Potatoes are the Best

[Maxil20]

42 minutes ago, Sweaper said:

And considering we have multiple and easy ways to get hp and sanity when needed, the amount of potatoes planted will be a waste stat wise, you won't always need hp/sanity, might as well focus on dragonfruit seeds and if a seed grows potato use it for sanity.

Honey itself single handily covers those pretty well too. 8 honey (the daily amount) heals 24 HP, and 2 taffy + 2 honey heals 68.8 hunger and 30 sanity.

I wouldn’t really recommend honey as the food you should always bring to boss fights, but for day to day activities you should be alright with some simple honey now and then.

[Rinkusan]

3 hours ago, GenomeSquirrel said:

If you’re putting in 60 crops per days worth of effort, I promise you can get more than a single honey per box per day. 

Correct me if I'm wrong, but don't bee boxes produce 1 honey per day unless you're physically present to witness the bees pollinating flowers?
 

[Starlogy]

9 minutes ago, Rinkusan said:

Correct me if I'm wrong, but don't bee boxes produce 1 honey per day unless you're physically present to witness the bees pollinating flowers?

While that's true, remember that you can make more than 1 bee box.

[Rinkusan]

2 hours ago, Sweaper said:

A whole server will have at least someone near bee boxes, even if not, you're comparing something that takes two specific characters against something that takes one.

Replanting is a lot of work, 60 potatoes a day means clicking the bird cage for a while, replanting, reading a book, harvesting everything, repeat. Beebox in the long run is less time consuming. And considering we have multiple and easy ways to get hp and sanity when needed, the amount of potatoes planted will be a waste stat wise, you won't always need hp/sanity, might as well focus on dragonfruit seeds and if a seed grows potato use it for sanity.

Now, if you're on a public server and don't care about sitting at a base planting over and over again then yeah, potatoes will carry an entire server, if you find repetitive work that fun, then good for you, I personally won't be babysitting someone and grinding for them to survive.

I'm not, though; I'm comparing a method that takes 2 specific characters plus however many people against a method that takes 2 nonspecific characters plus however many other people. Building a bee farm doesn't have to be a single-person job.

Keep in mind that 60 potatoes is an extremely generous overestimation because I'm assuming that all 18 players in the server are doing absolutely nothing but standing at base and occasionally walking over to the fridge to eat. I'm only making this assumption for the purpose of making a point because if you ARE able to keep an unrealistic amount of inactive players alive, then it should be astronomically easy to keep 18 average players alive.  

I'm trying to contribute to the multiplayer meta, not encourage people to be support slaves to an unrealistic number of lazy bad eggs. Every person in the server has something they can contribute, and if 2 people can single-handedly take care of food, health, and sanity for the whole server while stockpiling excess food for the future, that means someone else is chopping trees, killing spiders, making armor, ruins rushing, killing raid bosses, setting up the shadow clockwork statues, farming reeds, or even helping with the crop planting/harvesting. If you don't enjoy grinding to keep other people alive, that's perfectly fine and totally understandable. However, that also means that you aren't this thread's intended audience because this entire discussion is about potatoes and their amazing contributions to a team dynamic. 

I'm saying that 2 people CAN single-handedly keep 18 base sitters alive and healthy with potatoes; I'm not saying that 2 people SHOULD keep 18 base sitters alive and healthy with potatoes.

[GenomeSquirrel]

27 minutes ago, Rinkusan said:

Correct me if I'm wrong, but don't bee boxes produce 1 honey per day unless you're physically present to witness the bees pollinating flowers?
 

They work similar to spiders, the game won't bother loading any if 0 people are near, but as long as 1 person is close enough to spawn them, they'll seek flowers and make honey. With the large server sizes you're talking about, that probably won't be relevant unless there are multiple bases or you're also delivering food remotely. For the shorter days, I'd estimate that 4 honey per box is reasonable if you're just harvesting once a day, but I'm more used to the active approach. 

[Sweaper]

2 minutes ago, Rinkusan said:

I'm not, though; I'm comparing a method that takes 2 specific characters plus however many people against a method that takes 2 nonspecific characters plus however many other people. Building a bee farm doesn't have to be a single-person job.

