Farming Guide For Beginner's

[dragonstryk72]

Farming Guide-

Okay, so with how much time I've spent on Godus this weekend, I started working out Farming, having to play with it quite a lot. So, I figured that I would go ahead and put together a handy guide to help people get started out in Farming, as well as continue to maximize your farms as the game drags on.

The main reason for this is that the Settlement tutorial is woefully inadequate for explaining these things, as is evidenced by the numerous people we're getting that aren't able to get any wheat production off the ground.

Farming Prep- Farming rates are determined by the terrain layer you are on, so you want to build up to the 16th terrain layer from sea level as soon as possible, which you can first do when you get the option to go up on grass layers. There's a mountainous area to the back of the new playable zone, and it will allow you to get your optimal layer. Now, fair warning, you're going to be burning a lot of belief for this, as sculpting prices are still crazy, but this the best way to maximize both your belief gain, and wheat production.

Initial Farming- Since Farming unlocks automatically at 165 followers, this means that as soon as you get to about 150, you need to start stocking belief up, about 20k, as well as making sure you have one or two abodes out away from where you're going to drop your settlements, so you can still expand and build. You drop your first Settlement at no cost, then drop a second for 20k back where you started the game at. It doesn't really matter that you dont have the space to farm there, as it's basically just there to make sure you're not paying out resources for those buildings. This should start to give you some early flow.

Getting into the flow- Once you've laid out your initial two Settlements, you'll want to start flattening as soon as you can to get as much field space as possible on the one up on the grass, as well as some plots past that to set up regular abodes, so that you can continue expansion onward. Make sure you Leash any spare builders off away from your fields, though, as you'll want as many size 2 plots as possible. Size 1s do work, but produce remarkably little.

Finger of God- You've got a bunch of work to do when you finally get FoG. First off, you'll want to bulldoze your original buildings and the Settlement there, so that you can bring the terrain up even with the rest of your Settlements, as well as getting Deep Sea Sculpt as soon as you're able, so you can widen out that area as far as it'll go. That should give you more than enough space to set up a proper Farming settlement, with the second not far off.

Larger Plot Sizes- When you get Size 3 buildings, you'll also start getting Size 3 Plots, and you're going to want to make good use of those. So what you do, is you go to the Settlement menu for each of your active farming Settlements, and make all your farmers unemployed by click & dragging them out of their homes to the town center. From there, you're going to use FoG to knock down all the now workless fields, and get rid of the rocks. If you've got some builders nearby, I'd suggest also taking down your Settlement's houses in sections, so that you can get better population to work the new farm fields.

God Seed- This is the single most necessary item of the farmer in Godus. God Seed spawns 7 trees a go, which you can place wherever. Each tree gives the following: 1% Belief Gain, 1% Belief Capacity, as well as buffs for your wheat production. This means, that if you use this effectively, you'll be able to get much farther into your timeline without having to have Farming Settlements everywhere. Seriously, wrap every field in trees.

Monuments- In-town monuments don't have much effect on your farmers outside in the fields, but you should still put down Speed and Capacity shrines, which increase your popuplation for more farmers (currently bugged, but should be fixed soon), and increase the speed at which they make it to their respective fields. The Stamina shrine is more for builders, but Craft Shrines placed between groups of fields can give you a definite boost to your wheat production.

Size 4 plots- you're going to eventually get size 4 plots, but here, you don't really need to switch out the buildings, but just the fields. Now, before you go FoGing your fields, remember to click and drag all your trees. DO NOT FINGER OF GOD YOUR PLOTS UNTIL YOU'VE GOTTEN RID OF THE TREES.FoG has a nasty habit of sometimes reading a different click location, and it is only too easy to lose whole settlements to the fires that start. Unemploy your farmers, destroy the fields and rocks, and then reassign the farmers.

Cultivating Fields- This is another must have, as it adds an extra farmer slot to every field, making the size 1 plots more viable, though they'll still be the weakest producer.

If you've gotten this far, then from here it's really just rinse and repeat- Lay down your Farming Settlements so that you have all your buildings within the Settlement, and then do regular split between Farmers, Breeders, and Buffs. Lay down your monuments, and fill in trees around the fields for bonus wheat.

[dragonstryk72]

Matthew, we're still getting more new threads of people who can't figure out the farming.

[Tikigod]

A few details:

* In the latest opt-in branches Shrines of capacity no longer benefit farming (or anything for that matter). This doesn't seem to be a bug, but rather a intended change?

