by Sevenless » Wed Nov 20, 2024 9:01 pm All times given are in real life time, not haven time.
Don't like rambling? Here's my "Keep it Simple Sevenless" version
What you'll need:
Growth time is decided by the planting character, and the planter will also softcap the crop if their farming skill is below the quality of the planted seed. Crop yield is determined by the harvesting character. Getting enough farming skill points, taking the seed boosting skills (Gardening, Plant Lore, Druidic Rite) and the Farmer credo with its growth speed and increased yield are all mandatory for fully taking advantage of what farming has to offer. Inventory space also ends up being very important, which means nomad credo is also quite nice to do after farming credo is completed. Farmers have no Attribute related requirements, but strength to haul things with the lift command ends up being a very nice convenience long run.
Domestication:
Each wild crop can turn into multiple domesticated crops. This requires that you replant the seeds you get three times, and on the third harvest you'll get some domesticated seeds. Wild crops are capped by farming when harvested, so after your initial batch early on it's well worth hunting the various Q30+ patches to see what quality upgrades you can get. Mixing seeds resets the domestication process, never mix seeds during this process.
Which crops you get are based on where it came from, picking two patches of wild flowers side by side will almost always give you the same crop. Go on straight line foraging expeditions away from your base picking one inventory slot worth of seeds from each crop you find. If you replanted everything you get from domesticating that would turn into 9x that volume of domesticated crops which is plenty for anything other than very large villages. Try to grow 3x the number of crops that can result from a wild type to make sure you get most of them, but you'll probably still miss one or two and want to trade for it with neighbours.
Crop sources:
Brassica => Green Kale, Lettuce
Wild Tuber => Beetroot, Carrot, Turnip
Wild Onion => Garlic, Leek, Yellow Onion, Red Onion
Stringgrass => Hemp, Flax
Wildflower => Pipeweed, Poppy
Corngrass => Barley, Millet, Wheat
Wild Gourd => Cucumber, Grape, Hops, Pea, Peppercorn, Pumpkin
Village Development Tips: Stringgrass grows quickly, and mass planting this will solve any early cloth needs like for village banners, beds or snekkjas. Cereals provide straw early on and should be taken advantage of to get your first beehives rolling. With enough effort, early beehives can produce a lot of wax by pollinating your wild crops.
Domestication/Quality Catchup Mechanic:
Wild Windsown Weeds are produced when someone plants a domesticated crop seed and it will copy the quality. This can act as a catchup mechanic quality wise, but generally speaking it's better to just do your own domestication to get crops rolling since you can pick so many wild seeds vs getting one tile worth from a WWW. WWW pool is localized to your continent.
Growth Nodes:
All crops have an invisible growth node system. This is why the wiki basically doesn't have growth times for any crop: Minor growth boosts mess up any chance to really estimate how long crops will take to grow in your particular farm. The fastest node I've ever seen was a beetroot node that grew beets (normally a 3ish day crop with hives) in 24 hours. These are exceptionally rare though, and it mostly ends up as a 10-20% bonus which isn't super noticeable.
Growth nodes have a positive impact on quality gain because it's not how long the crop takes to grow, but how long the base growth time is for quality calculations.
Quality Growth:
Crops currently have a random roll applied to their quality between -2 and +5... per "unit of time" the crop takes to grow at base growth speed. I've never managed to figure out (mostly due to said growth nodes and quality RNG) exactly how long that base time is. What that means is a crop that grows in 1 day (harvested and planted immediately) will have the exact same potential quality growth as a crop that takes 7 days... In theory.
Hiccup with that: Short growth crops will be left unharvested in the field a higher percentage of time compared to long growth crops. If you're harvesting carrots every day, the 3hrs they're done while you're at work translates to ignoring a once a week crop for 21 hours.
Second issue: Cursed crops. The quality growth time is determined by when you can first harvest the crop (to prevent turnips from being quality king since they have that early seed harvest). However, unlike turnips, some crops get a harvest stage that can't be used for quality growth. Leeks have a very early seed stage that doesn't give enough seeds to properly replant leading to them having a "cursed quality growth". Leeks will always suffer, and I believe carrots also lag somewhat because of their pre-seed stage that only gives 1 carrot. Carrots with a strong enough growth node can still be competitive though.
