Farming within Necesse is incredibly useful for multiple purposes. Mainly feeding settlers, but also because food can give a temporary buff like a potion.
Requirements
In order to farm you simply need
- Farmland
- Seeds of crops you want to grow
Anything else is to help the process be more efficient, but not necessarily required. Such as
- Settler Automation
- Fertilizer.
Farmland can be obtained in a few different ways, but the primary way would be by crafting it in a workstation, such as the one the game gives you right as you spawn in.
From there you can place down farmland anywhere you would like, and to pick it back up, you simply hit it with a shovel.
Once farmland is placed, you can left click with any type of seed, and from there, the seeds will slowly grow until they are harvestable.
Automating Harvesting
As long as you have settlers that can do farming as a job task, they will automatically harvest the farmland.
However, they will need somewhere to put the resources. To do this, you would place down a chest (or go to one you have already placed down) and click the green “add inventory to settlement storage” opening a large menu.
This menu is full of options as to what items can or can not be put into chests, acting as a giant whitelist of items for settlers. But for this, we only want to worry about farming related items.
In order for what I would do.
- Configure Storage
- Clear All
- Consumable Drop Down
- Select raw food, or drop down and select individual crops.
You can also make another storage chest specifically for things such as seeds for this, in order to separate storage.
Fertilizer
Fertilizer can be made with a compost bin (made in a workstation) by inserting any 2 compostable materials. (namely, crops, seeds, and even spoiled food) and it will slowly turn into fertilizer.
From there, you can either assign an area to be fertilized by your settlers, or manually fertilize an area yourself occassionally by left clicking the tiles.
You can also buy it from a farmer npc, either in your own settlement, or where ever one may be.
The fertilizer should increase the crop growth speed by 2x. And for my brief testing, seems to last until the crop is ready to be harvested.
Misc Tips
- Using a Cooling box can significantly cut down on spoiling rate of food, however, it would require finding, or making a farm for ice blossoms.
- If you have a trader settler in your settlement, and a shipping chest, you can have the shipping chest be a last priority storage for items such as crops. This means if you ever have an extreme excess of food, you can atleast sell some of it for money.
- Growth speed of crops is affected by how fast in game time moves, meaning sleeping in a bed can cause crops to grow faster.
- Alongside the growth speed, spoiling rate appears to NOT increase with in game time, it seems based on real life time instead. Meaning to have excess crops, sleeping can be a valid strategy.