Talk:Farm Plant

So, I have ideas for the new Farming Strategy Section, but these are very major ideas to the point it would overhaul the section entirely. Basically, it would be splitting it into multiple subsections..

First would be what is currently called Monocropping, which I feel needs a new name, as it is instead talking about minimum effort for sustainable returns, as a strategy for lazy people/players focusing on different aspects of the game, while still wanting some easy food. Maybe call it something like Minimal Farming? still sounds boring, but something along those lines, as it is a general tactic not limited to only growing one type of crop at a time.

Second would be Growing Giant, a basic overview of what would be needed to specifically target growing Giant Crops, pretty basic stuff with some touching on advanced tactics that would be gone over in the next subsection i am proposing, Plant Care.

Plant Care would be mostly an intermediate subsection, with multiple subsections of its own, talking about advanced methods of dealing with things like Nutrients, how much Moisture a crop really needs versus overwatering intentionally to reduce attention needed, like if you were to be leaving camp for a day or two, but still want to keep the crops growing quickly, as well as advanced tools to handle plant Happiness.

The first subsection of Plant Care would be Nutrients, going over both Crop Combinations, and Crop Rotation, two very different tactics requiring different approaches, which might even need their own subsections under Plant Care instead of sharing Nutrients with each other

The second one would be Moisture Management, going into detail about how you only need to water once per stage to satisfy the Moisture need, but watering further would allow you to leave it for a little while, while still growing faster than if you just missed a stage or two entirely. (plant stress slows down growth slightly, in case you didn't know that.. just missing one stress source doesn't affect much.)

While the third, and final one in my current thought process would be called Happiness Gear (Name not final, i think it isn't great, but calling it Happiness Management sounds boring especially if sharing it with Moisture Management.) which would go over the various items you can use to tend plants, touching on the One Man Band, it needing to be used in short bursts to save durability, to going over how to use Shellbells to tend your crops, as well as the Friendly Fruit Fly being the best option available, yet being somewhat difficult to obtain.

@VeralinGTX

I rewrote the Farm Plant article. You said you reverted my edits because of "poor grammar and mass removal of large quantities of information, while not adding much new information beyond improved organization of sections."

People don't have to add information to contribute to a wiki. They can summarize information and remove unnecessary information. For example, I summarized the sections on killjoys, season, family, and overcrowding in 5 short sentences:

Those 5 paragraphs can be summarized in 5 short sentences!

For another example, the words "mass" and "large quantities" in your sentence are redundant. You can remove one of them and your sentence still makes sense. Concise writing saves reading time.

@WX100 /anon

I absolutely agree with people not needing to add information to contribute to a wiki.. to be blunt, the main reason I reverted was the large amounts of unnecessary rewriting... The first section, Farming did not need a rewrite. It gets things across in a short enough manner, while still going into enough details to get across everything.. It is also something you might expect to find in a professional encyclopedia, albeit it could use a few minor grammar edits, while it didn't go over the mechanics of planting, that links to Farm Soil which does.

The Stress rewrite I almost entirely agree with, though needed grammar edits afterwards to better fit the encyclopedia style, it was overall an improvement to organization, since there is very little information in each individual subsection under Stress. I mostly reverted this section simply for the fact that I couldn't revert just the farming section.. Instead I would have done grammar edits.

The summary section i was very neutral about. It was originally worded fairly complex, but sometimes complex is needed.. but at the same time, simple makes it easier to understand the basics.

The Plants section was what i was referring to as "Mass removal of information", as many of those were reduced to one line of information and many of them were left with absolutely nothing, just an info box. There is in fact too little information as well as too much information, which is referred to as info bloat. I don't believe the Plants section was info bloat, besides maybe the onion plant having too much detail on crop combinations, with a new section being made going over crop combinations

The Rewrite of Farming Strategies was to be blunt entirely unnecessary. Additions would have been appreciated, but this was just flat out replacement.. Going over random seeds was unneeded, due to its blatant disadvantages, making specialized seeds section mostly unneeded, especially with most of the information being in the Plants section originally. I liked the table for crop combinations, as it was much better for organization as well as the watering section, though it was sparse for information.

