I am going to try a challenge for my next game. One and only one chest! once you expand your house you can use the fridge for food only. The auto grabber must be emptied every day and cannot be used for storage same with huts.
Hmm, I guess you're not going for like 1,000 plots of starfruit then. One thing to note is that while I'm repairing the bus, getting the DSG early and then assembling up to 500k surplus cash for a huge splurge on starfruit seeds for the first day of Summer, I don't actually have the time to also get Farming 10 in Spring. I'm not saying that that can't be done, only that I can't do it. I settle for Farming 6 for sprinklers by the end of Spring. From there, it only takes about 265 starfruit to make the jump to Farming 10, and the DSG makes that happen on Summer 10, leaving enough time for two more cycles of what then becomes an 8 day crop. As you don't need anywhere near such a huge stack of cash for seeds, Farming 10 should be doable, so let's give it a go, here are my thoughts. Please feel free to use, amend, interpret or completely ignore, as you see fit If you're just doing normal Pierre crops, instead of a vast crop of starfruit, is it even worth rushing the bus to buy DSG on Spring 18? If you already have Agriculturist then DSG won't affect Blueberries at all, if you buy your DSG on Summer 4 then you can still get three rounds of Melon, and so the only thing it'd slightly affect is hops, with 2 extra harvests per plant. But while the cost of the bus is only about the equivalent to the profit from of 16 bottles of starfruit wine, it's equivalent to 114 extra pale ale. So, you need 57 hops plants (including the cost of the DSG) just to break even on repairing the bus early. You're already tying yourself to a very restrictive farm layout - the forest farm is even smaller than the riverlands farm, with more than 10% fewer tillable spaces, and a fair few of those in virtually unusable spots. So, considering how much of a PITA hops are to manage anyway, with their daily harvesting requirement, their lack of spammability due to being a trellis crop and their need for more than double the keg capacity to process them compared to the likes of melon or starfruit, if you're already on the smallest farm, do you really want to fill it with lots of awkward hops, just to try and make it profitable repairing the bus two weeks earlier than would otherwise be necessary? Oh, and on top of all that, in addition to needing more kegs, you also have less room in which to plant acorns, and far fewer oak trees from which to get those acorns. It just seems to me that adding hops, and especially trying for two extra harvests of hops, are going to make this far, far harder than it needs to be. In any case, if you are going to do this then the first milestone is going to be on day 0, where you find a save ID with plenty of accessible mushroom floors from about day 9 onwards. With everything else that is needed, such as watering crops, progressing down the mine and getting ore for sprinklers etc, I don't think that there's anywhere near enough time in the schedule for spending five full days fishing to afford the bus repair, plus more fishing to afford everything else. After saying all that, the rest of this answer is little more than educated guesswork, but I'll take a look at what I reckon would be some important things to do, and days by which I'd want to do them. Day 1 - Mining 1 (for cherry bombs on the first day in the mines) Day 2 - enough cash to buy the rod and bait tomorrow Day 3 - Fishing 5 Day 5 - Floor 25+, Mining 2 (for staircases) Day 6 - Copper watering can upgrade purchased Day 8 - Steel watering can upgrade purchased, Floor 80+, mushroom farming begins Day 9 - CC unlocked, space cleared south of greenhouse for crop planting, ~200 kale purchased Day 10 - minecart bundles done, kale planted and watered, start to establish furnace factory Day 14 - 25+ acorns planted Day 16 - kale harvest (Farming 6) and replant ~300 plants Day 17 - bus bundles paid for, start crafting/placing quality sprinklers Day 18 - cash assembled for DSG purchase today Day 22 - kale harvest and replant ~400 plants Day 28 - harvest for Farming 10, plant sacrificial parsnips, all plots covered by sprinklers, Steel Axe and Steel Pickaxe both reached by now to clear large logs and boulders from the farm before summer, 50+ acorns planted Summer 1 - plant hops with DSG, plant blueberries, plant wheat where melons will go Summer 4 - harvest wheat, buy more DSG, plant melons Summer 12 - harvest and replant melons Summer 14 - tappers starting to produce oak resin by now, 75+ acorns planted, quarry repair bought Summer 20 - greenhouse repair bought, last day to replant melons Summer 25 - buy DSG for fall pumpkins Planning in detail gets harder the further down the time line you get, the only dates I'd have in for Fall at the start of the project would be planting pumpkins with DSG on days 1, 10 and 19. And by Winter 26 you need to have donated 60+ items to the museum, to get access to the statue of uncertainty on Winter 27 so that stuff can be sold with Artisan on Winter 28.
