Llostsoul alpha farming guide

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This Guide has been archived 22/01/2017

Here is a wonderful farming observation guide provided on the Zomboid forms by "Llostsoul".

Project Zomboid Farming Guide (Steam Beta 2.9.9.17, Survival mode)

-by LlostSoul

I am the type of player who likes to establish a safe house, fortify it as much as possible, and see how long I can survive. I usually spend little time in town- I scavenge what I can carry and move to a "remote" location to set up my base. In order to survive long term however, farming is essential as I do not make many excursions for food. The following is my experience with how farming works.

1st- my methodology:

I play on the assumption that the game map is tilted to the North-East- so, for example, the main highway actually runs North-South on the West side of town, the logging company is West of town, the diner and trailer park is in the North-East section of town, etc. I don't know why I assume this, it just makes more sense in my head. I may be wrong- fair enough. But for the purpose of this guide, please keep this in mind when I use directions.

My base of operations during these tests was the unfinished school in the South-West area of the map. I entered the Western-most building through the open bay doors and set up the farm on the South end of the building. Walls were set up around the farming area (extending south from the eastern wall of the school and east from the southern wall of the school). Doors were placed on the crafted walls- one on the eastern side and one on the southern side. I usually build 2 walls to start, and finish a third wall as farming progresses. I find that with 1 wall, zombies can show interest in what's going on inside. With 2 walls, they usually leave me alone. 3 walls apparently make me invisible!

Please note that I used the TooManyItems v1.5b mod by Milk to spawn nails and planks to help me build faster. I did this so I could start farming as soon as possible (as one of the things I was looking for was whether time of year had any effect on farming). All the other items I used in the games (seeds, trowel, food, etc.) were looted by myself and carried to the location. As a result however, I cannot say whether chopping logs and cutting planks will attract a massive horde of zombies. All I can say is that every time I have arrived at the school there are minimal zombies nearby, and once the walls are up you are safe. You can even run around the school to your heart's content without attracting zombies. Once I hit January 1 on a game I will try yelling from the roof to see if that draws any zombies!

For some reason zombies do not spawn/migrate right outside the walls. You will have to put up with stragglers wandering into your area when you are building the walls (and always lure them outside of the farming area before you kill them), but once the 2 walls are up the massive hordes of zombies never appear right beside the wall. Even the gunshots and helicopter do not draw them to the walls (top 3 items I want to be able to craft: #3- compost bin, #2- wheelbarrow, #1- an anti-aircraft gun to take out that darn helicopter!!!). They will appear, and hang out, just to the east of the school however so be careful when leaving the area. Not very exciting I know, but I was aiming for long-term farming results, not a high zombie body count. :)

As well, if you decide to leave the walled area make sure you open the first crafted door, go through it, then close it. Then go through the second crafted door and close it. Why? I have found that if you have both doors open at the same time the game treats the farming area as a place where zombies can appear. So when you come back to the school, there may be zombies walking around inside your walls.

I build walls around the doors inside the school. I do not barricade those doors as barricading seems to draw zombies more than building walls does. Be aware however, the only exits to the school will be the doors you built. You can always leave another door unblocked but I prefer not having surprises when I'm busy harvesting my crops. Don't forget to build walls to block the open bay door where you first entered!

The unfinished school has a fridge for food storage. It also has a nice couch to sleep on! As well, there are crates in the "gym" and lockers in the shower area that seem to always contain a lot of nails. Finally, you can get up on the roof and have a nice view of the surrounding area to see if there are any zombies around.

There is a bug with the roof however- after accidentally falling off the roof I decided to build a fence along the edge of the roof. Whenever I did that part of the roof would disappear and I would fall to my demise.

Rain barrels were built along the northern wall of the farming area, crates were built along the western wall. 3 crates and 4 water barrels are sufficient (the longest I've seen it not rain is a little over 2 days. Once you start harvesting your cabbages you will get a lot of your water from them, so you will not need to drink much out of the barrels. 4 barrels are more than enough to keep a large garden watered). You want to build the water barrels a couple of days before you start planting crops to give them enough time to fill up with water before you start farming as you need to water your vegetables right after planting them.

What you will need before you start planting:

• 1) A trowel (people complain about how hard it is to find a hammer- try to find one of these!). Do not waste space on shovels- as of the current build they do not remove dead plants nor do they dig the ground.

