Growing (a beard while waiting)

[1Joachim1]

besides the pun in the title, i noticed that since i last played (probably 1.17?) the growth time of crops has skyrocket-ed. i'm not a super lucky person and i used to never find so many crops, thankfully there is wildfarming that allows to get seeds from extra cops (i didn't want to install it in this run)... but now i'm also playing on a steam deck (AKA small screen) and i'm finding even less food (even tho i turned the upheaval setting down to straight 0% the rough terrain is also being the bane of my existance) just to find out that crops take like 6 years and a few goddess blessings to grow up (i believe it's slightly more than 2 full months with the month lenght set to default, on terra pretta and 100% wet farmland?) 

what's going on? i'm aware that 100% humidity is not the best for crops but... it used to be way less painful. is there a way to change that setting? (i swear i haven't seen it unless it's shared with the tree growing ones...)

Edited June 8, 2023 by 1Joachim1

[Streetwind]

There is a custom setting you can enter:

/worldconfigcreate float cropGrowthRateMul 1.0 to set it initially
/worldconfig cropGrowthRateMul 1.0 to change it afterwards
/worldconfig cropGrowthRateMul to poll the current value

Not sure if you need to go larger than 1.0 or smaller to accelerate crop growth, but you should be able to test it quickly enough given that seeds show the actual growth time in their tooltip. Remember that if nothing changes right away, you may need to exit to menu and reload the world.

Do keep in mind however that you will introduce a massive imbalance, as crop yields are tuned for the long growth times. They drop 9-10 pieces of produce per harvest instead of 3-4 like in the past. And there is no setting to change that - you would have to write yourself a mod.

My recommendation: get used to the default growth times. There is plenty of food out there to hunt and forage, especially in singleplayer, and plenty of things to do other than sitting on the fence of your garden watching it grow.

[1Joachim1]

3 hours ago, Streetwind said:

My recommendation: get used to the default growth times. There is plenty of food out there to hunt and forage, especially in singleplayer, and plenty of things to do other than sitting on the fence of your garden watching it grow.

 

welp, screw myself. for the time the turnips grow they were damaged due to the heat. they dropped 1-2 per plant so i've not really noticed the "balance increase" yey-ho... i guess i'll leave the crops be. hope the flax fiber is getting a boost too. i have a mod (for the golden combs) that uses MASSIVE AMOUNTS of linen...

[Thorfinn]

Yeah, you definitely want to get turnips in early and late, never in the middle. Though check your temperature noon or so of the first day. You may not even be able to plant turnips early enough the first year unless you head north or turn your upheaval back up so you can find a plateau to do some highland planting that first year. With highland gardening, you might even be able to grow through the heat of the summer. I've even seen flax burn in the late summer in the valley, probably not 2500 south of spawn. Usually it does fine if you get it planted in the first half of May or so.

Do crops automatically adjust growth times for longer months?

Another possibility is that Vinter Nacht did a good job of balancing Fields of Gold for use with Golden Combs, though he said in that thread he did not intend for you to be able to get all frames of a Langstroth placed in the first year. My best was just short of 5 full, but that was by foregoing every use of linen but sacks. I believe I planted 62 flax on day 2, and another 50-some on day 4.

 

6 hours ago, 1Joachim1 said:

AKA small screen)

Man, isn't that the truth! When I have to play on my laptop (17", I think) I only do about a quarter, maybe a third as well as playing on my home system.

This is the first game I've ever played where the screen size made this dramatic of a difference.

[1Joachim1]

9 hours ago, Thorfinn said:

Yeah, you definitely want to get turnips in early and late, never in the middle. Though check your temperature noon or so of the first day. You may not even be able to plant turnips early enough the first year unless you head north or turn your upheaval back up so you can find a plateau to do some highland planting that first year.

please don't even mention the chance for flax to burnout... that's kinda annoying tbh. standard upheaval 30% produced like 5 serrated worlds that looked like they were Seismogram in venus... it's not only not viable for me, but a nightmare in a steam deck...  (stepUP mod gave me troubles last night when i tried to install it. the comments say it works 1.18 but doesn't seem to do it for me) 

it would be interesting to know how much the temperature changes with height. is there a way to see it? (or there's a scale somewhere?) first time hearing that tbh. i could have been using my terra pretta on the sky..   

10 hours ago, Thorfinn said:

Do crops automatically adjust growth times for longer months?

yes, or at least they used to do it. 

