[Sustainability] Modern Survival v63 (Volume 1): FARMING, UPDATED

ned · 2018-03-12 16:47:35

This is a periodical where the most up-to-date survival techniques and methods will be illustrated and posted. Feedback and criticism are appreciated! Letters to the editor can be submitted via reply on this thread.

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With the carrot-pocalypse coming to an end after this weekend's update, players have invented new ways of farming that defy the old standards, while other players have come up with unique habitation patterns to keep civilization going. In this volume of Modern Survival, we start things up by highlighting farming techniques, past and present, as well as some fun ideas about future techniques.

FOUR TO FEED, THREE TO SEED:
This classic farming technique helped amplify the output of many a farm. First mentioned in the forums by Hallon and illustrated by secondchild, this technique optimized efficiency by hacking how it takes 3 times as long for carrots to seed than to grow. Uncle Gus calls it "brilliant!"

OUT WITH THE OLD, IN WITH THE NEW:
However, as the game ages, so too will its rules. Versions 62 and 63 brought new farming mechanics as well as new content. For instance:
> Compost piles made from a bowl of mashed berries and carrot now provide 3 rows of soil, instead of 1.
> Seeding carrots use up soil, requiring 1 berry bush for every 3 seeding plots to be renewable.
> Seeding carrots provide 10 new seeds for each row, increasing seeding carrot potency.
> Seeding carrots grow in 9 minutes instead of 14.
> Wells and cisterns have been added. Wells are basically constructible ponds, and cisterns are basically mass water storage.
> Temperature mechanics have been "changed." - per Jason, possibly influencing food demand and the effect of clothing.

(Opinion) DOMESTIC BERRY BUSHES? STILL NOT WORTH IT:
Now that composting is necessary for carrot farming, and berry bushes are necessary for composting, is it now worth the time and effort to plant domestic gooseberries? I'm still not sold on it. Think of it this way: a vigorous domestic gooseberry bush will, in one hour, produce 6 gooseberries simultaneously! However, you only need 4 berries to make a bowl of gooseberries for composting. Wild gooseberries have the same production capacity, with the major difference being that wild bushes generate berries once every 10 minutes. In other words, when timed correctly, a wild gooseberry bush can generate 3 new soil every 40 minutes instead of every hour. That's 33% more efficient! Perhaps this would help in wetland farms, but most farms wouldn't need that.

MICROFARMING:
Who says farms need to be super-efficient? To optimize for long term success, they need to be ready for the next generation. With xoomorg's idea of wetland-specific microfarms, the goal becomes having a small area for new travellers to advance through the tech tree quickly in the comfort of a pre-built guaranteed food source.

THE NEW GOLDEN RATIO:
Worked out by PastaFasta55, the new epitome of optimization comes in the form of the good old 4:1 ratio. Best of all, it's intuitive!This optimization takes advantage of how seeding now takes twice as long as harvesting (while providing double the seeds) to grow 4 carrot rows twice for every seeding carrot (BONUS! You have one seed leftover for giggles). Sustainability worked out here.

Graphic below:

PUT SOME CLOTHES ON:
As can be seen above, the benefits of clothes are undisputed. Even putting on a loincloth and a hat (3 furs, 4 milkweed total) can reduce your food intake by 33%. When you add a shirt to it (4 furs, 2 milkweed extra), you've cut your food intake by half. That's crazy!

PAYING THE PIED PIPER (EDIT: hehehe, OH THE IRONY):

RETRACTED wrote:

I've been hearing lots of things about the usefulness of pies. Plutocrats with their wool sweaters boast of their resourcefulness while chowing down on their pies like they own the world. Well the world is laughing at you, because pies are useless! With the 4:1 farming ratio, you produce roughly 36 food per min, while using 1.1 water per min and 8 plots. Water is the critical bottleneck right now, so optimizing for that will be, well, optimal.
Carrot pies provide 32 food, and berry-carrot pies provide 76 food (counting the extra berries). That means, to equal the same food output as raw carrot farming, you'd have to make 1.13 carrot pies per min OR 0.48 berry-carrot pies per min. The dough from wheat alone requires 2 water units, so we can rule out carrot pies (as water used would be greater than 1.1 per min). Factoring in berry farming (which uses 1 water more per pie), we arrive at 1.46 water per pie (still doesn't factor in water for carrots). Rabbits might overcome this problem, but do you really want to harvest 30 rabbits every hour? How is that sustainable?
So my point is proven, I believe, that pies are less efficient than farms. Granted, if the food bonus is lowered, then pies MIGHT become more efficient. But how efficient? Some preliminary calculations tell me that the bonus would have to be ELIMINATED before it becomes a better option. So, in the interim: enjoy your carrots, plebs.

