Wild crop growth?

[Echo Weaver]

I marked a bunch of wild crops when I established my base and have been checking them regularly. Several did mature, and I harvested them.

However, I have some carrots I've been visiting all summer, and I could swear they've been at stage 5/6 for multiple months. I didn't write anything down, I'm afraid, but it seems like it's been a very long time.

Does the chunk need to be loaded for a wild crop to advance? Is there something else I'm not getting? 

[Krougal]

I believe it does. I've found it not worthwhile to wait for them. Better to just get the seeds and get to farming.

You don't get full drops out of wild crops anyway. Now in 1.19.8 you can still cheat and plow the ground under them to make them yield full but that was fixed in 1.20 so abuse it if you wish, but don't get used to it.

[xXx_Ape_xXx]

Wild crops grow reeeeeealy slow  I wouldn't spend too much time waiting for them to mature, you'd harvest your own crops several times by the time they finally mature. You're better off just picking them when you find them, hope to get a seed, and replant in your own garden.

[Echo Weaver]

53 minutes ago, Krougal said:

I believe it does. I've found it not worthwhile to wait for them. Better to just get the seeds and get to farming.

You don't get full drops out of wild crops anyway. Now in 1.19.8 you can still cheat and plow the ground under them to make them yield full but that was fixed in 1.20 so abuse it if you wish, but don't get used to it.

So how does this exploit work? Considering the absurd problem I've been having with soil quality, I don't feel terribly bad about using it. I just don't want to wipe out the crop instead of harvesting.

 

53 minutes ago, xXx_Ape_xXx said:

Wild crops grow reeeeeealy slow  I wouldn't spend too much time waiting for them to mature, you'd harvest your own crops several times by the time they finally mature. You're better off just picking them when you find them, hope to get a seed, and replant in your own garden.

As I've griped in other threads, I'm finishing out my first growing season with low quality soil because I have not been able to find anything else. After reading all the advice about how easy this is, I have to guess I just have a bad seed, but I'm committed to it now.

When I found the carrots, I wasn't going to be able to get a harvest in from the carrots before winter if I planted in my own garden.

[Krougal]

Hoe the ground under the crop. It can be a bit fiddly. You might need to dig out the block next to it to do it from the side.

Low fertility farming ugh. If you don't want to restart you should head south. Winter at 30 lat is cozy, can farm year round, with great variety.

Although I kinda do miss the snow. Days are also still kinda short in the winter there, you need to go further south yet for longer days.

[Echo Weaver]

1 hour ago, Krougal said:

Hoe the ground under the crop. It can be a bit fiddly. You might need to dig out the block next to it to do it from the side.

Low fertility farming ugh. If you don't want to restart you should head south. Winter at 30 lat is cozy, can farm year round, with great variety.

Although I kinda do miss the snow. Days are also still kinda short in the winter there, you need to go further south yet for longer days.

Hoe the side of the dirt block that contains the crop? Or hoe the side of the dirt block below the block that contains the crop?

I actually want the winter. I really like the pressure it puts on survival.

I'm so irritated about my failure to find higher quality soils that I'm making a custom recipe to make it from compost.

I don't like the soil quality mechanic at all at the moment. (Not the nutrients and crop rotation, but the base quality.)  I can, by grinding huge amounts of compost, go straight to terra preta. Otherwise I have to run around the world looking, which I don't find immersive or fun. I did locate a temperate high-rainfall area with huge hills of exposed dirt, and I STILL didn't find anything but low quality.

Meanwhile, once you've found high quality soil, the recipe for making terra preta from it is trivial. Just grind and grind and grind compost. We have these difficult-to-find fertilizer materials that are completely ignored.

I personally think there should be a crafting path to soil improvement -- something like low + compost = medium, medium + compost + bonemeal + ? = high, high + charcoal + bonemeal + obscure fertilizers = terra preta.

In the "real world", bonemeal and wood ash would be well-rounded soil improvements, but we don't currently have a way to burn down wood and keep the ash.

[Maelstrom]

Hoeing the block the wild crop is growing on will cause the wild crop to mature in 1 day.  Be aware this bug is fixed in 1.20.x

Medium fertility soil should not be uncommon.  There can be large patches of low fertility soil, but running 200 blocks in any direction should bring you to a place of medium fertility soil (except if you run into forest, that is always low fert. soil).

I concur with a soil improvement progression, but I would add a limitation of improving the soil by only one level which preserves the necessity to explore for high fert soil to convert to terra preta. 
disclaimer: I am aware that creating terra preta without high fert soil is realistic (and actually possible in game), but this is a game and there are some aspects that MUST depart from reality to fit the vision of the game and/or for reasons of FUN! 
additional discclaimer: The limitation I am proposing is a personal game play preference, ThankYouVeryMuch. 

