Beginner's Guide to Hay Day

Hay Day is a ridiculously popular farm simulator for mobile phones and tablets published by Supercell. In this beginner's guide to Hay Day, we'll answer the most common Hay Day questions and give some pro tips to get your farm started right. If you're new to Hay Day and need a helping hand, let's get started!

# Hay Day Guide: Coins and Diamonds

Coins are the standard currency in Hay Day. You'll earn them by selling goods that your farm produces, and for the most part you'll spend them on improvements to your farm.

Coins are pretty easy to come by. When visitors come to your farm, they'll ask for goods and pay you in coins. Similarly, you can sell stuff in the roadside shop or to the order board to make coins. As you harvest and sell your farm's goods, you'll also level up, which will unlock new buildings to buy with your coins.

Diamonds are the premium currency in Hay Day. A "premium currency" is just something the game gives you a small amount of and generally charges you actual, real dollars for more. Not all Hay Day diamonds cost money, though!

You can get free diamonds in Hay Day from a number of sources:

Diamonds can be used for a lot of things in Hay Day. You can spend them to skip timers, although that's usually a waste. You can also use them to buy rare items, which is a somewhat better way to spend them. Finally, they can also be used to add slots to buildings that produce stuff. This is the only way to add more slots, so it makes sense to save most of your diamonds for this purpose.

# Hay Day Guide: Crops

Crops are the first thing you'll learn to produce in Hay Day. Crops are planted in fields. To plant a crop, tap any empty field, and then drag the crop you want to plant onto the empty field. This will start a timer. When the timer expires, you can harvest the crops by tapping the crop and then dragging the sickle across the ready-to-harvest fields.

Warning! In order to plant a field with a particular crop, you need at least one of that type of crop. If you use up ALL of your crops of a particular type, you won't be able to plant more until you buy more from another person's Roadside Shop, or spend diamonds! I always try to keep some crops planted of every type all the time so that I never run out of seeds.

Tip If you have too many types of crops, they won't all show up at once for planting. There's a little "arrows in a circle" icon that you can tap to see the next page of crops to plant.

# Hay Day Guide: Goods

Once you've planted and harvested some crops, you can turn them into useful goods at various buildings. Each building has a different type of good it produces. Each good has different ingredients that are required. Producing goods also requires time.

As you level up, you'll unlock more buildings. Each of these buildings requires coins to purchase, and they can be quite expensive! Once you've purchased a building, you'll have to wait while it is built. This can take hours, so it pays to be patient.

Once you have a building for producing goods, you can queue up several items to build. This allows you to leave your farm for a while and still have it be productive, so be sure to take advantage of this! You can pay additional diamonds to add slots to the queue, if you so desire.

Tip If you tap and hold on a good, a little card pops up that shows what ingredients are required to make it. Do you see the little number in the upper right, though? That's how many you have in your barn already!

# Hay Day Guide: Animals

In Hay Day, Animals live in animal pens. They can produce goods, but you have to feed them first and then wait for (you guessed it...) another timer. Animal feed can be made at the Feed Mill, and it requires different crops depending on the animal. Usually one "bag" of feed will feed several animals.

Once you have the feed, you can tap on any one of your animals to bring up the feed menu. Then you can drag the feed over the animal to give it some food. This starts the timer. When the timer expires, you can tap on the animal and use the appropriate item to harvest what the animal produces. For instance, for chickens you'll use an egg basket to collect their eggs.

Note Each individual animal has to be fed individually. Each animal also has its own timer. You'll have to swipe all over the animal pen in order to make sure you feed or collect from each animal in the pen.

# Hay Day Guide: Orders and Visitors

Well, now that we've made a bunch of cool stuff, it's time to sell it for cold, hard... coins? In Hay Day, the first two ways you'll learn to sell things are to the Orders board and to Visitors.

The Orders board sits just outside your farmhouse, next to where the delivery truck parks. On it will be up to 9 different orders you can fill. Each one will call for different crops and/or goods. In return, you'll earn coins and experience. The number next to the "blue star" icon is the amount of experience you'll gain. Getting experience makes you level up, which unlocks new buildings, crops, animals, and so forth.

Tip Not sure what building you need to make a good for an order? Tap and hold on the good on the orders board and it will tell you where to make it!

Orders on the board that you have the required goods to fill are marked with a green check. If you pick an order and you can fill it, then you can tap the "Truck" icon in the lower right to deliver that order. If you don't think you want to fill an order, you can tap it and then tap the "trash can" icon to get a new order. This is good for times when the order requires a building you don't have yet, for example.

Tip Your truck can only do one delivery at a time, but it's pretty fast about coming back. Once it is back in front of the Orders board, you can send it out again.

If you're not sure what to produce in your farm, checking the orders board is a good thing to do. Since orders give you both coins and experience, they can be good goals to set in the early game to unlock and build new stuff!

Visitors will approach your farm house from time to time. They will request some amount of one type of good, and they won't leave until you either give them what they want or tell them they can't have it.

Visitors aren't worth nearly as much experience as Orders are. However, they do count towards a set of achievements that award diamonds, so they're worth talking to nonetheless. They're also a lot easier to satisfy in some cases.

# Hay Day Guide: Conclusion

Thanks for reading our Hay Day guide! Hopefully with these Hay Day basics under your belt you're ready to set out for new farm-based adventures. Keep on reading, though, and I'll share my tips and tricks, which are sure to give you a leg up on your hay-shoveling way.