[FARMING] A21 Do's and Don'ts

[Riitoken]

What are your A21 Pro Tips for Farming?

[Jonnson]

I'm not sure what you would consider a pro tip, but I'll give it a shot.

First, all you need is lotl-rank 2 (living off the land), in order to gain more than you need via farming. You only need 20 mags to unlock crafting all seeds, so I would recommend unlocking a second trader as soon as possible, since among many other reasons, you can pretty much buy 4-8 mags by day 4 (2 traders, 2 resets = 4 trade windows), you could unlock 4 traders and have 8 trade windows if you mission spam t1 missions from trader to trader, rather than working up the tier of 1 trader. This will also reveal 4 towns, and possible biomes, which is good, since locating the desert biome will allow you to harvest aloe for heals.

The town that you spawn near at the start of the game usually is a large town, surrounded by farms and ranches. If not, I'd just restart with a different name (=different spawn point) for so many reasons, but mainly travel time, throughout the game.

After doing the tutorial, do your 5 missions (during the missions loot all coffee makers and store all coffee grinds, also store plastic), then run a circuit around the edge of town, gathering roadkill (bones for knife repair and glue, rotted flesh for farm plots), killing any boars, snakes, and chickens you see (meat, leather, and feathers), looting all mailboxes (books and magazines), chopping down all tree stumps in poi yards (honey), looting all cement mixers (mags), all work trucks (mags and tools, possibly medical) and harvesting all potatoes, corn, pumpkins, mushrooms, hops, and blueberries. Mushrooms can be found at the bottom of the poi that has the pumpkins in its yard. There is a hole in the wall, go through there. Avoid the rest of the poi, for now.

Eat the corn/pumpkin/blueberries raw for heals and food. Store the potatoes, mushrooms, and hops. If you found the desert biome, harvest 100 aloe vera, and store.

I totally recommend running from trader to trader (5 t1 missions day 1/spend the night working on base, 2 t1 missions day 2, bike as reward, next trader, 5 t1 missions/spend the night looting mailboxes and any food/roadkill, day 3, 2 t1 missions, water filter as reward, next trader, 5 t1 missions/spend the night looting mailboxes and any food/roadkill, day 4, 2 t1 missions, water filter as reward. Trader reset day, first go to the new trader and check his inventory, dont get missions, then go check all your traders for magazines (cooking, seeds, workstations, tools) winding up back at the start, where base should be, or is going to be.) Get a t2 mission.

You should have potatoes, mushrooms, hops, coffee grinds, and aloe stored. When you get lotl 2, turn them into seeds. This should be day 4. Build your farm plots, and set up your 4 dew collectors. You could have bought more from each trader if you wanted, I go with 10 total.

You want 20 farm plots for each crop, not including mushrooms, which can be grown on the ground, so thats 80 plots (400 rotted flesh, iirc); 20 potato, 20 hops, 20 coffee, 20 aloe...and then 20 mushrooms.

This is steak and potatoes, first aid bandages, beer, and coffee. By day 5, you have infinite food, drink, and healing. Coffee is the highest speed buff, steak and potatoes is the highest stamina buff, not including rare high teir recipes that come and go, beer triples knuckle damage, which is the best melee weapon, and aloe provides near infinite healing.

Is this something like what your looking for?

..or, find the Boars poi, loot the supercorn, and farm supercorn to sell to the trader?

Edit; If you try this strat, it works well with tool and workstation acquisition as well. Choose miner69er to rank 3, then lockpicking to rank 3, then lotl to rank 2, then salvage operations to rank 3, in that order. You should have the auger and then the chem station by day 5-6. Wrench a ton of cars for parts, use the gas to use your auger, go back to the desert and harvest up 20k oil shale. Go home, and cook the shale into gas. Now build your base and upgrade it to concrete by day 7, using your auger)

[Kryzx]

Nothing much to farming to be honest...

If you're not focused on any Fortitude perks at all with your character, my suggestion:

- Have 5 skill points available (or drink a fergit'n elixir if you want to respec) & have a pair of "Tough Guy Sunglasses" available to wear & Sham Chowder to eat.

- Put 2 points into the Fortitude level (so you reach Level 3)
- Put 2 points into "Living Off The Land" (puts you at the 2nd skill level)
- Put on the glasses & eat a Sham Chowder, then put your last point into the final 3rd level of "Living Off The Land"

All you'll have to do when you harvest your crops is put on the glasses and eat a Sham Chowder to maximize your yields from now on!

=====

If you're looking to get more rotten flesh for the farm plots, zombie bears will give you the greatest yield (about ~50 when harvesting them).

Super corn generally will be the one you want to plant a lot of because they sell for a lot of dukes (and if you don't need the dukes, it's extra brass for smelting) & you can use them to craft Grandpa's Awesome Sauce (20% bartering), Learn'n Elixir (20% EXP gain), & Moonshine (400% melee damage).