CORRECTION:

I will be posting this in a future update, but the discussion in the forum and more detailed calculations have shown me that pie-making outright more water-efficient than carrot-farming. However, pie making (when using domestic wheat) can create intense soil requirements (especially carrot pies, or berry pies of any kind). Modern Survival emphasizes sustainability in reverence of the Tenets, and as such, composting soil for those pies can become especially water-demanding.

If you have more than 6 ponds within 20 seconds of you, and you aren't hurting for wild berry bushes, rabbits, or compost: than by all means make pies. Pies, in terms of productivity and ease of use, have loads of benefits that carrots don't have. You can stuff 3 pies in a backpack and be a shepherd, trapper, forger, without the inconvenience of interrupting your work every 3 minutes to grab more food. I believe I've done the community a disservice by not emphasizing the role of sustainability in my calculations.

Also, wool keeps you warm less effectively than fur. I hadn't done any research on it and just assumed it was a higher-tier clothing option. I was also incorrect on that.

[sarcasm]If you're interested in learning how to make a fool of yourself (its really quite fun),[/sarcasm] then please read the thread in its entirety. I deeply appreciate the challenging discussions from Matok, Commoners, Potjeh, PastaFasta55, Tebe, and asterlea. With intelligent discussion, integrity, and a desire for truth, we can conquer all problems together!

Last edited by ned (2018-03-16 18:26:32)

Zeromus · 2018-03-12 17:06:31

Excellent summary, and readable. I have subscribed!

evan.woods · 2018-03-12 17:32:13

Awesome graphic!

Hans Lemurson · 2018-03-12 17:46:01

How would this work out if you wanted to grow wheat for pies and domestic straw?

Are reeds plentiful enough that you would never need straw?
If you're in an area with ponds, does that guarantee nearby reeds?
Is wheat too dangerous a temptation to grow in large numbers and ruin your soil?

I'm trying to imagine if it's possible to create an enclosed farm that could sustain itself without external inputs. Water from wells?

Last edited by Hans Lemurson (2018-03-12 17:47:09)

ned · 2018-03-12 20:44:26

Hey Hans, thanks for your question. A very good one. While doing the calculations, I actually realized that pies are less efficient than carrot farming. That said, they do still allow for good food storage, though not as well as 4 baskets of 3 carrots in a hand cart (8X12=96 per space with the hand cart as opposed to a max of 84 with a rabbit berry carrot pie).

Joriom · 2018-03-12 21:17:29

Did you count in that you get 3 pie crusts per one dough bowl? Cause I can't see that in the visual representation and it's the game changer as for water/soil usage.

Also - pies are required if you want to travel further to collect resources and not hinder your inventory space.

Last edited by Joriom (2018-03-12 21:19:19)

Hans Lemurson · 2018-03-12 21:20:57

With all the trouble that pies are to make, combined with their disappointing yield, I was actually thinking about wheat more as just a straw supply.

1 Compost -> 1 Straw
1 Straw -> 3 Compost

2 Compost surplus feeds the seed-plots, and then pies are just an afterthought to use up the grain that accumulates.

(Pies are cheaper if the grain is a free byproduct rather than the intended crop. This of course assumes that reeds are not readily available, which they probably are.)

Last edited by Hans Lemurson (2018-03-12 21:23:02)

sticks223 · 2018-03-12 21:42:57

The problem with that hans is that it takes water to both grow the wheat and then turn it into compost, where if you just use reeds it takes half the water since you don't have to grow anything yourself. And usually if you have enough ponds to do that you also have enough reeds everywhere to not want to grow wheat anyway.

Portager · 2018-03-12 21:51:34

sticks223 wrote:

The problem with that hans is that it takes water to both grow the wheat and then turn it into compost, where if you just use reeds it takes half the water since you don't have to grow anything yourself. And usually if you have enough ponds to do that you also have enough reeds everywhere to not want to grow wheat anyway.

