Farming Hermits

[Dondy]

This world looks like it produces some interesting new challenges.

Spawning at shared hearth fires means everyone is fanning out from a central point, stripping resources as they go.

My first character headed for the first caves she found and did dust pile runs. She did two cave systems and got a total of eight cat gold. My second character was started on the second day and did a similar number of dust piles but got no cat gold, and my third character didn't get cat gold from any of the dust piles they could find, but unsurprisingly really struggled to find any dust, so had to cover a lot more territory. I believe this is the way it's supposed to work - there is a limited amount of cat gold available in the dust piles and once they all get bagged they are gone, until enough time has passed for the cat gold chance to increase.

My first character traveling steadily managed to find about ten wild plant stands, and get six types of wild plant seeds. My second character also got six, but my third character born on day three didn't find any. It stands to reason that now people know that crop seeds come from the wild plant seeds and not from ubiquitous www they will scour the place and grab all that they can. I am assuming however that the wild plant stands will eventually re occur, unlike the dust piles.

Interestingly the wild crop seeds do not turn into domestic plants the first time you harvest them. I don't know how many generations it will take but I expect I will be re-planting LOTS of wild tuber seeds in hopes of domesticating them into turnips AND into carrots. Beehives are not the trick to get them to turn into crop seeds. I am waiting to see if they turn into domestic plants after you get the crop up to q10, but I am not holding my breath. On the other hand, I have hopes of eventual radishes!

Solo farming hermits will likely find these two changes a particular challenge. It seems like it is no longer possible to find un-crowded terrain, either by traveling or by spamming alts at random locations. It's too early for me to know if I have merely been unlucky in not finding vortexes, and of course the first week of a new world always has staggeringly high player numbers. However indications appear to predict that the casual solo farming hermit is going struggle to get a toehold. Spawning in collective locations will be quite useful for well organized groups to get ahead quicker. They can assign one person to do caves and another to look for wild plant stands and when the cave explorer discovers they have gotten to all the caves late, or gets repeatedly thwarted by bats and cave rat ko's, there will likely be another member of the large group spawned at a different thingwall who can get to those local dust piles first. It's the same with the wild plant stands. Only a tiny fraction of the solo hermits will get wild crop seeds before the spawns that generated at the beginning of the world are gone.

With collective spawning points, being the first one out the gate becomes really critical. Having to work late on day one is going to leave you spawning into terrain that is extremely picked over. However I have noticed that players seem to be adapting to this by mass producing canoes at thingwalls to try to make dispersal more efficient. It's actually a benefit to the person making the canoes, because if they want to settle near the spawn to get their claim and walls up faster they also want to encourage everybody else to go look elsewhere.


Now there are some lovely new benefits in this world for the player who isn't first rank in terms of reflexes and foraging skills - squirrel caches mean that they can get hides and bones without flubbing the chase repeatedly and using up all their stamina, and also gives them the nuts to raise strength and perception. It is interesting to me that there are no almonds in the squirrel caches - presumably the devs didn't want them to raise will, the important fishing attribute, too quickly! Squirrel caches appear to refill pretty quickly too. I don't think I am merely stumbling on caches that other players have missed. I think some of them are filling up before I look into them again. They are a lovely resource for brand new baby players who can still use ordinary q10 nuts to raise their attributes.

Spawning beds are another benefit for those who would like to mass produce boiled lobster, or are willing to risk getting crab caressed cracking the crabs. The game has shifted towards becoming more of a survival game and less of a farming game.

Solo hermits will always be far behind large organized groups - it's just math. I'm very interested to see if the difficulty getting crop seeds is going to be a big enough barrier that a lot of them get too frustrated to enjoy the game. They face having several extra days without crops to rely on. If they are unwilling or unable to hunt, the delay between spawning and being able to mainly produce the resources they want inside their own pali may be long enough that it's not worth their effort. Of course, they can raise their farming skill long before they see any wild plant stands, and that might mean that when they do finally find some the can turn them into crop seeds with only one or two cycles of planting. Whatever the details are, farming is going to be a lot more tricky to get started. For players who play H & H because they just want to farm and craft, the barrier to entry has gotten rather higher.

[VDZ]

They face having several extra days without crops to rely on.

Early world hermits shouldn't be farming until they have a palisade (dried for 24h) anyways. It leaves marks on the map and draws attention.

[Dondy]

Early world hermits shouldn't be farming until they have a palisade (dried for 24h) anyways. It leaves marks on the map and draws attention.

That's a given. You start your fields when you start your paving, which is after you have gathered the materials to make the pali rush. That has always been a necessary waiting period. The delay that I think will hamstring them is first the competition for seeds, and then the number of cycles that might be necessary to turn wild seeds into a useful product. It appears to me (but with only four separately spawned characters) that there will no prospect of getting seeds now until the wild stands respawn, however long that will be. But perhaps in other areas the stands have already grown back.

[fallout]

Plant seeds now if you haven't already. If you're worried about being found. Just start a wilderness beacon nearby, separate from your claim. Gather tree seeds etc until you have another claim, build a farm with no valuables, profit

[Halbertz]

At first I thought this thread is about farming hermits, and then I realized it's about farming hermits. What a shame.