The new numbers on Animals: Can they actually compete?

Wool isn't as bad if you figure in the Shepherd bonus that makes wool regrow every other day. Making your calculations:

12*56*816g/28 = 19,584g/slot/year or 174.85/slot/day.

With the silos figured in that makes it:12*56*816/40.6 = 13,506.2/slot/year or 120.59/slot/day.

If you consider I have 5 barns and take the 120.59/slot per day that would give me 602.95g/d for all my animals put together or 67,530 a year per slot for 2,741,718 million per year. That's about half of what an Artisan can make, which isn't terrible considering I can still run a greenhouse and get the slots per day income out of running a brewery with it and have my cellar free for aging.

 

The problem is that this is a false premise. I keg or jar virtually everything coming up out of the ground after the first year. The second problem isn't that you're comparing jarred or kegged fruit versus animal products... it's that EVERY SINGLE ANIMAL PRODUCT can be turned into an Artisan good, making the bonus from animal products literally worthless.

 

Ok, so I've been running my Sheep Farm for about two months now ingame and have 60 sheep producing various quality Wool and Cloth. Adding in various other easy income enterprises, just how well is my farm doing? See results below. Granted this is a good day with my partially up and running brewery with just have about half the Ancient Fruits I'm going to end up with and don't have my kegs placed for yet (but made) and my partially up and running Crystalarium room with Gemologist perk that pops every 5 days. Right now that's at 15 but I plan on making it 56.

I have no complaints. You'll see if you count that 26 of my sheep produced this day and 18 of those produced quality wool.

 

5 barns and yet you make 1.5m less the year then only a greenhouse full with ancient fruit and a barn full of kegs
or 160 ancient fruits planted in spring and one barn full of kegs... (and you even reproduce seeds for the next year with that)

Plus you have to check all 5 buildings every day, with the fruit you only need to check once a week - but that comes down to personal preferrences

It might perform well for you, but the animals aren't even competing against better fareing artisan goods like Pale Ale (420g/day/slot) or Starfruit Wine (211.5g/day/slot). I powered through my first year on a new save, planted 120 hops in the summer and reached the 1M mark before 2nd year was even close... Really sad thing: Even tho hops only produces one season of the year, yet a single plant powers out 8400g in that short amount of time. Which gives them 75g/slot/day, even tho they only grow 1/4 of the year :/

The rancher profession would need to be boosted to +200% (or the base price of the materials boosted by 150%) to compete with Artisan Items. Or carry over quality in their end products, i.e. iridium wool -> iridium cloth etc.

As someone already said before in this thread - it kind of mirrors RL. Animal Products are cheaper then vegetables and plant products. Look at Wine - even average priced ones cost 8-12 bucks here, A liter of Milk? 69 Cent - and the farmer doesn't even see 20 cent of that. Which makes a cow produce 8 to 9 bucks worth of milk a day, minus heating/fodder and other bills

And it resembles Harvest Moon, which was Erics inspiration for this, as well. Animals were never worth it if you compared them to veggies and fruit. It was a nice side-income. But you never were able to go crazy to make money fast.
(example: Friends of Mineral Town - 1st fall, plant 200-300 sweet potatoes and youll make enough money to clear the game, or A Wonderful Life, where the broken Banana Trees and the Seedmakers made you enough money in one summer to buy everything you wanted)


But in the end it all comes down how you WANT to run your farm. I still have a barn and coop filled with animals. Mainly because i don't want my farm to be a huge monoculture, but animal products are neat to make foods for the mines as well. But with prices high for Junimo Huts (further feeding my own lazyness xD), the Warp Scepter and all the other new buildings, i don't want to grind day for day. My goal for the second year is 100-150k/day until i got everything i need to finally get all achievements ^o^

 

I haven't posted what I make a year realistically. That 2.7 million theorized is from my animals *alone*. It's pure sophistry to assume I'm not producing anything else. I can run a greenhouse and a barn full of kegs in addition to my animals. The only difference is what activity I'm applying a bonus too. Rancher may need to be bumped up but it by no means isn't profitable amongst other activities. Your profit per tile assessment completely ignores how anyone realistically plays.

 

It does not ignore how anyone plays because it is not taking in account how anyone plays. It only shows the pure data how much you can earn with a plant per year. Nothing more, nothing less. It doesn't say "do this instead of that" it only shows "If you plant this, you can get that amount of money out of it."

Myself, i'm not bothering with anything else besides what i need ingame. And that's usually nothing after the first 2 years when all seeds unlocked. Then it's just how to get the money you need to bring your farm in the state you want it to be and raise the amount to buy what you want. And sadly, the easiest way to get there is to have a huge area of high profit plants and process them into goods in barns/sheds or even in the open field until you are happy with your daily income.

