Giving up on farming - crazy expensive

[Bilbo Baggins Sr]

Before the patch, seeds and manure was automatic - you didn't have to purchase them - the farmers was getting them automatically out of thin air.
After the patch - no freebies anymore. Which throws the game in HUGE imbalance.
1) Manure - you need pigs
1.1 - craft pigsty - around 10 minutes real life.
1.2 - buy pigs - they are on the other side of the map. 10 minutes walking. Then each pig is 1900 - and you need a pair - 3800.
1.2 Food for the pigs. Bought 50 wheat grains for 1000 gold. you can buy wheat from the same village where you bought the pigs - another 10 minute walk. But will not be ready by next year. With 50 wheat grains you can make 5 animal feed. How long will it last????
so far investment - 5000 gold + 30 minute time. No manure yet produced.
2) Seeds - first investment will be hefty - 1000 for each seed type - 2000.

So I saved money for horse, but I spent it on farming.

Why do you need farming - to get a horse!
You can live without farming:
- Clothes are not a money maker.
- Food you can roast meat till they start belching.
However, the horse is a game changer. It seems the whole game is now build around the horse.

I'm leaving this game - I'm moving to ARK. It was interesting at the beginning, but this patch killed the game.

[Latriam]

do the other animals not give you manure
I would ask the developers to have any kind of animal give you manure.
given pigs and cows should give the most but.........
Just a thought

[Zhorge]

Originally posted by Bilbo Baggins Sr:

Before the patch, seeds and manure was automatic - you didn't have to purchase them - the farmers was getting them automatically out of thin air.
After the patch - no freebies anymore. Which throws the game in HUGE imbalance.
1) Manure - you need pigs
1.1 - craft pigsty - around 10 minutes real life.
1.2 - buy pigs - they are on the other side of the map. 10 minutes walking. Then each pig is 1900 - and you need a pair - 3800.
1.2 Food for the pigs. Bought 50 wheat grains for 1000 gold. you can buy wheat from the same village where you bought the pigs - another 10 minute walk. But will not be ready by next year. With 50 wheat grains you can make 5 animal feed. How long will it last????
so far investment - 5000 gold + 30 minute time. No manure yet produced.
2) Seeds - first investment will be hefty - 1000 for each seed type - 2000.

So I saved money for horse, but I spent it on farming.

Why do you need farming - to get a horse!
You can live without farming:
- Clothes are not a money maker.
- Food you can roast meat till they start belching.
However, the horse is a game changer. It seems the whole game is now build around the horse.

I'm leaving this game - I'm moving to ARK. It was interesting at the beginning, but this patch killed the game.

Your inability to buckle down and try to understand the changing nature of an early-acess game (especially when they patched out the easy-button exploit you abused) is YOUR problem and your inability to willing to work past these new, TRIVIAL barriers is also your problem, not the game's problem.

I have no problems, and I mean ****ing ZERO, with fertilizer or the farming cycle or earning income with farming.

So how does it work? Why is it so easy? This is how I do it:

Right now I'm running 140 squares:

10 Beets
10 Carrots
20 Cabbage (2x)
25 Flax
25 Wheat
25 Oats
25 on a rotating basis, usually flax.

Simple, you over produce foodstuffs. I use cabbage because I can put two crops of it in any one year. 20 squares of cabbage yields about 175 heads each harvest or about 350/year.

I have one pigsty with 3 pigs. I also have one gatherer and one hunter. Plus I hunt whenever I'm on the map so I have hundreds of meat plus a good supply of fur & leather.

Each harvest of cabbage I use 50 of the cabbage to make POTAGE FOR SALE. (Like I'm doing right now.) The rest I let rot. I also rot my extra carrots & beets, though it's only a handful as that's what I feed my village with. Further, that is supplemented by cleaning out my food-storage where all the food at 50% is put into my rot chest.

That makes hundreds and hundreds of rot. Which I then make into fertilizer. Plus I pull down quite a lot of manure every year which also makes fertilizer.

RIGHT NOW IN MY GAME:

Fall and the harvest is in. I have ONE HUNDRED FORTY (140) FERTILIZER and haven't bought fertilizer for years. Additionally I have 31 manure (makes 15 fertilizer) and 8 rot (need two more to make one). In the rot chest I have:

234 cabbage
100+ mushrooms
131 berries
and some odds and ends (rotten meat, rotten soup, rotten stew, couple of carrots and a beet)

In my seed chest I have

118 Wheat
124 Oats
51 Flax (sold the excess already)
30+ of each food crop (onion, cabbage, beets)

I have no fertilizer or income problems. I make hundreds and hundreds on flax sales. I make hundreds on potage sales. I also diversify and make hundreds on selling flax thread, iron hammers, small leather sacks, and fur capelets.

