doesn't work with soybeans. Since you have to spend 50 coins to attain the next coin fountain, there's no combination of soybeans (15 coins) and plowing (15 coins) that will get you to 50. Currently, the only crops that will work are Strawberries (2 plots), Wheat (1 plot), and Sweet Corn (2 plots). Using Sweet Corn, with a script, is going to get you a hellavalot of XP in a short period of time. If you can get immediate whither to acually be immediate, then you could probably gain 10,000 XP in less than 15 minutes, most of it free. Even without the coin fountain exploit, and running the soybean delete method using Sweet Corn and immediate wither is a great way to quickly pile up the XP (although it isn't free).

Fair enough. I may write something that just does a plant, using my idea. I like to separate the harvest, plow and plant steps anyway because my script can select all the plots at once, and then I can go do something else while farmville catches up. We may have a problem here. I noticed the same thing - the weird location of the Sweet Corn - but then when I visited one of my other accounts, it was in a different place. Here's a screen shot: And it's consistent. For some users the corn is in the forth slot, and for others it's in the second. Same standard xml for all of them.

I see they've just released the Sweet Corn seeds, which are pretty much the same as the Sweet Potatoes. I plan on checking them out tonight, but does anyone know if the no-wither for these types of seeds can be overridden by the xml? If so, they would be a kick-ass replacement for the withering soybean delete.

Running these scripts in full-screen is just asking for trouble, because as you pointed out earlier, once you get a popup, it switches away from full screen automatically. I don't see any problem with requiring that the user get out of full screen mode before running the script. And as far as I can tell, when not in full screen, the numbers I posted are consistent.

Sounds like our ideas are similar, but I'm not sure there's a need for training on the arrow button. From the tests I've done, the offset between the market button and the arrow button remains consistent (along with the offsets to all the buy buttons). Of course, the user would have to be instructed to be sure they select the center of the market button. Here's the numbers I'm consistently getting, all based off of the center of the market button: Center of Arrow Button: +26, -224 Center of Buy Button 1: -512, -210 Center of Buy Button 2: -375, -210 Center of Buy Button 3: -238, -210 Center of Buy Button 4: -101, -210 Center of Buy Button 5: -512, -14 Center of Buy Button 6: -375, -14 Center of Buy Button 7: -238, -14 Center of Buy Button 8: -101, -14 And you can throw in center of the Accept Button too: -381, -170 So, like you're doing, you can hardcode the page and position for each seed into the code, and depending on which seed is chosen, perform the clicks to get to it. I'm not really knowledgeable about the pixel checking yet, but I don't think the extra second wait is that big of a deal in the normal harvest-plow-plant cycle. The timing may have more of an impact on the soybean delete, since it hits the seed selection on each loop. And of course, my way wouldn't take into account any extraneous popups that occur while the script is running. I did play around with the pause between the plant and plow cycles, and it did help, but it's still not 100%. The delay got so long that it made the script run just about as slow as the old delete method. Good luck with that. If you don't get shut down, I may give it a try. ;-) BTW, do your calculations on how long it will take you to achieve all the mastery ribbons take into account the fact that they're adding new crops all the time? I have the feeling you're fighting an uphill battle my friend.

TimeHorse, how far along are you in accessing seeds not on the first page? I have an idea how to do that, and I'd like to modify your script to incorporate it.

TimeHorse, I don't think my script will replace yours. I was just pointing out that mine wouldn't work with the three plots, because of the delay in the withering. And I appreciate your open script. New to AutoIt, I need all the help I can get.

My soybean script, which I'm currently migrating over to AutoIt, takes advantage of the immediate withering trick using the xml. Because it uses that, I had to expand it to 4x4, because even though the wither is supposed to be immediate, it's not. So I have to give the plots more time between planting and re-plowing, so the 4x4 allows them that. I tried it with three plots, and most of the cycles were spent doing nothing, waiting for the plants to wither. With the 4x4, I still get some random plants that haven't withered by the time the re-plow click comes by, by it's a small percentage. With this, I'm getting about 10,000XP in a half hour. MUCH better than the old way using the delete. I'll post the script here once I get it migrated. (Also, this delay makes it impossible to use the wither technique in the Coin Fountain trick. Because once you try to re-plow a plant that hasn't withered, the cycle gets screwed up and the next coin fountain doesn't happen. Too bad, because this would make levelling up with free coins much faster.) And I was using Fiddler2 last night to replace the xml, so unless they've changed something since then, it should work. BTW, is there a tutorial anywhere for determining where to click based on pixel mappings? (how to created the mappings and how to search for them?) I see another user here has created a script that does this for Farmville, but the script has been obsfucated.

