Preparing for derby each week

Here's what I had prepped for a normal derby back in December. Week to week the list will change a little bit.



For town, I always have at least 9x Strongmen, and then aim for 10x minimum of Teachers/Dancers/Mechanics so that town is ready for the 9x of any of those four visitors, the Muscles basket task, and 2x the Townie basket task that has the above combination of players.

Below is the actual list of tasks completed in this week's derby.

I approach the derby in a similar way. In addition I make sure my smelters are empty and my fishing spots are ready. I do rice cropping tasks too in addition to the ones you mention.

Yes, all the ones with colored backgrounds were tasks I had prepped that week. I tend to have 61-65 of the possible 121 production tasks ready for normal derbies, plus 7 of the production baskets (not including the pure town baskets).

For town, I hardly ever do the 23 visitor task, opting to wait for 9x specific characters or 5x5x5x character baskets to pop, to make more efficient use of my 42 townies. Once I do one of the town tasks I'm prepped for, I'll send my personal train out to hopefully reload the same set. If we're in a very competitive derby, I may take a 23 visitor task as my very last derby task and not wait for a more specific town task to appear.

My typical 10 task mix will end up being 3-6 town tasks, 2-4 production tasks, and 2-4 basket tasks, pending the luck of the task board.
I prefer these "instant-finish" tasks and don't bother with tasks that take more than a few minutes to complete. I'd hate to be on a wheat task only to see my production/town tasks pop up on the task board...

My friend does similar stacking/prep for all their derby farms, and it's especially crucial for the one farm they play solo derby with, since you need to aim for ~7 min completion time in champions league for a good shot at gold.

I double stack all my machines the best I can. Example would be 13 apple juice and 18 tomato juice behind the apple. If you have most machines double stacked, then you just wait and delete tasks like crazy every 30 mins until you have 10 solid 320 tasks. This takes anywhere from 2 hours-1 day usually for me.

When all of your tasks are available to for your liking, you now must start the derby. I wait until day 2 or 3. Any later, you risk entering a league that’s already been established a few hours and you are already well behind. Although I did enter a derby on the last day once and was the only person in the league for about 6 hours. More than enough time to finish before anyone else joined.

Also, don’t feel bad spending all your time stacking and never have those production tasks come up. If you double stacked, you just will have a lot of product to entice players to help you on your RSS.

If your products are stacked/ready, why do you prefer to wait till you have a full set of ten x 320 tasks to go rather than completing the tasks as they’re ready?

Yes, I do that all the time (if I play Hayday). 4x mining task, 1x easy harvest task mostly wheat, 1x townies task and 4x help tasks. It helps when you have multiple babyfarms. Finish within 10-15 minutes each time. 

I trash the tasks every 30 minutes that I don’t want. You can have max 4 of the same tasks at once on your board.

First of all, welcome back ducktown. I hope everything is going well with you.

IIRC, you took a break from Hay Day last year. Are you playing HD again?


EDIT: Whenever I see your name, I suppress a giggle because I recall two questions I once asked in the forum games subforum.

justhayday.boards.net/post/41953/thread

justhayday.boards.net/post/42525/thread

Solo Champions requires fully prepping the board before you start if you want a shot at the gold. My teammate plays one farm for solo derby and got very lucky with the task board where they got all 10 tasks they wanted early in the day without using any gems. Finished this set of tasks in 6 minutes to lock in 1st place.

Usually they casually cycle the board over the course of the first day and then have the board ready by the evening to start/finish solo derby.

capture software

Yes, that’s correct. I still don’t play a lot. For me Hayday is still the same old same old with every update. I do like some of the new events but really would love to see something new to the game with the March update. But my hopes aren’t  high knowing already about new sanctuary animals, new machine and products. And the endless shortage of scrolls and puzzle pieces as well as the long grind doesn’t intrest me anymore to spent a lot of my time on this game.

That’s amazing ducktown2021 … wow. And you got all those tasks without any board refreshes?

Very lucky .. my board looks nothing like that and always needs several refreshes before I get my ten 320 tasks.

puzzles .. do you happen to know what the max number of items is that you can stack per machine? Is it the same for all machines or does it vary?

That’s brilliant.. exactly the info I needed. Thanks puzzles 😺

Derby is definitely whatever you want to get out of it. If you have specific goals for derby, it can be a challenge to find a neighborhood with like-minded individuals. I inherited a neighborhood last year and with my co-leaders we shaped it into the derby NH we wanted and have a core set of players that have the same goals, even if we have different ways of preparing for derby. Blossom derby has gone from the most feared/painful derby experience to the easiest/fastest derby format, which wouldn't be possible with 20+ other random players.

I decided 6 months ago that I should take every derby reward opportunity to try to collect expansion permits, so I've been rerolling the permit columns each derby to get the max each week. FWIW, last year there were 165 possible expansion permits from derby, out of the 1349 total permits needed to unlock all currently available land. Far more available than the 24-36 that can earn via valley. Unlocking all available land is definitely a long game....