How do you water larger farms?

[对不起我只会说英语]

I'm curious to what a bit of endgame is like when you have tons of crops to water because watering crops ever morning is becoming tedious, lol. I'm thinking of upgrading my watering can soon (just waiting for rain).

I know this game has sprinklers but the radius feels small :/ plus I haven't found iron yet to craft the 3x3 sprinkler (which is still very small btw). I didn't want to spoil myself too much but I did see screenshots and clips with people having very large farms. I don't understand how they manage that.

[jonesy_bluebird]

I'm on my 4th game, this time I have just bought loads of iron and gold ore from Clint to get lots of early quality sprinklers.

[Queen Droxxanna]

Originally posted by Ryvaken Tadrya:

Originally posted by soaringfreedom:

there's also a mod that gives an item to power up your sprinklers so they water an even larger area, if you are into huge farms.

That's...that's NOT a mod.
...
I honestly can't tell if you're trolling or if you've just played modded enough that you've lost sight of vanilla.

oh you are right, i just dont remember having the pressure nozzle in vanilla play, and now i have so many mods, i cant tell what is mod, and what is vanilla

[Nakos]

Depending on your tolerance for the mines (and whatever else you might be doing during the day), it's fairly easy to reach floor 80. Generally, I plan to do 5 levels per visit. So, 16 visits will take you to floor 80, which is where Gold starts being available.

I don't go every day, but I generally manage it by early to mid summer.

Unlike many people, I also LIKE the T1 sprinklers. It's true they only water 4 spots, so they're not nearly as useful as even the T2's, but they still do the job they're supposed to: They water some spots in your garden for you. They allow you to have more plants, with less watering.

I typically use them for trellis plants (Beans, Hops, Grapes):
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=956781791

[DaBa]

Originally posted by Ryvaken Tadrya:

Originally posted by DaBa:

My experience is that by the time you actually can produce a good quantity of irridium splinklers, you already have crafted so many quality sprinklers that there's no reason to switch.

8 squares of area of effect might seem small, but it adds up very quickly. 10 sprinklers is already 80 crops for example. And since the recipe is pretty cheap, if you make regular trips to the mines you can easily craft a dozens of them before the first year ends.

The iridium gets 24 tiles; 3 times as many. You're essentially losing 2 tiles of crops by not switching. Like you said, it adds up.

I like playing Riverlands. It's pretty. It also has a lot of weird little twists and turns and irregularly shaped islands. I use the best sprinklers I can for most of it then use the older ones as crack-fillers along the edges. I'm fairly sure there isn't a better way to organize them that ends up with more usable tiles, and as such I'm in the endgame with a couple basic sprinklers and a few qualities still on my farm. If they make even one tile usable, they're worth it.

Of course, but making every single tile usable is not necessary at all. I know people like to min max, but if you look at it from a practical point of view, those few lost tiles are not noticable at all. Sure, if you have nothing else left to do it's an improvement, but if you already have something like 50+ quality sprinklers, replacing it all with iridium splinklers is going to cost you a lot of time and resources. Definitely not immediately worth the upgrade for how little you get our from it.

And if you REALLY want to min max, think about it this way: calculate how much money you can actually get from that extra space every single season, then compare that to how much money you can earn if you outright sell the ingredients used to craft iridium sprinklers. It's not an immediate return in value, far from it. Again, it's an expensive improvement, takes time to actually start seeing returns, is available to you relatively late in the game. Unless you're absolutely crazy about extracting every single possible percent of value and hardcore minmax your farm, this is not a worthwhile improvement.

[Ryvaken Tadrya]

Originally posted by DaBa:

Sure, if you have nothing else left to do it's an improvement, but if you already have something like 50+ quality sprinklers, replacing it all with iridium splinklers is going to cost you a lot of time and resources. Definitely not immediately worth the upgrade for how little you get our from it.

And if you REALLY want to min max, think about it this way: calculate how much money you can actually get from that extra space every single season, then compare that to how much money you can earn if you outright sell the ingredients used to craft iridium sprinklers. It's not an immediate return in value, far from it. Again, it's an expensive improvement, takes time to actually start seeing returns, is available to you relatively late in the game. Unless you're absolutely crazy about extracting every single possible percent of value and hardcore minmax your farm, this is not a worthwhile improvement.

You asked for it.

Let's eliminate the uncertainties of which farm map we're talking about and look at the greenhouse. You can find optimal layouts on the wiki; short version is that 10x12 box takes 16 quality or 6 iridium sprinklers. Notably, 4 quality sprinkers and 2 iridium are placed on non-plantable surfaces.
That means the quality sprinkler arrangement loses 12 squares, iridium loses 4.

