Zynga, we have a bushel problem in FarmVille

If crafting in FarmVille is leaving you frustrated, a glimmer of hope arrived this week. Zynga has now increased the maximum storage capacity of our Market Stalls to 800 bushels. We still need more room.

Market Stall Expansion

The new 800 maximum storage capacity is only 25 more bushels than previously allowed, but I'll take anything. To take advantage of the new 800 bushel limit, you will have to expand your Market Stall by completing expansion construction phases. Each phase requires 30 parts and will only increase your bushel capacity by 25 bushels per completed stage. In other words, to expand your Market Stall to the full 800-bushel capacity – be prepared to expand multiple times and collect tons of parts.

The three different parts include Price Card, Basket, and Awning. You can send and receive parts for free via the FarmVille Gifting page or find spare parts on the Facebook News Feed from your neighbors' shares. Parts can also be purchased using Farm Cash at the cost of 1 FV$/part, but who wants to do that? Purchasing parts a la carte can get quite expensive, especially if you are hoping to fully expand.

Market Stall Expansion Requirements:

• Price Card x 10

• Basket x 10

• Awning x 10

Increasing the capacity of Market Stalls doesn't completely solve the FarmVille bushel shortage and crafting problem – but it's a start. Since your Market Stall capacity covers all your FarmVille farms in a shared storage space it's easy to run out of room to store bushels even if you don't farm on all seven farms. More farms should mean more bushel space, but the rate that Zynga is releasing the Market Stall expansions and how we have to complete them is not keeping up with the pace of the game. As a result, this adds to the problem and leaves more farmers feeling frustrated when it comes to crafting.

More Crafting Struggles

Where are all my neighbors? If you've attempted to buy bushels from your neighbors, you may be shocked to see how many neighbors are actually available. Some farmers have given up crafting recipes all together, especially those who weren't particularly interested in crafting in the first place or aren't interested in questing which also adds to the bushel shortage. Less neighbors crafting, doesn't help the crafting problem. Annoyed by the low capacity for bushel storage in Market Stalls and the unwillingness to participate in the lengthy expansion process leads to more bushels wasted and less bushels for sale.

Nothing is more bothersome than trying to craft a recipe with scarce bushels. Sure you can send out help requests for friends to send you bushels that none of your neighbors are selling, but that means your friends will have to click on your share and even if your friends do click, that doesn't mean the bushels won't get lost along the way. I have great FarmVille neighbors that always help me out with a click or two when I need it, but I almost never get the bushels they send me and I'm not the only one.

Crafting a recipe for a quest without the required bushels can certainly put a damper on your questing and it makes spending a few Farm Cash here and there for a hard to find bushel that more enticing – but who wants to willingly spend Farm Cash on bushels? As a last resort you may even grow the crop yourself just for bushels sake. We've all been there. We've all re-grown previously mastered crops just to get their bushels for crafting. It's not so bad unless it's a one day crop like those Red Tulips that keep haunting me.

What has Zynga done to fix the problem?

For one, releasing more crafting recipes is not a solution. Kudos for new recipes, but let's face it-- It's not really helping the problem. Bushels are still hard to come by, and once you actually have them there's not enough room to store them in your Market Stall. Suppose you focus solely on mastering recipes and work on this agenda at your own pace, it's likely you will still face a bushel shortage.

A few in-game items and features have been released to help alleviate some of the crafting and bushel issues, but they don't seem like a long-term fix. One example was Gilda (not Gilda's List), but Gilda our bushel friend. Gilda always had bushel to lend even when your neighbors didn't. But what happened to her? She's been AWOL after a very short stay in FarmVille. I actually liked her; my only complaint was that she could have been a little more generous with her bushels.

This week we also saw the release of the Double Bushel Statue. The Double Bushel Statue increases the amount of bushels you receive when harvesting your crops, which helps add to your bounty of bushels needed for crafting. It can be purchased for a whopping 250 Farm Cash. Even if you'd be willing to invest in this pricy statue, where will you store those extra Bushels?

Increasing the capacity of Market Stalls this week is a much needed and appreciated move by Zynga, but there's still more that can be done to help the hardworking farmers of FarmVille. Any farmer who uses bushels will gladly take this expansion, but we are all left unsatisfied. Wouldn't it make all our lives a little easier and more productive in eliminating the crafting problem if we could utilize Special Delivery Boxes on expanding our Market Stalls? Why not expand the Market Stall capacity as they've done with our Storage Cellars? This is my plea to have the Market Stall parts included in Special Delivery Boxes and the Market Stalls expanded even more.So Zynga- how much do you love me? A bushel and a peck, more please.

Are you experiencing a FarmVille crafting crisis? How would you make your crafting experience and bushel problems better?

Angela Morales created and manages FarmVille Freak, the largest FarmVille fan site, which provides news, tips and in-game updates for Zynga's Facebook farm game as it happens. She is also the co-author of FarmVille For Dummies book. Yes, it exists.