Farming
Guide initially based on 0.C (Cooper), various updates for 0.D (Danny) have been made. Some of the information present here might not apply to future versions.
Farming in Cataclysm can be a rewarding way of providing sustenance for your character. As of 0.C (Cooper), farming has received some solid updates and is now more than capable of providing all the food your character will need - despite the farming system being a work-in-progress (like everything else). Finding an actual farm in-game can be both tricky, and helpful - but is not necessary. If you can find a farm, it's a good thing, as the earth is already dug up for easy planting, and you can often find relevant tools, or vehicles - plus fruits, veggies, grains, herbs and occasionally seeds just sitting out in the fields (assuming they haven't rotted away yet). Otherwise you can just make your own garden in any old vacant lot or field.
The process of farming is pretty easy. It occurs in three steps - Planting, growing (read: waiting), and harvest.
Planting
The first order of business is to find yourself some Seeds. Seeds can be found in Gardening Supply buildings, Home Improvement Superstores, Hardware Stores, in Farms themselves, rarely in Houses, and some can be crafted by the player, using the crafting menu &. They also drop when a grown plant is successfully harvested. To get you started, you can get some early seeds by foraging underbrush in forests (examine underbrush) - wild vegetables or rhubarb you find can be crafted into wild vegetable stems or rhubarb stems (requires Survival 2), which can be planted like seeds. In summer, you can find strawberry or blueberry bushes in open fields that can be harvested for seeds & fruit as well.
To plant seeds, you must examine a dirt mound with seeds in inventory. You can find some dirt mounds at a farm, but be wary of monsters if you're visiting the farm for the first time. Clear the farm first then look around for some tools, if the farm has some farming tools or seeds then you can start right there.
So find a nice set of dirt mounds on your farm to work with or just create your own dirt mounds. You can accomplish this with any digging tool, but the ideal implement by far would be a hoe. If you can't find or craft one, you can use a Shovel, Entrenching Tool or even a simple Digging stick (any tool with Digging of 1 or higher). Make mounds by entering the *Construction menu and choosing Till Soil. This process takes about 30 minutes per mound, a steep price to pay. A hoe is quicker.
It's much faster to use the hoe, if you can find or build one; simply apply it and have your dirt mound ready in a minute.
Once you have dirt mounds, you must apply the seeds by examining the chosen mound. This will pop up a menu of seeds in your inventory - just choose the applicable seed and hit enter. Once the seeds are planted, the growing process begins.
One note: You can only plant seeds when the temperature is 50F (10C) or greater. Otherwise you'll get the message, "It is too cold to plant anything now." So planting season begins in Spring, around day 6 or so. You may even find a small window between 2-4PM on day 5 if you really want to get started early.
Your dirt mounds become planted seeds.
Growing
Now, just sit back and wait for the seeds to sprout. They don't pop up overnight - growth takes place in four stages: planted seeds, seedling, mature plant, and fruiting plant. The time to finish the full growth cycle varies by plant. Also, growth times scale with season length, so in 0.D (Danny), the growth times have scaled with the change from 15 -> 91 day seasons.
You will know when your crops are done by their appearance (bright green #), and their description tag (harvestable plant). Fruited plants will stay harvestable for a good period of time, a week or more (in 0.C (Cooper)) - if you do not harvest them within the available span, the plot will go back to seed and begin growth again starting from the seedling stage.
One important thing to note is that the growth a plant experiences won't actually be reflected until you leave the plant's reality bubble and return - a quick trip up and down a set of stairs will do it (unless you have Z-levels on). So if you think it should be harvest time but nothing looks ready, try leaving and coming back.
Another thing to keep in mind is that your crops are vulnerable at this stage and must be protected, firstly from monsters - a zombie stumbling through your patch will ruin any planted crops it staggers across, and secondly from cold - be sure to harvest before winter, as the first day of winter will automatically kill off any growing plants and render them into withered plants.
0.D (Danny) and 0.E (Ellison)
Each plant has its own growth period.
Oats are the fastest growing plant in the game. They grow in 45 days.
Zucchinis grow in 47 days.
