Essence Crop Speed Growth

[Darqueben]

I used monster essence, I believe Centaur essence on the Maccawas Plant, And it grew INSTANTLY. Does essences do something similar to other plants and what do they do, I assume improve grade and the like, But don't want to assume.

[JudgeHeath]

Essence improves the crop's health, enabling it to better survive changing weather conditions in the first place, and more importantly, causing it to give out higher quality seeds upon harvest, which in turn grow into higher quality crops.

All items in the game go from Grade 1 (no stars shown) to Grade 5 (5 stars). In general grade acts as a straight multiplier. So if a crop heals 5% HP at Grade 1, then at Grade 5 it'll heal 25% HP when eaten. Or if it grants say +1 Physique at Grade 1, then at Grade 5 it'll grant +5 Physique.

Since crops are the only way to improve the stats of your monsters, and they only gain the benefit of eating once per day, you can see how important it is to have high grade crops to feed them.

Cooking will also depend on the grade of the ingredients you use. The final cooked meal will have a grade equal to the average of the grade of the ingredients used in cooking it, and will combine all of the stats of the ingredients used in cooking it.

And that's all without getting into refined ingredients, like Flour, which is something that you guys will get to fiddle around with once we implement farming upgrades and you're able to build the Mill, thus enabling you to transform raw crops into oils, juices, flour, and other refined ingredients that have improved stats over the raw crops themselves.

Finally you also have 'pantry ingredients' which are only accessible from shops and dungeon traveling, but eventually you'll be able to build Plankton Pens, and raise different species of Plankton to produce them. In the mean time you can buy them from Yonten and some of the market day NPCs, and these provide a percentage multiplier to the final results of any dish made using them.

Essence is just one of the tools in your tool box, along with paying attention to the seasons and assigning monsters with high stats to work the fields, that will help you produce high grade crops over time! Once we do the big farming update I'll probably post a guide to how the whole system hangs together, but for the time being, just know that for at least the starting HP restoration crop, it should be possible to get them to Grade 5 relatively quickly given their fast growth time. Don't be afraid to wait to harvest them either, some crops actually grow to 'ripeness' so fast and don't 'rot' quickly enough that if you harvest them the moment they're ready, you won't get improved seeds out of them, so you need to give them care for a day or two more.

Every plant has a starting HP value that degrades based on the conditions it is in, and improves based on the actions you take with it. What it's current HP is determines whether it dies, produces downgraded seeds, or upgraded seeds. Each plant has different thresholds for each of these states, and also a different maximum HP, meaning that the plant can only get so healthy and you can't just improve it a ton and then forget about it, since it'll be losing HP every day. The very hardest to grow plants can take half a month to grow, and require constant tender loving care, or they'll die, but they produce the strongest bonuses.

Experiment and find out!

[JudgeHeath]

Sorry for that massive wall of text, we put a lot of work into the back end of the crop growing system and want people to experiment with it.