True, reeds are currently the more sustainable option at this point in time (assuming proper village placement).

SantaFray · 2018-03-12 21:58:50

I feel that pies still have a use in that they are really good for the use in expeditions. Can still be worth making a few and store in the village. However, if you're primarily working within the parameters of your civilization, it's a waste to put all that effort into making a pie then eating it afterward when keeping to a carrot diet would suffice.

ned · 2018-03-12 22:16:32

Ah, shoot. You're right, Joriom. I was in a rush, so I forgot. I stopped at those numbers because even without calculating for compost they were so high.

That correction leads to 0.66 water per carrot pie, 1.66 water per berry-carrot pie, which definitely makes it more efficient. So now we can continue the calculations.

So how does composting play into this (sustainability is important)? You need 68 carrot pies to match the raw carrot output. The water cost for pie crust is 2 water / 3 pies. The composting cost for wheat is 1 water / 9 pies (1/3 water per compost * 1 compost per wheat * 1/3 wheat per pie). This currently means The water cost for the carrots is 68/5 = 11.6 water / hour. Factor in 2 plots for seeding and associated composting cost: 2.66 water / hour. This gives us 14.2667 water / hour (.237 water /min).

Phew. This is fun.

So, what does that leave us with? 0.237 water / min + 68/60*7/9 (0.882 water / min) = 1.119 water / min. A little higher than our raw carrot water demand. Rabbits can make them more efficient, though.

Moving onto BC (berry carrot) pies, You need 29 BC pies to match the raw carrot output. Right now the water demand is 29*1.6667 = 48.3 water per hour, which is good. Doing the same calculations above, we use 3.5 water / hour for composting and 7 water / hour for carrots (6 carrots to feed, 1 to seed). This brings our water usage to 58.8 water / hour or just under 1 / min. That's all the water costs to my knowledge, so I suppose berry carrot pie farms are more water efficient. 12% more, in fact.

Crazy! But I still think carrot farms are the way to go. Much less overhead and you don't have to keep 30+ bushes for pies, and other spaces for wheat.

Last edited by ned (2018-03-12 22:32:12)

Zeromus · 2018-03-12 22:21:52

So, I really love all this number crunching you guys are doing. But this ain't Factorio. I wonder if the time it takes for one or more people to do this farming affects what is best. Or if some of the advantages of certain setups end up being completely lost because humans can't keep up in actual application.

Commoners · 2018-03-12 22:27:33

Pies become efficient when you're making rabbit pies, and wheat becomes more like a sidegrade using an untapped resource instead of the main food method for your town.

One wheat can make three rabbit pies, and rabbit pies turn an 11 food item (The cooked rabbit) into a 60 food item.

If you're fully clothed and lose 5 hunger bars per minute, that means that one rabbit pie will sustain you for 12 minutes, or 1/5th of your lifespan.

You could put that pie in your backpack and be able to do any work not involving food at all for 12 minutes.

3 rabbit pies will sustain someone efficiently through adulthood, but it's best to chow down on carrots when you're super young or super old. So with rabbit pies you can sustain an adult with 2 water used. One for the wheat, one for the dough. For all the water that would otherwise be used on carrots, you can now put that into milkweed to make more clothes (which will reduce your need for water by reducing your hunger) and compost to make more soil for carrots/berries/milkweed.

Brute forcing carrots is by far the easiest method, but without composting it will eventually (albeit slowly, and a tribe will totally die for unrelated reasons before they run out of fresh soil) run out of fresh soil from having to reseed the carrots.

You're totally right about berry and carrot pies being a total waste, though.

Last edited by Commoners (2018-03-12 22:38:38)

Hans Lemurson · 2018-03-12 23:31:10

Carrot-farming also has the virtue of simplicity. The more crops there are, the more rules and recipes there are, the easier it is for mistakes to creep in that start to break the cycle.

"Carrots for Food, Berries for Compost" is simple and effective and more stable in the long run than pies. The fewer rules, the better.

shoukanjuu · 2018-03-12 23:53:42

"Pies are better." "Raw carrots are better."

WHICH IS IT

Inquiring minds want to know.

