Hey Howdy Hey Ghostbuste..er I mean Gift Grabbers!
Snow has arrived in Springfield & is it just me or is anyone else have Déjà vu? Christmas looks a lot like Halloween (sort of). Instead of the creepy mist, Ghosts, Gremlins and GOO, Christmas brings us snow, gift boxes, gift bags and gift cards (Geez..what’s with all the G words EA?!) Confused yet? Don’t be…as always the Addicts team is here to help! We’ve got you covered, so that plus the 4 weeks you have to play the update should help you achieve all of the goals! Let’s get right to it by breaking down the “game inside the game”.
If we were Ghostbusters at Halloween we’re Gift Grabbers for Christmas, because that’s what EA is asking you to do here. The object is to “grab” (tap) gifts in your town to collect Gift Cards and other goodies. Gift Cards are the new in-game currency for special Christmas items. Occasionally a Gift Box will spill out a Gift Bag or a Spin Coin when you tap them. Gift Bags are collected to put into your friend’s towns, they’ll help you earn more Gift Cards. Confused yet? Don’t be…let’s break it all down step by step
Gift Boxes:
Once you’ve completed the Too Much Of A Good Thing Pt. 1 Task and Placed the Present Depot your town starts to earn Gift Boxes. The gift boxes appear out of the Present Depot and once you grab them they’ll disappear and be replaced with Gift Cards and other goodies, like gift bags.
Here’s what the Gift Boxes Look Like:
Gift Cards:
Again, Gift Cards are the new in-game currency. Gift cards are red with a green bow and appear when you grab gift boxes. They’ll also appear in a variety of other ways as well. You can also earn Gift Cards while visiting friends towns, completing special event tasks & grabbing Gift Bags.
Gift cards are then collected for personal AND community prizes. Just like Halloween there are 10 personal prizes you can earn from collecting Gift Cards.
Gift Bags:
Gift Bags are the new “Gremlins” of Tapped Out. You can place Gift Bags in your friends towns and they help earn more Gift Cards. In order to place Gift Bags in your friends town they (and you) MUST have completed the first part of the Holiday update (placing the Present Depot, & collecting 10 gift boxes from their present Depot). You can tell if a friend is at this point by checking out the Gift Card counter over their town on the neighbors map. If the counter is more than zero you know they’re able to accept Gift Bags in their town, however if they’re still at “0” then they aren’t quite ready.
Here’s what the map looks like:
All of these neighbors are ready for Gift Bag Drops!
The only other thing I want to mention at this point is, now when you visit friends (who are ready for Gift Bags) you can tap 3 buildings with Gift Cards over them to collect more Gift Cards (and cash). Be sure to collect all gift cards that come out of the buildings in your friend’s town BEFORE leaving. Otherwise they won’t count toward your goal. You can place 5 Gift Bags in a Friends town. Here’s how you do that:
Tap on the gift bag icon in the top right corner. They’ll place the gift bags in your neighboreenos town! Yes, it really is that simple!
We’ll be back periodically with more up-to-date information as we have it. For now, we’ve got to continue to play the update ourselves and see what comes up next!
Have fun Gift Grabbing!
Looking for friends? Check out the ADD FRIENDS area of the site. Unfortunately, all requests not placed there will be intercepted by The Grumple and no one wants that guy mad, trust me.
I haven’t seen any girt cards etc..either for me or in my neighbour towns? Is this a US thang? I am UK based.. Had the tree for ages but have seen no gift tags..???
Ummmmm
This was LAST years event. (hence why the date is 2013)
This years stuff can be found here:
http://tstoaddicts.com/events/2014-christmas-event/
I have over 300 gift bags but can only give 5 to each friend a day. Can I trade them I for gift cards or how do I get rid of them?
Only way that EA has established for us to “get rid” of them is to give them to neighbors. I find I never have enough for all of my 100 friends. Have you maxed out yours?
