POWER GARDENING AND EATING MY MAGIC BALLS
-A manual from Grindl, Guilty Sword and Golem turned REAL BOY!
Part of this guide requires Elona Custom enhancement to Elona Plus, but MOST of it is relevant without Elona Custom… Having EC however, will accelerate the process 100x and remove much annoyance.
This can be achieved with any character, though obviously a farmer or other character that starts with gardening, and weight lifting, will have an advantage.
Existing Characters: You probably have every skill learned and should have no problems with the actual gardening part – the first part of this guide is aimed at new characters / characters still growing and only in act 1 without access to things like kumiromi statue (which is too slow anyway, except for artifact seeds.. its really good at those) Skip to “Obtaining Seeds in Disgusting Amounts” and beyond, if you don't care to read all the starter tips.
NEW CHARACTERS
You start in the middle of the 8th month (August). Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to become the greatest farmer in the world. To do this, you will need to summon a god within three months (Before 11th month, November, ends)
-Skills to
learn ASAP-
--Gardening
--Weight Lifting
--Cooking
--Mining
--Alchemy (for pot of fusion)
--Traveling (free skill training + travel faster)
--Riding (you're slow as hell without it)
--Negotiation (optional but super helpful)
--Investing (optional but super helpful)
GETTING STARTED
Strength is important to carry all the heavy things we will have, but we start with a lot of it + weight lifting already.
Golem Farmer is overall the strongest choice – feel free to pick a different race/class combination, but be aware you will have to farm a lot more platinum before you can start working towards the goal of FARMING FOR THE WIN!
Making your character
Maximum stats for a Golem Farmer are
Strength: 15
Constitution: 19
Dexterity: 6
Perception: 5
Learning: 12
Will: 14
Magic: 6
Charisma: 3
Lock Strength and Constitution to ensure good carrying/damage and health. Reroll the rest until you get maximum will (14) and acceptable learning (10+). Even better, get max will AND max learning (14 and 12)
With just a few rerolls I was able to get this, all our most important things maxed, plus learning for more damage with gardening based attacks and the xp bonus. Will is to help us preach and get favor asap.
Strength: 15 (max)
Constitution: 19 (max)
Dexterity: 6
Perception: 3
Learning: 12 (max)
Will: 14 (max)
Magic: 5
Charisma: 3
After proceeding, it asks you what your “Notable Skill” is. This skill starts with +9 to its value (its also a way to start with a skill you normally wouldn't have). Pick Faith, this will bring your starting faith from 4 to 13, well over the 10 required to get the preaching ability you can use to level faith quickly (like performing, but will/faith based).
For feats, Knowledge of Magical Plants is a must. The initial ability gives a mana drain + strength reduction you can use on strong enemies. At 30 gardening you will get a poison move, “violent garden” that hits every enemy you see for poison damage based on your learning + gardening.. which you'll have lots of!
For the additional two, you can pick anything, but I suggest Dimensional Move (for escaping danger), and Zin-ba, which drastically reduces the accuracy penalty you get for melee attacks when you are riding (and you WILL be riding).
Once you level to five, consider Touch of Sleep for even more safety – guaranteed hit and inflicts the sleep status – this is WILL based (which you'll have lots of due to preaching and starting with good will), and never misses. You can use this offensively and defensively. Use it to make a creature sleep and you can either attack them with 100% hit chance (great for pesky bats) or run away while they snooze.
Alternatively, get touch of sleep when you make the character and dimensional move at level 5.
THE PATH TO SUCCESS
TL/DR: Be smart, get a horse, evangelize, break rocks
Ok now that your character is made, much of what you do right away is fairly standard
-You have 3 months in game to be ready to summon a God, otherwise you have to wait an extra year (not that bad, but you'll have to kill some time either with more farming or adventuring). You can definitely do this in 3 months.
-Do the tutorial for the free items, redesign/move the usable furniture if you want, then leave.