Cucumbers grow in 60 days.
Carrots, chili peppers, garlic (from both seeds and cloves), onions, tomatoes, and wild roots grow in 65 days.
Barley grows in 70 days.
Broccoli grows in 75 days.
Corn grows in 80 days.
Cabbage and lettuce grow in 85 days.
Sugar beets grow in 90 days.
Bee balm, blackberries, blueberries, buckwheat, cacti, cannabis, canola, cattails, chamomile, chicory, cranberries, dahlia, dandelions, datura, decorative plants, dogbane, elderberries, fungal, grapes, huckleberries, marloss berries, mugwort, mulberries, mushrooms, morel mushrooms, pumpkins, raspberries, raw beans, raw lentils, raw tobacco, rhubarb, roses, salsify, soybeans, strawberries, sunflowers, thyme, wild herbs, and wild vegetables grow in 91 days.
Potatoes grow in 95 days.
Hops and wheat grow in 120 days.
Celery and cotton take the longest to grow, at 130 days.
Fertilizer (homemade and commercial) reduces growth times by 20%. For example, fertilized corn grows in 64 days instead of 80.
You're in luck if you can find oat seeds or zucchini seeds early on - if you get started early in the year, you could potentially squeeze 4 back-to-back harvests into one growing season, providing enough oatmeal or zucchini for years to come.
0.C (Cooper)
In 0.C (Cooper) (note that this version had shorter seasons), there are three speeds at which plants grow: Fast, Medium and Slow. Growth time generally takes a week or two.
Fast-growing plants take 2 days per stage, fruiting in 8 total days. These are oats and zucchini.
Medium-speed plants take 3 days per stage, fruiting in 12 days. These plants are barley, broccoli, chili pepper, carrot, cucumber, garlic, onion, and tomato.
Slow-growing plants take 4 days per stage, fruiting in 16 days. These plants are blueberry, blackberry, bee balm, buckwheat, cannabis, canola, cabbage, cranberry, corn, fungal, dandelion, datura, dogbane, lettuce, marloss, morel mushroom, mugwort, mushroom, pumpkin, raspberry, beans, rhubarb, potatoes, strawberry, sugar beet, sunflower, thyme, wheat, wild herbs and wild vegetables.
Fertilize your plants - Or don't!
(This step is optional - fertilized seeds will grow much faster but yield much less crop!)
Fertilization is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, your crops will be finished much faster - fast-growing crops (oats and zucchini) will grow to the next phase of growth instantly, while medium-speed crops will take only 5 hours to advance to the next stage. The slowest crops will still take a few days between stages. The drawback is that you will almost certainly harvest the minimum amount possible at harvest time. This is usually one for veggies/fruits and 4 for grains, compared to 10-12 or 48 or so if they are left to grow the full time. You will, however, receive a few seeds, so for purposes of multiplying low seed stores, the fertilizer you spend could be worth it.
Liquid fertilizer can be easily found (it may be on the farm itself, or in a garden supply store, hardware store, etc), but you may have to craft it. It requires a cooking skill of 3 and survival skill of 2. If you've these skills then you can craft it using 1 water or 1 clean water, 2 bone meals, 1 chitin powder and 1 ammonia or 100 lye powder or 50 Saltpeter. Chitin powder can be ground from chunk of chitin using a quern, ammonia is commonly found in gallon jugs in most houses and bone meal can be created from bones using a quern or food processor.
When fertilizing, don't activate the plant food (activating or Eating the substance can prove harmful, don't do it!).
Instead, examine a seed with some liquid fertilizer in your inventory, just as with planting.
Plants can be fertilized once at every stage of growth (seed, seedling, and mature) for cumulative effect.
