Alongside free-form farming, FarmVille layered in structured, story-driven content.
Missions & quests: a recurring character, "the Duke," periodically assigned tasks — for example, writing postcards to friends — that formed short story-like chains similar to the mission systems in Zynga's other games of the era (FrontierVille, CityVille). Some quest lines were much larger; the "Return to English Countryside" quest line, for instance, ran as a 12-part story spread across 30 days.
Ribbons: ribbons were FarmVille's achievement system. Each ribbon tracked a specific kind of task (for example, harvesting a certain number of crops, or collecting a set of animals), and most ribbons had multiple tiers — commonly yellow, white, red, and blue, awarded as a player's progress on that task increased. Completing a ribbon tier paid out coins and XP, plus a themed item related to the achievement, and could be shared to a player's neighbors as a small bragging-rights post.