* Size 3 plots given their out of whack construction timer may not be the best choice if you actually want to play somewhat actively rather than setting up a ton of size 3 plots to be built and then walking away from the game. And size 4 plots are just outright out of the question in that regard given their initial build timer is over 1 hour!

* So with those timers on size 3 and size 4 plots, size 2 is generally the better comprimise if you're not playing AFK/Idle and actually want to be generating more food in the next 10 minutes, rather than the next 30-60 minutes.

* As mentioned: http://steamcommunity.com/app/232810/discussions/0/540742667378126519/#c540742667506250240

Has anyone actually noticed any actual benefits at all from layers or distance btw?

As from trying out all sorts of combinations between distance, layers and environments every single time it's worked out as 1 farmer working == 1 food.

I know the initial change notes about the new system when it was introduced back when they tried to pass it off as an actual food production/consumption per hour simulation mechanic (which seems isn't remote true at all) said things like distance and environment were impacting factors in how much a plot would generate but the only factor that seems to be in play is that after a certain distance away from the settlement a field won't generate any food.

Everything else seems static to ensure that 1 farmer working on a plot will always only generate 1 food, with the only benefit to larger farm plots being they can support more farmers per plot.

Trees, layer type etc all seem to play no role in farm yield, which gives the impression all those additional factors mentioned as playing a role were either a miscommunication when the patch notes were sent to be relayed, or stating how the system may eventually work later on once they've actually got all that extra stuff added but at present haven't included.

At least all meadow layers give the same yield with all the different combinations I've tried. Not tried sand layers. And mountain layers simply won't place plots at that stage.

So with that, things like god seed, trees, buffs etc don't seem to do jack to farming plots as the income amount seems static to 1 farmer = 1 food/wheat. Unless the plot is out side of settlement range in which case it gives 0 food/wheat.


Also noticed one thing missing from this 'guide' is a actual explaination of how the new system works in general, instead it just tells you how to play without letting you know how the system works. So a general explaination of the system 'as is':

Note: You NO LONGER gain a constant amount of new food surplus over time. That behaviour has been removed now.

Each farmer working on a plot generates 1 extra food. So if a plot supports 1 farmer it has the total potential to generate 1 food. If a plot supports 2 farmers it has the total potential to generate 2 food. And so on.

If you have a total of 15 farmers working, that's 15 food/wheat you will have. And it will forever remain at 15. You will not gain 15 more every xxx minutes/hours.

Abodes cost 1 food to build and sustain, but if you later destroy that abode you get the food it was reserving back to use again.

Abodes inside settlements have no cost tied to them.

Farms cost nothing to build and can be built in settlements or outside settlements.

It may be better to build settlements as your main hubs of population and have your farms outside your settlements and you can progress through both population and food at the same time.

Edit: And ore mines work the same way for clarity.

[ToolDaddy]

Why does my farming villages say that they are producing 6 wheat per hour?

[Tikigod]

Originally posted by I hate Molyneux:

Why does my farming villages say that they are producing 6 wheat per hour?

To confuse the hell out of as many people as possible. :p

Really though, who knows. The lack of explaination and presentation of the whole concept seems to be a huge farse to begin with.

You won't gain wheat per hour in any real sense of the word regardless to what the 'official explaination' or in-game stuff says.

Income per farmer and consumption per abode are balanced to a perfect 1:1 ratio, so you'll always have exactly the same amount of wheat until you build a new abode or assign a new farmer to work a field.

In which case you'll lose 1 wheat or gain 1 wheat respectively, and remain at that new level until another change in the balancing act occurs.

Purely speculative, but I really do get the impression that the devs at 22Cans claimed they had implemented something they hadn't, presented "Fluff explainations" of the idea behind the concept as explains for the actual mechanics to try sell the idea that there was something going on where it wasn't.

Though of course apparantly "None of that matters now, pretend it never happened, forget about it and just make do with whatever is handy. A whole new system is coming next month to replace it all and we're confident it will be good".

[Matt Allen]

Much of this will end up being moot sometime soon which, believe me, is a good thing. There were definitely some issues with the way that Settlements were handled, many of which are outlined in this very thread. The Settlements revamp will be addressing quite a bit of this thankfully.

[Mazian]

While the settlment revamp is much needed, if this is not already a game guide, it should be. Lots of useful pointers that I wish I'd had in my initial play through (or even in an in-game tutorial... which usually comes later in the development cycle since game mechanics need to be settled before a tutorial can be properly done-- otherwise you end up rewriting the tutorial multiple times which is, as I'm sure we can all understand, wasted development cycles.)

[Grå Gås]

make an actual guide this is good

[dragonstryk72]

Thank you, I was mainly hoping to keep people moving in the game.