Why are tulips better than parsnips?

In my opinion, the watering can upgrade is a trap. With how rapidly one can get sprinklers up and running, it's entirely unnecessary. Save your copper and your 2k gold for something more worthwhile like an Axe or Pick upgrade.

 

I can't catch enough catfish <any> to buy enough potatoes and kale on day 6 and strawberries on day 13 to match your Farming Xp gain AND still mine for your levels of gold to get sprinklers without the help watering. Period.

Maybe your new guide will help me with that. I'm looking forward to that. But until then I have to compensate somehow.
The copper watering can is what it is.

That aside. I could do the axe on day 6 instead. But what are you doing with the parsnips that my tulips aren't?

 

How rapidly are you talking about?

In my current playthrough, I tried going with the can upgrade first. I used fishing money to buy 100 potatoes on day 8. Those potatoes can be watered in two hours, which is fairly reasonoble for such a high quantity of potatoes. On day 14, all 100 tiles were replaced by strawberries. Thanks to a convenient rainy day, my watering can is currently at Clint for the steel upgrade. This means that I can expand with even more crops without having to spend more time watering. In short, I really like the early watering can upgrade so far.

The second upgrade might be excessive, but that first upgrade is important. I would have never planted over a 100 seeds if I had to water everything one tile at a time. I know that the usefulness of the can upgrade will wear off when I get my sprinklers installed, but being able to expand your crops early on is also valuable. Probably enough to offset the 2000 cost of the upgrade.

 

I only plant 40 potatoes instead of 100, so I need far less endurance to keep them watered. Also they get planted on day 6, instead of day 8. By day 14, I have 40 Strawberries, 20 of them on Speed-Gro, and 40 more Potatoes, but I also generally have gotten down to at least 60's if not all the way to 80's in the mine.

Day 13? Uhh... hang on, let's get the timeline down straight here...

Day 1: Plant 13 parsnips (sell the two other seeds), 1 cauli, 1 bean sprout.
Day 5 collect parsnips. Save one for bundle. Eat rest
Day 6: Plant 40x Potatoes.
Day 12: Sell 39x potatoes. Take parsnip, potato, cauli, and bean to unlock Spring Crops bundle, obtain 20 Speed-Gro. Buy 40x Potatoes.
Day 13: Buy 40x Strawberries. Plant 20x on speed-gro, other 20x on fertilizer.

 

There's so much to address here. Who would have thought tulips would be such a hot topic of conversation!

I'll go with what I see as the crucial stuff. Sorry in advance for the tl;dr post that's coming up

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Honestly, thinking about it a bit more, I think the poor "stackability" of tulips is a minor inconvenience that could be lived with if they were more competitive in other areas, rather than being the actual deal breaker. But it's not the big weakness

Before we even get to tulips vs other crops, let's look at your "concrete goals", and think about the reasoning behind them, because the only one that really makes sense to me is the goal of having Farming 6 before the end of spring, and that's for quality sprinklers for summer. The rest seem to me to lack a good enough purpose to justify their specificity

Why? If you are only aiming for Farming 6 by end of spring, a basic can will do the job just fine. The time and energy savings from a copper can will be absolutely minimal, and is unlikely to justify the expense when it will never be used again, except for the pet bowl.

Let's say you have a maximum of 80 crops at any one time, which is more than enough to get to Farming 6 if you choose wisely. You can perform a single basic watering operation much faster than a single copper operation; not three times as fast, I'll grant you, but the time saving won't be much. As for energy, if you want to water 80 crops for the day, at Farming 1 you need just over 150E for the basic can or just under 100E for the copper can. Because of the energy calculation rules, the higher your Farming skill, the closer that energy gap becomes, and in fact, if you were to go all the way to Fishing 10, then there is no energy difference at all between the basic can and the copper can. Anyway, on average through the levels, the extra energy is for the first few skill levels is going to be approximately the energy from eating a gold chub a day, which is worth 93g with the Fisher profession. It's 20 watering days from day 8 to day 27, the last watering day, so with the basic can you'd consume an exrta amount of energy costing no more than 1,860g, which is already less than the cost of the copper can. Furthermore, that 2,000g in one chunk on day 6 is worth an enormous amount more than the same amount spread in small chunks throughout a season; the lost opportunity cost is huge.