I apologize if this was a bit harsh, but things don't need to change for the sake of changing. there were lots of good edits mixed in with unnecessary edits, and I simply didn't have the time to separate the good edits out. I normally would use the message wall to communicate before doing a one sided revert, but I didn't have that option.

@WX100 /anon @VeralinGTX

I would be in favour of the version of 1 June over the 2 June one. 1 June removed some specifics information that can be useful. For instance, a day was properly defined to be 480 seconds of daylight, rather than the ambiguous 'day', which can mean anything from 120 seconds of day time in spring to 480 seconds of a full day. I also prefer to use seconds over minute since seconds is a SI unit, and the underlying mechanics happen on a second scale rather than minute. The summary of stress, also omitted information, or even provided wrong information, on when stress calculation is done. For instance, if carrot became stage 2 on day 55 dusk, and only became stage 3 on day 57, does it gain season stress for its stage 2?

I consider information on firepit and farm layout to be info blot. dwarf star would have been a better light source that help to crops to grow at night, and using that, the light radius is big enough for the farmer to use any reasonable layout. Even without dwarf star, the farmer can use lantern or miner hat instead, which does not need to worry about nightmare hand. Fuels, before the mass production of rot, is definitely going to be more expensive than light bulb. An experienced farmer would probably not need to watch the crop at night to start with.

There is already a nutrient page, and I would consider having more than 500 words about nutrient on page titled farm plant to be info blot too. compost will hardly enter my recommendation when the farmer is spending at least 3 clicks and 2 seconds to, in the best case scenario, convert 2 rot into 3 rot. The farmer could have simply get more rot by plucking stone fruit bush or even berry bush.

Crop combination should never be more than 3 crops. Combinations of more than 3 crop are just superfluous can be mathematically proven that they are linearly dependent.

The value of pepper vs dragonfruit is team dependent. Some team may value pepper more than dragonfruit because farming 2 tomato for heal may be easier, while warly can mass spice all the food for all the boss fight.

Icebox may be preferable to seed pack because the location of icebox is fixed. a seed pack missing from its original place could be because someone took it and logged with it, it burnt, or a farmer is using it, too many possibilities.

I would think monocropping is a more recognised term that has been used by other farmers rather than minimal farming. While monocropping may not really be only a single crop, minimal farming may not mean as little farming either. using a term to represent idea, is bound to have some distortion, but i think in this case, in terms of recognition by others, number of syllable, number of words, monocropping is still better.

I think the strategy should be geared towards someone with less than 100 hours in DST, if the strategy is not that horrible on an advanced level. Strategies on the bleeding edge, would be a debate and down to different valuation like how much watering can be done at once is a trade off of attention vs excess watering. mentioning the water as once per stage is simpler compared to 4 times at stage 1 and 3, and hopefully should be enough.

I would prefer to omit the section on individual plant info. the valuation of each crops may be too contentious and the superfluous content is just a repeat of the summary table.

I would think mods like geoemetric placement to be pretty much essential for new farmers getting giants

Hougang 3 June 2022

I would not be against returning the title of Minimal Farming to Monocropping, so long as the section does NOT indicate that it is exclusively meant for a single crop, as that is just not the goal. I feel that the state it was in on June 01 was good, and am perfectly happy for it's name to revert back to Mono Cropping.. though hopefully with some discussion over any different changes beyond just the name.

Mentioning the desired audience of an article, is in my opinion something that should not be done in an article.. I make mention that it is a basic strategy, and that is as far that any wikipedia article should go as far as recommendations, as this is not a guide page, it is ultimately a wikipedia page.. I feel pretty solidly that we should exclusively provide definitions as to WHAT the strategies are, not HOW to go about doing them, instead providing the basic goals behind it, and information regarding various tools to do it, while not mentioning direct advantages or disadvantages. I agree with not going into bleeding edge strategies, as those would probably be better suited to a Guide page instead of a page about learning the basic mechanics of farms in DST.