LET US HAVE A DEBATE

PastaFasta55 · 2018-03-13 00:16:04

Nice, I really like your graphic!
I don't quite understand where you get 264 Carrots an hour though.
5*4 carrots every 4 mins should be a flat 300 carrots in an hour.

In the calculator I made I removed wheat from compost production and it fits quite your results quite well.

The only difference is that you need 3 DGBs to support a single 4:1 carrot production.
And that means 7 ponds, not 6.
And 300 carrots an hour - consumption from compost for 3 DGBs = 297 Carrots an hour.

Also the 4:1 ratio doesn't actually give extra carrot seeds, that extra seed goes to the seed plot itself which I included later by changing seed production to 9 rather than 10 per cycle.

Other than that, really good job!

Commoners · 2018-03-13 01:18:54

Water is definitely a bottleneck resource worth considering for food throughput, but what about time? It's difficult to calculate time because circumstances will differ wildly between places - distance to water, what way people are moving that water, etc.

I'm totally down for carrot agriculture being super important and don't need convincing about that, but it still seems like making three pies and then freeing someone to work on other stuff for 36 minutes is a better trade than them needing to run back to the carrot farm to frequently refill.

Someone with 36 minutes could pretty easily produce all the steel tech, make a massive milkweed plantation at a nearby site with water available, catch piles of rabbits to make sure clothing is available, set up buildings, build more carts than will ever be necessary, etc.

My argument is mostly that your production possibility frontier gets pushed out way more if you incorporate both rabbit pies AND carrots, versus going monoculture on carrots only.

Last edited by Commoners (2018-03-13 01:21:04)

ned · 2018-03-13 01:49:47

shoukanjuu wrote:

"Pies are better." "Raw carrots are better."
WHICH IS IT
Inquiring minds want to know.
LET US HAVE A DEBATE

If you have limited space, raw carrots are better. If you don't mind reserving 37 spaces for farmland (35 berry bushes, 1 carrot row, and 1 wheat row), then you can sustainably cut down your water usage by a whole half a pond an hour to make berry-carrot pies.

However, don't cook your rabbits over a fire. Bake it into a pie. Mix it with a spare carrot for some extra pizzazz.

PastaFasta55 wrote:

5*4 carrots every 4 mins should be a flat 300 carrots in an hour.

Thanks for your comment, Pasta! I'm glad you like the graphics.

And you're right about the 300 yield. Interestingly, I'm pretty sure that the jump from 264 to 300 comes from planting that extra seed that I haven't used in the diagram. My seed usage was 8 every seed cycle (9 min) instead of your optimal 9 every seed cycle.

Math is fun!

Potjeh · 2018-03-13 01:55:02

Why are you only accounting for water efficiency? What about time efficiency and space efficiency? Using lots of space on outskirts for bushes is better than using lots of space in center for food baskets, IMO.

Matok · 2018-03-13 02:04:03

Oh boy, Carrots vs Rabbit Pies.

It's all rabbit food one way or another, isn't it?

But that lame joke aside, let's have a discussion then...

So I still don't buy into spending near 100% of your time churning out raw carrots as fast as possible for survival. Where is the time for advancing anything if all the time is spent churning out carrots to support yourself and maybe 2 other people who are being worthless? Because let's face it, there will be noobs, even perpetual ones, who are not going to pull their weight and use way more than they produce.

That's the real problem right now. Those who are productive are spinning their wheels on carrot production while those who are not are burning through the carrot stores faster than the producers can produce, and so you get civ collapse, over and over again. And being that you can't carry all the carrots on your person even if you do have a backpack, you fall prey to the famine just like everyone else, all be it maybe a few minutes later than everyone else if you managed to pack away a few carrots before the last ones got snapped up.

Every time you run out of food, you have to get more or you start from year 0 again. This means you MUST drop what you're doing and walk over to where there's food and eat. Think of how long this takes. It depends on how far out you are from the food source. The further away you are from the reliable food source, the sooner you have to start heading back home or start hunting around you for wild food, dropping what your original task was. That's lost time.

A backpack full of carrots is going to buy you about 2 minutes. You can increase that to 3 1/2 minutes if you also have a basket full in your hands, and if you have some nice clothing, you can even edge it up to more than 7 minutes before you run out of carrot food. This means your range is effectively half that, because you have to turn around and start walking back home when half your food is gone if you want to make it back in time before you starve, and you better pray that there's still some food left there when you get back.

