bug? 1.22 Medium fertility farmland(?)/flax(?) nerfed/bugged?

[Zane Mordien]

16 minutes ago, LadyWYT said:

What's even better is the normal boar are now no longer fast enough to outrun the player, so even if they do run they can't actually escape.

This was my experience as well and I don't have any runing speed buff. 

3 minutes ago, Silfrenbirce said:

I understood that they reduced it? Andy hay backs up the experience I've had in game so far, per what I previously wrote. They've been NOTICEABLY less aggressive and more likely to run after a few spear stabs.

Andy hay? Not sure who/what that is. Weird is all I can say. They aren't bear aggressive or anything but as they are pretty easy to aggro for me and they just come one by one like lambs to the slaughter. They do try to run at first but I just poke them once and they turn around and try to kill me.

[Silfrenbirce]

54 minutes ago, Zane Mordien said:

This was my experience as well and I don't have any runing speed buff. 

Andy hay? Not sure who/what that is. Weird is all I can say. They aren't bear aggressive or anything but as they are pretty easy to aggro for me and they just come one by one like lambs to the slaughter. They do try to run at first but I just poke them once and they turn around and try to kill me.

Yeah, Autocarrot caught me on that one. I edited it. Boars haven't been very aggressive to me at all and after three good stabs they run. It's been a real PITA honestly, because I've just never been able to keep up once they beeline it away. What's more they're tending not to chase me much when I do manage to aggro them; my typical strategy is to run them into a pit and them stab them at my leisure. Hasn't worked so well since updating.

Edited March 19 by Silfrenbirce

[dakko]

With animal aggression set to passive, boars run away from me for the first time. They used to ignore me.

[Odrayak]

I'm facing the same problem: I planted a relatively late crop and it has stalled in the last stages of growth, with winter approaching. I calculated the timing with some margin, knowing that it could be delayed due to a block update failure, and they should have already finished growing. To give us an idea: they are already two weeks (18 days) behind in game time, accounting for the adjusted delay in the last stages. I want to think that it's because of the negative temperatures at dawn, but this has only happened in the last week and the crops had been stalled before.

[MKMoose]

On 3/18/2026 at 4:00 PM, williams_482 said:

The bug which was fixed was a "fencepost problem" with nutrient consumption as crops grew. Flax, for example, has nine growth stages and is supposed to consume 50 K nutrient. Previously it was consuming 50 / 9 = ~5.5 K per growth stage. This is wrong because although there are nine stages, there are only eight transitions between stages because crops start at stage one, so flax should have been consuming 50 / 8 = ~6.3 K per growth stage.

The changelog mentions two changes separately:

Quote

• Fixed: Crop growth was 10% faster and consumed 10% less nutrients than intended
• Fixed: Farmland crops consumed slightly less soil nutrients than intended

I don't really know what is what here, but there seems to have been another change as well: farmland no longer recovers nutrients while crops are growing on it. It used to be that farmland would stop recovering nutrients when it had a ripe crop on it, apparently. Now this was changed to where farmland seems to only recover nutrients when empty or when it has a ripe crop on it. Both before and after the update nutrient recovery is significantly slower for the nutrient preferred by the currently planted crop.

 

On 3/18/2026 at 1:35 AM, Calmest_of_lakes said:

Is it my imagination (probably the case,) or was medium fertility farmland OR flax nerfed? I used to be able to get 1, maybe 2 flax crop harvests per year back in 1.21, but now, my flax stops maturing after reaching stage 8/9. It's been a solid week of being stuck on stage 8/9, and it's too late to harvest, being in the negative temperture range in october where I set up my home. Is this a bug, a deliberate change, or me being silly? Do I need potash in order to grow flax, now?

Based on a quick test, flax planted in medium fertility soil used to take ~2.5 months and leave the farmland at ~15 K (~35 K net uptake) at the time it finishes growing, whereas now it seems to take ~3.5 months and leave the soil at 0 K (50 uptake).

 

I do generally like the change for the most part, or at least the general direction, because it used to be quite easy to outright ignore the nutrient levels and still have almost zero issues with farming, whereas now fertilizing, crop rotation and better soils are much more useful. That said, especially combined with the yield reduction for grains, this is a very significant nerf that will in all likelihood just cause people to build even larger farms than they used to make. If they want to address farming being nearly free food, then the current plant-and-forget cycle should also be changed in some way, instead of just making everything slower and less efficient. Few methods would achieve this nearly as effectively as requiring more care and maintenance for optimal growth.