I agree with removal of the individual Plant info section, for similar reasons that you have stated. It simply cannot avoid opinion based edits, as they mostly have a massive variety of uses, and only so much info can be added before it pushes towards info bloat. The summary provides sufficient information and links to decide on what crops to grow.

My primary reason for NOT mentioning mods, is because this is a wikipedia about base game DST, not modded DST. It may be a very popular mod, and may even be very useful, though I do not believe it is REQUIRED to Farm effectively. Mods just should not be mentioned on a Wikipedia Article about game mechanics. Maybe on a separate Guide page, but not directly on the article itself.

Moving forward with edits on this page, I believe that we should first revert to 01 June, then all three of us should go over the sections one by one, mentioning what each of us want to add or change, then discuss before going ahead and doing it. There are just too many people trying to make changes at the same time, so we should discuss in the Talk page before sending the Farm Plant article into chaos. Just a quick note, we all seem to be in very different time zones, so discussion will likely take a while for everyone to make their opinion known.

VeralinGTX Still in June 2nd, 2022. (Currently 6:26 PM for me)

I'd simply like to inform everyone here that there are ways to make this page more readable for everyone involved that you can find here : https://community.fandom.com/wiki/Help:Talk_pages

Following these simple tricks of talk page discussion will make it easier for all of you and for people who want to join the conversation. I don't mean to sound like a smartass, I simply hope this will make things more readable and easy to follow, especially if you're going to talk about multiple different topics

And just to give my opinion on one thing (as I'm really not an expert on farm plants), I really don't think we should be suggesting mods. I don't think there's an official rule about this, but this wiki should be about giving informations about the game only. I think mod suggestions should go into guides and not official pages

Quetiapine (talk) 02:56, 6 June 2022 (UTC)

I agree with the general principle that mods should generally not be recommended. That however, remains as a general principle and is not a hard rule, as everyone here has recognised. As for why I think recommending geometric placement for tilling soil is an exception to this principle is because getting a layman to till the soil, while fulfilling the requirements for family, overcrowding, crop combination is too verbose and unpractical. Currently, the instruction on how to fulfill the family and overcrowding requirements is glaringly missing, that if a noob is copying widely available crop combination, is unable to get their giant crop. When a noob cannot get their giant crops, they are in no capacity to troubleshoot, that the fault is with them or the guide, when it was actually due to the faulty general guide that censored mention of essential mods due to some purist principle.

To disprove my point, you can perhaps try to write an instruction under 50 words that will fulfill the family and overcrowding requirement. The instruction should allow a beginner to dig 36-40 tills on 4 farm turfs, with less than 4 tills destroyed due to tills being too near, with 90% of the crops grown being able to fulfill the family and overcrowding requirement, using widely available crop combination layout, without mods. Bringing in the concept of mods such as geometric placement would be able to achieve the above challenge in under 10 words.

Hougang (talk) 03:33, 1 August 2022 (UTC)

My problem with mods in a wikipedia page is more about how easy it is to slip into talking about Modded Content, which does not belong on the wiki, while ignoring the base game information.

If you cannot accomplish something in the base game, or in the context of a Wiki, the full information of how to do it in the base game has been glossed over to talk about mods instead, I consider that talking about Modded Content, not talking about the base game mechanics. It is so very easy to do that, that it is often easier to just not mention mods at all.

Mentioning that a mod can make things easier on you or otherwise recommending mods, that is perfectly fine to me personally after base game information has been gone over completely, at the end of the Section, or ideally in a separate Section dedicated to that at the bottom of the page.

I agree that tilling mechanics are missing from the Article, but telling people to just use mods is NOT the right way to add the information.

I do feel that it is worth mentioning after the base information, that the mod exists and is helpful, but mods are not something to use INSTEAD of going over the actual mechanics of how to do it.

I will come up with a basic overview of tilling in the next few days, and post that on the talk page, but for the moment I need to get to work in an hour. It is probably worth mentioning that I have actually never used Crop Combinations, I just don't have the experience to include that aspect of things.

