Share your tips on Crop Farming

[Riddla]

Is there a tip you recently stumbled across that helped you in farming a lot? Feel free to share your techniques in crop farming, like anything that could help with stockpiling of fertilizers, favorable crop combos you have found, and other quality of life stuff in general.

One thing I've discovered is that you can trade twigs/grass very early to catcoons for a high chance of obtaining common crop seeds, such as carrot, corn, tomato, and potato seeds. The process is tedious, but it's nice to rush 4 of those seeds for early giant vegetables.

[IntegerNotFloat]

I love trading to catcoons because they can throw up tentacle spot meaning you don't even have to go to a swamp to get a Tail o' Three Cats or (if you are playing Walter) the Feather Hat.

As for a tip related to farming, I found it useful information for late game that you can use normal seeds for the composting bin considering by that stage you already have the important seeds mass produced.

[ArubaroBeefalo]

i mostly plant in spring so i dont need to water the crops that much. I like tomatoes+dragonfruit combo for wurt

[Frashaw27]

If you do a blood sacrifice, you have a higher chance to get what you want as the seeds will be scared of you.

[zacqiang]

A trick that I usually use is that, I store most of my stuff (hoe, Friendly Fruit, One-Man-Band, bundled crop seeds) in a chest just beside the farm plot to prevent myself from accidentally picking them up when I'm trying to maximize my inventory space for harvesting. And, I can equip the One-Man-Band from the chest and automatically place it back (via picking up my backpack beside the chest) after strolling around the chest for ~1 second to maximize it's use. You just need ~1 second of the One-man-Band to mass-tend all the crops within a 5-tile radius.

[Echsrick]

ok i only realy know the good old POTATO AND TOMATO COMBO its realy easy to make it it works good on autum and spring since thats what both share it goes something like this

P P P               potatos
P X T                potato nothing tomato              
T  T T                 tomato

that way you realy sould always get big things if you do it and then there is something i somewhat know that is what i call the
"big warly triple deluxe"
its pepper garlic and onion if you ask and you need more then 1 small field for it to work and i forgot the best season for it but just balance the 3 things around so at least 4 of the same are close and they all give each other nutriends

[QuQuasar]

• Nutrients are easy to restore when you know how.
  • Manure can be farmed en-masse by giving a pig 4 monster meat and a bunch of stacks of light bulbs. You can also get a lot of guano from bats, as well as from feeding spare seeds to a caged bird.
  • Rot is everywhere all of the time, to the point that a composting bin is simply overkill. Compost makes for good fuel, though.
  • A full bottle of super growth formula is as cheap as 1 kelp and 1 ash, and has 5 uses. You'll just need to bring back an empty bottle the first time you go sailing.
• Don't eat your first random harvest. Give it to a bird for more crop seeds so your second harvest can be giant.
• If you can't be bothered with crop combo's, "potatoes and toma root" is all you'll ever need. Grows in both autumn and spring, and both crops provide health if cooked over a firepit and have sanity recipes in the crockpot. Eat the tomatoes first, since they spoil faster.
• If you can be bothered with crop combo's, this is the cheat sheet I use.
• Crop farms pair well with Lureplant boat farms. Beefy greens and veggie burgers are very powerful.

[HowlVoid]

Work smarter not harder, I prefer to have a monoculture and prioritize hunger (corn is a good one). Grow enough to live off of it for a year and spend less time farming. Sanity and health can usually be obtained a lot faster with alternatives or supplement my pirogies with my crop (Wurt may need to do more farming).

I always use a sun caller staff now when I farm since crops don't grow during night and a dwarf star negates this (aka faster growing times).

[Astraia]

Plant Tomatoes and Potatoes together, Potatoes and Tomatoes are hunger efficient and Potatoes are also health efficient

[QuartzBeam]

5 hours ago, ShadowQueen said:

Potatoes are also health efficient

So are Tomatoes.

[Spino43]

I kinda prefer Potato because it grows in Winter, and Tomato isn't.

But Tomato also allows you to make two 33 sanity dishes which are pretty good.