Because of this, many just stay chained to the same small area their entire life, because venturing further than a minute or two away is too much uncertainty.

The other option is to put in the time to bake a few Rabbit Pies. One wheat field will probably do for a person for their lifetime. Why? You're very like not going to find baked pies just waiting for you as soon as you hit 4 years old so you won't be eating those at first. You're going to eat some other things while growing up, most likely a lot of berries and carrots. Pies are also not a simple thing to make, so it's going to take you more than a few minutes to get them made. By the time you get everything together to bake a few pies, you've likely already hit adulthood and you're probably 20 to 30 years old, so you've got half your life left ahead of you. It all depends on your starting situation, of course. If you get lucky and someone gives you hand me downs and you're in a place that already has the plates and bowls and oven ready to go, you're going to have a lot easier time than if you start off in the middle of the woods naked.

But back to the pies, and why you only should need a few. A single Rabbit Pie affords you at least 4 minutes of food, and if you have decent clothing on you get 8+ minutes per pie, or 24+ minutes with just 3 of them, which is over three times as much time as a full backpack and basket of carrots! If you bake and take 3 pies with you, you can almost live the second half of your life on just those 3 pies and never have to go find a carrot again. And all you needed were 3 rabbits and some wheat and a couple skins of water, one for the wheat and one for the dough. A similarly clothed adult would likely have to eat another 25 carrots in the latter half of their lifetime, which is going to need at least 5 trips to the pond to grow that many. And assuming you tried to carry as much with you in a backpack and a basket as you can, you're still going to need to make 3 to 4 trips back for food minimum.

Your numbers are based on cranking out carrots or pies at breakneck speed, being chained to a field or an oven for your entire life.

Don't do that!

You don't need to cook 30 Rabbit Pies in an hour! You need 3, and you can easily double the recipe and cook 6 if you feel like sharing with someone or teaching them without it taking much more additional time.

And since you can carry 3 pies on your person fairly easily with a backpack, you don't have to worry about moochers eating all your hard earned food and leaving you with nothing.

Yes, it's kinda selfish, but people need to learn to make more than they consume or civs are always going to fall apart. Maybe once they notice that everyone except for the guy running around with the pie is starving to death, they'll get curious and ask why.

I tell ya, you're a slave to that carrot field and it is a harsh mistress.

PastaFasta55 · 2018-03-13 07:46:27

Matok wrote:

So I still don't buy into spending near 100% of your time churning out raw carrots as fast as possible for survival. Where is the time for advancing anything if all the time is spent churning out carrots to support yourself and maybe 2 other people who are being worthless? Because let's face it, there will be noobs, even perpetual ones, who are not going to pull their weight and use way more than they produce.
That's the real problem right now.

And that problem is irrelevant to this discussion, this thread is about farming.

Matok wrote:

Because of this, many just stay chained to the same small area their entire life, because venturing further than a minute or two away is too much uncertainty.
...
But back to the pies, and why you only should need a few. A single Rabbit Pie affords you at least 4 minutes of food, and if you have decent clothing on you get 8+ minutes per pie, or 24+ minutes with just 3 of them, which is over three times as much time as a full backpack and basket of carrots! If you bake and take 3 pies with you, you can almost live the second half of your life on just those 3 pies and never have to go find a carrot again. And all you needed were 3 rabbits and some wheat and a couple skins of water, one for the wheat and one for the dough. A similarly clothed adult would likely have to eat another 25 carrots in the latter half of their lifetime, which is going to need at least 5 trips to the pond to grow that many. And assuming you tried to carry as much with you in a backpack and a basket as you can, you're still going to need to make 3 to 4 trips back for food minimum.

While I get that get pies are a more dense food compared to carrots, you need to prove that traveling range is necessary in order for production of it to be a requirement.
And given a player can cross an entire biome under a minute, there is little need for that much traveling.

