Aloe in the north?

[His Quivzness]

I'm set up near New Asagard, and i haven't found any aloe up here. Do i have to go south of the wall just to find aloe?

[thurgond]

Yes, just like you need to go north to get hops and leavening plant.

[Macdallan]

I have never found any aloe in what most of us would consider the "north" but it's really light so you can harvest a lot of it in a single trip and bring it north with you. You can also grow more from seeds using planters and compost. There are some areas that have a huge amount of it and if you're using a decent quality sickle (hardened steel or better) you can harvest a few thousand pieces of aloe in a very short amount of time.

thurgond - You may not know this but on the EL map you don't have to go north for hops or leavening plants since they do exist in other places. From what I've seen hops are fairly rare south of the wall but they can be found in at least one place, and there are several places to find leavening plants.

There's one particular island in the jungle that has a bit of both plants at N-6.

[Kvinden]

The simplest solution is to grow them in a planter. They don't even need special compost.
Visit the south, take some leaves, dry them in the dryer, plant the seeds and in 2 days you'll have more aloe in your fortress in the snow than you'll ever need

They even grow outside in a blizzard tempest, which is very unrealistic for a tropical plant.

Inverse the process for hops in the desert. Collect them in the north and import them to your southern fortress, dry and plant the seeds, and in no time your darfari thralls can also enjoy a good fresh beer like the nordheimer and the cimmerians.

There is almost no need to search plants in their native biome, after some time the problem is more to find a place to store the seeds ( and a use for all those plants).

[His Quivzness]

I forgot you can dry out leaves to get seeds! I did a run to the pools of w/e (the mitra statue thingy) and grabbed a bunch a while ago, but i totally forgot about using the dryer for seeds. Thank you so much for reminding me.

[Macdallan]

I just did some searching online since I never bother drying seeds and I rarely use planters. I don't know a lot about the ratios or effectiveness of farming now. According to what I read it's better as of patch/update 2.4 than it ever was (it was nearly useless before) but I doubt it's as good as it probably should be given the time and resources that go into farming in this game.

According to one player's testing three aloe turns into 1 seed when dried. One aloe seed plus compost in a planter produces 5 aloe. So, it seems like you have to dry 3 out of every 5 aloe that you produce to maintain a steady supply.

Based only on that ratio I'm not sure if it's worth the effort to grow aloe. The low seed yield from drying (3 aloe becomes 1 seed) and low plant yield after planting (1 seed becomes only 5 aloe) make me feel like growing aloe as your main supply isn't worth the effort. You're only able to use 40% of the aloe that you make, the rest must be put back into aloe production or your yield will eventually go to zero. Then there's the need to maintain production of compost in order to grow aloe and you also must harvest bark to keep drying the aloe for seeds.

My guess is that it's faster and more efficient to just make the occasional run south for aloe rather than keep up the production line for it in the north and to grow only the seeds you get from harvesting.