• 2) 1-3 watering cans. You can have more if you want but more than 5 is not necessary- the presence of water barrels make re-filling watering cans extremely easy. And since you want to start planting as soon as possible, you don't have time to search for a ton of watering cans. If need be, you can water your plants with your water bottle. This is time consuming however as you will have to fill your bottle after every plant that you water. Do not use buckets! There is currently a glitch in the game where every time you use a full bucket to water a plant a multiple of empty buckets appear in your inventory. (Editors note: This has been fixed in the most recent Steam beta patch 2013-11-19) So, if you use 5 full buckets to water your plants you will have 15-25 empty buckets in your inventory (I am not sure of the exact amount of empty buckets that are created but it is not a 1:1 ratio). You may be thinking "great! I can have a million buckets to fill up with water so I don't die of thirst!" First, you don't need buckets of water- you will get more than enough water from cabbages and barrels. Second, you need to store all those buckets somewhere and I personally hate having hundred of buckets uglifying my fortress. And finally, I got killed the first time this happened when all the empty buckets I didn't realize were in my inventory caused me to move at a snail's pace when I was trying to run to get my shotgun.

• 3) Seeds. Do not waste time picking up carrot and radish seeds. They do not grow. They ALWAYS die within a few days of planting them (even at master level farming. The problem seems to be that the game thinks they have no water, even when they are fully watered). Cabbages are going to be your main crop since they grow so fast. Potatoes are also good because they take a "long" time to rot and they reduce hunger the most. Broccoli is the next choice. You can live without tomatoes and strawberries (for reasons outlined below) but I plant them when I want to "role play" (because I doubt I'd stay sane very long in real life eating cabbage, broccoli and potatoes every day).

• 4) 1-2 weeks worth of food to eat while your crops grow. It is also a good idea to go on a berry run to have some backup food for the times when you are between crops. I am presuming however that eventually berries will be made perishable and if you don't mind wasting some vegetables and have the planting space, you can always just plant more vegetables to keep you fed.

Planting your vegetables:

The results outlined here are from 3 different games.

In the first game, vegetables were first planted on August 31 and the game ran until November 3 (the trees were stealing my tomatoes so I went to chop them down. Apparently they had signed an alliance with the zombies because I was invaded shortly thereafter and it was game over). My vegetables were planted as such:

T(omatoes).B(roccoli).S(trawberries).P(otatoes).C(abbage)

T.B.S.P.C _ T.B.S.P.C T.B.S.P.C

There was no space between the vegetables in each row, but there was a space between the 2 groups of vegetables.

Oddly, the very first harvest of each vegetable came a day sooner than subsequent harvests. This was not observed on the other 2 games (and in fact during the second game, the first harvest took longer than the subsequent harvests).

In the second game, vegetables were first planted on August 31 as well (that's just how long it takes me to get to the school with supplies, fortify the place, and get ready to plant) and the game ran until October 15 (this game ended early due to a combination of boredom and disease running rampant). Vegetables were planted as such:

T_B_P_C_S ("_"= a space between the plants) _ T_B_P_C_S _ T_B_P_C_S _ T_B_P_C_S _ T_B_P_C_S

I planted them this way to see if I could limit the spread of disease- this was a spectacular failure as disease was even more prevalent then during the first game.

In the third game, vegetables were first planted on August 30 (I did not go on a berry run, although it took me a very long time to find a trowel) and the game ran until December 1 (I will continue running tests with this game to see what crops do December-March). Vegetables were planted as such:

B.P.C_ _B.P.C B.P.C_ _B.P.C _ _ B_P_C_ _B_P_C

I did not plant Tomatoes as I already had sufficient data on them. Strawberries were not planted so I could see if the spread of disease was slowed in their absence. At first, the results were astounding- there was almost no disease in the game. Then I realized that the developers had added icons for the plants (a water drop for "needs watering", a bug for "fly infestation", etc.) and I thought maybe they had changed how prevalent diseases were. So, I planted 4 strawberry plants to the east and south of my cabbages, 1 space away. It didn't take long for disease to spread to the rest of the vegetables. And once I removed the strawberry plants disease almost disappeared. So it seems that strawberries are still the zombie plants of the garden!

