10 second read - Photo Albums are coming to Homestead. Reward pools will now be diluted with pictures, fewer rewards for you hard work. This is not a F2P feature, or casual, and the math is stacked against you. Treat it like background noise.

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Homestead is trying to tease a new feature. You don't have to follow their Social Media, you just need to look at the spoiler in the Stores.

Collections are the standard sticker books offered in many games. In Homestead, their will be 9 sets of 8 for a total of 72.

Each photo has a 1 to 5 star rarity, and from here forward, prizes and rewards will offer photo packs.

Photo packs also have rarity. Every pack has a diminishing chance of giving higher rarity photos and should guarantee at least one photo of the advertised rarity.

The nine sets are comprised of increasing rarity photos.

Each set has decent completion rewards (think 100 - 250 gems) that increases with the set difficulty.

Completing the full photo album will give an outrageous reward. (I'm curious to see where they set the bar because this had some adjustments and backlash on SI.)

If you get duplicates, there is an exchange currency that allows you to buy other packs.

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Sticker books don't excite me. They are a gimmicky FOMO (fear of missing out) way to drive monetization that doesn't belong in a 'free to play casual farming simulator' and dilute the total rewards they pay out.

Every event moving forward, and your daily tasks, will now offer photo packs. Less seeds, feeds and coins, more photos. The same amount of work will now reward you with pictures.

The first few will be unique and easy, but as you progress, the chances of getting the missing cards become smaller and smaller. The best sets will be all 4 and 5* cards.

If you get 20 of the highest tier photo packs during the books life for completing events, you are still looking at a 1 in 1,000 chance of completing the book. If you can increase that to 40 premium photo packs, you will increase your odds to 1 in 300. Towards the end, they will offer jokers to complete sets.

There is also no transparency from the developer, so it is possible to weight the drops inside tiers, or fudge the numbers to make sure you need a joker.

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This is NOT a casual free to play feature.

The main push is spending to complete a set for rewards. Unless the numbers are vastly different than SI, you almost never win.

(If you are spending $2 to buy a single premium pack for 1 missing 5*photo, <1% chance, to get 500 gems completion, you are better to just buy 500 gems for $2. Also, adaptive pricing - once you spend that $2, all your packages increase in value, so you will need to spend $5 to get 3 photo packs.)

They will never drop this feature, so we will just have to accept they are here, adding more buttons to the HUD and diluting the reward pools. My advise is keep playing like you play. Earn stickers from just playing, recycle your duplicates, and see where you end up. They are just background noise.