All because when they changed the game (for the better because farming was a major easy-button exploit) I sat down and determined fertilizer production was key to a successful farming economy.

[Zhorge]

Originally posted by Latriam:

do the other animals not give you manure
I would ask the developers to have any kind of animal give you manure.
given pigs and cows should give the most but.........
Just a thought

Just pigs. I wish the others did. But I understand what they're doing - each animal contributes in a unique way.

Chickens & Geese give you eggs & feathers (geese for sure, not sure about chickens).
Pigs give you manure.
Cows give milk.
Sheep give wool.

Never had goats and horses and they were introduced during my hiatus so I have no experience wit them.

[BulletHole]

wow this post is just whiny.. i mean just off the bat oh no i have to work for resources they arent magically appearing... watch me list out the whole 2 steps it takes to get pigs producing manure.... and you got it wrong.. you dont need to feed them.. so half of your complaint is just wrong, and the other half is only partly right, you can also make fertilizer out of rot, and so listing out how hard it is to get pigs is just.... sad..... and whole game is focused on the horse... i mean just no.. thats literally the smallest part of the game....

beyond all of that the real reason that the update broke the fertilizer and farming is the bug where it destroys the stored up amount that is not used.... i mean you whined about something that is broken but not the part that is broken....

[Capuzzi09]

Originally posted by BulletHole:

[...]
beyond all of that the real reason that the update broke the fertilizer and farming is the bug where it destroys the stored up amount that is not used.... i mean you whined about something that is broken but not the part that is broken....

Farming works just fine. I figured out that most probably very big fields and too many field workers can cause this problem. Just reduce your farming to smaller fields and assign less field workers. You really don't need that much. I mean - who needs 200000 flax plants per seasons and the like? For what do people need millions of coins? It's just ridiculous.
I have a couple of fields (just 5 fields and the biggest is 5x6) and everything works well for me without a single bug.
And (this might be surprising for some of you) I earn a good coin from that.
I only have a small field (3x4) where I grow onions and I cook meat with gravy from that to feed myself. At the end of the year I cook everything which was left from the last harvest and sell it.
I grow wheat and flax on the 4 other fields, sell the surplus of grain (which I don't need for replanting in the next season), craft linen cloth and sell all that.
I never had any issues paying my taxes and my money increases steadily.

So again, reduce the size and number of fields, stop the ridiculous amount of overproduction and from what I experienced so far it should work just fine.

[[vv]guruthos]

I absolutely agree with Bilbo. And precisely because it is still in the test phase, criticism must be urgently welcomed. I also see the last change in terms of farming critically. In my opinion, the game is still unbalanced in terms of costs and income. Since the update I have stopped farming. Because I don't depend on it either for the production of goods or for food. A suggestion would be to use the fertilizer optionally to increase the yield, but still be able to plant without fertilizer.

[Capuzzi09]

Originally posted by Bilbo Baggins Sr:

Before the patch, seeds and manure was automatic - you didn't have to purchase them - the farmers was getting them automatically out of thin air.
After the patch - no freebies anymore. Which throws the game in HUGE imbalance.
1) Manure - you need pigs
1.1 - craft pigsty - around 10 minutes real life.
1.2 - buy pigs - they are on the other side of the map. 10 minutes walking. Then each pig is 1900 - and you need a pair - 3800.
1.2 Food for the pigs. Bought 50 wheat grains for 1000 gold. you can buy wheat from the same village where you bought the pigs - another 10 minute walk. But will not be ready by next year. With 50 wheat grains you can make 5 animal feed. How long will it last????
so far investment - 5000 gold + 30 minute time. No manure yet produced.
2) Seeds - first investment will be hefty - 1000 for each seed type - 2000.

So I saved money for horse, but I spent it on farming.

Why do you need farming - to get a horse!
You can live without farming:
- Clothes are not a money maker.
- Food you can roast meat till they start belching.
However, the horse is a game changer. It seems the whole game is now build around the horse.

I'm leaving this game - I'm moving to ARK. It was interesting at the beginning, but this patch killed the game.

You're terribly wrong about almost everything you've written.
But the worst part is that as soon as you need to think a tiny little bit strategically and act smart, you give up. Wow. Seriously?

I'm just picking this one statement out of your rant as an example:

Originally posted by Bilbo Baggins Sr:

2) Seeds - first investment will be hefty - 1000 for each seed type - 2000.

