Maximum Ranch Space : More Ways to Expand Your Ranch

A few months ago I showed many of you a step by step instruction on doubling up your ranch. Since then I have learned a few things.

First off you are NOT limited to just double plots. I personally have quadruple plots on my ranch and I love it. I have triple plots for animals.

And beyond that I have learned a few better methods for enhancing your ranch. Ones that are quicker and allow for less mistakes. Even people who struggle with carpal tunnel like my self will appreciate it.

So take a quick look at what a ranch that has 1000+ plots looks like. It is so awesome. Honestly.

And while it took me awhile to figure out what works and what doesn't I have got to say you are gonna probably love these methods more than the method I presented. 

This is what quads looks like CLOSE up. 

So how did I get it so neat and pretty?

Well go back into your shop tab and under the Christmas tree  / Hay block in the GARDEN section, go to the tiles.

This was the tile I told you to use at first. But turns out you can use ANY of the tiles. 

You also have ALL these options. I am actually only gonna point out the benefits of TWO. 

So we will start with the straight road above. WHY? 

Well remember what I said to those who were having issues since lining up four itty bitty tiny plots can get tedious and cause you serious pains in your wrists. Well this takes the plot count from 4 to 1. 

Here is your visual. Its the size of ONE crop plot. 

For those of you like me who need a bit more help with lining it up, flip that sucker around! 

So the basics of this one is pretty much you want to put those double yellow lines in the middle of a plot.  So literally DIRECTLY ON TOP OF THE FIRST SET OF PLOTS NOT STAGGERED!!!!.   Now when you put down a 2nd piece of road, you just go down the line and put the NEW plots in between the yellow lines. Kindergarten easy folks.  It is THAT easy to now get doubles. 

I read that and it sounded confusing lol so I thought VISUAL!!!. 

Now you can go back and do more plots but its a bit trickier with these roads to get your lines right. Or at least I think so.  But you have two options. 

Long option: Pick up those roads, store them and put them down again in a way so that you can do the plots between the lines deal. 

Faster Option : Hit refresh. Now just put new plots down. As long as the roads are down already just hit refresh and GR will let you place more tiles over the top. You do NOT want them to be directly on top of the first or 2nd set of plots. You want them to be 1/4 way over the yellow line. Otherwise you bury a plot and you have to delete the one on top of it to get access to it. 

'

Remember I said I second option you will love. 

These mowed grass tiles are my absolute favorite for quad planting. 

Okay let me say first off this is 4 itty bitty plots so this might not be friendly to some of you. 

When you put 4 of them down together they look like this:

STRIPED!!!

And how awesome is this? Now you can do quadruple plots and you only have to stay in the lines. 

Plant them directly on top of the first row.

Option 1

You can do the 1st yellow to the third green (Note : This is 8 itty bitty tiles. )

Option 2

2nd green to 3rd Yellow

Option 3

2nd Yellow to 4th green.

Remember you can do a row of one option above, hit refresh and go thru and do another option then hit refresh again and go back and do the last option.  

When you are done with the crops go back and STORE all your little plots. Sell them all at once. Its so much easier and a whole lot less clicking. 

Animals are for the MOST part exactly the same. The only thing is the last step. You don't do it. Its a pain to remove those tiles so don't. Your animals can sleep on the road or the sand or mowed grass. Doesn't matter. 

There is an added benefit to NOT removing them from the animal pens. 

TREES!!!!

As you can see I did NOT remove the tiles below my animals. They are triple plots and the animals harvest and plant just fine. I do trees along my back row and I can see my animals just fine. 

 I also do the refresh trick but just ONCE for trees. 3 / 4 times it tends to bury your trees. Its not fun to be staring at a tree you can't harvest or do anything with. It messes with my OCD something awful. 

Here you can see the walnut trees and the turkeys getting along fine in a nice tight space. 

I would make a small suggestion that if you do intend to put trees in your animals' space put it out of the way. IE along the Top of the ranch or along the left most side.  Otherwise on the bottom or right side it will obscure other items.  That is not fun either. 

If you didn't already see them I also have TWO videos, one for animals and one for crops that show how to get this started. Remember you can use ANY of the tiles above. 

Video Walk Thru for Animals

Video Walk Thru for Crops

And of course I have the ORIGINAL walk thru linked here if this post above was confusing or still not much help.