After playing through this game for the 6th time (other 5 saves are all in year 4 or further) im not really in for the "long haul" ,but i don't want to skip days to fasten up plant grow either. Nor do i want to run around 3-4 hours/day petting/shearing/milking animals. It's what Harvest Moon taught me back on the SNES and later in Back to Nature on the PSX and formed my style after countless playthroughs when i tried to marry all bachelorettes with only 6 save states on 2 Memory Cards xD

I basically got the Money Machinery up and running in the first 5 seasons, married in second spring and built the villagers hearts up to half and higher over the course of the 1st year, while only bothering with one coop, one barn and one slimehut for animals and their products. If i were to play the standard map again where i tried to minimize my daily work i'd have 5 barns of kegs, 750 sprinklered Ancient Fruit all year round + 300 Starfruit in Summer of the 2nd year. But im going slow, enjoying what is new in 1.1 aiming for the 10M achievement mid/end year 3.

That said: I still would like to know how much can be earned by a modern styled "ranch" that is not producing it's own fodder but maximizing profit by mass animal husbandry


Aaaaand back to the game - my second round of Ancient Fruit is ripe >;3

 

Exactly. You're running entire models based off of activities I can do just as easily on top of my sheep ranch and only take a 30% hit to. How does that figure into the math for a profitable farm? My entire point is that you're treating those same activities as worthless without Artisan and yeah, 100% isn't as good as a 130% but if the difference can be made up for with animals then it's viable. It's certainly worth taking a real look at. As it stands there are some pretty serious bugs with animals preventing such a look from being achievable.

 

Ranching becomes non-viable the moment you have to supplement your feed by buying hay from Marnie.

 

Haven't had to do that.

Let me ask some serious questions about Magistrella's model. What's the profit per tile on seed makers and how does that affect your ancient fruit farm? What's the expenditures on speed-grow and how does that affect said fruit farming? How long does an ancient fruit plant take to mature with speed-grow and how many days of real production does that cut into in the first season. How does that affect your model?

 

1) To be able to regrow next year you need to invest half an harvest, but as ->
2&3) Deluxe Speed Grow sells for 80g at the oasis (or 150g at pierre's year 2. It cuts off 25% of the time needed to grow before first harvest. --> it reduces the growtime from 28 days to 21 days --> in the end you get a full harvest more out of the year (10 instead of 9) which increases your profit by roughly 10-11% (as you can only use 8.5 out of 9 harvest but 9.5 out of 10) with only 80g/tile investment, depending on luck in the seed makers tho.
4) The more you grow the more you make, for 1 keg you need roughly 1.8 plants outside (or 100 kegs -> 178 plants) or as i do it, 2 sheds (1 barn) kegs needs 8 Iridium Sprinkler areas of plants

A calculation should clear other questions, so lets do a barn full fruit:

9.5 harvests of 192 fruit with an investment of 192 speed grow and slots total used: 200+28


The amount of wine you get per year is 9.5x192 = 1,824 / without fertilizer: 1,632
Net profit: 4,213,440g
real Profit with fertilizer costs: 4,198,080g which makes a profit of 164.4g/slot/day
profit without using fertilizer: 3,769,920g which makes a profit of 147.63g/slot/day
Real increase of profit with fertilizer: 11.357% / year

If i add in aged wine: 1574 normal wine, 250 aged wine = 3,635,940g + 1,080,000g = 4.715.940g (or 184.68g/slot/day) vs. 4,272,420g unfertilized which is still an increase of 11,03%

The more wine you make the closer it gets to the optimum increase of 11,357% But if you want to increase your profit you usallly don't age Ancient Fruit Wine but Age Starfruit Wine which you get from 125x2harvests in the summer additionally.


But let me tell you: Your barn profit takes off quicker - because first i have to grow enough seeds for ancient fruits to get enough seeds to even get going, usually i.e. i'm growing ancient fruits in the greenhouse until it filled up, then i produce 400~600 seeds, depending how many kegs i can get, for the next spring (which is usually year 3). Until then i feed my production with coffee/ale and starfruit wine so my model becomes realistic at year 3 at best. Which doesn't usually matter b/c i'll break the 4-5m mark from Ale and coffee alone as it looks like atm ^^""

 

Ok, I just wanted to see what changed in the numbers for figuring in expenses and grow times. Thanks.

My barn profits would take off a lot quicker if animal production weren't all screwed up. Still, I'm happy were Shepherd is right now. I'd be even happier if Rancher were 30%. Given the 10% increase in crops and 40% increase in Artisan Goods, 30% isn't asking too much for Rancher. The same 40% bonus that Artisan gets would be even better. There's a great imbalance in the Force.

