Jan 26 2010
Starting Your EC
1. Starting Your Own EC – The Basics
When I first started, right away I jumped into everything – bought meadows, boxes, and hired employees. Soon I was down to only 5,000e. I deleted all my boxes and canceled employees. It’s best to just wait and buy meadows so you can get your EC to 100,000 equus. (This will also help you with achievement level seven.)
Comps:
To have a top EC, a high prestige is needed. Running competitions is easy and will bring up prestige. The easiest way to do this, but not necessarily the cheapest, is to buy a high skilled horse, around 900 skills, and enter it in your competitions. For further information on how to do this, read the next post below. This doesn’t have to be the first step you do, but it will help give you a head start.
Growing Crops:
Sell a horse in the Private Sales for a pass or two or buy a pass with your reserve. Try your best to get some passes on your hands. Use these to purchase five 15 acre meadows, or at least one. This allows you to continue to save up your EC money instead of using some to buy meadows. No matter how many fifteen acre meadows you have, purchase two or three six acre meadows for resident horses.
As soon as spring starts, grow flax with horse dung that you make into manure. Once you harvest them, sell just the flax to the store. Keep the bedding; you can use this for boarding horses. With one 15 acre meadow, you can get about 10,000e, (just flax) depending on the weather. In the summer, do the same thing except with wheat seeds. Once that harvests, sell both products – straw bedding and wheat. This alone can give you about 25,000e. Those three six acre meadows will also help bring in money. Buying horse dung to create manure to sell back to the shop will also bring in a profit. Only a few hundred equus. This is very time consuming, so I don’t suggest doing this often, as there isn’t much of a profit. Purchasing a greenhouse can really help. This allows you to grow crops in all seasons or just provide carrots for the boarding horses. Just remember – if you buy a greenhouse, buy it from the secret market so it will cost one pass instead of equus from your EC.
Adding Some Boxes and Pets:
Once you reach 100,000 equus, think of all the things you will need first. Boxes, (18 by 18 would be nice) flax bedding, employees, and clean/fertile meadows. However, Howrse gives you a fifteen acre fertile meadow for completing the achievement and you already should own a few six acre meadows. Only purchase one 18m by 18m box. This will still give you high prestige, even though it’s only one. You can also get some extra things like pets for you stall, but I suggest getting these later in the game. These will attract boarders to your center.
Hiring Employees:
I would play it safe and wait till you get around 600,000e. Don’t worry – this is actually very easy once you have five 15 acre meadows. You can get 170,000e from one crop. Once you reach a good amount of equus, start hiring employees. Howrse provides you with a groom already, so as long as you have less than 20 boxes, you won’t need to hire one. Then, hire one of every employee. Having a player accept can be very hard. Since you have 500,000e – 600,000e, it would be okay to hire temporary employees for a bit. Provide the highest pay for the job and a raise when possible for players. This will give you the highest prestige.
Finally, you need to have a good rate for your EC. You can keep it at 10 equus at all times, since boarding horses don’t help much. Read on to the third post to read how to improve prestige and become a top Equestrian Center! Good luck!
I have to say, I don’t think you have to wait so long to start buying boxes and stuff. I only have about 130,000 E, but I have employees, pets, and boxes. My prestige is at 53%. I’m doing better everyday.
I have several greenhouses and large meadows. I plant turnips and crops and sell them. It’s not that hard to do well early.
That’s just my advice. :)
You do have a point with starting earlier…However, in order to get your EC in the top 500, you need to have great prestige – at least 79%. Mine has been at a steady 74% and is ranked 1,000. I guess I could re-word it so you can buy boxes and pets once some money is made, but focusing on growing crops is key. Plus, in order to achieve full prestige, you need to have the biggest boxes which cost 100,000e. So unless pays are available, the players needs to save up a lot of money for that.
I didn’t have much Equus left because I don’t have passes nor will I ask my parents if I can buy them because they wouldn’t, so I did the manure thing and in two days I went from 300 equus to 2000, so it works if you’re low on money.
If you wait a bit to buy passes you have the option to get four for the price of one. Wait until you catch a +2 pass UFO. This way, you get two extra passes. Then, buy one pass. If it is the first pass you buy, you automatically get another. If you have a hard time convincing your parents, you could bring that up. Also add that it could be a birthday or holiday gift. ;)
I discovered something useful! If you grow a field of wheat you should then buy a greenhouse. Plant more wheat in the greenhouse, and then sell that. Buy another greenhouse once you have enough equus. Keep buying greenhouses until you have 3. That way you can grow 3 things at once no matter what the season: Carrots, Flax, and Wheat. It may not generate as much as a 15-acre meadow but it still generates a decent amount of equus.
That’s an excellent idea, but sadly, players can only purchase one greenhouse.
I do think that you should change the tips so that they suit people who DON’T have passes. Keep what you have, but change it so that those of us who can’t buy passes with real money can have advice. I learned that buying 3 unfertile 15-acre meadows and planting them with wheat/flax with manure fertilizer generates around 20,000 equus per field, even when you lost around 15% of your crop due to storms.
I agree with Anna. I love Howrse, but I (nor my parents) are willing to spend money on a web game. I think giving tips without passes are best. Plus, you can still do well without buying passes with real money. If your EC is more important to you, spend passes on that. If you want to focus more on your howrses, use passes on them. You just save and choose what will help you best.
Oh, also, my parents only let me get on 20 minutes a week (pathetic, I know,) but I don’t get a lot of time to grow crops and everything. What’s the profit for the different crops like wheat, apples, stuff like that? I’ve only planted flax, turnips, and carrots.
Thanks so much for this website, I love it!