I am very much a visual person so I prefer to show others as I would want to be shown. 

Maximizing Your Ranch Space

I hope this helps.

Have a great day ranchers!

The Keys to Leveling up

Its one of the big questions we hear as experienced players. How do we get MORE keys?  How do we level up FASTER???  

Well there are only three ways of getting your keys, buying, finding, leveling.  If you are wondering WHY I am discussing this now when I have already covered this, in two weeks we will have a double whammy of awesomeness. The carnival quest AND the masters of fruit.  Three dishes all in the top 10 dishes of this game.  Its 28 keys for Masters of Fruit and 26 keys per side on Carnival. And you do need both sides of carnival to cook the top dish. Its like Easter where the best dish takes supers from both columns.  And I have some neighbors who have few to no keys.  They need a way to make a LOT of keys in a relatively short amount of time.

First you can buy them. Like with real money. I don't recommend this because Gourmet Ranch is not being updated by the developers.  So really there is no rush. The quests come back around every year, regular ingredients don't go anywhere. 

Second - Treasure Hunting.  Keys aren't guaranteed but they do pop up.  

So if you look at your boathouse. This is the one with the older captain.  When you send him off you get a little magnifying glass. Click on that to do a search,

When you do a search its on a grid like this. The bigger your boathouse the bigger your search area. Make sure if you find stuff to click on it to add it to your boat. If it doesn't have a orange box you won't get that item. 

And of course once it returns make sure you click on COLLECT. 

Keys usually pop up in 1.2 5 or 10 increments. That is the most I have seen in the two years I have been playing. 

The last and obviously most consistent way to get keys is to level up. 

The awesome thing about GR is that there are SO many ways you can level up faster its crazy. Its a matter of what you have available.  

My personal favorite method of leveling up is to sell dishes. Not just any dishes. You need dishes with a high coin value. 200 coins or higher. 

This is Nian Gao the TOP dish in the game. Dishes that are over 500 coins are ROUGHLY 10K XP to every 100k servings you sell.  It goes up or down depending on the value. Nian Gao is actually closer to 15k per 100k servings. Most stoves are roughly 4k servings each. If you have 53 stoves its over 200k servings every 6 hours. That is 30k XP every six hours.   This is if you SELL it to neighbors. Not serve it to your counters. You don't get that XP if you keep the dish to yourself.  If you have neighbors who are awesome then team up and each of you sell dishes to each other. If each person cooks 50 stoves worth of a high dish like nian gao . Not only do you get the benefit from selling but you get the benefit from buying. Its the same either way. Roughly 30k XP to buy 100k of the Nian Gao dish. 

So another quick method BUT NOT CHEAP is the buying of decor. Specifically buildings or balloons.

I am just gonna discuss balloons for now but buildings is the same concept essentially.  If you look below you can see that the ROO Balloon is 430K coins.  For everyone you purchase its 1k XP. ALL of the big balloons are the same value. 

And this is the last page of balloons, it has a smaller set of balloons for 12k coins, which gives a measly 41xp.

This is a fine option for players who have billions of coins. This is NOT ideal for any player struggling with coins. 

Lets look at the math on this

1 Turkey Blimp 4.3 million and 3666 XP

OR 

3 Kangaroo Balloons or whatever for 430,000 =1.29 million for 3099 XP

OR

88 Red and White Balloons for 12 K each =1.056 million for 3608 XP

So the smaller balloons are technically the best deal. cheaper, more XP.  The problem here is when it comes to resale value you will only get 10%.  So on the turkey blimp you will get 430k back. On the Kangaroos, 43k back for each one and for the Red and white balloons 1200 back for each one. 

If this was the only way to get XP quickly I would say just eat the cost and move on. BUT we have another option. 

BIG MART. 

This guy should be your favorite neighbor when you hit the wall on needing keys. ESPECIALLY IF YOU ARE A BROKE OR NEWER PLAYER!!!

First you can buy multiple items from him for coins if and when you need them

Eggs, pork, chicken, apples, cherries, COCONUTS, Raspberries, Watermelons, grapes, Corn, Hops, Tea, Tomatoes, Carrots, and Potatoes.

Now you may have noticed I have done coconuts in big letters. Just like balloons ANY of the above ingredients will work for this but the return on the coconuts is the best. 

