Rain totems are severely underrated

[pleasespamme2004]

I've been playing with the goal of filling up my farm and making it rain every day. I tried to Google this strategy and everyone seems to say not to do it. I'm in Spring of my 2nd year and pulling in about 400k gold when harvest day comes. EDIT: I'll be pulling in over a million gold for the month. I'm not using rhubarb. This is my first time playing and I wasted a lot of time in my first month, so next time I play maybe I'll pull it off by Fall of first year. I did the math on filling my entire farm with iridium sprinklers and getting all the stone for stairs, gold bars, bus and so on and I still can't afford it, but in a couple more harvests maybe I could. If it weren't for the rain totem money it would take a lot longer. Not that I need to ever switch.
Quality sprinklers would cost about as much and waste 1/9th of the farm. So even if you'd rather have sprinklers for the long term, the quickest way to get there is rain totems in the short term.

Here's what you do:

1. Early on start with high harvest gold/seed gold/day crops (Divide those 3 numbers into a calculator) instead of high profit/day crops. Switch to profit/day crops once you can't water any more.
   
   Because early on gold is your bottleneck not energy or time. Energy and time limit you later on. Farming technique is an entirely different topic though.
   
   
2. Tap at least 20ish pine trees and get at least 6ish pigs. Get oil maker(s).
   
   Plant pine trees in a grid with a 1 gap space between. Plant more pine trees than you will tap because growth is random and it might take forever for some of them to mature. On the flipside you only need to buy 4ish pigs and let them have babies. You can plant pine trees on the farm for convenience, or off the farm to save farm space. Or both and you can move your taps later. If off the farm later you might want extra taps for fewer trips.
   
   
3. Get the lumberjack profession to make it easier to get hardwood. At least if you're going to use this strat long term.
   
   You'll be chopping trees for regular wood anyway. Alternatively get hardwood from the secret woods but it's more walking. Almost all your money is from farming so not like extra foraged items matters much anyway. OTOH you might have plenty of hardwood early on anyway, so if you aren't doing this long term your profession may not matter.
   
   
4. Make it rain every day except the first of the month and festivals. It can't rain on those days. Check the weather report and don't waste totems on days that are already raining.
   
   That's 3 of 28 days that you skip watering, so plan that in your planting schedule. But your farm is huge enough to more than make up for the lost 3 days. Also keep in mind:
   - Sprinklers don't water unhoed land on the first day of a month either, which is most of your land.
   - Sprinklers waste 1/9th or 1/25th of the space on your farm yet no one complains about that.
   
   Those 3 days that don't rain give you all the truffles you need.

I think people miss this strat plus the strat to use high harvest gold/seed gold/day crops early because they're only thinking of the end game. But isn't most of the game reaching the end game?

[Florist]

nice to see a fellow comrade doing what im always doing

[MisterSpock]

If you start fast you can have 100 quality sprinklers in 1. summer. Thats 800 tiles watering service. The farm has around 3000 tiles.

Investing 150k + a few 1000G per day doesnt sound cheap.

In summary, it doesnt sound that appealing for me.

[MisterSpock]

Btw: For having 400k gold per harvest you need 1000 tiles of Rhubarb.

[pleasespamme2004]

İlk olarak MisterSpock tarafından gönderildi:

Btw: For having 400k gold per harvest you need 1000 tiles of Rhubarb.

Or more tiles of something else. I have most of the 3000ish tiles filled, minus buildings and what not. I did kale due to lower upfront cost and faster scythe harvesting. Then strawberries. If I do a faster run next time I will get rhubarb by spring 2. So I should also mention that I have twice as many harvests as I would with rhubarb and am getting 800k in the amount of time it would take to harvest rhubarb

İlk olarak MisterSpock tarafından gönderildi:

If you start fast you can have 100 quality sprinklers in 1. summer. Thats 800 tiles watering service. The farm has around 3000 tiles.

Investing 150k + a few 1000G per day doesnt sound cheap.

In summary, it doesnt sound that appealing for me.

If you want to fill the farm with sprinklers it costs around 400k. For 800 tiles I can water manually.

100 sprinklers costs over 100k, not counting the major effort to get the quartz. I can get the ore faster by farming and buying than mining.

I'm going to try another play through and try to get rain totems by year 1 summer or fall since my first play through I didn't know how to play.

The lost thousands of truffle gold each rainy day is a bit weird because it doesn't happen until after you're getting extra tens of thousands of gold each day from extra harvests. It's not an upfront cost like the barn, pigs and tappers. So initially it's meaningless. Actually it's a little nice initially because selling extra truffle oils helps offset your upfront costs right away until you can rain totem. So it's good to do tree planting (free) and barn stuff before tappers. Pay for the tappers or other misc expenses with truffle oil. And once you're rich from this if you want to switch to another strat to eek out slightly more gold you can actually afford to do so in little time thanks to this strat, not that it matters at that point.