This just seems unnecessary too, especially as you are adding a pointless delay of 2 days by planting tulips instead of parsnips. Suddenly you have to condense the rest of Farming 6 into 20 growing days, instead of using the whole season. The risk of crows even appearing isn't that high, and the actual loss if they do is not large.

These last two both seem less concrete, and pointless to boot. What's so special about Spring 12 and Summer 10?
Farming 8 offers Kegs and Deluxe Speed Gro, both of which need Oak Resin, which you won't have in any meaningful volume yet.
Meanwhile, Farming 4 has Preserves Jars, which you can't make in any meaningful quantity because they cost a fortune in resources, Retaining Soil, which can't be combined with either Speed Gro or Basic Fertilizer, both of which are far superior, and Iron Fence, when you have nothing to fence in.

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That adds up to 111 crops, which seems an unnecessarily large number of crops at this stage. This daily drain on energy is bigger than it needs to be, certainly nobody needs to plant 70 parsnips. The goal for is getting XP for sprinklers, and the most efficient way is either kale or strawberries, so we shouldn't be planting much of the other crops. And if you weren't planting the free parsnips on day 1, you should have just sold them for an easy 150g

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This whole argument is fundamentally flawed because it falsely assumes that you'd be in an otherwise identical position, regardless of whether or not you grew tulips. In actual fact, if you don't waste 300g on tulips on day 1, and if you do all the other things associated with getting cash rolling in quickly from fishing, then by the time you get to the hypothetical day 8 situation you posited, the non-tulip farm will be a long way ahead of the tulip farm, because you will get the fiberglass rod and bait much faster, and then you will get more fish biting on days 2 and 3, meaning you will level up Fishing faster, you will get more fish and better quality fish, which will earn much more money, or make available much more food for energy for mining. With 1.4 offering iridium fish, an iridium chub (or smallmouth) offers 65E and 29HP, and you can easily have 40 or 50 of them by day 8. Not only can you go much harder in the mines with 2,500E or more in the bank, you can also afford to tank many more hits from monsters, or your own explosives, as you look for ladders in the race to get down the mines. By comparison, your 15 regular tulips only offer a measly 675E, snd you can burn through that in a single day in the mines.

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1395g by day 9 is pocket change. But spending 300g on tulips you don't need, and then failing to sell the free parsnip seeds for another 150g, leaves you 450g short of where you could have been going into day 2, and in real terms it's worth a lot more. It's 90 bait, more than a whole day's fishing. It's nearly two Trout Soup for the evening on day 2. It might even be the difference between whether or not you're even able to afford the Fiberglass Rod early enough on day 2.

The earnings gap between the Bamboo Pole and the Fiberglass Rod is huge, and by failing to get access to iridium fish by early evening on day 2, I'd conservatively estimate that you'll be well over 2,000g worth of fish behind by the end of day 3. That would have comfortably enabled you to get the backpack on day 4 instead of day 5. And that would have enabled you to go straight to the mines on day 5, instead of waiting for Pierre to open at 9am to buy the backpack, and losing three hours of rock breaking time for no good reason. Depending on the daily luck, that's five or ten floors you missed out on, and the deeper you get in the mines, the more valuable the goodies you pick up. That time might also be the difference between whether or not you reaching Mining 2 for staircases on your first day in the mines.

In the early game (ie the first few days before the mines unlock) fishing is light years ahead of everything else for making money, literally nothing comes close. Not only is there the obvious value of the fish caught, but also the potential for getting gems and other useful or valuable items from chests. So literally all of our available day 1 resources should be aimed at optimising our fishing. Planting tulips, or parsnips for that matter, degrades our fishing rather than enhancing it. Spending time, effort and money on getting a scarecrow does nothing for our fishing, so is counterproductive.

I hope this explains where it "sets you back".