Edited March 21 by MKMoose

[williams_482]

2 hours ago, MKMoose said:

farmland no longer recovers nutrients while crops are growing on it.

Is that all nutrients, or just the current crop nutrients?

[MKMoose]

16 minutes ago, williams_482 said:

Is that all nutrients, or just the current crop nutrients?

All nutrients - recovery is completely paused while a crop is growing. I'm frankly unsure whether it's an intentional change, but that's what it is right now, and it's arguably better from a design perspective, even if not ideal.

Once the crop ripens, recovery resumes again, though at a much slower rate for the nutrient preferred by the crop.

[williams_482]

1 hour ago, MKMoose said:

All nutrients - recovery is completely paused while a crop is growing. I'm frankly unsure whether it's an intentional change, but that's what it is right now, and it's arguably better from a design perspective, even if not ideal.

Once the crop ripens, recovery resumes again, though at a much slower rate for the nutrient preferred by the crop.

That must be a bug, because it defeats the point of crop rotation. 

There's no reason to bother rotating crops of different nutrients if the soil isn't going to recover any nutrients at all when any crop is growing on it. You're going to grow a K crop, and P crop, and N crop, and then leave it fallow for a very long time while all nutrients recover, instead of the first nutrient being mostly recovered by the time the third crop is done. Rotating through three crops and then leaving all of your fields to fallow at the same time and starting an entirely new farm just feels bad, especially if it's expensive Terra Preta fields that you're leaving barren.

[MKMoose]

38 minutes ago, williams_482 said:

That must be a bug, because it defeats the point of crop rotation. 

Hm, I neglected that part somehow. Yeah, it is a bit odd that crop rotation without a fallow period is non-functional, except the little bit that will recover between ripening and next planting.

 

38 minutes ago, williams_482 said:

Rotating through three crops and then leaving all of your fields to fallow at the same time and starting an entirely new farm just feels bad, especially if it's expensive Terra Preta fields that you're leaving barren.

I don't feel like it's too bad if you time it neatly. Four fields, one nutrient each for three of them, the fourth one left fallow, and switch them around after each harvest. Some aspects could be tweaked depending on whether you even need any P crops, or some other factors.

Kind of heavy-handed, but actually incentivizes a more proper crop rotation cycle now with three nutrients and a fallow period. It's not ideal, but in the previous balance you often didn't even need to use all three nutrients, and just alternating two of them was often entirely viable, so I feel like some sort of in-between option would be great.

Edited March 21 by MKMoose

[williams_482]

1 hour ago, MKMoose said:

I don't feel like it's too bad if you time it neatly. Four fields, one nutrient each for three of them, the fourth one left fallow, and switch them around after each harvest. Some aspects could be tweaked depending on whether you even need any P crops, or some other factors.

How long does it take fallow farmland to recover nutrients? If it's only ~3 months to recover 50 points then this works fine. 

[MKMoose]

44 minutes ago, williams_482 said:

How long does it take fallow farmland to recover nutrients? If it's only ~3 months to recover 50 points then this works fine. 

It is partially random, on average 3 months, 2 days and 4 hours, though the variance is low. Just to note, keep in mind that nutrient recovery (just like crop growth speed) is slowed down by 10% for every 1 C below 10 C, so nutrient recovery over winter is much slower, or entirely paused during the coldest months.

Edited March 21 by MKMoose

[Calmest_of_lakes]

On 3/21/2026 at 11:37 AM, MKMoose said:

I do generally like the change for the most part, or at least the general direction, because it used to be quite easy to outright ignore the nutrient levels and still have almost zero issues with farming, whereas now fertilizing, crop rotation and better soils are much more useful. That said, especially combined with the yield reduction for grains, this is a very significant nerf that will in all likelihood just cause people to build even larger farms than they used to make. If they want to address farming being nearly free food, then the current plant-and-forget cycle should also be changed in some way, instead of just making everything slower and less efficient. Few methods would achieve this nearly as effectively as requiring more care and maintenance for optimal growth.

 

On 3/18/2026 at 5:26 PM, Thorfinn said:

As @williams_482 alluded, I suspect it is an intentional design choice.

Before, there was absolutely no reason to bother with anything above medium fertility soil. Especially when composting itself took 2.5 months, and was gated behind full copper. Now improvement of your farmland has been put more on par time-wise with other mechanics like animal husbandry, fruit trees, and, now, berry patches.

