Tips you think might be useful--general or specific

I guess I better add these are my tips for maximizing farm value. I see there is a huge contingent of folks who build these gorgeous farms I enjoy looking at in these forums.

I'll start with a few I think were important for me:

1. When planting, harvesting, watering, or hoeing, try to minimize repositioning difficulty, particularly cases where you need to move in 2 axes, such as around a sprinkler (try to move straight in 1 of 4 directions for each movement).
2. The copper (and higher, I believe) watering can has an odd feature which allows it to water North or South along each of 3 tracks (straight ahead and 1 square to each side. This allows you to minimize repositioning as you water. Oddly, you can't do the same thing when watering East or West.
3. Fences make crop maintenance more difficult. They're good for keeping livestock from impeding farming, but I'm not aware of a reason other than decoration (maybe seeds from trees?) to put them around crops. If someone knows otherwise, please enlighten me.
4. Try to get in the habit of using the escape key and a numeric entry to change items. It saves quite a bit of game time in the typical day as opposed to searching for the icon with your mouse.
5. When in the mines, minimize decision-making time with the clock running. The escape key is useful as is the elevator.
6. Play with zoom minimized, so you can see the largest possible area for planning, whether farming or in the mines.
7. Go to sleep with the scythe in hand. When you wake and run out to farm, you won't use energy or destroy a plant accidentally. This is especially important in the first month, when energy is the critical resource.
8. Before you start each day, make an ordered to do list. Even more important, make a list items you need for those errands.

 

If you have the recipe and resources, Lightning Rods make for good non-degrading fence substitutes.

 

Here's another one for mining:

Right-size your bombs, which almost always means using the cherry bomb instead of larger varieties. In order to get the best coverage, place the bomb 3 X 1 (I think of it as an "elongated knight's move") away from the furthest node or rock you want to include and in the direction of the bulk of rocks/nodes. Cherry bombs are generally best because they:

• Are cost effective
• Allow you to plant multiple bombs sequentially and clean up the previous area as each detonates
• Have a small blast radius which alows you to get out easily, yet stay close for cleanup
• Do much less harm if you are caught in the blast radius for some reason

When using mid sized bombs, they will reach a distance 5 X 2 away at twice the cost. They are quicker to place and good for large, dense packs of rocks, but I find the dimensions more difficult to manage on the fly.

 

Well, personally, I prefer the mid-sized bombs. For me at least I didn't use bombs until the Skull Cavern and by that time resources weren't a huge issue. It just seemed quicker to place bomb and then eat a small snack to keep my health up and keep those invincibility frames while you eat. I guess that can be my tip. Don't bother running away just eat

 

It's best to repair the beach bridge early on since it gives you extra cash most days.

 

I haven't got any tips yet as I've only just started playing this game today. Really enjoying it, but my fishing in this game is terrible and I would like to improve it. If anyone has got any tips to help me catch the fish I'll be very grateful. I'm playing the Xbox One version, in case the controls are different.

 

I found that tapping the button is more helpful than just keeping it pressed once you have the fish. Doing it gently can 'land' the bobber without it bouncing too much.

 

It's worth noting, as a tip, that if you search using "tips" as only topics in this forum, you'll find quite a few threads with a large amounts of useful information. "Hints" works, as well. Which isn't an argument against posting tips here, but only a means to supplement them.

 

I believe if you don't fence your crops, they're susceptible to destruction by encroaching weeds - you'll wake up one morning to the "spreading weeds have caused damage to your farm" message, and debris will appear, potentially over the top of some crops.

 

- Because it's not made clear in-game, and I went years before stumbling upon it, nearly wearing my poor finger to the bone clicking hundreds of times buying seeds and lumber one at a time: You can buy multiple items at once on console, simply move the cursor over what you want to buy and press and hold the square button on PS4, X button on the Xbox.

- Fishing is very much a case of 'practice makes perfect', you want to carefully press and hold the square/X button just enough to keep the bar centered over the fish, letting go before it goes too high and tapping slightly to get it to stay there. Also the bar is apparently made of rubber, as if it drops straight down it will bounce like mad once it hits the bottom, but you can lessen this by tapping once or twice before it hits bottom.

- If you plan on running a winery(easily the most profitable method of money currently) you're going to need a lot of kegs, which require a lot of oak resin, something which can be difficult to gather in large quantities(wood, copper and iron can all be bought or gathered yourself). As such as soon as you unlock the tapper consider putting your tool upgrades to the side for a bit and making five tappers, which will take you 10 copper bars and 200 wood, and going down to the lower right area of Cindersap Forest, where you'll five five oak trees you can place the tappers on. Once a week make a run down to collect the resin and by the time you've got the copper and iron to spare for kegs you should have enough resin to match.

