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    Farthest Frontier

    Checkout the Farthest Frontier Official Farming Guide for basics on farming.

    "While not the only method of producing food in Farthest Frontier, crop fields are one of the most effective. Anyone that’s ever contended with nature can attest that planting crops is not as simple as setting seeds in a patch of dirt and calling it done, and Farthest Frontier respects that. Proper care and maintenance and even soil mixture can make the difference between a bountiful yield and one choked out by disease and weeds." - Crate Official Farming Guide

    Farming is a complex but rewarding part of Farthest Frontier. Providing vast amounts of food and raw materials, it is necessary to reach large populations and provide the food variety demanded by citizens.

    Crop Properties

    Yield

    Crop Information view - detailing most crop properties

    This determines the base value of how much of the crop you get when you harvest it, with all other factors affecting this base value. The higher the better!

    The displayed rating does not show total produce harvested, but rather the ratio of yield per growth time required (e.g. both beans and peas have a rating of 6, but beans have an average yield of 11 units per tile compared to the faster growing peas' 8 units per tile, but almost the same yield per day and thus, the same rating of 6).

    Frost & Heat Tolerance

    This determines the likelihood that your crops will suffer frost/heat damage. Crops that have a low frost tolerance will likely suffer frost damage if planted early in the year, while crops with a low heat tolerance will suffer heat damage if planted in the summer.

    Grow Time

    This is an unchangeable value that determines how much space crops take in the growing year, and is the main hard-limited on your crop cycle designs. Each year has a total of 270 workable days, and all crops planted in that year must fit into that window (unused space is just idle time). The goal of a good crop rotation design is to minimize idle days while respecting all other factors.

    Fertility dependence

    This determines how strong of an effect the field fertility will have on the final yield. Crops that have a low fertility dependence will not be overly affected by the field fertility, and vice-versa.

    Fertility Impact

    This conveys the relative impact that crop will have on the field fertility. The numeric impact of a crop's planting on field fertility isn't directly correlated with this number and instead uses a complex mix of characteristics not yet confirmed (late vs on-time planting, current field fertility, etc.).

    It is recommended to review the crops table later in this guide to find effective fertility impact per-crop.

    Weed Suppression

    Weed Suppression is a measure of a crop's impact on the speed at which weeds grow on crop fields.

    Crops like Buckwheat with maximum suppression ratings will halt the growth of weeds, while Carrots and Leeks will allow weeds to grow at maximum speed.

    NOTE: Suppression of weeds slows/stops new weed growth but does not reduce weed levels, only field maintenance reduces weed levels.

    Rockiness Resilience

    The higher the rockiness resilience the less the rockiness of the field will affect your final yield.

    Soil Preference

    Each crop has a soil preference, yielding a 10% yield bonus if the soil composition of the field is in the green zone of the crop, down to a 10% yield loss if the soil composition lies outside in the red zone

    Note: This property is not visible in the crop information view, it is only visible once you add the crop to your rotation and click on the crop.

    Make New Fields


    Each square requires labor to create for the first time. 44 Labor per square.


    When you expand a field currently, you do not get to reuse the labor from the original field.

    Length Width Area Total Labor
    5 5 25 1100
    10 5 50 2200
    10 10 100 4400
    12 12 144 6336

    Crop List

    Crop Resource Output Yield (max 10) Avg. Harvest Per Tile Frost Tolerance (max 10) Heat Tolerance (max 10) Rockiness Resilience (max 10) Weed Suppression (max 10) Grow Time (days) Impacts Fertility (%) Fertility Dependence (max 10)
    Beans Beans (category) 6 11 0 10 10 2 125 +1 6
    Pea Beans (category) 6 8 10 0 8 0 92 +1 4
    Buckwheat Grain 7 11 0 10 10 10 101 -2 4
    Wheat Grain 9 22 7 10 10 2 160 -6 10
    Rye Grain 8 20 9 10 10 7 160 -5 7
    Carrot Root Vegetables 8 13 10 3 3 0 103 -2 6
    Turnip Root Vegetables 6 8 10 5 5 4 81 -2 6
    Flax Flax 6 12 6 10 8 2 135 -3 9
    Cabbage Greens 9 17 10 10 10 3 125 -4 9
    Leek Greens 10 25 10 10 8 0 160 -5 10
    Clover N/A 5 (not harvestable) 8 10 10 10 6 96 +3 4

    Yield Calculation

    The crop yield display, accessible by hovering over the (i) button next to "Crop Yield" in the farm menu. This view is helpful to determine what factors are affecting your crop yield

    Fertility

    Factors into the final yield you will get from your crops. The higher your fertility, the more stuff you will get when you harvest.