-As you level up, put ALL your skill points into Faith to boost it and your Will quickly and keep its potential up. Once you have 42 Faith skill, you can stop doing this and save skill points for keeping high level skills potential up later on when the platinum costs get higher.
-Keep an eye out for gear with gardening bonuses, faith bonuses (it makes you pious), and +will stats, as will is important for preaching successfully along with faith (you will do this a lot later). Also, save every junk stone you find. As they build up you can leave them in a pile in your home so they don't weight you down too much.
-Go
to Vernis, get your little girl pet and sell the junk. Buy cheap
armor with PV and a scythe if you didn't start with one so that you
get the benefit of the farmers class feat (decapitate more often).
-If
the little girl starts with an offhand like a shield or claw, but has
heavy weapon (over 4 weight), remove her offhand item so her two-hand
skill will boost her damage a lot more. She is your protector.
-Check
the quest board. Check for
item delivery quests that have a long quest timer (remember, you are
super slow, 45 speed right now!). Ecology, Book
Delivery, and A Small Token quests, are
where its at and pays very well with long timers usually, but a good
6-7 day “before it's too late” will work too if the town you go
to is Yowyn or Palmia. You won't make it to the other towns in time,
don't even try. If any are available, AND your pet is alive you can
attempt easy Harvest Quest and get a head start on seeds + extra
cash/platinum. Without your pet at this point however, the hermit
crabs will destroy you. If you do these, give your little girl all
your armor and do your best to avoid the crabs while she kills
them.
-Do the quest and get the large payout. The NPC that joins you will usually be strong enough to hold their own at this early point in the game with low level/low fame and easy enemies spawning.
-As you travel from this town to the next, check towns that are on your way for scythe if you dont already have one. Not only is scythe important to allow our class feat to activate, but training our skill up is great because eventually we will have the kumiromi scythe god gift, and we might as well be good at using the weapon we're guaranteed to get! If nothing shows up, don't worry – you will find one quickly in the puppy cave.
-While
traveling, try to gather the static small medals in the towns and
other static maps. There are enough to get the sages helm (so you can
see pesky invisible monsters that will destroy you) and a small stack
of water to bless seeds and other important things later)
-If you get an early wish from a well, make sure the 7-league boots are what you get! With a mount, and the boots (equipped on you, not the mount) you will be able to do tons of delivery quests very fast (you can get performer to help train your charisma quickly to get additional pet slots, which you will need at least 3 before the end of this, so you must get at least 15 charisma. 20+ is best, so that you can have extra space for more escort quest, or eventually, a shopkeeper. Eating fruits will also help charisma, cook them first). A wish in the first year is pretty easy, and all but guaranteed if you scum (this is a power gaming guide, I won't judge if you do), but if you don't scum, you still have a very high chance of getting one if you drain every well. Drink hearty my friends! Take note of the boots if you get them – inspect and see if the material they are made of is acidproof or not – if it is not, you better get it acidproof soon (acidproof liquid) or be floating. Acidproof is better as some attacks may hit gear with acid even while floating. Eventually this will destroy your beautiful boots. Bless them ASAP. Eventually, create change material scrolls with jeweling and bless a stack of them and turn them into a nice high end material. After that, if you're ballsy and willing to spend a LOT of medals (94) you can get a garok's hammer at the workshop and turn them into an artifact. If you're lucky and dont get terrible / negative modifiers, you will have a truly amazing item after this. This is a good use of extra wishes/medals later in the game too until you get one you like.
-Once you have 5 platinum, go to yowyn and learn how to ride. Buy a horse (also in yowyn) so you move fast finally! Now you can really do those escorts, and everything else, without sucking. If you still dont have 5 platinum, do easy hunting quests while your fame is still low (with your pet alive and helping). You will fail harvest quests because you are too slow, especially if you get whats in the next bullet point. If the hunting quest has stuff that is too hard, use your dimensional move to escape, and consider just waiting for more Ecology and Book Delivery quests.
-As soon as you have a mount, head north to Truce Grounds and accept <Opatos> as your god. This step can be done earlier if you want, but with this character being so slow it is probably better to get the mount first.
