Farmer or Rancher

[一安NNN]

When skills reach level 5, do you choose a farmer or a rancher?

[Irimex]

I generally go with farmer. I've been told crops tend to bring in a larger profit margin than animals do. I'm no expert on being a money tycoon in SDV though, it's just what I've heard from a few youtube videos and comments around here.

[CalhounMKZ]

Farmer leads into Artisan which can increase the value of processed goods including animal goods.

[CloudSeeker]

Well. Pigs have an extreme ability to generate money. So if you make a pig farm you can earn huge amount of money using pigs.

Just so you know. You can respect any skill so if you want to change, all you need is a Sewer access and 10.000g.

[Maya-Neko]

The Rancher tree is better, if you want to focus on pigs and/or sheeps, but in every other case it's definitely better to take the Farmer-Skills in terms of money.

[I Kinda Fail]

The crop path is much, MUCH better unless you're focusing hard on animals, and even then, the level 10 crop path buffs how much money things like cheese give.

- With a massive pig farm, you'd want Rancher and then Shepherd; raising friendship with pigs will be easier, and happier pigs find more truffles. And if you take the Botanist foraging perk, you won't even need to convert the truffles to oil, so Artisan will be useless.

- With a massive sheep farm, Rancher and Artisan are both decent. You'll get more wool with Rancher, but you'll get more money per wool with Artisan.

- With goats, they're probably pretty even. Rancher will help you get more large milk, which means you'll have more gold star cheese to age, which takes much less time than no-star to iridium-star. However, Artisan will make your cheese worth more. If you don't plan to use casks, then... I guess Artisan would be better?

- With a mix of everything, I'd say Artisan. Likewise, with a fair balance of crops and animals, Artisan wins by a lot.

[Vinyl Scratch]

Generally speaking, the Farmer into Artisan perk is better.

The only deviation you should ever make is going Rancher -> Shepard so you can gather more wool, then switching back to Farming -> Artisan when you're looking to sell your product. Though doing this kind of implies you're pretty far into your current game, and have enough going where spending 20k to swap your perks would actually be worth it.

Considering you're asking about just the level 5 perk right now, I'm going to assume you're not anywhere near that point in your game, so stick with Farming -> Artisan.

[CloudSeeker]

Originally posted by Maya:

The Rancher tree is better, if you want to focus on pigs and/or sheeps, but in every other case it's definitely better to take the Farmer-Skills in terms of money.

It might be if you do not actually take playing the game into account. Farming is far better until you actually gotten to the point you can have pigs. Just so it is clearly stated. Truffles do not actually gain any benefit from the Rancher profession. Truffles are considered "Forage" and is for that reason affected by Gatherer and Botanist profession instead. Luckily the Botanist cause all truffles to be maximum quality.


Lets take into consideration what it actually takes to get pigs.

First you need the Delux Barn
The total needed get this is 43.000g, 1350 wood and 650 stone
If you buy everything it becomes 69.500g for year 1, 175.500g year 2+

Second you need the pigs. So lets fill the barn. This is 12 pigs.
Each pig cost 16.000g so 12 cost 192.000g.

So in total a Barn full of pigs have a value of 261.500g year 1 or 367.500 year 2+
If you got optimal conditions, pigs produce on average three truffles a day. This means 12 pigs produce 45.000g daily after you invested maybe 367.500g into them. That means your investment is going to be paid back 8 days, but it will most likely take many seasons to get to that point.
However. You should know that Artisan will still be the best pick here as Truffle oil still have a higher value then the best quality truffle. So for making money using pigs. Artisan seems to be the way to go. Rancher is good when you need to grind them up to maximum.

[The Bored Chairman]

Depends on the farm for me. If I'm playing something like the River Farm, I go Rancher, because the available room for farming is quite low (and my income will likely be supported by fishing anyway). On farms with a ton of arable land, I choose Farmer because the end game goal is to have a massive crop yield. I generally don't buy too many animals because they require feeding/petting, whereas you can just drop a sprinkler down and your crops more or less take care of themselves.