Official FarmVille Podcast (12/17/10): Pig Pen Expansions, Winter Countdown details

In this week's official FarmVille podcast, FarmVille Community Manager Lexilicious gave users a sneak peek at some of the upcoming features that will be launching in FarmVille in the coming days and weeks. Here's a recap of this week's details.

First, Zynga will soon be launching a Greeting Card contest. Similar to the Baking Contest, this Greeting Card contest will ask aspiring artists to create a FarmVille themed card (either in the real world, or through Microsoft Paint, Photoshop, or another photo editing program). The prizes for this contest will be 1,000 Farm Cash, 1 million coins and any limited edition FarmVille item of your choice. We'll be sure to give you all of the details of this contest as soon as it launches (presumably on the forums).

Another upcoming feature will be the introduction of Pig Pen expansions. These expansions will allow you to upgrade the capacity of your Pig Pen from 20 to 40 pigs. As a result, you'll be able to hold more slop, and send more pigs truffle hunting at once.

The New Year's Party feature that we gave you a sneak peek of last week has also been officially confirmed. This will be a social event, with the more friends you get to attend resulting in better rewards. Some of these rewards include new crops, new clothes for your avatar, and a new pony.

Sometime after December 25, a Winter Countdown will begin. Each day you login, you'll be able to ask for and give an item from FarmVille's old Winter Holiday theme to/from friends. If you unlock all 12 of these items (that is, login each and every day and participate for that 12 day time period), you'll receive a special, apparently exclusive animal as a prize.

Finally, Lexi confirmed that the FarmVille team is hoping to add the coin purchasing option for the 28x28 land expansion to the game sometime after the new year. There was no announcement as to how much it would cost, but she did confirm that the team was working on it.

For those that love listening to the FarmVille Podcast in full, you can check it out at the top of this post. The next FarmVille podcast is scheduled for release on January 7, and we'll make sure to bring you all of the details therein after it is released.

Official FarmVille Podcast (02/04/11): 28 x 28 Land Expansion coming next week

In this week's official FarmVille Podcast, Zynga gave all listeners a brief sneak peek of some new features and changes that will be coming to FarmVille in the near future. While most of this podcast was concerned with giving an overview of the new Greenhouse feature, we did get a couple of previews, one which seems to finally put the next land expansion issue to bed once and for all.

That's right, Zynga has yet again brought up the topic of the 28 x 28 land expansion, but this time, they've actually given us an exact time frame for its release - it will be coming to the game, available for coins, next week. Apparently, this expansion was formerly going to be part of another feature in the game, but Zynga has scrapped that feature (at least for now), so they've decided to simply release the land expansion to satisfy users that have been waiting for it since last year when it was released for Farm Cash.

Along with this, Zynga once again confirmed that watering cans will soon be available to earn from Orchards. They've also given us a ratio - two watering cans will be received per Orchard harvested, and you'll also receive an extra watering can, that is only available to share on your wall (up to ten neighbors can claim this free can).

Lastly, Zynga will soon be introducing a new set of crops to the game, which offer more experience points and more coins than normal crops. No other details were shared about these crops, such as when they will be released, but they appear to be unrelated to any other feature.

While this isn't as feature-heavy a podcast as we're used to, it is nice to see Zynga finally announcing a static release window for the next expansion. When it, and these other hinted features launch in the game, we'll be sure to let you know.