-Now that you have a god you can finally get dreams from your god, increasing your FAITH skill when you sleep. Aside from preaching, and very rare scrolls of faith, this is the only way to increase your faith (aside from probably offering items, which you will do anyway, and maybe praying,b ut that uses your favor.. dont do that if you can help it)
-
-If
you are scumming, or like to gamble, hang out for a bit in the first
etherwind that happens and you can get the carapace skill for more PV
(reduces speed but we wont care, we're riding), and the violence
bonus – we have a lot of life, so the extra damage we take will be
mitigated by that and the bonus PV. At level 1 carapace gives a
whopping +15 PV which is huge at this point, +1 every 2nd
level. Your speed gets -20 though, and an additional 1 every 2nd
level. While riding however, we use our mounts speed, so its not a
big deal. You're a slow-poke golem – you are going to ride.
-At this point you should have a mount and even with low riding skill you will be much faster. Riding skill goes up by fighting things while mounted, so don't neglect defending yourself even if your attacks aren't very good without tactics, two hand, etc. Every swing trains you.
-Continue doing escort quests, the next skill you buy should be traveling because you will be doing so much of it at first and it will constantly be leveling your skills up. Acquire a nice nest egg of money and buy a full set of gear for you, your little girl) and your MOUNT. Get as much PV/DV as you can for the mount, and +Str gear to make it easier for it to carry your weight NOT speed gear, as your riding is too low and increasing its speed will make it harder to ride, slowing you down. If you get gene engineering, splice riding skill onto your mount to make it easier to ride. Continue gathering platinum and buy all the required skills listed at the beginning of the guide. Don't worry too much about the rest, but if you have extra platinum, do it.
-At level 4, take all your little girls gear, abandon her (aww) and buy a juere infantry from the slave trader in derphy. He is way way better. Give him the gear set you bought her. You won't be keeping him long! If you manage to get 3 blue capsule drags from rogue attacks or magic vendors, replace your horse with <Kaneda Bike> in noyel during the december Festival of Jure by feeding him 3 in a row and talking to him a fourth time.
-Now
that you and your pet and mount are fully geared and you know all the
skills you need, move on to the next part
PREPARING FOR INTENSE FARMING
Everybody knows farmers are good, harding working, spiritual folk, so we're just going to follow that path. Respect your god, and find humility and spiritual favor in hard labor.. that is, digging big giant holes in the earth.
Go to random cave-type dungeons of very low levels and mine them to get ores. Lots of ores. Those junk stones I said to save when you saw them? Those count as ore. This will also increase your constitution and make you more tanky. Yay! Mine TONS of ore and bring it to palmia and sacrifice to opatos. Use the 9-god symbol to check your favor – if you are at max favor for your current faith level (faith x 100, +25) then just stockpile the ore at home until your faith goes up. Each ore gives 25 favor with <Opatos>
Do harvest time quests to help increase your gardening (we need this up high + it will give you awesome attacks) and learning, as well as weight lifting. This will also help get a head start on seeds and provide extra platinum for potential training. You can also fail the quest if your fame is getting too high and triggering harder monsters, by doing the harvesting but not turning the items in.
Preach! This entire time all your points should be going into faith. As your faith and will get higher, around the 20 point mark, you should start preaching. Do easy party time quests and preach to train your faith. Avoid the high level NPCs just like you would with perform. Use the platinum to keep your potential high (like 150-200 at least). This will help raise your faith quickly. As party times will start to increase your fame, you may go back to yowyn to take harvest quest but not complete them, as said above, to keep your fame managed. Preach some more, and then preach some more. If you are trying to do this by the first november (I keep bringing that up huh…) you will need at least 41 or 42 skill in faith by then. Most if not all of your platinum should be going to faith potential, on top of your skill points. And you should be sleeping EVERY time you get sleepy ASAP, to get more god dreams to increase your faith skill.
