Storm Frequency

[MekaDovah]

Did something happen to make thunderstorms more frequent? Years ago I remember they only appeared in the Summer, but now I can't seem to go a single month (except Winter) without not only multiple storms, but some that last 2-3 days straight.

Even when using lightning rods and ending the day early, I still often end up losing something that can be destroyed (crops, paths, trees) no matter what and it's rather annoying. It's to the point where I don't consider it worth using the main farm for actual farming because I'll just keep losing crops.

I read on the wiki that there was always a chance for it to be like this, which I take to mean I was either super lucky before to never get storms in Spring and Autumn or I'm absurdly unlucky now to get them so often.

Be nice if there was an upgrade to lightning rods or something that made it so the farm never took storm damage again.

[Omegatherion]

Lightning storms are more common in Summer than in other seasons and never occur in Spring, Year 1.

Other than that you just seem to get unlucky. I don't have too much trouble with that and i am almost through year 3 on my current save.

I have like 20 Lightning Rods and have lost mabye like 5 crops total in 3 years. Keep in mind that a Rod can only absorb one lightning strike per day. Then it has to process the power and can't abosrb any more lightnings. So maybe you want to put up some more.

[red255]

Originally posted by MekaDovah:

Be nice if there was an upgrade to lightning rods or something that made it so the farm never took storm damage again.

general suggestion is to replace your fences, particularly fences that protect grass, with lightning rods.

not sure which farm you are running, but yeah I got like 8 days of thunderstorms summer year 1. didn't lose too much, got a pile of batteries but I made a pile of lightning rods.

leave trees before you get lightning rods so the lightning hits other stuff.

[Maya-Neko]

i would say, that 20 lightning rods should be the minimum you should aim for, 30 if you want some more protection. Anything beyond that obviously helps to some degree, but will have diminishing returns and the iron might be more usefull in other objects. For example investing it in kegs or bee hives gives you back way more than what you would loose on lost crops, unless you're very unlucky

[MekaDovah]

I have 35 lightning rods. My run is currently on year 7. Back when I had an actual tree farm for sap on site, I would lose one every storm. Eventually moved the tree farm to another part of the map since lightning doesn't seem to strike out there. Lightning rods were ineffective at preventing this no matter how many I had.

Was doing large scale ancient fruit farming to build up funds and while I wasn't as certain to lose something every time there was a storm, the risk felt high and given how long it takes for that stuff to grow, replacing even 1 felt like a pain.

I would routinely just go back to bed immediately to minimize a storm's effects, but then they started happening several days in a row on a regular basis.

So now I just moved all my farming to Ginger Island (still concerned about weeds causing damage, but so far so good), but I do have pathways that get blasted now and then. While they're not hard to replace, it's annoying to have to check all the time.

It's really just become a massive nuisance and feels very limiting on what I can actually use my farm for.

[Maya-Neko]

As said already: Lighting rods won't catch every single lightning, but the more you have, the higher the chances of getting a storm with every lighting being intercepted. The formula is

1 - ( charging rods / amount of rods ) ²

for each single lightning. So with 35 rods the first one will be intercepted with a 100% chance, the second one with a ~99,92% chance, the 10th with a 91,84% chance and the 36th one with a 0% chance.

On top of that if one lightning gets through, it only has a 25% chance to hit any feature excluding chests. Obviously, if you've like 100 trees and 10 crops, it is more likely to have a tree getting hit, but if most of your features are crops, then it is highly likely that they're getting hit. Though if you're building floor tiles and fences, then these can also be hit. But overall you could also just ignore it and fix stuff when you run past it, so no need to take your time to check the whole farm after each storm (just make sure, that no expensive objects got hit). Even crops doesn't need to be replaced instantly that late into the game already.

So only getting 1 hit every storm is already quite good and definitely far away from being ineffective. Like normally you can expect 2-3 or even more things to get hit on a full day.

Overall it might be worth for you to install CBJ Cheats Menu, where you can simply switch the weather to normal rain, if you doesn't feel like it should storm that often. Though i personally would definitely feel lucky to get like 8 storms in one month, given that batteries are needed in high quantities in the late game for Jade-farms.

[MekaDovah]

I have no need for that many batteries or jade, but thanks anyway.

[red255]

how many crystallariums do you really need for your jade farms?

[Maya-Neko]

Originally posted by MekaDovah:

I have no need for that many batteries or jade, but thanks anyway.

But then i don't understand, why you care about loosing one crop or one tree every now and then, if you doesn't care about min-maxing that much anyway.

Originally posted by red255:

how many crystallariums do you really need for your jade farms?

Well, 50+ is already quite important to me, given that i don't want to plan month ahead for when i want to go into the skull cavern. Obviously not only Jade, but Ruby as well to get my hand on some spicy eel, until i can produce lucky lunch in masses.

[red255]

here I thought you were using the jade to buy staircases to turn into 99 stone with a deconstructor for some project

[Maya-Neko]

Its rather for the iridium bars^^ Going in the normal way needs some luck, especially when playing in multiplayer as i usually do. And since farming iridium gets easier the lower you go it is definitely better to take like 200+ floors before actually starting (or in online-MP without time stopping at least 100+) and for that, Jade is definitely the way to go. Overall we talk about the difference of ~30 iridium ores without ladders and 500+ ores with them per day here. (Obviously, everybody can do it their way, its just that i don't want to sit their searching for ladders for dozens of hours to build everything i want to)

And since we've got this giant greenhouse with the ginger island, it starts to get interesting to use the best fertilizer, which obviously needs iridium^^

Though, if i wanted to have stones, i would simply just go to robin and buy them that late in the game. I definitely don't want to pay a million gold just for skipping 100 floors though, which is why an array of Jade-crystalariums is definitely helpfull. And once i've enough iridium, then they can be easily turned into diamond as well.

[MekaDovah]

Originally posted by Maya-Neko:

But then i don't understand, why you care about loosing one crop or one tree every now and then, if you don't care about min-maxing that much anyway.

Because I find it a nuisance to keep replanting and for my harvest days to be out of sync. And because it isn't occasional losses, it's with annoying regularity because the storms are that frequent.

Plus this is one top of that other bug that causes plants on the tile directly right of my sprinklers to occasionally just vanish for no reason. I would prefer to not lose plants randomly all the time.

[TamanduaGirl]

I'd say it's just bad luck. I found thunder storms pretty scare in my recent summer in new farm.

I never lost any fruit trees or crops to lightening on my 8yr farm but I did put rods spread out. I did lose some on the island farm but I didn't put any there. It's possible it was hitting the wild trees instead of my stuff though since I'm lazy and don't max out my farm. I wouldn't have noticed a wild tree go missing from the mess of them.

[MekaDovah]

Originally posted by TamanduaGirl:

I'd say it's just bad luck. I found thunder storms pretty scare in my recent summer in new farm.

I never lost any fruit trees or crops to lightening on my 8yr farm but I did put rods spread out. I did lose some on the island farm but I didn't put any there. It's possible it was hitting the wild trees instead of my stuff though since I'm lazy and don't max out my farm. I wouldn't have noticed a wild tree go missing from the mess of them.

Looks like it, and I'm just very unlucky lately for some reason.

Well, I have a new farm plan and it involves growing nothing on the main farm so the storms have nothing but cheap, disposable stone paths to blow up.