No, as I'm doing it, I'm aiming for 200 fruit, by the end of summer. That would put me light years ahead of where I've been before and fit with my goal of a balanced game that can be realized by a drub. I'm not shooting for the 18th. In my mind, Summer 4 is plenty of time to get starfruit rolling. That's much more ambitious than I'm aiming for. My schedule goes something like this... Day 1 - Plant 2 each, potato, bean and cauli, plus 21 parsnips. Forage the whole map and meet 27 people. It falls into my goal of a balanced game to meet everybody as quickly as possible. I end up gifting Linus on the second to get the 100g reward and get that quest out of the journal. Also, I don't plan to miss any birthdays. Day 2-4 - Just fish(and clear the trees in the space below the cabin). Get the fiberglass rod on the 3rd and the backpack on the 4th. Need at least 4100g for 205 parsnips to plant the 6th and 2k for copper water can on the first rain day. Save back gold chub for eating. Day 5 - Harvest parsnips, save them as food. Check the cart(only looking for cabbage & nautilus shell, plus maybe a pufferfish if it's cheap.) Mine to floor 20. Hope for a better weapon drop. Start hoping for rain. First opportunity upgrade water can, and spend the rain day with the catfish. Day 6 - Plant parsnips. Finish the day clearing and chopping wood. Day 7-9 - Fish for seed money - need 10k for 105 potato seeds before Wednesday, the 10th - then mine as time permits. Day 10 - Harvest parsnips, plant potatoes. Save back 6 gold, 1 regular parsnip for the bundles and a gift for Pam. Save silver and gold parsnips for food and sell the rest. Gift Vincent my best daffodil then mine. If I haven't got a better weapon yet, revisit bug floors to get the bugs head reward. Day 11-12 - Fish as necessary to have 13.4k for strawberry seeds. Hopefully there's been a rain day, because a day of catfishing will knock out a majority of that cash. Plus prepare a space for strawberries below the greenhouse. Upgrade pick on the 12th. Day 13 - Buy 134 strawberry seed. Fill the crops bundle, for the 20 speed-gro, and plant the berries. Day 14 - Pick up copper pick and mine. From here on, mine everyday possible. Day 15 - Upgrade axe to copper and give Haley a daffodil. Day 16 - Harvest potatoes and plant back with the 9 cauli from Gunther and ~200 kale. Day 18 - Before closing time, gift Pam a gold parsnip at the saloon and buy a beer. Day 20 - Give Shane a beer. (If it's sunny, he's at home in the AM. Rainy, he goes to work.) Day 22 - Replant kale. Also in the last week of Spring, build a silo and coop, plus gift a quality daffodil to Pierre and a Topaz to Emily. It works for me and it's a repeatable schedule that doesn't require any extraordinary skill, real luck or save scumming. Except it feels really crippled if there isn't an early rain day to upgrade the water can. I don't get down to 80+ in the mine until after the 16th. But, any mushroom days I can get are just money in the bank. Without any added "money days" it supplies level 10 farming, the price of the bus, and money for my normal summer seeds, plus a bit for DSG and starfruit seeds. If I'm on my game I've got 48+ quality sprinklers to start summer. I'm really focusing on getting deeper in the mine quicker. The best start I've gotten with it so far, is 40 DSG and seeds, on Summer 4. But I didn't plan for the Luau/Oasis conflict on the 11th and couldn't get seeds to replant or DSG to grow my plots. That's the kind of bottle necks I'm running into. I get to spots where I think; "OMG, if I had only done X differently", and I restart. The Luau/Oasis hit was 1 day before my blueberries came in. Feels like "I was that close" to turning the corner. If I didn't enjoy the game so much it would be infuriating. The screenshot I'm hoping to get is a Fall 16 community center completion, with a half million dollar stack of wine. But, so far I'm having trouble pushing through mid summer without shooting myself in the foot. Maybe by the time I stumble through learning the path, I'll have gotten better at the details and can get twice that much wine. I like the forest farm and for what I'm trying to do it's plenty of space.
