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We have seen continued confusion about how to save the most Iceberries during the Winter Frostival event, so I thought it would be useful to collect our accumulated wisdom and strategery* into a single post.

TERMINOLOGY - Part of the confusion has arisen over messy terminology, so let’s define some terms first. Iceberries are stored in two distinct places, and we somewhat sloppily refer to both of them as a “bank”. The “Iceberries” icon that appears on your main screen contains currency that you can spend in the prize tent at any time, so rather than calling this a bank, let’s call it the “wallet” (I’m open to other suggestions!). The other place that Iceberries are stored is in the Social menu’s Gifts tab. Iceberries stored here can’t be spent until they are withdrawn into your wallet, so it’s appropriate to call this the “bank”. For the purposes of this guide, “banking Iceberries” explicitly means accumulating them in the Gifts tab.

There is also some confusion over the term “reset”. There are three distinct kinds of reset that are relevant to this discussion. “Park reset” is when your park contacts the server to get new instructions and put new rules or conditions into place. Park reset occurs whenever you restart your app (e.g. after it has been killed or your device has rebooted), when you return to your park after visiting friends, or when your park has experienced a problem and had to reload (e.g. a spell has gone wonky, among other things). “Iceberry reset” occurs daily and means that the Wizards have hidden more Iceberries in your park and have reset the daily cap of Iceberries you are allowed to collect (more on caps later). Iceberry reset occurs at 11:00 AM BFS Time (there is a handy BFS Time clock near the top of our forum pages). “Gift reset” also occurs daily and means that new friend gifts are available to be sent and new Party Hats are available to be tapped when visiting friends. Gift reset happens around 6:30 PM BFS time.

COLLECTING ICEBERRIES - I won’t go into great detail about collecting Iceberries other than to note that they can be found in the same basic ways that we’ve seen in previous events (with, as usual, a wrinkle or two): competing in the Arctic Arena, spinning the Wheel of Chance, playing Name That Dragon, collecting a gift from the new Advent Calendar, collecting DragonCash, harvesting Treats, hatching/selling dragons, competing in the Colosseum, performing Kairos quests, clearing island obstacles, spending Gems, receiving friend gifts, visiting friends to collect Party Hats, and finding and tapping special park visitors. For this event the special visitor is Sandakloz. Sandakloz appears at least once a day in your park, but he may appear again 12 hours later if you find and tap him early enough after Iceberry reset. Finally, you can buy Iceberries as an in-app purchase using real-world money. Iceberries that you receive as friend gifts initially go into your bank and must be moved to your wallet before they can be spent (but you may want to hold off on doing this as I will explain below).

ICEBERRY CAPS - The amount of Iceberries that you can put into your wallet has a daily cap (although there are a few ways that you can put extra Iceberries into your wallet above the cap). The daily cap is 1000 Iceberries unless doubles are in effect, in which case the daily cap is also doubled to 2000. Iceberries that you receive from the daily Advent Calendar gift or that you buy as an in-app purchase are exempt from the cap and will be added to your wallet above and beyond the cap limit. If you have a problem in your park you may receive compensation from BFS in the form of Iceberries as well. Depending on the nature of the problem, Iceberries received in this way may go into your wallet or into your bank. If they go into your wallet they will not count against your cap either. Iceberries that you receive as friend gifts initially appear in your bank and are not subject to a daily cap (until you move them to your wallet). You can receive an “unlimited” amount if you have lots of friends. However, note that there is a practical ceiling associated with device limitations and we have seen problems if the gift tab has too many items in it (twin eggs as well as uncollected gifts). You may withdraw Iceberries from your bank into your wallet as long as you have not yet reached your daily cap by tapping the "Collect" button next to the gift. In addition to gifts received from friends (or from BFS), there are two other ways that Iceberries can be banked: if you exceed the daily cap by collecting a prize from the Wheel of Chance or Name That Dragon, the excess will be credited to your bank. Also, if you wait until you have reached your cap to collect your winnings from the Arctic Arena, those winnings will be placed in your bank as well.

BANKED ICEBERRIES - The precedent that BFS has established for previous events is that all event currency that has been banked will be moved to your wallet and made available to you for purchasing prizes when the event is over (the Prize Tent will remain open for a while after Iceberry collection is over), so don’t be shy about saving as many as you can. However, note that a new wrinkle in this event is that some prizes must apparently be purchased before the event is actually over (sorta like the one day limited offers we’ve seen in previous events), so be sure to account for that.

