Should you do farm at year 1?

[Windfly]

Newbie here, after the farm update, should you start putting up farms at year 1? Or should you just focusing on hunting meats on Fall and surviving through Winter?

[QuQuasar]

Either can work. The new farms *do* produce food during winter.  and are a viable source of filler vegetables for the meatballs recipe (as a new player, meatballs are your best friend. Any meat item plus 3 filler will give you them).

However, meatball filler isn't difficult to get, even during winter. Berries and carrots both qualify as filler. Plus, in winter you can get ice, which is also a filler ingredient (and doesn't spoil in an ice box to boot!).

[Cheggf]

Whether you choose to farm in the first year or second I would still gather a bunch of seeds as you're first exploring the world. They'll last 80 days in an ice box so having a good chunk of seeds to start with without needing to go out and get some is useful.

[QuartzBeam]

18 minutes ago, QuQuasar said:

Either can work. The new farms *do* produce food during winter and are a viable source of filler vegetables for the meatballs recipe (as a new player, meatballs are your best friend. Any meat item plus 3 filler will give you them).

In most cases, eating 3 farm veggies raw/cooked will get you more hunger than using them to make Meatballs.

[Cheggf]

19 minutes ago, QuartzBeam said:

In most cases, eating 3 farm veggies raw/cooked will get you more hunger than using them to make Meatballs.

Yeah, most crops will give you 20-40 hunger each while meatballs are 62.5 hunger. Even if you're using the least nutritious crops at 12.5 each that's 37.5 hunger from just the filler, meaning using a large meat to make meatballs will do nothing to the hunger restored while likely lowering the healing received, and using a morsel or monster meat will only barely increase the hunger received.

Meatballs is a trap recipe that people just give with no explanation since it's easy to make, so often people will either make meatballs for no real reason (e.g. carrot carrot carrot meat) or make meatballs that actually gets rid of quite a bit of nutrition (e.g. pumpkin pumpkin pumpkin meat, which turns 137 hunger and 27 health into 62 hunger and 3 health).

[QuQuasar]

9 minutes ago, Cheggf said:

Meatballs is a trap recipe that people just give with no explanation since it's easy to make, so often people will either make meatballs for no real reason (e.g. carrot carrot carrot meat) or make meatballs that actually gets rid of quite a bit of nutrition (e.g. pumpkin pumpkin pumpkin meat, which turns 137 hunger and 27 health into 62 hunger and 3 health).

I stand corrected.

I'd still characterize it as a newbie-friendly recipe when utilizing newbie-friendly ingredients, such as berries, carrots, ice, morsels and monster meat.

Once you gain enough experience to reliably obtain large meat and rarer types of vegetables, you should definitely adjust your playstyle.

[Ohan]

perhaps not in ur first autumn/winter because theres a lot of exploring to do but the first spring can definitely be the perfect opportunity to start farming since the rains will take care of watering and the majority of the crops are in season in spring. If you manage to also get a surplus of crop seeds back in spring u can take them with you as a long lasting food source in the ruins when summer comes if you dont have bundling wraps yet.

 

Once you have the infrastructure and seeds after the first spring/second autumn u can definitely start relying on farms as your main source of food. If you're playing solo, 1 big harvest of 4-6 tiles of Giant produce is more than enough to feed you for an entire season if you prolong their freshness in an optimal way; 

• leave giants unpicked for as long as possible (wiki says it takes 6 days for them to rot on the vine)
• when picked only hammer them as you need them to eat, dont hammer all of them at once. 

 

[Evalora]

you shouldn't be making meatballs with non-monster meat/filler that isn't ice or redcaps ideally

but they are the premiere way to convert monster meat/ice/redcaps/maybe some red berries into a lot of hunger

as for farming a lot of crops (and notably a LOT of common results, particularly in autumn) give either disproportionately large hunger or 20 hp when cooked, new = probably take a bit much damage = getting a bluecap's worth of hp without the sanity hit en masse off harvests will probably be a godsend (cooked potatoes/tomatoes/eggplants/pomegranate/dragonfruit, beware the speedy spoil time when cooked and snug your potatoes 'cause they're also 25 hunger ea cooked, if get lucky with some dragonfruit can try for the gold with them since dragonfruit farm + 40+ dug up saplings will take a huge chunk out of your hunger/healing worries off dragonpie)

[.]

Depends who are you playing.

If you play with Wurt, you should bc the only food that you can get is the uncollected ones and old ones you collect before.

If you play with Warly, you must. Because it's really hard to make different recipes without farm plants.

But farms dont need so much effort. It's just free food.

[ArubaroBeefalo]

If you want. Unless you want to rush other things it helps to have the specific seeds for veggies that gives you healing or sanity (like potatoes) for future fights and shenanigans

Is a sand box, if you feel like you will have fun doing it do it, also isnt a waste of time imo 

[Muzarello]

If you play alone I think you'd be best exploring, even with more people but if there is more players one can focus on the farms, they really produce a lot and can help a team.

[Chesmu]

Question is, can you? if yes then why not.

[Cheggf]

10 hours ago, QuQuasar said:

I stand corrected.

I'd still characterize it as a newbie-friendly recipe when utilizing newbie-friendly ingredients, such as berries, carrots, ice, morsels and monster meat.

Once you gain enough experience to reliably obtain large meat and rarer types of vegetables, you should definitely adjust your playstyle.