Seriously?
From everything you wrote above, I suspect you are continuing an older game. So you should have enough money for everything you complained about.
If not - have you ever thought of starting small?
1000 for each seed - how many do you want to buy and how big did you think you wanted to make your first fields?
Just start small, put a few (or even one) small fields to start with. For example, 3x4. Grow some wheat there, don't buy pigs if you can't afford them at the beginning. Buy 12 seeds and 12 fertilizers and start with that. You will make a good surplus after harvest so you can buy more fertilizer for an extra field or two next season.
No one told you to create a ridiculous number of fields, all 16x16 and start there, that's just complete nonsense.

So maybe you should think a little bit about how to get started and what you should do to make a good profit even with the new mechanics?
It's really not that expensive. You still can make quite a lot of money with farming. You just need to think first, before you do something.

[Bilbo Baggins Sr]

Thanks for the interesting comments.
Some valuable suggestion - start small. I suppose this would work. One of the comments actually nailed the reason of my frustration, I already had a few fields 10x10. This is not sustainable post patch upgrade. I wish I could "fire" my farmers and replace them with crafters. I would do the farming instead so I can get that valuable XP.
Yes, I think horses are key in the game. People can judge for themselves where they find a value in a game. I personally don't enjoy the running across the map neither the berry gathering.
The game is good but very much imbalanced. Fetrilizer should be much cheaper. In the end it is a by-product. I can only suspect how difficult it is to balance these types of games. This is one of the games that will be in alpha,beta, etc until the community stops playing it.

[Eddie]

Animals also don't eat yet

[Zhorge]

Originally posted by Bilbo Baggins Sr:

Thanks for the interesting comments.
Some valuable suggestion - start small. I suppose this would work. One of the comments actually nailed the reason of my frustration, I already had a few fields 10x10. This is not sustainable post patch upgrade. I wish I could "fire" my farmers and replace them with crafters. I would do the farming instead so I can get that valuable XP.
Yes, I think horses are key in the game. People can judge for themselves where they find a value in a game. I personally don't enjoy the running across the map neither the berry gathering.
The game is good but very much imbalanced. Fetrilizer should be much cheaper. In the end it is a by-product. I can only suspect how difficult it is to balance these types of games. This is one of the games that will be in alpha,beta, etc until the community stops playing it.

Based on the starting conditions (early winter/late fall start point) on my post above I have fully planted all 140 tiles. I now have a surplus of 252 fertilizer.

1 Farm tiles produces just over 18 cabbages/year (dual planting).
It takes 6 tiles (5.5 really, but there is no half-tile) to produce just over 100 cabbages.
Because I became curious, I've started to experiment with what rots best. So I started with the endpoints of the what rots (by weight) and how much it produces:

100 Cabbages produce 400 rot which produce 40 fertilizer.
100 Berries produce 100 rot which produce 10 fertilizer.

I intentionally rot (approx) 275 cabbages for 1100 rot which is 110 fertilizer.

I'm not sure, yet, how much manure pigs produce per season, but it's a damn lot. Three pigs (two adult and a piglet) produced 34 in just one day. So I'm conservatively expecting each pig to produce 10 per day which turns into 5 fertilizer.

That's 15 per day from 3-pig, pig-farm which works out to be 180 fertilizer (probably more as it's more like 11 or 12 manure a day, but I'm being conservative) per year.

With just that little effort I'm producing 290+ fertilizer a year. Never mind all the mushrooms, berries, other vegetables and sundries (food & meat) I rot.

The bottom-line is that if you, or anyone else is in trouble with fertilizer, you're not thinking it through.

[Capuzzi09]

Originally posted by Bilbo Baggins Sr:

Thanks for the interesting comments.
Some valuable suggestion - start small. I suppose this would work. One of the comments actually nailed the reason of my frustration, I already had a few fields 10x10. This is not sustainable post patch upgrade. I wish I could "fire" my farmers and replace them with crafters. I would do the farming instead so I can get that valuable XP.
Yes, I think horses are key in the game. People can judge for themselves where they find a value in a game. I personally don't enjoy the running across the map neither the berry gathering.
The game is good but very much imbalanced. Fetrilizer should be much cheaper. In the end it is a by-product. I can only suspect how difficult it is to balance these types of games. This is one of the games that will be in alpha,beta, etc until the community stops playing it.

On the second view my comment above might sound rude in some parts. It wasn't meant to be like that. Don't know, I seem to have a certain talent to sound rude even If I don't want to, so: sorry, I didn't want to offend you or the like.

