6 simple Hay Day tips I wish I learned sooner

Hay Day is a pretty addicting little zen farming game in the vein of Farmville, but behind the simplistic facade there are a lot of little details that never get explained. After playing the game for quite a while I've picked up several simple tricks and tips that I wish I'd known about when I first started playing. Read on for the top 6 simple Hay Day tips I wish I had learned sooner.

1. Newspaper Pages

My good buddy agent86ix taught me this one in his article on Hay Day tips. I was shocked to see that you could swipe the pages of the newspaper to find many more items for sale! Every few minutes you'll get a new batch, and you can tell by looking at your mailbox. When is starts "hopping", there are more sales to review, so get browsing!

2. Exclamation Points

Have you ever noticed the tiny exclamation point next to the names of some seller's in the newspaper? It took me a long time, and then I had no idea what it meant. Well, the answer is that it means that farm needs help in some way - either to fill a Boat (most often), or to revive plants, etc. You'll find that you get the same option to request help, but now you know that anyone reading the paper will see it. More on that in tip 3!

3. Sell for Success

You get a free ad in the paper every 5 minutes. This means that most times you go to list some stuff, the first item you list will show up in the paper. This will bring in a fair amount of traffic to your farm and ads last for 3 whole hours! Unfortunately, as soon as your items sells you'll get dropped from the limelight like a hot stack of pancakes. A tip to work around this is to sell your most undesirable items at max price in as large a quantity as possible. I find a stack of 10 Indigo at max price has pretty low demand, and medium size stacks of Wooly Chaps seem to show similar unpopularity.

Pro Tip If your newspaper ad expires without a sale, you can re-list it in the newspaper by selecting that item in the Roadside Shop interface. Eventually one of the non-player characters will buy it, so at that point you'll have to add a new item from your inventory, but using the newspaper re-list will keep you from burning slots on more undesirable items.

Pro Tip Get the most out of your ad traffic! Even when you list an undesirable item in an ad, you can still fill your other slots high demand items, and the constant listing in the paper means those items will sell fast. The increased visitors you get from ads can also help with Boat items you flag and Trees/Shrubs that need love from a friend. I don't usually have much difficulty with get Trees/Shrubs watered, but if you want a quick response be sure to move them near your Roadside Shop or Boat - because that the first place visitors are likely to look.

4. Preparing for next Boat

After you send a boat off, you might be tempted to just close game and come back later, but before you do - check what's coming next. You can tap the Boat dock and it will show you the three items the next boat will require, without quantities attached to them. Use this info to start long lead time items building, because in some cases the build time is so long that the Boat will leave before you can finish if you wait to start until it arrives. Its also a good idea to peruse the newspaper and stock up ahead of time, if you are lucky enough to have items like crops that are easy to acquire from the paper.

5. Mass produce long build time items

As you advance in levels, you will more and more often be asked to cough up large quantities of long lead time items without being given enough time to build them. For this reason, it is a good idea to start stockpiling whatever your longest lead item is for each Building. This has the very significant fringe benefit of increasing your Building's "Star Level". At Star Level 1 you get 10% more gold from Truck Orders. Star Level 2 grants 10% bonus experience from Truck Orders too. Finally, the big reward is Star Level 3 with 15% less build time. Obviously this is a huge advantage, so you want to keep all of your Buildings busy with long lead time items any time you aren't using them to build something specific.

6. Your Buddy Greg

In classic Social Game fashion, even the computer is your friend and wants to help you. Hay Day's "MySpace Tom" is an animated character called Greg. Greg sometimes visits your farm to request things, but if visit a farm via the Newspaper and then use the bottom navigation boxes to cycle through your friends you'll eventually see Greg's farm. He has a staggering lack of financial savvy, and this means its almost always a good idea to buy everything he sells. His inventory is refreshed about once a day.

That's it for our 6 simple Hay Day tips, we hope you found them useful. Got any Hay Day tips of your own? Leave a comment and let us know!