[Thorfinn]

Maybe more than a couple hundred. Gravel and sand deserts can go forever, and only if they end at large lakes do they occasionally go MFright away. But, yeah, if you find a lake, you will usually find MF.

I'm not firmly committed to one step, and not sure it would be worth it anyway. "I have this block of MF that won't stack with other MF." I just think it should be more bother making the stuff than finding it. @Krougal (?) says he gets more HF than he knows what to do with. 10 stacks, maybe? I usually end up with 4-5. Whatever number is reasonable, just set that as the rough maximum for what a high achiever could produce at home in a year starting from MF, which is common enough to be an expected input. If the high achievers can only compost enough dough or berries or whatnot to make 4 stacks of HF per year, while that is still better than I do finding HF, (because diminishing returns on found resources, while increasing returns on growing a larger farm) the average player would maybe do half that well. 

Edited October 29, 2024 by Thorfinn

[Echo Weaver]

Having to explore for soil is exactly what I don't want to do. I enjoy exploring, but I want to be able to do it at my pace. Medium fertility soil is something you really want to find in Year 1, which means it's high pressure right out of the gate. I'm more comfortable with the idea of exploring to find high fertility soil, which is something I can do in Year 2 when I have more resources.

It's quite possible that I just don't see the color difference in medium fertility soil, but I certainly think I've looked closely. I was trying to figure out if there was a server command that would locate some for me so that I could determine whether the problem is with me or with this seed. I thought I found one in the wiki, but when I attempted it, I was told I needed to be in creative mode. I haven't experimented further yet.

I think gating soil improvement with compost makes it a bigger pain to craft soil than find it out of the gate. Crafting would be more of a last resort, but it would give some kind of path forward when searching the landscape doesn't seem to work.

[Thorfinn]

The modding tutorial in the wiki explains how to add particles (like smoke of various colors) can be added to call attention to blocks. There is also the mod that does that for HFS. Should be really easy to change that to detecting MFS, then you can undo that once you learn how to recognize it.

[Echo Weaver]

44 minutes ago, Thorfinn said:

The modding tutorial in the wiki explains how to add particles (like smoke of various colors) can be added to call attention to blocks. There is also the mod that does that for HFS. Should be really easy to change that to detecting MFS, then you can undo that once you learn how to recognize it.

I have the HFS mod. I don't know why it didn't occur to me to look at how that was done. Great idea. I'll try that.

ETA: Oh, it looks like that's a code mod. I'll look at the modding tutorial to see how easy it is to make a mod like that. I've done some Minecraft minor Minecraft modding and some more serious modding of other games. Setting up a development environment for code mods can be a real hassle.

Edited October 29, 2024 by Echo Weaver

[Krougal]

Yeah, like Thorfinn said, I would try that mod (I use it myself) and maybe do your own for medium.

I suppose if you are in a vast desert you might not find any better soil but are you looking for very green areas on your map? (Assuming you set it to true color, because the default is stupid).

So something else I discovered yesterday, you can use potash on a HQ farm block and it turns into TP, except it has lower stats than the TP you make from compost. I am still trying to determine if after time it becomes normal TP or not. I also don't know if this is an old feature or not since I roll with 1.20PR. I would think it is something from before the crafted block and should be on the chopping block, but I don't know the feature history.

 

[Thorfinn]

4 minutes ago, Krougal said:

I would try that mod (I use it myself)

Oh, OK, I don't feel like such a loser for not finding anywhere near as much HFS. "He's only been playing for a week. How is he that much better than I am already?"

 

6 minutes ago, Krougal said:

you can use potash on a HQ farm block and it turns into TP, except it has lower stats than the TP you make from compost.

Works for the lower level soils too. I never tried it before, and never brought things up that highly before, but I had excess fertilizer, so decided to see if I could make it grow even faster. Don't know if it goes back. Suspect it probably does.

[Krougal]

10 minutes ago, Thorfinn said:

Oh, OK, I don't feel like such a loser for not finding anywhere near as much HFS. "He's only been playing for a week. How is he that much better than I am already?"

 

Works for the lower level soils too. I never tried it before, and never brought things up that highly before, but I had excess fertilizer, so decided to see if I could make it grow even faster. Don't know if it goes back. Suspect it probably does.

Yeah, I use a lot of QOL mods. If I were forced to play vanilla, I'd never have bought this game. Still I've also taken to warmer climates and it seems more frequent there, although it might just be that I found a lot of rainy areas. Right now I'm living around 30 lat which is not too hot and not too cold, although I am contemplating moving North again to see snow. Oh, I also only plant 128 blocks of fields and that's it, if you go bigger than obviously you'll have less to spare.

