Anyone understand compost?

[briancourt2]

It appears like it adds 6% ish to the fertility regardless of how big the plot is. I have been almost always playing with 10x11 then expand to 20x11. This time I started with 5x7 fields expanding by 5x7 until I got 15x7 and I get the same 6% even though the field is much smaller. It appear making small fields is a large penalty here. So once my fields are mature from weeds and rocks, I started the food, but I can't grow fertility with my population because of the number of compost yards I now need. Sure I can use bean and peas to help but the grain is now not possible without a slow steady decline.

[martinolund]

Try multiple fields for the same crop and rotate (like so, tweak as needed)..

Field1
Y1: Clover
Y2: Grain
Y3: Clover
Field2
Y1: Clover
Y2: Clover
Y3: Grain
Field3
Y1: Grain
Y2: Clover
Y3: Clover

This will ensure that you get Grain harvested each year and you get maximum fertility boost.
Experiment :)

[Velico]

I tend to do a little more intensive than martin, but once I get weeds/rocks under control through clover/maintenance/buckwheat, I specialize into grain or vegetable production. For me, it looks like:

Field 1
Y1: Carrots > Clover > Peas
Y2: Rye/Flax > Clover
Y3: Clover > Carrots

Field 2
Y1: Clover > Wheat
Y2: Carrots > Clover > Turnips
Y3: Wheat > Clover

Most of the time this keeps fertility around 75-80% before compost addition, and any disease that pops up doesn't have a negative impact before going away. I also keep my plots 8x8 for the most part so that 3 people are working them. I have a few larger fields for grain to go to my windmills and brewery to ensure enough of a yield. Make sure you move the crop types around each year to account for their preference/tolerance of heat and frost to minimize losses.

[Matthew]

Yep, Martin has the right idea. You can create large fields and reduce each field farmer down to 1 (10x10 or so) or 2 (10x20, 14x14).

Since farmers don't actually need to farm clover, this piles up each farmer on to 1 field so they still get the work done. So even though you have 3 large farms, you only need 1/3rd the farmers to work them.

[Ninjafroggie]

grain is worthless to pursue until you're a very large town anyway until we get production limits in place. Bread just spoils WAY too fast, so you'll be making thousands of bread and throwing most of it away. Stick with veggies early on from your farming, that plus meat from hunting/fishing gets you to tier 2, then add barns and cheese production to get to tier 3, THEN pursue grain. Supplement the lot with fruit from foraging and later orchards.

People are so used to games having grain be the way to go for food production in games that they just go straight for it and dont even consider what's actually going on in-game.

As for the actual farming of grain itself, clearly you're not using the crop rotation system correctly if you're losing fertility without constantly refreshing it via compost. Try this:
yr1: work clover work
yr2: clover buckwheat
yr3: clover buckwheat

Net positive fertility. Make 3 fields, offset the rotation so that 2 are growing grain and one is being maintained in any given year. You can use the higher yield grains if you want, but they'll only just about maintain fertility instead of passively raising it over time. Even using buckwheat you should still make more grain then your people can eat as bread.

[Matthew]

Grain is fine. It is far cheaper to buy one heavy tool than it is to buy 2 (minimum) cattle and either the long, multi-year wait to get a decent herd going or buying out even more cattle. It is useful on low hunt starts to get a consistent second food group to upgrade homes quickly since 1 deer hunter can't cover large populations.

You just can't have bread as a main food source and you need to store it in a cellar which is close to most of your workers so they eat it first.

At some point I'll try to calculate what percentage of total food is good for bread. I'm sure there is a break point where as long as the percent is low enough, villagers eat it as quickly as it is being baked with no rot. Anything above that break point and you shouldn't produce more bread.

[jwinter]

I agree with Ninjafroggie that grain is not good starting crop for a small village due to lack of production limits. Even single miller/baker can turn all grain into bread nearly instantly so that your whole harvest rots and you are most of the year without grain/bread. It is actually one of many traps a new player can fall into at Tier II which is imho badly structured.
Initially it is much better to start with half fields with beans/maint/clover and the other half with clover/maint/beans and keep it for several years until field is near 100% fertility. it will prepare fields for better crops later and yields some food that is enough for starting village.

[Matthew]

^
Yes, or peas / maintenance / maintenance if you want to get weeds/rocks down quickly. I don't think it is worth waiting all the way to 100% fertility, but I suppose it depends on what rotation you are planning on using.