Crops list
We have a list of various crops for 0.D (Danny). The tiers are subjective, and subject to change.
| Name | Tier |
Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Barley | B | Can basically only make flour and booze. |
| Blackberry | A | Berry |
| Blueberry | A | Berry |
| Broccolo | B | Basic vegetable |
| Buckwheat | A | Makes flour, does not rot. |
| Cabbage | A | Used in a lot of recipes, keeps ok. |
| Cannabis | A | Weed and plant fibre, seeds turn into oil. |
| Canola | C | Cotton gives way more seeds and oil, and thread. |
| Carrot | B | Lot of recipes, keeps ok. |
| Celery | B | Lots of recipes, keeps ok. |
| Chilli pepper | D | Crafts into chili powder, a useful spice, at a high yield. |
| Corn | S | Makes a ton of stuff, including cornmeal, sugar. |
| Cotton | A | Slow growing, gives infinite thread and oil if you process the bolls. |
| Cranberry | A | Berry |
| Cucumber | B | Makes pickles. |
| Dandelion | F | Only good to keep you from starving, not very nutritious |
| Garlic | A | Gives a ton of product, keeps well for a long time, lot of uses. |
| Hops | F | Only used for beer and tanning. For the latter tanbark is easier to get. |
| Lettuce | B | Doesn't keep well, not used a lot. |
| Oats | S | Fast growing, makes oatmeal and flour, doesn't rot. |
| Onion | B | Keeps well. |
| Potato | B | Keeps well, makes good booze, used in a lot of recipes. |
| Pumpkin | C | Edible seeds, not a lot of product, rots quickly. |
| Raspberry | A | Berry |
| Rhubarb | C | Only usefull to make sugar. |
| Strawberry | A | Berry |
| Sugar beet | A | Makes sugar and other products. |
| Sunflower | C | Seeds can give oil or be eaten, not a lot of seeds. |
| Tomato | A | The most versatile vegetable. Can it for more uses. |
| Wild herb | A | Makes massive amounts of herbs, easy to grow, lot of uses. |
| Wild vegetable | B | Found everywhere, lot of uses. |
| Zucchini | C | Fast growing, but keeps badly, and not used a lot. |
| Bee balm | M | Medical: Anti-flu tea |
| Datura | M | Medical: Datura seeds are used for anti-parasitics or adrenaline. |
| Dogbane | F | Only used for plant fibre |
| Mugwort | M | Medical: Easier to get, but less effective anti-parasitic. |
| Thyme | M | Medical: Disinfectant oil. |
| Poppy | M | Medical: Everyone's favourite painkiller |
- All berries and fruits will give you yeast as a byproduct if turned into must and fermented in a vat. Berry bushes can be harvested multiple times. Can also make longlasting pemmican. Great for mass production of booze and/or biodiesel.
- Flour was non-perishable in 0.C (Cooper), and last a long time in 0.D (Danny) and is used in a lot of recipes. Flour-making foods are a godsend, so pay attention to them.
- Some crops are only for medical purposes (M tier). It is usually best to convert these into non perishable variants, so you don't have the situation where you are sick but all your medical plants have rotted away.
Harvest
Once they are ready, examine your plants to harvest them. You'll receive some produce, some seeds, and straw/withered plants. Different types of plants will produce in different quantities. Grains like barley and buckwheat will produce at a high rate, averaging around 46-48 grains per plant and somewhere around 6-12 seeds. Lettuce and carrots produce in high amounts in the 60s and 70s, while other plants like cabbage produce more in the 10-12 veggie range, and more like 18-24 seeds. For a breakdown of average yields, see the seeds page.
Make sure you are ready to eat/preserve any perishables, because the spawned items will start to go to rot as soon as they are harvested. Congratulations! You've just farmed your first homegrown produce.
Powered Farming
In 0.D (Danny) you can find and build farm equipment that plows, seeds, and harvests respectively.
The following vehicle (source) would allow you to reap, plow and drill (seed) two lines of tiles:
o o DPs>R DPs>R o o
In the example above, the reaper (R) is followed by an engine (>), a seat (s), a plow (P) and a drill (D).
As of yet, there is no fertilizer attachment for vehicles and the chemical sprayer doesn't accept liquid fertilizer. Details to follow.
Animal Farming
As of 0.D (Danny), you can also farm various animals such as cows. More details to follow.
Healing animals
It is in 0.E (Ellison) not yet possible to heal animals directly, but animals will heal damage over time. So just keep the biters away, or install the Magiclysm mod, and use spells.
See also
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