Astro Garden-Holiday Territories: The «Island» Guide

The update will introduce and add a new additional location. This territory is referred to as a holiday one, since any related update is dedicated to a well-known holiday.

Holiday territory

 A holiday territory is accessible during a limited period of time and only via your own farm. Neither a visit to a Festive island of your friend, nor invitation for your friends to that of your own is possible, since this is not written in the game code.

Completing festive quests yields fertilizers, experience points and other rewards for a player. Yet the idea at the core of the «Island» update is to build a big, fancy decoration which at all times will remain a unique one. The entire building process is split into three stages, each requiring a fixed amount of points to acquire by simultaneously completing event quests.

Once the update is live, you will see a quest icon, both available while in main locations and on the Island. Usually, the first quest is aimed at accesing your warehouse and placing the base part of a decoration in your garden. It can be placed on the main part of your territory, or on the prehistoric island.

 While on a quest, you can always ask for a hint: the «help» button in the quest window, the «?» in the decoration construction progress window. 

Bear in mind, that you can not put a decoration back to your warehouse until the feast is over. However, once the event quest time has expired, the decoration will become a common decoration puzzle wich you will be able to put back to warehouse, or vice versa, whenever you see fit.

If you are newcomer and it is the first time you are up to do an island event quest — do not be in a rush, as the time, meant to complete the quests is more than enough.

By clicking on a decoration, the decoration construction progress window will be displayed.

The upper line contains the event title («The Halloween Journey», «The New Year Journey», «The Easter Journey», etc.).

To the right of the event title, you will find the «How to play» hint («?») offering event walk-through brief instructions. Newcomers might find it hard and confusing to digest all this at first, yet you can always get back to read a paragraph you need.

 Below is the construction stage progress gauge. When you hover a cursor over it, you will see how far you have gone while building a decoration, as well as the information on the quantity of special items you need to contribute to advance to the next stage.

 In the «Build» window, you see the two special item types required to contribute to decoration construction. One of them adds 3 points to construction progress, whereas the second adds 15. By using the arrows, you can choose the quantity of items to invest then press the «Build» button, right under the item displayed. Should any of the items be out of stock, the button will be inactive.

   On the right hand, in the decoration menu you will find the points of contribution either your own, or that of your assistants.

 Right below is the «Assistants» button, which being clicked upon sends you to the assistant(s) selection window, where you choose someone of your neighbours. Choosing responsible and enthusiastic allies grants you better chances to complete the constraction and save rare resources for a later use. The «Go on a trip» button will help you to travel to the Island and come back to your garden.

Therefore, the decoration you have placed is also a portal to the holiday territory!

   The «Compass» icon, found in the «Moves» menu, can also be used to access the holiday territory.

When you come to the island for the first time, you will receive tree or stone sprouts (depending on the event currently running). Use these resources only, when special need arises.

 Take a good look around, there are a lot of peculiar things to find. The Island is beautiful, our artists have worked hard to achieve this! A small plot of land for festive gardening, festive decorations and animals across the perimeter. Once you pass all the challenges thrown at you, you will be honoured to take one of these animals home with you.

Keep the basic rule of the Island in mind: do not be in a hurry! Do not feed any animals or collect first harvest until prompted to do so in a quest. It may take a lot of time before the garden beds are ready anew and animals are hungry again.

  

You can not move decorations and/or animals around once they have been placed. The «Move» feature is only available for use with garden beds.

Certain festive decorations (e.g., fencings, tiles, trees, figurines) can be bought in the Shop or created in a laboratory. To create these items, you will need exactly the same material as the one used to build the main decoration, so see for yourself, what is your priority. There were occasions, as players had created festive fertilizers and then issued complaints about missing resources for the decoration construction, without even having carefully studied the recipes.

While on the Island, your lower panel will look different. The space chat, neighbours list options (if you visit your neighbours via the island panel, you will return to the island), laboratory, collections and gift menu have been left intact. There is a separate shop and warehouse designed for the Island, the latter (warehouse) is called Barn.

Barn. This serves as an analogue to the warehouse for the main territory. It has got three tabs: seeds, decoration and recipe materials, other. The «Other» tab is used to store fertilizers and special tree sprouts created for use on the Island.