I'm guessing they aren't big fans of it. I first became aware it was possible when someone posted a screen cap of a farm with overlapping plots on Zynga's Farmville forums, with the question, 'what is this?'. It lasted just a few minutes before the moderators deleted it. (And it also led me to do a google search on the oddity, which is how I found this place.) If they're aware if it, I guess it would be easy for Zynga to set up a DB query to determine who is doing this, and then start messing with those user accounts. That might explain some of the problems being reported here.

Fixed a small glitch in the game settings download program, where it wasn't saving the Version Number from run to run. Link to the executable Link to the source code

Wrote a little program to download the gameSettings.xml file, and automatically make changes to it. Anyone is welcome to it if they want it. Looks like this: After you get it set up, all you have to do is enter the latest version number in the first text box, and then click on download, and it will download the file and make your changes to it. Input fields: Version Number: Gotten by the hover-over trick on the Farmville help page. Zynga Path: Already preset, but available to be changed if it ever changes. The embedded '{0}' is the placeholder for the Version Number. Destination Filename: Already preset to 'gameSettings.xml', but you can make it anything you want. Destination Directory: Location where the downloaded file will be saved. You can either type it in, or just drag and drop a directory from windows explorer. Replacements: String replacements that will occur before the downloaded file is saved. Each line in this field is a single replacement, and is broken down into three comma-delimited fields: Search After, Search For, and Replace With. Search After: A string that tells the replacement engine where to begin searching in the file. This allows you to locate specific strings that may occur more than once in the file, such as '<growtime>'. So, if you want to change the growtime for soybeans, you would set 'itemname="soybeans"' as your Search After, so the growtime for the soybean will be the one replaced. Search For: This is the string that will be replaced. Replace With: This is the string that will replace the 'Search For' string. The search and replaces will occur in the order that they appear in the list. You can enter replacements manually, or drag and drop a text file containing the replacements onto the field. All entered values will remain as defaults for the next time you run the program. If you have Fiddler running during the download, and it's autoresponding to gameSettings.xml, then it's not going to download from Zynga, but your own directory, which isn't what you want. So you probably want to shut down Fiddler while you're running this. The program is written in C#, and I've include both a link to the exe and the source code, for anyone who wants to change it. If you do change it, I'd be interested in seeing what you do. For the replacements, I originally wanted to use XSL instead of straight string replacements, but it gets very convoluted. So I decided to go with the simpler string replacements. Link to the executable (.NET Framework 3.5 required) (This is the executable, not an installation file) Link to the source code

Nice work! Are those the last 3 digits of your coin amount? So, for example, it could be 43222, and if you plow that square, you get a coin fountain? And I wonder if farm size affects it at all? If I had to guess, it looks like they're using some combination of the coin amount and the grid position to seed a random number generator, which eventually determines if a coin fountain should occur. What is hard to figure out is how the browser and server are communicating on this. Does the browser have complete freedom in determining when the coin fountain should happen, and the server just accepts it when it happens? Or does the server check the browser's messages coming back, and override it? If we would change the XML file so that the probability of a coin fountain was 100%, would the coin fountain happen on every plow, and if so, would the server accept it?

That seems odd. Just by looking at probability, you should have gotten a coin in that many plows. Did you set your coin count to end in 3 or 8 before you started the script? Are you using the official xml setup file?

