Question on "farming"

[stevecrowe]

Having fun with the game overall. Hope someone can answer my question. I've purchased a plot of land that can grow raspberries and strawberries. Planted some of each, and got 2 or the harvests from them. Now they show up as bushes and I haven't been able to harvest them for a long time (year or 2 game time). So is there a limit on how many times you can harvest berries from a particular "bush"?

[Oragepoilu]

Yeah, they are limited.

The top tier food source over time with farming is still the bee hive (since once it's here, it barely cost any time to harvest, sell well and give 50 food). You need pollen, and while they can be somewhat rare (low quantity in forest), they are also super easy to spot when running around.

You could also plant trees - I planted apple tree to try it out. But it take 30 unit of time to harvest only a few of them. I switched to bee hive, but you could maybe try planting coconut and banana in another biome ?

Overall it's quite difficult to make anything decent from farming right now, since it's both time consuming IRL and IG (considering we can't buy seeds in bulk) and the yield is usually poor like wild crops/harvestable.

Maybe if at some point we get a real bonus on planted crops (especially harvesting seeds back, but not only) it willl be worthwhile trying to grow stuff and make food from them.

[Tertiary]

Fig Trees, too.

If you have Ag upgraded to where you get the seed drop buff then wheat/flax/etc. become sustainable... but, I don't think the berry bushes ever become sustainable. I haven't seen it yet at least.

Edit: I use them for decoration. They change the color of the square on the mini-map so you can make pretty patterns. :shrug:

[Cathulion]

there has been an update adding floromancy, it has woodbend at 15
Casting it on most trees destroys them giving you their wood (no need for logs or hatchets) AND seeds, I seem to pretty much always get at least 2 per tree, I got 31 mahogany seeds on my character right now
BUT on fruit trees like apples, you can woodbend AND gather and the tree stays, effectively doubling the harvest
Can't cast it on gatherables like wheat, cotton or berries tho

[Asulox]

Wheat is a good way to make money as the yeild is also the seed so you get plenty. I have 300 wheat planted and I let my follower plant them while I'm threshing. Grain usually sells for more than flour, but wheat beer makes you a lot of money. Its time consuming though, best done in windowed mode while you do something else.

[Asulox]

So with Agriculture maxxed I'm getting half the number of seeds for cotton sown, so from 16 plants I got a return of 8 seeds.

[Sagetim]

I would say that if you want to make the most hassle free money, then go for banana trees. This will require you to wander on into the jungles, but banana trees grow stupid fast, can be planted in savannah (which can also accomodate dates, palm trees, and I think coconut trees too), and when you get to 15 flouromancy you can gather and then special gather off of each tree.

This also works with apple trees, but those tend to take a lot longer to grow.

Importantly, you can easily level agriculture up early on with some wheat. As long as you get even just one, you can thresh that and plant all the grains to get a wheat plant each. Even if you can't legally harvest wheat in any of the towns, you can generally buy wheat grain from farmers because it's both food and seed. Even just a 3x3 plot can get your skill leveled because you get xp for planting, harvesting, and threshing the wheat.

Later on, you can get your construction up to 13 to learn how to make alchemy benches, then take like, a thousand wheat grain around with you and build alchemy benches on the outskirts of town, craft beer, then sell the beer and move on to another town where beer hasn't been devalued from overabundance.

But like I said, bananas are super low maintenance and you can get tons of seeds while harvesting the trees. And the trees don't have to be replanted, they just keep growing more. So settle in a savannah with a river and you can make a banana and date farm, then fish up fish as well. You put the cooked fish steaks at a higher priority in your inventory, and you can then wander around eating your fish and selling bananas and dates until you run out. Then go harvest again and repeat.