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Going to put out a potentially controversial view here; if you're aiming for lots of money then getting the 20 free speed gro is another trap, much like the copper can.

It ties you to all the inconvenience of a day 1 bean and cauli, and a completely inflexible 27 day watering schedule, all for the sake of just 20 extra strawberries. Assuming that you reach Farming 6 before harvesting the extra strawberries, you'll get an expected quality multiplier of 1.1225, so those strawberries will be worth, on average, [qty] ×[price]× [tiller bonus]×[quality], which is 20×120×1.1x1.1225, or 2,963g. You might get a bit more, you might get a bit less, but whatever, it's not actually that much at the back end of the month, once you consider the rigidity it builds in to the schedule, and if you ask me, it's not worth the effort.

 

That math gets me no-where near farming level 8? It's not even level 6?
2541xp is what I got from that. what else do you have planned to reach the goal (what-ever it is)

Thanks for the reply.

I did more intend this to be much more about why tulips are not as good as parsnips. But apparently everyone <not just you> thinks my fishing and chopping and mining and everything else is all wrong. And I'm behind the game. So I guess we'll get into that more.

For example, since I'm meeting Lewis by the CC on Spring 5 at 8 am. The 9 am buying the backpack at Pierre's is not an issue. (That I have encountered.) And I have had zero issue with getting the fiberglass rod first thing on day 3. I am certainly not 2000g short of fish at the end of day 3 unless you are counting catfish which are NOT related to tulips at all.

But, Instead of nitpicking and trying to embed quotes and sound confrontational, which I'm not. What I'll do is just post later a more cleaned up version of the plan with deadlines / goals/ supporting thoughts and what -not. So we can all get more on the same page as to what the reasons and alternatives are. <even though I thought I had laid out my 'alternatives' pretty well in the first post>. -whatever.

I'll also agree the cauli and bean for 20 speed gro is probably a trap. It's why I left it out of this plan. Though I thought I might try to work in home grown speed gro to see if I could get farming 8 <kegs> before hops come in, and farming 10 <artisan> for sure as soon as reasonable.

cheers

 

That's because we're only half way through the season.

Also, by the time the 13th rolls around, you should have plenty of cash from your mining expeditions in the second week. And once you're done with your mining, not only will you have plenty of cash for seeds, but plenty of endurance left over for power farming. And once you hit Farming 6, you can start placing Quality Sprinklers, and really ramp up your farming. Your final planting of potatoes which is picked up before the end of the season can be up to 120.

 

You've made assumptions about my mining habits that have not been discussed. I fear they are incorrect. Some of that is on me since I thought we would be talking more about tulips and parsnips not mining and fishing. But, hey, we are where we are.

What else do you have planned to plant reach the farming level goal you have set (what-ever it is).

I think I have enough crops set up to get me to level 8 now (since I found an error in my watering can math) But we'll see.

 

That's because we're only half way through the season.

Also, by the time the 13th rolls around, you should have plenty of cash from your mining expeditions in the second week. And once you're done with your mining, not only will you have plenty of cash for seeds, but plenty of endurance left over for power farming. And once you hit Farming 6, you can start placing Quality Sprinklers, and really ramp up your farming. Your final planting of potatoes which is picked up before the end of the season can be up to 120.

Money's not the primary issue here, at least not for me. Money will come in later, Spring is the time for preparation and infrastructure and growing your character's skills. As long as you have *enough* money for your purchases, that will suffice unto the day. Everything just gets plowed back into infrastructure at this point anyway.

My overall strategy isn't a get rich quick scheme, it's a get rich *big* scheme. Which is why the oak tree stand down by the end of the second week at the latest and end of the first week by preference is so crucial. It's why I was trying to see if Foraging 7 was going to be viable in the first spring for Tree Fertilizer to ensure that you could be farming Oak Resin by the batch of 30 by the time Summer starts. Because once you hit Farming 8? You're going to want, minimum, 120 Kegs and 90 preserves jars by the time Winter sets in. And those numbers are only going to grow from there.