Keep in mind that 60 potatoes is an extremely generous overestimation because I'm assuming that all 18 players in the server are doing absolutely nothing but standing at base and occasionally walking over to the fridge to eat. I'm only making this assumption for the purpose of making a point because if you ARE able to keep an unrealistic amount of inactive players alive, then it should be astronomically easy to keep 18 average players alive.  

I'm trying to contribute to the multiplayer meta, not encourage people to be support slaves to an unrealistic number of lazy bad eggs. Every person in the server has something they can contribute, and if 2 people can single-handedly take care of food, health, and sanity for the whole server while stockpiling excess food for the future, that means someone else is chopping trees, killing spiders, making armor, ruins rushing, killing raid bosses, setting up the shadow clockwork statues, farming reeds, or even helping with the crop planting/harvesting. If you don't enjoy grinding to keep other people alive, that's perfectly fine and totally understandable. However, that also means that you aren't this thread's intended audience because this entire discussion is about potatoes and their amazing contributions to a team dynamic. 

I'm saying that 2 people CAN single-handedly keep 18 base sitters alive and healthy with potatoes; I'm not saying that 2 people SHOULD keep 18 base sitters alive and healthy with potatoes.

Just because they "CAN" doesn't mean it's not time consuming. If you're already playing with people that already are competent enough to kill spiders/raid boss, make armor (?), ruins rush, there is no need to mass plant potatoes, they can find stuff while they do their things. Those two keeping the farm going are better off doing something else.

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unrealistic number of lazy bad eggs

Most people playing the game in publics are pretty bad, if you keep filling an icebox of food they will just walk around a base looking for something, find nothing, go back to base, open icebox and eat anything in there whenever it's any season other than autumn.

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Building a bee farm doesn't have to be a single-person job

That's should be great, shouldn't it? Less work than either making a farm and maintaning it or playing as wormwood or having someone play as him and maintaining the farm.

________________________

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because this entire discussion is about potatoes and their amazing contributions to a team dynamic

If they were amazing they wouldn't require that much maintenance, they are okay but not the "best" as you said in the title. There are semi auto farms that are way less time consuming while still being able to maintain hp, hunger and sanity topped off.

Instead of wasting time multiplying potatoes and then maintaining it you will help the server more by making a pig farm before 11, getting stone fruits, making auto spider farms with bunnies and shoveling the same old good stuff. That way you get armor, food, pierogi, spider glands/telltale hearts , silk for either top hat or tent for every season without the need to be replanting stuff to meet the demand

Balanced diet > Potatoes

______________________

Oh, did you know that a long time ago our ancestors would capture rabbits, dry their meat and eat it to be sane, healthy and full? That was considered the best food once upon a time. Yeah, no... let's not go in that rabbit hole again

[Rinkusan]

5 hours ago, Shosuko said:

If someone is playing Wormwood to feed an entire server I assume that means they will rarely leave the base.

If I wasn't going to leave the base I could build a simple setup of 24 bee boxes.  While active this would produce 3.5 stacks of honey each day.  Each stack can feed normal character for 4 days.  This gives an upper limit of 14 characters that can be supported off of a simple bee box setup.  Spoilage time is quite long so reserves can be easily stored for winter or when the base-player wants to leave on some adventure.  It can also be kept up by any player so no single player is forced to be the base player just to keep it going the way Wormwood is required to keep up the plant production.

Gathering the honey is a bit tedious, but so is planting a bunch of seeds, feeding the crops to the birds to generate specific seeds, and then planting fields of these specific crops.  Which is "better" probably comes down to team composition and player choice.  Neither is "bad" in that they can both do the job, but its hard to argue against honey when it comes to low maintanance food sources once they are set up.

I'm still very skeptical because of some of the honey production drawbacks, most notably the requirement to actually be nearby when the bees are doing their thing, but I think this is worth investigating because if what you're saying is true, then I definitely underestimated the amount of honey each bee box can produce as long as someone is nearby. The last time I made a bee farm months ago was a disappointment, but looking it up, it might be because I planted the flowers too close together. I'm going to do a couple of tests, do a bit of research, and get back to you. Thanks for the input. 

