farming Wild Plants

[AMBLCO]

After watching many people's bases in the launch upgrade I see almost nobody using wild plants and I wonder why. You only need 21 waterweeds, 51 sleet wheat and some shove voles to supply food to a 20 duplicant base feeding them frost burgers with no dupe time being used except for the shove voles. It's even quite easy to setup, you just need one pip and you let the the plants harvest themselves. When they drop their harvest you can sweep everything up with an auto-sweeper and deliver it to your kitchen automatically.

[Zarquan]

The main issue with wild plants is how much space they take.  Pips won't plant plants too close together, so the farms have to be extremely large.  Getting the densest wild farm farm takes a lot of time and micromanagement.  The temperatures would also be hard to achieve and maintain for sleetwheat in th eearly game.  Also, the number of seeds required for that would take a very long time to get (except for sleetwheat). 

I could see myself doing this in the late game, but I would have to consider the space taken when compared to the resources gained through arbor trees. 

[SquirrelTeeth]

I've done a lot of pip-planting and wild farms, and I still find them a bit touchy.  Farm tiles are just very fast and dependable.

Wild plants do require rather a lot of space to be planted.  Both horizontally and vertically.  It takes 4 times as many seeds for the same output because wild plants grew at 1/4 the speed.  51 sleetwheat is "a lot of space" that's also going to have to be temperature controlled.

And there needs to be natural tiles in the proper place to fit it.  So if there's a a gas pocket or sand/snow in a place where you want to plant, then you've got more work to do.  And you can't plant on obsidian or abysallite.

And you still need a pip, and not all maps have pips so it's up to the Printer to enable wild planting.  I think they're kinda slow on putting the seed in too, if I can get three planted per day that's pretty good.

 

Spoiler

Although, it is incredibly useful for making the nature preserve shower: as you can get useful materials and a massive +9 morale from about 18x11 space. Thimble reeds are also pretty good here.

 

[chemie]

51 sleet is 102 tiles of horizontal and more if you stack vertical.  But for me it is more that there would be nothing to build with a wild farm.  I did do wild lettuce since it is a pain to do domestic and not worth the effort.

[MorsDux]

3 hours ago, AMBLCO said:

After watching many people's bases in the launch upgrade I see almost nobody using wild plants and I wonder why. You only need 21 waterweeds, 51 sleet wheat and some shove voles to supply food to a 20 duplicant base feeding them frost burgers with no dupe time being used except for the shove voles. It's even quite easy to setup, you just need one pip and you let the the plants harvest themselves. When they drop their harvest you can sweep everything up with an auto-sweeper and deliver it to your kitchen automatically.

I dont use wild plants as they use much much more time - they are scattered around the world and my farms are located close to the living area and have auto sweepers. Also try scaling that up to 30-40 dupes with hardest difficulty and you will have 10 dupes just walking to and from harvests. And they will harvest then another dupe will come to pick the food separatly, at least most of the time

[blackbellamy]

I use Pips to plant Arbor trees because they take up three tiles anyway.   I have them move my Oxyferns around where my CO2 collects in the early game.  I use wild plants to create a Nature Preserve.   And of course the One Tree that grows in the middle of the Great Hall.   That's about it.  For food I like my plots nice and compact.

[AMBLCO]

 

2 hours ago, Zarquan said:

The main issue with wild plants is how much space they take.  Pips won't plant plants too close together, so the farms have to be extremely large.  Getting the densest wild farm farm takes a lot of time and micromanagement.  The temperatures would also be hard to achieve and maintain for sleetwheat in th eearly game.  Also, the number of seeds required for that would take a very long time to get (except for sleetwheat). 

I could see myself doing this in the late game, but I would have to consider the space taken when compared to the resources gained through arbor trees. 

I plan on doing wild plants late game so it won't be a problem.

2 hours ago, SquirrelTeeth said:

I've done a lot of pip-planting and wild farms, and I still find them a bit touchy.  Farm tiles are just very fast and dependable.

Wild plants do require rather a lot of space to be planted.  Both horizontally and vertically.  It takes 4 times as many seeds for the same output because wild plants grew at 1/4 the speed.  51 sleetwheat is "a lot of space" that's also going to have to be temperature controlled.

I don't care about the space requirements because I will plant them under my solar panels. Temperature control something which stays cold isn't difficult.

2 hours ago, SquirrelTeeth said:

And there needs to be natural tiles in the proper place to fit it.  So if there's a a gas pocket or sand/snow in a place where you want to plant, then you've got more work to do.  And you can't plant on obsidian or abysallite.

You can use algae and a glass forge to make natural tiles by letting the molten glass fall on chunks of algae to create dirt.

2 hours ago, SquirrelTeeth said:

And you still need a pip, and not all maps have pips so it's up to the Printer to enable wild planting.  I think they're kinda slow on putting the seed in too, if I can get three planted per day that's pretty good.

For me they plant more than three seeds per cycle it's more like 10 or so.

