Farming with Bird Cages in DS/T

[Electroely]

With the Warly update out for everyone, me and some friends decided to start a new world and play together. A few of them picked Warly, and I picked Wormwood (I always do, I love the guy). and decided to farm 4 of the new crops...

For anyone unaware of how bird cages work with farm crops, here's a brief explanation: When you feed a bird a crop, it drops one seed of that crop with a 50% chance of dropping a second seed for it. There's also a chance to drop regular (random) seeds, but those aren't really useful for farming specific crops.
With this system, you would get about 50% more crops than you fed the bird if the 50% chance happened exactly 50% of the time. But it doesn't, so there's a bit of variance in how much you actually get.

To farm specific crops, I usually set aside a specific amount of that crop to feed the bird and the rest gets used up as food. Said amount is 30. By always feeding the bird exactly 30 crops every harvest, I get a relatively consistent amount of seeds, usually around 42-48. And since 30 of those will go back to the bird, I'm left with 12-18 crops as profit.

I personally find it kind of ridiculous that in order to keep farming a certain crop, I have to sacrifice TWO THIRDS of every harvest. Planting 45 seeds takes a long time and it isn't exactly very engaging when all you're doing is right clicking the ground in various spots. And I do this 4 times for 4 different crops (onions, garlic, potatoes and pepper) so the total amount of seeds I get is well above 160. Getting so little (15 of each crop) from farming so much is what I feel is the main problem with farming.

And all of this is only possible for me because I'm playing Wormwood. Other characters would have to build a farm for each and every single seed they want to plant. I don't think I'd get involved in farming at all if I had to build 45 farms to get a decent amount of crops as profit.

I think a nice solution would be to make birds always drop 2 seeds for the specific crop you want, so that the profit from farming is consistently higher (you'd always profit half of what you farmed, which sounds pretty good to me) and to leave the random seeds drop as the only random chance item involved.

If you've tried out farming with bird cages yourself, please let me know what you think of it in the replies!

[NSAiswatchingus]

Agreed. As someone already grinding crops to amass spices, I would love that guaranteed second seed drop. 

Plus, 3 Pepper for 2 spices is a lot of Peppers if you're going for a 40 stack!

[yhslai]

I personally don't farm a specific vegetable. Even Dragonfruit isn't worth the effort. Unless you play DST with Wormwood/Wickedbottom/Warly combo, just don't bother.

[Electroely]

5 minutes ago, yhslai said:

I personally don't farm a specific vegetable. Even Dragonfruit isn't worth the effort. Unless you play DST with Wormwood/Wickedbottom/Warly combo, just don't bother.

That's why I think it'd be good for bird cages to receive a buff. Getting more out of your efforts would definitely make them more worthwhile for more people. The way they are right now most people I see just say that there's no reason to farm crops.

[yhslai]

1 minute ago, Electroely said:

That's why I think it'd be good for bird cages to receive a buff. Getting more out of your efforts would definitely make them more worthwhile for more people. The way they are right now most people I see just say that there's no reason to farm crops.

Yeah. Maybe some rare birds (canary or new kinds of birds) should have better seed exchange rate?

[NSAiswatchingus]

10 minutes ago, yhslai said:

Yeah. Maybe some rare birds (canary or new kinds of birds) should have better seed exchange rate?

That seems like a fair trade off. 

[minespatch]

18 minutes ago, yhslai said:

Yeah. Maybe some rare birds (canary or new kinds of birds) should have better seed exchange rate?

That would mean that the friendly scarecrow would be even more useful in that regard.

[GenomeSquirrel]

While I agree the birdcages are part of the problem, I still think that farms themselves are a bigger one.

37 minutes ago, yhslai said:

Yeah. Maybe some rare birds (canary or new kinds of birds) should have better seed exchange rate?

That will ruin my birdcage color coordination.

[Terra_Zina]

Maybe different birds have different 'abilities' or sorts? Like Canary having a guaranteed chance of dropping 2 seeds of specific veggie/fruit fed and a 50% chance of dropping a third, Redbirds having 10% chance of dropping an extra egg or something like that.

