A curious thing about the bat/shroom cave

Well, I'd been playing around on this game to test some things out, and found something very... interesting.

So, apparently the fruit cave will continue putting fruit in the cave, even if there is already fruit in the cave. This is approximately a full season's worth of accumulation, I believe.

This makes fruit bat caves slightly more appealing to those who don't want to have to check their cave every day, because any additional fruits will simply show up there. Mushrooms would probably still be more profitable than fruits if you show up every other day religiously, but if you just want to check in every week or so, fruit cave won't lose any resources, but you would with mushroom cave.

Interesting, eh?

 

Very interesting! I'm on my first playthrough and I chose mushrooms, and it's been very underwhelming. I did it thinking it'd be easier to get a purple mushroom for the CC, though not long after that I discovered the mushroom floors towards the end of the mine. Also, haven't come across hardly any of the fruit called for by the CC. I've been regretting my choice, and this pretty much confirms it. I'm terrible at checking it more than once every few days, the bonus accumulation would be really beneficial.

Nice find!

 

In my 5th play through now. I've had both bat cave and mushrooms, I definitely prefer the mushrooms. If you concentrate on getting the greenhouse done as quickly as possible you can plant fruit trees around the edge and get fruit all year long. Also the travelling wagon lady will have fruit quite often. Make sure to check with her every Friday and Sunday. The mushrooms will make you a lot more gold than the bats. I guess it depends on what is the most important thing for you, making money or finishing the community center quickly. Take a quick look at the link.

 

u have 11 fruits bro..how is this more worth? you can just get mushrooms whenever u want

 

I mentioned in the last "Mushrooms vs Fruit Bats" thread around here that the peace of mind to not having to pick mushrooms every day was totally worth it for me personally. It's more profitable with 'shrooms, but the added monotony of picking them all the time was too much. I already had fruit trees and crops in the greenhouse to harvest and process, crab pots to refresh every day and bee hives to clear ever so often, animals to pet and their products to fix (milking, truffle picking), I didn't need another one.

If the mushrooms were affected by Forager, I might have felt obligated to take 'em, but thankfully that's not a thing I need to worry about.

 

You apparently failed to actually read the post, so to reiterate:

Every other day you fail to harvest mushrooms, you lose that harvest of mushrooms. It's gone. You 'lost' money.

Every time you fail to harvest fruit... nothing happens, it sticks around, and doesn't prevent the next fruit from spawning.

I am not trying to say that fruit > mushrooms, I am simply saying that this ability to 'stack' produce makes fruit more attractive than if fruit cave didn't do this. It was a new discovery for me, at least, that made fruit more attractive than it used to be.

Ultimately, neither fruit nor mushrooms are a major provider of anything worth bothering with. The amount of 'profit' it produces is less than a drop in the bucket, even grinding mushroom cave religiously. The amount of stuff you get from it is negligible. A single day hitting up a mushroom level nets you ten times (or more) what you could get out of a whole season of the mushroom cave. Likewise, the amount of fruit you get from the fruit cave is insignificant compared to normal foraging and minimal investment in fruit trees. So trying to say which one is better is kind of like trying to compare a penny and a tuppence, technically one might have more value but the difference is so insignificant that you lose any real value out of either one when you round the checkbook at the end of the month.

 

I knew the fruit stayed there, but I hated the fruit cave the one time I picked it. It took forever to deliver, I could probably have just planted trees - the greenhouse was finished with artisan animal items, and only a couple of fruit. Also, because of varying qualities of apple, by the time I got the stack of three apples for fodder bundle I could have just sold mushrooms and bought a whole orchard, never mind a single tree. YMMV, but never again for me!

So anyway, there is always that argument of which option is better for bundle completion, but did you ever crunch any numbers? I searched the forums and couldn't actually find anything by anyone else, but I already did this, so

On one farm, while doing everything else with the outside, I harvested the mushrooms last thing each day for the last 6½ seasons I ran it, and stuck them in a dedicated chest in the cave, mainly because I was curious just to see how much it's actually worth. Daily harvesting was no real hassle imo, just do it last thing before bed

Anyway, I still have that chest, so I'll publish the results I got

Firstly, here's a screenshot I just made of what's in the chest





It's a total of 1152 mushrooms, which at six per day meant I harvested 192 days

Type	%	Qty	sell price	total
purple	2.5%	29	250	7,250
common	71.8%	827	40	33,080
morel	6.5%	75	150	11,250
chanterelle	7.9%	91	160	14,560
red	11.3%	130	75	9,750

Total = 75,890

divide by 192 days for a mean daily income of 395/day

The sample size is big enough to use that value with confidence

So, I've now got an actual value for the mushroom cave. OK, I didn't keep a daily record of the exact amounts, so I don't know the distribution, and I might run bad on just common or red mushrooms for a day or two, but it'll pretty much sort itself out in the season and a half that I need it.

