The social element of the game is an aspect confuses many people. That’s because there’s a bit more to your 3 daily actions than simply tapping on friends’ buildings and collecting money and XP, vandalizing their towns, and leaving graffiti or helping them clean it up. And, as well as whacking snakes and leaving eggs, Whacking Day has given you one more things to consider in the 3 daily actions you choose.

Let’s talk about vandalizing and cleaning up first. Vandalizing a building hurts your friend’s righteousness rating – and should also hurt yours (although a recent glitch meant that in some cases your rating actually goes up!). In the same way, cleaning up the graffiti helps the righteousness rating of both you and your friend. While many players hate seeing graffiti in their towns, those mops and buckets that appear as a result of your graffiti can actually help them out when their righteousness rating inexplicably drops. It’s not really as straightforward as it seems and any choices you make on leaving grafitti or not are within the spirit of the game.

You can also tap on buildings and collect a small amount of cash and XP for each building. But just which buildings you should tap on requires at least a moment’s thought. If you really want to help your friends, you should tap on the most expensive buildings available. If there is something for you to tap on above the building, then it means that the building has finished its rent regeneration cycle in your friends town and your friend hasn’t collected yet. The simple act of tapping means that the clock starts running again on the rent/earning cycle of those buildings. So, if you usually tap on the Simpsons’ House or the Brown Houses, you’re not really helping your friends as much as you can. You should only really tap on these buildings if you have no other choice (and when you do, a handshake icon will appear over the buildings you tapped on when your friends go into their games.)

And if you see any dead crops, tapping on these may bring them to life again in your friend’s town. Not only that, you also get to collect cash and XP as a reward for doing so (although no more than you usually do!). However, it’s important to know that you don’t help your friend in any way if you tap on Cletus’ Farm if the crops are still alive (and tapping on Chanel 6 doesn’t really help them out, either).

And for Whacking Day, there’s one more set of actions you can choose. Tapping on any of the icons above the snake-generating Rocks, Stumps and Logs will speed up the regeneration cycle of those decorations – and will mean that your friend will get their new set of snakes a little faster. If this happens a couple of times while they’re away from the game, they may even get double the amount of snakes!

One more point about visiting friends – you only need to tap once on each building you want to collect from. This makes the dollars and XP fly out and you don’t need to tap on these to collect. The game automatically scoops them up them for you after a few seconds. And you can even leave before everything is scooped up, and it’ll be automatically added to your total. Beware, though, as this doesn’t seem to be happening with the snakes you whack!

The moral then is think before you tap – although if you have 100 friends and only a little time, sometimes that’s hard to do.

P.S.: Longer term players will recall that there used to be a glitch that let you build up your cash total and collect huge amounts of cash and XP if you visited all your friends sequentially, This has been repaired and now you collect a fixed amount of $16 and 2 XP per action.