What do you do with all your excess seeds and berries?

[Tungsten Whitmarsh Cadow]

I know how to get experience out of fiber but what can I do with berries and seeds? I can eat some of them or feed them to tames. Is there anything else I can make with them to produce experience or something useful? I gather so fast that I've been throwing a lot of stuff out. Either that or I'd have to build more crates, but they'll just rot in there anyway.

[zerassar]

Med and stamina brews.

[Liralen]

You can plant the seeds in crop plants, but you will need fertilizer and most likely need irrigation, if there isn't enough rain at your base. You can increase the yield of your crops by 300% by enclosing them in greenhouses, which then necessarily requires irrigation, so plan ahead.

The ability to make fertilizer requires compost bins and medium or large poop. Irrigation requires either stone or metal pipes to connect them to a water source, either a natural body of water or water tanks.

Once you can do that, you won't even need to harvest them out in the wild. You will eventually get to the point where narcoberries become a bottleneck.

You will eventually need vegetables (citronal, longrass, rockarrot, and savoroot) to make some advanced recipes so don't destroy the seeds for them - you will need them later. And never destroy Species X seeds https://ark.fandom.com/wiki/Plant_Species_X_Seed. They are awesome base defenses. I also place them in my mining areas.

Basically, don't destroy seeds until you know the use for them.

[Samadhi]

Popcorn the lot, let the Ark gods sort it out.

[william_es]

Have a fridge full of seeds, pretty much nothing else but seeds. Why? why not (I'm a horder).

Extra berries???? what is this "extra" you speak of earthman??? No such thing as extras. Feeding troughs full of berries, and in my main breeding base I think I have 4 whole fridges all around the industrial cooker full of nothing but berries (and other fridges for meats, special ingredients, and kibble eggs). I can empty all the fridges pretty quick if I start mass producing brews and kibble.

I do all my cooking in one map, and then send whole stacks of stuff to other maps via the obelisks/terminals. Lot of hungry mouths to feed.

[Tungsten Whitmarsh Cadow]

I have a compost bin and fridge type thing. I have 3 large plots. It won't allow me to make any more. I already have more narco berries than I can use, more poop than I can use. My plots all have fertilizer and raw poop. They accept straight poop. i don't know if there's a benefit to getting them fertilizer.

The tames just stand around most of the time because like I said i can gather a huge amount of berries in just a few bites and then I don't know what to do with them.
You spelled whorder wrong. I haven't made any healing potions nor do I know their recipe. I've not made any jerky as I have tons of cooked meat.

When I go out my tame's tend to get killed. They seem rather worthless except as pack animals. Trike, parasaur, some small flying thing that sits on my shoulder and attacks things that I just want to knock out. Pressing y doesn't seem to work. They're supposed to quit following me.

I tried irrigating plots. i didn't get any water, but also didn't need water so that remains a mystery. If I build in the distance do I get to build more gardening plots? How's that work? I guess I might try to build a greenhouse for the extra yield but really have no need of it now. The game doesn't really create much need. I could just sit here in my little paradise and enjoy my limited life forever.

I am most interested in collecting experience and leveling up, which is now pretty hard as I've made thousands of cloth headcovers for the XP and then thrown them out. Someone suggested making rafts, but you can't just throw away excess rafts. I suppose you can break them up and get more experience rebuilding. Seems grindy as heck.

Perhaps the most fun thing for me at this point is taming some high level dino. Gotta place the traps and lure them into it and tranq them quickly. maybe need to set up another trap. They don't let you save so I lose all my stuff if something goes wrong and there are many unknowns. If I could save I'd be more likely to explore. I guess they never thought of that.

[Migromul]

To create fertilizer in a compost bin requires 50 Thatch and 3 of any poop. (can even be human-poop.) per Fertilizer. But this method is the slowest. (maybe 1/hour or something like that). It's way better to just tame a phiomia and feed it stimberries and use the poop directly at the beginning. (Fertilizer can be a bonus, though).
Plant fruits. Berries aren't necessary. Not even stim- or narcoberries. (just tame a trike for that.) If you have a greenhouse eventually, you can plant them as bonus, so you don't have to farm any time you want to create something. (although, if you don't use S+ this might be even faster, than earning the berries and using them for cooks.)
Kibble may be needed even at SP-settings if you want to breed. (babies may want special kibble. In that case, you need exactly the one, they demand. better ones don't work, in comparison to K.-O. taming.)
You need at least medium plots for fruits. Every plot, regardless of size, supports only 1 type of plant. For berries small, for fruits and vegetables medium and for the special plants (species x, y, z and so on.) large.
Later on, you should tame a dung-beetle. They're an easy passive tame. Just feed it spoiled meat or poop. (poop works better. The bigger the better.) Then put poop in as many as possible, set it to wander, and it will produice oil and fertilizer. (the latter on mass.) maybe, at least medium poop is required for that. The normal food for dung beetles is spoiled meat. Just level weight on them. All other stats, including life) aren't necessary. Beware, though, dung-beetles roam in dangerous envirements, especially caves. You should take a cryopod with you, sind they're VERY slow, and you need both hand without a shoulder-pet to carry them.

