wild crops Why I think Wormwood can get absurd with his Wild Crops

[Frashaw27]

Hello everybody, I have come down with the opinion that you all were waiting for. You all were clearly waiting on the edges of your seats in anticipation for this ungodly analysis. 

Okay, time to get serious.

Ever since the RWYS update has been released, the opinion that Wormwood's Wild Crops has been given the shaft. In essence, due to not being able to grow giant crops from them, they have been seen as less then desirable after you start the process of gathering the stuff to spark the fire of farming. Past this point, the zeitgeist has determined the Wild Crops as inferior, which I think is a little bit hasty from consideration. While I won't debate on if the giant crops are better in singular bursts, I will say that when in combination of giant crops, they can easily reach absurd levels. 

The basic premise is that you first distribute and tend to what crops you want to make giant, and then throw all other in season seeds in the ground so that they don't sit around doing nothing. It is basically making it so that you never have any in season seeds in storage and having make a quantitative crop field instead of a qualitative crop field (quantity v quality). Now, the "in-season' part in actually extremely important as that is what is going to help give the brevity to allow for more 2 seeds per crop, allowing you to further grow like a vegan cancer. The process to maintain your bacteria like growth is to simply tend to the crops with the blossomed Wormwood's radius or a One man Band every stage, while the Friendly Fruit Fly acts for your giant crops in your steed, while also bunching together the families of seeds (I have never seen the Wild Crops actually get a point of Overcrowding stress, so idk if they actually do have the ability to have that stress factor, but erring on the side of caution is never bad). This process of familial ties and constant drum banging will get you the double seeds we desire, and makes the process absurdly broken as the growth is exponential, the type of function that gets very silly, very fast.

So I have theoretically proven the idea of how using wild crops can be get silly after a while,  but how does it do in practice. It is time to put my money where my mouth is and so you the screen shots of my concurrent Wormwood-Only world.

How I decided to distribute the plant seeds was to separate the farms into 3 separate sectors: The Proper section where I use the all the bells and whistles on them (i.e. I tilled and watered the crops), The Plantation where I plant the mitosis seeds, and the random section where I plant the unknown seeds in fear of getting weeds.

The Proper Farm:

The Plantation:

The Plantation contains, but not limited to, ~60 garlic, ~50 corn, 9 eggplants, 23 onions, and a singular Pumpkin

The Results of the Plantation after harvesting (No Giant Crops): 

 The sheer amount of seeds would fill Wormwood's sanity ~18 times if they were all planted.

The harvest after both the Plantation and Proper Farm (w/ Giant Crops):

The remaining Giant Crops are going to be waxed for preservation, for decoration.

As we can see from my screen shots, we can see that after a certain point, the amount of potential food will severely grow after each harvest. It is clear that Wild Crops do still have great potential even after the starting of gathering the farming materials. The main point of this post is to show that while every character can now farm more easily, Wormwood's Wild Crops' exponential growth has lead me to the conclusion that they can become easily absurdly powerful, maybe even more so then Giant Crops. But, even if you see my writings as a deranged psychopath, I want to destroy the narrative that Wild Crops becomes inferior to Wild Crops.

Thank any of you who read all the way through, and have a nice day/night/evening/timeless hellscape.

EDIT: I would also like to add two more factors. Time and Space. Time is super important in this and I feel obligated to tell y'all that it take around a whole day of planting and harvest for the Plantation, and thus comes the biggest crux, that it could take to long to plant all of the crops when ever you get a new harvest, and I agree. It is a massive time sink into planting this many crops, but you also get the same amount of effort you put in, and thus mean that you can always reach a counter balence of time to plant that you feel is right for you. Once you feel you have enough crops to to sustain you, just tend to them once instead of every stage, and you wil only get one seed, which will only make the farm be self sustaining, instead of growing.

Space is the big thing that holds back Giant Crops imo, as you need both highly specific other crops so that they grow giant, as well as needing tilled and specialized ground just so that they can grow. While it is possible that you can make this gigantic til farm, you would also be sinking a ton of materials into it, as compared to the seed only cost of the Wild Crops. Even if you do get this giant til farm going, you still could use the runoff seeds to make more wild crops and help that farm even more. There is just so much benefit in using Wild Crops that i hate to see how they are downplayed.

[ShadowDuelist]

Misuto recently showed on a stream this same thing. During spring he just started planting 2x2 wild dragonfruits, and tended to them on every stage, while paired with spring's heavy rain.

