Is there a point to high fertility soil?

[Thorfinn]

Unless you are playing for more than one year, I doubt you can produce enough to bother with. Or I can't. Let's say saw by 1 JUN, and you have 64 rot waiting. Both are quite possible. I just finished speedrunning the anvil, and had the saw on 7 MAY, and 93 rot ready to go. The compost is not ready until, say, 3 SEP. (Yes, in this case, it would be 1 SEP, I think, but that was some really lucky copper deposits, plus blue clay and peat right next to each other, plus a dozen pieces of brown coal. I also did nothing other than pursue these goals except for a single hand basket until I had located the large surface copper.) 

And after all that, you end up with just 2 blocks of high fertility soil. Maybe another couple over the next few days, depending on how many berries in your vicinity. (So far as I know, that's all that rots fast enough to bother with on year 1.) It just seems to me you are much better off just planting in medium fertility and whatever TP you find rather than waste a fair amount of time for an absolutely trivial gain.

Am I missing something, or is it really that bad?

 

[Streetwind]

Honestly, it's fine. It's a long-term goal for players to improve their farm with. It's not strictly necessary in singleplayer - medium fertility is perfectly fine unless you're the dedicated food guy for a whole bunch of people on a server - but it's a goal to work towards, something that makes the player feel they're making progress. And it's not even that minor in practice, due to the silly growth speed breakpoints we currently have.

It's also quite obviously not meant to be speedrun. That, too, is fine in general - if perhaps slightly frustrating for you specifically.

The real problem with high fertility soil is something else entirely, and its name is terra preta. By the time you have produced your first block of high fertility soil, even if you rush it, your average player already has enough terra preta to cover all their needs forever. The better soil type is easier and faster to obtain, and that ruins the point of the existence of high fertility soil entirely.

I've made a suggestion psot in the past (the 1.14-1.15 era I believe) to swap the two soil types - let high fertility soil spawn naturally in the way terra preta currently does; and make terra preta craftable in the way high fertility soil currently is, because spoiler alert, terra preta is manmade soil IRL. That would maintain the exploration/incentive to find some good soil on your travels; it would also maintain the long-term goal of slowly improving your farm - whether or not it's strictly necessary doesn't matter, players love having the best of something; and it would result in actual progression, where the best soil type is actually the one that takes you the most time and effort.

That suggestion was super popular with everyone who read it. Sadly that didn't seem to include the dev team =/

 

Edited July 26 by Streetwind

[ArtiKs]

Not saying you should use the mod and forget about this (because i've agreed with the argument and seen the post regarding the high fertility soil)... but there is a mod called "Terra Tweak" by UnnamedSystem that does this specifically.

There is absolutely no reason to use high fertility soil at all once you've explored big areas. It's like waiting 20 days to get something worse than the stuff you can obtain if you know where to look. Swapping the HFS with the TP organically makes you work to obtain a steady supply of TP over time using rot and not simply obtain the highest soil after a single trip to the northern valleys and flat lands.

After we started using that mod, the farming progress feels more natural and we've actually been using a whole building as a composting facility while all the crops have been growing in HFL. In all my previous worlds i've never even cared about it. This is one of those features that i hope get integrated in the vanilla game eventually not because "it just makes sense", but because it makes the farming progression better in my opinion~

[Maelstrom]

In my most recent world I was able to find a grand total of 1 stack of terra preta by the start of the first winter.  By the end of the second winter I increased that to a second stack.  In between I rotted a TON of dough to make 2 stacks of high fertility soil.  Obviously, I didn't need the high fertility soil from farming a large amount on medium fertility soil, but it was nice to have the high grade soil available for use.

during the second summer I installed the Visible Terra Preta mod and found that I hadn't missed any terra preta in my previous travels.  I installed the mod to make sure I hadn't missed any of the precious black soil.

[Thorfinn]

17 hours ago, Streetwind said:

The real problem with high fertility soil is something else entirely, and its name is terra preta. By the time you have produced your first block of high fertility soil, even if you rush it, your average player already has enough terra preta to cover all their needs forever.

Agreed, but largely because once you have your gambeson and enough linen for a couple fully upgraded windmills, there's little point to ever planting more than a half dozen flax at a time ever again, just enough for a few bandages and repair of your clothes, and you need maybe a couple dozen blocks to supply all your food. That's one of the reasons I'm losing interest by fall -- I'm already just letting TP go fallow because why not, and ignoring any more TP I happen across while exploring.

Incidentally got to thinking about optimization, and when the next start had a few coal bits not far from spawn, and a few more in a cracked vessel, it allowed me to be pouring my pick on day 1. The saw was ready the afternoon of day 2. Involved burning off everything to make it easier to see loose copper on the ground. Still wasn't until late afternoon of day 4 that I had 64 rot ready to seal up. Largely because of the wildfire, I was able to see a whole lot more terra preta -- slightly more than 1.5 stacks. And also because the fire had burned up most of the wild crops, it was also more TP than I had seeds for. It was a wildly different experience -- my first linen sack wasn't until day 5.

But again, so what? I totally gimped what was probably a pretty decent starting location in exchange for a late summer "windfall" of 2 blocks of high fertility soil that I likely wouldn't even need.

@ArtiKs I'll have to give that a look see. It leaves TP where it is, but with vanilla HF stats, and lets you craft potting soil or whatever they decided to call it that has the stats of vanilla TP?

[Thorfinn]

7 hours ago, Maelstrom said:

I rotted a TON of dough to make 2 stacks of high fertility soil.

Oh, I hadn't thought about that as a source. Does it do better than berries, 25%? Is there anything that does better than berries, or are they all the same?

[Maelstrom]

I think dough rots on a 1:1 ratio.  It's been a long time since I made dough for rot though.  Another good use for all that flax grain.

 

[Troy]

I like to play with the global climate set to cold, because I like the added challenge of the shorter growing season, harsher winters, and scarcity of common resources like flax. It makes terra preta almost impossible to find without traveling tens of thousands of blocks south, so high fertility soil is a worthwhile investment for me. I'd say it's useful if you're playing with a self-imposed challenge that makes terra preta harder to find like that.

[Bumber]

It seems to me that the issue is that the high fertility soil crafting recipe is ridiculously underpowered.

Did you know that you can use a single piece of compost on a medium fertility farmland block and it will convert it into a high fertility one? That's 16 per stack of rot instead of 2.

Then, you can use a single potash on each high fertility farmland to convert it into terra preta farmland. Didn't find this info anywhere in the handbook. Just happened to stumble across it since potash is only good for fertilizer and realized that the farmland had been converted.

[Vallen]

It may convert the name to Tera Preta but it doesn't convert all the stats of it to the same as Tera Preta, it just exceeds a single stat maximum for High Fertility soil and then renames it. Go into creative and add a bunch of potash to it and you'll see it doesn't change all stats. Technically, the best way to go is to still start with Tera Preta and add potash from there to at least make it really really good for some crop types.

[Retsof90]

but then do the rest of the stats slowly increase to the Terra preta level?  same as if you drained the nutrients with crops?

[Maelstrom]

No, they don't.  The artificial terra preta is not exactly as good as natural terra preta.