VeralinGTX (talk) 15:04, 1 August 2022 (UTC)

It took me awhile, but I have come up with a rough draft of hopefully helpful Tilling instructions to reach 11 Tills on a typical farm plot. I know that you asked for tilling across 4 farm turfs, but people should be able to transfer their understanding to complete bigger projects. Doing it across multiple tiles shouldn't change much.

Just keep in mind that this is definitely a ROUGH draft, not ready to be posted onto the article. Needs grammar edits to read less like a guide, removal of bias in the text, not using You/removing any individual identifiers, and possibly more details before then.

Tilling is more complicated than you might think. Instead of tilling in nice straight rows, you should instead stagger your tills diagonally, one upper, one lower. This allows you to Till quickly, while actively leaving open spaces behind you.

Typical First Pass. 9 Tills with open spaces for more.

You will need to make a second pass to fill the empty spaces you left behind, which will usually bring you up to 11 Tills. Sometimes, there may not be enough open space to place the last two tills easily, so don't be afraid to overwrite your Tills to expand the open space you have to work with.

VeralinGTX (talk) 20:55, 5 August 2022 (UTC)

I have also gone over the Family and Overcrowding Stress sections, to hopefully make them easier to understand. These are almost entirely grammar edits, but I am also posting those to look over.

Also made the realization that 11 Tills are not desirable because of overcrowding.. but the guide DOES reliably get you to 10 along the way.. That will have to be rephrased to call attention to that.

Family. At the end of each growth stage, Plants will check for nearby Crops of the same type. If there are not four of the same Crop within 4 metres, including the one checking, the plant will gain one Stress point.

Overcrowding If there are 11 or more farm plants or weeds on the same tile, all crops on the tile will accumulate 1 stress point at the end of each growth stage.

VeralinGTX (talk) 21:12, 5 August 2022 (UTC)

Tilling 4 contiguous turf is definitely an order of difficulty above 4 single turfs because the adjacent turf affects how close you can till towards the edge. The challenge I have given, tilling 36 holes across 4 turfs suitable for common crop combination layout, is roughly the same difficulty as tilling 16 holes in a single turf in terms of precision requirement.

I left it as common crop layout so that you can search the internet to pick, but for reference, this can be one.

Hougang (talk) 03:35, 9 August 2022 (UTC)

I have made a few attempts and give up after roughly 20-30 minutes of trying. I cannot plant 36 tills onto the 4 farm Tiles. Doing so evidently REQUIRES the use of mods to reasonably accomplish.

With my best efforts, I made it to 32, using far more effort than I would be willing to put into regular gameplay.

If the methods you want to share on the page require mods, please make it very clear that it isn't possible for vanilla players to casually do…

(I am sure SOMEBODY can do it, but it's clearly not easy, and I cannot build a guide for something I can't do myself. I would more strongly object if I believed it literally impossible, instead of just difficult.)

As the initial reasoning was new players struggling to understand overcrowding/family, I intend to improve those sections by making it more clear what the numbers mean.

Family.

At the end of each growth stage, Plants will check for nearby Crops of the same type. If there are not four of the same Crop within adjacent Farm Soil, including the one checking, the plant will gain one Stress point.

Instead of defining what 4 Metres are, put it in easier to understand terms, removing the mostly meaningless numbers. Most players do not know what Metres mean in game. I don't have a way to casually find out, either. I can GUESS that Tilled Farm Soil is separated by roughly a meter.. But that still doesn't tell me much. From a brief google search, I turned up absolutely nothing defining what this means.

Overcrowding

If there are 11 or more farm plants or weeds on the same tile, all crops on the tile will accumulate 1 stress point at the end of each growth stage.

Similar to Family stress, attempted to make it easier to understand. Mostly a grammar edit, I don't really see a way to make this easier. I just don't have anything more to build off of.

VeralinGTX (talk) 18:07, 9 August 2022 (UTC)