So when you click on big mart this is what you see. A box of 10 is just 12250

But if you buy 100 you get a discount of 30 percent. 

So why do we want coconuts? Well we don't we want the xp. 

Before we bought 100 Coconuts

After we bought 100 Coconuts

If your math is fuzzy thats 1226 XP. 

BAM your welcome!

And now we have coconuts what to do with them ? Sell them to neighbors of course. 

And look you MAKE money instead of losing money. 

AND you get XP from selling to your neighbors. Though this is limited according to your level. Right now my cap is like 125k, I believe coconuts are like 1-2 xp for each one you sell. Its not a lot but if all adds up. 

So lets go back and look at the math AGAIN with the balloons and NOW add the coconuts in. 

Lets look at the math on this

1 Turkey Blimp 4.3 million and 3666 XP

OR 

3 Kangaroo Balloons or whatever for 430,000 =1.29 million for 3099 XP

OR

88 Red and White Balloons for 12 K each =1.056 million for 3608 XP

OR

300 Coconuts for 85750 = 257,250 for 3678 XP sold for a profit of 76k and an additional 300 xp.

I can understand why experienced players will suggest balloons. Its faster. In about 3 minutes you can have bought 50 balloons. Where as it takes longer with the coconuts. I think at most you will have just a few thousand coconuts. But you aren't wasting as many coins, and you are getting more value overall.

I hope this helps those of you with key shortages. 

Have a great holiday weekend.!

Gourmet Ranch Video Walk thru ANIMALS

Gourmet Ranch Video Walk thru CROPS

Maximizing Your Ranch Space

Did You Know You Have Multiple Plots / Pens / Trees in a Space?

One of the best aspects I have just learned is to maximize the space on ranches by using multiple pens or plots in a space. 

So first thing you wanna do is put your plots down as you normally would. 

They would like the plots above. 

Once you have the plots down you are gonna want to go into your decor tab.  

You are gonna wanna click on the tree / haystack section 

and under that click on the garden tab.

Then you want to find the dirt soil plots for 2k coins

Now go back to your ranch. You are gonna put these little MINI plots on top of your plots. 

You can look and see the row above the green plot has been done. Its solid. The ones below have not been done.  It takes 4 mini-plots to cover one regular plot. 

Once you have a few mini plots down to cover a few plot spaces. (or animal spaces) its the same. 

Now go back to the plots and put down a fresh plot on top of the mini plots.  You want to position it between two plots.  THIS IS IMPORTANT. 

Now once the plots are done. Get your X tool. You are gonna wanna delete or store if you want the mini plots. DON'T DELETE THE BIG CROP PLOTS. 

Now you should be able to plant 2x the amount in the space.  Animals and crops are done exactly the same way. 

BEFORE

AFTER

BEFORE

AFTER

If you want trees, you just put down mini plots and add trees on the mini plots. You do NOT delete the mini plots when you are doing trees. 

This is the animals with trees. 

Tips and Tricks: BIG MART

Every game I have played on Facebook has has that one character that has served as a mascot and first neighbor for new players. Gourmet Ranch is not the exception.  They have a player named BIG Mart who appears at the very top of you neighbor bar.  This is what he looks like and he ALWAYS has stuff for sale. For some of us he might be the only neighbor with stuff to sell.

Most of the stuff he sells is for GR cash. And he can quite expensive if you aren't careful. 

There are also a handful of items available for sale in BIG MART for coins. 

Tree Crops

  

Vegetable Crops

Fruit Crops

Grains

Livestock 

A great tip for BIG MART that many players are often unaware of, is that you can buy BIG MART items for an unlimited amount of experience. For any other neighbor there is a cap.  That does not exist with BIG MART.

You will get experience no matter how much you buy from BIG MART.  It's also a great way to build coins and experience quickly. 

For example, Coconuts are widely accepted as the go to item for quick leveling. 

This is my experience.

So I bought 100 Coconuts.  Take a look at that price too and remember it for just a second.

Now this is my experience

1226 experience is my gain. 

And then of course I don't really need coconuts so I will sell them. 

And look! PROFIT! $25,650 to be exact.  And if you haven't reached your regular ingredient cap you will get that additional experience as well. 

Probably one of the most underused aspects of Gourmet Ranch is the BIG MART. Once you get past those initial quests of where you have to grow it, you will never need to grow it again.