I do note however that there was a lot less rain in this game. I cannot rule this out as a factor for the almost total absence of disease.

On the plus side, the new icons make it a lot easier to determine whether your plants have diseases or need water. They're not perfect as it is sometimes difficult to tell which plant they refer to, but at least they can point me in the general direction.

Not having tomatoes and strawberries to look after, and not having to constantly replant vegetables killed by disease, significantly reduced the amount of time I had to spend tending the vegetables. There were days, between cabbage harvests, when the farm didn't need any looking after. In September alone I had 9 days where the only thing I did was check the water levels of the vegetables. This left a lot more free time of improve the shelter, go on supply runs, fast forward, etc.

An odd thing also happened in the 3rd game- vegetables further east matured quicker than vegetables to the west. I lump this in with the "growing slower along a wall" and "faster/slower maturity for 1st crop" oddities that I have seen- maybe it has an explanation, maybe it is just a result of the game being in the beta stage.

Of note, for the first 2 games I also planted additional crops in order to test other aspects of the game. I had way more food than I could ever eat. For the 3rd game I did not plant any additional vegetables to see if my farm would provide enough food to survive (I strongly suspected it would as I had previously survived until December 15 with a similar amount of vegetables. Sadly that game also ended after my attempt to remove bothersome trees led to zombies steamrolling my home). I ate 2 vegetables (1 of which was a potato when I had them) whenever I was peckish. By October 1 I had 37 broccoli, 59 potatoes, and 46 cabbages in my bags- way more than I could ever eat. I had not touched any of my non-perishable food or berries. This did not however take spoilage into account due to the "magic" bags.

Spoilage would be reduced by staggering planting times. I did not stagger the times I planted the vegetables in my games. Because I was looking at growing times, the effects of diseases on crops, rotting times, etc., I didn't care if I harvested 40 cabbages the day after I harvested 30 potatoes. If I wanted to limit the amount of vegetables that spoiled however I would have staggered the times I planted my vegetables so all the (eg.) cabbages wouldn't have matured at the same time. There's no point harvesting 40 cabbages in one day- a majority of them will rot before you get a chance to eat them. If I were to plant vegetables to minimize spoilage I would plant the first 2 rows, wait 2 days, plant the next 2 rows, wait 2 days, plant the last row. That will still mean that there are times when you cannot eat everything you harvest, but it will minimize the amount of food that is wasted.

Finally, I like to plant my vegetables in the same order (eg. TBPCS) so I can see at a glance which plants are taking longer to mature- if I plant 2 cabbages at the same time and one is growing faster than the other it's an easy clue that the slower growing plant is diseased. It saves time on having to check each plant for problems as it makes comparison easier.

All seed packages contain 50 seeds. Each vegetable takes a different amount of seeds to plant: T-4, B-6, S-12, P-4, B-9. Of note, you need 12 strawberry seeds in your inventory in order to be able to plant a strawberry bush, but it only actually uses 6 seeds. You will be left with the other 6 seeds in your inventory. I presume this is a bug that will be changed.

Vegetables (yes, fine, strawberries and tomatoes aren't vegetables!) reduce Hunger/Thirst by the following amounts: T-10/15, B-15/0, S-5/5 (plus a -10 reduction in unhappiness), P-30/0, C-10/15.

Before I get to the results, here are some tips:

• 1) Plant tomatoes at the north or west end of your farm. Because they grow so tall they will block anything planted immediately to the north or west of them, making it extremely hard to care for those other plants.

• 2) Vegetables right against a non-crafted wall grow slower than vegetables that are not against a wall (I didn't test this against a crafted wall). I have no idea why this is. If you are looking to get some food ASAP, leave a space between the wall and your vegetables. However, planting beside a wall is a good way to help stagger harvests.

• 3) Every time you harvest a vegetable you will have to use seeds to re-plant the vegetable. However, you don't have to re-plant harvested strawberries. Once you harvest the berries the plant remains and starts producing strawberries again. This has a downside as whatever diseases were on the plant when you harvest it remain after harvest.

• 4) Digging is exhausting. This is irrelevant in the vanilla game but if sleeping is changed, or you use a sleeping mod where exhaustion is a factor, you will not be able to dig many plots before you are exhausted.