1 hour ago, MorsDux said:

I dont use wild plants as they use much much more time - they are scattered around the world and my farms are located close to the living area and have auto sweepers.

The wild plants ca be planted with pips and you can build your farm everywhere and it's better because your dupes do nothing.

1 hour ago, MorsDux said:

Also try scaling that up to 30-40 dupes with hardest difficulty and you will have 10 dupes just walking to and from harvests. And they will harvest then another dupe will come to pick the food separatly, at least most of the time

You can let the plants harvest themselves and sweep the food with an auto sweeper to deliver it automatically to your kitchen.

[Lifegrow]

5 hours ago, AMBLCO said:

After watching many people's bases in the launch upgrade I see almost nobody using wild plants and I wonder why.

Loads of people are using wild planting -many peoples. Where are you looking? Here's the first part of my wild planting thus far : 

22 minutes ago, AMBLCO said:

You can use algae and a glass forge to make natural tiles by letting the molten glass fall on chunks of algae to create dirt.

I prefer to use hot liquid through radiant pipes personally - I tried the glass forge strat in this playthrough and it was a royal time waster. The splitting of the pipes, the deconstructing, reconstructing, 12 plants max per operation, etc etc.

My way is way faster, and doesn't use the door bug either.

Spoiler

 

And then for all your dirt needs :

Spoiler

 

 

[AMBLCO]

3 hours ago, Lifegrow said:

Loads of people are using wild planting -many peoples. Where are you looking? Here's the first part of my wild planting thus far : 

From the bases I've seen so far on the forum and on the discord.

3 hours ago, Lifegrow said:

I prefer to use hot liquid through radiant pipes personally - I tried the glass forge strat in this playthrough and it was a royal time waster. The splitting of the pipes, the deconstructing, reconstructing, 12 plants max per operation, etc etc.

My way is way faster, and doesn't use the door bug either.

  Reveal hidden contents

 

And then for all your dirt needs :

  Reveal hidden contents

Oh really nice I didn't know that thank you. I'm about to create the tiles and you came at the right moment.

[Lifegrow]

6 minutes ago, AMBLCO said:

From the bases I've seen so far on the forum and on the discord.

Oh really nice I didn't know that thank you. I'm about to create the tiles and you came at the right moment.

I think maybe people aren't sharing wild farms because a) it's pretty boring to look at, and b) as soon as pips were brought in, we were all spamming them to high hell

And I'm glad, hope it helps  

[AMBLCO]

@Lifegrow Yes, it helped quite a bit actually because if I would do the natural tiles the other way it would be very long. Also, I won't use a metal refinery because I plan on boiling crude oil to petroleum which will give me the heat to create the tiles.

[Gus Smedstad]

7 hours ago, chemie said:

I did do wild lettuce since it is a pain to do domestic and not worth the effort.

I’m surprised you’d say that. The main issue with a domestic lettuce farm is that it needs salt water, so it’s not renewable until you get a salt water geyser.

Other than that, it’s pretty forgiving. The stuff grows in an incredible range of temperatures, and only needs a tiny amount of bleachstone in addition to the salt water. Yeah, it requires that you flood the farm, but that’s pretty easy to do - just build a short water pipe over it, and disassemble the pipe. Presto, 10kg of water per tile.

If you’re going to automate the fertilization, you’ll want to overpressurize the farm with air, but that’s a lot less work than the CO2 atmosphere mushrooms want. The issue being that bleachstone will offgas in the conveyor receptacles otherwise. 

I suppose it’s a pain if you’re worried about having to make bleachstone, instead of just mining enough. I haven’t found that to be a problem so far.

Worth it? Yeah. It doesn’t take a lot of lettuce to upgrade mushrooms to mushroom wraps, adding +11 morale. It’s also an ingredient in frost burgers.

It’s true you can get the same morale boost with stuffed berries, but going from mushrooms to stuffed berries is a much bigger step, and requires more cooling if your water source if 95 C from geysers.

[zOldBulldog]

Wild plant (or animal) farms sound like a wonderful thing, but there are some problems that me it nearly impossible for the early/mid game, no matter how desirable:

- In an asteroid like terra you can't fit it in the starting biome even if you get pips through the printing pod.  That space is already used up by other things by the time you get the pip.   So, it must be in one of the surrounding slime/caustic biomes and that requires heat management. By the time you achieve it you are done with the mid game.

- Also in terra, you would need to plant in a natural block to be close to your base.   But there is no well known method to place those natural blocks once you mined them.  I saw a video on how to make a natural dirt block... and it involved late game materials and techniques.

- Finally, there are virtually zero tutorials/guides on how to make wild farms.  Even the most valuable one for a beginner (a wild slickster oil farm, using slickster from the printer) is something that there isn't a single tutorial about.    For example, I have a cold co2 geiser and a cool steam vent right next to my base.  In principle I know that I could use those with a gold amalgam/polluted water aquatuner design to produce at least some 22C water to supply and cool my base and co2 at the right temperature to supply and keep a wild slickster (from printing pod) farm at the right temperature.   Of course, designing such a beast is way past my skills at the moment.   But I can dream and try.  Combined with slickster farm plastic even the small amounts of oil from such a thing would let us leap through some of the trickier mid-game problems.