EXPLOITS - An “exploit” is a technique for using a mechanism built into a game to obtain a benefit. An exploit is not a “hack”, although exploits may be either intended or unintended by the developer. Some folks regard exploits as “cheating” but this is certainly a personal choice. There are two interesting exploits available in Dragonvale. The classic one is to “extend doubles”. This exploit allows you to continue collecting double Iceberries after Iceberry reset on the final day of doubles. To use this exploit, you must be in your park at Iceberry reset when doubles would normally be over. Basically, if you do not have a park reset (i.e. you don’t kill the app or visit friends) then you can continue to collect double Iceberries and your daily cap will remain doubled as well. If you intend to attempt this exploit, don’t quit the app or allow your device to go to sleep (these actions won’t necessarily cause a park reset, but they might), and don't visit friends.

A new exploit was discovered this year and there may or may not be another opportunity to take advantage of it. During the first doubles weekend, doubles actually started before Iceberry reset, providing a short window of time where the previous day’s cap was lifted to double its value and, if you were quick and efficient, you could collect an extra 1000 Iceberries before Iceberry reset. This effectively gave us an extra day of doubles. We have at least one more doubles weekend coming, so keep an eye out for this situation again if you’d like to try to use it.

MAXIMIZING ICEBERRIES - The trick to maximizing your Iceberries is to take advantage of the various ways available for sending them to your bank. Be aware of how big your wallet can grow as you play each day. This is a running total that increases by at least 1000 or 2000 per day (depending on doubles). It is made more complicated by the fact that Advent Calendar gifts or purchased Iceberries go into your wallet without affecting your cap, so pay close attention to the new total each day. As you play, be sure to save 1 or 2 spins of the Wheel (or 1 or 2 Name That Dragon plays) and don’t collect your last (5th) Arctic Arena reward. Note how close you are coming to your limit for the day and try to use small rewards (hatching Plant dragons, clearing obstacles, etc.) to creep to within 1 or 2 Iceberries of the limit. When you are within striking distance, go ahead and use your last spin or two (or your last Name That Dragon play) to surpass the limit. Any excess above the limit will be banked. This can net you anywhere from 0 to 39 Iceberries (or twice that if doubles are active). Once you have passed the cap, now you can safely collect the last Arctic Arena prize, which will be banked in its entirety (resulting in a 50 or 100 Iceberry bank, doubled to 100 or 200 when doubles are active). Also, wait until you have passed the daily cap to collect your Gem and Treat gifts from friends. If you do this you will still be able to collect your Gems and Treats, but the Iceberries will remain in the bank. If you follow these techniques, your bank will accumulate a large BFS gift and a bunch of smaller gifts comprised of uncollected Iceberries from each gifting friend. Again, after the event is over, BFS will move all your Iceberries from the bank into your wallet.

I hope this guide is helpful for you, and if you notice anything I've missed or gotten wrong. please let me know!

Koala everybody!

* Yes, that was on purpose!

The advent calendar has been awarding 25 per day that don't count against the 1000 limit.

Looks like you don't need to panic if you miss a day on the advent calendar. I missed in my baby park (I don't put a lot of effort into keeping it up) and was offered the chance to "catch up" for 1 gem. Don't know if it will be a gem a day or if it's a compounding penalty or something.

In my case, I still had a couple Habitat limit upgrades which I had planned to do anyway when my gem stash is replenished. But this was too good an opportunity, so I spent 400 now and got 800 closer to 2500! A little party hat grinding and I've got 2500 for the first day, plus an Arena bank! Awesome!

You can grind Plants by simply buying the egg, they're dirt cheap (well, grass cheap I guess)!

An Advent calendar analog! Very nice!

Dearest gem and food friends: I shall endeavor to forego bestowing gifts this evening on the assumption they will have added value on the morrow.

In my head I read this part in a Monty Python Spam skit accent! 

I've wondered about this... The sandbox lists cloning probability as 10% for SFs and Monos, 1% for the other Mono5 combos. Has anybody done any big testing runs to get the stats?

ETA: Note that the sandbox also indicates that cloning has a lower chance than the other combos for the lower level Monos as well! 10% to clone, 20% otherwise.

I may have over-indulged this harvest season as well. I will be in trouble if the next island is in the 10B range!