• 5) When you dig, close your inventory, skills screen, plant information, etc. For some reason having them open when you dig sometimes makes it so you cannot plant vegetables in the place you just dug. If that happens you have to dig in the same spot again. As well, if a plant dies and you want to prepare the location for a new plant, sometimes one dig is not enough. I presume this simulates the act of having to remove the old plant before you can start a new plant. It does get annoying though as sometimes you can dig over and over and the ground is never ready to plant seeds.

• 6) Broccoli takes longer to grow, rots faster, and doesn't yield much more vs. potatoes. So why grow them? It's the only vegetable that you can currently grow that you can make into soup. You'll need a pot of water and a piece of broccoli and you have soup. As of the current build soup does not spoil so it's a good way to preserve broccoli for a long time.

Okay, on to the results.

Maturation:

The first vegetable you plant in a location will always be more disease resistant than vegetables you subsequently plant- as a result the vegetable will be more likely to survive and more likely to produce more food. Do not base your food supply on how much you get from the first harvest as plants will start to catch more diseases the second time you plant them. I can only presume this is a sick, demented attempt by the developers to lure you into farming by saying "look how fast and easy it is to farm!" before they inevitably crush your spirit with disease and dead plants! ;)

Tomatoes and strawberries only have 1 maturation level- they have seeds when they are first ready to harvest. Potatoes, cabbage, and broccoli will be ready to harvest first without seeds, then a day+ later with seeds. Your hunger level, how low you are on seeds, and how diseased the vegetable is will determine when you harvest. Once you have a stockpile of seeks you can freely harvest vegetables before they are seed bearing, thereby decreasing the time between harvests. As an idea of how quickly seeds can build up, on my third game I started with 50 potato, 50 broccoli, and 100 cabbage seeds. By November 11 I had 406 potato, 308 broccoli, and 265 cabbage seeds.

Healthy crops will mature in the following times (the effect of disease on maturation will be discussed later):

Tomatoes: Ready to harvest- 15 days

Strawberries: Ready to harvest- 15 days Note- I never had a strawberry plant survive for 2 harvests in a row so I have no idea if they take the same amount of time for each subsequent harvest!

Broccoli: Without Seeds- 14-15 days Seeds- an additional 3 days (i.e. broccoli will say "ready to harvest" after 14/15 days; 3 days after that it will be seed bearing broccoli)

Potatoes: Without Seeds- 12-13 days Seeds- an additional 3 days

Cabbage: Without Seeds- 5 days Seeds- an additional 1 day

The reason why broccoli and potatoes are x-x days is that during the tests I tried to sleep at 8pm every day. As a result, my "days" are not counted as a 24 hour period. By "day" I mean "I planted it on Sept 16 and it was ready to harvest on Sept 21". So, if you plant a potato at 4am one day, you might not have to wait to the 13th day for harvest- you may be able to harvest late on day 12. As I was already sleeping late in the day some of the vegetables may have been ready to harvest before I woke up the next morning (and yes, I realize that at higher farming levels you can see how long it takes for a plant to reach the next growing stage. That would entail watching each plant as it changed stages to determine the exact time between stages, factoring in the health of the plant [because the "time to next stage" varies with the health of the plant and diseases], factoring in at which levels it reaches seed and non-seed bearing maturity, etc. If someone wants to do that, great. Watching plants grow and writing down harvest times, etc., was boring enough thank you!).

As you will notice, cabbages mature very quickly. They will become your main crop because you can get so many of them in a short period of time and they decrease thirst as well as hunger. The downside is they "rot" quickly (throughout this guide I use "rot" to mean the point at which eating the vegetable will have a negative effect on happiness. It takes a lot longer for the vegetable to gain the "rotten" trait).

For my first game, I had the following amount of harvests in around 10 weeks: Tomatoes- 8 harvests; Broccoli- 9 harvests; Strawberries- 7 harvests; Potatoes- 9 harvests; Cabbages- 30 harvests (keep in mind that I had 4 of each plant going at one time, except for strawberries which I gave up on because of the disease. So 8 harvests of tomatoes means each plot gave me 2 harvests in the 10 week period). I tried to replant a crop either the same day that I harvested it, or the next day. The reason why the amount of harvests does not match the maturation times is either because disease lengthened the harvest time or the crop died before it could be harvested.

