Yes, 16 seeds planted and watered, but after that? A friend of my son's who likes to try to break things told me about his latest finding, and so I downloaded CJB's Item Spawner to verify. Sure enough, that's evidently not a sufficient condition. On my standard hardcore farming start (63 seeds planted and watered), usually, that means 0-2 crows per day. I've occasionally lost 5 crops before the scarecrow. But spawning in seeds, never leaving farm nor accepting initial parsnips, it looks like you only ever get 1 crow max, about once per week. At least up until Winter, two runs, one with mixed seeds, one with a sort of randomly chosen seasonal crop resulted in no more than 1 crow, even planting up to 126 seeds (14 sets of 3x3, to keep watering easy, and not run out of energy.) Either I've had insane luck or there's some condition other than total seeds growing required to unlock the later crows. Any ideas?
I don't get what we've found other than using a mod 'breaks' the game? Can you run it again without the item spawning? (and if that means you have to leave the farm to buy seeds I guess I am ok with that too.) I guess i am trying to isolate if it is the mod or the initial parsnips. Reading the crow description again and again. The crows eat at night and won't eat seeds planted that day. If one planted the starting parsnips. They harvest on the 5th. It looks like any number of seeds can be planted on the 5th and they would not be eaten. The scarecrow would go down on the 6th and the crops would be protected that night. I have not been planting it that way. This changes everything. (maybe).
We need someone to look into the code for this; the wiki won't be the best source. I've done it before on Windows, but I've switched over to Linux and haven't yet figured out how to decompile the game files.
@ThorfinnS, I just looked at the decompiled code, and I did not see any other conditions to spawning crows. When it's counting up the number of crops, it looks both for tiles that are hoed and for a crop to be planted in that tile. Normally you can't have one without the other, but maybe this playstyle or mod is somehow not setting one of those properties. However, it doesn't make any sense to me. It also looks like crops that are still seeds would act as extra insurance against crows, as these tiles are eligible for crows, but a crow can't eat the seed, thus wasting one of its 10 attempts. However, this most likely means planting the crop but not watering it, as I'd bet (but don't feel like hunting for in the code) that crop growth occurs before crow spawns. Since the only spring crop that lasts more than 1 day in the seed state when watered is the rhubarb, this would mean planting the crop but leaving it unwatered. I can't see many uses for this so early in the game. You'd probably want at 2-4 times unwatered seeds as good crops to have a realistic chance of protecting the good crops. In the meantime, you'd be increasing the number of crow chances. On a similar note, placing even a single scare crow to cover some of your crops will provide some protection for crops not under the scare crow, because the crow will be scared away if it attempts to eat a crop under the crows protection, thus denying the crow the chance to eat an unprotected crop.
So am I understanding you are saying that a watered parsnip seed that was planted on the 5th might get eaten that night ? Or is that the one day bit? If they can get eaten then the part about seeds that were planted that day needs corrected.
I couldn't find the function call for growing the crops, so I'm not sure if it occurs before adding the crows or after. If it occurs before calling the crows, then obviously the new seeds are fair game to be eaten. Otherwise they're safe. I'm not sure if the author of those particular lines in the wiki was looking into the precise timing that's important to us. This should be easy enough to test in game, but trying to track it down in the game code could take some time; the code structure is extremely hard to follow.
Had to do some serious scavenging to get enough cash to get 48 planted without touching the parsnips and still have a few to fill in spots that got eaten or harvested early. Had to visit every area (wouldn't have had to visit the beach, but it got me my ONE artifact, so that's another 250). Problem being I ended up having to hit every trigger I considered a possibility, except for meeting someone. Anyway, got 3 crows before the tulips came in and when I ran out of seeds and dropped below 32 crops, I added CJB back in, reloaded, got more mixed seeds, got 3 crows the next night. Restored the original save, spawned in seeds, got roughly 5 crows per month again. I don't think its the mod that's changing the behavior. [EDIT] DOH. Should have refreshed before posting. I'll have to think about what's going on. The coincidence seems unlikely. But it would only take one data point to show that's all it is... Thanks for looking. [/EDIT] [EDIT2] Had a fairy show up the night I planted some crops, and there was a crow there, but I didn't think to look and see if they were still seeds, [/EDIT2]
I have a video of a fairy on day 1; the crops had already grown to the next stage when the fairy arrived.
OK, I've convinced myself this is something to do with the CJB mod. Finally managed to get 33 mixed seeds on day 1 without leaving the property, completely vanilla, and though it took a few reloads, eventually got a 2-crow event before first harvest. Similarly, by opening the save game in a text editor, and changing the number of mixed seeds, the 3-crow events happen with about the predicted regularity. I have yet to encounter a 4-crow event, but assuming the wiki is correct, (and I'm understanding it properly) not terribly surprising. Not a very high probability event, assuming the 30% is checked immediately, and the 10 attempts to find an eligible crop happens ONLY if the check succeeds.