    Fertility can be increased by:

    • Planting fertility-positive crops (clover, peas, beans) (~2-5 gain per season)
    • Applying compost to your farms (10 gain per application on a 10x10 field)
    • Grazing livestock on fields planted with grain or root vegetables. This is also supposed to work with clover but this is bugged as of patch 0.7.5b.


    Fertility is decreased by:

    • Planting fertility-negative crops (most crop types)


    The exact amount crops will affect fertility is a combination of the fertility impact modified by the initial land fertility. This means that initially unfertile land will always be harder to make fertile as it will permanently debuff the fertility gain rate and increase the fertility decay.

    Weed Level

    Factors into the final yield you will get from your crops. The higher the weed level of your field, the lower the yield from your crops

    Weed level passively increases as time goes on, and the speed is affected by the weed suppression of the crops you plant.

    Weed level is reduced by performing field maintenance

    Rocks

    Factors into the final yield you will get from your crops.

    Rockiness is reduced by performing field maintenance

    Soil Bonus

    Soil Bonus display. White marker shows the current soil composition of this field, while gold is the target soil level your farmers will attempt to get the field to (movable using the arrows on either side). The Green/Yellow/Red colours mark the soil tolerance of the selected crop

    The soil you plant a field in will lie somewhere on the scale from very clay-like to very sand-line. . You can change the soil composition at the cost of clay/sand.

    Changing the soil composition cost resources + consumes workhours, so it is inadvisable to plant crops that have extremely different soil preferences. However in most cases they will differ a little, so it is best to adjust the soil composition to match either the midpoint of all the crops in the 3-year cycle or closer to the main crop you want to get a yield bonus from.

    Other Mechanics

    Disease

    Every crop is susceptible to different diseases, which will significantly affect the yield of those crops. Disease can also spread to neighboring fields, and persists through planting seasons. If left untreated, the disease will grow stronger and have a stronger affect on the yield + be harder to remove. Most diseases affect more than one crop type, which make it advisable to diversify your crops such than a single disease cant spread through all your fields


    Each disease functions differently in its method of spread and how to deal with it, but in general:

    • Make 1 of your 3 planting years a "rest" year (i.e. only perform maintenance + plant clovers) so that the crop diseases can die out.
    • Plant crops that do not have any overlapping diseases in alternate years (e.g. wheat and leeks) such that a disease affecting one will die out when the other is planted.
    • In the case of a disease that had taken a strong hold it may be necessary to leave the fields completely barren for more than a year until the disease is completely removed.
    Crop Diseases*
    Name Affects Crop Loss (at max%) Spread Chance (at max%) Spread Distance (m) (at max%)
    Clubroot Turnip, Cabbage 50 10 30
    Leaf Spots Turnip, Cabbage 40 30 80
    Rye Rust Rye 90 90 200
    Wheat Rust Wheat 90 100 200
    Blotch Wheat, Rye 60 90 100
    Root Knots Wheat, Rye 30 10 30
    Flax Wilt Flax 30 40 80
    Flax Rust Flax 45 60 200
    Powdery Mildew Bean, Pea, Buckwheat, Carrot 30 70 100
    Bean Brown Spot Bean 60 30 50
    Bean Wilt Bean, Pea 50 10 30
    Yellow Dwarfing Wheat, Rye 30 50 100
    Aster Yellows Wheat, Carrot, Buckwheat 50 50 100
    Stem Rot Buckwheat, Bean, Pea 60 20 50
    Leek Blight Leeks 35 60 100
    Pink Root Leeks 12 20 50

    *Some values may vary depending on difficulty settings

    Rot

    If crops are not harvest within a 25-30 day window of reaching maturity they will rot in the field, so it is important than farmers are available to harvest at the end of a crop season. It is also advisable to stagger the harvest time of your crops across the different fields, so that farmers are able to attend to each field with enough time to harvest.