 

10 hours ago, Thorfinn said:

Another possibility is that Vinter Nacht did a good job of balancing Fields of Gold for use with Golden Combs, though he said in that thread he did not intend for you to be able to get all frames of a Langstroth placed in the first year. My best was just short of 5 full, but that was by foregoing every use of linen but sacks. I believe I planted 62 flax on day 2, and another 50-some on day 4.

 

man WHATTF O.O i really hope that those 110 seeds in the first week is due to the fields of gold mod because there's no way i find that many seeds even in a full run... that's actually insane (and makes clothing repair viable...) i'll have to take a look... 

 

10 hours ago, Thorfinn said:

Man, isn't that the truth! When I have to play on my laptop (17", I think) I only do about a quarter, maybe a third as well as playing on my home system.

This is the first game I've ever played where the screen size made this dramatic of a difference.

man i feel like i'm a totally noob... which i am, but not at this level... even tho i use an external mouse and a bluetooth (foldable pocket-sized keyboard) i'm really really struggling with everything  

[Thorfinn]

Someone said in a thread once the official answer was something like 0.6C per block, but I'm finding it's usually about half that, more or less. I think it might vary by location. For a given size stack of ladders, I'm not getting a constant delta T. But I think it's close enough to right that if you climb a ladder around noon and check "C" (or install something like HudClock) you can find out what height you need to be around there to avoid stunted crops. Then just look around for something about that height. Better yet, look at the coldest temperature at around midnight, and make sure you are planting somewhere sufficiently above the minimum temperature. Turnips being a little chilly is better than being too hot. Rye is another one that is just a royal pain for being stunted.

9 hours ago, 1Joachim1 said:

man WHATTF O.O i really hope that those 110 seeds in the first week is due to the fields of gold mod

No, vanilla. You want to avoid mods if you want high counts. Certainly anything affecting mapgen. Though I love things like Wildcraft Trees, it obscures your sight too much to see crops well. Even things that do not affect mapgen slow things down just enough that I'm sometimes seeing flax suddenly "appear" while I'm looking off into the midrange distance. My best ever was 126 seeds on day 1. I was really hoping to end up with needing 3 stacks for flax seeds, but alas...

[1Joachim1]

On 6/9/2023 at 7:26 PM, Thorfinn said:

But I think it's close enough to right that if you climb a ladder around noon and check "C" (or install something like HudClock) you can find out what height you need to be around there to avoid stunted crops. Then just look around for something about that height. Better yet, look at the coldest temperature at around midnight, and make sure you are planting somewhere sufficiently above the minimum temperature. Turnips being a little chilly is better than being too hot. Rye is another one that is just a royal pain for being stunted.

 

well, i thought that the temperature display was the average in the area (like "the maximum temperature in this area is 27ºC in summer") not something that accurate.. guess i'll have to check it constantly. never bother with the hudclock even tho i seen it because taking even more screen space is not an option tbh. maybe when i get back to my country..

On 6/9/2023 at 7:26 PM, Thorfinn said:

vanilla. You want to avoid mods if you want high counts. Certainly anything affecting mapgen. Though I love things like Wildcraft Trees, it obscures your sight too much to see crops well. Even things that do not affect mapgen slow things down just enough that I'm sometimes seeing flax suddenly "appear" while I'm looking off into the midrange distance. My best ever was 126 seeds on day 1. I was really hoping to end up with needing 3 stacks for flax seeds, but alas...

... welp. i need to re-evaluate my life choices. i haven't found that many crops EVER. Even more, i don't think i ever had 120 seeds (counting every single seed i owned) in any of my playthroughs... no shit i was finding a constant lack of flax on everything and felt like repairing clothes were insanely expensive. 

for the mods i usually avoid them. Not because "i want the most vanilla experience" but because i'm unexperienced enough to not need extra content yet. (for example in the other overrated block game i used to play so many mods that the game used to take around 10 minutes just to load them all) the only ones that are a must for me are wild farming and anvil metal recovery. and i don't think they have a change in the world generation, but for certain, even when i didn't have any kind of mods i struggled finding seeds.

how do you do it? you use a stack of ladders and climb upwards? i believe someone mentioned that trick in this post about dirt uses... was even you? that would be funny... anyway thanks for the tips... i usually kind of rush the game, i like to have bronze tools before summer (so i could have a nice door that did not break and last a bit longer than the copper ones but that's not important anymore)

[Streetwind]

54 minutes ago, 1Joachim1 said:

... welp. i need to re-evaluate my life choices. i haven't found that many crops EVER.

Honestly, that's not a normal amount of seeds by any definition. Just reading "100+ seeds in one ingame day" makes me go "I'd rather have a conversation with Clippy the MS Word Mascot than play this way". It sounds genuinely unpleasant. Like someone telling me to run full speed to the grocery store, screaming the entire way, when calmly walking will do just fine.