If you're using berries & carrots as the filler then all it's really useful for is removing the -10san -3hp from eating monster meat (which isn't even particularly bad penalties) but monster meat can be used for more important things like creating eggs, taking part in better recipes, or turning pigs into werepigs. Using berries & carrots as filler then putting not monster meat in doesn't accomplish much except waiting for it to cook. If you're using ice as the filler then it actually is increasing the amount of hunger restored, but you need to go out of your way to get ice and it can be much better spent on things that need it like ice flingomatics, ice cream, melonsicles, banana pops, soothing tea, asparagazpacho, and the hilarious ice cube. 3 ice & some form of meat might not be a bad emergency recipe but it's not something that should be relied upon.

I think new players should be taught recipes like bacon & eggs, honey ham, and meaty stew. They still use ingredients that new players can get while being much more generally useful recipes than the niche recipe that meatballs is, which is frequently the only thing know how to make so instead of treating it like the niche recipe that it is they treat it like the only thing that's edible. Even if they're unable to obtain meat (even though a koalefant hunt will give 8 & pigs give 1-2) you can still make bacon & eggs and honey ham with just monster meat and morsels.

Also, if we're teaching new players, we shouldn't just tell them recipes and how to make them because that's what causes the meatballs problem in the first place. If we're going to be educating them at all it should be a proper education that says what the recipes are for and what fillers are good to use in them. Not elaborating on what the recipe does and what the ingredients do is what causes me to frequently see people make meatballs with things like pumpkins (137 into 62), make fist full of jam (50 or 75 into 37), and make lasagga (75 into 37). Many people have a misunderstanding that food outside of the crock pot is always bad, and food inside of the crock pot is always good.

I'm not sure if it's what the developers intended, but to me it seems like meatballs, fist full of jam, and monster lasagga are kind of like wet goop. It's like a recipe that gets created when you fail to make a different recipe, but not as penalizing as wet goop. All of those recipes are extremely easy to make whether on purpose or accidentally (requires 1 meat, requires 2.5 or less fruit, requires 2 monster food), they will generally remove or stagnate the nutrition, and they require real specific recipes to get any value out of them if you ever even can.

Also, RWYS's farming makes it real easy to just never use the crock pot and only eat farm crops either raw or roasted.

[Electroely]

I would personally say it would be good to start farming once you have at least 36 seeds. I often get that many in the first autumn so I do start farming. Pumpkins and Potatoes are particularly good crops for early game: good hunger and healing, slow spoilage time and grow through winter.

[Baguettes]

In my opinion, I'll say you should gather and explore during your first Autumn, and focus on trying to survive the following Winter.

When Spring comes, it will become a great time to farm crops, because:
-Constant Rainfall
-Most crops(and useful crops e.g. dragonfruit) grow during this season.

Just my thoughts, though. But yeah, once you have a farm up-and-running, you'll soon have too much veggies to eat in no time.
Keep in mind that you'll have to spend quite the time tending to your crops. If you have something more important to do, leave gardening behind and do that first.

[QuQuasar]

3 hours ago, Cheggf said:

I think new players should be taught recipes like bacon & eggs, honey ham, and meaty stew. They still use ingredients that new players can get while being much more generally useful recipes than the niche recipe that meatballs is, which is frequently the only thing know how to make so instead of treating it like the niche recipe that it is they treat it like the only thing that's edible. Even if they're unable to obtain meat (even though a koalefant hunt will give 8 & pigs give 1-2) you can still make bacon & eggs and honey ham with just monster meat and morsels.

I'm not disagreeing, these are obviously straight-up better recipes than meatballs. But they also require appropriately higher-tier ingredients. Getting access to both honey and eggs means tackling spider nests and bee hives, adventuring through the swamp for reeds, and crafting the intermediary tools required to catch the appropriate animal(s) to imprison. Trivial for an experienced player: less so for an newbie.

My perspective on it is that meatballs is a level 1 recipe for level 1 ingredients. Sure, it becomes redundant once you get access to level 2 ingredients, and most experienced players will skip it entirely, but it still has a place for players new to the game who bound to the base and reliant on rabbit traps to survive their first winter.

[Cheggf]

11 minutes ago, QuQuasar said:

I'm not disagreeing, these are obviously straight-up better recipes than meatballs. But they also require appropriately higher-tier ingredients. Getting access to both honey and eggs means tackling spider nests and bee hives, adventuring through the swamp for reeds, and crafting the intermediary tools required to catch the appropriate animal(s) to imprison. Trivial for an experienced player: less so for an newbie.

Meatballs requires killing spiders, too. Making it with non-monster meat is pointless. The only additional step for B&E is picking 8 reeds from the swamp which are usually available right at the entrance of it. 

[DinsdaleP]

for hunger? not really worth it, unless you're playing Wurt or Wolfgang, there are so much other sources of food around. for sanity, however, farms are downright ridiculous. even just doing toma root + potatoes, one of the easiest crop combinations, allows you to make vegetable stinger with ice, and consequently run around for 7+ days down in the caves without ever dipping below 80% sanity. (15 days spoil time, so they become stale at 7.5 days, no longer restoring sanity)

go for something more advanced (since toma root spoils fast as hell) and you can have over a thousand points of sanity at your fingertips, available to be used up for about a year, even just using a 2x2 farm plot.

[SinancoTheBest]

There is no reason not to. Usually you shouldn't dedicate yourself to farm life right away, trying to get 0 stress levels, as it takes time to amass different fertilizers, crop seeds, tools and farm plots, time better spent on other base-building endeavours but otherwise Garden Rigamajig has a quite cheap recipe and you should totally start planting the random seeds you encounter when exploring- you don't need to pay much attention to watering, attending, weeding, seasons and families. There is no better time to start farming than first year, as an alternative resource for foods and obtaining specific crops. Its especially good in winter since it gives something productive to do for those who are spending lots of time in the base during long and cold nights.