I only have 3 other friends my account always says can’t add other players. so I just have tons of bags
Try using the desktop manager for Origin instead. Sometimes you get that message due to THEY are full. The manager let’s you see if they are. You can send, delete, and check pending requests.
http://tstoaddicts.com/2013/09/24/easier-neighbor-eeno-management-for-android-tappers/
Thank you 🙂
Question: is it better for my friends/neighbors if I do not collect all available money from buildings in my town, so that more options are available/ready when neighbors come looking for gift cards? And is it better for my friends if, when i visit their towns, i click on higher-reward buildings rather than lesser ones like a brown house? I’m still not sure how that part works.
http://tstoaddicts.com/guides-to-tsto/new-tappers-guide/
Our New Tappers section has a LOT of great info, including “Helping Your Neighbor Most”. Feel free to poke around the page and get some GREAT tips.
For me…I like to leave a few buildings with money on them that I KNOW will take a while to regenerate. I tap on the quick ones to clear them in my own town (Simpsons, Flanders, Kwik E Mart…to name a few). That leaves the others for gift card collection. 😉
where are the community prizes and the global count? I don’t have that anywhere.
Bottom right corner. Candy cane striped trophy. Once you click on it you’ll see personal prizes. From there you’ll see two icons now in bottom right corner. Homer and community. Homer is personal prize. Community is…well…community. So you can switch between each and see numbers where we are at. 🙂
Will I be able to collect all of the personal prizes if I don’t have any neighbors? I have already like 2500 gift cards, any ideas of how many do you need to get the costingtons building? I’m afraid of adding people i don’t know, is it safe?
Costington’s is 30,000 Gift Cards. Check out Bunny’s Calendar to see if you’re on track. It’s doable without friends, but you’ll need to play a lot. Adding friends is safe, they can’t access your information (just don’t provide them with your email address only your screen name). Or you can add others from our Friends page. The benefit to adding friends is you can gain an extra 30 gift cards per friend per day, as well as get presents dropped in your down from them. Hope that helps! 🙂
Well, I guess I’ll add some neighboreenos. Thank you!
Has anyone else not received any spin coins from gift bags? 🙁 Is there any benefit to dropping bags in the “other Springfield”? My son has a bunch of leftovers after dropping the Max of 5 bags per friend every 24 hrs. Happy Holidays Everybody!
No real benefit to dropping them in “other Springfield” other than to complete the task where you have to drop 3 gift bags. As far as the coins…they’re in there. Very rare to find them, but they are in there. I think finding donuts in gremlins was more of an occurrence than coins in gift bags. However, once you unlock the Elf House they tend to have a little bit better of a time finding those coins! 🙂
As always, timely & helpful! Thanks girlfriend! 🙂
Anytime! 🙂
Add me shopreciosa@hotmail.com
I wasn’t able to get my holiday tree. When the task started and I got disconnected i believe before i was asked to attain a holiday tree ( the bigger xmas tree w/ presents under it; not the metal one from Clause Co)What can I do to try to get the tree or where can I find it please help!
Ps send a friend request to solangeles0
Have you checked your inventory? Usually when you unlock a new prize it automatically goes to your inventory.
Add me! My username is nathawali and I’m going to help you all as well as I can! Need neighbors! 🙂
Happy Christmas everyone
Everyone add me! My username is iamjeremyr and I’ll help and give presents everyday! 🙂
I placed my present depot and it’s not giving me presents or saying I completed the task….anyone able to help me out?
We’re hearing reports of this from other tappers. We’re currently investigating things on our end to see what we can come up with as far as troubleshooting from EA, but in the meantime your best bet is to contact EA directly. To do that you can follow the steps Bunny outlined in this post back on Halloween when Lisa & Homer went missing.
As soon as we have any solutions/resolutions we’ll pass everything right along to you 🙂
I haven’t been able to contact ea for help. I hope this problem gets fixed soon im missing it on all the Christmas tasks and gift cards. I’ve tried uninstalling and reinstalling logging out and back in nothing is working.
Bunny outlines how to contact EA in this post from when we had Halloween glitches. Good luck!
http://tstoaddicts.com/2013/10/05/where-is-my-character/
Add me! Need more gift cards!😬
Artpop1996
On the in-game info, it says the Gift Bags count towards the community. it doesn’t say Gift cards…which is true or is it both?
Also, how often does the Present Depot drop gift bags?
Gift bags essentially give out gift cards…so pretty much one in that same. 🙂
As far as the Present Depot, I am trying to see if I can fine tune a count of how many and when they drop. For me it seems like every 4-8 hrs, but I want to be for sure.