I collect like... 20-ish flax seeds, maybe 30 if I'm really lucky (or playing malefactor instead of blackguard) before picking a place to spend the night. I don't usually pick up any seeds other than flax either before settling down, except maybe for onions. Gotta have onions.

[1Joachim1]

4 minutes ago, Streetwind said:

Honestly, that's not a normal amount of seeds by any definition. Just reading "100+ seeds in one ingame day" makes me go "I'd rather have a conversation with Clippy the MS Word Mascot than play this way". It sounds genuinely unpleasant. Like someone telling me to run full speed to the grocery store, screaming the entire way, when calmly walking will do just fine.

I collect like... 20-ish flax seeds, maybe 30 if I'm really lucky (or playing malefactor instead of blackguard) before picking a place to spend the night. I don't usually pick up any seeds other than flax either before settling down, except maybe for onions. Gotta have onions.

yeah.. i usually go with 20 flax seeds too, but that brings me to the "it's too expensive to use ever".. 20 fibers give you a single linen sack.  and 16 to repair one single cloth piece... thinking about the windmill basically hurts XD

[Streetwind]

20 seeds on day one, mind you. I still think 100 is crazy talk, but 20 is super doable. I will certainly acquire more later-on, usually around a full stack.

Harvesting 20 flax crops gives you about 160 fibres on average in 1.18, or 10 linen sheets. That's half of a full-size windmill already, so a single harvest of 40 flax crops will check that box. If you can plant 40-60 and get two harvests in your first year, which is perfectly doable even if you only start planting after an ingame month has already passed, then you'll be set for pretty much anything.

If you have the ability to start early with leatherworking - for example if you have borax or limestone or chalk in your area - then it helps if you only make like 2 linen sacks and upgrade the other slots directly to leather backpacks.

[1Joachim1]

4 minutes ago, Streetwind said:

20 seeds on day one, mind you. I still think 100 is crazy talk, but 20 is super doable. I will certainly acquire more later-on, usually around a full stack.

Harvesting 20 flax crops gives you about 160 fibres on average in 1.18, or 10 linen sheets. That's half of a full-size windmill already, so a single harvest of 40 flax crops will check that box. If you can plant 40-60 and get two harvests in your first year, which is perfectly doable even if you only start planting after an ingame month has already passed, then you'll be set for pretty much anything.

If you have the ability to start early with leatherworking - for example if you have borax or limestone or chalk in your area - then it helps if you only make like 2 linen sacks and upgrade the other slots directly to leather backpacks.

well Thorfinn didn't say 100 seeds on day one. it was me adding up his seed planting:

 

On 6/8/2023 at 11:17 PM, Thorfinn said:

I believe I planted 62 flax on day 2, and another 50-some on day 4.

110 seeds on the first week for me is crazy. not sure how you people do it. but finding SO MANY crops is insane for me. maybe i got tunnel vision or i'm just not observant enough (i have Attention deficit and hyperactivity disorder so i usually struggle doing a single thing and usually i start a bunch of them at once and spend a lot of time doing nothing useful) how do YOU find so many crops @Streetwind ? when i watch youtubers they just turn the corner and there are wild crops waiting there, but when i do it the only thing i see are crows and vultures waiting for me to starve to death lol.

[Streetwind]

I... don't know? I just walk around. Crops appear before me on their own

Having issues with paying attention to what's happening on screen probably isn't helping you, admittedly, but I couldn't tell you any specific strategy. The game gives you many reasons to travel: finding food, fetching wood for charcoal, discovering new resources, prospecting, looking for traders, pilfering ruins... the works. Picking up wild crops is something I do along the way while traveling. It just happens.

Maybe Thorfinn has better advice, since he clearly finds way more crops than I do.

[Thorfinn]

35-40ish in a day's scouting is a much more normal number. Yes, it involves ladders. Climb up 10-20, depending on terrain and your ability to memorize where things are, look around for where the flax spawns are (sometimes you can even spot a copper deposit), climb back down, collect your ladders, and run from flax to flax taking all the flax from blue up. It also involves holding down the run key (or in my case, hitting the macro key on my gaming keyboard that I have programmed to toggle the run key). Plus jumping all the time, making it a little easier to see copper and flax you might have missed. It also is a laser focus on the important stuff to get done, and refusing to get distracted. Ruins? Bees? Terra preta? That's all stuff for another day after you get your crops in.