Matok wrote:

One wheat field will probably do for a person for their lifetime. Why? You're very like not going to find baked pies just waiting for you as soon as you hit 4 years old so you won't be eating those at first. You're going to eat some other things while growing up, most likely a lot of berries and carrots. Pies are also not a simple thing to make, so it's going to take you more than a few minutes to get them made. By the time you get everything together to bake a few pies, you've likely already hit adulthood and you're probably 20 to 30 years old, so you've got half your life left ahead of you. It all depends on your starting situation, of course. If you get lucky and someone gives you hand me downs and you're in a place that already has the plates and bowls and oven ready to go, you're going to have a lot easier time than if you start off in the middle of the woods naked.

That is irrelevant to a farming discussion.

Matok wrote:

Your numbers are based on cranking out carrots or pies at breakneck speed, being chained to a field or an oven for your entire life.
Don't do that!
You don't need to cook 30 Rabbit Pies in an hour! You need 3, and you can easily double the recipe and cook 6 if you feel like sharing with someone or teaching them without it taking much more additional time.

Farming is not about providing for yourself, it's about providing for your civ.
And while making pies from wheat seems nice, you need to prove it's better in terms of food per water since water is the bottleneck.

30 pies an hour for a wheat plot is a necessity, you need to provide for your entire civ not just yourself.
That one wheat plot requires 10 soil an hour, which requires at least 4 Domestic Gooseberry Bushes.
Then you still need carrots!
4 an hour to provide for the soil, plus 30 for your pies.
Thankfully you can do that AND seeds on just one plot, and not even run it for the full hour.
Just crop rotate, run it for carrots 48% of the hour and run it for seeds 12% of the hour, That'll provide just enough carrots without being a full blown carrot farm.
How you are going to teach someone ingame to crop rotate I have no idea.

So from this setup your overall production is
-26 Water per hour
32 Carrots per hour
8 Berries per hour
10 Wheat per hour
0 Carrot Seeds per hour
6 Straw per hour
1.2 Soil per hour
And that 10 wheat is going to require 10 water so...
-36 water = 3 ponds exactly.

And how much food do you get?
Assuming you're making carrot pies.
32 Food per pie*30 pies = 960 food per hour
960 food per hour/36 water per hour= 26.666... Food per water (80/3 in rational number form)

Assuming carrot rabbot pies. (30 rabbits an hour required)
64 Food per pie...
It's just double.
53.333... Food per water (160/3 in rational number form)

Compare that to an ideal carrot farm (Assuming reeds and DGBs used):
-72.66666667 Water per hour
297 Carrots per hour
6 Berries per hour
0 Wheat per hour
0 Carrot Seeds per hour
-3 Straw per hour
2.333333333 Soil per hour
Ignore the -3 straw as reeds take that place.

297 carrots per hour*8 food per carrot=2376 food per hour
2376 food per hour/-72.666... Water per hour= 32.697... food per water

So pies are better ONLY IF you are making carrot rabbit pies, and even then the amount they produce can be reduced if you factor in raw rabbits in carrot farms go to become cooked rabbits.

Matok wrote:

Yes, it's kinda selfish, but people need to learn to make more than they consume or civs are always going to fall apart. Maybe once they notice that everyone except for the guy running around with the pie is starving to death, they'll get curious and ask why.

Sorta a tangent but since it does relate to the job of farming I'll entertain it.
Civilisation works by specialisting people in certain areas, so that they all together work as a whole.
If nobody has a designation and everyone is a jack of all trades, things will be left undone without people noticing, multiple people will be working on a thing the civ only need one of, actively being a detriment to each other.
Only once designated farmer placements are filled are people allowed to live off their profits to do things like make clothes, forge, construct and such.
Only by working for the colony and not for yourself does progress get made.
Yes working fields all day seems like a chore, but you play a part in the greater whole.

Last edited by PastaFasta55 (2018-03-13 09:52:06)

Matok · 2018-03-13 17:02:25

Yeah I'm not aiming to derail the thread Pasta, but my caution is that I feel like a thread like this might be encouraging ineffective use of time for transient gains. I've seen dozens of full baskets of carrots vanish in a matter of minutes, there's no lasting impact on the civ. A much more lasting impact can be had by building something that lasts generations such as some clothing, but as we all know milkweed is a bit of an issue right now. The best way is to go find some, but to do that you have to travel, sometimes very far.

You're not going to get far with carrots.

So my point is, the food per minute really doesn't matter if you're not going to do anything with it. Your freedom of how you can use your time does. You can have a much longer lasting impact if you get thread together to build 4 sets of clothes than if you fill up 3 dozen baskets with carrots. With the carrots, your gonna be making repeat trips home to eat and you waste so much time doing that.

