YoVille Tips and Cheats

YoVille provides a nice graphic interface to let users create their personalized characters that make money, socialize with other Yovillians and decorate their apartments, even buy their own house and live the country life. The real power dynamics of the game are socializing, and a big part of this dynamic is creating an awesome apartment, throwing parties and just hanging out.

The game is a lot of fun, but if you're looking for some great tips to make it even more entertaining, this guide has some great decorating tips, some clever tricks and even a cheat that will make it a lot easier to create the dream apartment you want, but never seem to have enough coins to get.

Creative decorating

When you join YoVille, you are very generously given a three room apartment, complete with kitchen appliances, a bed room and a pretty bare living room. Unless you have a ton of money, this three room apartment will be your canvas, and the floor plan will be identical to what everybody else in YoVille calls their home. You can redecorate any of the rooms any way you like, and if you want more furniture and different colors, there's a Yo Depot and a furniture store in town where you can pick up decorative items to create the look you want.

You can put any piece of furniture in any room, but you'll be confined to the grid of the room floor to place most items, which still gives a lot of options for what you can do, but for the really creative minded, there are a few items that can be placed freely anywhere in the game window, allowing you to build outside your apartments walls and creating some pretty nice effects. For example, rugs, plants and many decorative items can be place anywhere. By placing some rugs outside your room boundaries, you can create an illusion of your room being a lot bigger. Your character won't be able to use this added area, but the room will have a feel of being a lot bigger. If you want to, you can cover the entire game window with rugs, expanding the room out in all directions. Plants and towels can also be placed outside the room frame in this way, making it possible to create room features not available form the in game furniture. The first picture shows my living room, where I have used the beach rug to create a sandy beach, several beach towels to create an ocean front, and several decorative art pieces to create a separation between the living room and the beach front. To compliment the feel of having beach access from my living room, I have created a huge flowering bush in the lower corner by adding lot's of flowers from the flower shop together. By placing items outside the room grid my living room is essentially split into two rooms, my regular living room and a beach property.

Another way to break out of the basic style of YoVille decorating is to use items to create illusions of levels. The windows are especially useful for this purpose, since YoVille is nice enough to let you place windows anywhere in the game area also. Windows and certain wall art can be used very effectively to create fake walls, and even room features. If you go back and look at the picture of my living room, you'll see that I have used two windows to remove the kitchen door and instead replace it with what looks like a walkway. The effect is completed by adding a rug just under my newly created wall to extend the floor down my new walkway. Windows can be used to make even more dramatic changes to a floor plan. The second picture shows my bedroom design. Here I have used windows to create a lowered section of the floor, the space windows create an illusion of the seating area being lower than the rest of the room, the effect is reinforced by the staircase which is made by placing three tables next to each others so as to create a staircase leading down to my lower level. Again, the room is expanded by the use of rugs in the lowered section, the rugs also help cut of the 'wall' created by the windows, completing the floor feature. With some creativity, you can create many different levels, water features and almost anything, just play around and see what effects you can create.

Making your money last

Everything you want to do in YoVille costs coins, and coins are hard to come by. The developers say they are trying hard to keep the economy balanced in the game, but in reality, the reason why the cash flow is so constricted is to tempt you into using some of your real money on buying fake YoVille money. Don't do it, instead, get a good size crew and show up at the factory as often as you can. There's a couple of game tricks you can use to make your hard earned coins last longer.

First of all, once you have decided what wallpaper and flooring you want and put them in your room, you don't really need them anymore. If you have spent lot's of coins on a nice hardwood floor, and a nice matching wallpaper, you can sell both items back to the store after you have put them to use in your room. The flooring and wallpaper will not be removed even if you sell the items. This way, you car recoup at least some of the expenses you had purchasing the items. Even better though, if you have crew members or friends that want the same floor or wallpaper as you, one of you can buy the items, put them in any rooms they like, then trade away the item to the next person for free. The person receiving the items can put them in their rooms, then trade the items right back, and voila! half priced flooring and wallpapers, of course, after the items are traded back, the buyer can sell the items to get an even better deal on the items. Of course, the items can be traded between as many people as you'd like, potentially giving all 50 people in your craw wood flooring in their entire apartment for a one time payment. There's one drawback though, if you want to change wall color or flooring later, you'll lose any wall colors or flooring that you don't have available in your inventory. For example, if you have a wood floor that you have traded away, if you go to change the wallpaper, the wood floor will be replaced by the default carpet.

Unfortunately, this trick only works for flooring and wallpaper, any other items will disappear from your apartment as soon as you trade them away.

The big cheat

As far as I know, there is just one cheat in YoVille, but that cheat is a major one. I am sure you are wondering how people can afford all the very expensive items in theor appartments, if you look at the pictures of my apartment, you will see that I have plants and furniture that are worth many 1000's of coins. The reason I could get all of those plants and flowers, rugs and furniture is cloning of items. You might have read that cloning of items in YoVille is not possible, there are a few websites that claim it can't be done, but that is not true. There is a glitch in the interface that will allow you to clone any item. The process for cloning is hard to describe in words as the process requires a specific technique, but I will explain how it works and refer you to a video that shows the process very clearly.

Cloning items takes advantage of the game interface and the potential for slow down in the game. Start out by editing the room where you want a cloned item, make sure your item tray is empty and grab the item you want to clone and place it in the tray as the only item. Now, start clicking the item very quickly, while moving the mouse left and right as if you want to move the item along the tray. The fade out effect in YoVille will allow you to grab the item twice and dropping one copy in another cell in the tray. You will now be able to grab one of the two items and place anywhere in your room, and you can repeat and clone the item over and over. This is how I was able to get so many plants in my apartment, and also get enough sand carpets to make a beach. All for the price of just the original item.

As you can imagine, this technique will allow you to get unlimited amounts of items without spending any money, and you can build out your apartment with anything you might desire. There is one little drawback though, a cloned item can not be put back into your inventory, it will simply disappear if you try to move it to another room, trade it, or even sell it. So, cloning items works only for the room you're currently in, but if you can get someone to trade you their items for a little while, you can basically fill your entire apartment for free.

I know this description can be a little confusing, so for all the details on item cloning in YoVille, check out this video