[camelot]

So red bird for tomato and pepper, snowbird for asparagus, crow for onion, canary for potato and garlic? The base would be so colorful

[BeliarBAD]

On 26.7.2019 at 3:26 PM, NSAiswatchingus said:

Agreed. As someone already grinding crops to amass spices, I would love that guaranteed second seed drop. 

Plus, 3 Pepper for 2 spices is a lot of Peppers if you're going for a 40 stack!

what are you planning to do with 40 pepper spicies xxxxD kill all bosses 10 times????? xD

i havent done it yet but with one pepper spicies you can kill solo evry boss so it should be hard to obtain

[NSAiswatchingus]

Just now, BeliarBAD said:

what are you planning to do with 40 pepper spicies xxxxD kill all bosses 10 times????? xD

i havent done it yet but with one pepper spicies you can kill solo evry boss so it should be hard to obtain

New shop in the starting town. Sells each of the spices and spiced powder cakes. I gotta have a stock pile for the shop inventory!

[Gourmand]

I made a post the other day about a similar Warly fatigue. A merchant that sells seeds or crops would be a nice addition, and make farming less tedious.

[BeliarBAD]

1 minute ago, NSAiswatchingus said:

New shop in the starting town. Sells each of the spices and spiced powder cakes. I gotta have a stock pile for the shop inventory!

what xxD are we playing the same game. so you have a shop in your dst server? but whats the starting town?

[NSAiswatchingus]

4 minutes ago, BeliarBAD said:

what xxD are we playing the same game. so you have a shop in your dst server? but whats the starting town?

lol yeah. I'll make a post at 4000 days. At 3900 now. It basically makes DST into more of an RPG experience like Hamlet. I have 22 "shops" across 7 towns, with different "quests" at each town. Different "sidequests" scattered through out the world too for higher rewards. It's on PS4 so no mods. 

[Scrimbles]

Making farming too constant allows you to more easily start spamming the best food recipes in the game.

Which in turn makes don't starve too easy, which it should NEVER be.

I say keep the current system, there's a cost for long term investment.

[Theukon-dos]

1 hour ago, Ogrecakes said:

Making farming too constant allows you to more easily start spamming the best food recipes in the game.

Which in turn makes don't starve too easy, which it should NEVER be.

I say keep the current system, there's a cost for long term investment.

That's the thing though, basically all of the good recipies are either 

A. Dragonpie 

B. Warly's recipes

 

Not only do farms have a very low throughput, but anything that requires farm crops is objectively worse than most other recipes that don't require them

Stuffed eggplant only restores 37 hunger and 3 HP, despite the eggplant alone restoring 25 hunger and a respectable 20 HP

 

Pumpkin cookies only restore as much sanity as taffy, but if you have the honey production to make pumpkin cookies, then you can just make taffy and eat 1 more honey to offset the health cost.

Pepper poppers restore 30 HP while dealing a sanity hit, while pierogies heal more, feed more, and don't cost sanity.

 

And dragonpie is ok, but it's still cheaper to just make honey ham

 

Not only this, but bunny hutches exist. With bunnymen dropping 1 meat and 2 carrots every day potentially, even a small bunnymen farm can give more food and healing than dozens of farms producing dragonfruit.

 

So really, the only time farms are even worth *considering* is either 

 

A. With a Warly

B. With a wormwood

[Scrimbles]

5 minutes ago, Theukon-dos said:

cut reply

That's all the fault of the under developed food recipes, it would be a better idea to create better recipes with stuff like eggplants rather than tuning the entire system to make it easier to farm dragonfruits.

[Theukon-dos]

36 minutes ago, Ogrecakes said:

That's all the fault of the under developed food recipes, it would be a better idea to create better recipes with stuff like eggplants rather than tuning the entire system to make it easier to farm dragonfruits.

None the less, saying that they don't need buffed is complete bogus.

 

Infact, I'm going to have to find asource, but I'm fairly certain that dragonpie is beaten out by a berry farm for equivalent resource cost.

 

EDIT: Math