[00petar00]

You shouldn't really value crops that much, they are not the best food source overall and they require constant maintenance because of spoilage and if you want to keep them going, not really worth the effort.

Just get rock trees from moon island/kelp or build beeboxes.

There's even the option of making a meat farm but i usually do beeboxes and rock trees and just use lure plants for meat, every year you get a few that you can place for meat. 

Lure plants are actually one of the most useful items in the game you can get.

[Rinkusan]

2 hours ago, Sweaper said:

Just because they "CAN" doesn't mean it's not time consuming. If you're already playing with people that already are competent enough to kill spiders/raid boss, make armor (?), ruins rush, there is no need to mass plant potatoes, they can find stuff while they do their things. Those two keeping the farm going are better off doing something else.

Most people playing the game in publics are pretty bad, if you keep filling an icebox of food they will just walk around a base looking for something, find nothing, go back to base, open icebox and eat anything in there whenever it's any season other than autumn.

That's should be great, shouldn't it? Less work than either making a farm and maintaning it or playing as wormwood or having someone play as him and maintaining the farm.

________________________

If they were amazing they wouldn't require that much maintenance, they are okay but not the "best" as you said in the title. There are semi auto farms that are way less time consuming while still being able to maintain hp, hunger and sanity topped off.

Instead of wasting time multiplying potatoes and then maintaining it you will help the server more by making a pig farm before 11, getting stone fruits, making auto spider farms with bunnies and shoveling the same old good stuff. That way you get armor, food, pierogi, spider glands/telltale hearts , silk for either top hat or tent for every season without the need to be replanting stuff to meet the demand

Balanced diet > Potatoes

______________________

Oh, did you know that a long time ago our ancestors would capture rabbits, dry their meat and eat it to be sane, healthy and full? That was considered the best food once upon a time. Yeah, no... let's not go in that rabbit hole again

I strongly disagree with that first point. Not only am I not at all saying that I'm "already playing with people that already are competent enough to kill spiders/raid boss", even if I was, there would absolutely still be a strong benefit to mass-planting potatoes. 
What I'm trying to say here is:
- Public servers have all types of players, from the veterans to the newbies. This entire thread is about maximizing survivability for those people. It's not about just the incompetent or just the competent. I only gave a scenario where all 18 of them were base sitters to make a point about how efficient potatoes are. In other words, the entire premise of your first point doesn't really apply here because this is a thread about using potatoes to be a better team player in public servers. 
- Even if you had 20 Joeschmo or Don Giani clones all playing on the same server, some of those clones would still starve under your conditions because there are not enough berries/carrots/butterflies/birch trees to support 20 nomadic players of any skill level. At some point, you will have to stop what you're doing and go out of your way to find food in a situation this crowded; either that or bunker down and make some kind of massive farm, whether it's potatoes, berry bushes, avocadoes, honey, etc.

As someone who regularly plays on public servers, I can safely say that that's a completely inaccurate generalization. Base sitters in public servers are a significantly small minority. Do you play on the official servers or one of the steam-group servers?

Aside from the honey farm that I'm still doing some research on, could you list any other massive semi-auto farms that have the ability to sustain roughly 20 people?

The whole point of food farms is to maintain everyone's hunger so that people can go out and do these other non-food-related things, though. No point making a pre-day-11 pig farm to help the server if the server is starving.

 

[Easonade]

14 hours ago, Rinkusan said:

Bee boxes produce honey extremely slowly unfortunately. If you're not standing next to the bee boxes 24/7, the honey production rate is 1 per day per bee box. You need 8 honey to feed a single person per day, meaning you'd need 160 bee boxes to feed a whole server let alone the extra amount needed to keep them sane via taffy.

A Wormwood potato farm, on the other hand, costs nothing but seeds, a single bird cage, a bird net, and Horticulture. It takes 3 cooked potatoes per day to feed a person, meaning 60 potatoes per day if you're excluding other crops that you'll inevitably grow from regular seeds that you have a 50% chance of getting every time you feed any crop to the bird. That's easily doable for a Wicker/Wormwood duo whereas I don't think 160 bee boxes is even possible. 

