Welcome to Hearts and Harvest, a Valentine's Day Event for Big Farm Homestead. New products and recipes are added to different buildings around the farm along side your regular production. These whimsical sweets and soulful simmers are then served in the dinning tent (in the events area beside your barn) for customer satisfaction points. These points are then used in the delivery station to earn 30 rewards, with the final one being a Valentine's Skin for your bakeries. (Skins are purely cosmetic.) There are also 7 tasks to complete to earn a cute profile picture. Tasks can be found below.

I will break this page down into 2 sections: how to do it, and if you should do it.

How to do it

8 of your buildings will now offer additional products and recipes. (Cowshed, Bakery, Chili Kitchen, Copper Field, Food truck, Sugar Refinery, Berry Grove, Pancake House). Each building level has the same yield, so if you are splitting your buildings, do Valentine's goodies in your lowest level buildings.

The first task is to collect creamy cookies, creamy chili and roses.

• Cookies are made in the bakery, but you need to make cream at you cow sheds first.
• Just pick the cow and select cream. It takes an hour.
• After this, you can make creamy cookies in the bakery, and creamy chili in the chili kitchen.
• Roses are planted in Copper Ridge fields and take 3 hours.

Once you have some products to 'sell', there is a dining tent icon beside your festival icon (bottom left of your screen) and you will find guests with orders to fill.

*** It is hard to get your first stock, and the second task is filling orders, so it may be wise to wait until you can fill 2 orders ***

• You can trash up to 10 guests per day. There is a forced ad to trash the contracts.
• You get no coins or materials for filling guest orders. It costs coins and building time to make the products.
• Valentine products will not show up in market contracts or barge and train crates.

After you finish the '30' tasks, there are 5 looping rewards like exactly like Heart of the Herd.

Should you do it?

The event isn't difficult. I takes some time to build up stock and get the product lines going before you can fill multiple orders. The additional products can be nice for pacing when you are away from the game, like cream for an hour, or creamy berry soup for 2.5 hours instead of 20 min chili dogs.

But...

I need to be honest, because this is a fansite for fans.

When I was playing Sunshine Island, the developers released a new Picnic Event, which added new products to pre-existing buildings and then 'sold' them to customers for points that gave rewards. The issue is that you couldn't do both the event and run your market, ships, and planes. Most would think that isn't an issue, except all of your hard work had no monetary or material benefit, and lets face it, losing 50% of your materials and coins for 2 weeks is utter nonsense. The community was outraged and the backlash was so severe, they promised to never do that again. Fast forward 2 years, and they are doing it on Homestead, with 'better rewards' to compensate for severely hurting your market.

8 of your buildings, mainly on Golden Hills, where space is the tightest and production is the most squeezed, will now be serving up event goods. Do you grow strawberries or blueberries? If you grow blueberries, your market suffers. With your wheat flour, you need to decide on market, pasta, or strawberry rolls, blueberry muffins, and creamy cookies. For a level 30-32 farm, 33% of your production items will be affected, which will impact 68% of your market contracts. You have to ask yourself if the rewards are better than not growing your farm for 2 weeks.

There are 31 coupons. If you put them in your largest ship crates, it's the same as 3200 bricks/rakes/ink sets, or 800 glass/saws/books. If you play enough to finish the event, you would earn more materials and coins, so the value in coupons is being able to use them to complete tasks and player tournament (but everyone you play against will also have them...)

We looked at growing the items and selling them straight up, and it's worth less than half the price per hour of just doing the normal processes and sell them, plus no chance of market for materials.

When I played Sunshine, I didn't have a fansite, wasn't very active in the community, so I just quietly told my guild to ignore the event and make sure they submit feedback to Sunshine Island.

Now, I'm an influencer, and I have spent the last 3 months helping players build great farms and enjoy the game. I just can't recommend or encourage players to do this event unless you really want the challenge.

Changes were made

Homestead reached out to me for feedback on the event. I gave them an honest reply, which was similar to what you read here. They never responded, but I did notice the next day that all of the Valentine's products were now free to start (except roses, which were probably forgotten), so at least you weren't losing coins to do the event; just not making anything. It's curious that they would try to 'fix' the event and never say anything to the players.

Homestead did gift me the skins so that I can add them to the building tables and also display them here. I will try to upload a screenshot tomorrow.

The final question

I know a few players that have finished the event. Most of them said they did it for the challenge and really noticed the impact of less coins and materials. I am very thankful to them for providing the data for these tables. Most players I know are picking away at it when they have excess capacity because they have goals that this interferes with.

I've been picking away at it when my barn was full. Strawberries, even with an extra grove, have been brutal this week. I won't finish it, because I want to get 3-4 expansions on Sundale (after I expanded Golden last week.)

You will need to ask yourself if you willing to trade 50% of your farm market and farm building power for the rewards offered.