But you picked the main idea from my comment (which is good): start small.
Another good idea would've been to get you some pigs and safe up quite a pile of manure before the patch. But I guess you didn't do that.

Since you already have some fields, I'd assume you also have some money at hand.
So I'd suggest you to do the following:

Delete all your fields for the moment.
Did you save at least some grain, or did you sell everything? If so, you really need to start small, I think.
Go, get yourself some pigs. You can buy the baby pigs, they are way cheaper. BTW, the amount of manure they produce doesn't change when they grow up. Start with maybe 2 or three, one of them should be male so they can breed.
Put a NPC in the pigsty with highest possible skill in farming.
Look at the amount of manure they produce per hour. Multiply that amount with 120 (assumed you play with default season length) and divide the result by two and you'll see what amount of fertilizer you'll have at hand for the whole year.
Place new fields that exactly meet this amount.
Get some seeds and start your complete farming economy from there.
If you do it this way, it isn't that expensive, trust me on that.
You don't need to buy fertilizer and carry it all over the map each season.
You only need a small amount of seeds to get things started.

If you do so and start developing your farming accordingly to the "leftovers" from your pigs, you'll still be able to make really good money from that.
You only need to keep enough grain for replanting in the next season and craft some fertilizer or let it be done by your NPCs.
From my experience it works pretty good and you don't lose any money. In the contrary, it makes you rich over time. Not that rich as you might get used to from the previous game version, but still...

Edit:
Your animals still don't need any food right now. But this certainly will change in the future. So I recommend to safe up a certain amount of wheat, just to be prepared when they change this in an upcoming patch. Nobody can know right now, how much they'll eat. But I guess it will be a decent amount of food. Nevertheless, just store a bunch of grain to be prepared for that. ;)

[Rammstein]

Originally posted by Zhorge:

I have no problems, and I mean ****ing ZERO

U sure?

[BulletHole]

Originally posted by Capuzzi09:

Originally posted by BulletHole:

[...]
beyond all of that the real reason that the update broke the fertilizer and farming is the bug where it destroys the stored up amount that is not used.... i mean you whined about something that is broken but not the part that is broken....

Farming works just fine. I figured out that most probably very big fields and too many field workers can cause this problem. Just reduce your farming to smaller fields and assign less field workers. You really don't need that much. I mean - who needs 200000 flax plants per seasons and the like? For what do people need millions of coins? It's just ridiculous.
I have a couple of fields (just 5 fields and the biggest is 5x6) and everything works well for me without a single bug.
And (this might be surprising for some of you) I earn a good coin from that.
I only have a small field (3x4) where I grow onions and I cook meat with gravy from that to feed myself. At the end of the year I cook everything which was left from the last harvest and sell it.
I grow wheat and flax on the 4 other fields, sell the surplus of grain (which I don't need for replanting in the next season), craft linen cloth and sell all that.
I never had any issues paying my taxes and my money increases steadily.

So again, reduce the size and number of fields, stop the ridiculous amount of overproduction and from what I experienced so far it should work just fine.

I guess you didnt quite understand what i wrote... i have been testing the new mechanics, and even with a small field, with only 1 field worker and 1 plot to work. when they are done, the entire stockpile of fertilizer gets destroyed by a bug in the game. they use the resources 1 by 1 all good, but when they finish one field completely, fertilized, plowed, seeded, and then move on to the next one, at that point even though I had a stock pile of 1300 fertilizer it all got cleared out, so then the workers cannot do all the farms without my supervision, which is a known bug they are working on

[wyrdplace]

Despite the fact that I've often complained about the game being too hard, in some aspects (particularly taxes), I was happy to see the farm workers using up fertilizer and grain while planting. It was bizarre that they didn't. I know it makes it more difficult, but I think it improves the reality of the game to have to stock up before planting season.

This isn't to say there might not be some bugs with how they're used up. I'm fairly certain they burned through MUCH more grain and fertilizer than they should have. But my flax fields are large, and I suck at math, so I'm still trying to sort that out.

[asta]

Originally posted by Zhorge:

The rest I let rot. I also rot my extra carrots & beets, though it's only a handful as that's what I feed my village with. Further, that is supplemented by cleaning out my food-storage where all the food at 50% is put into my rot chest.

That makes hundreds and hundreds of rot. Which I then make into fertilizer. Plus I pull down quite a lot of manure every year which also makes fertilizer.

In which building do you have your "rot chest"? Which is the best so it rots the fastest?