It has become harder to play the entire content in a single game year, and that's not a bad thing.

The problem is that it feels like you can't even rotate crops in time for winter unless you live in a warmer environment. I accidentally settled in an environment that gets winter early, around october or so, and I lost so many seeds because the first harvest took longer this update. Am I doing something wrong, or can I only get 1 harvest a year?
 

[LadyWYT]

37 minutes ago, Calmest_of_lakes said:

Am I doing something wrong, or can I only get 1 harvest a year?

I think it's just a balance shift. Right now I'm working off the assumption that only one harvest will happen the first year, with subsequent years offering at least a couple of harvests.

[KahvozeinsFang]

On 3/17/2026 at 8:12 PM, Calmest_of_lakes said:

But now, crops dont seem to mature in time before winter

They definitely don't. Not without fertilizer anyway. My Flax is at 8/9 and down to 29% growth speed. 

[EnbyKaiju]

In theory the point of proper crop rotation is to leave the fields empty for a length of time between harvests to get their nutrient levels up. You'd plant your crop, harvest it, then either switch out the crop or leave it fallow/unused for the rest of the year. That was until we got industrial levels of fertilizer for this kind of thing.

It definitely sounds like there needs to be a bit of a balance done on growing times, but only getting one harvest in year one, then multiple in year two-onwards makes a lot of sense. Especially if they are trying to encourage crop rotation instead of just pulling up the soil after every planting. But again, if you aren't getting one crop in at least during the growing season there needs to be tweaks to growth timers.

The four field system rules!!

[Calmest_of_lakes]

1 hour ago, KahvozeinsFang said:

They definitely don't. Not without fertilizer anyway. My Flax is at 8/9 and down to 29% growth speed. 

That sounds over punishing. 

[Calmest_of_lakes]

1 hour ago, LadyWYT said:

I think it's just a balance shift. Right now I'm working off the assumption that only one harvest will happen the first year, with subsequent years offering at least a couple of harvests.

I don't understand the logic behind it tbh. Compost is wayy more valuable as terra preta than fertilizer and takes so much time and resources (as of the rc) to make, bonemeal barely covers any nutrient besides phosphorus (which said plants dont need a ton of,) and the other fertilizers can only be consistently obtained through trading, which is also chance based. 

[LadyWYT]

Just now, Calmest_of_lakes said:

I don't understand the logic behind it tbh. Compost is wayy more valuable as terra preta than fertilizer and takes so much time and resources (as of the rc) to make, bonemeal barely covers any nutrient besides phosphorus (which said plants dont need a ton of,) and the other fertilizers can only be consistently obtained through trading, which is also chance based. 

By balance shift I meant that the game balance seems to be shifting towards the player needing to rely a little more on hunting and foraging the first year while they get themselves established, as they can really only count on one harvest that year, assuming they didn't plant too late. In subsequent years, the player will be able to plant seeds earlier in the year and thus have much more potential for two harvests, possibly even three if they've got really rich farmland.

Fertilizer I still don't expect to actually need to use outside of a little bonemeal for berry bushes. It's probably rather useful for lower fertility farmland or late plantings, but not something that I would say is absolutely necessary for farming.

[KahvozeinsFang]

1 hour ago, LadyWYT said:

assuming they didn't plant too late

When I first bought this game in 2024 I joined a non-modded server and it was July on the server. I was able to get one harvest in before any cold damage to my crops.

 

Now in my single player world in 1.22 I found lots of seed and planted them no later than the 7th of May. As of today I'm in mid November and only been able to harvest some turnips so far. 

 

It certainly takes longer than the missing 10% of time they "fixed". Every growth stage uses nutrients which in turn slows down growth speed. I think it shouldn't be a hard requirement to use fertilizer just for one harvest a year. Especially with all the extra grain we'll have to be planting now.

Edited March 23 by KahvozeinsFang

[Thorfinn]

3 hours ago, Calmest_of_lakes said:

The problem is that it feels like you can't even rotate crops in time for winter

I'm not saying it doesn't need some tweaking. I'm still undecided. Did they really intend to give that much reason to seek out saltpeter? Another thing you had almost no reason to bother with before? You can even get by with compost. It's pretty labor intensive, but farming needed something.  Maybe not quite this much, though. I'm inclined to agree with @KahvozeinsFang that it seems you should be able to get one harvest per year without it. Still have not found any cabbage seeds, but I suspect those are going to have to be fertilized.