[Xerain]

Originally posted by SugarySnax:

I have a compost bin and fridge type thing. I have 3 large plots. It won't allow me to make any more. I already have more narco berries than I can use, more poop than I can use. My plots all have fertilizer and raw poop. They accept straight poop. i don't know if there's a benefit to getting them fertilizer.

The benefit to fertilizer over poop is it last longer per slot on the plot. As your garden grows and you go off adventuring, you won't want to be refertilizing it all the time, so filling all the open slots with fertilizer instead of poop gives you more time to be doing other things than worrying about the ferilization level of your garden. Also Plant Species X effectively uses fertilizer as Ammo, so fertilizer instead of poop for it means it gets more Ammo.

That being said, compost bins take forever and waste thatch. When i was using compost bins it was hard to keep up with my garden's fertilizer needs. Getting yourself a dung beetle to replace the composter should definitely be a goal.

As for what do do with all this produce? try looking up Sweet Veggie Cakes. You can put them in Herbivore's inventories to allow them better healing than Carnivores get. Sweet Veggie cakes need a lot of ingredients, so if you ever want to use 20 Therizinosaurs to take down a boss, you're going to want a massive green house and industrial cooker to make all of this cake.

Also I guarantees you don't have enough narcotics. You need 3 narcotic for a single tranq dart and or tranq spear bolt. You also need them to make med brews, which you will want a lot of.

Originally posted by SugarySnax:

When I go out my tame's tend to get killed. They seem rather worthless except as pack animals. Trike, parasaur, some small flying thing that sits on my shoulder and attacks things that I just want to knock out. Pressing y doesn't seem to work. They're supposed to quit following me.

That's basically correct. You could get into breeding them to make them stronger, but you're better off putting your breeding efforts into things that can fight.
[/quote]

Originally posted by SugarySnax:

The game doesn't really create much need. I could just sit here in my little paradise and enjoy my limited life forever.

I know what you're saying, and I went through that phase myself. But the game does actually have a plot and a last boss. Eventually I decided i wanted to "beat the game" and had to begin industrializing.

Originally posted by SugarySnax:

I am most interested in collecting experience and leveling up, which is now pretty hard as I've made thousands of cloth headcovers for the XP and then thrown them out. Someone suggested making rafts, but you can't just throw away excess rafts. I suppose you can break them up and get more experience rebuilding. Seems grindy as heck.

Keep in mind the main reason to level up is to unlock engrams which progress your technology level. And to get the materials needed to craft them you will need more powerful dinos in order to survive. Your own stats can only get you so far.

Originally posted by SugarySnax:

Perhaps the most fun thing for me at this point is taming some high level dino. Gotta place the traps and lure them into it and tranq them quickly. maybe need to set up another trap. They don't let you save so I lose all my stuff if something goes wrong and there are many unknowns. If I could save I'd be more likely to explore. I guess they never thought of that.

Absolutely you should be taming high level dinos. It's not really worth taming dinos below level 100, assuming you have your difficulty settings set "correctly" where dinos have the intended max level of 150.

[bhaalspawn]

Everything you don't want can go into a Gacha (if you have one).
Fertiliser lasts longer than poop and has more nitrogen, meaning you need less and it rots slower, a dung beetle is the best and better than the bin.
Irrigation is fairly simple, start with the intake pipe in a body of water (it will turn blue when placed if full of water) then run your pipes all the way to your base. The taps need to be around head height or lower or they have no effect. There is no distance limit.
The best way to earn xp is to play, not stand around trying to grind xp's. If you're desperate then get on a carnivore and attack trees and anything that moves.
For me the best way to tame a dino is crossbow/longneck rifle with tranqs while riding the back of a tanky mount (a steg might do and they can be tamed on foot), if they are small and fast then maybe a bola. There is very little need for big traps.
You will need jerky (both types), vegetables (all four types), berries (lots), eggs (all categories), fibre, honey, sap and a pile of other things to make kibble, which is an essential part of the game (at least for me).
If you are unsure of anything use the wiki, the new one is at gg, it will be very very useful when making different types of kibble or taming different dino's, you also won't find all the artifacts you'll need without some sort of map.
Lastly if you have too much of anything just drop it, its that simple. Or make more storage, then more storage, then even more storage.
If you are wondering how many materials you will need look up the industrial forge/grilll/cooker, the chemistry bench and the tek fabricator as a start.

[sendjes]

A sidenote:
Keep in mind, that using large crop plot for berries, wont yeld more berries than the small one which is best suited for berries.