Tips and Tricks

This Tips and Tricks page offers any useful techniques, methods and suggestions for improving the Brightwood Adventures experience.

Starting Over
If you want to start Brightwood Adventures again from the beginning, Kiwi has not provided a simple way of doing this. Your game is stored on their servers, and gets reloaded to your phone even if you uninstall and reinstall the game, or clear all the data stored on your phone. However, there are two ways to make a fresh start: Since Option #2 is more realistic for most people, here are the steps to make it work, at least in later versions of Android that allow you to remove the initial Google account that your registered the phone to. Earlier versions will not let you remove the initial account, so you are probably out of luck on pre-ICS phones.
 * 1) Use a different phone (Hehe, I knew you'd love that option!)
 * 2) Use a different Google account

The Steps
That is it. No need to uninstall or reinstall the game. All your game data is wiped, and when you open the game the next time, the Kiwi server will not be able to locate your old game by matching the unique phone ID and Google account pair you used before, so it will start a new game from the very start.
 * 1) Go to Settings, and under Accounts choose Add Account
 * 2) Add a new Google account (sign up for as many as you want. It's free!)
 * 3) Go to the old Google account and click the three vertical dots in the upper right-hand corner
 * 4) Choose Remove Account
 * Now, while still in Settings, go to Apps
 * 1) Select Brightwood Adventures
 * 2) Click the button that says Clear Data

If you want to go back to your previous game for any reason, just follow the same steps above, but sign into the old Google account and remove the new one. Clear the data, run BA and Viola!, there is your old game again.

Oh yes, and this works for other Kiwi games such as Shipwrecked! and Jungle Town Adventures as well.

Use paths to manage clutter
If you want to separate your buildings but are fed up of clutter filling up all the spaces (especially if you use the "Walling Off" technique above), use dirt or brick paths to cover over open space. This prevents clutter forming, can look visually pleasing, and allows Helpers or Residents to travel over if needed.

Place tall buildings at the top of the screen
Taller buildings will hide any open space behind them, so you won't see when clutter forms there. The Watch Tower is a classic example of this, and is one of the first Buildings you will place in the game. By placing it up against the Forest at the top of the screen, it will only cover Forest space, leaving all the open space visible below it.

Pre-harvesting Trees
Harvest your trees but at the end of harvesting don't collect the reward. This leaves them waiting ready for instant harvesting whenever a quest requires them. By doing this during idle periods it'll make things a lot easier when time limited quests need resources in a hurry. Check the List of Quests to find out when a tree will be needed by one of the Quests you are working on.

A wise use of Cheer
In general, it costs 4 units of Cheer for every 1 minute of time you wish to save by speeding up production. However, there is one very useful exception. The final minute of production of any item costs only 1 unit of Cheer to complete. This means you can speed up a large number of things, especially Trees that take 1 minute or 30 seconds to harvest. You will earn Cheer much faster than you can ever spend it this way, so speed up everything you want, including cutting off the final minute of production of any item you have been waiting to complete.

Because of this exception, Cheer can be exploited using the Tent or Igloo to gain accelerated XP.

A wise use of Gold
Whenever a Quest wants you to buy Decor, or anything, that costs Gold, wait until there is a Discount Sale on Items that cost Gold. It takes patience to be able to leave it in your queue for however long it takes for the right Sale to come up, but it will be worth it when it does. Gold is too hard to come by and too valuable.

Bottlenecks
Even if you are spending tons of money on Axes, Gold and Coins, you will find that there are bottlenecks in the production of certain special items that slow the game down considerably. In the early game, the 4 worst offenders are: Wild Honey and Quarry Stone are produced at the rate of only 1 per day. Yet they are essential in the production of a large number of buildings and other items. You can easily end up with a quest queue that will take more than a month to clear simply because it requires more than 30 Honey or 30 Quarry Stone to complete all items in it.
 * Wild Honey
 * Quarry Stone
 * Planks
 * Dew Drops

There are limited options for fixing this, but some careful planning will help.
 * 1) For Wild Honey, complete the Ze Sweet Honey quest as soon as possible. Prioritize it over all other quests. Also, build the Bakery while waiting for the Beehive to complete, so that you can complete the Bakery with the first Wild Honey produced.
 * 2) For Planks, build the Boomerang Hall early in the game. It costs 13 Gold, so build it just as soon as you have 13 Gold available. The Sawmill produces too many other things to produce the amount of Planks you will need. But don't wait for a Quest to tell you to build the Sawmill. Build it as soon as you reach Level 6 and can spare 1900 Coins.
 * 3) For Dew Drops, you can build a Water Park as soon as you reach Level 9 and have 5 Planks and 2600 Coins to spare. However, click here for a simple way to intensively farm Free Dew Drops.
 * 4) Unless you plan to spend lots of money on Cheer to speed up production of Wild Honey and Quarry Stone, don't bother spending much money on Coins, Gold or Axes. Those will let you speed up other aspects of the game only to have you crash to a grinding halt while waiting for 8 Wild Honey or 10 Quarry Stones to complete. Spend as little money as possible, and you will find that the game play becomes much more balanced regarding what you are waiting for next.

Moving Buildings
If you move a Building prior to Harvesting it, it can improve the chances of it producing a Special Item when Harvested. Unfortunately this is by no means guaranteed, especially with multiple versions of the same Building, but if you find your four Marketplaces are steadfastly refusing to produce Dye, you can usually squeeze at least one item out of them per Harvest by shifting them around.

Whether the time you move the building (i.e. moving it while it's regenerating, or before Harvesting) has any bearing is unclear and needs testing. Similarly, storing in the Inventory and then returning to your village might have an effect on a building's production. Further study needed.

Mysterious Caravan
This unique Quest Building has its own page full of tips here.