BTW, I think doing the same for fruit option would be much harder because of how small the sample size is, it might need a collaborative effort of dozens of players, but I digress.


How useful is the mushroom cave now?

Well, assuming I get the cave by mid spring, which is quite reasonable IMO, I am disciplined about harvesting every day, and I simply sell the mushrooms, at just under 400g per day the mushrooms will completely fund the purchase, in the following order, of

• one orange sapling at 4,000g by about spring 25
• one apple sapling at 4,000g by about summer 8
• one pomegranate sapling at 6,000g by about summer 23

and have time to get all the fruit I need for

• artisan bundle by about fall 8
• fodder bundle by about fall 11
• enchanter's bundle by about fall 23

Artisan is now complete, assuming I also have at least one cow, one goat, one cheese press, one preserves jar and one bee house. Which I definitely do. On top of that, I also get about 15 apples and a handful of the other two, which earns me around 4,000g if made into jelly.

The icing is that I also don't have to worry about two red mushrooms for exotic foraging and dye bundles (tip: don't waste a purple mushroom on exotic bundle). The cherry on the icing is that the mushrooms can continue to be harvested until mid fall to fund at least one of the trees I need for my brand new greenhouse.

I always want the greenhouse asap (because who doesn't?), and this way I'm getting it mid-fall guaranteed, when my gold pumpkins come up, without costing any money from any other income streams, and without relying on stupid bats.

So what conclusions can we draw from these numbers?

Unless your farmer's name is Bruce Wayne, pick mushrooms.

This debate is well and truly won

 

I use the Automate mod and it makes collecting mushrooms completely painless. Just pack the space between the mushroom boxes with jars. kegs or furnaces, and a chest will feed the machines plus pull the mushrooms as soon as they spawn. It kinda feels like cheating.

 

it is
)

 

Umm... you realize that your greenhouse produces literally a hundred TIMES that right? And that's a conservative estimate

Let's assume you don't plant any fruit trees, don't plant any hops, and just have a greenhouse full of ancient fruit. That's 116 ancient fruit, which produces per week that gets kegged into ancient wine. Let's also discount aging in casks because you could only age a tiny fraction of that, due to space constraints in the cellar and the time required to age.

So, assuming Artisan (because really, if you care at all about money, Artisan is the only realistic option), that's 2,310g per wine * 116 = 267,960/week or 38,280/day. So yea, you are literally counting pennies, as in 1/100th of meaningful income. Your income from the entire mushroom cave from the day it started until year FIVE is punked by a single week's yield from your greenhouse.

Of course, that's nothing compared to a fully optimized greenhouse with 74 hops, 30 ancient fruit, and 30 peach/pomegranate trees. Hell, the 74 hops alone brings in 31k/day (74 * 420 per pale ale = 31080) + 17.6k/day from the trees (588g/ea for peach/pomegranate wine * 30 trees = (17,640) + almost 10k/day from the Ancient Fruit (2310*30=69.300/wk /7 = 9900g/day) = 58,620g/DAY. Three quarters of your entire multi-year run... done in an entire DAY. That is how insignificant your decision on cave preference is.

To put it into perspective, a single chicken produces one egg per day which turns into mayo for 399g. Think about that... a single chicken out-produces the mushroom cave's profitability. That's how ludicrously low your income from the cave is.

Choose mushrooms or fruit for your personal preference, not for profitability. It is completely insignificant, either way.

 

I know all that, and obviously the mushroom cave is basically useless well before the end of year one. I think you rather missed the point. I harvested those mushrooms in my screenshot for the definitive information on what the cave is worth, to help me on future runs, not for the measly 3k per week. I never actually shipped them, as attested to by the fact I could still open up the farm again and screenshot it.

And I've done the greenhouse packed full thing a few times now. FWIW, you can squeeze in 78 hops if you are prepared to lift sprinklers. At least 78, someone else may well have done better, but my hops layout has 78 if I'm collecting daily.

But anyway, back to mushrooms, I rather think you missed my point, which was that choosing mushrooms is the route to getting a guaranteed mid-fall greenhouse (when your gold pumpkins pop), and all the other bundle fruit, without needing to worry about whether the bats bring what you need. Choosing mushrooms means you have already locked in the income to be able to buy the three trees that guarantee you get the fruit

After you get into the greenhouse the cave is utterly irrelevant no matter what you choose, so pick the mushrooms which will definitely get you there by mid fall, rather than bats which might get you there earlier (if you also want to waste time and effort in spring on trying for gold parsnips when you still have to manually water stuff), but might also leave you stranded.

