Obtaining Higher Quality Crops

[Dante D Vlad]

As the subject says, how do I acquire higher quality crops? I remember reading somehwere that if u don't harvest the crops when they are ready and let them grow further, they become of a higher quality.
Personally, I have been able to test it for a few crops. If I harvest them one day after they are ripe. The yield is two starts.
Does anyone have experimental stats on the scaling?

[jisaacs1962 (AKA Macmagotty)]

In general, I have found that using dragon workers is a pretty solid path to 5-star crops. Because some crops have 7 day growing cycles, it is not always possible to go from 1-star to 5-star in a single season. Since you can only get seeds from the first harvest of a tree or a shrub, these probably prove to be the hardest to get up to 5-star yields.

2-day cycling crops you can manage to get to 5-star in one season, that is, if RNGeezus likes you. Just accept that RNGeezus reigns over this more than anything. You can tilt things a little more in your favor by using dragon 5-star essence as fertilizer AND using farm workers with the traits: Bountiful Yields (bonus % to quantity of crops harvested) and Life Maker (bonus % to number of seeds harvested) to get more seeds and crops. Maybe equip your farm workers with Widebrim/Farmfingers and Humble Spade/Seed Satchel (equipment to boost crop/seed yield).

You can use the Mill to process 2-star crops into 2-star seed, then grow 2-star stuff until you get some 3-star crops. Then it is onto processing 3-star crops into 3-star seeds, then rinse repeat until you have a pretty good supply of 5-star seeds.

I waited until I had completed all of the quest content to Savannah F8 before working on the farm in any serious manner. Then, it took about 4 in-game years just focusing on farming to get to a point where I was growing nothing but 5-star crops. I was also breeding monsters like a madman to get the perfect farm-working dragon all through that, so your results may be different. At the end, I ended up having about 15 million koronas from selling all the near-misses from the monster breeding and assorted low quality crops that I wasn't feeding to my monsters. That was nice and all, but there's really nothing in-game to do with all that cash.