For my second game, I had the following amount of harvests in around 6 weeks: Tomatoes- 12; Broccoli- 7; Potatoes- 8; Cabbages- 21; Strawberries- Not one of my strawberries survived long enough to bear fruit. This was with 5 plots of each vegetable.

For my third game, I had to following amount of harvests in 3 months: Broccoli- 25; Potatoes- 26; Cabbages- 68. I started with 6 plots of each vegetable but cut back to 4 plots of cabbages at the start of November.

Yield:

How many vegetables you get per harvest varies significantly depending on the health of your plant as well as whether the plant has a disease. The time of year did not seem to affect the yield, nor did my farming level.

For my first game I had the following yields:

Tomatoes- Tomatoes are currently bugged. I received 1 tomato and 2 seeds every harvest. At this level you will run out of seeds rather quickly.

Strawberries- The average amount of strawberries/harvest was 9.43. 11 seems to be the maximum amount you can get per harvest.

Broccoli- The average amount of broccoli/harvest was 7. 8 seems to be the maximum amount you can get per harvest.

Potatoes- The average amount of potatoes/harvest was 6.89. 9 seems to be the maximum you can get.

Cabbages- Average 4.44. Low 1, high 7. 8 seems to be the maximum.

I did not include in the averages the harvests that did not yield any vegetables. For the 10 weeks I had 1 tomato, 2 broccoli, 3 potatoes, and 1 cabbage not yield anything when I harvested them. This is all attributable to disease.

So, for the 10 weeks I played, with 4 plots of each plant, I received 7 tomatoes, 66 strawberries, 63 broccoli, 62 potatoes, and 120 cabbages. Yes, that is highly unrealistic. However, as fast as they grow, vegetables spoil just as fast so it balances out.

You also get seeds if you harvest a vegetable when it is in its seed bearing stage. Other than tomatoes, you always get 3 seeds per vegetable harvested.

For my second game I had the following yields:

Tomatoes- Same as first game.

Strawberries- None

Broccoli- Average 6.57.

Potatoes- Average 7.

Cabbages- Average 4.67.

During the 6 weeks I had 1 tomato, 2 broccoli, 1 potato, and 7 cabbages not yield anything. All of them had "DWF" (see below).

During the 6 weeks I received 12 tomatoes, 46 broccoli, 56 potatoes, and 98 cabbages.

For my third game I had the following yields:

Broccoli- Average 7.16.

Potatoes- Average 6.73.

Cabbages- Average 4.32. During the 3 months I only had 1 broccoli and 1 potato not yield anything- both of them had DWF.

During the 3 months I received 179 broccoli, 175 potatoes, and 294 cabbages! So, while the yield/harvest remained similar to the first 2 games there were significantly more harvests (as disease did not delay harvest nor did it kill plants). I ate approximately 4 vegetables a day and I only got "hungry" when I wasn't paying attention- otherwise I was never more than peckish. For the 86 days that I was eating my harvested vegetables (until my first cabbage crop was ready I ate perishable food that I had looted) I ate approximately 344 vegetables. That left 304 vegetables uneaten (I had 2 hiking bags completely full of vegetables and was filling up a crate with the leftovers). As you can see, 2 people can easily be fed with this farm.

Disease:

For this guide I lump all negative effects on crops as "disease".

When you plant a vegetable you need to water it. Do not presume that because it is raining when you plant your seeds that your crop will get enough water. It is always safest to fully water your vegetable when you first plant it.

As noted, you can use your water bottle to water your plants. I do this when I have only a few plants to water. When you have a large amount of plants to water however, it is more economical to use watering cans. If the water level of your vegetable gets too low, the plant will die. You will see this most often when you wake up as your plants will have gone without water for a amount of hours. Check your plants before you go to sleep and water them if they need it (especially plants with flies).

The diseases are:

Mildew-

Makes your plants take longer to mature. It will only have a small effect on yield and will only rarely kill your plants by itself. It is potentially very lethal however if combined with the other diseases as it gives diseases and lack of water a longer period of time to kill your vegetable.

Most of the time mildew adds an extra day or two to maturation. However, I have had cabbages that took an extra 7 days to mature because of mildew.