The mining is a key change in strategy from the previous guide, and a key point in the success to the strategy. You should be hitting at least 10-15 levels easy per day of mining, hitting them up daily in your second week while you only have 40 potatoes, 1 cauliflower, and 1 green bean to water.

Farming goal for Spring is a minimum of Farming 6, but the higher the better. You're going to hit Farming 8 with your first Melon harvest any way you look at it and can start producing kegs with your backstock of oak resin and (hopefully) copper and iron bars.

 

I'm going to come back to tulips in a moment, because I think they are an interesting suggestion. But first:

I don't think catfish are at all necessary for a strategy that gets good farming xp and also gets sprinklers by the end of spring.

Until very recently I never tried for catfish on Day 3. I fished in the mountain lake on days 2-4, selling the fish once I reached fishing level 5. This funded potatoes day 6, which funded strawberries day 13, 20 (or more if I was organised) on speed-gro. I typically reached farming 8, 9 or 10 by the end of spring, with 10-20 sprinklers already up and running and many more ready in the next few days so I had a large sprinkler-watered summer crop.

However, I still skipped the copper watering can. My strategy was 'as many strawberries as possible', so normally my only tool upgrade before 13th was the fibreglass rod. I spent my early copper on tappers. By the time the next rainy day rolled round, my farming level was high enough to make me doubt the worth of the copper watering can, especially given I find it slow and awkward to use, and I had already laid my crops out in the shape of sprinklers ready for adding those in over the course of spring.

I admit this was a gut feeling based on experience of trying both, rather than a calculated choice. However, looking at the numbers (and assuming I've interpreted the wiki description correctly):

At farming level 5, watering a block of 8 crops uses 12 energy and 8 water with the normal can, or it uses 9 energy and 6 water with the copper can. They take me about the same amount of time to do. 200 crops (which was fairly typical for me at the time) is 25 blocks, so I would save 75 energy a day if I upgraded the watering can. This isn't nothing, but then again it's only 3 salmonberries eaten each day out of my ginormous stack. The advantage of the copper can then reduces with farming level.

I got some pretty strong successes without either catfish day 3 or a copper can, including farming level 10 on day 21 of spring. (See the thread 'min-max challenges'.) So this really isn't an either/or.

Thank you for suggesting a different way of looking at the utility of tulips. It has given me an extra tool to try out, which I think might help with my energy needs in early spring (particularly on day 6).

Discussions about different crops always seem to end up with people quoting different numbers at each other and not agreeing. I think that's because different crops come out looking best depending on what you are prioritising: energy to water, profit, cost of seeds, space, time to grow, or (as you suggest for tulips) energy gained from eating them. In reality, a successful strategy has to take account of more than one of these factors, and most of the numbers given in these discussions take account of only one or two.

For example, some people swear by kale because of its high farming XP per energy cost (17xp for 6 days of watering). However, its relatively high cost to buy means that it only really works well in higher-money situations, for example if you're making lots of money from fishing or if it's nearer the end of spring. Kale and strawberries can both prove to be a trap for a farmer with lower amounts of money.

For most farmers in spring 1, money is tight, so they need to take this into account. Each 1000 gold spent on kale will only gain the farmer 238XP, at a rate of 40XP per day. By contrast, each 1000 gold spent on parsnips will gain 400XP, at a rate of 100XP per day. For tulips the figures are 350XP total at 58XP each day. For spring year 1, parsnips rank 1st on this measure, tulips rank 2nd, blue jazz is 3rd, potatoes 4th and kale 5th. Strawberries planted at the egg festival are lowest on this measure (apart from coffee beans if you bought them at the travelling cart...)

So then the farmer needs to think about watering the crops: 50 parsnips, 50 tulips, 20 potatoes, 14 kale or 10 strawberries? Is the cost and time of the extra crops worth it to speed up the XP gain? It would be possible to calculate total energy to plant and water each crop you're considering. Or, as a rule of thumb for spring, your 270 base energy per day will water 135 crops. If you want energy for other activities, a field of 80 crops is still very manageable. If you're happy to eat food (chub / spring onions / salmonberries), 150-200 crops is manageable in early spring (e.g. day 6) and this increases rapidly as your farming level brings down the energy cost of watering. This has to be considered together with your overall aims and strategy, since it leaves less time for mining, fishing or foraging - choice on this is probably down to personal preferences and aims.