 

Yeh, for a lazy player like me an animal farm is a horror scenario... its bad enough to have one coop and one barn of animals to take care of. Sometimes i just dont bother and just get pigs so i don't have to...

The amount of work should make ranching more profitable then just planting. With my farm later on, all i have to do is till the soil once a year, water it once a year (except for extra things i want to plant), harvest once a week and exchange wine for fruit in my kegs once a week. Harvesting a huge 600tile field doesnt even take 2 ingame hours, exchanging a barn full of wine usually only 40-50minutes...

Then just throw it into the bin... done. While as ranching includes: open/close doors twice a day to get the max of happiness, milk/shear animals or gather what they leave lying around, make that stuff into better stuff (mayo, cheese etc.), pet them, watch out that food doesn't run low and invest a load of time on scything grass and replanting it in spring

If you compare it like that, ranching shouldn't be off by that much :/

 

When I get into animals, it's generally to get bundle completion and to get cheese to eat while I'm down in the mines/skull cave and to mass-produce gifts. It is never intended as a profitable sideline, it yields dividends in non-monetary forms.

 

Sorry, I saw this earlier and didn't intend to blow it off. Hay and Grass Starter need looked into on costs and cost effectiveness per each as well. I'm about to come into spring again so I can explore this. Since there's only a 25% chanced to turn grass into hay it may be more cost effecient to just fill my 9 silos with hay from Marley. What I need to know is how well grass can spread while being eaten by a herd.

Right now filling my silos for winter with bought hay is going to run me:

1890*50=94,500g.

That may or may not be necessary, but is 600 or so grass starter at 120,000g going to feed my livestock for 3 seasons and fill my silos for winter?

 

In my experience a full barn (or coop for that matter) will be fine if you place 30-40 starters in their fenced area. Animals tend to eat grass closest to the doors, so they will eat a "clean" area over the course of the year in it. Grass grows faster the more you have of it as there is a chance for it to spread to the 8 adjacent tiles every night. To fill those silos until winter, you'll have to cut out areas that are already grown to maximum and arent fed on by your animals, the grass will grow back pretty quickly. Keep that up over the course of the year and you'll be fine~

I tended to leave my animals inside for 5-8 days in spring, until i had the starters spread out quite a bit, then unleash them unto the fodder.


about cost for hay and grass.... even if you get the grass yourself it is kinda a horrible calculation. Even if we start with a fixed area for each building and a fixed need of starters for each fenced zone, the hit your products take for just producing your own grass on land that could be used for crops is horrendeous. Actually, you might be better of using hay from Marnie. The investment cost is 50g/day/animal, and with that a multiple cost of starters, but the area you get to be used for crops etc. would make you way more then what you "loose"

Which doesn't really matter if your farm is not at its maximum capacity, tho. Seeing how placement of buildings on farmland is a bigger trouble on the forest farm, which i play atm, i don't even want to grow grass for my animals. I'm already going with hay 112days/year to maximize the area i can use, and i placed the coop/barn/sheds in the spaces that aren't occupied by valuable farming land. Which in turn made a quite nice looking farm layout even in early year 2 >;3

Anyways, if you buy hay, the cost is 67,200/12 animals/year (or 5,600 per animal per year), which is quite high. 7-8 iridium wool for a sheep, thats 2 weeks with sheperd :/

Infinitly higher if you use grass instead of crops on farmland ><

 

So I doubled checked the wiki and it says hay is 50% chance from grass. I already bought 600 Grass Starter before I checked so we'll see what kind of crop circles I can do with grass.

 

I planted 300 of the grass starter in 3 fields, so aorund 100 per field. Field Alpha grazes 12 sheep and fields Beta and Charlie graze 24 each. Since I know the amount of land I devoted to grazing is considered wasted I figured I might as well unashamedly show that off and then document grass growth after it quits raining with some comparison shots. The 2nd and 3rd have both been rain days so far.

Field Alpha touches the top of the map and Fields Beta and Charlie touch the West, South and East sides respectively. So not only am I wasting space, I'm wasting a lot of it.

 

It looks really awesome though!

 

I...I may have a field Delta ready for at least 1 barn. That will bring me to 6.

 

Alpha is probably double what you need for it, you could probably add another barn to the top without running out of grass. Same for Beta and Gamma, probably.

The closest example i have is a coop filled with 12 bunnies in one of my save (told you im not big on animals xD), Its a reaaaally small area for grass to grow, but it never ran out of food ever.
I think coop animals eat less then barn animals, the thing i always noticed is, that the clean area a full barn with animals eat into a full field of grass is about double the size of a full coop animals. You will probably notice what youll need at the end of the year, everywhere where your animals dont feed will be overgrown with grass, if its double the amount then what is clean you can add another full building~