So all spring/summer/fall, I let my animals graze as well as sectioned off an area to just grow hay. Between an unplanned pregnancy (thanks for the free goat!), growing another duck and just not planning well, I ran out of hay 5 days before the end of winter. It cost me a pretty penny to make sure my animals had enough to make it. I have two cows, two goats, 2 ducks, 5 chickens and 1 rabbit. One silo. What are your best tips to make sure I have enough for next winter?
Count the number of animals and multiple by the 28 days of winter. That's the amount of hay you'll need to feed them all winter. They should eat 1 hay a day each. Divide that number by 240 and round up to get the number of silos you will need. At the start of the year (spring), a lot of your uncultivated land will turn to grass. Harvest it with a scythe and there is a 50 percet chance you'll get some hay in your silo. But don't harvest it all because any you leave will spread. Also, fence in a nice section by your barns and coops and plant some grass. Your animals will eat that of they can get outside. This also grows and expands. On the last day of dayof fall, harvest everything and fill your silos. Rinse and repeat next yeat.
You can divide by 240 to get the number of silos. <or> if you want to micro manage and save the space hay stacks in bins. You can harvest the grass to fill the silo all year. I try to scythe a little each day to allow more to grow. If you want deluxe barns and coops to house those special animals and have auto feeders then this trick doesn't work as well. You'd need extra silos. But if you build a non auto feeder barn or coop and make sure you leave the feeder bench open. Then you can go and pull all the hay out of the 240 size silo and store up to 999 in one slot in a bin. Then all you need to do it top off the silo during the winter as the hay gets eaten. I usually build a 2nd barn to put kegs in anyway so this works out for me.
I do a combination of both ideas above. The first year I pull out hay before autofeeders and store 300 or so in a chest. After the first year I then build multiple silos to hold enough to get thru the winters. Also I do not fence in my animals. Sure it can make it a little harder to find truffles but the pigs tend to drop them a fairly small area but this way the animals can graze on any available grass and not just what you plant as starters in the fenced area. That is why I close the doors every evening so I don't have to chase them the next day to pet them before I let them out.
It SEEMED like I didn't have enough hay growing on my entire land last year to fill my silo by winter. I have cleared a bunch of my land of trees over the last year. Will hay grow there by itself or do I need to plant it? Also, I currently have a deluxe coop so it auto feeds. I didn't realize I could add to the auto bin. I don't mind getting two silos if I have more animals than 240 hay would feed. My farm is so new, I have TONS of unused space. In fact, everything is still on the main section by the house right now. But I have been considering getting a new building just to put my items like keg, cheese churn, mayo maker. Right now all of that is in my kitchen. It's getting a bit cramped. I have been looking at images of nicely laid out large farms. I can tell that many of them are just for show but some are for functioning farms. My goal is to eventually make a large functioning farm that I can manage. I am in no rush.
Some hay will appear at the start of Spring, but as there's no way to control where it goes, I suggest buying a few grass starters from Pierre and putting it where you want your field of grass. Every so often, if the area is getting full of grass, scythe it so that only a little remains - it grows back fairly fast. Since it can grow in any direction, it's better to leave a few scattered small bits to grow back, rather than one large clump.
And when you harvest your hay, harvest in a doughnut pattern. I harvest from the edge, then I go into the middle and harvest a big doughnut hole in the middle. Grass grows from the edge, so the more edge you have, the more you will grow. When your doughnut grows shut, just harvest again.
Ok, these numbers are hopefully not going to get full on boring accounting snore level or into min/max world. But I'm providing them for insight as to what may or may not work for your particular farm needs. As stated elsewhere, each animal will need hay each day of the winter. 28 each for each animal. I prefer to round to 30 since that makes the numbers "easier" to deal with. And as such will do that here. As stated a silo holds 240 hay. at 30 each, you need a silo for every 8 animals. Two full deluxe level barns/coops is 24 animals or 3 silos. Each grass when scythed is 50% chance of a hay. 240 hay is 480 grass cuttings. If you were going to harvest it all at once that would be a 22x22 square of grass. PER silo. -Which is roughly the size of two plant-able scarecrow areas. Per silo. (Each scarecrow covers 248 fields) That's a lot.The good news is grass can be grown and harvested and multiple harvests can be had from the same "field" of ground. over the year. 480 grass cuttings (one silo) over a year is 20 grass cuttings in 8 weeks or 2 months. (summer and fall) If you assume spring is only a growing season. 20 grass cuttings is a 4x5 area a week. A harvest-able 4x5 area of grass is easily had with -sorry to cut short. I have to leave, I'll be back later to edit this to a more useful post after a bit from my other machine. -cheers
Doing a quick check of where I am on the first day of fall, I'm WAY short of filling the two silos. I think I haven't harvested enough of the grass each time. I've done the "donut" pattern but I think I've left too much grass. I will work on this every day the next month to see how close I can get. I'm thinking Marnie will be making a fortune off of me again this winter... UnexpectedParole, I'd be interested in your math when you get a chance to finish it, with a summary at the bottom that makes it easy for us non-math people to figure out how much of my land would have to be cleared/grown/harvested in a year to fill two silos.
You ideally want each tile of grass to be able to expand in any direction, so instead of a donut I do something like this: Like I said above, just a bunch of scattered little bits of grass. They grow back surprisingly quick. (This is my hay area for 24 animals, btw.)