Here you're literally comparing the worst case scenario to the best case scenario, I do not see how this comparison is fair

[Ezaroth]

8 hours ago, Rinkusan said:

Correct me if I'm wrong, but don't bee boxes produce 1 honey per day unless you're physically present to witness the bees pollinating flowers?
 

The loading area is like 4-screen radius around all players, it's bigger than you think. Besides, the only difference with standing near bee boxes all day and farming all day is that one's automatic and another one takes a lot of effort.

[Yuuko]

6 hours ago, Rinkusan said:

I'm still very skeptical because of some of the honey production drawbacks, most notably the requirement to actually be nearby when the bees are doing their thing, but I think this is worth investigating because if what you're saying is true, then I definitely underestimated the amount of honey each bee box can produce as long as someone is nearby. The last time I made a bee farm months ago was a disappointment, but looking it up, it might be because I planted the flowers too close together. I'm going to do a couple of tests, do a bit of research, and get back to you. Thanks for the input. 

Its good to be skeptical, what I said was based on a maximum collection of 6 honey per box and the ideal conditions may not be ever present.  I play solo so I've never been pressed for food to really measure the production I get.  I decided to start off your investigation with a sample size of 1 with the setup I use for honey farming.

Spoiler

First off an image of my setup

I don't plant flowers in gather spots so I can torch the box and press space to gather quickly so that I do not agro the bees.

Looks like production is about 75% immediately before winter, and about 50% when spring starts, and ~100% throughout summer.  I'm no statistician but you could graph this over a standard distribution to see what your ability to support players would be year round.

Cons:

A limiting factor you might encounter is honeycomb.  Its needed for bundling wraps in addition to bee boxes and not every world spawns a massive supply.  Queen bee does have a chance to drop honeycomb when you hammer her hive so it can be generated albeit slowly.

The setup does take some time to build since you need the boards for the bee boxes, twigs and grass for fencing, and the butterflies for flowers.  If you have a good team of players these resources shouldn't be difficult to amass but if you are carrying scrubs, or are playing solo as I typically do, it might be more of a first year goal considering the other things you might need to do.

Pros:

This set up does scale so you can build a second set and double production, or 4 sets and quadruple it.

As with farms you can use bee boxes in caves provided they are in a natural light area.

You only need to be near the bee boxes for them to do their thing, so within a screen or so is good.

It is very quick to harvest, taking about a quarter of an in game day to gather from all boxes.

Conclusion from my sample of 1:

I'd say for carrying complete noobs where you want to provide a safe base and let them explore, and are willing to continually perform tedious tasks at base, Wormwood can carry with potatoes well enough.  It takes very little resources for him to set up a bird and its an easy command to tell players to bring you back seeds.  IF you have a wicker its not tough for her to make an agriculture book to speed up the process but even without her you should get a decent crop of potatoes before winter, and in spring time you can hit the ground running.

However if you have a moderately experienced group who can feed themselves for the first season and provide you the right materials a honey farm is probably the lower maintenance setup allowing more flexibility with your time at base, and the chore of hanging out there and harvesting honey can be rotated between players as needed.

You could consider a transition too - starting with Wormwood + Wicker for the first year setting up potato farms and when you can build the honey farm use the Celestial Portal to swap out Wormwood for someone who doesn't get harassed by bees and switch over your food supply.

(Complete side note, Wormwood should not agro bees in spring.  They are following him because he's a flower not because he's a threat.  Klei plx)

 

[Booklover]

You could think of it like this:

Honey is food over time. You have to wait.

Potatoes are food over time that takes longer than honey but with a Wicker becomes instant food.

So honey is like a set-it-and-forget-it type of thing. You drop it near base and make sure it's springproof so you can harvest it every night/everytime you felt like it whereas potatoes take longer and more care but is more spontaneous. Thus if you are really hungry and can't wait then use potatoes with Horticulture. If you (like me) are often a base sitter, arranging stuff and basically being a maid then honey is way better.

