Guide to Zynga's Pioneer Trail for Facebook: tips, tricks, hints, and cheats

The Pioneer Trail is a brand new Zynga game for Facebook that is not only a sequel to FrontierVille, it's also set to replace FrontierVille on the Zynga Facebook game roster. It's really two games in one - like FrontierVille, you get to have a homestead, where you clear out weeds, build your house and other buildings, plant crops and bushes, raise livestock, and get married. Unlike FrontierVille, however, there is a second game too, in which you embark on the Pioneer Trail with your wagon, your posse of livestock and your doctor, carpenter, and hunter, completing quests and working your way up the trail and earning frontier points. Both games interconnect and your goals play into each other, giving you goals to both build a great homestead, get married and start a family, but also giving you goals to bring back animals and other such souvenirs from your journeys along the trail, and other adventures that you unlock as the game goes on. Read on for tips and tricks on how to win at both games within The Pioneer Trail.

If you do not already play FrontierVille, and you begin playing Pioneer Trail, you will start with your very own brand-new homestead. However, if you play FrontierVille, and you have already established a homestead there, your homestead will carry over to the new Pioneer Trail game, and you will keep your house, crops, livestock, neighbors, wealth and everything else that you have accumulated in FrontierVille. Your tricks of the trade will also carry over to your homestead, but the travelling is a brand new animal, and you will need to develop new strategies to be as successful as you can be.

For the travelling section of the game, you only need friends to fill three positions - the doctor, the carpenter, and the hunter, so your play will not depend on having a massive quantity of neighbors in Pioneer Trail. Instead, what will affect your adventure is the QUALITY of your friends, and their frequency of playing the game, because you are all in the same adventure together, and their play will show up on your screen. It's important to communicate with your trail buddies using the message board on the trail (if you do not communicate with them in real life otherwise), even if they are on totally different schedules than you are.

Even if your friends rarely play, though, it's better to have friends on your trail than not to have friends, simply because your maximum rations increase by 5 for each friend that you have hired to help. Even with completely inactive friends, this can still more than double the amount of play that you can do in one day.

Back at the homestead, often you will encounter an unfriendly creature that you don't want to keep around, like a snake or a fox. They don't actually do anything negative to you or your homestead, but clobbering a snake or a fox will earn you large amounts of coin and experience points, as well as other collection-related goodies.

Sometimes, a certain task will bring out a certain creature - for example, if you buy geese and tend to them, there's a chance that tending to your geese will lure a fox to your homestead. Luckily, the fox won't actually do anything to your geese, but clobbering the fox, which takes 5 moves, will earn you plenty of bonus money and experience points.

When you run out of food to buy more energy with, but you're close to gaining an experience level, simply go to your shop and buy decorations, and then sell them once you gain a level. The log decoration costs 2000 coins and earns you 22 experience points, which is the best experience-to-coins ratio of any decoration, so simply buy a few of those if you have the money to do so. Sell them back afterwards for 700 coins. Sure, it's a bit expensive to do, but you'll have your energy fully recovered once you do it.

Whenever you're about to go offline for an extended period of time (or even, any time at all), try to have long term crops that have already been watered and just need to take time to be ready for harvesting, especially roses of any variety. They earn you large amounts of coins, experience, and food, for doing essentially nothing.

That's all for now! More tips? Post as comments!