Other than that, normal corn & potatoes to sustain yourself with more Sham Chowders would be good. Coffee, blueberries, pumpkins, & hops are fine as well, since these are not easily found in the wild & only certain POIs have them to harvest. Goldenrod, chrysanthemum, aloe vera, & yucca are so plentiful you should hardly ever have to farm more of them unless you have a very small map or you play on a map without a forest/desert biome.

Remember mushroom spores don't have to be planted on farm plots; they can be planted anywhere.

Don't even bother planting any cotton seeds you find, there's plenty of clothes you'll find to rip apart for cloth.

Crops take 2 hours IRL (on 60 minute day lengths) to be ready to harvest. However, it's about 3 hours for the corn & mushrooms.

Lastly, remember it's RNG if you get seeds or not with every harvest, so don't be surprised if you only get ~6 seeds from a farm plot section of 25 crops sometimes LOL.

[Jonnson]

"All you'll have to do when you harvest your crops is put on the glasses and eat a Sham Chowder to maximize your yields from now on!"

That's pretty cool, I like that one.

I gotta point this out though, it was a huge 1000+ post some time ago, and people dont seem to get it;

"Lastly, remember it's RNG if you get seeds or not with every harvest, so don't be surprised if you only get ~6 seeds from a farm plot section of 25 crops sometimes LOL."

You will always have far more food in your harvest than you need, regardless of the seeds that you get. So, if we are going with lotl3, then we are talking 3x crops, using the 25 crop example, that would be 75 veggies, if you only got 6 seeds, then you need 14, which is 70 of your 75, leaving you with 5 veggies (edit; math is wrong, see below). That sounds horrible, but thats a worst case scenario, the best case scenario is happening just as often, meaning the next day can be 20 seeds, meaning you only need 25 veggies in order to replant, leaving you with 50 veggies. So, over the 2 days, you are looking at 55 veggies, which is about 27 meals. Thats enough to last several weeks, or more, depending on what you find in poi's. Within one week, you should be sitting on 20-30 STACKS of leftover food. I get that using lotl 2. I stop farming, altogether, after about 2 weeks, and I play to GS 1000, day 300+.

Actually, 6 seeds in this example is not possible, you never have less seeds+veggie harvested than you planted at lotl 2 or 3.

You would need 19 seeds, which is 95 veggies, and thats higher than the 75 you started with. That happens with lotl 1, only.

[Kryzx]

(sigh) I guess a tilde is unfamiliar with folks nowadays....

[Jonnson]

Originally posted by Kryzx:

(sigh) I guess a tilde is unfamiliar with folks nowadays.... :Aste_Roy:

Thats fair brother, but an approximation goes up AND down. So, I could take you to mean 3 just as well as 9. In all cases we are still lower than the starting amount, and that is what confuses people, hence that giant post, back in the day. Unless you mean to move totally beyond standard deviation? I already gave a 50% adjustment, both ways.

hehe=)

[Riitoken]

Am LotL 3 and disappointed that there is only a 50% prob. to get a seed from 1 plant.

So essentially there is no free crop growth. You sac your yield until you have the number of seeds you want. So to maintain 10 seeds you're always sac'ing half the yield.

[Kryzx]

Originally posted by Riitoken:

Am LotL 3 and disappointed that there is only a 50% prob. to get a seed from 1 plant.

So essentially there is no free crop growth. You sac your yield until you have the number of seeds you want. So to maintain 10 seeds you're always sac'ing half the yield.

But you still have a net positive of half of your yield AFTER converting what you need for seeds.

That's why it's generally advised if you want to actually produce positive yields for farming that you really need to be at least LOTL 2 or 3. Otherwise, you're just breaking even or even losing on your net yields.

[Riitoken]

Originally posted by Kryzx:

Originally posted by Riitoken:

Am LotL 3 and disappointed that there is only a 50% prob. to get a seed from 1 plant.

So essentially there is no free crop growth. You sac your yield until you have the number of seeds you want. So to maintain 10 seeds you're always sac'ing half the yield.

But you still have a net positive of half of your yield AFTER converting what you need for seeds.

That's why it's generally advised if you want to actually produce positive yields for farming that you really need to be at least LOTL 2 or 3. Otherwise, you're just breaking even or even losing on your net yields.

It is net positive .... MINUS the burden to manually convert yield to seeds.

[ulroth]

Wow. I am a farmer. This is not how farming works at all. Thanks for explaining the mechanics of farming in the game because it made no sense to me. I thought I was doing something wrong. Turns out the eggheads did it wrong.

One ear of corn will produce 200 -400 seeds. 1 mushroom can produce thousands of spores. 1 potato can sprout 10 or so potato plants. 1 tomato can produce a hundred seeds. 1 Green Bean produces 10 or so seeds. . . and on and on.

I put up 900 lbs of tomatoes last year and I harvested well over 10,000 seeds from them.

If life were like this game we would all be dead from starvation.

[Uncle Al]

Just a note that making your own seeds becomes worthwhile at Living off the Land 1.