Getting Different Quality Rolls:
Currently the quality rolls are done in such a way that you get large batches of the same crop quality. Every seed of the same species planted at the same time that has the same starting quality will roll exactly the same results (I haven't tested multiple qualities together in retrospect, but it's not really meaningful for gaining quality). To get a different roll, you need to space your plantings out a minimum of 5 hours. There was information from patch notes when this system was introduced stating that it was "5 hours or 2 minimaps of distance" but I could find no evidence of distance mattering within 3 minimaps. That was also like ~8(?) years ago so it could have been quietly changed at some point who knows. My guess is that the addition of continents is when the change happened.
Regional Caps:
Every crop has a regional maximum quality that it can reach via the -2->+5 rolls. When you hit that quality, your rolls will be reduced to -2->+2. Harvesting and replanting normally will grind your quality growth to an effective halt, slowly inching up when you get good luck since most crops let you plant three times off harvesting once.
What this means is you will need to plant 2-3 times per harvest of new best quality to push further. For meaningful growth this requires multiplanting from every harvest, but doing the actual 5hr window is usually too much for a human.
Quality Gardens:
Since you need to spam replant so often, for the purpose of increasing quality I make a small area where I plant small batches of crops. Rather than full 5 hour plant, my strategy is to harvest and then replant the highest quality of each crop once per day (updating my highest quality if the harvest boosts my top quality). Due to speed nodes, you can't predict how big this needs to be using this method without trial and error.
This system leads to a rolling harvest/plant where every day I tinker with every crop. But since it's in small quantities (usually 10 tiles per crop) it's 30-40 minutes of work. I actually much prefer this over the "do nothing for 3 days and then harvest for 4 hours" method of planting larger fields.
Continental Leaders:
The regional cap system has one more layer: Your crop cap is actually "your regional cap OR the current quality of the best crop on your continent". This catchup mechanic has an unintended side effect: If you're not farming on the spawn continent you'll always be significantly behind world top quality. Even if we ignore factions minmaxing this mechanic on spawn cont, the sheer number of different farms constantly rolling increases and pushing the cap higher due to the large population of spawn continent makes it go up much faster than any non-spawn continent's growth.
Beehives:
There is a misunderstanding for many players about how beehives work. They have a massive radius, but can only store the ability to polinate 50 tiles of crop at a time. Since we plant in large batches, that means every 50 tiles of crops needs its own beehive. This can look a bit ridiculous, but it's the reason why people who under-polinate their crops have their crops come in patchy over time instead of in a single wave (the tick updates roll from the north west to the south west if I remember correctly). Some crops with rapid stage changes and powerful growth nodes can cause issues. My beehives couldn't regenerate fast enough (they regenrate 6 tiles per hour) because my turnips grew so quickly, so I ended up needing 1 hive per 40 tiles or so. And to round this out: Remember that wind pollinated crops in real life also don't need hives in game. Hives have a very slow honey/wax production that ignores crops, so don't be fooled into thinking it means they're actually needed.
Hemp, Barley, Millet, Wheat all don't require hives.
Miscellaneous tips:
Guesstimating it, hemp takes about 4 days to grow while flax takes about 5 when not using hives. If you're trying to mass produce cloth without using stringgrass you're better off using hemp early. Small amounts of cloth production are best done with beehived flax.
"The barley/wheat trick": Barley and wheat can be germinated on an herbalist's table as part of the beermaking process. This causes them to gain some of the table's quality, and the resulting germinated seeds can still be planted. This far outpaces natural crop quality growth and makes them the highest quality crops every world as a result. If you don't have your own quality herb tables, buying the seeds or just riding the boosted quality cap are your main options.
As mentioned in my breeding guide, don't fall for the turnip trap. Just make a bigger field and use crops that don't require hives. They produce less food per tile (a one time investment), but produce the same amount of food per harvest action. And trust me if you're a human you will miss your turnip seed window and cry. Long run you spend far more time farming than you do walling off a bigger field anyway. Also noting the herbalist table trick, you want to use wheat or barley anyway to take advantage of that sweet quality increase. Doesn't matter for four legged animals, but your chickens end up soft capped against your food quality long run so you'll want it for fodder either way.
My quality garden this world:
Ends up with 40 tiles per hive to neatly fit with the 10 tiles per crop I've been doing.
You can stack trellises 3 to a tile for higher planting density. It's annoying but it can be done by hand with the ctrl+shift placement system.
Chickens! Make a couple coops to boost quality, but then have coops with no roosters. Drive by and grab eggs as needed while barely increasing workload. This makes mass producing egg curios and egg based foods incredibly easy.