Quite right. I'm an old man who immediately fell asleep in the chair after work that night. So I pulled up an old save. Day 7 of Winter 1 and figured I would run some tests, I found out a lot. And got more questions for me than answers. Let us go with the issues before my wasted wall of <inconclusive> test results in another post. 1. You can plant grass starters on day 7 of winter and any sunday after that. (I presume you can plant them on any day, but I only planted on sundays in my test.) 2. Grass grows in the winter! 3. You can scythe grass into hay in the winter! 4. the explosion at spring 1 was insane. I had 5x5 areas fenced off, and on Winter 28 I had about 3 or 4 grass spots in each. I woke to all of them being filled. 4.The stated wiki of 50% hay seems high to me. It might be only 50% of the total stages of grass. I could not cut down 25 squares and get 12 or 13 hay without it being thick. I cut down 9 5x5 areas and got 73 hay on day 1 of spring. In the summer I waited until all 5x5 were full and in 10 (250 squares) i got 124 hay. I had serious issues with my animals eating hay even though there was plenty of grass outside. The 11 animals ate 11 hay every day in spring and into summer. It took me until summer to get them to stop eating the hay from my silo. Once I figure out what I did or didn't do that made a difference I'll be better able to re-run the tests and get a better post about how much we need. Does anyone know the criteria of how to get the animals to stop eating hay and switch to grass ???
That's quite strange, UnexpectedParole. The wiki says that grass dies on the first day of winter. Do you have any mods that might be effecting that? Also, I have never had my animals stay inside on sunny days in any season except winter. They always go outside and eat the grass. I keep the doors open in the coop and barn all year until winter. Elenna thank you for the picture and explanation. That is totally NOT what I've been doing. Hopefully I can get those silos a bit more filled in the next 28 days.
I am playing without mods. And my grass did die on the first day of winter. But I bought grass starters and planted them during winter. And it grew. I had the doors open, and the animals were runing around outside during the spring. I also had my test plots of grass and loads of regular spawned grass all over during the spring. But they would not eat. Maybe it had to do with my sleeping through the days? As for Elenna's idea, she is on the right track. Each existibg grass tries to expand in the n-s-e-w directions. So having single plots or small clumps with area to grow in all directions is 'better' that leaving only one direction for grass to grow. More plots with more cardinal room to grow gets more growth. I'll try a different save and see what I can figure out with the animals feeding, and see if I can grow more grass during the winter.
Huh, did they actually spread during winter? I was under the impression that grass starters could be planted in winter but would not actually spread and create new grass, although I've never actually tested it myself. It never occurred to me that the locations of grass spawns on Spring 1 were related to the previous locations of grass. Does that work with grass that exists on Fall 28, or only with grass starters planted during the winter? From what I've seen, the animals walk out of the barn/coop at random times, and then once they exit the barn/coop they walk to the nearest bit of grass, eat it, and then wander around. You can actually see the grass disappearing - this is more obvious with barn animals, which eat more grass each day. (Both barn and coop animals eat one hay a day, but if given fresh grass, barn animals eat more. If you pen up your barn and coop animals separately, and plant the same number of grass starters in each pen, you can see that the coop pen will eventually end up with more grass.) So presumably you weren't staying up long enough for the animals to walk to the grass and then do the grass-eating animation, so the game recorded them as not having eaten grass, so it made them eat hay instead.
Last time I experimented with grass in the winter it died out the next day. Except for grass planted on the 28th which showed explosive growth on the first day of spring. I will experiment again next time I play.
They spread over winter. I planted varying number of grass starters in 5x5 fenced areas to track how much grass i could grow. From 1 to 5 starters. They all grew and grew and grew. I started on 7 winter by planting (sunday) I think and harvested on saturday. then replanted on sunday to harvest on sat a week later. It always grew. I was harvesting between 3 to 13 hay in a 5x5 depending on how much I started, how long I let it grow, and how much I left behind instead of new starters. On a side note, the trees grew like crazy too. (Maybe this is linked to the fact that I was sleeping through most of the days.)? I don't have data from what happened end of fall to winter, since I just opened an old save from 7 winter year 1. I am pretty sure that there was zero grass before I bought starters, so I think the winter freeze killed it all. -But I also make sure I harvest all the grass in fall too. So I might not have had any to freeze in that file, I don't recall. I do know that spring 1 (of year 2) spawned a bunch of grass not related to my test plots. All over my farm there were new grass and rocks and limb litter like normal. But inside my 5x5 areas where I had left a smattering of remaining grass from a harvest on winter 28. All 5x5 that had any grass in them at all on day 28 were Full of grass spring 1 of year 2. I am following your logic about the animals not eating before I went back to bed bit. I think that when summer they started eating outside it was because I had planted starters right in front of the door. Maybe they didn't have time to walk to get to my other grass before I went back to sleep. Again, I'll run a test on a new farm or different farm maybe when I get back from vacation next week. I would get up each day. walk down to the plots, check growth, check the hay trough, silo levels and then go back to bed. The plots and coop were in line with the north entrance but below the level of the east pond and the silo was up at the nw corner of the greenhouse so I was walking a bit, but not a long ways. Since I was testing I did very little else, other than a few days here or there swapping keg products and selling to buy more grass. but otherwise i just slept... I'm on a pc, bought through steam and not using any mods what-so-ever. for those looking to replicate.
That was my understanding, but I just planted a grass starter on winter 1 and it was still there winter 2. Hadn't grown, mind you, but it's only been one day. (On pc, no mods) That's odd, I've definitely never noticed trees growing in winter, and I can't imagine how sleeping through days would change that. EDIT: @UnexpectedParole I figured out the grass thing - they do grow, but if you exit the game and re-enter they disappear. No clue what's going on with the trees. I did have another file where I planted 10 oak trees on the farm sometime mid winter, and all of them are still seeds winter 21.