 

While I would strongly debate that the mushrooms don't give you the cash you need for the trees by the time you need them, the point is entirely moot to the original post...

Again, as I have said three times now in this thread, the original post is not to claim that fruit is superior to mushroom, merely that fruit is better than I thought it was previously because of its ability to stack drops. That's it. You are beating up on a poor defenseless strawman. No one ever tried to claim in this thread that fruit is better than mushrooms. You are crusading for a cause which does not exist.

The choice of cave is entirely irrelevant to the game. Neither cave option really gives you any sort of benefit. The amount of money you get from the mushroom cave is less than the amount of money you get from a single chicken. The fruit bats only give you an option for a shortcut if you don't end up getting cloth from recycling soggy newspapers, and even then, not much of one. The difference is negligible in either case and won't help you do anything in either case. You are stridently defending your right to have your shiny penny when no one is trying to take it from you.

 

Fruit bat cave is fun in it's own way, let's be real here. What's 'better' doesn't really matter to some people, and as OP pointed out even with it being 'better' it's not enough to really matter to some people even if they are doing a more 'optimized' playthrough.

Also all that mushroom stuff means even less if you go Forest Farm because you get the mushrooms from there. There's a million and one factors. Acknowledging something isn't as bad as one previously thought isn't saying that it's great either just that it's better than they thought. IDK why people think that building something up has to involve tearing another thing down absolutely, but OP wasn't doing anything of the sort and there's nothing wrong with enjoying something for what it is that's not an attack on something else.

 

I reckon it had already become fruit vs. mushroom before I first posted imo, but fair point, that wasn't actually the point of your OP, and I shouldn't have dragged it further down that path.

You're right that nothing is lost by missing a day of the bat cave, whereas you do lose mushrooms, but for me checking the cave for mushrooms last thing before sleeping has become as automatic as the TV first thing after waking, so it's not enough for me, I'm still #teammushroom, and I'd need way more fruit to switch

 

well, you're not Batman, you're more like Mario

 

I have to admit I'm a little surprised that you of all people are only just finding out about this mechanism, @ShneekeyTheLost -- not a criticism, I just figured you had mapped all the little technical details on the game long ago. There was even a video series a year or more ago where one player tried to see how long it took for the cave to fill with fruit when left alone for many seasons.

Now, I do have one point/query to make, and it's a detail I don't know myself-- while it's true that fruit can spawn while there's already fruit there, but do we know if the cave works the same as the Quarry, where potential spawns can be blocked by something already existing on the cave floor? In other words, does /not/ harvesting fruit potentially slow the rate at which it appears because the game tries to select spots already occupied by fruit? If so, not pulling up fruit regularly might not prevent spawning but it might slow new arrivals until the RNG hits an empty cave floor tile. Just wondering if there's any way to know for sure.

 

Yea, well... I had never left a fruit cave laying dormant for long enough for accumulation to accumulate. It's entirely possible that it functions like the quarry, or like foraging that can be blocked by other forage items occupying that particular square. So I suppose you are correct in that it might retard accumulation as it fills. But it was something interesting that I thought amusing enough to share with the class.

 

ugh, i decided to use the bats on my second game because after a full year i couldn't get the community center finished but between the poor yeild i have gotten in-game and the info here it seems to be a garbage choice x______x

 

And you felt the need to necro a six month old post to make this declaration?

It doesn't matter, either way. Bats or Shrooms, neither one provide much benefit. I suppose if you're trying for a Y1 bundle completion, the fruits will be marginally useful as there's at least a chance you can get tree fruits for the Artisan Bundle or get a Pomegranate for the Wizard bundle, obviating the need for planting one before the end of summer. You'll still need an Apple Tree for the Fodder Bundle, of course, since you need three apples (unless you get phenomenally lucky).

But honestly? The amount of money you'll make from the cave is less than a single chicken brings in. Significantly less. It will be less than a drop in the bucket either way. Unless you are using the bat cave as an additional chance to skip a couple of Artisan Bundle requirements, there is no significant gameplay change either way. And even then, it's only a chance, and it's not like the Artisan bundle is particularly difficult to complete without it. So it's purely a matter of preference, not a matter of income, because the income, even in a very lucky shroom cave, is less than a drop in the bucket in the long term.

 

Another minor advantage of the bat cave is that (according to the wiki) bat fruit gives 7 foraging xp each and cave-farmed mushrooms give none. It's not much, but it's there.