Farming Question

[Tristin]

Sorry if this has been talked about before but,

Is there a penalty to planting crops close to each other? the speed of my crops growing has decreased a lot, to more than an hour. In the picture i have from back to front, corn, tomatoes, onions, broccoli and carrots, all planted at the same time. yet they are all taking forever to blossom.
this was a new farm, my other one had a different issue of, i raked the ground, and then farmed it, the ground would go back up the little bit that i raked off covering the soil, and the plants would stop growing.
https://steamcommunity.com/app/1106840/screenshots/?p=1&browsefilter=mostrecent

[Klandor]

First thing, different crops have a different growing time. I believe Tomatoes grow fastest, with Carrots second. Onions take a few "days" and Broccoli and Corn are the slowest, per my observations

[Tristin]

and yet my corn was ripining, and other then the tomatoes everything else was not. And ive found onions to be slowest of all the crops

[Klandor]

How are you watering your crops? Are you using Sprinklers, yet, or dripping Pipes?

[Tristin]

there is a sprinkler off of a pressure pipe right above the cement blocks, hitting the crops except for one carrot on each side. need to shift those down further.

[Tristin]

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2912247879

[Klandor]

So, the Sprinkler is located at the back, centered on the plot, with 4 rows of Crops. How many Grid Squares does the Crops cover, both away from the Sprinkler and to each side?

[Tristin]

5 rows of crops, 10 long, on both sides of the blocks which the sprinkler is sitting on. so 10 rows in total. 4 blocks long, 2 blocks wide on each side, plus the one block the sprinkler is sitting on. so 4x5 in total.

[westrud]

As far as I can tell, crops need direct sunlight to grow. I am not sure if crops will shade crops next to them or if only world objects like trees and rocks shade them. I have a large drip setup but some crops always take longer to grow because they don't get as much sunlight, and they don't advance growth at all at night. I can't tell if the shadow of the pipes running above them affect growth at all.

I also haven't tried the greenhouse at all, I am not sure if that has any affect on growth rate.

[Klandor]

I can comment on a few things. I suspect use of a Sprinkler may help with Sunlight, as the density of Pipe above the crops is much lower. A single Sprinkler can cover up to a 5 x 5 area off a line of Straight Pipe, while pipes used to drip water require a higher density of piping. EACH PLANT needs its own individual drip and a single Pipe can only serve a maximum of two plants, maybe three on the end of a Pipe row.

I don't think plants block light to other plants, though. I'm just finishing the redesign on my Farm area, moving from mixed Sprinkler and Drip watering to exclusively Sprinklers. I'm currently up to 4 Sprinklers with the plans clustered as densely as I could make the holes in which the seeds to be placed. Each Sprinkler servers a single type of vegetable. One Sprinkler has Carrots, another Tomato, a third Onion, and the last Corn. I have a planned space for Broccoli when I get enough for my next Sprinkler, and a location I can expand to for the Beets, but I don't have any Beets YET... My Onions are just getting to the point of resuming harvest for Soup, but the Corn is not yet plentiful enough. My first harvest of it since relocation is coming up and it'll all be turned back into Seeds. The area around my Farm is fairly clear with no trees to shadow the crops and any hills only having an effect at sunrise or sunset... If I remember correctly, though, sunset is across the "ocean", so that time is not even an issue.

The one advantage of NOT using a Greenhouse is the extra watering that rain gives. Unless there's a growth benefit generated BY the Greenhouse, which I've not heard of, then I see ZERO advantage to it, while the extra water from rain may BE a benefit, especially at the fringes of the Sprinklers...

[Tristin]

i put the single blocks under the sprinkler, just so i can line the crops up nicely, without them going under the pipe. not that i thought about sun. Just that when i get the tractor, i dont want the crops unreachable by being under a pipe.

last night i was on, had the game running for 2 hours with me watching the crops on one screen and a stream on the other screen for about 2 hours. very little grew in that time period, other the tomatoes. This morning, i did the same thing, and harvested the crops twice in about 90 mins. not sure what the difference was. But i wanted to get a YT video out today, but that didnt happen. lol

[goldeagle78]

I'm a little late to this, but I just watched a yt vid by Drae where he mentioned getting confirmation from a dev that crops need light to grow, and it can be artificial. Logic lights will eliminate any shadow spots in your farm, and I've found that once I set them up and turn them on, I can remove all the extra cables and leave just the ones with lights and they stay on. (Can anyone confirm this on their game? Maybe I'm just bugged, lol)

[westrud]

That is very interesting. Using the logic lights to grow the crops opens up a lot of possibilities.

Edit: Just heard the logic shopkeeper say "My lights work great for underground farms"

[Blighte]

Is there a benefit to using T3 soil as opposed to growing on the surface dirt?

[Klandor]

The deeper one places a Miner, the richer the Dirt. T3 Dirt requires a T3 Corestone Miner and T3 Corestone Harvester. One has to work up to T3 Equipment, as most of it cannot be bought. One needs to gather enough Cloutium and Iron to build T2 Miners and a T2 Harvester. One needs to gather enough Cloutium and Corestone to build T3 equipment. All that can be purchased are the T3 tools (Shovel, Pickaxe, and Rake) and Pipes. Purchase of T3 Tools and Pipes requires Prospector Tokens, which are earned through completing Mining Quests.

FYI, picking up a scoop of Dirt from a higher Tier and moving it to the surface does NOTHING in terms of what the Miner will produce. The Miner needs to be PHYSICALLY PLACED in the T2 or T3 Dirt to get the benefits of it. Moving the Dirt does nothing except changing the location of the Dirt (and, therefore, changing it's Tier).

[Alucard †]

Originally posted by Klandor:

The deeper one places a Miner, the richer the Dirt. T3 Dirt requires a T3 Corestone Miner and T3 Corestone Harvester. One has to work up to T3 Equipment, as most of it cannot be bought. One needs to gather enough Cloutium and Iron to build T2 Miners and a T2 Harvester. One needs to gather enough Cloutium and Corestone to build T3 equipment. All that can be purchased are the T3 tools (Shovel, Pickaxe, and Rake) and Pipes. Purchase of T3 Tools and Pipes requires Prospector Tokens, which are earned through completing Mining Quests.

FYI, picking up a scoop of Dirt from a higher Tier and moving it to the surface does NOTHING in terms of what the Miner will produce. The Miner needs to be PHYSICALLY PLACED in the T2 or T3 Dirt to get the benefits of it. Moving the Dirt does nothing except changing the location of the Dirt (and, therefore, changing it's Tier).

He was asking about growing crops on T3 soil, not mining.

Originally posted by Blighte:

Is there a benefit to using T3 soil as opposed to growing on the surface dirt?

There is no difference when growing crops at Surface T1 or underground T2 , T3 except the fact that you now need Logic Lights to even be able to grow crops underground.

Yield and grow timer is the same regardless on what soil you grow them.