What did the game mean by only harvesting as much as I need?

[dermaniac]

Hi!

I'm relatively early in the game (Level 3 on Furrowfields). At some point the dialog in the game suggested, that seeds only grow a limited amount of crops, and so I should only harvest what I need. Or at least that's how I remember the dialog.

I didn't quite understand that. The food doesn't spoil, does it? So it shouldn't matter whether I harvest it in advance and stockpile, or only harvest it when I need?

So far, I've been harvesting every time crops were grown up. Now I have a crate with over 200 cabbages and over 300 wheat and it just keeps piling up. Will I ever need that much food? Is there a mechanic later where I sell it like in Stardew Valley?

I just generate so much food already - at such an early level - that I don't know what to do with it other than just stuff it in a chest that will last my village for decades :-D

[justmeb249]

Your crops only produce so much. If you use up your supply you will have to do more work then needed. Remember to take all your seeds with you when you leave the island. That means you have to dig them up when you leave.

[genoforprez]

Honestly that message is technically correct but isn't something you will probably ever have to worry about, especially if you are a hoarder type of player.

All that it means is that when you plant any one seed (e.g. one wheat seed) then that one seed will yield harvestable wheat maybe 3 or 4 times and then it will disappear. So if you want to keep your field completely full of wheat or continually producing wheat, and if you don't want to completely exhaust your wheat, you should know that you will sometimes have to replant. The seeds don't last forever. And you might want to be a little bit conservative, at least in the early parts of Furrowfield.

On the other hand, if you just never harvest the wheat at all, it will just remain fully grown and ripe and will not spoil. You are not required or pressured to harvest it when it's ripe.

Very early in Furrowfield, when you have very few seeds to work with and it's hard to acquire new seeds, it's theoretically possible to blow through all your seeds and then just not have any left. That means it's also theoretically possible to blow through all of your food and put yourself in more danger of hunger. It could also theoretically make some of the Furrowfiled objectives harder (e.g. the one where you have to plant like 50 different seeds of six different types) if you exhaust them too much.

But as you probably discovered, you eventually have tons of seeds (especially a ton of wheat from ants in Furrowfiled), so running out of food isn't really a serious concern once you get to a certain point.

But considering that each new story chapter island makes you start from zero, this lesson to be careful how you blow through seeds/food in the beginning might be a tip for later chapters too.

[dermaniac]

Thanks a lot for your comment!

The thing I don't get is this:

> it's theoretically possible to blow through all your seeds and then just not have any left. That means it's also theoretically possible to blow through all of your food and put yourself in more danger of hunger.

Isn't it all the same, though? For simplicity, let's say I have 250 seeds that each produce 4 yields before they disappear. What does it matter whether I take my time and only harvest what I need, or I always harvest everything and stockpile? In the end I will have 1000 yields to feed my people no matter which way I did it.

[genoforprez]

I guess it depends on how you're storing it. If you're just putting it all in your bag, then it doesn't really make much difference if you're harvesting it all or not.

On the other hand, if you're putting it in a chest somewhere accessible to NPCs, then they will remove the food from the chest and cook it and/or eat it. (This is good if you want or need the hearts, but that's all you get in return, so it's okay to choose not to feed them or to feed them only the worst food lulz).

It also matters in the case of some quests in Furrowfield that require you have to have X number of crops planted. If you are all harvested out with nothing else to plant, that means you're gonna have to find seeds or grind for them.

it also matters if you want to have a bunch of fields planted for aesthetic reasons but run out of the kind of seeds you want. Still, this seems unlikely to happen to most people, as you'll finish the chapter and leave before that ever happens, but it theoretically could.

I think for the most part the text about "only taking what you need" can just be treated as flavor text since the "negative" outcomes of over-harvesting are so unlikely but also very minimal. Even if you ran out of farmed food, kelp and oysters are so easy and abundant to find (either in the environment or in the barn chest) that you're unlikely to run out of food.

Food is a little more tricky in the beginning of one later chapter, so you might feel the need to ration a little more then, but Furrowfield is overflowing with edibles, so there is no real fear of famine.

TLDR: I'd just ignore it haha

[lilisaur]

Originally posted by genoforprez:

it's theoretically possible to blow through all your seeds and then just not have any left. That means it's also theoretically possible to blow through all of your food and put yourself in more danger of hunger. It could also theoretically make some of the Furrowfiled objectives harder (e.g. the one where you have to plant like 50 different seeds of six different types) if you exhaust them too much.

This is not true. Several enemies at Furrowfield will drop seeds. Large Drackies drop Cabbage seeds, the Army Ants sometimes drop Wheat seeds, and the Orcs will drop a 10 pack of a random seed. So even if you've used all the seeds from chests and quests, you still can not ever technically exhaust the supply of seeds because these enemies will infinitely respawn (though the Orcs will not do so until the next morning)

What is meant by not harvesting more than you need is to make the quest to grow 250 crops easier. If you harvest too much, some of the crops will expire and additional seeds will need to be planted. Its really not that hard to get up to 200+ and run into a situation where your incoming seed supply (from killing enemies) is no better than crops that aren't regrowing after harvest. The solution is just to stop harvesting until you've met the 250 threshold (all five Furrowfieldian crops needed, not 250 of only 3 or 4), then you can go back to harvesting them again because it won't matter if you fall under 250 once the quest is cleared.

Later in the story, Farmers will learn to harvest for you. When they harvest, the crop will always regrow after harvest. Ten different crop types must be acquired for this to happen, which is a little past mid-game. Until then you've just got to get used to losing some of your plants every harvest and replanting.

[dermaniac]

Originally posted by lilisaur:

What is meant by not harvesting more than you need is to make the quest to grow 250 crops easier.

This makes a lot of sense. Thanks a lot for the explanation!

[genoforprez]

Originally posted by lilisaur:

This is not true. Several enemies at Furrowfield will drop seeds. Large Drackies drop Cabbage seeds, the Army Ants sometimes drop Wheat seeds,

I literally said this further down. To be clear, I didn't mean that you would exhaust every seed that exists in all of Furrowfield. I simply meant all the seeds you HAVE.

Originally posted by lilisaur:

What is meant by not harvesting more than you need is to make the quest to grow 250 crops easier.

I literally said this, too.

I was probably too verbose and convoluted in my explanation, though, I'll give you that.