The Basic Sprinkler: A fairer look at the unloved little squirt

Discussion in 'General Discussion' started by One More Day, Jan 27, 2020.

  1. WilliamZ

    WilliamZ Phantasmal Quasar

    This! I don't worry with the completion of greenhouse in year one, I plain to have my things done until the end of autumn instead of Spring/Summer.
    I definitely will give a try to basic sprinklers on my next game as I always ending purchasing Iridium quality ones.
     
    • WilliamZ

      WilliamZ Phantasmal Quasar

      I was thinking here... instead of went to jars, why not bees? Bee houses synergize very well with kegs (you don't waste tappers and honey can also be made into mead), you don't need to have a lof of sprinklers as one flower is all that you need, heck you don't even need the scarecrow! The money that you would using purchasing a bunch of seeds can go into the basic structure of the bee houses like coal and copper, I think that this might work but reaching farming 10 by the end of spring is crucial since raises Poppy honey value of 380g to 532g.
       
      • Grimgaw

        Grimgaw Space Spelunker

        Good analysis @One More Day.
        Seeing as the basic sprinklers are not long time investment (replaced by mid Summer), I wonder how does the energy used to mine the extra ore compare to just hand watering 160-180 Kale for 6 days.
        How much in game time would you dedicate to farming extra ~450 ore to cover a field of 160-180 Kale?
        (I've put extra in bold because these sprinklers will pretty much be thrown away within a season.)
         
        • ThorfinnS

          ThorfinnS Orbital Explorer

          It would be a better investment for you than for me, to be sure. It's a whole lot less energy for anyone who starts the mines with a copper pick.
           
          • UnexpectedParole

            UnexpectedParole Phantasmal Quasar

            How much less really? 2 e per ore node found?

            If it takes me 3 strikes to get copper ore which averages say 2 copper per then to get 50 ore you save 50 e? About 1 e / ore found?

            the best I do it maybe 70 copper in a day. Maybe. 70e is like 2 tulips.
             
            • ThorfinnS

              ThorfinnS Orbital Explorer

              OK, let's go with that. 50e saved is 50 extra ore, is 10 extra bars, is 5 extra sprinklers, is 20 extra crops, is 40e saved EACH DAY. More importantly, that saves about 40 minutes of daylight. Personally, I'm not nearly good enough at mining that I'm seeing that kind of improvement, but it would be great if I were.

              Even if you have enough iridium that you are trading sprinklers out by mid-Summer, the youngest of them have been around for 25-30 days, and saved you a couple hundred energy each, at least 60e each depending on how fast you upgrade to steel can. But they've still saved you all that game-time. 40 minutes each day adds up.

              BTW, if I weren't as good at fishing as I am, I'd plant a lot of tulips at those sprinklers. As is, though, I'm better off catching a chub or 6 when I run out of food in the mines. Maybe if there weren't 5 colors of tulips, I'd be tempted to save that time. Harvesting is a whole lot faster than fishing.
               
              • UnexpectedParole

                UnexpectedParole Phantasmal Quasar

                I don't see how it is extra ore. If you are getting 50 ore normally in a day and saving 50e from using the copper pick there is no direct correlation to getting 50 more ore with that e. Is there? I don't see the upgraded pick suddenly taking me to 100 ore in the day. -Especially if you want 50 of them to be iron.

                Backing up though, even if I wanted to buy the copper and coal for the upgrade, I'd still need 20 copper over day 1 and day 2 to craft the furnace. Can that all be bought as well? When does copper and coal appear for purchase from Clint?

                Also, my mileage must vary since I'm not looking at iridium sprinklers in the near future. I don't play SDV to dive in the skull caverns.
                I get my iridium sprinklers one at a time from Krobus. I'm starting to think IF I were to arrange a day 3 upgrade it might be for the watering can. :)

                You are giving tulips a bad rap. Who cares how many chest slots they take up when you eat them on the farm after a large watering session, or a tree massacre operation, or large hoe job? Or if they sit in the chest at the top of the mines? Carry parsnips, spring onions, field snacks, salads or chubs if you want stacks of portable immediate food. But don't forget the huge benefit of energy sitting there easy to get.

                @grimjaw you can also sell sprinklers now so they are not totally lost.
                 
                • ThorfinnS

                  ThorfinnS Orbital Explorer

                  It becomes so when you need to stop mining in order to get food. As soon as you need to take a few hours off to catch some chubs, or worse, wait for some crops to mature, that time COULD have been spent mining, if only you hadn't eaten all the food, And, of course, were you not growing food, you could be growing cash crops. In a few weeks, who cares? But until then, cash is pretty scarce, in my experience.

                  9am Monday.

                  Yeah, that wasn't really addressed to you. Rather to @Grimgaw, who was saying the sprinklers would all be "thrown away" by summer. They are still useful until you are watering every other tile you plan to farm, presumably with iridium. Because the exact same case can be made against quality sprinklers, that they will be junk shortly anyway.

                  Didn't mean to. I know it makes little difference how small the stacks are while on your farm. And once you have the backpack, you can fill the blank spaces and leave them in the mining chest. (Though IME, that puppy fills up awfully fast as is.) It's more that I have the choice between growing food and growing a cash crop, and at that point in the game, I'd much rather the latter.
                   
                  • One More Day

                    One More Day Cosmic Narwhal

                    Firstly, it's only 200 extra ore, not 450. And only 175 ore if you were otherwise upgrading the can to copper.