[Sweaper]

9 hours ago, Rinkusan said:

No point making a pre-day-11 pig farm to help the server if the server is starving.

Starving in autumn is a new low, if that's happening you might not even be able to make any farm.

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Aside from the honey farm that I'm still doing some research on, could you list any other massive semi-auto farms that have the ability to sustain roughly 20 people?

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making a pig farm before 11, getting stone fruits, making auto spider farms with bunnies and shoveling the same old good stuff

If that's not enough hammer some moleworms. Bunny farm near frog ponds setpiece. And in the worst case scenario put bunnies near merm houses if the base is in swamp. But these are overkill. Since you can still find stuff while doing your thing.

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At some point, you will have to stop what you're doing and go out of your way to find food in a situation this crowded; either that or bunker down and make some kind of massive farm, whether it's potatoes, berry bushes, avocadoes, honey, etc.

In a 20 nomads server you can survive by spreading out both in caves and out, if someone can't survive on their own they should go on a <10 player server, but we all know only a minority of the players play as nomads. And there are less time consuming food farms than potatoes, that alone make them not the "best" as you put it, now if we consider that other farms give you stuff for crafting some pretty good stuff, well, why maintain an over the top amount of potatoes?

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Even if you had 20 Joeschmo or Don Giani clones all playing on the same server, some of those clones would still starve under your conditions because there are not enough berries/carrots/butterflies/birch trees to support 20 nomadic players of any skill level.

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they can find stuff while they do their things

Which player skill now? Joeschmo/Don G. or any?

Anyway, I never said nomadic play style , yes finding stuff while they do their things is part of nomadic except do their things could be building farms or anything else for that matter and if you're not finding stuff while doing something then your worlds you play in must be very barren and small.

What are exactly my conditions? You mean berries/carrots/butterflies (I won't even bother with birch trees)? What about meats, those are everywhere, you can easily get 20+ of those in a evening+night if you so wish. I'm pretty sure those 2 players are smart enough to figure out that they can survive without having two characters maintaining a potato farm even if there were 20 of them in a server.

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Do you play on the official servers or one of the steam-group servers?

Both, why? As long as the server is unmodded I don't care which I enter as long as it's on a season I want to play in.

[GetRektKids]

 

 

 

 

 

 

4

5 minutes ago, Sweaper said:

Starving in autumn is a new low, if that's happening you might not even be able to make any farm.

In a 20 nomads server you can survive by spreading out both in caves and out, if someone can't survive on their own they should go on a <10 player server, but we all know only a minority of the players play as nomads. And there are less time consuming food farms than potatoes, that alone make them not the "best" as you put it, now if we consider that other farms give you stuff for crafting some pretty good stuff, well, why maintain an over the top amount of potatoes?

 

20 PEOPLE!!!! WHAT!!!!

 

I can barely handle 6 people, I'm having to set the player max at 4! (I play PS4) I'm the ONLY one supplying food to the pub plebs and every time I add food, it's gone. It gets to the point where I say "I'm creating MY OWN personal fridge and if anyone takes food from it, it's an instant kick." THEN WHAT DO YOU KNOW! My food starts CLIMBING at an exponential rate... I hate pub plebs...

[z3rox12]

On 7/1/2020 at 4:16 AM, Rinkusan said:

...

this came to my mind hile reading your post XD

[Misuto]

Just wanted to clarify some math on this topic since there seems to be some confusion. 

 

Honey: Using this design of just 14 bee boxes you can produce well over 160 honey in a 4 minute work period. So low estimate, that means a single player spending 4 minutes will produce 3.33 days of food for a server of 6 people eating only honey. This is repeatable and sustainable with no extra input from the users. This can be scaled up easily. Since this is only 14 bee boxes, it's very easy to build this set up at a few areas spread out across your world allowing players to access beehives regardless of where they are on the surface or in the caves (using evil flowers in the caves). This also helps with lag compared to doing say 50 bee boxes in one area. 