These two crops are at their own top tier really, and they pair up with each other for giants!

[kiwikenobi]

I like to plant tomatoes and dragonfruit. 2:1 ratio of tomatoes to dragonfruit has each crop fully fertilize the other, so you get giant crops when they're in season, which is half the year for dragonfruit and three of the four seasons for tomatoes. After getting the friendly fruit fly, all I have to do is water them, and I can even skip that in spring most of the time. I use tomatoes to make vegetable stingers for sanity, or as vegetable fillers for other dishes, and dragonfruit for pies for hunger and health. Even if they don't grow giant out of season, I find I always have an overabundance of produce when growing just those two crops. I used to use a whole digamajig and make four plots for myself when I played solo, but I never used all of the resulting tomatoes and dragonfruit, so I started only making two plots, and there's often still too much, but not as ridiculously too much as before.

Probably there are more efficient setups, but since I always have too much food from my farms anyway, I don't need more efficiency. ^o^;>

[Captain_Rage]

'Efficiency' also means you could get the same yield with a smaller investment. If you are constantly overproducing it doesn't sound very efficient. xd

[ArubaroBeefalo]

2 hours ago, Captain_Rage said:

'Efficiency' also means you could get the same yield with a smaller investment. If you are constantly overproducing it doesn't sound very efficient. xd

Bundle wraps exists

I only farm 1 spring every many in game years

[Parusoid]

I rarely use crop combos or go for oversized crops
I mostly aim for 11 stress points which is 1 crop + 1 seed (so i can replant after harvest)
Planting a crop seed in preferable season renders watering and fertilizing unnecessary

The only thing i need to do is plant at least 4 crops of the same kind nearby, not plant random seeds to avoid weeds and talk or play music to them only once (without having to talk to them every stage) this will yield 11 stress points

That's also great for mass farming specific crops like garlic pepper or corn for spices and powdercake using wickerbottom's book: 10 seeds + 0 nutrients + 1 book = 50 crops
 

[Riddla]

Speaking of Wickerbottom's horticulture book, a thing I tend to do with her is first plant random seeds on the plot, water them, then wait until the 1st stage to kill weeds, since they suck out nutrients and also make plants unhappy. After getting rid of weeds, I water once more, and then use the horticulture book for a bigger seed yield. Then I use seeds which favor the current season and plant them depending on how the nutrients are balanced out, so for example if it's Autumn, I do stuff like Potato + Tomato (1:1), Pumpkin + Corn + Potato (1:1:1), Garlic + Pumpkin + Potato (1:2:2), and use more Horticulture while watering those for guaranteed 1-2 seeds per harvest.

Wickerbottom's Horticulture book is sadly hard-coded to never grow giant vegetables, even if you use it on vegetables at their final stage of growth. Even if you fully water them, one-man band them, and give them perfect amount of nutrients, they will still not grow giant, however they will give you 2 seeds per harvest.

An extra thing about giant vegetables: as soon as they all finish growing, pluck them out. After harvesting them however, you can leave them on the ground, because their spoiling time is massively reduced compared to normally grown vegetables. That way if you have a lot of food already, you can break them later in a lot of days later, just hover your mouse over the giant vegetables to see their status once in a while, they get "Stale" and "Spoiled". Breaking them in any state (except rotten, of course) will yield fully fresh vegetables, so it's nice to keep giant vegetables around in case of emergency.
Just keep in mind to harvest them first, they rot rather quickly while still buried.

When you play as Wormwood, you don't need to till the farm tiles with hoe, you can simply just plant seeds inside the tiles like wild crops. It's a pretty convenient thing to take advantage of, since using hoe feels sluggish and annoying, and you'll also save up a bit on flint/gold and twigs.

Like zacqiang said, you can mass tend crops with One-man Band, it's especially useful during early days when you can't access friendly fruit fly just yet and you wish to feed a lot of players through gardening. It's a worthy investment which can also suit well even beyond spring if your fruit fly ends up being killed suddenly. Also a nice minor synergy with Wickerbottom's horticulture book, you can play the instrument as your vegetables rapidly sprout if you wish to get a lot of crop seeds.
Use the One-man Band roughly for one second, and then switch out - crops will be tended almost instantaneously, you'll waste durability for nothing if you keep playing it for too long.

