Zombie Hemp Farm?

[Kanonenfutter]

How come there's no such thing?

[Cryten]

Hemp is very low priority, no food or booze, just rope and oil so I guess it was not a consideration.

[madcapbeatitude]

1. Hemp is about normal priority IMO.

Carrots are higher priority cheap crops, since they feed the donkey who brings the bodies.

Beets are the higher-priced cheap crop, which requires you to spend more on seeds but also to gain more energy from them when cooked.

Wheat is the most efficient cheap crop for feeding the Keeper. Wheat --> Flour --> Dough --> Bread is the quickest, easiest, cheapest way to start carrying dense stackable piles of energy with minimal cooking.

Cabbage is mostly useful in recipes.

Hemp can make rope for candles, which are a factor in achieving the highest church scores late in the game. Buying candles in order to upgrade the church is not cost effective, but making candles out of beeswax, hemp rope, and human fat is VERY cost effective.

Hemp seeds can make oil that facilitates frying methods for cooking food, or making polishing paste which is an ingredient in glass lenses. Glass lenses might not sound like a huge deal, but there is a juncture at which the only way you can make a gold-quality steel chisel is to burn a bunch of them on a 30% chance of upgrading your silver-quality chisel. Right around that same time, you will need a gold-quality chisel to make a silver-quality marble carving, without which you can't upgrade your church to a cathedral.

Even after you have your first gold chisel, and hopefully the sense to repair it BEFORE it breaks, you may be making lenses in volume - just polishing stone and marble to make quality graves of whichever material requires chisels, and polishing marble requires steel chisels. Making gold chisels OR repairing them consumes lenses, and when your food is being grown by zombies while your furnaces are blasting out manufactured goods, you may have time on your hands to carve batches of stone for top-quality graves, or to sell as goods.

Oil is a big deal, and by extension so is hemp. You can cook with it early on, and it's an industrial good later on. I was VERY disappointed when I couldn't task a zombie with growing me unlimited hemp for candles and seed oil.

2. Being from Southeast Michigan, I can tell you that employing zombies at hemp farms is definitely a widely practiced business model IRL.

[Dosbilliam, Boring but Practical]

Originally posted by madcapbeatitude:

Beets are the higher-priced cheap crop, which requires you to spend more on seeds but also to gain more energy from them when cooked.

Gonna assume you mean in the more complex recipes they're in, since Beet Slices is a terrible recipe outside of the extreme-early-game. Grated Beets, on the other hand...

[madcapbeatitude]

Originally posted by Dosbilliam, Boring but Practical:

Originally posted by madcapbeatitude:

Beets are the higher-priced cheap crop, which requires you to spend more on seeds but also to gain more energy from them when cooked.

Gonna assume you mean in the more complex recipes they're in, since Beet Slices is a terrible recipe outside of the extreme-early-game. Grated Beets, on the other hand...

Extreme early game is what I'm talking about.

I'm talking about:
- spending the money from your first burial on wheat seeds so you have some bread to run around with and don't need to sleep constantly starting out
-Buying carrot seeds in anticipation of reaching +5 score in the graveyard, causing Donkey to become disillusioned with your comradeship and take a carrot-seed dump in front of you, before showing up a few days later to demand his cut.
-Starting some composting so you can spend less money on wheat and carrot seeds, and transitioning from wheat to beets, or dividing between them. Wheat's better for eating, but beets are better for selling

NONE of the cheap crops are profitable in the big picture unless you're using them in recipes.

Once we get out of the extreme-early game, where carrots, wheat, and firewood are like money, the cheapest way to eat well is probably to catch fish. This means that until we reach rank II with the farmer and can start buying seeds for onion (hamburgers), lentils (eating), or pumpkins (most profitable crop), beets are good crop for growing in abundance so you can sell the surplus.

Late-game farming is ultra profitable, but early game farming is more something that helps you avoid starving and make sure you have SOME money coming in, for unavoidable essentials like buying seeds. Beets are the pumpkins of the game's first 10-20 days. It's note life-changing money, but if you sell too much firewood to the farmer he'll start paying 1 copper for them, and he goes through a lot more beets than firewood.

[Dosbilliam, Boring but Practical]

Originally posted by madcapbeatitude:

NONE of the cheap crops are profitable in the big picture unless you're using them in recipes.

That's probably because there's no reason to sell them when things like Silver exist; Stone will always be an infinitely better item to sell compared to any crop, and by the time that stops really being a good option you've got easy access to the Quarry, meaning Iron and Silver access. Hell, with BSS installed you can even, with enough pushing on Blue points, make a few pieces of Jewelry to sell to the Merchant for several gold.

[madcapbeatitude]

Originally posted by Dosbilliam, Boring but Practical:

Originally posted by madcapbeatitude:

NONE of the cheap crops are profitable in the big picture unless you're using them in recipes.

That's probably because there's no reason to sell them when things like Silver exist; Stone will always be an infinitely better item to sell compared to any crop, and by the time that stops really being a good option you've got easy access to the Quarry, meaning Iron and Silver access. Hell, with BSS installed you can even, with enough pushing on Blue points, make a few pieces of Jewelry to sell to the Merchant for several gold.

Even if you started the game with a full chest of silver ore in your bedroom chest, you need the smithing skill to build the right furnace and smelt it into ingots. 8 of them would get you 1 gold from the Merchant if you sold them 1 at a time, so over the course of a typical game a player could probably make a few gold this way.

I hoarded my silver, since money stopped being much of an obstacle once I saved up for my trading license, and before that point I didn't know if there was silver jewelry I might be able to craft. Over the course of a full playthrough, my complete hoard of gold was only worth a few gold in total, most of it coming in after I was processing unlimited supplies of iron, which meant other critical milestones had been reached.

If anything, I'd say the optimal use of silver is for shortening the grind for your trading license, which can seem very expensive before you can use it to make more money. Depending on how much silver you find how early, it can also help significantly with you building permit, so you can raise the low ceiling on how much faith you can earn in the early game.

The best sources of early-game emergency cash are probably beets and fish, both of which require no processing to bring in some money other than what you get from burial licenses, and either of which can be noteworthy food sources before you get access to high-energy recipes. Once the church is open, blue points and faith become your most important currencies for awhile, and grapes become the real moneymaker.

Grapes become grape pies that you can sell to the tavern, bronze and silver wine that you can sell to the tavern, gold wine that you can sell to the merchant, and grape pies and wine that can prevent you from ever needing to sleep again for more than a brief moment at a time. Winemaking equipment can turn human fat into oil, which can turn human ashes into ink, meaning that feathers become the only writing component you need to buy with money. Flyers and hemp rope become a farmable source of blue points if you make any mistakes investing your early points, so after that point we're off to the races.

By this early point in the game, a player is unlikely to have found much silver yet, if any, but grapes can make them enough money and food to be out of poverty forever. I had the hardest time with alchemy unknowns, like how to make my own ink, oil, and health potions, since the game provides wrong information about how to do some of these things. Silver is a helpful source of burst income, once you have the ability to smelt it and are trying to fund your trade license. Once you get the trading license, though, pumpkins rapidly become the most profitable thing in the game.