 

Potatoes: 3.33 days of food from just potatoes requires 60 potatoes to be eaten, in order for the 60 potatoes to be eaten, 180 must be grown as crop seeds are given at an average of 1.5 per crop fed to a bird. Using Wormwood, this would require 4 days to grow so you'd need slightly more than 180, but let's say the extra non-crop seeds make up the difference. 

 

Now, the time to do all this is hard to be exact, you have to figure out how long it takes to harvest 180 crops (1 second pick animations for each dictates a hard minimum of 180 seconds if travel time did not exist.), How long it takes to feed 120 to a bird (hard minimum of 60 seconds at 2 per second), and how long it then takes to plan another 180 potato seeds. If we generously say that you can plant at 1 seed per second given travel times that's another 180 seconds, and furthermore, to get the full value of a potato we have to take the time to cook them at a rate of 1 per second so another 60 seconds minimum for cooking the potatoes. This leaves us with a bare minimum total time of 8 minutes of work that only wormwood can do to create the same value of food as the 14 box honey method did with only 4 minutes of active work input. Literally half as effective. And character specific. 

 

 

Potatoes and many other crops are excellent when you magically just have them, but the time investment even under the absolute best circumstances always far out weighs the benefit they provide. Crops need to be buffed in some way that requires less effort from the player to be a competitive method of food production or they will just fall short when you try to compare them to most other sources of food production. 

 

 

Also, if I were wormwood I would never invest that much time into potatoes when pumpkins exist. They provide 50% more food per crop and don't need to be cooked to get that value meaning even more time saved. 

[Yuuko]

3 hours ago, Misuto said:

Just wanted to clarify some math on this topic since there seems to be some confusion. 

 

Honey: Using this design of just 14 bee boxes you can produce well over 160 honey in a 4 minute work period. So low estimate, that means a single player spending 4 minutes will produce 3.33 days of food for a server of 6 people eating only honey. This is repeatable and sustainable with no extra input from the users. This can be scaled up easily. Since this is only 14 bee boxes, it's very easy to build this set up at a few areas spread out across your world allowing players to access beehives regardless of where they are on the surface or in the caves (using evil flowers in the caves). This also helps with lag compared to doing say 50 bee boxes in one area. 

Curious - why evil flowers in caves?

Also - Are you sure about your bee box arrangement?  You would have to harvest 6 honey from each box twice to reach 160 honey out of 14 boxes...

[sawchuk519]

Evil flowers don't wither when deprived of natural sunlight.

[Yuuko]

2 minutes ago, sawchuk519 said:

Evil flowers don't wither when deprived of natural sunlight.

Does this include natural light areas in caves where you can grow plants?  I haven't had issues with flowers in caves...

[Misuto]

7 hours ago, Shosuko said:

Does this include natural light areas in caves where you can grow plants?  I haven't had issues with flowers in caves...

 

Flowers need natural light or they wither. So if you plant them in the natural light areas then they don't wither. If you plant them in the ruins where natural light does not exist, then they will wither if you don't convert them into evil flowers. 

 

 

Also I'm certain about the 160 minimum honey from that set up. You can very easily get more, especially during summer with the longer day cycles. 

 

The set up is very particular, the road gives you a run way so that you lose aggro from bees much faster, meaning the bees nearly immediately go back to work pollinating flowers rather than wasting time chasing you. So to do it, harvest up to two non-consecutive bee boxes on one end then run to the other side (i.e. from the 8 boxes to the 6 boxes). Repeat. If you want to do this on consecutive days, leave some honey in the boxes as you approach the end of the day as this allows you to "wake up" the bees faster than naturally possible the next start of day (by picking honey all 6 bees immediately leave the box and begin pollinating rather than releasing a bee every 30 seconds or so.) 

[Yuuko]

4 hours ago, Misuto said:

 

Flowers need natural light or they wither. So if you plant them in the natural light areas then they don't wither. If you plant them in the ruins where natural light does not exist, then they will wither if you don't convert them into evil flowers. 

 

 

Also I'm certain about the 160 minimum honey from that set up. You can very easily get more, especially during summer with the longer day cycles. 