[fsp98]

In the beggining, I make two double plots.

On the first plot, I mostly just farm what vegetables/fruits I need in the moment. I make sure to keep at least 4 of each of all the useful seeds - melon, potato, tomato, dragon fruit - in either a fridge or a wrap. I occasionally help the plants by using 1 or 2 composts.

On the second plot, I just keep forget-me-lots. Even if they are wilted, I make sure to keep 1 or 2, so they can repopulate. I like to use the tea for sanity, but I understand there are probably easier methods.

Later, you can expand these plots with another digamajig.

[QuQuasar]

4 hours ago, filipsperl said:

On the first plot, I mostly just farm what vegetables/fruits I need in the moment. I make sure to keep at least 4 of each of all the useful seeds - melon, potato, tomato, dragon fruit - in either a fridge or a wrap. I occasionally help the plants by using 1 or 2 composts.

Of note: compost won't help potatoes and dragonfruit. With those seeds you'll probably want to be giving your plants manure instead.

 

20 hours ago, HowlVoid said:

Work smarter not harder, I prefer to have a monoculture and prioritize hunger (corn is a good one)

Smarter not harder it is then. Let’s math this out.

 

Goal 1: the simplest and most efficient way to use crops to fill a bundling wrap to the brim with raw healing, sanity, and hunger.

I suck at the game make full use of my characters health/sanity reserve, so I like to have health and sanity restoration in my food.

I'll use crop combo's, because I'm too lazy to fertilize my crops.

I‘m going to focus on the tomato/potato combination since intuitively that seems like it will be the most rewarding, and can be grown in both spring and autumn:

 

• Each farm plot can grow 8 plants.
• At 2.75 vegetables per giant plant, that’s 22 vegetables per plot.
• So we need 2 plots for a stack of 40.
• Let’s assume a 2x4 garden (two digamajigs).
• That will produce 2 stacks of potatoes and 2 stacks of toma-root, plus some spare for the salt box.

 

Cooked over a firepit, that’s a good 3000 hunger points (40 days) and 3200 health. Not a bad result. But I still want sanity in my wrap, so let’s see what we can do.

 I see two options here: fancy spiralled tubers, or vegetable stingers.  The former will require two stacks of twigs, and one stack of filler: honey would be easiest. This will give us 600 sanity points. For 80 twigs, that doesn't seem optimal.

 The latter requires two additional stacks of vegetable filler and one of ice. Sure we could use stone fruit, but since we’re already farming giant vegetables, let’s go ahead and farm up an additional two stacks of vegetables.

 

• Add another digamajig and you’ve got a 2x6 garden.
• Great! We now have 3 stacks of potatoes and 3 stacks of toma root.
• All three stacks of tomatoes can be crockpot’ed with ice to make one full stack of vegetable stingers.

 

Great! Our wrap now has 4000 hunger points (53 days), 2520 health and 1320 sanity. Not a bad haul for a single bumper harvest.

 

------

 

But you said your interest was not health and sanity restoration, but simply raw hunger. Okay, let’s see.

Goal 2: ALL OF THE HUNGERS.

Intuitively, I think pumpkin-corn-potato in autumn will likely be the best crop combo for raw hunger. Of these, only the potato needs to be cooked.

 A tri-culture crop has one disadvantage, though: we won’t be able to make optimal use of the 4 spaces in the bundling wrap.

 

• With a 2x4 plot, we have 24 plants of each type, which means 66 vegetables of each type: 3 stacks of 40 and 3 stacks of 26.

 

No matter what we do, we’re going to have quite a few left over vegetables. Regardless, let’s assume a full stack of each type plus an extra stack of 26 pumpkins. That’s 4475 hunger points (nearly 60 days) in a single bundle! Plus an extra 1300 in the salt box, to bring it up to a total of 77 days, meaning it'll will easily last you till next autumn before you need to grow another crop. 