Next we can think about profit. Each 1000 gold investment will generate a profit of 587 gold (at level 0) if we spend it on kale, but we'll get 767 gold in profit if we invest in parsnips. Profit per day for the entire crop is 98 gold for kale or 192 gold for parsnips. For tulips it would be 86, but of course if we're eating them then it's 0. We're probably not making most of our money from farming at this point, so the differences in profit probably don't justify spending the extra time and energy on watering. But it's still interesting to see the rankings: Parsnip is no. 1, potato 2nd, green beans 3rd, egg festival strawberries 4th, cauliflower 5th, kale 6th, blue jazz 7th, and tulip last (apart from those coffee beans...)

Most spring guides go for a sequence of crops over the season that reflects the changing priorities of the farmer. Plant parsnips early for fast farming xp with limited money. Plant potatoes next for decent profit and xp at a relatively low cost. Then move to either a higher-XP crop (kale) or a higher profit crop (strawberries) when you have enough money to plant what you need in order to reach your XP goal for spring. Of course it all gets complicated by issues of timing. I don't think there is one 'best' answer - every farmer will have slightly different priorities and will hit milestones at different points. I also quite strongly believe you can't tell how something will work out just by looking at the numbers - mostly because, in a complex situation, you might not be looking at all the relevant numbers. I'm always excited to read other suggestions or ways of looking at things, so the idea of planting tulips to eat is intriguing. I'm going to see how it works!

 

Squiggly, good points the lot. I'll address the rest after a bit too. But for this bit.
I'm drafitng this 'guide' for myself. I never intended to tout it as 'the way to go' for anyone but myself. But given my playing abilities / limitations/ desires I am looking at ways to get the 'most efficient' spring <that I can> out of it that is still enjoyable.

So, when I tell you, that I have not been able to follow any of the guides out there and get farming 8 and get mining enough for 20 sprinklers without the watering can help. I'm not just talking silly. I have thousands of hours in this game. The vast majority of them in Spring 1. But I'm, always willing to discuss strategies and read new ones.

Sadly, some of them just won't work <for me> like Schneeky's new one coming up. And maybe I'm still missing something, but no-one's brought it up yet.

How many nights do you sleep by the lake or in the mines to get 20 sprinklers? What do you do with your first 15 parsnips?

 

I also want to just state for the record that there are no bad experiments conducted with the intent of furthering knowledge. Even though I don't really feel that tulips are going to pan out, I absolutely applaud the attempt at thinking 'outside the box' to be able to come up with something like this. We're all working in this together.

I think that before I can release my farmer's guide, I'll need to create a separate mining guide to rest upon, because it's become pretty clear that the tactics and strategies in the mine are key and central to the overall success I'm looking for in this guide I'm working on. It will depend upon some rather unorthodox strategies, such as deliberately 'tapping out' by emptying your endurance bar and taking the financial hit from that in exchange for being able to dive even deeper and more greedily than before.

 

I don't normally sleep by the lake, though I have done so on occasion. Leaving at 1 to run home isn't a big difference in catches. I don't think I've ever slept in the mines.
I always used to sell my first 15 parsnips (unless any were gold). Nowadays I normally keep them to eat instead, which is why the tulip idea is tempting.

It's interesting to try to work out why I was able to do this when you can't. I don't think I used to be particularly good at mining or fishing when I first used this strategy.

I used to fish at the bottom right of the mountain lake on days 2-4, with a chest there. I bought the fibreglass rod at the start of day 3, and used to get to fishing 5 somewhere within day 4. After buying the fibreglass rod, I kept the rest of my fish to sell once I had the level 5 perk for extra money. I also sold any gemstones I fished up. That used to get me enough money to plant maybe 140 potatoes on day 6.