OK, I totally misunderstood what you were trying to do, or what you were asking, sorry. I thought you were planning an alternative to your usual start, but now I see it's supplementary. Let me try again for some of the bottlenecks I see Even setting aside the RNG associated with the red cabbage and nautilus shell for a moment, which is out of your control unless you preselect the save ID, these two together is quite a big ask given your other constraints. If you're going to use the statue of uncertainty to switch to artisan then you need to use it no later than Fall 15, which means getting the donations by Fall 14. If you're not doing regular skull runs from spring, which would get you decent quantities of omni geodes, then I can see getting the required 60 museum donations by Fall 14 might be a struggle, so that's a potential bottleneck that I can see. How many donations do you normally have by then, and if you are usually short, what's your plan for getting more? *************************************** If you're only planting the starfruit at the last minute, then you only have a shade over two weeks between harvest and Fall 16 to process them. A half million stack of wine is 159 starfruit with artisan, which means you're going to need an average of 80 kegs up and running during the two weeks after Fall 2. That's a fair chunk of oak resin, so even if you get a few trees tapped early, you'll need something like 30-35 oak trees tapped by about Summer 14. With a mean growth time of 18 days, I'm estimating that means you need 50-60 acorns in the ground by about the time of the flower dance. That's going to be tricky when you only start with 11 oak trees on your Forest farm, compared to about 27 oak trees to start with on the standard farm. You also need to think about where you are putting the oak farm - I guess if the crops go in front of the greenhouse then the oak farm must go in front of the farmhouse. Anyway, the acorns are a potential bottleneck. **************************************** On top of that, there's the resources for the sprinklers, tappers and kegs. It's at least 150 copper bar, 128 iron bars and 48 gold bars, which is 750, 640 and 240 ore of each, and 16 fire quartz, plus at least 342 coal. That's a lot of mining, or an unafforable amount of buying. It's also something in the region of 40,000g worth of wood you'll have to buy for kegs and tappers, because there's not way you're going to be able to chop it when you'll also use almost another 4,000 pieces of wood on the deluxe barn, the deluxe coop, the kitchen upgrade, the bridge repair, the construction bundle and other equipment such as chests and scarecrows. So that's another potential bottleneck, because fishing is far more limited than skull cavern for providing the funds for the massive infrastructure and animal costs you'll incur on a project like this. Some of the big costs 43k - barn 34k - coop 10k - kitchen ~37k - animals 40k-60k - 4,000 to 6,000 wood for kegs, tappers, buildings 96k - 200 starfruit seeds and DSG 42k - bus repair ~30k - tool/backpack upgrades ~25k - summer crops 10k - apple and pomegranate trees That's over 360k-380k of costs right there, with a few things missing, and all of that money is going to be needed pretty close together from the end of spring. OK you can get some of that money from crops, but I can't see fishing being able to bridge the gap. If you're always fishing then you have massive added costs for ore, and if you're mining to get the ore rather than buying then you're not getting income from fishing. Potential daily income from fishing is very firmly capped, no matter how good you are at it, but potential income from skull cavern can be absolutely enormous. So anyway, funding is going to be a major bottleneck that 8k/day of fishing is simply not going to come close to meeting. ********************************************* Another bottleneck is the watering can. If you don't get a convenient rainy day then you're screwed, because your schedule doesn't allow a single day off from watering in spring, but in the middle part of spring, before you get sprinklers, you'll be looking at watering over 300 plots every day with a basic can, which is going to cost you so much time and energy that needs to be spent doing other things. And without mushroom or skull cavern income to buy salad, you'll need to waste even more time getting salmonberries for your energy needs, until you can start eating kale or strawberries. The best way out of this that I can see is dropping the plan for the 20 speed gro on day 13 and get the can upgraded to copper on day 6. The speed-gro thing is only the equivalent of an extra 10 strawberry plants, and I think it's more trouble than it's worth. Especially as you can then also put the other tools in for upgrade whenever you need to, instead of having to hold off on them so that Clint is definitely available when it rains. ********************************************** Another