6 iridium sprinklers need to match the value of 8 tiles. That is actually worse than the usual ratio of 1:2. Make sure you understand this: THIS SCENARIO MAKES IT HARDER FOR IRIDIUM SPRINKLERS TO SHOW THEIR VALUE.

Ancient fruit is the most reliable high value crop available.

Ancient fruit is worth 550 gold base and harvest once a week.

The sell value of the components of an iridium sprinkler are 1750 gold. +625 with the Blacksmith profession.

6 sprinklers are worth 10,500 gold, or 14,250 if you have blacksmith.
8 ancient fruit sell for 4,400 per week, assuming normal quality.

Iridium sprinklers are unlocked at level 9. Assuming no other buffs, expected return of the mix of qualities is 1.17x base price. 5,148 gold per week (average).
Tiller profession? 5,663 gold per week (average)

If you process the ancient fruit into jelly, 1150 gold per fruit. 9200 gold per week.

Artisan profession? 1610 gold per fruit. 12,880 gold per week.

Wine? 1650 per fruit, 13,200 per week.
With artisan? 2310 per fruit. 18,480 per week.


Now I could just point out that I'm earning back the gold in less than a month and that's assuming I'm just shoving fruit into shipping while my profession choices are aimed at selling milk and eggs because I hate money or something. More likely, I'm making a profit after one week's harvest.

In the farm, that's game over for your argument that it's too expensive. All you have to do is change your layout on day one of the season.

But let's say I had the greenhouse fully planted with quality. Only one sprinkler can be replaced where it is. The other eleven quality sprinklers need to be replaced and three mature plants destroyed. Using eleven deluxe speed grow (690g crafting cost) I miss out on two harvests before the new plants are mature, assuming the entire greenhouse is in sync.

That's 6 lost fruit and 2 lost weeks, and an extra 690 gold worth of ingredients.

The first week's harvest makes up for that loss with 5 fruit to spare. Assuming wine without artisan, that's 8250 extra. Minus the 690 is 7560 gold on week 3.
Plus 13,200 on week 4 will surpass the value of selling the ingredients.



One month after refitting the greenhouse with better sprinklers, you have made a profit on the decision.

And again, this scenario was chosen to give the greatest advantage to staying the course and not upgrading, but instead selling the ingredients that would be used to make sprinklers. And it still exceeded the break even point in a month.

This isn't min/max. This is recognizing that a sprinkler that covers THREE TIMES the radius is a major jump.

[pvilleSteph]

If you can mod try getting the tractor mod and using that to water is a good idea rlly ez to get

[hexnessie]

Originally posted by Ryvaken Tadrya:

One month after refitting the greenhouse with better sprinklers, you have made a profit on the decision.

Nobody is arguing that greenhouse or specific limited-space scenarios (River Farm) won't benefit from iridium sprinklers.

It's the outside farming that is really a toss between the two. To put things plainly, on standard farm you are going to have MUCH more farming space than you can actually process, so the loss of a couple squares to sprinklers is inconsequential.

You can also go absolutely bananas and use no sprinklers at all, watering by hand - that's 0 loss of space. But would you do it?

(I did, once, on the Beach Farm - had 1000 plots and a pumpkin plantation, it was amazing and fun, but not really your standard use case)

[Ryvaken Tadrya]

Originally posted by hexnessie:

Nobody is arguing that greenhouse or specific limited-space scenarios (River Farm) won't benefit from iridium sprinklers.

It's the outside farming that is really a toss between the two. To put things plainly, on standard farm you are going to have MUCH more farming space than you can actually process, so the loss of a couple squares to sprinklers is inconsequential.

Sigh.

Your reasoning is actually backwards. The smaller farm is the one that is going to have irregular patches where the larger sprinkler's efficiency is lost.

Originally posted by Ryvaken Tadrya:

Make sure you understand this: THIS SCENARIO MAKES IT HARDER FOR IRIDIUM SPRINKLERS TO SHOW THEIR VALUE.

...

And again, this scenario was chosen to give the greatest advantage to staying the course and not upgrading, but instead selling the ingredients that would be used to make sprinklers. And it still exceeded the break even point in a month.

The advantage in the greenhouse is 6 iridium do the job of 12 quality, a 1:2 advantage. The advantage in a theoretical endless grid is 1:3, making iridium sprinklers even more valuable if you have a large, contiguous field to use them in. The actual size is mathematically invariant -- the ratio remains the same on a large farm as it does on a small one.

