JOB question

[Spartan007]

Sorry if it has been asked before. I used search and could not find the specif topic.

1 Can a lv 1 base have a farmer and be profitable?

2 Can a farmer npc start from just dirt or do I have to dig/till the land then they will farm?

3 If any one can think of any other information for NPC jobs in general that is help I'd appreciate it. Still new to the game. Thanks for any replies.

[roy2x]

Bases will always be profitable because you do not get taxed on them. You get taxed based on time and your fame. Bases can make money off the get go though it won't be much. A new base has enough fertility for a lot of pasture you can use to start a ranch. You can also plant a decent amount of berries or mushrooms in a new base.

The only residents I see that actually work are those with the Cleaning job. Those with Chores job are apparently also supposed to pick stuff up from the ground and put them in containers but I have never seen one do it, not that I waited to watch. Residents like Farmers only contribute by improving base stats. They may go out to the field but they are just "pretending" to work and nothing actually gets done. This means that you will have to do the digging and tilling yourself.

NPC jobs improve the better their beds are. This is actually huge for farmers because soil levels get expensive if you manually level it with gold bars. If you are new a tip I can give is to check animal tamers for animals with the jobs you want because they can be very cheap. Some npcs have fixed jobs for example farmers always have farming and gardening, maids always have cleaning+chores and a third random job. Knowing what jobs npcs have can be useful when headhunting for residents. You will want to do this later on to make your bases efficient. On my food base for example has a mix of farmers to increase soil levels and mercenary archers(who always have hunting) to generate meat.

[Iyasenu]

As it was said, a Farmer does not actually do any work.
The only thing Farmers do is they are guaranteed to have a Job of Farming and a Hobby of Gardening.
There would be no difference between a Farmer and, say, a Snow Putit if they both had the same levels of the Farming/Gardening job/hobby.

What both of those have the effect of is boosting the "Soil" skill level of the base they live at, which improves the Fertility value, allowing for more crops to be planted without worrying about them crumbling to dust upon harvest/reaping.

You will have to be the one to till any land, and plant the initial crops.
And you will have to harvest and replant manually unless that base is at level 2, and you enact the "Delegated Farming" policy.
And, all that policy does is auto-harvest/replant seeds, and that would work even if the base was completely empty, because as stated NPCs do not actually do any manual labor.
If you see a Farmer out in the fields, it's just an animation they do to look like they're working.

In short, you should get a base to level 2 to activate Delegated Farming, improve the base's Soil skill level as much as you can (likely through hiring many NPCs with the Farming/Gardening skills such as Farmers), and make sure you've got all the crops set down as you want and any shared containers have their distribution settings set up as you'd like.

[Spartan007]

Thank you both for the replies I appropriate the help.