Mining was day 5 (hopefully 15 levels), then other days after watering (5-10 levels). I normally used to upgrade my pickaxe during salmonberry season. The main limit on progress to level 80 was if I didn't get a better weapon than the steel sword, since ghosts are a real pain from level 50 upwards.

I probably did used to try for catfish if it rained once I was level 5 fishing. But I wasn't very good at them, so I doubt it made more money than mining that day would have done.

With the mines, I used to come out and fish if I thought I wouldn't make another 5 levels before heading home. Maybe that extra fishing money made a difference to the number of strawberries I could buy? I also rarely upgraded anything (including backpack) before buying strawberries.

Most of my sprinklers used to happen right at the end of spring, when the strawberries were done and I could focus on mining. Sometimes I didn't have 20 ready for summer 1, but I always had them rapidly after that - maybe that different priority is what made the difference?

EDIT: On reflection, I wonder if the difference is just my sheer bloody-mindedness in watering lots of crops with the basic can and throwing away cheap stuff in the mines to avoid the backpack upgrade. 4000 GP is 40 extra strawberry plants, which is 1440 extra XP - most of the difference between level 7 and 8 in farming.

 

And that is why the past half dozen of files have been "tester" farmer.

Once you've metephorically bitten the bullet and realized the parsnips are food it seems to me the next logical step is to consider the tulips.
In my experiences, (3 starts so far) The tulips are easily eaten at the farm to fuel chopping/watering/hoeing fests, especially if one wants foraging leveled up quickly. They also are easily stored and eaten in the fishing chest which nets more energy and money than selling the cubs instead. Day 5 mining is a little tighter without lots of parsnips if the spring onions are light unless you have salad or saved those early chubs. But it wasn't long ago mining day 5 was easy without eating parsnisp. So I'm not that worried about it.

And yes, it crams more farming xp into fewer days, but I'm looking at over 100 strawberries which are the best in xp per day, gold per day, and even xp+gold/ gold spent. Plus I'm not hoeing ground after day 8 or so when the cookie is there. The ground is almost filled with crops that either hang around after harvesting or are harvested on the last day. My late spring day watering is nearly nothing. So who wouldn't want to do more farming on farming days, more fishing on fishing days more foraging and chopping on foraging days and more mining on mining days?

I've got the watering can upgrade the 6th. The pick copper on the 15th, the pick steel the 18th. and the copper/steel axes depend on how many tappers I built and how much ore I generate while diving for the gold.

 

Energy and time benefits. Ever since kale actually started giving xp (and tons of it), it's been a major part of any of my strategies. It's better than potatoes in basically every way now, which is what I had already migrated to for the most part. If you're truly rushing sprinklers, you can manage it with ~96 kale in sets. Yes, getting the money is tricky for that, but possible. Even with a little more relaxed strategy, it's still vastly more xp , which in my opinion is the only use for farming in the spring other than gifts. If you want money, there's far better options. Advancement of just about everything else is done different ways, as well. It's mostly just about hitting farming 6, and potentially 8 by the end of the month. At least, that's if we're talking about maximizing mathematical calculations. But brute force rushing sprinklers (which saves an extreme amount of both time and energy), or pacing it a little more both benefit from the extra hour or two and energy remaining after planting kale rather than anything other than strawberries. And even speed-gro strawberries are too slow for me in the first spring, which is why I prefer kale.

I still like the original consideration that tulips may be better than parsnip. But when it comes down to it, even though I've tried many strategies in the game, it's just very rare to run into energy problems unless you're doing specific things. There's the massive planting before sprinklers, cave diving, fishing, and mass deforestation. Each of them have specific ways to gain back energy that are more efficient for time, which is usually more important than money (because you can make money in the most efficient ways with that extra time).

Cave diving benefits from a great fishing spot right there that can regain energy very quickly, while also gaining important fishing xp for getting Legend for your first spring. The times where you're doing enough fishing to run out of energy are usually going to be on rainy days in town. So there you've got easy access to algae, trout soup while you're leveling, and smallmouths in the 'worst' case scenario, which are extremely efficient for energy and not worth a ton. For mass deforestation, you should be at least partially relying on field snacks (there's almost always enough seeds left over for massive tree farms as well).

