Am I in the minority who does not like.....

A lot of people don't like the idea of mystery derby. I like trying to figure out a strategy to minimize the potential pain from various tasks. I have stacked about 33 or 34 of the known 39 production tasks, so the majority of those won't be an issue if they come up.

Everyone in my NH last year had at least one town task, so you have to choose if you want to set up your visitors to have some tasks ready to go while others start at 0, or fully serve a variety so no matter which town task they give you, you have some completed.

I just went through an exercise with a teammate on how to plant fields before derby starts to minimize the number of harvest cycles for some of the longer tasks. The chili pepper task is the worst one they can give you, but it turns out planting an entire field of chili peppers before derby isn't actually the best strategy.

Strategy A tries to plan for the worst case chili pepper task and plants all chili peppers before derby. If chili pepper comes up, task is only 8h vs 12h without any chili peppers in the fields.
But if potato/lettuce/pumpkin comes up, they are starting from scratch.

Strategy B plants the "scrap" ends of each of these five long crop tasks.
No matter which of these five tasks comes up, the player has the "scrap" round done when starting the task, and all five groups save one harvest cycle.

Of course all this planning goes out the window if they give me an Indigo task...

I love your strategies puzzles. Mystery derby just kicked off .. milk tea x 19 is my first task. At 38 mins per item this will take just over 12 hours, maybe a bit less if I can speed some up with the 50% timer feature.

Not my favourite derby .. I’ve been away on a sunny beach holiday so haven’t been able to stack up production machines for this one.

Good luck everyone 😺

As for me I quitted derby completely a long time ago. The Mystery Derby was the one I ignored first. Due to the fact that I mostly received tasks as the mentioned pizza frutti di mare or goat milk.

I am not sure whether you can do this derby strategically. I admit you can shorten the time if you go with puzzles preparations. This won't protect you from bad tasks, though. Nothing for me, I am not in the mood spending a lot of time for this, other things are more important for me. It's a personal choice everyone has to make.

Main reason for quitting derby totally a long time ago however weren't long lasting or dreadful tasks. That alone is annoying enough in my opinion. No, the really nuisance was getting never resp very rarely permits in the horseshoes. Even if I used diamonds to shuffle. Zero! Sometimes I am about to think game knows that I dislike derby and was punishing me for that.

Well, since then I took the appropriate measures and steered clear of it. I never regretted my decision. It fits very well for me. 🙂

Much better start this year.
Last year at this time I'm still waiting for my first harvest of chili peppers for task #1...

donkeyfan and gymgirl
I am with you!
I have been thinking about stopping the derby also.
Thank you for your opinions, I have been giving SC too much credit on play level. I am frustrated.
It is me that has to change to be a good fit to play Hay Day. Learning this slowly.
It is just me and baby farm. Okay with this.
I sometimes wonder how many players are reading the one Daily Dirt at a time 🤔
I would please like a copy that is not shared with the an outrageous amount of farms

I got a task for 15 hotdogs, 60 pounds of fish, and 16 truck orders.

The latter two I don't mind, but the hotdogs will consume all my bacon.

I don't voluntarily take boat tasks, so with getting them in mystery derby, I gemmed for quick arrivals.  35 gems to save 24hrs.  3.5 days worth of mining   Or $0.70 USD at the rate of last year's Black Friday sale.

All other production/town tasks were prepped ahead of derby, so those paid off big.  My grill had Baked potato(17), Bacon and eggs(12), Hamburger(13), Roasted tomatoes(16) stacked and I had to unload it all for that roasted tomato task.

I only keep 9 of everything, less what my (non greedy) event trucks use up. Nothing stacked. Thinking I’ll just wait for reasonable 320s. So….haven't started yet. Somehow I don’t think this is going to go well.

Lvl 135, town rep 43 
I'm on the last upgrade (coin) for the cinema, then two more on the beach cafe, and if I feel like it, maybe I'll max out the left-behind grocery, just for completion's sake.

My teammate has more dedication and played four farms today, two in our main NH, one in our alt NH, and one solo.  Just waiting for the last lettuce harvest on one farm.  We prepped identical production tasks on our main farms, and the other farms were prepped as their level permitted.

donkeyfan

It helps to have others that are into the game as much as you are. I used to play a similar game about 10 years ago called Paradise Bay. I see some elements of the game in HayDay, and some of the techniques in that game transferred over, like stacking on machines (though I don't recall an actual limit on stacking amounts in that game). The game shut down a few years into playing and it took a while to find this game.

One thing I appreciated in Paradise Bay, which I wish HayDay would adopt, is that they had expansion/upgrade parts for their barn and silo and not only was it a fixed amount for each upgrade, but the parts did not take up any of your storage. They also gave you +25 more barn and silo space each time you leveled up, so it was nice looking forward to that. They also had some group events where if you coordinated and helped each other out, you could earn more upgrade parts.

How long have you been playing?  I've met some people that have played for about 10 years.

puzzles

I am playing for over 7,5 years. I remember being committed like you in the beginning. I wanted everything and at once, not in the mood for patience.

For example...I was around lv 60 I desired the black bunny. It's so cute and I had not enough vouchers. The game kept me waiting for a long time, but eventually I got the bunny. 🙂

Over the time as my level increased I calmed down. Concomitant with it I became more fastidious. I decided only to do what suits me. That's the reason that I advance already since a longer time very slowly. If I'd have pursued my advancing properly my lv could be > 200. I decided otherwise. I don't force it. What happens, happens.

This approach has many advantages, e. g. no pressure, no stress, no necessity to be online to check on my farm. It's chilling, and I like it how it is and it's meant to be. 🙂🌺🌻

puzzles

Yes, everyone can tell something from the beginning. I needed time to understand how useful the town could be. So I decided very late (in my opinion) to develop my town. IIRC it was also around lv 60 when I begun to focus on it. It's a chore. Fortunately I knew at that time players who helped me a lot with trading. Nevertheless it took it's time. I never regretted it, though.

Town is still my favorite place in the game if I need items, etc. In the past I often recognized that a full developed town can't be beaten from anything else. 😍