Anyway, OP mentions 20x11 fields. It is obviously not a "starting village". Legumes are best as a staple, but if you are pushing 150+ population quickly then bread is an easy, cheap way to supplement a 2nd or 3rd food source. If you set it up properly, you can get around 50% more food than legume farms. So even if a portion of it rots every year, you aren't necessarily behind in average food.

The advantage over barns is you can start prepping wheat farms as early as you have population for it, then you only need a single heavy tool from Atka. With barns, you can't build it until you get a trading post and then you need to have 1200+ gold. And even when you get it started, milk rots as quickly as bread and you can't slaughter cattle consistently for many years until you get a decent herd.

Again, mostly for low hunt maps. With enough deer/fish, you can just ride legumes/meat for a very long time.

I agree it is an easy trap for new players, but if you know what you are doing you can do bread in T2 and make it work.

[briancourt2]

Guys thanks for the info, kind of already knew all of that. That wasn't my question. The field size as it relates to compost. At 800 population, I see that I need compost to work the fields. I keep my fertility at 100% with rotation. But late game, as population nears 900 the food distance is an issue, so I need to keep farms close to the city, and the way to do that is to exchange one clover for one food source, and then rely on compost to keep between 90-100%. This worked. When I restarted a new game after hitting population 1000, I figured I would try smaller but more farms to give more control over time and what is delivered and saw that this broke compost yards being effective. Note the same amount of farmland, just broken up this time.

Never lower farmers. They eventually start to die from old age, and you will go from 80/60 to 60/60 and it will not work. The issue is farmers all work starting on one field. As you add fields you end up putting them say on all sides of your city, and they have to walk across the large city now. Doesn't work and you will get crop rot. Sure early game you can get away with 5/20 farmers. But you just gave up the "bug/feature" of having more than 100%.

Now early game, grain is not useless. I grow flax. That is a sustainable income. In my opinion better than candles, since you need wood for that, albeit not much. The point is clothes are great income to sell to your city and scales well. Sure you place beehives all around but that is way less efficient for those farmers, and another cause of your farmers spending all their time walking.

Now I have made another assumption, again on compost. My assumption is that if all 3 bins fill up, than the compost yard is full and can't work. So if I am not using the compost, waste pickup also stops working. When you get to population say around 500 the compost starts coming very quick. I am delivery about 3 fields a year. This was perfect with 20x11 plots. 2 3x5x7 plots now take 6 deliveries a year, which with the same population doesn't work.

It feels like the mechanic is compost give x boost regardless of size.

[John Kennington]

Just my opinion, but fertilization doesn't work properly. It is the same no matter what size field, which is wrong. And fertilization should add back more than a few percentage points. That is the whole purpose of fertilizer. Of course, it is still a Beta game, so much can change. But the farming doesn't really work like it should. It should be 1 product per field per season. If you plant 2, you have to fertilize between crops. Right now, it is just gaming to find the best production.

[Ninjafroggie]

Originally posted by John Kennington:

If you plant 2, you have to fertilize between crops. Right now, it is just gaming to find the best production.

That's not neccessarily true...all that's required is to have a net zero or positive total fertility impact across the 3 year rotation. With a net zero impact, you may have years that you lose fertility due to the RNG of fertility impacts, but it's also possible to gain fertility, so in the long term it *should* average out. With a net positive impact, the field will gain fertility over time even without fertilizer. I run the following for my veggie production:
yr1: work, clover, work
yr2: peas, clover, turnip
yr3: carrots, beans

Total net fertility impact is +10, which in game translates to a 1-2% passive increase in fertility per 3 year cycle, even though year 3 has no clover growing between the two crops. For grain, which has a much larger negative impact on fertility (except buckwheat), then yes you can absolutely only do 1 planting per year with a clover to balance it out.

[Ninjafroggie]

Originally posted by briancourt2:

Now I have made another assumption, again on compost. My assumption is that if all 3 bins fill up, than the compost yard is full and can't work. So if I am not using the compost, waste pickup also stops working. When you get to population say around 500 the compost starts coming very quick. I am delivery about 3 fields a year. This was perfect with 20x11 plots. 2 3x5x7 plots now take 6 deliveries a year, which with the same population doesn't work.

It feels like the mechanic is compost give x boost regardless of size.

One of the things you have to consider is how MUCH compost gets used on the field.

