Auto-watering for farms

[Uncrushed]

I love farming, but often feel chained to the farm while everyone else goes off to have fun elsewhere.  Auto-watering would mean that once you had the Friendly Fruit Fly, proper nutrients, and appropriate companion plants, you could just go adventuring and come back to harvest giant crops.  I'm willing to light my farm on fire if that's what it takes to get it watered:

The dwarf star cast in the center of the plot after it was planted makes plants smolder almost continuously.  A flingomatic prevents disaster, but does not water garden crops the way it does for saplings and shrubs. ;-(  The Fire Pump works better than running to a pond with a watering can, but it has to be incredibly close and takes dedication to operate.  The Spittlefish will occasionally water your smoldering garden if it spawns from a nearby Sea Weed (like the one I spawned here with the console).  A fish dropped from your inventory swims away almost instantly and despawns.  The Spittlefish in the Scale-o-Matic does nothing.

Could you maybe:

• Allow gardening on a boat or dock tiles?
• Make the flingomatic snowballs supply water when they melt?
• Allow a spittlefish in the Scale-o-Matic to put out nearby fires?  Even if I had to put one on each side of the garden, that would work great.
• Have some Sea Weeds, or at least Sea Stacks (that you can plant Sea Weeds on) spawn very close to land?
• Make tiles adjacent to water always wet?
• Allow the Fire Pump to work when placed on wooden flooring on land, possibly only adjacent to a pond?  I'm least excited about this one because it's manual.
• Provide some other auto-watering system, such as a canal or irrigation turf/tile?

I'm very open to other ideas.  If anyone found a better auto-watering system, I'd like to know about it.  Any of the above will result in disaster if the flingomatic is allowed to run out while the dwarf star still burns.

[ToteVirus]

I couldn't agree more, probably they will add it with Winnona Skilltree or with a new boss drop since they are adding new stuff for QoL like the portal ice-box or the incoming vortex.

For now, most people use telelocator staff to make it rain: 2 or 3 uses and it will rain. a bit expensive early game but in late game when you get gems every time hounds come.

[Uncrushed]

One little, bitty problem with setting your garden on fire is that if you go far enough off-screen for it to unload for long enough, it ignores the flingomatic and calculates that everything flammable burns up.  Unless you're mono-cropping Dragon Fruit, that kind of limits things.  IDK, I used a `c_gonext()` so that may have messed things up, but I'm still nervous about this.

[lenship2]

eh, imo gardens are already super cheap to maintain and you really only need to water them if you want better results (more effort put into gardening = more food to reap)

[Bird Up]

Wickerbottom can incessantly read the Practical Rain Rituals, but of course that limits you to one character - or max, and you need rain gear.

Telestaff uses speed up rain by ~2 days but its costly.

I don't think these work in winter because it will only snow.

[Uncrushed]

On 12/6/2023 at 12:52 PM, lenship2 said:

eh, imo gardens are already super cheap to maintain and you really only need to water them if you want better results (more effort put into gardening = more food to reap)

Who is your main and what do you use a garden for?  Specific crock pot recipes?  Crafting (scarecrows, bunny houses, Astro-Goggles)?  For Wormwood or Wurt, what you're saying makes a lot of sense.  For anyone else...  I don't know, maybe the Sunk Cost Fallacy is getting me.  I just feel that by the time I make the digamajig, clear the detritus, make the hoe, till, and plant, I've already put so much effort into it that I want to get the most out of it.  Not to mention stopping or backtracking in my travels to pick up every seed, digging the weeds, then the seed and harvest storage...  If I'm going that far, why not go all the way and try for giant?

[lenship2]

21 hours ago, Uncrushed said:

Who is your main and what do you use a garden for?

winona and i make my wormwood slave farm tomatoes for my vegetable stingers

[Popian]

If you limit the number of plants on a tile to 6 and water 4 times per tile you will always meet the water requirement in all seasons with all products assuming normal growing conditions. (Playing with farm info mods can help with learning some additional tricks and cues.)

The tradeoff is losing 6-8 slots of product from the 2 tiles, which can be made up for by setting up more plots with the free space you have (which gets limited by natural light in caves/Brightshade safe zones (which you actually don't need much of because it's generally not as useful as a food source to grow all at once)).

[Uncrushed]

On 12/11/2023 at 9:24 PM, lenship2 said:

winona and i make my wormwood slave farm tomatoes for my vegetable stingers

You are a Winona main, but switch to Wormwood to farm?  You have someone in the real world willing to farm for you as Wormwood when you play together?  I guess it works either way.