But I have hundreds of games I've played only the first few days, trying to figure out the best way to optimize the early game for my goals. Just like sometimes there are 3 ripe flax in one stand, and 2 in a stand a handful of blocks away, if you play enough times, sometimes the random numbers align and you you get sky-high finds. And, to be fair, there's probably a lot to getting used to seeing the slight difference in color/texture. The difference between how "x" model grass and "#" model crops appear at a distance.

But like @Streetwind says, that playstyle is not to everyone's liking. 

[EDIT]

Until you get used to taking in the scene at a glance and finding stuff from the top of your ladder, if you are on single player, you can just hit "H" and move the handbook out of the way while you spend some time looking at things, seeing what they look like from this perspective.

I also noticed this last playthrough (a well-above average 83 seeds by dusk) that stage 2 flax also drops seeds. Maybe 25% or so? If I knew that before, I forgot it. So take 'em all. Not like you are going to just happen to be coming back through when they are ripe.

Another useful thing is as soon as you start accumulating some food, put an unlit (so you don't fret over jumping into water) torch in your off-hand, to increase your hunger rate. It's pretty easy to end up with 5 or more bonus hit points your first day, so long as you can burn through the food fast enough. By end of day, it means you can tank a hit from any bear, which is pretty nice. If it's just black bears, you might tank 2 hits.

[/EDIT]

Edited June 12, 2023 by Thorfinn

[brndd]

On 6/9/2023 at 10:32 AM, 1Joachim1 said:

it's not only not viable for me, but a nightmare in a steam deck...  (stepUP mod gave me troubles last night when i tried to install it. the comments say it works 1.18 but doesn't seem to do it for me)

StepUp runs into a strange Vintage Story bug on Linux in that it fails to work if any shared libraries (read: DLLs) are injected into the game with LD_PRELOAD. Steam Deck does this for some of the overlay features and such. On desktop Linux it can be triggered by running the game with Gamemode.

Edited June 12, 2023 by brndd

[1Joachim1]

12 hours ago, brndd said:

StepUp runs into a strange Vintage Story bug on Linux in that it fails to work if any shared libraries (read: DLLs) are injected into the game with LD_PRELOAD. Steam Deck does this for some of the overlay features and such. On desktop Linux it can be triggered by running the game with Gamemode.

thanks for the tips!  but i had an issue this last week with the steam deck and vintage story. somehow the last update (18.5) and some linux things made it so buttons could not be pressed because mesa was automatically turned on, however when i turn it off via arguments the game randomly freezes, and i can't even load a world without the freeze occurring, so i can't right now.. 

[Thorfinn]

Just finished a half-dozen one day runs without using ladders, and I'm getting roughly what @Streetwind does. 25-43, typical value somewhere around 29. The other thing I noticed is that it is vastly more difficult to find clay or peat without getting to an elevated position, though I suppose that is what the map does for you. I don't recall the map color varation being as obvious, though.

It's also a little more difficult to stay down a HP or so in order to burn through more food. Natural drops are either too short or too tall. Much more controllable to just fall off a 5-high ladder now and again. I also wasn't thinking through the fact that Wilderness has higher hunger rate. With standard survival mode, I think you can't get much above 3 HP bonus by dawn, no matter what you do. At least I'm not sure what else affects hunger. Sprinting, being wounded, something in off-hand. Anything else? That I can do in early game?

[EDIT]

Urk, just had a bad start. I didn't get out of extremely uplifted gravel/sand until about 4pm, and ended up with just 8 seeds. The only positive is that it is in medium fertility, so it won't cost me time to go find that.

Is anyone else finding medium fertility soil much less common? Or maybe it's just my perception? I've started grabbing a stack of medium fertility as soon as I find any because it seems otherwise I have none.

[/EDIT

Edited June 14, 2023 by Thorfinn

[dakko]

23 hours ago, Thorfinn said:

At least I'm not sure what else affects hunger. Sprinting, being wounded, something in off-hand. Anything else? That I can do in early game?

Are you also without mods? Iirc, CarryCapacity had a penalty of some sort for carrying anything larger than a reed chest on your back. May have been a speed reduction, but I'm thinking it increased hunger. Not certain though... and not sure if that has come forward into CarryOn.

[brndd]

On 6/14/2023 at 8:37 PM, Thorfinn said:

Is anyone else finding medium fertility soil much less common? Or maybe it's just my perception? I've started grabbing a stack of medium fertility as soon as I find any because it seems otherwise I have none.

I travelled about 5000 blocks the other day to find medium fertility soil. Once I returned home via another route, I found another area with it 200 blocks from my house.