He basically got the crop + 2 seeds on every plant, he would then turn each crop into seeds effectively multiplying the amount of plants x3 on each cycle, giving him A LOT of bundles of dragonfruits. Since wild crops only need space, the limit to continue doing this is only spring itself. And even without the rain (summer for example) you'd still get a crop and a seed out of each plant so its still pretty viable.

I haven't tried the new wormwood yet, but I really like that a dedicated wormwood can still feed an entire server cheaply should they choose to. It was sort of like this before RWYS and now it would seem its more engaging and less rng dependant.

[Frashaw27]

14 minutes ago, ShadowDuelist said:

its more engaging and less rng dependant.

While I would agree, the crops you do get is still left up to chance, and thus could screw you over if you didn't get enough of a specific crop, the crops weren't close enough to gain the famial bonus, etc. I even had this phenom occur in the last semi-long running Wormwood world had been put on permanent hiatus (I was salty that I had to run from Dfly), but during that run the first batch of crops gave me a lot of carrots, and thus a lot carrot seeds which allowed it to grow significantly more quickly. While I would say that it is overall less rng dependent, crops still do require that initial "throw at the wall to see what we get, and go from there" approach.

[Ohan]

i dont think any of this is a revelation to be honest. 

4 hours ago, ShadowDuelist said:

It was sort of like this before RWYS

+1

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i think overall you may be overestimating/exaggerating how hard it is to farm Giant Crops past the initial setup, and underestimating/underselling how long it takes to plant and harvest screenfulls of crops. just as an example, to match the amount of veggies 40 giant crops would produce you would have to plant and harvest 110 individual wild crops. Can it be done? yes, but when it comes to time(and space, storage) Giant crops are more efficient, does that mean Wild Crops are useless? no, Wild Crops have the same utility as they did before: space (and now extra time) is their only limiting factor. Also one does not exclude the other you can just opt to go for farmplot Giant Crops as Wormwood later on and you'll still have all his farming perks on top of the efficiency of Giant Crops. 

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I think some people misconstrue the reasoning behind the complaints around Wormwood. Its not that wild crops got worse, but regular farming got better for everyone else. thus encroaching on Wormwood's niche. Farming rework had to happen however since it was simply too impractical/not fun.

With the release of RWYS however Klei compensated for this in other areas like his unique Blooming mechanic, self fertilizing and wetness immunity. Wild Crops are fine the way they are now because his character got expanded way beyond just a farm bot. Right now the only thing that could make him even better is the introduction of more plant mobs that Wormwood can interact with in a meaningful way. (and maybe tiny tweaks to his craftables ) As things are now he only has Lureplants which have a few limited applications like Cave entrance defense and BQ fight, but they're a major step down from the Snaptooths in Hamlet. 

[ArubaroBeefalo]

36 minutes ago, Ohan said:

and maybe tiny tweaks to his craftables

They already "did" this having more healing option to produce living logs and easy access for bones and the buff to the healing wrap

[Ohan]

11 minutes ago, ArubaroBeefalo said:

They already "did" this having more healing option to produce living logs and easy access for bones and the buff to the healing wrap

Yeah i know, thats why i said that part was optional. I think it could be fun if Bramble Traps automatically reset after a few days (so no replacement for starfish) since they're made with living logs, and the bone shards for the Husk replaced with Hounds teeth since they pile up even more as Wormwood because of Bramble Trap. (Or two bone shards, or bit more durability or repairable with fertilizers.) Spoiled fish drop more bone shards but they're also the cheapest source of early growth formula for blooming. Again these are just little things from my perfect scenario wishlist, doesnt mean i dont already use bramble traps and husks as they are right now. 

[ArubaroBeefalo]

7 minutes ago, Ohan said:

Yeah i know, thats why i said that part was optional. I think it could be fun if Bramble Traps automatically reset after a few days (so no replacement for starfish) since they're made with living logs, and the bone shards for the Husk replaced with Hounds teeth since they pile up even more as Wormwood because of Bramble Trap. (Or two bone shards, or bit more durability or repairable with fertilizers.) Spoiled fish drop more bone shards but they're also the cheapest source of early growth formula for blooming. Again these are just little things from my perfect scenario wishlist, doesnt mean i dont already use bramble traps and husks as they are right now. 

changing the recipe to hound fangs will be lovely

[Primalflower]

5 hours ago, ShadowDuelist said:

I haven't tried the new wormwood yet, but I really like that a dedicated wormwood can still feed an entire server cheaply should they choose to

I have done exactly this as the new wormwood, you should try it too, its so much fun to make the combos as you go along