While the same fertility increase applies regardless of size( even though it shouldnt), small fields have a problem in that they only use some of the compost. You can see how much actually gets put down by composting a newly built 15x15 field and then using the fertility overlay, you'll see a square of darker green where the compost was put down but it wont cover the whole field. IIRC only 10x10 or 11x11 of the field actually gets fertilized...I'd have to check to make sure, but lets say it's 10x10 for simplicity's sake...that means a full bin of compost is 100 field tiles worth of fertilizer.

This means that fields smaller than this dont use up all the compost already in the bin, so your 7x5 fields with only 35 tiles of farmland only use 35% of the compost bin up. However, this still resets the "decomposing" timer, which takes the same amount of time to run down no matter how much is in the bin. If you're starting the timer with the bin already 65% full, then it'll get full and spill over into needing another bin long before the timer runs down, and the net effect is that you need 3x as many compost bins to handle the waste that one bin could handle if you were completely emptying it every year.

So for small towns, when population is limited and food requirements are small, small fields work well, but as your town grows large enough to handle allocating enough people to farming for larger fields, you absolutely should replace your small fields with bigger ones, because it makes your waste collection operation much more efficient if you're able to completely empty the bin every time you put down compost on a field.

[Yehoodi]

Originally posted by Ninjafroggie:

Originally posted by briancourt2:

Now I have made another assumption, again on compost. My assumption is that if all 3 bins fill up, than the compost yard is full and can't work. So if I am not using the compost, waste pickup also stops working. When you get to population say around 500 the compost starts coming very quick. I am delivery about 3 fields a year. This was perfect with 20x11 plots. 2 3x5x7 plots now take 6 deliveries a year, which with the same population doesn't work.

It feels like the mechanic is compost give x boost regardless of size.

One of the things you have to consider is how MUCH compost gets used on the field.

While the same fertility increase applies regardless of size( even though it shouldnt), small fields have a problem in that they only use some of the compost. You can see how much actually gets put down by composting a newly built 15x15 field and then using the fertility overlay, you'll see a square of darker green where the compost was put down but it wont cover the whole field. IIRC only 10x10 or 11x11 of the field actually gets fertilized...I'd have to check to make sure, but lets say it's 10x10 for simplicity's sake...that means a full bin of compost is 100 field tiles worth of fertilizer.

This means that fields smaller than this dont use up all the compost already in the bin, so your 7x5 fields with only 35 tiles of farmland only use 35% of the compost bin up. However, this still resets the "decomposing" timer, which takes the same amount of time to run down no matter how much is in the bin. If you're starting the timer with the bin already 65% full, then it'll get full and spill over into needing another bin long before the timer runs down, and the net effect is that you need 3x as many compost bins to handle the waste that one bin could handle if you were completely emptying it every year.

So for small towns, when population is limited and food requirements are small, small fields work well, but as your town grows large enough to handle allocating enough people to farming for larger fields, you absolutely should replace your small fields with bigger ones, because it makes your waste collection operation much more efficient if you're able to completely empty the bin every time you put down compost on a field.

Quick question.

Are you saying that smaller fields will use less compost from the compost area?

This way, even though the compost % of the fields go up not matter the size, there is more compost left in the bin when you supply a smaller field than a bigger field?

I have not follow compost that closely, but be nice to know how is works.

Thanks.

[Ninjafroggie]

yes, that's exactly what I'm saying. Early on it's not a concern, but once you start growing it becomes a problem if you dont fully empty the bins. As with all things in this game, efficiency is paramount. Since each bin can only service one field per year, you want to make sure to fully empty the bin, otherwise you need more bins and more fields to put the compost on just to handle the same amount of waste.

[Matthew]

The change of a second minimum worker isn't helping you get across town in time before rot? I don't have the hardware to do 1k towns yet.

But anyway, you can just place down dummy farms in some corner of the map to get access to more farmers if you need them. Don't farm on them, they just raise the maximum amount of farmers you have access to.

If I am understanding the poop convo correctly, what happens when all three bins are getting full but it apparently isn't lining up with the timer? Does the worker just idle until you can unload some of it?

[Yehoodi]

Originally posted by Ninjafroggie:

yes, that's exactly what I'm saying. Early on it's not a concern, but once you start growing it becomes a problem if you dont fully empty the bins. As with all things in this game, efficiency is paramount. Since each bin can only service one field per year, you want to make sure to fully empty the bin, otherwise you need more bins and more fields to put the compost on just to handle the same amount of waste.

Okay, thanks . . .