That leaves massive early farming. I've done that before, with fields up to around 200 plants, and I used to use parsnips if I didn't get enough other random energy sources. Would tulips be better in that case? Possibly... if they gave equivalent farming xp per day (2/day), they would almost assuredly be better than parsnips in almost every way (though getting your very first crop 2 days earlier is kind of significant). But that massive xp drop still makes it a hard sell for me, especially since as I pointed out, energy problems can usually be solved in less time with other strategies other than mass farming.

 

I wouldn't say that - potatoes are still better money-wise, at least at early farming levels, since the seeds are cheaper and you basically average 1.25 potatoes per seed planted. I'm not sure about later farming levels, the fact that the extra 0.25 potato is guaranteed to be normal quality makes the calculation tricky, but at lower levels you can basically assume everything will be normal quality anyways.
It's definitely likely that the xp benefit from kale is worth the drop in gold/day, but they certainly aren't better in "basically every way". (Also, the higher initial seed price of kale means that you may have to delay spending money on other things while waiting for the kale to grow, but that depends on your exact plans.)

 

Whether or not you consider the xp drop to be massive depends on how you measure it. Total XP from the investment of money isn't significantly lower with tulips than parsnips. 200 tulips will get you 1400xp, and 200 parsnips cost the same and will get you 1600xp. The main advantage of parsnips is they get there two days quicker, which is why the xp/day is much higher. Parsnips are the best crop for making fast xp from limited money, assuming you have the time and energy to water what you plant.

The interesting thing is that tulips are still the second best crop by this measure. For the same money that buys the 200 tulips (4000gp), you can only afford to buy 57 kale, which only brings in 969xp total. Or 80 potatoes, which gets you 1180xp.

However, I wouldn't advocate planting a big field of tulips early on. You're never going to need 200 tulips to eat, and you'd get better profit and xp from parsnips. I have tried strategies which involve getting a large crop of parsnips planted in the first few days - most notably when I was aiming for farming 10 as early as possible. Normally, though, the point when I plant a bigger field is day 6, at which point I have enough money to invest in a more expensive and energy-efficient crop.

Thinking about planting a large crop on day 6 in a strawberry-based strategy, I think potatoes win out over kale. Fishing days 2-4 and selling most of the fish at fishing level 5 brings in about 10000-12000gp. (I'm assuming day 5 is used for mining). 12000gp can buy 240 potatoes or 171 kale. The 240 potatoes would get you 3360xp and level 6 farming, and the sale price of the crop would buy you 240 strawberry seeds. The 171 kale would get you only 2914xp, farming level 5, and the sale price of the crop would buy only 190 strawberries.

In practice, it's a push to get 240 potato seeds hoed, planted and watered on day 6. But it's nice if you can pull it off (a rainy day 5 or 6 helps a lot). Farming 6 by the time you plant your strawberries means you can start getting quality sprinklers in with them as soon as you have the necessary ore. This strategy also gives enough money to plant 300 or more strawberries and hit farming 10 by the end of spring.

Of course, that's just one way of doing things. I'm sure other people have excellent strategies that do use kale - I'd be interested to read them. But I do strongly believe that which crop is best to plant depends on day, money, circumstances and aims, rather than any one crop being better in all situations.

 

Kale has completely replaced potatoes for me too. I don't need the money from it right away so usually chuck the majority of the regular quality kale in preserve jars which sells for a not-too-shabby 270g without perks. I don't have extreme min/max goals for myself though--a horse, some tool upgrades, 10-20 preserve jars, a handful of tappers, sprinklers and about 25-30k to start Summer with is a good Year 1 Spring for me.

 

Let's start with your final statement. I fully agree that the "best crop" is totally situational.
The headline was intended to be cheeky, and in my first post I thought I laid out that the situation I wanted to discuss was starting with the first day of planting 15 tulips instead of parsnips. Clearly I failed in that. such is life.
The goal of the tulip start would push back the second planting from the 6th to the 8th and grant a ton of extra energy for a very tiny xp loss but still maintaining the level 1 farming gain from the first harvest. Getting the copper watering can would alleviate the extra watering burden of the bigger field sizes.