 

The set up is very particular, the road gives you a run way so that you lose aggro from bees much faster, meaning the bees nearly immediately go back to work pollinating flowers rather than wasting time chasing you. So to do it, harvest up to two non-consecutive bee boxes on one end then run to the other side (i.e. from the 8 boxes to the 6 boxes). Repeat. If you want to do this on consecutive days, leave some honey in the boxes as you approach the end of the day as this allows you to "wake up" the bees faster than naturally possible the next start of day (by picking honey all 6 bees immediately leave the box and begin pollinating rather than releasing a bee every 30 seconds or so.) 

That's good to know - so far I've only set up bee boxes in natural light.  While I do base at least partially in caves I rarely base in the ruins.  Are there specific advantages to that?

Ah - I guess that does make sense where you can wake up all the bees by gathering.  I might try a morning harvest and see how that effects my production.  I play solo so I'm already drowning in honey, but its interesting to play around with efficiency.  Thx for the tips.

[WoodieMain45684]

Only problem with potatoes is you can't grow them in winter.

Better stock up before the deep freeze!

Or you could just rely on stone fruit during that season. (Or ice tbh)

 

I'm actually starting to collect the bull kelp stalks during my first visit to the lunar islands in pubs as of late.

They only grow in 3 days, never have to be fertilized, have been recently been made a veggie filler, and can be dried for an easy 10 sanity per bull kelp. Not to mention they only take a quarter of a day to dry.

Only problem is there is not a way to make more bull kelp stalks aside from pushing them in with a boat, though in most pubs the 20+ stalks on the island is more than enough.

At least if you use the kelp with 1 meat for meatballs

[Rinkusan]

On 1/9/2020 at 7:51 PM, Misuto said:

Just wanted to clarify some math on this topic since there seems to be some confusion. 

Hey Misuto welcome to the thread. Apologies for the late responses to both you and @Shosuko

Regarding your math, it seems like you disregarded Wickerbottom's Horticulture book as you made the point that it required 4 days to grow and that the extra seeds would make up for that long period of growth. Keep in mind that the scenario here is 20 people in one server with 1 exceptional Wormwood player, 1 exceptional Wickerbottom player, and 18 average players. The normal seeds that you get from the bird-feeding and Wickerbottom's Horticulture make a huge difference in the calculations.

Looking back, I unintentionally muddied the water by mentioning "60 potatoes" in one of my potatoes vs bee boxes replies. I'm not actually arguing for a "potato-only" Wormwood farm; I'm arguing for a "potato-priority" Wormwood farm skewed heavily in favor of potatoes, garlic, and dragonfruits, with potatoes being priority #1. I tried to make it as clear as I could in the OP that a huge advantage of potatoes compared to other crops is the two sanity recipes, with one being extremely accessible and the other being moderately accessible but more efficient if you happen to have garlic. The goal is to keep all 20 players healthy in every regard - sanity included. 

I'm still crunching some numbers with crop statistics, comparing the two farms, and playing around with the bee boxes, most notably trying to figure out the best ways to make as many bee boxes as early as possible because setting up the bee farm with a sufficient number of bee boxes seems to be this method's biggest weakness. I unfortunately say this too often because I have weird work hours - including the weekends - and an unusual amount of physical fatigue as of recently, but I will get back to you and Shosuko with what I've found as soon as I can, either here in this thread or in a thread of its own depending on how much information I have to share.  

 

[CameoAppearance]

I'm noticing an undercurrent in this debate of "if something isn't optimal, you should never do it ever, instead you should find the objectively optimal action and do that every single time", and that baffles me. It's good to have a variety of options, including some that are suboptimal for mass farming and only shine in the early game or when you're dealing with specific other problems at the same time or for a certain playstyle. You shouldn't have to be able to feed two dozen simultaneously-active people entirely on potato-based foods in order for maintaining access to potatoes to be deemed worthwhile. And when I say "maintaining access to potatoes", I mean something potentially as low-effort as saving a handful of potato seeds in your base's storage and then when you want a potato handing them over to a Wormwood if one's handy or planting them in the rows of barely-used farm plots every megabase seems to have despite the inefficiency of farm plots as a food source.