Also higher temps are not all they are cracked up to be. Sure you can grow all year, but food rots faster. I can't even salt meat before it goes bad. Growing still seems to slow down in the winter even if it doesn't get all that cold too.

Oh, yeah, I neglected to mention the lower quality soils, but you can only go 1 step. So if you use it to make medium high, you can spam away on it and it isn't going to become TP.

 

Edited October 29, 2024 by Krougal

[Thorfinn]

6 minutes ago, Krougal said:

the lower quality soils, but you can only go 1 step

Oh, so it appears there are already two versions of, say, HFS farmland? One that is from base HFS (or possibly crafted from MFS?) and one that is MFS that has been fertilized sufficiently?

That would reduce the number of different kinds of blocks, indeed.

Edited October 29, 2024 by Thorfinn

[Echo Weaver]

So you can use potash to essentially do what I was thinking about doing with a compost recipe? Huh.

OK, so not exactly what I was thinking. Here's what the wiki says: "Potash's only use as of version 1.16 is as fertilizer. Uniquely, it permanently raises the maximum K capacity of a farmland block by 15%, in addition to adding 60% K to the block. This results of converting farmland soil to it's high quality variant (Barren -> Low Fertility -> Medium Fertility -> High Fertility -> Terra Petra)."

Potash is the hardest to find of the two obscure fertilizers, but since I'll be looking for Halite anyway, it's no problem to keep looking for it.

[Maelstrom]

1 hour ago, Krougal said:

So something else I discovered yesterday, you can use potash on a HQ farm block and it turns into TP, except it has lower stats than the TP you make from compost. I am still trying to determine if after time it becomes normal TP or not. I also don't know if this is an old feature or not since I roll with 1.20PR. I would think it is something from before the crafted block and should be on the chopping block, but I don't know the feature history.

 

That has been around since I started in 1.14.  Once it become TP- it stays TP-

 

[Maelstrom]

2 minutes ago, Echo Weaver said:

Potash is the hardest to find of the two obscure fertilizers, but since I'll be looking for Halite anyway, it's no problem to keep looking for it.

It can be purchased from Commodities traders as well.

[Krougal]

So it's still worthwhile making the compost TP since it has higher fertility.

Potash seems to work normally as fertilizer on it, but doesn't give the bonus.

It's still a nice option if you've got it since it takes so long to make compost.

Edited October 29, 2024 by Krougal

[Echo Weaver]

So this x-ray mod came up on another thread: https://mods.vintagestory.at/xray

It seems like this could be my soil-seeker. 

Has anyone played with it? I ONLY want help finding soil. 

[xXx_Ape_xXx]

3 hours ago, Echo Weaver said:

So this x-ray mod came up on another thread: https://mods.vintagestory.at/xray

It seems like this could be my soil-seeker. 

Has anyone played with it? I ONLY want help finding soil. 

You'd be better off using this mod: Visible High Fertility Patches

[Echo Weaver]

3 hours ago, xXx_Ape_xXx said:

You'd be better off using this mod: Visible High Fertility Patches

I already have it, but I haven't found any.

[Krougal]

Yes. You type in what you want to scan for. You can select multiple things at once.

You can also save groups of presets to swap between. I like to keep one for arrows and animals, since I'm friggin blind it helps me to keep track of targets and retrieve my arrows.

Hit scan. It can be a little fussy to adjust the range, at least it is for me.

I think all of the GUI mods are a bit fiddly.

So if it gives you trouble, click on the search box then click on the range box, then click an arrow on the range, then you can select and delete all the text in it and type in a range. It also seems to ignore the first keypress every time.

 

[xXx_Ape_xXx]

2 hours ago, Echo Weaver said:

I already have it, but I haven't found any.

Then you need to explore more. 2k-3k or 5k blocks around your "base" location, even more. Like everything in this game, it won't magically appear unless one explores a larger area. Maybe you're lucky and it's in an area you previously have explored, that sure has happened to me many, many times, and things like high fert soil can be easily overlooked by obscuring shadows or bushes. I have on several occasions found it in areas I frequently have travelled trough, but just not noticed it because I was looking for other stuff. Don't give up, its out there, and I'm certain you will persevere and find what you're looking for. 

[Krougal]

Yeah, Ape is right. Sometimes your location just sucks. I have gone through many restarts trying to find terrain that I am happy with.

While I would prefer to just naturally play I feel I have invested far too much time into maps to find them lacking in one thing or another and so I now go and do a fly around in creative before I commit to anything, and there are several terrain generation mods to try.