At 15+ faith (and 1525+ earned favor, use 9god symbol to check it) your maximum favor points is high enough to pray and get the 1st god gift from <Opatos>, the Golden Knight. Remember you started with 13 faith, and put all your skill points into it? Well at level 2 you should have already gotten up to 15 faith. Not including bonuses from converting altars to your god (x5 favor, 125 for ore), it will take 61 ore to reach 1525 favor and get the pet.. barely any! At level 3 just from spending skill points I had 17 faith.
Before you pray for the pet, make sure you have room for the pet! Take your melee pet (little girl or juere infantry) and remove their gear and abandon them before you pray to make room for the pet he gives you. The new pet is your new protector!
Praying uses 15% of your current favor, it does not remove ALL of it, so you dont have to do all mining work over again to get it back, just some of it. This also means that you should pray for gifts as soon as you have enough favor to get them, and not go much higher than that amount, as you will lose more favor points that you will have to recover
At 25+ faith / 2525+ favor points, pray again to receive the secret treasure of opatos, use it to get a feat that reduces some of the damage you take (just by a little but every bit helps)
At 40+ faith / 4025+ favor points, pray a third time and he will award you with a big heavy hammer that does lots of damage and invokes the hero buff.. give this to the Golden Knight pet. Now he's EXTRA beefy.
Now, keep mining and recover all your favor points to 4025+ and make sure you keep it there (faith very slowly decays over time, so dont assume it will stay high enough if you dont maintain it once in a while)
When november comes around, and all of this is done, and 4025+ favor points, go to the truce grounds and pray. <Opatos> will be summoned. Talk to him to receive the <Fetter of Earth> boots, which reduce your healing skill.. and speed.. by 1373 when equipped (they wont go negative, and speed has a minimum floor.. usually if I use these I am at 16 speed). You wont be touching these for a while, but these are important to have.
Go to kumiromi's alter and press P to pray to him (not enter, which will enter the offering menu). Convert to kumiromi.
At this point, you should have at least 30 gardening (and the lovely skill that comes with it, violent garden – which will save your ass a ton). Buy a farm deed and place it where you like. Near Yowyn is convenient, but its really not hard to just walk to Yowyn. The best place at this point is near palmia – once the setup is done, you can pick it up and put it somewhere you like better.
Do lots of harvest quests in yowyn and palmia/vernis to get tons of vegetable seeds. Save the other seeds and plant the veggie seeds. Only vegetables. Bitches love vegetables. So does <Kumiromi>
Farm the hell out of the veggies.. earn as many as you can and plant them whenever there is an empty space, or when a plant withers and dies.
Take those veggies to the altar in palmia and sacrifice them all to <Kumiromi>
Make sure you have at least 15 charisma so you can have 3 party members at this point (Your mount, your Golden Knight, and one more empty space at least)
At the same favor levels as before (1525/2525/4025) pray to <Kumiromi> for the rewards
1st reward: The Cute Fairy pet. Like the wiki says, when she eats she spits out seeds, but rarely for fruits/veggies.. only for really filling food.
2nd reward: Kumiromi's stone of rejuvenation. This can grow any plant by 1 step, but its far more useful ability is to take a withered plant and revive it + set it to stage 2 of 3 of growth. Use it liberally, but it has a long cooldown so keep in mind soon when you have TONS of seeds you wont ever want to use it on common things like fruits/veggies etc.
3rd reward: <Kumiromi Scythe> … remember when I said to get a scythe and practice using it? This is why! It's a light weapon, so two-handing it is useless – use it with a shield, or dual wielding.
It gives a whopping +23 to gardening which is immensely helpful (plus it boosts your gardening attack skills), +13 to cooking which you will ALSO be doing a lot of with all the food your farms produce, and +17 to mining, which we're also good at.. and now we're better! On top of that it gives a bunch of chaos resistance which is going to be helpful when you fight <Zeome> and increases speed by a little, and strength by a LOT. OH and it lets you digest rotten food without penalty. This will be important.
