Farming Tutorial By Reelya

Farming
The profession of farming might seeming confusing at first, but really it's not that difficult if you know how the crop system works. Then, you can forget about how it works and follow some simple to remember routines and get high yields all the time. But be warned - farming is a slow and time-consuming affair. To get the best effects you need to keep farming for at least several hours at a time, and you can't queue most regular farm activities. It's not for the casual players.

General Notes

Crops have two main stats,' 'health" and "growth".

Health% is how well watered your crop is. Each tick health declines by a certain % (different for each type of crop) until health hits 0%. Using the "Water" action on a crop immediately boosts health to 100%, but the decline occurs afterwards so you will see it as e.g. 98%. For chickens, "Feed" is the action instead of "Water" and it uses fresh grain which you must get from growing wheat or barley (barley is best).

Growth% is how well grown a crop is. Each tick, growth goes up by a % proportional to current health. Growth can go past 100% (which is overgrown and gives poorer harvests the higher it goes), and once it hits the "limit" shown in the info for that crop, it drops back to a lower % depending on the crop. It also drops back to the same lower % when harvested, regardless of current growth.

Harvesting: The best harvests occur when both health and growth are high, but growth is less than 100%. This is most easily achieved by letting a crop grow until growth is about 90% (how close depends on the crop as some grow faster than others), then watering and harvesting in 2 consecutive ticks.

Fertility: Is a stat of the plot itself, it increases the amount you get when harvesting, with no other effects. You do the fertilization activity to boost this, which needs 5 compost per tick. The limit is about 100% + 10% per level of farmer rank. As you get higher fertility, increases get rarer. Having high Mood when fertilizing increases the rate and chance of increases. Each night at 23:00 fertility drops 10%. If you boosted it past your "limit" then you won't be able to boost it again until it goes below that limit. Which means you'll probably only be able to fertilize fields every few days once they're at your limit.

Compost:  You can get compost by letting food rot, or buy buying $25 fruit at the supermarket and letting that rot. If you have fresh grain it's better to sell that for $30 and buy the fruit, than to rot the grain, it's faster too. Hunters oftern sell stuff for compost cheaper than $25.

Strength: Stength is depleted 1 per tick while farming, you should eat enough to keep farming for the time period you want to farm for. It's best to queue eating for while you are offline (keep an eye out for 23:00 when food goes bad, though).

Choosing Crops

Currently, the best strategy is to get level 3 farmer growing whatver you want then switch to barley and chickens. '''No exceptions. '''Everything else just sucks compared to the money and food this combo makes.

Farming Method #1 "Cyclic" Barley Row

Pro: It's cheap to set up and doesn't need much space, and won't affect other people's crops, so it will work well on a shared farm. Can save money and grain up with this for more elaborate farm methods.

Con: The first cycle of any day is going to be 2/3rds of average, and each "cycle" takes 3.5 hours, so you really need to be at this all day to make the biggest money.

You need 9-10 crops for this, some mix of barley and chickens. I suggest you just start with 9 barley, and add/sustitute chickens as you get used to how farming works. You'll need some grain from the barley saved up to start the chickens up.

Getting Started: Day 1

- Plant 9 barley, water the 9 barley plants (takes 9 ticks), then spend 6 ticks eating etc. Now do a harvest run as described below.

Harvest Run

Click the first crop and queue the water activity, then click "back" button on your browser twice (or backspace on keyboard twice), then queue the harvest activity. Doing it like this ensures you don't accidentally harvest the wrong one. Do this for all 9 plants. This will take 3 hours.

Then, eat fresh grain for 3 ticks, or fresh meat if you have any. At this point the first crop will always be at "growth: 94%". It's time to start another harvest run, now, and all plants will be harvested at their "optimal point".

When you log on after stopping farming, all your crops will have dropped growth, usually to around 67-69%. Just start a harvest run as normal, it's the easiest and most effective way. You'll catch them all at 94% on the second run (don't forget the 3 ticks for eating after the 9th barley).

Adding a Chicken to the row system

You can add a single chicken coop to your 9 barley row. Place it then feed it once, then feed it again after harvesting your barley (fit it into the 3 ticks of eating you do between rows of barley). Once it's grown to 70% or greater, you can alter your row farming like this:

Do the harvest run of 9 barley, then feed the chicken, then harvest the chicken, the eat 1 x fesh meat. The next two runs you can eat 3 x fresh meat instead of harvesting the chicken again. This will restore your strength so that it stays steady. Or, you can harvest the chicken each run, and sleep overnight.

You can add more chickens, but substitute each one for a barley when you do your harvest.

'Farming Method #2 "Mega" Barley Field'

Pro: Every harvest is the same, you get more XP on average than the row system, and there's no timing to worry about so you can farm as you like. Con: Expensive to set up, doesn't work very well on a shared plot.

Method

- Get a private farm plot, plant a LOT of barley, e.g. 100 or more. You want to place other things, like a row of 10 chickens, and a large sawmill first to make sure you have space.

- Then irrigate the barley for 37 ticks (queue up 35 ticks then 2 ticks right after). Let the health drop back to zero. The crops will now be 96% grown, 0% health.

- Water and Harvest each crop. You can do as many or as few as you like. When all the barley is harvested, let the health drop to 0% on the last ones, then irrigate for 20 ticks. This will refill the barley to be harvested again.