 

[Gus Smedstad]

4 hours ago, zOldBulldog said:

So, it must be in one of the surrounding slime/caustic biomes and that requires heat management. By the time you achieve it you are done with the mid game.

The game still has a long way to go when you start seriously exploiting adjacent biomes and have heat management. I’d go so far as to say that the mid-game doesn’t begin until well after you’re expanding out of the starting biome.

Algae turns to dirt at 125 C. That doesn’t require late game materials. Either run a pipe with hot oil through the tile, or drop some molten glass on it. The bigger issue is that you need algae or fertilizer to make dirt tiles, and I’m personally wary of burning algae until I have an electrolyzer oxygen setup and don’t need algae for oxygen anymore.

Cold CO2 geysers have almost no value due to the low quantities of CO2 they produce. It’s OK to hook them to an existing CO2 handling system because hey, free resources, but a CO2 geyser by itself won’t support anything, including a wild slickster. I do understand feeling like they’re an exciting resource when you’re not familiar with them. I know the first time I encountered one I thought it would be a big deal, like a cool steam geyser. Then I started using it and the results were disappointing.

Slicksters don’t really care that much about temperature. Granted, they’ll eventually die if left below 35 C, but >35 C is pretty common once you’ve expanded. There’s the risk of getting mostly-useless long hair slickster eggs if the environment’s cold, but otherwise not a lot of reason to worry about temperature in a wild slickster farm. Just put it at the bottom of your base where CO2 collects naturally, put in a pump to collect oil, and you’re done.

[zOldBulldog]

1 hour ago, Gus Smedstad said:

Slicksters don’t really care that much about temperature. Granted, they’ll eventually die if left below 35 C, but >35 C is pretty common once you’ve expanded. There’s the risk of getting mostly-useless long hair slickster eggs if the environment’s cold, but otherwise not a lot of reason to worry about temperature in a wild slickster farm. Just put it at the bottom of your base where CO2 collects naturally, put in a pump to collect oil, and you’re done.

That is excellent information.  I can very easily make a pen right outside my base wall, in a caustic biome (40+C) and send the longhairs to a kill chamber for meat. And heat up the co2 by sending it through the steam vent hot water first.

 

Thank you!  One less printer output that gets wasted/rejected.

[MorsDux]

9 hours ago, Gus Smedstad said:

It’s true you can get the same morale boost with stuffed berries, but going from mushrooms to stuffed berries is a much bigger step, and requires more cooling if your water source if 95 C from geysers.

You get 16 morale from frost burger and -15% stress/cycle on top of that. My dupes can walk in puddles all day and im fine at max difficulty. 

[chemie]

9 hours ago, Gus Smedstad said:

I’m surprised you’d say that. The main issue with a domestic lettuce farm is that it needs salt water, so it’s not renewable until you get a salt water geyser.

Other than that, it’s pretty forgiving. The stuff grows in an incredible range of temperatures, and only needs a tiny amount of bleachstone in addition to the salt water. Yeah, it requires that you flood the farm, but that’s pretty easy to do - just build a short water pipe over it, and disassemble the pipe. Presto, 10kg of water per tile.

If you’re going to automate the fertilization, you’ll want to overpressurize the farm with air, but that’s a lot less work than the CO2 atmosphere mushrooms want. The issue being that bleachstone will offgas in the conveyor receptacles otherwise. 

I suppose it’s a pain if you’re worried about having to make bleachstone, instead of just mining enough. I haven’t found that to be a problem so far.

Worth it? Yeah. It doesn’t take a lot of lettuce to upgrade mushrooms to mushroom wraps, adding +11 morale. It’s also an ingredient in frost burgers.

It’s true you can get the same morale boost with stuffed berries, but going from mushrooms to stuffed berries is a much bigger step, and requires more cooling if your water source if 95 C from geysers.

I do not want to bother with bleach stone as I see it as mostly non renewable.  Plus as shown by OP, not much wild lettuce is really needed anyway.   I do not like mushrooms.  BBQ, berries and wheat are just so much better.

[Loscil2]

11 hours ago, Gus Smedstad said:

The issue being that bleachstone will offgas in the conveyor receptacles otherwise. 

Does bleachstone et al. off-gas even while in transit inside solid blocks?

[Aelfled]

2 hours ago, chemie said:

I do not want to bother with bleach stone as I see it as mostly non renewable.  Plus as shown by OP, not much wild lettuce is really needed anyway.   I do not like mushrooms.  BBQ, berries and wheat are just so much better.

My map has 3 chlorine geysers, it's more than renewable

[AMBLCO]

9 hours ago, Aelfled said:

My map has 3 chlorine geysers, it's more than renewable

But it is really difficult to transform chlorine to bleach stone through pufts becaue you need a puft prince and the chance of getting a new squeaky puft isn't 100%.