FarmVille Village

Every now and then when playing FarmVille, you get the message “A lost animal has wandered onto your farm! Would you like to help give this animal a home?” Saying yes to this message does not mean you have adopted it. Instead, it posts the animal to your Facebook wall, giving your friends who play FarmVille a chance to adopt it for their farms.

Once the animal is posted to your Wall, everything that happens after that is entirely random due to a known bug with adoption – and that’s where the confusion sets in.

• Each animal can be adopted by more than one friend. So, if you post a sheep to your wall, that single sheep can be successfully adopted by multiple people.
• Each player has the same chance at adopting the animal – it’s something like a 1 in 10 chance, although the exact metric is unknown.
• Time is not a factor – you are not more likely to be successful 15 seconds after an animal is posted for adoption than you are 30 minutes after it has been posted. Success is random.
• If the animal you have put up for adoption is successfully adopted, and if you are logged into FarmVille when that happens, you may get a notice and a $ reward. It is not known if the reward is random or simply bugged and unreliable.

After a certain time interval, the animal is no longer adoptable. Animals have been reported as adopted up to six hours after posting.

If you want to adopt an animal, your best bet is to regularly check the Facebook pages of your FarmVille friends and neighbors. This is much easier if you organise them into a FarmVille group using Facebook Lists.

Note: According to the Zynga support site, only one person is supposed to be able to adopt each animal. This is obviously mathematically logical, but adoption has never worked this way. The multiple adoptions per animal is a known bug.

Information Last Updated: 25 August, 2009