In single player, you don't really need more than that (although you can get higher skills quite cheaply by messing around with chowder and glasses as noted above), but if you're farming for a group, or going with a fortitude build anyway, the higher skill levels make farming more consistent.

Over a long period of time, LotL 1 will give you an average return of 1.5 crop per harvest per farm plot (assuming you're converting to make up for lost seeds and always keeping the same number of seeds). 20-30 farm plots with that level of return will keep you completely fed, while also allowing some utility (coffee, supercorn etc.) crops on the side.

[Riitoken]

Originally posted by ulroth:

Wow. I am a farmer. This is not how farming works at all. Thanks for explaining the mechanics of farming in the game because it made no sense to me. I thought I was doing something wrong. Turns out the eggheads did it wrong.

One ear of corn will produce 200 -400 seeds. 1 mushroom can produce thousands of spores. 1 potato can sprout 10 or so potato plants. 1 tomato can produce a hundred seeds. 1 Green Bean produces 10 or so seeds. . . and on and on.

I put up 900 lbs of tomatoes last year and I harvested well over 10,000 seeds from them.

If life were like this game we would all be dead from starvation.

So what they did with LotL perk was to give you some control in your ability to achieve both crop yield and seed yield.

I currently have 31 farm plots. I put a storage box on the side of a plot. I store my whole crop - yield and seeds there. I also have an extra box there to stash current inventory. So the 7DTD farming game loop is this:

• Visit farm and stash my standing inventory in the extra box.
  
• Open the crop box and take everything.
  
• Using my knife, run thru the plots and harvest all 31 plots, and mushrooms (if any)
  
• Open crafting favorites (where I've got seed conversion tagged)
  
• Do seed conversions to maintain my required seed balance - which is 30.
  
• Store standing crop/seed inventory back into the crop box.
  
• Take some recent crop yield for food/drink crafting.
  
• Take my standing inventory back from the stash box.
  
• DONE

So I hear what you're saying. A true to life farming sim would mean an entire quarter-section of land and a John Deer planter/harvester (with AC and stereo :) ).

It turns out that with LotL L3 and about 30 farming plots, you've all you need to sustain your food supply with growth. Yes, the gaming loop cheats the normal seed surplus that is IRL. But seed management is part of the "funsics" of the game. Once you settle in, the experience of seed conversion to maintain your target seed surplus is a satisfying gaming experience, albeit a fiction compared to IRL.

[comet_65cali]

Originally posted by Kryzx:

Nothing much to farming to be honest...

If you're not focused on any Fortitude perks at all with your character, my suggestion:

- Have 5 skill points available (or drink a fergit'n elixir if you want to respec) & have a pair of "Tough Guy Sunglasses" available to wear & Sham Chowder to eat.

- Put 2 points into the Fortitude level (so you reach Level 3)
- Put 2 points into "Living Off The Land" (puts you at the 2nd skill level)
- Put on the glasses & eat a Sham Chowder, then put your last point into the final 3rd level of "Living Off The Land"

All you'll have to do when you harvest your crops is put on the glasses and eat a Sham Chowder to maximize your yields from now on!

This right here. You're never away from base with farming, Once you unlock Sham-chowder, unless you're not focused on that tier, all you need to do.

[Doc]

With only LOTL level 1 I can make a profit from seeds. Yes, there is risk if you plant just one see and don't get a seed when harvesting. But planting 20 corn seeds yields 80 corn crops. So even when I only get 8 seeds from 20 crops, I make 12 seeds from the 80 harvest and still have 20 corn profit. I just make meat stew as it's the best value to me. And can make 10 meat stew from the 20 corn profit. I plant 20 corn and 20 potatoes with LOTL 1 along with some other crops and have a surplus of food by the day 21 horde.

One trick is to take LOTL 1 with your perks points from the tutorial so that you start getting more seed mags right away. Buy seed mags when you can. I reached all 20 seed mags on day 10 in my current playthrough, then I can start making seeds from all of the corn and potatoes I harvested from the zombie farms I looted. Though corn seed is very easy to get from the farms and the seed bags you can harvest with the shovel.

[ulroth]

I get it. It got video gamed. 5 ears of corn = 1 seed (not sure how to condense 5 ears into a single kernel.)

- - - reality 5 ears of corn = 500 new corn plants and 1500 ears of corn (RNG willing).

For those who dont really know though (in case we have bad times) save some of your seeds. Next year you will probably have even more food, and yes RNG Jesus is a big part of actual farming.

Thx For the Tips

[Sr Humungus]

This not from a21, but if you want to live in an underground bunker, you can have an underground farm if you respect some things:

First, you will need solar light, so, dig 1 square to the bottom where you want your underground farm, and an small tower to protect this square to not let zombies in.

Each square of light gives to your plants a 6x6 radius to let them grow around it, so, the best way is making floors respecting how tall they grow (in squares) + the planter, dont worry with mushrooms, they dont need light source.

If you need to grow the farm, just make another light square and repeat.