Pest Flies-

Makes your crops require more water. If your plants have flies you will be watering them every day, as opposed to every few days with a healthy plant. It is essential to water plants with flies before you go to sleep as they can easily die of thirst before you wake up.

Devil's Water Fungi ("DWF")-

This is the plant killer. Most of the non-strawberry plants that died in my games had DWF (stupid strawberries don't seem to need a reason to die!) . It also significantly affects yield. All of the times I received no vegetables when I harvested, and most of the time when I only received 1 or 2 vegetables, were with plants that had DWF.

If you have a plant that has mildew, flies, and DWF, it's pretty much a lost cause- there is a very high likelihood that the plant will either die before harvest or will give no vegetables when harvested. If it's early in the growth cycle it is best to simply start over. If your plants have all three and are ready to harvest (without seeds), do not wait for the seeds- harvest them immediately as it is better to hopefully get 1 or 2 vegetables as opposed to having your plant die before it reaches the seed stage.

In theory, diseases will jump from plant to plant. To avoid this, you should either keep space between each vegetable or plant a amount of small gardens instead of one large garden. This is particularly the case with strawberries as their diseases do not go away when harvested. In reality however, I have found that spaces between plants don't make a difference. The only reliable way to minimize disease is to not plant strawberries. As noted earlier, since standing outside for a short time gets rid of boredom (even in the rain as my boredom will disappear before I have a chance of catching a cold), and without boredom I don't get unhappy, a food source that gives minimal nutrition and water, and is a major pain to grow, is pretty worthless.

Freshness:

The final factor to take into account is how long a vegetable will stay fresh (when not inside a working fridge). I tested inside crate storage vs. outside crate storage vs. main inventory. There was no difference. I initially got "excited" because the storage times seemed to differ between inside and outside, and between plants (eg. a tomato would take longer to spoil inside but a potato would take longer outside). I thought "wow! The developers put a lot of time into vegetable spoilage!" As the game played out however, it became evident that any differences were just "glitches" in my first play through (although I still say "wow" about all the hard work the developers have put into this game ;]).

Of note, in the current build vegetables do not spoil when they are stored in bags. I do not know if this is the case for bags that are no longer in your inventory, but I had vegetables in my equipped backpack for 2 months and they remained fresh the entire time. Very useful for people who want to test farming and don't want to spend time looking for other food!

My biggest problem with the entire farming system is when vegetables rot. Every single vegetable rots at midnight. They take a few days to rot but they will always turn rotten at midnight. Regardless if I harvest it at 1am or 11pm, the vegetable will rot at midnight. And yes, I did in fact build a crate beside my couch and had the inventory open when I slept so I could confirm his. I do this in the name of Project Zomboid science not because I enjoy it!

As a result, I cannot say that a vegetable will take X amount of hours to rot. All I can say is that on the X amount of midnights after harvest, your vegetable will rot. That said, this is the amount of midnights that a vegetable can stay fresh:

Tomato- 5 Broccoli- 5 Strawberry- 3 Potato- 8 Cabbage- 3

Conclusions:

I stopped planting tomatoes because on the current build they are not worth it. I know in previous builds I was getting 3, 4, 5 tomatoes per harvest so I presume it will be changed in the future. As of right now however, if you're looking to maximize food you shouldn't waste time with tomatoes.

Likewise strawberries- since they get diseased so quickly, and die so often, they are not worth growing if all you want is food. As well, the amazing ability of strawberries to spread their diseases to all your other vegetables makes farming unproductive and frustrating.

Potatoes and cabbage will be your main food source- cabbages because they grow quick, and potatoes because they give you so much nourishment and take a long time to rot.

Keep in mind that it takes a lot of time to maintain a healthy garden. A good portion of many days, especially when you are just starting to plant your garden and when it is harvest time, will be spent looking after your vegetables. When multiplayer comes out groups will definitely need a dedicated gardener (or 2) to keep everyone fed. I grasp the concept that since the game is beta, much of this information may change before the final version of the game is released but I hope this guide is of some use while people wait for the final version. Feel free to use/distribute/quote/pretty up this guide as you wish. Please don't ask me to attempt to replicate any part of this guide- keeping track of every little detail of every vegetable I planted surprisingly takes a lot of the fun out of the game. Now, if you don't mind, I need to go take care of some trees that are getting on my nerves!

-LlostSoul