At
this point, you are mostly “done” with kumiromi but I like
staying because having high favor with kumiromi increases gardening
(and our gardening attacks) and provides a lot of passive stamina
regen – and you will be doing a lot of things that use stamina,
like cooking, spamming violent garden etc. When the next november
comes around you can summon <Kumiromi> just like you did
<Opatos> for a special reward.
To get the other gods, set up a storage house next to truce grounds. Look up the god with the rewards you want next and what their favored items for sacrifice are other than corpses. Save and stockpile the items these gods want until you have enough to get all their rewards and convert, and sacrifice them. Stopping at each favor threshold to reduce how much you lose when you pray, you will only lose between 1100-1250 favor from praying. This means you will need at least around 5300 favor – i'd get 6000 favor worth of items to be sure. 6000 favor = 240 favorite sacrifices. Bring a bit more if you plan on summoning them for the special gift on a november (You can only summon one god per november, but you can also summon them by wishing for them by name). After you obtain their pet, treasure, convert back to <Kumiromi>. You will have no favor anymore, so start sacrificing vegetables to kumiromi at the palmia altar in massive amounts.
Thats it, you're all set to POWER GARDEN. Lets continue
OBTAINING SEEDS IN DISGUSTING AMOUNTS
First we need to talk about speed and satiation. Speed is how often you take turns compared to the rest of the games creatures. Your turns do not affect the flow of time (that is, a slow creature might only take 100 turns an hour, a fast creature might take 400 in an hour). Your turns do however affect you personally, your regeneration, your buffs wear off.. and you lose satiation (calories, food, etc). This is important to remember: Every turn you (or an NPC) takes, reduces satiation, and turns are relative.
I made my home and farms (and food shop, magic shop and general shop.. use thieves guild members for shopkeepers, get a domination wand @ the workshop for medals) by vernis because it is small and the food vendor is very close entering from the west or south.
Invest in a food vendor x50, at least twice. You can afford that by now. If your negotiation sucks, hire a vendor in your home, invest x50 one time, then fire them. Repeat (make sure you are only hiring the 20k to hire vendors, not the 80k). This will train your investing very fast for the smallest amount of monies. Have your pets out with you if they know investing, as their skill affects your prices and trains them as well. The food vendor will now sell a lot more food at once – they sell filling items too, bread/flour based items.. items the fairy will spit out seeds from eating almost every time. Eventually we wont NEED any food vendors, but for now, this is what will get us going.
Lets talk about the Cute Fairy. I personaly don't use her for combat and just use Call Familiar to summon her and send her away when I am doing this.
The cute fairy.. she gives us seeds when she gets full and eats very filling food, so we need to feed her these heavy things, but then she has to get hungry again before she will eat. UGH! Such a pain in the putit. She also has an annoying tendency to eat the seeds she vomits out.
1: Use taming whip to prevent her from picking up / eating items on the ground. Do this to any pets you plan on having around when you feed her or they will eat the seeds. 2: In Elona Custom (This is the part that requires Custom), talk to the fairy and select 'other', then 'other settings'. In this menu you can turn on 'eat items from your bag'.
3: Remove all her gear that isn't light with +Speed
Now the fairy can be given tons of items directly into her inventory which she will automatically eat when hungry. But she still needs to be hungry. And waiting for that can burn a lot of real time.
SHELTERS: Shelters make time advance tremendously fast, burning a ton of turns… and satiation. So we feed her in a shelter and rest. In the game options (detailed settings) turn 'Auto Turn Speed' to 'Highest”. But we cant use town shelters, they are full of hungry NPC's that may eat your seeds. So buy a portable shelter and place it in your home with your vendors near your farms and shops. (or where those things will eventually be anyway).
Unlike town shelters, portable shelters do not feed you, so you will have to provide your own food. Buy cargo food and use that at first. It's readily available – it doesn't train potential, but you aren't at the food potential stage yet, you're farming seeds.