Not bad for a 2x4 farm plot.

[Cheggf]

Whenever I farm I place four separate 2x2 plots in a square with one tile between them, and a fire pit at the center. I find it aesthetically pleasing and it allows a good production of crops. I also prefer farming underground instead of on the surface, but it isn't too big of a deal. No wildfires, no faster spoilage in the summer, no frozen lakes in the winter, no frogs or mosquitos at the ponds, and a few other minor conveniences.

A lot of the crops people think are bad are great. Toma root can make salsa fresca for sanity or eaten cooked for health, but they do spoil fast. Garlic can make a good filler and a few sanity dishes. Onion has done good dishes as well. Most of the plants are good.

[QuQuasar]

1 hour ago, Cheggf said:

A lot of the crops people think are bad are great. Toma root can make salsa fresca for sanity or eaten cooked for health, but they do spoil fast. Garlic can make a good filler and a few sanity dishes. Onion has done good dishes as well. Most of the plants are good.

Agreed. Most of them have some use. You do have to weigh them against other crops that consume the same nutrient, though.

Growth formula consumers:

Carrot: Bunny hutches.
Pumpkin: hunger.
Onion: sanity recipes, Warly.
Pomegranate: health.
Toma Root: health, sanity recipes, also consumes compost (balances manure consumers).

Compost consumers

Corn: edible raw, low spoilage, powdercake.
Garlic: grows in all seasons, Warly.
Asparagus: health and sanity recipes, grows in winter.
Durian: hunger for Wurt.
Watermelon: sanity, temperature control recipes, also consumes manure (balances growth formula consumers).

Manure consumers:

Potato: health, sanity recipes.
Dragonfruit: very efficient hunger/health recipe.
Eggplant: why would you ever grow this what is wrong with you.
Pepper: temperature control recipes, Warly.

[Horsheen]

I'm pretty lazy, so I like to use a self-sustaining crop combo and just talk to and water 'em whenever they need it

Depending on what you're growing depends on what season you should plant in, personally I plant a few times in spring for sweet sweet dragonfruit, cuz I'm a sucker for dragonpie.

I'd recommend you read Quartz' guide for self-sustaining farms, it's a pretty handy thing, I'll leave a link to that here 

 

[Ohan]

Farming gets really fun imo when u can wean off the guides and wing it on the spot 

here i first planted 6 asparagus in each plot (for veg stinger) near the end of winter and fertilized each plot with 12 rot, then i realized i could fill the remaining three spots with potatoes and have them be fed by the manure produced by the asparagus. So free potatoes for hunger or filler for veg stinger!

after i harvested all the potatoes and asparagus in early spring i filled all 4 plots with 9 tomatoes each and fertilized each plot with 9 rot. (i need heaps of roasted tomas to heal my beef)

because of the previous crops the soil was maxed out on growth formula since both potatoes and asparagus produce it. Which was awesome because even though ive sailed to lunar island and back at this point, i still dont have a single bottle 

This kind of crop rotation is really fun i think  u can turn cheap and abundant rot into precious growth formula which can be really handy early on. winter into spring chains are also extra favorable because watering basically takes care of itself in both seasons. 

Spoiler

 

the nutrient sheet cheat:

• asparagus: eats 2 arrows of compost, produces 1 arrow of both manure and growth formula
• potatoes: eat 2 arrows of manure, produce 1 arrow of both GF and compost
• tomatoes: eat 1 arrows of GF and 1 arrow of compost, produce 2 arrows of manure

 

 

[Falkenpelz]

After planting, scatter some of Pearl's hell's bells on the plot so that everytime you walk across it, the bells' highly melodic, very entertaining "Plink" gives the plants the same amount of happiness they would get from your sweet voice.

[BeeClops]

burn da weeds

seriously, design your garden so you can burn everything down, it's such a time saver if you want to use it after a long break. 

[ArubaroBeefalo]

11 hours ago, Ohan said:

 

this screenshot gives that much pleasure that i think should have rate +18

1 minute ago, BeeClops said:

burn da weeds

done