bottleneck is time. You won't even be able to afford 3k per day for coffee either, nor will you have access to crab cakes from iridium crab drops, so everything you do takes even longer still. I find that permanent +2 speed buffs are essential for creating the time every day to do all the stuff that needs doing. And this will only be exacerbated by the lost opportunity cost of spending hours finding people on their birthday to gift them. Speaking of which Haley's birthday is Spring 14, not 15. Honestly, I don't think you're shooting yourself in the foot in mid summer; I think it's not so much about little mistakes you may or may not be making, more about trying to do the impossible of wanting to get lots of money, while still doing the CC bundles, all the social aspects and pet favourites like the 20 speed-gro, but without venturing into skull cavern, the only place capable of funding it all. I think something has to give. If you want the megabucks in year one, I think you have to give up on the CC and the villagers, and just go Joja after repairing the minecarts and bus. What I reckon is happening in mid summer is that you keep hitting a wall that is simply too high to climb over. I think you need to change your path and go around it instead.
I'm using the artifact system fixed patch. It levels out the probabilities from dig spots and reduces the number of duplicates from geodes. For me, it's kind of like the No Seeds From Trees Fix; Once you use it, it just feels like that's the way it was meant to work. Plus, on the geode side, without the patch a person could get the same equivalent perk by micromanaging geode cracking, with the predictor. I'm also using Fast Animations, with it's default settings. You've already shamed me into giving up the Automate mod... don't be a dick. That's doable. It only becomes a problem when thinking about it in combination with infrastructure for animals. Like I've said, my best start had me resetting 1 day before blueberries started producing. From what I've done before, just a little push would put me in the ballpark of 300 blueberries. I think, as long as I can get them onto sprinklers, blueberries might be the key to making it work. I try to get the ground cleared around all the oak trees early, to boost the number of scattered seeds that drop. Also the 7 trees that grow off the farm get chopped early for seeds, then tapped later if needed. As long as I don't screw it up early, as I've done before, the oak resin is doable. That's not a problem on the forest farm. Remember that everything you see as wasted farming space is perfect tapper farm ground. You see, this is why I look to you. You can spot my obvious game breaking oversights. I've just realized, I need to switch up my Summer 1 planting strategy. I've always set blueberries as secondary priority on day 1, because there's a couple days leeway before losing a harvest. But with the 10% growth perk there's an extra harvest, if planted on day 1. And, with the 10%, the blueberry harvests sync up with the starfruit planting days. I just need to get DSG on Summer 4, then focus on getting my coop built up. I can do a deluxe coop, with two rabbits, by the 10th, I've done it before. Then the 12th is a blueberry harvest in time to plant two rounds of starfruit. Then two blueberry harvests later is another starfruit day. 300 blueberry plots is 900 x 50g = 45k. That's 100+ starfruit seeds each time. Just need 100 DSG on Summer 4 with a big patch of blueberries, planted on Summer 1, and it looks like it should all fit. That leaves 3 other blueberry harvests(135k) to build out my barn and kegs. Thoughts? EDIT: I kind of gave short shrift to your other concerns... Yes, the oak resin is tight. I think it's doable, but it has always been a point where it's easy to screw everything up. Getting an early rain day is definitely critical. I've had a couple saves where on Spring 10 I restarted, simply because there wasn't any rain. Once the watering can is upgraded to copper, I'm good with it. I've don't see the need for a steel can but, to be honest, until I started doing this I had always used the basic can all Spring. Yes, there is watering every day but skipping a day, to upgrade the water can, means one fewer harvest, which means having to ramp up the size of later harvests. Which means more watering, after I've got a pick upgrade to optimize the mining time. I don't understand how upgrading the watering can on a non-rain day could be helpful. As it's been going, I'm spending maybe 8k on salads, plus eating all gold chub and SMB, all parsnips with stars(-6 gold), and lots of forage. Plus, if I get some mushroom days, I hold back a lot of purple mushrooms. They're my last option for food, and hopefully get sold, but food is tight. Still, I've never been completely booger'd by running out of eats. Speed buffs are great. The only thing is, 3k of coffee could last me a week, because I never remember to drink it.
