Day of the Dead: New Limited Time MINI QUEST

Today Gourmet Ranch released a limited time MINI Quest. This Quest will be available until November 4th.  The really neat aspect of these quests is these are very quick to complete.  For example, you will notice the first step says PLACE not HARVEST.  That means once you have planted those items that part of the quest is done. In step 3 you will notice, it says to COOK not serve. Therefore you only have to put the dishes on your stoves to get credit. You can do three things after that. Let it cook and then serve it if you need something on your counters, let it cook and sell it to neighbors, or just delete it and put something better on your stoves.  The final prize after all the steps are completed is 10 GR cash. And of course you get coins, tons of experience, and speedups.

STEP 1

STEP 2

STEP 3

STEP 4

STEP 5

STEP 6

STEP 7

Thanks for stopping by and Happy Ranching!

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. 

Tips and Tricks: Neighbors

A really great group of neighbors can make your enjoyment of this game so much better. They can help you with Quests, they can help you with ingredients you may not have yet unlocked. And the social aspect of this game just makes it so much more worthwhile. Neighbors are really the key to growing in this game.   You can do almost everything in the game without a neighbor but it makes the game slow going.  Most people tend to give up when they see very little progress.  With neighbors you can progress quickly and painlessly.  I am nearly level 600. Most of the people I play with have played far longer than me, and I have passed up many of them.   A good network like in real life is gonna make all the difference in the world for your game.

You can also visit neighbors and they can visit you.  You can click on their picture in your neighbor bar or in your neighbor management. That would be this guy.

 In neighbor management you will be able to see who has visited you recently.  When you visit a neighbor you can do FOUR things. You can fertilize TWO crops. This will allow your neighbor to harvest DOUBLE. IE instead of just one item they will get TWO.  You can also feed one of their animals, once again doubling the harvest on that particular plot.   And then you can spice their food. A spiced dish adds 25% of the servings.  Since many neighbors will sell the dishes on their stoves that means there is more to buy.  You can tell if someone has visited you easily enough if you ranch is sparkling. Anything a neighbor has touched will literally have little sparkles floating around it.

A good tip for getting people to visit you is not have a lot of decorations out. It will slow their loading time significantly and most neighbors will skip farms that are super busy.

Day of The Dead : Quest at a Glance

For most of my Gourmet Ranch Quests that I have done over the past year, I have done a companion spreadsheet.   It has been one of those things that has really cemented me in the Gourmet Ranch neighborhood as one of the more informed players despite only having a year of game play under my belt.

The spreadsheet is great because you can see the entire quest in literally a single glance. You can see the dish names, the times they take to cook, what each dish of the quest sells for, as well as every single ingredient for that particular quest.

Blue is general information such as name, price and cook time.
Red are the seasonal ingredients. IE ingredients only available to grow during this particular quest.
Yellow are regular ingredients. These can be grown in advance.

Tips and Tricks : Buying and Selling

BUYING AND SELLING

Sales - Have a sale daily of ingredients.  There is an experience cap on buying / selling ingredients from neighbors.  If you don't have anything to sell you can either buy in bulk from Big Mart and sell those items for profit. Or grow some quick turnaround items. Coffee, Barley, Rosemary etc.  Coffee was my go to item when I first got started.  If you don't want to waste time or space growing anything you can find a neighbor and pass back and forth ingredients until you hit your cap. There will be a small popup once you do saying you have reached your daily experience cap for buying ingredients. You can still buy ingredients, you just will not receive any further experience from the purchases.

Have Dish Sales - Unlike ingredient sales, dish sales are really your best friend. The experience you can gain from buying and selling dishes is UNLIMITED. The better the dishes, the more experience you will gain. For every 30 coins a dish sells for its 2 experience points roughly. When you are buying and selling dishes in the 300-500 coin range, that can add up very quickly. 

During a major quest, you are going to want to find a partner. And each of you cook dishes for the other person.  That way you get the experience for cooking the dish and for selling as well as buying and you are not out anything.   You do not get any additional experience beyond cooking when you just serve a dish to your counters.  For example the Rippers Flapjacks is over 300 XP just to cook it. If you sell it roughly 4k servings. It comes out to roughly 22 XP per serving. That is an additional 88k in experience points!!  You lose those 88k experience points the minute you serve it your counters.

To give you a visual idea this is the dish I bought.

My experience both before and after purchase. 

The difference is 65,657 experience. 

This is exactly why I tell everyone buy and sell HIGH dishes. Because those dishes make a huge difference in your game play. 

For every single dish you cook that is NOT part of the Mini Quests you are gonna want to put it in your fridge first. This is an additional 2 XP per dish.  I currently have 84 stoves and that is 168 XP every time I clear off cooked dishes. It might not seem like a lot but it all adds up. 

Day Of The Dead : Recipe Album.

Here are screenshots of all Day of the Dead recipes

Day of The Dead : Recipe List

Below you will the recipe book entries for each of Day of the Dead recipes arranged from highest earner to lowest.  In order to see a photo of the recipe itself. Please go to the Recipe Book for this Quest.