1: Go to the food vendor and buy ALL the food they sell, because its all flour/bread types. By the raw noodles and flour and cook it into food as well. Make sure you are wielding the <Kumiromi Scythe> whenever you are cooking or gardening or even mining. Use your food processer, barbecue set, etc. If you don't have one, use the one right there in the cooking shop. They won't mind – you literally will buy them out constnatly, so you're their VIP customer.
2: Make sure you have a few cargos of food to feed yourself
3: Send your other pets away, too many other pets doing this will massively lag even most modern systems. Make sure your autoturn speed is set to the highest speed, as mentioned above.
4: Enter your portable shelter. Your fairy should have a mostly empty inventory. Give her the <Kumriomi Scythe>. This will increase her speed and protect her if any of the food is rotten or rots in the middle of this method. Put ALL of this food (except cursed) into her inventory, even rotting food.
5: Equip the boots <Fetter of Earth> .. your speed should be about 16 assuming you aren't boosted some other way.
6:
Rest until you stop hearing
the feeding noise and she starts drooling. Give her more food and
repeat if you had more than she could hold.
SPEED, SATIATION, AND LETS DO THE TIME WARP AGAIN
Remember what I said about SPEED and SATIATION and TIME earlier? Here is where the magic happens. Even without boosting her speed via training, and only having her base starting speed of 116, +12 from the kumiromi scythe, her speed will be 128 vs your 16.. giving her exactly 8 turns spent every time you spend 1 turn. Thanks to magic of shelters and their time warping effects, she will take MANY MANY MANY actions compared to you (as will any other pets, and they will get hungry and cause a ton of drooling messages when they see the seeds they aren't allowed to eat, if you told them not to eat food off the ground, which causes a ton of lag, which is why I said put them away)
This will cause the Cute Fairy to burn through her satiation at an ENORMOUSLY accelerated rate due to the time warp and portable shelters not providing food. At the same time, your slow ass will barely need more than a few food cargos to make it through the process.. she will easily eat 10-20 meals to every 1 you eat.
In literally seconds you can empty her entire inventory of food. Seeds will be EVERYWHERE. It is hilarious farming seeds with <Fetter of Earth> and the <Cute Fairy>.
Set up piles of each sort of seed outside the shelter after identifying them all (this is why I do it at home, so I can pay my wizard to ID all the seeds at once). Different seeds are good for various things.
Farms have 72 tiles once you clear out the useless scarecrows ( I also get rid of the trees just below the field because they block view of the field)
Once you have about 100 of a type of seed is a good time to start a farm for that. That is 72 seeds for their tiles, plus extra for replanting failures etc. Remember kumiromi only likes veggies, not fruit – but fruit stat gains tend to be a little better, and help train your charisma, which lets you have more pets. None of this really matters because the end goal is a sustainable herb farm. It will take months of doing this in game to get enough herb seeds to fill an entire farm, though the time will literally fly by. (Careful if you're high ranked in adventuring, arena, etc, to pay attention to those timers. Or just get the ranks back when you're done)
When harvesting/cooking plants, if something rots you can use a juice mixer (from embassy, goods vendor maybe) to turn it into juice that wont rot and has full nutritional value even if the fruits/veggies used were rotten.
A secondary benefit of this, is the time you spend in the shelter will easily burn two or more game days, which means all the vendors will be restocked – if you have a black market vendor and multiple magic vendors all highly invested right in your home near the shelter, this can be a fairly reliable way to obtain rare items needed like flying scrolls, evolution potions, and occasional godly artifacts at the black market.
IMPROVING THE SEED FARMING
This part assumes that you have done this for a while and gotten a big stockpile of fruit, veggie, gem, and magical herbs. You should have a large amount of unknown seeds and probably a few artifact seeds.
This will focus on sustaining your seeds without needing a food vendor (though you can still use one to augment the food amount you have), and pot of fusion boosting.
While actively farming you should carry your seeds on you. Only carry blessed seeds. When you identify the seeds the fairy creates, the regular ones and cursed ones can be dropped in piles. Once you get enough uncursed/unblessed seeds to be worth it (at least 50 in my opinion), bless them and add them to what you carry. Never waste blessed water on cursed seeds unless they're herb or artifact seeds.