Didn't think that the artifact spots were that broken. I would just expect to take ages to find all of them anyway, because there is such a low chance of any specific item. I know how weird and counter-intuitive the results thrown up by probabilities can be. Same for minerals really, but I get what I need to get to 60 donations by sheer volume of geodes, and whatever artifacts I find through the year. And I am happy as long as I get to 60 by Winter 26, not mid Fall. And I definitely use fast geode animation, because Clint is painfully slow. But I've only ever actually completed the museum collection once, I never bother with donations after I have the rusty key, so I'm not actually fussed about what comes out of the dig spots, I just know I'll get enough different ones over the course of the year. I definitely use the predictor for mushroom floors, I'm not afraid to admit that, but simply can't be bothered with it for geodes, because I will get enough for what I need, and I also want the ore and coal and stuff anyway. A lucky early shard from a geode is nice, but not having one isn't a good reason to discard a save with good mushrooms; I know I'll definitely get one on my first skull dive anyway OK, I literally have never tried for a large oak farm on the forest map; I only use that one occasionally, for speed running the CC bundles. So I didn't have a clue what rate you can realistically expect to get them planted, only that it would obviously be quite a bit behind the standard farm, and therefore a potential pitfall. But if you still get enough then fine. OK, fair enough. I think the only time I did a proper farm on this map I stuck coops and barns on the "wasted" space, didn't consider oak trees there 300 blueberry plants would actually give you a little over 50k per harvest, selling them raw. You'll get a 10% increase in sell price, to 55g, from Tiller, plus you'll get a few more than 900 berries from the small "extra berry" chance, and you'll also get about another 5% uplift on top of that from gold and silver quality on the first berry from each plant. That's a handy 25k extra you maybe weren't expecting. Or, if you could manage to get 20 seed makers going, which admittedly needs a lot more coal and wood, plus 100 extra gold ore, you could run your entire blueberry harvest through them in about 12 hours, turning them into seeds, and turning that 50k into about 75k, which is a far better financial return on the day's activity than fishing would give you. Actually, you might do better to just eat the gold blueberries for energy instead of turning them into seeds, and just process the regular and silver ones; you'll get about 60 gold ones per harvest, they're better g/E than buying Salad or eating fish. But anyway, five harvests of processed blueberry seeds would give you somewhere north of 350k for the season, which would help defray some of those costs you're going to face, and also somewhere in the region of 20 ancient seeds basically guaranteed, if that sort of thing floats your boat. The seed costs seem to be met, but I still have doubts about all the other resources you need. Directly or indirectly, doing the bundles consumes almost 4,000 wood on its own. Even if you can chop all that, there's still all the tappers and kegs you'll need, which will be about another 4,000 wood. Altogether, we're talking about 400-450 trees, and even if you had the time and energy, there's simply not enough trees in SDV to meet that need. On top of that is all the ore and coal you need, and that just takes so much time to acquire. I mine the iron, but I end up buying a fair amount of the copper, which is needed for both tappers and kegs, because there simply isn't enough time to mine it all. It'd be interesting to know from previous farms, what's the most tappers you've had up and running by middle of Summer, and most kegs you've had up and running by start of Fall. I agree that going beyond copper can is probably unnecessary for what you're trying to do. I think I might have misunderstood you first time. But if you're not doing a casual farm then you definitely can't use a basic can all spring, when there's everything else you want to do and so little time in which to do it. I think you have to create a dedicated opportunity to ensure that you can upgrade it. Scrapping using the speed gro on 20 