Yes, passes are definitely not necessary for the game. I have bought one, but only because of the +2 UFO and since it was my first pass, I got an extra one. I only did it because I really wanted access to the Private Sales and I was one point away. Buying that one pass allowed me to help out the donkeys as well, which gave me about two more karma points (at two different times). Actually, I think your parents are making the right decision with the limited time on a computer. I think it’s almost like a black hole that sucks you in and spits you out, hours later. xD
Flax and Wheat are the best – with five 15 acre meadows, you can usually make about 140,000e. I don’t know the profits for each different crop since it varies depending on storms, scarecrows, and fertilizer. I wouldn’t grow turnips anymore due to the dramatic decrease in sales prices for them.
The thing about flax/wheat prices:
Flax generates around 5,000e per UNFERTILE 15-acre meadow with manure with no part of the crop lost to storms. Wheat will generate 20,000e-25,000e per unfertile 15-acre meadow with manure depending on storms (I know this because I lost around 15% of my first wheat crop (1 unfertile 15-acre meadow) and still made a little over 20,000e, and my first flax crop just came in today and I made around 15,000e with 3 fields planted, I sold a little bedding as well). Wheat is the crop that brings more money. Flax gives bedding. That’s why rotating the two is best.
ADD: The only reason to grow other things (Turnips, oats, etc.) is to make mashes. That’s all you need them for.
I have to disagree on one thing, though. For the greenhouse, if you can’t buy passes, don’t waste a pass on buying a greenhouse. Buy it from your EC reserve; spend your pass on the 15 acre meadow.
That’s a very good point, actually. I checked the EC store and greenhouses are selling for as little as 12,000e! I’ll add that tip as soon as I can. ;)
Hi, i was just giving a tip for all you who needs more money to their EC. Allways log in every day, buy 50 pounds of horse droppins, make maure, sell the manure, buy, make, sell, buy make, sell and so on until there comes a message that says you have reached your 1000 droppings limit. My log in on howrse is meltsku
No space, no points or anythuing. Just text.
Thank you, meltsku
So would you suggest to get a medow first to try and get some more equus?
Yes – any size will do, but 15 is the most successful.
And what one would be better? The meadow or the fertile meadow?
Definitely the fertile meadow. Sorry if I forgot to list that in the post.
Non-fertile meadows won’t make it past 50%, making it very hard to grow crops.
hey i started out buying 3 6acre places then farmed them with turnips and now im waiting im gunna give my ec a few howrse years then im gonna get boxes with the money from my plants is that good idea or no
Hm…well, lately turnips haven’t been the best crops to use. Since about September of 2009, the prices dropped so low, players brought up a fuss about it. I would suggest to just grow them this time and then plant wheat in the summer and flax in the spring. As far as the boxes, I would wait for that until you reach your 100,000e achievement. I understand that you would probably want to jump right into everything, but it saves much more time to just wait a bit.
Starting out with that size meadows was a good idea. Hopefully you will be able to purchase 15 acre fertile meadows as your EC improves.
As a side note: I have a new service I provide on Howrse – I pretty much evaluate your EC and post in your forum on what to work on to help improve your EC. There is a post about it here on HowrseHelper (right on the home page) or on my forum on Howrse.
Thanx 4 the tips!!!Hope they work!!! I really need to pass achievement 7!!!
How do you get your prestige up, and your cleanliness, space, and fertility for your meadow?
For space, you need to have enough meadows for your horses and some fallow. To improve fertility, lay them fallow for some time. Cleanliness will gradually improve.
it would be so easy to get to 100000 equus at my ec if i had passes but i dont know how to buy them apart from paying in real life? any tips?
Hm..Buy them with your reserve and try to buy some from other people…It will be very expensive though. Try training foals and selling them for passes. You could just work with one 15 acre meadow, it will just take about one Spring & Summer on Howrse, if you start growing crops as soon as the seasons start.
Have you or anyone you know had problems with buying passes with your credit card? Is it safe?
I bought only one pass my whole time on the game and I used PayPal. It’s completely safe and you will get the pass(es) within minutes of the purchase. Other methods, like phone calls, usually have delays in sending the passes…or at least that’s what I heard.
I’ve got an idea too!!
When I first started I bought heaps of medows. Then I planted heaps and heaps of turips and apples. Then sold most of the apples and turips till I had 1000 of each. I used the 1000 to make health mashes.
Also When you start a new game these days you can take test thingys with the little mokey mascot. You can heaps of money and other things like black market items too!!!!!!
I wish I hand of found this page earlier – I might not be fretting over the 100,000e thing before the end of March.
Right well I have the flax and the manure waiting for spring. By the way, how long does it take to grow flax?
Um..I’m not too sure. I think it’s about 9 days…It will say once you start to grow it
Any idea on how to get passes without using money from your reserve, payal or anything like that?
P.S
My name on howrse is Horsey-girl. Please mail me!!
How do you make manure out of droppings? Everyone seems to think it’s a good idea to make money out of manure, but i don’t know how to!!!
1. Buy manure in the shop (try to get 50)
2. Go to your meadows. Towards the top of the page, there are two buttons – one for mash and the other for manure.
3. On the manure page, it will give you the option to make manure out of how ever many droppings you bought..that’s it!
Well,
I was very worried about the achievements leaving and that I wouldn’t be able to get all these BM items, but now Howrse has added them back again? Good thing they also mentioned a new achievement system!
The (little) greenhouses cost 20,148e and its Winter. I just started my EC and am wondering if I should buy the greenhouse using the 25,000e I have or just buy a meadow and let half of my crop rot? I learned that wheat sells most and flax is useful, so Im going to buy those as well. So, which one? Greenhouse or meadow? I would really appreciate your advice.