    Farming Strategy

    Crop Rotation Design

    When designing any crop rotation, you will be looking to achieve the following:

    • Minimize Idle time. Some unused time is inevitable with most rotations, and can actually be useful to ensure your farmers are not overly busy at any point of the year such that they missing planting/harvest time.
    • Maintain a positive fertility field rating. This is done by ensuring across all 3 years, the sum of the fertility impact of all your crops is greater than 0. Generally this will means planting things like clover/peas/beans to offset your other crops. A sub-zero sum is acceptable if you plan to fertilize or graze livestock during your clover seasons.
    • Keep weed levels down if planting anything other than buckwheat by incorporating 1 field maintenance season somewhere in your 3-year rotation
    • Respect the seasonality of the crops planted to minimize frost/heat damage. There is some flexibility, but generally crops can be grouped up into 3 overlapping categories
      • Early Spring: Pea, Rye, Carrot, Turnip, Cabbage, Leek, Clover
      • Late Spring: Wheat, Flax, Beans, Buckwheat
      • Summer: Beans, Buckwheat, Wheat, Rye, Flax, Cabbage, Leeks, Clover
    • Reduce the chance of disease by planting crops that are not affected by similar diseases and/or by introducing gap/maintenance years into your rotation (where 1 of the 3 years does not grow that main crop to give the disease a chance to disappear)
    • Avoid combining crops that have vastly different soil preferences in the same field. This is not an extremely important metric (particularly because you can change the soil composition permanently at the cost of clay/sand) but it can affect your overall yield by +-10%


    The exact crops you plant will depend on your settlement needs:

    • Root Vegetables store well and can feed livestock in the winter
    • Greens and Beans are needed in your settlers diet to prevent diseases like scurvy
    • Grains are necessary in the production of bread, beer, and to feed livestock
    • Flax is needed for making clothes

    Rotation Staggering

    Because a field can be set to plant unique crops in a 3 year period, Generally it will be best to employ 3n (where n is any multiplier like 1,2,3) (e.g. 3, 6, or 9) fields for any single rotation, as this will ensure you get the same crops harvested every year. This is accomplished by setting each field do use a different combination of the 3 years in the base rotation.

    Crop Rotation Example
    Field 1 Field 2 Field 3
    Year 1 Crops Maintenance Crops
    Year 2 Crops Crops Maintenance
    Year 3 Maintenance Crops Crops

    Field Preparation

    The yield of your crops will affect the fertility impact from that season (needs confirmation), so ensuring a high yield will also make it easier to keep up fertility. Likewise this works the other way - if you field fertility is low, you will have a lower yield, resulting in a worse impact to fertility, creating a downward spiral.


    Therefore it is important that before you being planting useful crops (things than can be gathered), that you prepare your field.

    This will involve:

    • Getting Rockiness down to 0%
    • Getting Weeds down to 0%
    • Getting Fertility as high as possible (at least > 60%)


    Start with a maintenance year when your field is first build to address weed/rockiness levels as well as fertility. As a standard 2x field maintenance + 1x Clover, but if fertility is already high you can do 3x Field Maintenance seasons.

    Based on the rotations you want to go for, you can either keep running fertility-positive configurations to get your field fertility up or if its already adequate switch to fertility-neutral rotations.

    General Tips

    • The first year after building a field focus on 2-3 seasons of field maintenance (or 2x field maintenance + 1x clovers if the fertility is low)) so that the next year you can setup your proper 3 year rotation without having to worry about getting the field state to normal levels over many rotations
    • Peas can be serve as a great fertility-boosting crop as they can be planted in the earliest part of the year AND will still allow a clover and a maintenance season in the same year. This is currently one of the best fertility-boosting year designs that still has a maintenance season.
    • Consider the timing of your different crops and when they keep your farmers busy. The start of a crop season is busy with planting, the end with harvesting - so you want to make sure your farmers don't have too many conflicting things to do at any one point of the year across all your fields
    • Plan to graze livestock on your fields when grains or root vegetables are growing, as this will boost your field fertility and provide fodder for the livestock. Since the livestock grazing area is 10x10 it is advisable that your field size is standardized to at least this size. Note that grazing on clover is no longer possible as of patch 0.7.5.
    • Every crop has a preferred soil composition - so you want to plant similar (or close) soil preferences in the same fields
    • Crops that have a high weed suppression will not require more than 1 field maintenance season per 3-year rotation, so you can instead focus on clover seasons to keep the fertility high). Likewise crops that have a low weed suppression will require (usually) 2 seasons of field maintenance per 3-year rotation
    • Rockiness Resilience is really only an important trait if you intend to plant immediately after your field is built, as you can get the rockiness down to 0 quite quickly by only performing field maintenance for the first year or two, and it will stay low with very little maintenance after that
    • Farmers will prioritize the construction of a new field over working existing fields, meaning that you might miss a few harvests while the new field gets setup. You can get around this by pausing construction of the new field during planting/harvest times (clover season is great too as there’s no harvest) and unpausing during growth phases.
    • No Matter the size of your field adding compost to it will always apply the same fertility boost. This makes using compost on large fields way more efficient. Use the maximum amount of field expansions to increase this benefit even further if you have enough workers.