strawberries means you also don't have to rush cauliflower or beans on the first day either, which will help a lot with early cash flow. You'll get cauli for free, either from mixed seeds or from Gunther, and you can wait until as late as day 16 to plant your bean and cauli for the bundle. You're only actually losing 20 extra strawberries, not sacrificing an entire harvest on all of them; it's only 360 XP, which can be easily replaced by planting another 22 kale on the back end, when it'll mostly be sprinklered anyway, and whatever isn't sprinklered is going to be done by hand with a much better can. I mean, there's also a few extra XP from those "missing" beans and day 1 cauli to make up, but as against that, you're guaranteed the copper can, regardless of weather, and you will be saving yourself a heap of time and energy down the line, plus not having to consider a reset if the weather forecast doesn't oblige by day 10, which is basically the last day for getting it upgraded. As for the second bundle needed to open the boiler room for the minecart repair, it doesn't need to be spring crops bundle, you can use the construction bundle instead. You'll almost certainly get 10 hardwood from breaking random crates in the mines as you descend, and the stone and wood are easily acquired anyway. It's actually less watering really though, even if it's more tiles being watered, because you water everything with the upgraded can, which is far more efficient, in terms of both time and energy, including over 50% fewer trips to the lake to refill; a full copper can covers 84 tiles, but a full basic one only covers 40. By creating that fixed window of opportunity on day 6, I don't see it as upgrading on a non-rainy day, more like upgrading on a day it's not needed, knowing that the small upfront investment will pay off handsomely further down the line. Just like the gold blueberries, silver-plus quality purple mushrooms are more efficient than salads and fish for energy replenishment, and as long as you're going to use all the energy or HP they'll restore, I don't think you should be eating them last. All parsnips are great eating, and gold kale is almost even with Salad, but saves time on the trip to buy it. I think running round cindersap for hundreds of salmonberries is going to be a time-trap, even though they are unbeatable value in a casual play through. If you were going to walk literally right past them anyway then fine, grab them, but I wouldn't go out of the way for them at all; better overall to eat whatever edibles come your way, as part of the growth of the farm. Hah, even IRL I chug down a coffee as soon as I get up, and then constantly throughout the day, so it's just natural for me when playing SDV
I ran through a throwaway save where I upgraded the water can on the 6th. That does seem to be the ticket. It messes up the grow time fit of parsnip/potato/kale/kale so I've got to drop the parsnips and ramp up the others. Also I hadn't been properly planning for getting sprinklers down as they came online. I'm also looking at dropping the strawberries and planting kale in their place. Strawberries are cheaper but the kale can be purchased with potato earning on the 14th. Also, this most recent test run I ran the tree shaker mod. It was finding ~20 acorns a day by shaking trees and gathering dropped seeds. That seems a little far fetched but still, I think, there are a lot of acorns that are getting past me.
Wow, that's ridiculously overpowered, especially on Forest map. Could probably make 10 field snacks a day and still get a ridiculously fast oak farm up. At that point, might as well just run CJB Spawner and spawn in however many you want. Even on the standard farm I doubt I often reach ten gathered acorns in a single day, never mind twenty. Not without chopping down, anyway. I reckon I more usually get maybe 5 acorns on average for the first two weeks or so; feels like forest map should only get maybe 2 or 3 because of starting with fewer oak trees. Actually, on a new standard farm I just started today, I dug up 8 acorns on day 2 and I was absolutely delighted. I uninstalled No Seeds From Trees a while back though, to have a shot at absolutely vanilla game mechanics for a while, even though that was a mod which made it feel more natural. I'm not giving up Fast Geodes or UI Info Suite though.