                    Mining the ore for the basic Sprinkler isn't just about the ore. You're also putting XP in the bank, and that means you will already have Mining 5, for that extra piece of ore from every node, by the time you start farming gold ore. This will help speed up your gold gathering efforts later. You'll also be killing dust sprites while getting iron, which will boost your Combat, making survival against the tougher enemies on floor 81 much easier too, because you won't spend as much on food for HP. These incidental benefits are actually worth quite a bit.

                    And there's absolutely no point in throwing the basic Sprinklers away in mid summer. There's no reason at all why they can't stay until at least the end of Fall, and honestly they could stay there much longer. A single scarecrow will completely cover 40 of them, for 160 watered tiles, and that's actually not much worse than Quality Sprinklers. Given that it's rather unlikely you completely run out of space to plant, there's really no benefit to removing them. If someone is good enough to be able to plant the whole 3,000 plots in summer then fine, they're also going to be good enough to catch all the fish, and given that skipping fishing was the predominant rationale behind this whole thread, it didn't really apply to them.

                    *****************************

                    Assuming you find 5 coal, a copper pick upgrade on day 3 costs 5,375g (45 ore + Clint's fee), and even with iridium fish now a thing, you can't get that much money that without catching a few catfish at Fishing 3 and 4, by about 3pm on Wednesday, in time to run down to Willy and sell enough fish to then run back up to Clint before he closes at 4pm. Again, this strategy was not really aimed at expert fishermen.

                    ******************************

                    As I think was established in the tulip vs parsnips thread, tulips are a total dead end anyway, and particularly here. They suck for Farming XP, they suck for money, and if you prepare properly, you won't need them for food, even on a non-fishing farm. You can't get them before day 7, by which time you can be on floor 41 and farming the iron ore. Even with a basic pickaxe. Or, if you wait until day 6 and a scarecrow, you're not getting them until you're within touching distance of salmonberries, and all the cheap energy you will ever need.

                    ******************************

                    Catching fish requires a fair bit of skill, but mining is actually less about skill, more about making good choices and being very disciplined.

                    then this strategy wasn't aimed at you.

                    Literally the whole point of basic Sprinklers strategy is no can upgrades at all. Whether it's the basic Sprinkler or the Quality Sprinkler, once you have the recipe, you can just make more of them.
                     
                    • UnexpectedParole

                      UnexpectedParole Phantasmal Quasar

                      There is a difference between "was established" and "you asserted".

                      That whole argument also hinges on your definition of "prepare properly". -In which you disregarded several stated assumptions of the build that was being discussed. So we're not going to argue that over here.

                      On topic
                      But either way, call it 3 chubs instead of 2 tulips. My point still stands. 70 e is not a large amount of energy.
                      And that was saved over a whole day finding ore. Even if the energy was replaced via eating, you don't gain the time required to double your ore collection. So it doesn't translate directly.
                       
                      • KThomas14

                        KThomas14 Subatomic Cosmonaut

                        @UnexpectedParole, to me a comparison of energy is not directly applicable, unless they are astronomically different. Let's assume the energy spent watering crops or mining for the extra ore required for the basic sprinklers is the same. As @One More Day said, there are a lot of other good things happening while we spend that energy in the mines: we're leveling mining and combat, we're finding gems which we can sell, we're finding coal and many other things. And after we have basic sprinklers, we can get farming experience and revenue with no effort. If we spend the energy watering crops, all we get at harvest time is crops to sell/eat and farming experience.

                        I'm using basic sprinklers like this: I manually water enough plants to get me to farming 2 very early, then I do very little farming until I get strawberries. I will spend the bulk of the time in the mines to build up infrastructure or fishing if I need cash. I intend to buy around 200 strawberries if I can afford it, with the bulk being watered by basic sprinklers (I only want about 35-40 basic sprinklers though, I'll hand water the rest until I get quality sprinklers). I really dislike the massive amount of hand watering you have to do to hit farming 6 quickly if you skip basic sprinklers.
                         
                        • UnexpectedParole

                          UnexpectedParole Phantasmal Quasar

                          In that specific instance we were discussing the energy difference between spring 5 mining with a copper pick vs a regular pick. So I think in that case the comparision is directly valid. For me, I don't see enough gain in energy or ore collection in having the copper pick before the 3rd or 4th day spent mining. Or at least until level 30 or so. So the day 3 upgrade to the pick just doesn't seem worth it me . And that was a bit off topic since this is the sprinkler thread, but it was a reaction to a post earlier.

                          I agree If we are/were talking energy spent watering vs energy spent mining obviously we are comparing apples/parsnips to oranges/copper ore and other methods of comparison would be more appropriate.

                          RIght now I manually farm to get farming 3 on the 11th. Then strawberries. Lots of strawberries. Those get hand watered until i can afford quality sprinklers. My mining isn't fast enough to quality sprinkler the strawberries and it would just delay my quality sprinkers to try to get regular in. I get th math and see it's uses for many. But for me it doesn't pay yet.
                           
                          • Grimgaw

                            Grimgaw Space Spelunker

                            180 crops = 45 sprinklers = 45 iron bars + 45 copper bars = 90 bars = 90 * 5 ore = 450 ore.
                            You can do that regardless whether you choose to make sprinklers or not.
                             
                            • ThorfinnS

                              ThorfinnS Orbital Explorer

                              Depends on what you mean by "discipline". Even with the highlighting on all the time, I'm finding if I don't wait half a beat before clicking, the game thinks I'm on a different tile than the screen is showing. If discipline means "leading" the target, yeah, but isn't that a learned skill? Learning how much lag you need to account for?
                               

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