Farmer's Almanac

Farmers Almanac

The basics

In the Resource Extraction tab at the bottom you can find the farm building and the farm tool, the latter being used to create fields for the farmers to work through the farm building.

Nutrients and fertility

The term nutrients refers to how rich the actual tile is or can be while fertility is related to the crops themselves. using the farming tool to move over various tiles youll find a section displaying X%/Y%. this is the actual tile fertility level (referred to as nutrients to make it distinct from the plant based fertility) which will play the largest role on growing most crops. fertility is the actual expected output of a tile if a crop is planted on it in its current state. this varies from crop to crop and can still be impacted afterwards by things such as pollution

Growth time

The growth times are a convenient 5% or 10% of a full year, taking the evening into consideration. Meaning the growing times are 864 seconds and 1728 seconds respectively. Berries, flax, and mushrooms are the fast growing ones with everything else taking twice as long.

Winter

There is no actual winter as we know it, instead most crops rapidly die when exposed to freezing temperatures. This has the upside that if you warm the farm above that point you can continue to grow crops all year round. However it may be best to let the field rest and recover nutrients in winter depending on what you are growing and the fact that most heat sources tend to cause harmful pollution. Speaking of pollution...

Rocks, light, and pollution

Rocks and pollution cause a direct reduction in fertility (not nutrients) ranging from 50% to 100% fertility loss at 100% rock/pollution level. It is unclear at this time if having both results in an additive or multiplicative effect on fertility as we could not find a farming whisker willing to "harm my precious crops like that". Notable exceptions are flax which only takes a 20% fertility hit at 100% rock level and trees which only take 25% fertility hit at 100% pollution. The only light source in this world comes from the sky as far as the plants are concerned so campfires and other fire sources will *NOT* work as substitute light. All crops have a minimum light level to grow (usually 75%) but it is unclear at this time what effect going below that has on fertility, growing speed (if any) and on nutrient recovery (if any).

More things to consider

Mushrooms

Mushrooms are special in several ways that are worth noting. For starters they do not suffer from rockiness at all and do not need any nutrients (though interestingly they will use it up if you fertilize their tiles anyway). Cold and pollution works similar to the other crops. But the final point is the biggest difference: they cannot stand sunlight. The way sunlight works is that every tile exposed to an open sky has 100% sunlight and every tile away from it reduces it by roughly 1/8th. Meaning that you need to be at least 8 tiles away from it in a direct line in order to grow mushrooms without them suffering damage. A good use for that buffer space is putting down warehouses and the farm buildings for your future mushroom farm

How much work can a farmer handle?

WIP (a very crude answer is about 40 tiles per farmer if they don't spent too much time walking, half that on the fast growing crops)

Small field vs traditional farming

variable WIP

Fertilizer

fertile WIP

Dreaded beaches

Spooky WIP

The impact the rock toggle has on non-rock behaviour

Mysterious WIP