Small tips and tricks
Small tips and tricks
I recently learned that crows only eats your crops if you have 16 or more tiles planted. That means you can plant 15 crops early without worrying about the crows at all.
What are other small tips and tricks you guys know?
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Build a silo before building any coop or barn. Otherwise you'll need to buy hay for your animals at the start, and Murphy's Law says that you'll reach Marnie when she's busier staring the microwaves oven.
If the silo is full, you can pull out hay from the manual feeders and dump it into a chest. You can use this to build a single silo ever.
Don't cut every single bit of grass on your way, once you have a silo. Leave some spots here and there, so it regrows. A good way to do so is to use the scythe on a full column or row of grass, then leave a small gap before the next column/row.
If your animals graze outdoors (I recommend it), you can protect bits of grass here and there with fences or lightning rods. It helps to regrow the grass faster this way.
If you're a complete newbie: save money for the first Egg Festival, in 13th/Spring. Buy as many strawberry seeds as you can there. Strawberry is a cash crop, and if you plant them fast enough you'll get multiple harvests.
Also, don't ship every single strawberry that you harvest, leave some normal quality (cheaper) to make seeds later on. If you're able to unlock the greenhouse early enough, you can fill your field with as many strawberries as you want right off 1st/Spring of the year 2.
The best season to mess with your farm layout is winter, as you'll have less crops to deal with. "Less" doesn't mean "none" though - be sure to use winter seeds, they're highly profitable.
You can build sheds for your machinery if you want, but I find the best place to put them is inside the coops/barns with the animals producing the raw materials. For example, the mayo maker goes inside the coop with the chicken, the cheese maker with the cows, etc. It economises time this way.
With some exceptions, preserve jars are mostly for the fun. Kegs are where the real money is. Make wine/juice of everything expensive that you have.
You can put random machinery and chests outside your farm, just be careful where - NPCs destroy what's in their way.
Never donate to the museum the first dino egg or prismatic shard that you get! Use the dino egg to raise more dinos, and the prismatic shard for the sword (more damage = killing monsters faster = more efficient mining = more prismatic shards).
Do donate to the museum the first ancient seed that you find though, as you'll get the recipe.
Ancient fruit + keg = mad profits. Plant it on the 1st of Spring, then harvest it through three seasons. Make sure to keep some for more seeds later on.
On average the seed maker outputs 2 seeds for each sacrificed crop, being useful the most for things with multiple harvests (ancient fruit and berries). Plan accordingly.
The greenhouse isn't that big, it's just 120 plots of land, plus some space to plant trees around the plots. It won't give you as much money as a certain endgame location, but since it doesn't care about seasons it's a great place to multiply seeds.
I see this sentiment a lot about silos, and I don't agree.
I used to be the same. Always get a silo before a coop to... what, exactly? A silo does three things:
- Gives young animals food
- Give animals food on rainy days
- Give animals food in winter
But those three are the vast minority of an animal's time on the farm, and by the time you get to winter you'll have one anyway.
The 500g is much better spend on seeds or an earlier coop. The animals can eat grass anyway, it gives more friendship than hay.
Buy the silo when you have money, like after the first harvest in summer
Always get a silo before a coop to… what, exactly?
It's mostly to store some food before you buy your first animals, so you don't need to buy it from Marnie, and you have some time to set up some space for them to graze on later. (The early game farm is usually a mess, and it gets a bit annoying to get animals walking through all of that junk and your crops.)
That said it's perfectly fine to ignore this piece of advice - as any other - if you already know the game a bit better.
Yeah, but why do we want to store food? The few days of early friendship isn't worth it, and you'll only really be seeing the benefits way down the line
Unfed animals don't produce, so you're losing 50G/day/chicken until the silo is complete. And small bits of money like this are actually a big deal in the early game, sometimes you want to do something and you can't simply because you got no money.
In other words, you're better off saving your money unless you get 10 very early rainy days
Even then, a 500g investment in seeds will make you more money in the long run