Farming

Farming happens in three places: garden beds in the garden by your house, vine trellises in the vineyard across the broken bridge, and the orchard, where apple trees and berry bushes grow by themselves. A bed or trellis takes 4 seeds and gives back crops, more seeds and 2 Leaves; the leaves become Peat, the first fertilizer. The Farming page of the tech tree opens in chapter 4.

The most important rule: your own Farming mastery only counts while you plant. Once a bed is growing, what matters is the bed’s own skill, set by garden upgrades and fertilizer. Your talents and tools do nothing for a growing crop.

Making a garden bed

1. Buy Gardening (5 green).
2. At the garden’s blueprint table, place a Garden Bed. It costs nothing, but can only go on the marked bed area.
3. Dig it out with a shovel: 4 swings, 2 energy each. Digging needs Farming mastery 2. The Rusty Shovel gives only 1, so you need one more point, from a fishing rod on your hotbar or the first Farming node of the talent tree.

Planting

Use seeds from your backpack and interact with an empty bed. Planting always takes 4 seeds, and it is 4 steps of work with the shovel, graded like cooking: each seed has a Farming requirement, and below it some swings fail. A step that fails at planting stays failed for the whole crop, so it costs you harvest for good. With no Farming mastery at all you cannot plant.

Crop	Seed requirement	Grows on	Tech points at harvest
Wheat	2	Garden bed	2 green
Carrot	4	Garden bed	4 green
Flax	5	Garden bed	5 green
Beet	6	Garden bed	6 green
Cabbage ★1 / ★2 / ★3	8 / 10 / 12	Garden bed	8 green
Onion ★1 / ★2 / ★3	10 / 12 / 14	Garden bed	10 green
Pumpkin ★1 / ★2 / ★3	12 / 14 / 16	Garden bed	12 green
Hops	7	Vine trellis	7 green
Grapes ★1 / ★2 / ★3	12 / 14 / 16	Vine trellis	12 green

Growing

A crop has 12 steps, and the 4 planting steps are already among them, so 8 are left to grow. The bed works through them by itself, one tick every 2 minutes. On each tick the bed compares its own skill with the crop’s requirement:

• Skill at or above the requirement: every tick succeeds, and moves the crop 1 step, or 2 or 3 if the skill is two or three times the requirement.
• Skill below it: each tick moves one step, which may fail. The lower the skill, the more fail.

Bed	Skill	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

So a skill below the requirement does not slow a crop down; it only makes it poorer. Wheat at the start takes 8 ticks, 16 minutes (about two in-game days). After Garden Upgrade I the garden’s skill is twice what wheat needs, every tick moves it 2 steps, and a bed of wheat takes 7 minutes.

The sermon buff God of nature takes 20 seconds off every tick, but only for crops that start growing while it is on you, and those keep the shorter tick for the whole crop.

Exact rules

• Steps left to grow = 12 + Crop Boosting − 4 planting steps − Headstart.
• Skill ≥ requirement: each tick adds ⌊skill ÷ requirement⌋ successful steps, at most 3.
• Skill < requirement: each tick adds one step, successful with a chance of ⌊100 × skill ÷ requirement⌋ in 99.
• Tick = 120 seconds − 15 (Garden Upgrade I) or 30 (Garden Upgrade II) − 20 (God of nature), fixed when the crop starts growing.

Example: an ★1 Cabbage (requirement 8) in a bed of skill 2 succeeds on each tick 25 times in 99. With all 4 planting steps done, about 4 + 8 × 0.25 = 6 of its 12 steps succeed, so it gives about 3 cabbages and 3 seeds: fewer seeds than you planted.

Harvest

A ripe crop is pulled by hand. There is no mastery requirement to harvest; your Farming mastery only decides how many pulls it takes. The bed drops what it grew:

• One seed for every odd successful step and one crop for every even one. A bed where all 12 steps succeeded gives 6 crops, 6 seeds and 2 Leaves: you get back the 4 seeds you planted and 2 more.
• Cabbage, onion, pumpkin and grapes grown from ★1 or ★2 seeds give crops and seeds one star higher from the 11th successful step. Planting ★3 seeds gives ★3 throughout.
• The perks Farmer, Farmer II and Seed Master each add a crop or seed per harvest, and Grape Master a grape.

