Farming
You can farm in three places:
- Garden beds in the garden beside your house.
- Vine trellises in the vineyard over the broken bridge.
- The orchard, where apple trees and berry bushes grow without help.
A bed or trellis is sown with 4 seeds and returns crops, fresh seeds and 2 Leaves. Leaves turn into Peat, your first fertilizer. The Farming tab of the tech tree unlocks in chapter 4.
The key rule: your Farming mastery matters only while you’re planting. After that, the bed’s own skill takes over, and only garden upgrades and fertilizer change it. Talents and tools have no effect on a crop that’s already growing.
Setting up a bed
- Research Gardening for 5 green.
- Place a Garden Bed from the garden’s blueprint table. It’s free but only fits in the marked bed area.
- Dig it with a shovel: 4 swings at 2 energy each. This needs Farming mastery 2, and the Rusty Shovel only provides 1. Make up the difference with a fishing rod on the hotbar or the first Farming node on the talent tree.
Planting
Interact with an empty bed while carrying seeds. Every planting uses exactly 4 seeds and is 4 shovel steps, graded the way cooking is: each seed type has a Farming requirement, and under it some swings fail. Failed planting steps stay failed for the life of the crop, permanently shrinking the harvest. At Farming 0 you can’t plant at all.
| Crop | Planted in | Farming to plant | Harvest pays |
|---|---|---|---|
| Wheat | Garden bed | 2 | 2 green |
| Carrot | Garden bed | 4 | 4 green |
| Flax | Garden bed | 5 | 5 green |
| Beet | Garden bed | 6 | 6 green |
| Cabbage ★1 / ★2 / ★3 | Garden bed | 8 / 10 / 12 | 8 green |
| Onion ★1 / ★2 / ★3 | Garden bed | 10 / 12 / 14 | 10 green |
| Pumpkin ★1 / ★2 / ★3 | Garden bed | 12 / 14 / 16 | 12 green |
| Hops | Vine trellis | 7 | 7 green |
| Grapes ★1 / ★2 / ★3 | Vine trellis | 12 / 14 / 16 | 12 green |
How crops grow
Each crop is 12 steps long, and the 4 planting steps count toward that, leaving 8 to grow. The bed advances by itself, one tick every 2 minutes, comparing its skill with the crop’s requirement each time:
- Skill ≥ requirement: every tick succeeds, moving 1 step, or 2 or 3 steps if the skill is double or triple the requirement.
- Skill < requirement: each tick moves exactly one step, and that step may fail; the lower the skill, the more failures.
| Bed | Skill | Time per tick |
|---|---|---|
| Garden bed, at the start | 2 | 2:00 |
| After Garden Upgrade I | 4 | 1:45 |
| After Garden Upgrade II | 8 | 1:30 |
| Vine trellis | 6 | as the garden |
| After the Vineyard Upgrade | 11 | as the garden |
In other words, low skill doesn’t make crops slower, only smaller. At the start, wheat needs 8 ticks, or 16 minutes (about two in-game days). Once Garden Upgrade I doubles the garden’s skill relative to wheat, each tick moves 2 steps and a wheat bed is ready in 7 minutes.
God of nature, a sermon buff, cuts 20 seconds from each tick. It only applies to crops that begin growing while you have it, and those crops keep the faster tick until harvest.
The rules in full
- Growth steps remaining = 12 + Crop Boosting − 4 planting steps − Headstart.
- Skill ≥ requirement: each tick gives ⌊skill ÷ requirement⌋ successful steps, capped at 3.
- Skill < requirement: each tick gives one step, successful ⌊100 × skill ÷ requirement⌋ times in 99.
- Tick length = 120 seconds − 15 (Garden Upgrade I) or 30 (Garden Upgrade II) − 20 (God of nature), locked in when the crop starts growing.
Worked example: ★1 Cabbage (requirement 8) in a skill-2 bed succeeds 25 times in 99 per tick. With all 4 planting steps successful, roughly 4 + 8 × 0.25 = 6 of the 12 steps succeed, yielding about 3 cabbages and 3 seeds, which is fewer seeds than went in.
Harvesting
Pull ripe crops by hand. Harvesting has no mastery requirement; Farming mastery only changes how many pulls it takes. The bed then drops its yield:
- Odd-numbered successful steps give a seed, even-numbered ones a crop. A perfect 12-step bed gives 6 crops and 6 seeds plus 2 Leaves, returning your 4 seeds with 2 to spare.
- Starred crops upgrade late. Cabbage, onion, pumpkin and grapes from ★1 or ★2 seeds produce crops and seeds one star higher from the 11th successful step. ★3 seeds give ★3 all the way.
- Perks add extras: Farmer, Farmer II and Seed Master each add one crop or seed per harvest, and Grape Master one grape.
