Grow A Garden dropped a brand new update yesterday, which was surprising, as it meant we only had the Alien Invasion event for one week.
Since the new era of Grow A Garden, aka post-Christmas, the updates have all been two-week updates, but they only gave us one week of the aliens, and Grow A Garden 2 has now been announced.
If you’d like to find out what this event is, what the rewards are for doing it, and if you should even bother doing it, keep on reading…
With the Grow A Garden Harvest Party Update, there’s a dude in top hat on the event display, with a countdown above his head. Every hour, on the hour, for ten minutes, the Harvest Party event starts.
When the time hits the top of the hour, it turns into a progress bar above the dude’s head, and the progress bar shows a black Sheckle bar starting at zero.
This event is supposed to be a collaborative server update, where everyone contributes, like past great updates like the Summer Harvest update and Safari Harvest update, but that all changed when they nerfed the Racoons, Foxes, Kitsunes and Red Rose Foxes, and made them actually steal people’s fruits, and not duplicate. You can get your garden ripped apart from 15 second Mimics and a Kitsune, so nobody wants to play in publics anymore.
You can do the event alone, but it’ll obviously be harder, as there will be less contributions.
When you talk to the dude in the top hat, he tells you the following:
- The harvest party happens every 60 minutes
- Everyone will have 10 minutes to collect their harvest!
- Work together to boost the meter for rewards!
This event needs you to HARVEST fruits and not HAND IN fruits, which is unlike every other event we’ve ever had. You have to harvest your fruits by manually collecting by pressing E, or the Harvest button, depending on which device you play.
Alternatively, you can run around with your Harvest Tool and tap on your trees and plants one by one, depending on which is easiest for you.
I tested this event twice, so I could see how it works, and how best to do it.
First, I used a garden with 100 Coconut trees, with coconuts covered in mutations that I’ve picked up since New Year. Every coconut has a minimum of five mutations, that they’ve collected naturally over time.
I also equipped seven x Cape Buffalo pets, all of which are Nightmare mutated and 39kg (I have pet scaling on), and one 63kg Stegosaurus that is also Nightmare.
The Cape Buffalo and Stegosaurus duplicate coconuts amazingly, and you’re guaranteed to duplicate every single coconut, so I figured this would help for this event, as I’d be duplicating my coconuts for the Harvest Party.
After testing, it appears that having duplicating pets made no difference to the value on the meter above the dude in the top hat. When I sold my inventory, the total sold for double for what the value was above his head on the meter.
Here was the meter at the start of the Harvest Party event, before I harvested my mutated coconuts.
Coconuts are Mythical rarity, so they’re not the most valuable fruits, but I figured the decent mutations would mean they’d collectively be worth a decent amount of money for this event.
I harvested every single coconut, and the value meter finished on $85,453,980 (eighty-five million), and it ended on “Tier 4 Unlocked”.
What did I get for this, and harvesting this many super mutated coconuts? No physical rewards of any kind.
My reward for doing this, harvesting every tree over 10 minutes, using 100 Harvest Tool uses, was the Coin Rain weather being triggered. Rain was also running, but it was already, because it was the weather chosen at random by the Admin Board.
That was literally the only reward. No physical rewards, just Coin Rain. I had seen some people on Discord mention they’d received Admin Packs for doing the event, so I decided to try again, but this time I was going all out on my preparation so I could get the best rewards…
I started by equipping one Echo Frog and seven x 15 second Mimics, and planted a mix of my best value seeds; Gingerbread Blossom, Alien Apple and Bone Blossoms. I had a total of 15 plants, and once they were all fully grown, I placed a mix of sprinklers; Basic, Advanced, Godly, Master, Grandmaster and Christmas (for the Gingerbread Blossom).
Once the sprinklers were all placed, I equipped my one 67kg Rainbow Orange Tabby and my seven x 15 Second Mimics, and quickly harvested each of the 15 trees so they had no fruits on them.
The mix of the sprinklers and the 8 x Orange Tabby Cats (thanks to the Mimics copying), the fruits started growing absolutely huge. Once each fruit had started growing, I took out the Orange Tabby, and threw in my holy grail pet, my Nightmare Ghostly Spider, which firstly makes things grow insanely fast, but it also triggers all of the other pets abilities over and over.
This meant every colossal sized fruit grew rapidly, so I could get ready for mission mutate, watching the Harvest Party clock countdown…
Now my huge, huge fruits were all fully grown, I kept my seven x 15 second mimics, and used each of my mutation pets:
- Dragonfly – made every fruit gold as the base
- Kappa – wet and bloodlit
- Badger – cracked
- Wolf – moonlit
- Phoenix – flaming
- Tanchozuru – tranquil
- Ghost Spriggan – blight
- Disco Bee – disco
- Spriggan – bloom
- Trapdoor Spider – webbed
- Geode Turtle – geode (converts an Advanced Sprinkler into a Geode Sprinkler to give all surrounding crops the Geode mutation
Once I had got all these mutations on all of the fruits, I took out the mutating pet, and swapped it with my Nightmare Tiger. The Tiger swaps mutations on a fruit, and gives other ones, and the Mimics can copy that – although it can copy the XP giving too.
It means you introduce lots of new and super rare and valuable mutations to the plants.
When I had run the Tiger and my 7 x 15 second Mimics for 15 minutes, I took out the Tiger and put in a T-Rex. The T-Rex is my second favorite pet, as it takes one mutation from one fruit, roars, and spreads that mutation around your garden.
The T-Rex was spreading the mutations the Tiger had swapped mutations for, and the 7 x Mimics all copy, and with their larger weight (of 69kg+) they end up spreading mutations to around 15 to 20 fruits every 15 seconds – insane.
So, my fruits are all crazy mutated, huge and gold as a base – surely this would ace the event, and earn lots of rewards?
Here is my meter before harvesting; you can see one of the giant Bone Blossoms behind the dude in the middle – they were that huge.
I harvested every single one of the fruits, and the total value on the meter ended up at $86,238,949,160,393 (eighty-six trillion).
What did I earn for harvesting the insane value of eighty six trillion sheckles? Six weathers. Rain was running anyway, as it was chosen by the Admin Board.
The weathers I got as a “reward” for doing this event were:
- Sandstorm
- Ice Rink
- Snowfall
- Boombox Party
- Acid Rain
- Frost
The weathers triggered automatically, as soon as you’ve harvested, and they don’t even run for the full ten minutes of the Harvest Party. They finish as quickly as they usually do, when they’re naturally triggered.
Harvesting all those super-mutated fruits only gave me six weathers being triggered, but surely some Admin Packs? Yeah, no. Zero Admin Packs, and zero rewards for those fruits when participating in this event.
What is the biggest kicker of this event, is that you have to harvest your garden to trigger these “weathers” but your garden is then empty of fruits, so you have nothing to mutate from the weathers, so what is the point?
There is none, unfortunately. Bring back the alien event, at least we got a tangible reward for playing the game.