Harvesting gives green tech points (see the table above), counts toward the inspiration Earth Power, and the first harvest of carrots, beets, cabbage, onions or pumpkins gives you that crop’s cooking technology. The bed is then empty again, ready for new seeds.

Fertilizer

Fertilizers I gives every bed one fertilizer slot and Fertilizers II a second; there are never more than two. You can only fertilize an empty bed: hold the fertilizer and interact, or place it from the bed’s window.

Fertilizer	Effect on the bed	Made from	Technology
Peat	Skill +1	8 Leaves at the Compost Pile → 2	Fertilizers I
Crop Boosting Fertilizer I	2 more steps to grow	2 Peat + Dream Dust	Fertilizers I
Farming Fertilizer I	Skill +2	2 Peat + Weak growth elixir	Fertilizers II
Headstart Fertilizer I	1 step done at the start	2 Peat + Weak growth elixir	Fertilizers II
Farming Fertilizer II	Skill +3	4 Peat + Rich growth elixir	Fertilizers III
Headstart Fertilizer II	2 steps done at the start	4 Peat + Rich growth elixir	Fertilizers III
Farming Fertilizer III	Skill +5	8 Peat + Miracle growth elixir	Fertilizers IV

All but Peat are made at the Formulation Bench, which comes from the church side of the tree (Church Lighting I) and uses Anatomy mastery. The growth elixirs are alchemy results.

What each does:

• Farming Fertilizer and Peat raise the bed’s skill: fewer failed steps below the requirement, faster growth above it.
• Headstart puts steps in the bank that always count as successes, so the crop is ready sooner and has a guaranteed minimum.
• Crop Boosting adds 2 steps to the crop, so a full bed gives one more crop and one more seed, and on star crops both extras are one star higher. The crop also takes 2 steps longer.

Garden and vineyard upgrades

Upgrade	Materials	Effect	Technology
Garden Upgrade I	10 Peat, 18 Bronze Nails, 9 Wooden Planks	Garden skill 4, tick 1:45	Garden Improvement I (30 green)
Garden Upgrade II	9 Farming Fertilizer II, 8 Iron Details, 4 Oiled Beams	Garden skill 8, tick 1:30	Garden Improvement II (100 green, 25 blue)
Vineyard Upgrade	6 Farming Fertilizer III, 6 Advanced Details, 4 Oiled Beams	Trellis skill 11	Vineyard Improvement (175 green, 50 blue)

Garden Improvement II stays hidden on the tree until Garden Upgrade I is built. Each garden upgrade also switches the area where beds can be placed: room for 10 beds at first, 20 after Garden Upgrade I and 30 after Garden Upgrade II. The vineyard has room for 12 trellises, 18 after the Vineyard Upgrade. Vine trellises come with Vineyard (55 green) and cost 5 Sticks and 3 Peat each; digging one needs Farming mastery 6.

The orchard

Orchardry (20 green) unlocks the Orchard (10 Peat) and the Apple Tree; the three bushes, Berry Bush, Blueberry Bush and Rhododendron Bush, unlock only once the Orchard is built. Each takes one seedling, which you buy from Herm at his third tier or at the town Vegetable Stand.

Trees and bushes grow on their own, at a fixed pace that no mastery, fertilizer, upgrade or sermon changes, and you pick them by hand as often as they bear:

Plant	First crop after	Then every	Gives	Picking needs
Apple Tree	25 minutes	20 minutes	4–8 Apples	Farming 2
Berry Bush	about 7 minutes	20 minutes	2–4 Berries	Farming 1
Blueberry Bush	about 7 minutes	20 minutes	2–4 Blueberries	Farming 1
Rhododendron Bush	about 7 minutes	20 minutes	2–4 Rhododendrons, sometimes a Firefly	Farming 1