A harvest pays green tech points (listed in the crop table), advances the Earth Power inspiration, and the first harvest of carrots, beets, cabbage, onions or pumpkins teaches you that crop’s cooking technology. The empty bed is ready for the next seeds straight away.
Fertilizers
Fertilizers I gives each bed a fertilizer slot, and Fertilizers II a second; two is the maximum. Only empty beds can be fertilized, either by holding the fertilizer and interacting or through the bed’s window.
| Fertilizer | Unlocked by | Recipe | Bed effect |
|---|---|---|---|
| Peat | Fertilizers I | 8 Leaves at the Compost Pile → 2 | Skill +1 |
| Crop Boosting Fertilizer I | Fertilizers I | 2 Peat + Dream Dust | 2 more steps to grow |
| Farming Fertilizer I | Fertilizers II | 2 Peat + Weak growth elixir | Skill +2 |
| Headstart Fertilizer I | Fertilizers II | 2 Peat + Weak growth elixir | 1 step done at the start |
| Farming Fertilizer II | Fertilizers III | 4 Peat + Rich growth elixir | Skill +3 |
| Headstart Fertilizer II | Fertilizers III | 4 Peat + Rich growth elixir | 2 steps done at the start |
| Farming Fertilizer III | Fertilizers IV | 8 Peat + Miracle growth elixir | Skill +5 |
Except for Peat, they’re all crafted at the Formulation Bench, which sits on the church side of the tree (Church Lighting I) and runs on Anatomy mastery. Growth elixirs come from alchemy.
| Type | What it does |
|---|---|
| Peat, Farming Fertilizer | Raises the bed’s skill: fewer failures under the requirement, faster growth over it. |
| Headstart | Banks steps that always count as successes, so the crop finishes sooner with a guaranteed floor. |
| Crop Boosting | Lengthens the crop by 2 steps. A perfect bed then gives one extra crop and seed, both a star higher on starred crops, at the cost of 2 more steps of growing. |
Upgrades
| Upgrade | Result | Unlocked by | Cost |
|---|---|---|---|
| Garden Upgrade I | Garden skill 4, tick 1:45 | Garden Improvement I (30 green) | 10 Peat, 18 Bronze Nails, 9 Wooden Planks |
| Garden Upgrade II | Garden skill 8, tick 1:30 | Garden Improvement II (100 green, 25 blue) | 9 Farming Fertilizer II, 8 Iron Details, 4 Oiled Beams |
| Vineyard Upgrade | Trellis skill 11 | Vineyard Improvement (175 green, 50 blue) | 6 Farming Fertilizer III, 6 Advanced Details, 4 Oiled Beams |
Garden Improvement II is hidden on the tree until you’ve built Garden Upgrade I. Each garden upgrade also expands the bed area: space for 10 beds initially, 20 after Upgrade I, 30 after Upgrade II. The vineyard fits 12 trellises, or 18 with the Vineyard Upgrade. Trellises are unlocked by Vineyard (55 green), cost 5 Sticks and 3 Peat apiece, and need Farming mastery 6 to dig.
Orchard
Orchardry (20 green) unlocks the Orchard (10 Peat) and the Apple Tree. The three bushes, Berry Bush, Blueberry Bush and Rhododendron Bush, become available only after the Orchard is built. Each plant needs one seedling, sold by Herm at tier three and by the town Vegetable Stand.
Orchard plants grow unaided at a set speed that mastery, fertilizer, upgrades and sermons can’t touch, and you pick them by hand every time they’re ready:
| Plant | Regrows every | First ready after | Farming to pick | Yield |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Apple Tree | 20 minutes | 25 minutes | Farming 2 | 4–8 Apples |
| Berry Bush | 20 minutes | about 7 minutes | Farming 1 | 2–4 Berries |
| Blueberry Bush | 20 minutes | about 7 minutes | Farming 1 | 2–4 Blueberries |
| Rhododendron Bush | 20 minutes | about 7 minutes | Farming 1 | 2–4 Rhododendrons, sometimes a Firefly |
Notes
- Try not to plant under the seed’s requirement. Failed planting steps are gone for the whole crop, so load your hotbar with Farming tools before sowing cabbage, onions or pumpkins.
- No watering, no seasons, no weather. The well in the garden supplies water for cooking.
- Fertilizer is permanent. Nothing clears it after a harvest; it’s only replaced when you put a different fertilizer in that slot. Unconfirmed: based on the code, not yet checked in play.
- Applying a duplicate by hand wastes it. Using a fertilizer on a bed that already has that kind consumes it for nothing. The bed’s window won’t offer duplicates.
- The Vineyard Upgrade’s speed bonus is broken. It writes a value nothing reads; trellises actually speed up with the garden upgrades.
- Green Thumb is a dud. It claims +2 Farming for planting and harvesting, but its bonus is never applied.
- Crop tablets are only for zombie gardeners. They tell a gardener what to sow. Once a gardener has claimed a bed’s order, you can’t plant or fertilize that bed yourself.