Soil quality early game: how to find?

[WanderingQuill]

Probably dumb but I'm pretty new to Vintage Story. I spawned in and explored a bit until I found an area that I liked, with common rainfall and some flat land, with forest and some rolling hills not too far away.

I have now spent all of spring and into summer desperately searching for anything better than low fertility soil . Everything is low fert or forest floor. Am I going the wrong way? Is there something I should be looking for besides rainfall being common? At this point I'm about to plant in low fert soil just so I don't starve to death in the winter, but it seems weird that in a common rainfall area I can't find any medium fertility anywhere in any direction so far for 100s of blocks.

[Streetwind]

"Forest floor" is actually a mask over the soil type. If you dig that up, you still get one of the standard soil types. So it's worth digging a block occasionally to see what it actually is.

Otherwise, yes, plant your farm on the soil you have. Planting earlier is always better. Any P-type crops you may have (onion, parsnip, peanut) can be supported by bonemeal as soon as you have a quern. Berry bushes will help you a lot, as they do not care about fertility or nutrients.

And like any other question that starts with "how to find", the answer in VS is likely to be: walk moar!

[Thorfinn]

17 hours ago, Streetwind said:

"Forest floor" is actually a mask over the soil type.

Oh, I guess I misunderstood. I thought it was always low now. Guess I'll have to start checking.

And, yeah, plant early, plant often. Even on medium fert, you won't be bringing in flax until late July. If you don't have medium fert or better by then, take your seeds and, like the plover or the house marten, seek warmer climes in winter. You can grip it by the husk.

Couple games ago, I had extraordinarily bad luck and didn't find medium fert in 5 full days of sprinting in more or less one direction, probably somewhere 15,000-20,000 blocks south of spawn. I'll go a couple days just accumulating seeds, but on the third day, I'll plant them all on any soil near an obvious landmark that I can find, counting on finding more to put on better soil later.

Edited July 25, 2023 by Thorfinn

[1Joachim1]

they already answered your question, however i will add a bit of information about climate and exploration
 

On 7/24/2023 at 1:11 AM, WanderingQuill said:

Is there something I should be looking for besides rainfall being common?

-Ideally caves. they are not as important as they are in the other super famous, super simple block game but they can contain ruined rooms and those ruined rooms may contain either money in the form of rusted gears (that will allow you to buy food "in extremis" in some vendors or even seeds) or better yet, translocators.

translocators. they must be repaired using temporal gears and they will teleport you to another random translocator. why is that important? because they are usually really far away one to another (easily >1k blocks) making exploration really easy

-Appropiate climate. unless you changed the world parameters a radious of 100 to 1000  blocks isn't that much. you may want to move to the south, which is usually the home of terra pretta (the warmer the climate, and rainy the more common it is, however it is still very rare) which is the best soil of the game, so you can use your "winter" months looking around the equator of the world. in a standard world the distance from the pole to the equator is 100k blocks and if you haven't changed anything then you spawn around 50k blocks from the equator (and that's why i said 100 to 1k blocks isn't that much) 

-BEES: they don't like rainfall and don't like colder climates, so you will have a really hard time finding bees in your area, so since you're gonna visit the south, make sure you hold a spot to be able to carry bees to your main base. check the witki for more details about bees

my advise is to stash as much food as possible for the winter time and then proceed to explore to the south until you find the hot climate that allows you to at least farm during the winter.