Shop (Festive). This shop has only got a single tab, offering wares to facilitate both the quest completion and accumulation of materials and resources to build the unique decoration. This hop offers you tree sprouts, a feed to instantly make your animals hungry, and a fertilizer to half the ripening time of your harvest — everything for your Island.

So, let us summarize. We have familiarized ourselves with the Island, now let us turn to the quests and how to complete them. These are very simple, besides, each one has got a magic «help» button to greatly facilitate the search for necessary items, animals and other stuff. As we have already mentioned earlier: do not rush on to collect harvest and/or feed animals, as this may be required further to complete the quest and you will loose a lot of time just waiting.

While on the Island, you do not spend energy at all, and festive seeds appear right upon collecting the freshly ripened harvest on the beds. As a newcomer, it is highly recommended to sow all the seeds (various ones) you have got at your disposal, however, once you have enough seeds, you can sow the entire area with a single plant. This is the point, where you define the best solution for yourself: either to use seeds with longer ripening period (two or three times a day), or those which will allow you to collect dozens of harvests a day. But pay attention, that using seeds with longer ripening periods, will yield more special resources needed to work in the laboratory and build a decoration, as well as parts of collection. Though, this solution is a questionable one, since there are players who think otherwise. You may figure it out experimentally and choose your own playing style.

Make sure you leave some space for trees and stones to grow. Usually, the space necessary for them is 3x5 cell (cell=garden bed). You may leave less, but if you are unable to enter the game and get rid of them, the next ones will not appear. Stones / trees grow approximately every 8 hours. During this time, you have to be outside the Island. 

 Choosing Assistants and offering help

 To find an Assistant to aid you with the construction of the unique decoration, go to the Build menu, click on the Assistants button and act at will:

If you wish to invite someone, use the «Invite a friend» button, type in the name in the search field and send an invitation.

 Should a friend of yours has sent you an invitation, you will find it in the «Invitations» tab, go there and accept it.

Nano-Farm is a social game, that rests upon player interaction. 

When your neighbours do their part, this makes it much easier to complete holiday quests on the Island. Your assistant builds both decorations: this means, that a part of his construction contribution points (5%) counts towards your decoration construction. This illustrates a point, that you should choose responsible assistants and take the construction seriously yourself.

An enthusiastic and responsible assistant can contribute around 500-550 points to your decoration, which is quite a feat.At the first stage of construction, you may invite up to 5 assistants; the second one unlocks 2 more vacancies, and the third — 2 more. You may also buy two extra vacancies for gold. Assistants can be added only while the decoration construction is in progress. Upon completion, this function is blocked. You cannot dismiss a selected assistant until the quest has been completed.

Be sure not to invite the maximum number of assistants on the first day of the quest, unless you are 100% confident about them. As a rule, the following days demonstrate the true attitude of your assistants, whether they are up to work hard, or not. However, you should also be a responsible person and work hard, otherwise other players will hardly reach out to you next time.

  Every day, the first visit to the Island will grant you stones/trees (normally, 2 pieces). Do not waste them for nothing and save for upcoming bonuses «Doubled holiday territory material drop», which occur 3 to 4 times during the entire event quest period. Usually, such bonuses start on midnight or at noon according to the Moscow time and lasts 24 hours.

      Feast laboratory

Another important section of the Island is the feast laboratory. Like any other event update, it appears as a separate tab in the laboratory. At start, the majority of recipes is blocked, but you will learn them and discover new ones as you progress through the quest.

  

The laboratory enables you to create the following items:

• fertilizers, feeds and elixirs for use on main territory;

• fertilizers for use on the holiday territory;

• decorations;

• animal(s).

Certain recipes are required to study to complete a quest, but most of them are studied by the players on their own to stock up on fertilizers, decorate their farms, etc.

The fertilizers and feeds for the main territory are sent to the warehouse upon creation, while those created for use on the Island, remain in the barn and become obsolete once the event is over unless used up. However, once a new Island goes live, these materials will become available for use again.

You may stock up on fertilizers to be on the safe side, since these will also be usable during the next Island-related event update.