Here's the video I promised, demonstrating the Coin Fountain trick: Link to video The video begins with the script running - plowing, planting and deleting two plots of strawberries. At the start of the video, I have 91,198 coins, and 57,933 XP. With each plow-plant-delete cycle I lose 50 coins and gain 4 XP. After two cycles, about 13 seconds in, I hit a Coin Fountain. (This was actually about a minute after starting the script, but I cut off the beginning to cut down on file size.) When I hit the Coin Fountain, I had 57,941 XP and the Coin Fountain bonus took me up to 91,148 coins. After that, I get a Coin Fountain on every cycle, and each Coin Fountain bonus brings me back up to 91,148 coins (50 coins spent on plowing and planting, and a 50 coin bonus from the Coin Fountain.) However, even though my coin total continues to be reset, my XP keeps increasing by 4 with each cycle. I let it run for a while, and then stopped the script, but I could have let it go indefinitely. When I stop it, I have 91,148 coins, and 58,007 XP. To prove that the numbers are synched with the server, I log out of Farmville and then immediatly re-enter the game. The coin and XP numbers are just the way I left them - 91,148 coins, and 58,007 XP. So, since I hit the first Coin Fountain, I gained 66 XP and it didn't cost me any coins. BTW, this isn't really my farm. Just a dummy account I use to try stuff out.

Nice! And thanks for the heads-up on the mouse-over. Checked it out and it works great. This coin-fountain trick isn't a theory, it's a fact. I've used it myself to repeatedly level-up, and the money amounts stuck with the server. And the coin amounts are 50, because while the game is in the free loop, you can watch your coin totals go down by 50 as you plow and plant, and then go back up to the same number it started with, over and over and over. Give it a try. You'll see that it works. If I have time tonight, I'll create a video of it running and post it here.

Wow! There's certainly a bunch of goodies in that file. Has anyone documented what can be changed without getting into problems with Zynga or Facebook's servers? For example, I see a 'giftingPerUserTimeLimit' value, which is set to 14400 (4 hours), which is actually the time you have to wait before you gift someone again. If I change this to one minute, does that mean I can gift someone that often (without exceeding the daily limit of course), or are the servers going to prevent this from happening on their end?

Got it, thanks. Couldn't find it at first, but it must have been cached, because once I cleared the cache and reloaded the game, it showed up in fiddler. Latest game settings: http://facebook2.farmville.static.zynga.com/current/v6884/gameSettings.xml

Hello everyone. New here, and I've very interested in trying out the scripts presented here. (Especially the smaller plot sizes) Thanks to all for your contributions. One thing I was wondering was how do I get hold of the Farmville game settings xml file? When I click on the links provided here, or right click and select 'download target', I just get a blank html file. Also, to answer the above question, yes, there is a way to plow, plant, and delete without losing money. There's a pattern to the coin fountain, and it can be exploited. Turns out, if you're plowing and you get a coin fountain, and then you spend exactly 50 coins and then replow the original plot, you'll get another coin fountain. Since you get 50 free coins with the fountain, it pays for itself. If you look at the crops that are available, two of them fit this scenario, Strawberries and Wheat. (Sweet potatoes were perfect for it, but not available anymore.) So Strawberries will take two plots to reach 50 coins: Plow (15) + Strawberry seeds (10) x 2 = 50 and Wheat will work in one plot: Plow (15) + Wheat seeds (35) = 50 For example, if you're plowing and you get a coin, you can plant wheat, dig it up, and then replow the same plot, which will result in another coin, and so on. If you want to use strawberries, then after you get the coin, plow a second plot, plant strawberries in both plots, dig them both up, and then replow the original plot (where you got the coin), which will result in another coin, and then continue the cycle. With scripting, all you have to do is set up a loop that either plow/plant/digs a single wheat plot, or two strawberry plots, and let it run. It will eventually run into a coin fountain, and once it does, your efforts from that point on are free. (In a perfect world of course. But we all know sync errors and popups will put an end to our free XP eventually.) It's been claimed that if you start with a coin amount that ends in a 3 or an 8, you have a better chance of running into a coin fountain. From my experience, that seems to be true. I'm not sure how the delay caused by the coin fountain will affect the scripts used here. I'll have to test and see. (or maybe modifying the xml file can get rid of the coin fountain delay?)