It's always better to use sprinklers to open up new fields than to put them in a chest, so leaving old sprinklers while using new ones to make more farmland available makes sense. However, there is no sound argument that favors quality sprinklers over iridium, short of an extreme iridium shortage. And even then, buying them is still valid, if noticeably more expensive.

[NBOX21]

Originally posted by hexnessie:

You can also go absolutely bananas and use no sprinklers at all

True, considering banana trees are self-sufficient and grow by themselves even without watering them.You can even grow them inside the greenhouse, even along the edges where you can't normally plant crops.

[Maya-Neko]

Originally posted by hexnessie:

Originally posted by Ryvaken Tadrya:

One month after refitting the greenhouse with better sprinklers, you have made a profit on the decision.

Nobody is arguing that greenhouse or specific limited-space scenarios (River Farm) won't benefit from iridium sprinklers.

It's the outside farming that is really a toss between the two. To put things plainly, on standard farm you are going to have MUCH more farming space than you can actually process, so the loss of a couple squares to sprinklers is inconsequential.

You can also go absolutely bananas and use no sprinklers at all, watering by hand - that's 0 loss of space. But would you do it?

The math about it is actually quite clear, especially for outside farming, since you don't need to care about the loss of income due to the replacement period.

Your point of it being inconsequential, because you don't care if you get some expensive items a few days later, is definitely a valid point though, but that doesn't change the math at all.

And no, it's definitely not that hard to process like 1k+ tiles of crops, especially in the late game, which all this math was about to begin with anyway. But even when you're unable to make it into wine, selling it pure on top of what you're able to process is still more profit mathematically and will btw. get you faster to the point, where you can actually process it (since you're mostly just buying wood/stone/ores/coal in the lategame anyway). It's not like you're throwing everything away, which can't be processed.

[Nakos]

And ... the game is finite. eventually, you run out of things to buy, upgrades to make.

But you can just keep generating cash endlessly.

For me, the fun part is early on, when you're poor, and you're trying to decide what to do next, trying to figure out which thing will help you the most.

By time you've got 10's or 100's of thousands in the bank, it's hardly relevant what you buy next. Almost any investment will be recouped in a week or two at most.

[hexnessie]

Originally posted by Ryvaken Tadrya:

Sigh.

Your reasoning is actually backwards. The smaller farm is the one that is going to have

No, it isn't and it doesn't.

Losing 12 tiles in 120 of is a huge loss.

Now with 3427 plantable plots on standard farm, you are going to be VERY late in game before you run out of growing space.

It does not may any sense whatsoever to *replace* perfectly good sprinklers with new versions BEFORE you have used up all your arable land.

You can just plop down your iridium sprinklers in new spots you want to farm, and leave your existing layout of 3x3 sprinklers in place until you are so bored with life you really want to replace those.

And lets be hones, there are much better uses of iridium early on rather than replacing sprinklers that doesn't give you any more farming space than you already have:
- upgrade your tools, esp. the axe
- build a fleet of Crystallariums and have them pumping out jade and diamonds
- and so on

By the time you run out of your 3427 plots and go way past 10 million, you may decide to just leave the old sprinklers be.

The only scenario where iridium sprinklers are a bonus is in limited space, such as the greenhouse or when using Junimo huts (limited collection area)

[Maya-Neko]

Originally posted by Nakos:

For me, the fun part is early on, when you're poor, and you're trying to decide what to do next, trying to figure out which thing will help you the most.

That's the fun part for me as well, which is why i rather go with Iridium Sprinklers over Quality Sprinklers from the 2nd year onwards.

Originally posted by hexnessie:

And lets be hones, there are much better uses of iridium early on rather than replacing sprinklers that doesn't give you any more farming space than you already have:
- upgrade your tools, esp. the axe
- build a fleet of Crystallariums and have them pumping out jade and diamonds
- and so on

Why the axe in particular? i can easily play with the gold axe in the late game without any problems, since trees doesn't grow that fast anyway. The Iridium Pickaxe is pretty much the only really necessary thing for me

And the things, which make crystalariums really expensive are rather the stones and gold bars than the iridium bars (at least the way i play the game), so min-maxing on income first is definitely not the worst thing you can do about iridium usage here.

[Frandez]

Mmmmm... I smell this post gonna be lock as well

[ZEN]

What is going on with these over complicated debates on posts where people are asking for simple help.