Wormwood definitely allows for much less intense gardening.  I'd think you'd deplete the compost in your plot pretty quickly, or do you use companion plants to compensate?  Or does it just not matter?  Stingers are one of the most versatile crock pot vegetable recipes, allowing either Asparagus or Toma Root.  I bet you could just plant any seeds, dig any bindweed, and otherwise, take whatever you get!  Make stingers when you need sanity and cook-and-eat crops like Pomegranate, Eggplant, and Potatoes for health and hunger.  So there's not much reason to save seeds to grow specific crops.  Wininoa even gets 40 hunger instead of the usual 25 for that recipe.  I see how that could work for you.  Thanks for clarifying!

55 minutes ago, Popian said:

If you limit the number of plants on a tile to 6 and water 4 times per tile you will always meet the water requirement in all seasons with all products assuming normal growing conditions. (Playing with farm info mods can help with learning some additional tricks and cues.)

The tradeoff is losing 6-8 slots of product from the 2 tiles, which can be made up for by setting up more plots with the free space you have (which gets limited by natural light in caves/Brightshade safe zones (which you actually don't need much of because it's generally not as useful as a food source to grow all at once)).

That's also going to limit companion planting.  You can't even do 1 dragonfruit and 2 toma root because that would take 3 rows.  Unless you put them across 4 tiles...

+-------+-------+
| x x x | x x x |
| g g g | g g g |
| d d d | d d d |
+-------+-------+
| o o o | o o o |
| x x x | x x x |
| x x x | x x x |
+-------+-------+

x = empty till
g = Garlic
d = Dragon Fruit
o = Onion

So you never have more than 6 plants per tile.  You're saying you can water once (4x to get 100% saturation) at the beginning and not have to water until after you harvest?  Cool!  I'll have to try that!  I'm a little suspicious how well it works in the summer on the surface world, but otherwise, I bet it works great.  Wish I thought of that!

[Popian]

2 hours ago, Uncrushed said:

That's also going to limit companion planting.  You can't even do 1 dragonfruit and 2 toma root because that would take 3 rows.  Unless you put them across 4 tiles...

+-------+-------+
| x x x | x x x |
| g g g | g g g |
| d d d | d d d |
+-------+-------+
| o o o | o o o |
| x x x | x x x |
| x x x | x x x |
+-------+-------+

x = empty
g = Garlic
d = Dragon Fruit
o = Onion

 

Try:

+-------+
| x x x |
| g d o |
| g d o |
+-------+
| g d o |
| g d o |
| x x x |
+-------+

x = empty
g = Garlic
d = Dragon Fruit
o = Onion

[Uncrushed]

9 hours ago, Popian said:

Try:

+-------+
| x x x |
| g d o |
| g d o |
+-------+
| g d o |
| g d o |
| x x x |
+-------+

x = empty
g = Garlic
d = Dragon Fruit
o = Onion

That's much better.  I'll do that - thanks!

[Uncrushed]

21 hours ago, Popian said:

If you limit the number of plants on a tile to 6 and water 4 times per tile you will always meet the water requirement in all seasons with all products assuming normal growing conditions. (Playing with farm info mods can help with learning some additional tricks and cues.)

The tradeoff is losing 6-8 slots of product from the 2 tiles, which can be made up for by setting up more plots with the free space you have (which gets limited by natural light in caves/Brightshade safe zones (which you actually don't need much of because it's generally not as useful as a food source to grow all at once)).

This certainly helps, but it's not enough in summer.  I ran out of water when half grown.  

[Uncrushed]

On 12/6/2023 at 9:57 PM, Bird Up said:

Wickerbottom can incessantly read the Practical Rain Rituals, but of course that limits you to one character - or max, and you need rain gear.

This works a treat!  100% waters a whole plot and it often keeps raining for days!  I had to add fertilizer because I hadn't balanced my crops perfectly and also just to keep up!  She has another huge gardening advantage being able to grow a crop of seeds in seconds just to see what they are.

[Popian]

3 hours ago, Uncrushed said:

This certainly helps, but it's not enough in summer.  I ran out of water when half grown.  

This is because you are not growing giants and there are other stressors slowing down the growth rate so more water is getting lost to the environment. Sorry for being misleading with the wording, the context was on growing giants.

If you want starter crop seeds I would suggest extra tending or using Horticulture books.