    Example Rotations

    Fertility-positive rotations

    These rotations are useful if you need to bring up the fertility level of your fields while are the same time producing some food, but are not efficient once your fertility level is high due to their relatively low output.

    Clover Fertility Only

    This rotation is completely unproductive but will raise the fertility level of your fields faster than anything else. You can also graze livestock on this rotation year round for an extra fertility boost.

    Peas + Clovers + Maintenance

    You can run this rotation to generate small amounts of beans but mainly to rapidly grow your field fertility. Once fertility is at desired level, you can swap to a fertility-neutral rotation for more yield

    High Fertility Green and Beans

    Use 3N fields with rotation staggering

    This rotation will generate lots of Greens and Beans (lasting through the winter) while steadily growing your field fertility

    High Fertility Flax

    Use 3N fields with rotation staggering

    This is a good flax rotation that will also steadily grow your field fertility

    Beans + Roots + Rye

    Use 3N fields with rotation staggering

    This rotation ensures a positive fertility while providing adequate beans for villager disease prevention, root vegetable for long term storage and preservation and rye for grains. This gives a +1 to fertility over the course of the rotation.

    Beans + Roots + Flax

    Use 3N fields with rotation staggering

    This rotation gives a high positive fertility rating and provides beans and roots for long term storage and flax for clothing. This gives +3 to fertility over the course of the rotation.

    Fertility-neutral rotations

    These rotations are more efficient but require your fertility level to already be high (>70%) as they do not passively grow the fertility level (indeed if you get bad RNG the level may go down requiring some compost to get back to desired levels)

    Leeks

    Use 3N fields with rotation staggering

    This is a good rotation if you need to get generate a lot of greens, as leeks are very productive. This is also a good rotation to use both early and into the late game on your non-grain producing fields for a source of greens

    Productive Greens and Beans

    Use 3N fields with rotation staggering

    This is a good rotation if you need to get generate greens but also need to make them last over the winter, as beans have lower spoilage rate than other greens. You will need to compost very infrequently.

    Root Vegetables

    Use 3N fields with rotation staggering

    This rotation produces lots of spoilage-resistant root vegetables from early spring summer, which is a good choice if you are suffering spoilage related food issues, and can be further canned if glassmaking industry is setup.

    Sustained Rye

    Use 3N fields with rotation staggering

    This is a grain-producing rotation that is mostly self-sustaining (tiny drop in fertility that can be compensated for by infrequent compost application) . Excellent Rotation to use before you have large amounts of compost available.

    Fertility Negative but Productive Rotations

    These rotations are highly productive but require regular applications of composting to maintain fertility

    High-Yield Wheat/Rye + Leeks with Compost

    Use 3N fields with rotation staggering

    Note: You will need to supplement with Compost every two years to keep fertility high. You can opt to replace the Rye for Wheat for more yield but will need to apply compost every year

    Gameplay Updates [Show/hide]

    Link to full Version History page

    0.7.5

    • Fixed an issue where farmers would prioritize Apiaries over building, maintaining and planting/harvesting fields. Towns with an excessive amount of Apiaries may find a reduction in Honey/Wax production as a result.
    • Fixed an issue with assigning Farmers to Crop Fields.
    • Fixed an issue where farmers may become unable to access crop field storage and end up stockpiling several harvests.
    • Fixed an issue where if there were no farmers assigned when field maintenance starts, adding farmers after the fact would cause the maintenance to get skipped.
    • Fixed an issue where if a game was loaded when field maintenance was in progress, the maintenance would be halted.
    • Fixed an issue where Clover could be exploited for mad fertility gainz.
    • Fixed an issue where expanded fields did not update the affected fertility area until the game was reloaded.
    • Fixed an issue where expanded fields had the affected fertility area off-set from where it should be.
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