I've also been spending a lot on bundles while waiting for stuff to finish. I have most of my bundle items already except fish. I want to finish the community center and get all 4 candles by the very first grandpa eval.

[Buffmania]

One would need a huge crop output to compensate for the recurring opportunity costs. The cost of totem materials alone is 39,125g/month. There's the lost revenue from six pigs that could have been generating for 75 days per year. One would also have to water everything manually on those three days that don't get rain as well.

The cost of sprinklers is fixed and, by the nature of fixed costs for things that never wear out, eventually nears zero. One could buy 4 iridium units from Krobus for about the cost of one month's rain totems and easily recover the the investment from the next month's crops. Even using the 39,125g to purchase the metal for quality sprinklers will buy 13 quality sprinklers during year one and 7 during year two which again pays for itself easily within a month.

The best part of buying sprinklers is that one doesn't have wait to buy a deluxe barn for 43,000g, 650 stone and 1350 wood or 96,000g worth of pigs. It also saves a ton of space that would be taken up by the barn and associated truffle harvest area. Those pigs'll also need like 30,900g worth of purchased hay per year to keep fed and need a silo to store it, unless even more space and time is dedicated to growing hay.

TL/DR:

One can get quality sprinklers sooner, for a lesser initial investment, with no recurring cost and doesn't require hand watering an entire farm 3 days per month. They even take up less farmland than a pig setup that doesn't pay for itself.

EDIT: clarity

[pleasespamme2004]

Filling the entire farm with sprinklers takes longer / costs more. I wish people would run ALL the numbers before they make a comment instead of searching for a handful of things to pick at to make a point. This strat is for farming the entire farm and harvesting over a million gold worth of produce a season (though profit after seed cost is less). Watering only part of the farm isn't relevant.

[Lenneth]

Interesting idea, but I would not recommend doing it.

1. You lose about 2 days in a season. Sure, it doesn't sound much, but if you plant starfruits, rhubarb, cauliflower, melon, and pumpkin at day 1 or strawberry at day 13 with deluxe gro, you will get 3 harvests with no day to spare. And, those are generally regarded as cash crops to plant. If you lose 2 days, you will only get to harvest two times in a season. Sure, you can't fill all 3,000 plots in day one. But, even if you fill only 1,000 in day one, you will end up with more crops.

- With deluxe gro and quality sprinklers only: 1,000 day 1 + 2,666 (3,000*8/9) + 2,666 = 6,332
- With deluxe gro and iridium sprinklers: 1,000 day 1 + 2,880 (3,000 * 24/25) + 2,880 = 6,760
- With Rain totem: 3,000 + 3,000 = 6,000


2. If you can install 20-30ish tappers, put them in oak trees and go artisan instead.
It will take about 360 pine tars per a year (24 days* 3 seasons * 5 pine tars = 360). If you get 360 kegs instead

Ex: 3,000 starfruits. Everything is silver quality.

- With Rain totem: 937 * 6,000 = 5,622,000
- With deluxe gro, quality sprinklers only, 1,000 day 1 and 390 kegs, artisan perk and in one season: (360 kegs * 4 processes * 3,150g) + 4,892 * 937 = 9,119,804

That's 62% more profit than rain totem. And, if you manage to make more kegs and processed all starfruits to wine, that's 20 mils.


3. If you can raise pigs, going with mass pigs are another option with botanic perk.

Ex: 4 barns with pigs, two truffles per a pig, 25 days of sunny days per a season
1,250g * 48 pigs * 2 truffles * 25 days * 3 seasons = 3 mils.

TLDR: You will end up with more cash crops, if you go with sprinklers. And, if you focus on artisan/oak resin instead of pine tars, you will end up with much more gold at the end. Or go with pigs. They will all end up with more gold than selling crop by themselves with rain totems.

[MisterSpock]

I get around 50 iridium ore per day, when mining. Its not that hard.

[Naid]

Too advanced for me. Ima stick with my lil chicken farm.

[Mr. Aqua]

İlk olarak Naid tarafından gönderildi:

Too advanced for me. Ima stick with my lil chicken farm.

I love my new emote.

[Romanus]

İlk olarak Naid tarafından gönderildi:

Too advanced for me. Ima stick with my lil chicken farm.

I just planted 50 Winter Seeds. I think I am advanced enough for this strategy?

[cf.barbossa]

I am certainly not advanced enough to calculate how long it takes to plant 3.000-ish seeds and to harvest all that, to put it into kegs and maybe even casks. Somehow I feel that it would take all day for most of the week.

[Mod Sloth]

İlk olarak pleasespamme2004 tarafından gönderildi:

Rain totems are severely underrated...

You, my friend, are severely underrated. I hadn't given rain totems a second thought until now.