Edited March 23 by Thorfinn

[Zane Mordien]

2 hours ago, LadyWYT said:

By balance shift I meant that the game balance seems to be shifting towards the player needing to rely a little more on hunting and foraging the first year while they get themselves established, as they can really only count on one harvest that year, assuming they didn't plant too late. In subsequent years, the player will be able to plant seeds earlier in the year and thus have much more potential for two harvests, possibly even three if they've got really rich farmland.

Fertilizer I still don't expect to actually need to use outside of a little bonemeal for berry bushes. It's probably rather useful for lower fertility farmland or late plantings, but not something that I would say is absolutely necessary for farming.

The problem is really just grain though isn't it? I've harvested turnips multiple times. Sure the growth is stunted but I'm hitting October with 6 stacks of turnips. I have carrots and onions as well. I agree though it seems a little over done. The new player is going to suffer on grain since I assume they won't be as fast finding it and they won't understand that they need to plant it ASAP.

[LadyWYT]

34 minutes ago, Zane Mordien said:

The problem is really just grain though isn't it? I've harvested turnips multiple times. Sure the growth is stunted but I'm hitting October with 6 stacks of turnips. I have carrots and onions as well. I agree though it seems a little over done. The new player is going to suffer on grain since I assume they won't be as fast finding it and they won't understand that they need to plant it ASAP.

Honestly I haven't really had issues with grain. There was a bit of weird behavior in one of the pre versions, but that seems to be cleared up by now. I think the key is just making those farms earlier rather than later, or perhaps putting them in greenhouses when possible.

Edit: worst case scenario, the player should be able to glean enough fibers from wild flax an other sources that they can build a basic windmill.

Edited March 23 by LadyWYT

[williams_482]

14 hours ago, EnbyKaiju said:

n theory the point of proper crop rotation is to leave the fields empty for a length of time between harvests to get their nutrient levels up. You'd plant your crop, harvest it, then either switch out the crop or leave it fallow/unused for the rest of the year. That was until we got industrial levels of fertilizer for this kind of thing.

It definitely sounds like there needs to be a bit of a balance done on growing times, but only getting one harvest in year one, then multiple in year two-onwards makes a lot of sense. Especially if they are trying to encourage crop rotation instead of just pulling up the soil after every planting. But again, if you aren't getting one crop in at least during the growing season there needs to be tweaks to growth timers.

The four field system rules!!

Between the renewed need to fence in crops, larger fields, and the nutrient recovery changes, this update has made removing and replacing med fert soil a more understandable strategy than it used to be. 

Fencing in larger fields makes it more difficult than it was to simply expand your farm instead of replacing your existing spent soil. The need for larger fields also means that a smaller portion of your fields can be expensive high fert or terra preta soil that you would never just dig up given the choice. Finally, the fact that leaving a field to fallow is now a mandatory step instead of a three crop rotation allowing almost continuous growing makes remove and replace appreciably more space efficient than allowing the intended fallowing period. 

I think that last point is inescapable, unfortunately: if you want players to be leaving fields fallow for a time, some of them are going to skip that and replace soil instead, unless some kind of explicit penalty for soil replacement is implemented. 

[Zane Mordien]

44 minutes ago, williams_482 said:

this update has made removing and replacing med fert soil a more understandable strategy than it used to be. 

Hey, now at least I finally have a reason to make a iron hoe since I will have to replace all of my medium fert soil. Before I never bothered with anything than a stone hoe since by the time I could spare the metal to make a hoe my planting was already done. 

 

10 hours ago, LadyWYT said:

Honestly I haven't really had issues with grain.

Me either, but we aren't exactly the average new player. When I watch someone stream VS who is new they all pass right by the wild crops not realizing they need to harvest them and start planting. That or they think they need to wait until they are fully grown to harvest them. 

[MKMoose]

As of rc.5, seemingly all changes to crops besides halved grain yield and increased wild grain frequency seem to have been rolled back.

The changelog only mentions one fix:

Quote

Fixed: Farmland would not recover while growing, instead recovering when the crop was ripe

However, it seems that the nutrient consumption and growth time of all plants has been multiplied by 1 - 1 / growthStages, returning the effective consumption and growth time to 1.21 values. Unless maybe one other bugfix still changes things relative to 1.21, but either way most changes are no longer a thing right now.