But if it’s Gift Bags, then the cards that you collect in other towns wouldn’t count, right?
Cards you collect from neighbors count too. Anytime you see one of those card icons, whether it comes from a present/gift bag from your town or a neighbors town, it adds to your overall count. That is how you hit those goals fast. You collect from neighbors too. This is why we suggest using the “Add Friends” page to maximize your friends and neighbors and hit those goals faster. 🙂
I meant count towards the Community goal.
Can some clarify this. I had 23 gift bags to deliver, so I went through dropping 5 at a time to various friends and also collecting my 3 actions as I normally would recieving gift cards, XP and Cash. All good, then a few friends(after I have exhausted my gift bags) on the actions vanished, no more gift cards hanging over roofs, so cannot get cards, XP or Cash, even though they were at their 24 hr cycle to recieve three actions and 5 gifts.
There was nothing to tap, I even hung around for 10 minutes over a brown house and the Simpsons hoping for something. Is that because I ran out of gift bags and should drop only 1 gift bag per friend to keep the actions going ? Anyone else found this ? Is this a glitch ?
Hmm I haven’t seen this exact thing happen, but we’ll try to recreate this between our A & B games and see what happens. 🙂
“Be sure to collect all gift cards that come out of the buildings in your friend’s town BEFORE leaving. Otherwise they won’t count toward your goal.”
I don’t think that’s true, although the user interface is confusing. If you collect the gift cards, you see your total increase right away. If you *don’t* collect the cards, and exit the town, your card total appears to stay the same… but once you go back to your own Springfield, your total is updated to include those cards. So, no worries about accidentally losing gift cards — unless you put them in a drawer and forget about them ;-).
I updated the new Christmas update and it asked me to place the “present depot” and I did and in my task book it says “done” but the icon is still in my task book and I don’t have the little icon on the bottom right, about the prizes and I’m not getting presents, anyone else have this problem? PLEASE HELP!
Sorry. It seems several people running into this. Try the standard troubleshooting like in this prior post. If no luck, follow the steps in the link within the post to contact EA so they know how wide spread issue is.
http://tstoaddicts.com/2013/12/02/glitchy-gil-deal/
The gift bag icon doesnt appear on my right hand corner of my screen…and I only have one gift bag! why is that?
DO you mean it doesn’t appear when you are visiting friends? It won’t show when you’re in your own town and also appears after lisa gives you a quest to give bags to friends. This happens after you’ve collected three gift bags.
I would really love some extra friends to give some bags to.
Add me: MrJustapersn
Wow…just went through my friends list and saw that some are closing in on 50,000 gift cards…how is this possible?
Either really popular or more likely, donut rushers.
“If the counter is more than zero you know they’re able to accept Gift Bags in their town, however if they’re still at “0″ then they aren’t quite ready.”
Not true, I have a friend who I know for a fact does not play the game any more and still all my friends show 5 on the counter. The only friends that you’ll get the ability to drop gifts on are those that have updated the game which so far for me is about half of them.
The counter indicates how many bags you can give that friend.
It should, but like I said half my friends I can’t give bags too as they haven’t updated the game yet. If it was all my friends that I couldn’t drop gifts on then I’d see it as a bug but right now the behaviour is exactly the same as when the Gremlins were here.
Hmmmmm…. hopefully it all sorts itself out. I’ve been lucky so far as all my friends are definitely active. You may have to cull your friends list.
the gift bag counter is 0-5 showing how many gifts can be left, but the 0 they are talking about is the gift card balance. If your friends don’t have gift cards yet they aren’t ready.
add me too mrluissilv193 daily player
Good Thing Pt. 1 Task and Placed the Present Depot your town starts to earn Gift Boxes. The gift boxes appear out of the Present Depot and once you grab them they’ll disappear and be replaced with Gift Cards and other goodies, like gift bags……..
This dident work for me I haven’t gotten any cards or gifts yet
I am sorry you are still having issues. At this time if none of the basic troubleshooting helps, contact EA. We are still looking into the glitch.
http://tstoaddicts.com/2013/12/02/glitchy-gil-deal/