The goal would be to plant lots and lots of strawberries because they make a lot of gold per day and a lot of xp per day. Better than kale or potatoes.

The good news is, that the broader discussion has given rise to some interesting things to maybe incorporate into my strat. For example, to maximize the efficiency of the copper watering can all the strawberries got planted in a mass block, no room for sprinklers without losing strawberries, which probably would not happen. In that plan, the sprinklers are just installed day 1 of summer, or after the strawberries are done producing. I should now look into ways of planting the cauliflower and other non strawberry seeds so that they take up the sprinkler spots and leave the strawberries out of the way. I don't need farming 10 or farming 8 by the end of spring since I never have the materials for kegs by then anyway.

A "good" strawberry planting for me has been 100 to 120 strawberries. Not 240. And an ideal day 6 (or day 8) planting has never been that high a number of fields.
My day 2-4 fishing totals are much closer to 5500g than 12000g.
Selling all fish on the night of the 4th at fishing level 5 with bonus I don't think I have ever made more than 7000g. Let alone 8000g. Certainly not 10 or 12k. Obviously tulips and parsnips are not my problem here.
12,000g in 3 days of fishing ? Let me see if that is even possible for me. If I caught nothing but iridium quality fish the mountain lake averages 150 per fish. That is 80 fish. 80 fish in 3 days is 26.67 fish per day caught and sold. Not eaten. For every 3rd fish caught gold instead of iridium, I would need a 4th. This seems very hard for me to reach ,without totally devoting my days 2 to day 4 to fishing and catching serious bubble luck. Not to mention max cast and perfect catch luck and time off to go buy the fiberglass rod and bait. I'll have to do some more math on this.

 

I think the main draw-back from my point of view is the two extra days on the schedule. I would need to then plant parsnips as my second crop, so that they harvest in time to re-invest in strawberries.

The 240 is definitely a high end. I moved towards it because I realised I was hitting farming level 5 with that crop anyway, and only needed a few more potatoes to get farming level 6. In practice, a few less than 240 are needed to reach farming level 6, especially if any rice seeds have been fished up. Last game I planted 220 (actually on day 5 because it was rainy).

Before the update, fishing the mountain lake, I normally found I had somewhat over 10000 gold on the 6th. Most of that (probably 7000-8000) came from selling fish from days 2-4. Some came from gemstones from day 5 mining or from treasure chests. Some came from selling spring seeds, including 1050 from the reward from the community centre bundle (sold on day 6) and any other sets of forage I could put together.
In 4.0, iridium fish have made the money higher, which has made the 12000gp for the 240 potato strategy more achieveable. At the same time, I have also switched to fishing ocean and town day 2, getting the fibreglass rod day 2, and fishing catfish day 3. I realise those things won't work for everyone, so I just ran a test of the first 4 days, fishing just in the mountain lake, going home to bed. With no bubbly patches at all, the fish I sold on day 4 fetched 8485 gold. I didn't fish particularly well so this ought to be an attainable figure, and is probably on the low side compared to what many experienced fishers could manage. I kept some chub behind to eat in the future, as well as eating chub as I went. I think this put me in line for 10000-12000 gold on day 6, whatever the weather on day 5 - probably not the full 12000, though. It turns out day 5 is rainy, so there will be no 1050 from spring seeds tomorrow, but presumably it's fine to go for catfish now at fishing level 6 so I think day 5 will be fishing in town until the shops close then planting potatoes in the rain, and I might plant some parsnips on Monday to make up the difference to farming level 6 by the egg festival.
EDIT: No need for parsnips. I caught around 2/3 of the catfish on day 5, which gave me enough money to buy 238 potatoes and keep the smallmouth bass to eat, getting nearly everything planted on day 5 in the rain. This definitely leaves a margin for luck, since I didn't have to plant any of my mixed seeds and I fished pretty poorly by my standards. It's very nice when it rains on day 5!