Set up a farm for strange plants (unknown seeds). If you do not have enough unknown seeds, before you bless what you do have.. you can just make more! Despite being rare compared to veggie/fruit/magic/gem (but not as bad as herb and the unmentionable artifact seeds).. we don't have to rely on the cute fairy DIRECTLY for these seeds. We can make them in UNLIMITED QUANTITY.
Pot of Fusion: Unknown Seed, mix two food items and two seeds. Technically seeds are food items, but you can only use one of any particular item in this recipe, and so you dont want to use all seeds or you would end up using your rarer seeds (though you COULD do veggie+fruit+magic+gem seeds if you really wanted.. dont use herb/unknown/artifact). Two different fruits/veggies from your farms, one veggie seed, and one fruit seed – this is all essentially infinitely available now… this creates one unknown seed. Do this until you have the 100 seeds you want to start up a specialized farm and DO IT.
This is a GREAT USE for all the cursed veggie/fruit/gem/magic seeds the fairie gives you.
Harvesting Strange plants: Strange plants can give a lot of random items.. pretty much anything.. even randomly give artifacts, so its one way to occasionally get them despite how hard to get artifact seeds are. Most commonly however they will provide some very important items for Pot of Fusion recipes that will really ACCELERATE YOUR GAME.
*Tea Leaves: Used to make tea with pot of fusion (unimplemented at time of writing, sell or save for later)
*Coffee
Beans: This will provide +# enchant quality coffee. Use 1 by itself
in the pot of fusion (recipe: coffee) and itwill make 4 coffee. Due
to the high enchant values you can get on these, their gold value
will skyrocket. Sell it at your shop for mad profit if it has a
+value, keep the no enchant ones for yourself.
*Rice: You can eat this. DON'T DO IT. It doesn't rot – neither does the food it makes, but you cant cook it. One rice produces TEN rice balls with the “Onigiri” recipe in the pot of fusion. These are almost weightless, and extremely filling for their weight (seems nearly on par with cargo). They provide no stat training and sell for almost nothing, but they are a good replacement for cargo food while you spam the cute fairy seeds in the shelter – saving you money. Turn into rice balls (they dont rot either) and stack them outside your shelter for on-demand food supply when you farm seeds. There is another tremendous use for them detailed further down.
*Bannou
Mugi: THIS IS THE MAGIC! Pot of fusion recipe: Barley and Wheat, this
creates 3 whisky and 3 beer which you can sell or keep for other
things, and two noodles and two bags of flour. The noodles and flour
will have a higher and higher +# enchant value as your gardening
skill goes up. This enchant value like all other food values is
passed on to the food you make.. which is bread/flour based food –
FAIRY FOOD. Because of its high value and being cooked well, its
extremely filling and will generate a TON of seeds very fast. Stack
them WITHOUT using pot of fusion yet, outside your shelter, until you
are ready to farm seeds. While the flour and flour based products do
not rot, the noodles this also creates will rot, so save the Bannou
Mugi until you are ready to cook a ton of food for the fairy to eat.
At
this point you will have massive amounts of fairy food and no longer
need the food vendor… or spend a single gold piece on sustaining
your farms.
From here you can keep farming seeds til you get 100+ herb seeds, bless them all and start an herb farm. Stockpile MASSIVE amounts of herbs.
At this point, you want to make herb infused food. Herb
food is amazeballs and will train stats incredibly quickly. Food Item
+ Stomafillia + Curaria + any OTHER herb in pot of fusion.
Pets get a huge multiplier on food gains for stats. The multiplier is less on herb infused food, but still HUGE. Create herb food for your pets with whatever is on your farms, load up their inventories and then use the same <Fetter of Earth> + Portable shelter trick to make them eat TONS of it, VERY quickly.
You can herb infuse riceballs, which you should have in near infinite supply. You now have huge amounts of nearly weightless food, that does not rot, satiates heavily, and provides immense stat training. You should eat this whenever you do the feeding trick in the shelter, but ALSO carry it with you when you go adventuring and eat them whenever you get hungry.