- Another thing I learned far too late involving Cindersap Forest is that the trees will regrow after you cut them down, with no need to plant seeds. A run through the forest cutting down every tree that doesn't have a tapper on it can net you several hundred wood, very helpful for building if you don't want to buy from Robin, and making it so you don't need to waste a bunch of space on your farm planting trees to cut down.

- You likely won't need many Pine Tar and Maple Syrup, but you will need some, and easy spots to place the tappers for those are at the bus stop for Maple Syrup and the path north of the farm that leads to the mountain for Pine Tar.

- This next one is a tip to deal with a glitch, but given how aggravating it has been to people I figure the more places the solution is mentioned the better. If you ever end up with a box of fertilizer stuck in the ground while laying it down, you can destroy the box and free up the eyesore/dirt by using explosives. One cherry bomb and the fertilizer box will be destroyed.

 

I learned this one fairly early. On PC it's shift and when it comes to chests it'll take out half of the stack.

 

Really good point on location of oaks in SE Cindersap. There are also 2 at the bus stop you can tap each playthrough.

I also like a grid of 20-30 oaks on the farm, all separated by stone paving of some sort to prevent blockage growth. Make sure to put it on the most difficult to use land and trees can be grown on some grass squares which can't be tilled.

To underscore what ChaosB notes, you may want 5-8 sheds filled with kegs (66 or 67 each) to keep all of your fruit processed and artisan profit maximized. A useful technique I found was to fill a shed with wine brewing (and a chest), place it directly against a wall with move buildings, and bring it out to be emptied/refilled every 7 days. It takes a little more time, but you can have a rotation of sheds and it saves farming space.

I guess folks have other methods, but I like to have a chest in each shed (reducing keg capacity to 66, which allows you to keep units of 66 fruit in each for processing. A central source also works, but I find it helps me plan a little better if I pre-apportion.

To set an expectation for keg/shed need, if you plant all ancient fruit in your greenhouse (other options with a combination of pomegranate and ancient are often noted as better), you'll produce 116 plants every 7 days. You'll then need 116/66 =1.75 sheds permanently assigned to ancient wine production to optimize production.

 

Don't clear-cut your grass if you plan to raise animals your first year. Also, build at least one silo as early as possible in your first year, so any grass you do have to cut has a chance of turning into hay for your animals.

On that note, if you go the dairy route, place at least one cheese press in your cow barn. (This might work for coops and mayo machines, too, but I haven't tried that placement yet.)

 

Also, you only really need one silo. When it gets full, just pull hay from inside a coop or barn and put it in a chest.

 

Anyone have good methods to maximize animals quickly? They seem like a complete pain to me.

 

Nothing beyond just feeding and petting them everyday, and letting them out to eat grass when the weather isnt terrible. If they dont really appeal to you, its fine to just skip them entirely.

 

Petting animals seems a lot like watering to me, a manual activity forced upon me.

I need them to complete the animal bundle and one of the bulletin board bundles. As soon as I am done with those, I sell all the animals, destroy the buildings, and convert the space to farming crops or sheds.

 

The problem with skipping them entirely is getting all the animal-related products for the bundles. It's going to be tough waiting for all that stuff to appear on the cart.
I just do the bare minimum -couple of cows and pigs, 1 goat, couple hens & rabbits (instead of sheep because rabbit foot), 1 duck. It's not too much hassle.

 

If you're a completionist, look at the ingredients in each recipe before you buy seeds at the beginning of the season. That way, if you need a special crop for a dish, you won't have to wait another year or rely on the travelling merchant.

 

My best tips are usually things folks prolly already know but I found them handy when I found them. So I post them just in case someone else doesn't know!

-In winter, I find it advantageous to start filling your crop spots with winter seeds. Especially if you got sprinklers. Just make sure to keep making more winter seeds so that you have a ready supply. Incuding some you save for next winter. In later years I prefer sending a batch of the winter seeds to their doom by planting them so that when spring kicks over they will turn to just easily-scythable husks. But because they were a crop the night before it means the ground underneath is already tilled and watered so you can just slam down your spring crops right away without having to worry about tilling/watering large spans of land.
-When harvesting crops that aren't going to just keep producing all season (so for example parsnips), I have active in my hands the seeds I'm going to plant next and I like to hold down the right click as I harvest because I find that doing so will basically plant the seed immediately after I pull up the crop. So it cuts down on a lot of time spent harvesting crops then having to run through planting the seeds seperately.
-Seriously though holding the right click(just make sure you dont have a food item or your sword active cause it slows you down. I tend to default to the bucket) when harvesting is also nice cause I find I can just make move my mouse in the squares adjecant to my farmer as they are doing the harvest animation and usually can grab like 4-5 things in a single animation. It makes mowing through my greenhouse a lot easier versus picking them individually.