AND THATS IT, YOU'RE A POWER GARDENER!!
Eat my magic balls, get stronger!
-Grindl (Lucentdepths)
Additional TIPS AND TRICKS
GARDENING
Always use the <Kumiromi> Scythe – you worked hard to get it fast, and its awesome
Only plant seeds that are blessed. Using my method above you will have huge piles of seeds to bless, so your blessed water will be used very efficiently.
Always
PLANT when it is RAINING. If it is not raining, rest on the world map
until it is. This reduces the chance of your newly sown plant
withering immediately.
Even with high enough skill to never have a skill based failure on wither checks when plants grow, there is a second 5% chance that a plant will wither and die on any particular growth stage anyway, just to spite you. So get used to it. You'll always need seeds.
Always HARVEST veggies/fruits/unknown farms when it is RAINING. If it is not raining, rest on the world map until it is. This increases the +enchant value of the produce. This has no discernable affect on other types – though it could be possible that it increases the rarity of the rods you find in magic plants, better quality on artifact gems, etc, this is really hard to quantify and I don't bother with it (except probably on artifact gems because they are super rare)
If you have a ranch, it will produce shit. Shit makes fertilizer. Fertilizer instantly grows a halfway grown plant to full size and increases the quality of its crop. I don't really bother with fertilizer actively, because it can be tedious and I tend to use my rotting food items for other things. My suggestion – save shit from your ranch (which you should also have if you're farming, put the winged snail there or a dog or a chicken for lots of eggs to cook & sell). Put it in one of your farms compost bins and have just enough produce to save rare plants – if an herb plant withers and you revive it with kumiromi, you can fertilize it and still get a good yield.
Just like the real world, it rains more in the spring and summertime. You get plenty of seeds using my method, very quickly, so it mostly doesn't matter.. but due to rarity of them and not wanting them to wither so much, you should only use artifact seeds during these 'growing' times.
Don't plant your farms in the snow and the desert. Or the forest.
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OTHER
Your Gem Farm will help keep potential up as well OR provide extremely valuable items for your general store to sell - give all mica/gold to your pets or sell in the store, but save rubynus, emerald, and diamond ores and use the pot of fusion to combine them into brilliant ores (5 pieces to make each one). The value of the 1 of those is worth far more than the 5 ores used to make it - however, do not attempt this recipe until you meet the minimum skills as listed on the fusion page, or you may fail and lose all the ore.
Save the tobacco plants in a big pile after you identify them (You get them from unknown seed "strange plant"). Save all healthy leafs and wood pieces you find, they're light and do not rot. Mix all 3 items in fusion pot to process the tobacco into multiple products to sell in your shop. Best to do in big batches
Set
up a food shop to sell your cooked fruits/veggies. Always wear the
<Kumiromi Scythe> when gardening and cooking because it makes
you more awesome. Keep spending platinum as you get it on their
potential.
Set up a magic shop to sell high value potions/scrolls/rods. Personally I sell everything but cure corruption/evolution potions and named healer potions (eris, jure etc), superior material and flying scrolls. Once your gear is all +6 or higher, drop all the enchant scrolls in it.
Set up a goods shop to sell anything else. If you dont want to use 3 pet slots for shopkeepers, then just make this one (shops default to this type)
Shops do not need to be fancy. You can just step inside the shop and drop everything in ONE pile and it will sell. NPCs that come to your shop do not care about how pretty you laid out 400 items over 400 tiles, or how long it took you to do it that way.
Very effective early shopkeepers are thieves guild members which you can dominate pretty easily (especially if you do the cat quest for the monster heart first). Tight boots always have +negotiation, so you can easily get them bonus negotation with any tight boots and then keep an eye out for artifact equipment with more negotiation (I personally dont waste much time looking at any gear that isn't miracle or above, because SO much drops).
All your shop storage safes are connected – you don't have to visit every shop to access it.