So I take issue with this thread basically saying 'pies bad, don't make'. They absolutely are not bad.

asterlea · 2018-03-13 17:23:28

I think it's odd that carrot-rabbit pies are completely discounted because "who wants to catch rabbits" when, if you are making clothes as suggested, you will already have rabbits to use and they would add calories that take no water or soil to make.

Edit: Okay, the argument was who wants to catch 30 rabbits an hour, but I think part of the problem with posts like these is that they are assuming people are being completely efficient. When I bake pies in-game I'm usually having to grow the wheat and make compost myself, sometimes stop to fire more plates, run off to fetch water to make dough, stop to make a fire, raise a kid, or help a new player, etc. I'm lucky if I get six pies out before I die, and that's assuming I start in a settlement that already has a carrot farm, fire-making tools, oven, kiln, etc.

I don't know if that makes it more or less efficient to make pies, but if there are already people doing the carrot farming, then why shouldn't I aim for the thing that is more efficient in regards to space or portability instead? It's more fun if you're not just doing the same thing every game anyway.

Last edited by asterlea (2018-03-13 17:41:59)

Tebe · 2018-03-13 19:54:42

Matok wrote:

So my point is, the food per minute really doesn't matter if you're not going to do anything with it. Your freedom of how you can use your time does. You can have a much longer lasting impact if you get thread together to build 4 sets of clothes than if you fill up 3 dozen baskets with carrots. With the carrots, your gonna be making repeat trips home to eat and you waste so much time doing that.
So I take issue with this thread basically saying 'pies bad, don't make'. They absolutely are not bad.

Oh man, I agree 1000%. Matok's point of a backpack of pies being able to feed you for half your life is a major one. If you've ever done this, had a backpack of meat pies, it changes the entire game experience. No more worrying about food at all, you've got it on you, you've got time on your side. And time is everything, whether with carrots or rabbit pies or wild berries, whether with one pond or twelve, time is THE thing you're always buying.

If you've got a backpack with pies in it, no matter where you are or what you're doing, it takes two seconds to whip that pie out and take a bite and put the leftovers back in the bag. Now you're full and can keep working and never had to walk a step to feed yourself. Whether you're trapping in the prairies or clubbing seals in the tundra or tending the aulde carrot patch, a single backpack can hold 12 servings. That's incredible. Each pie is like its own uber-basket of food. This particular quality of pies is SO valuable when it comes to the messy business of actually making things happen in the world. One single watered wheat plot creates enough dough for THREE pies - an entire half of a lifetime from 1.6 bowls of water (.6 for the three carrots). A pie-carrier can easily manage to build a pen and domesticate sheep, but for a carrot-eater it's going to be uphill.

And not to mention the abundant rabbit meat if there's an active trapper in the village. Cooked rabbit is a mess. It seems like a waste to me to cook rabbits if it's possible to make them into pies. It doesn't have to be constant - just once in a while, and if there's enough water, and abundant rabbit meat - It seems absurd not to make use of pie magic.

ned · 2018-03-13 22:34:22

Matok wrote:

Yeah I'm not aiming to derail the thread Pasta, but my caution is that I feel like a thread like this might be encouraging ineffective use of time for transient gains. I've seen dozens of full baskets of carrots vanish in a matter of minutes, there's no lasting impact on the civ. A much more lasting impact can be had by building something that lasts generations such as some clothing, but as we all know milkweed is a bit of an issue right now. The best way is to go find some, but to do that you have to travel, sometimes very far.
So I take issue with this thread basically saying 'pies bad, don't make'. They absolutely are not bad.

Hey Matok. I appreciated your responses and thoughts. You bring up some valid points, but before we go further, I just want to make sure we have a common understanding. The amount of pies you need to sustain a certain population isn't an efficiency calculation. Let's assume you're breastfed until age 6. If you're naked, you use 675 hunger pips in your lifetime. This changes to 306 when you're fully clothed in fur, shoes and all. When a full pie worth its salt gives you about 64 food, and if pies are all you eat, you'll need to cook 5 to sustain yourself, minimum. This is not negotiable. If you're living off of 3, that means you're taking food from somewhere else or perhaps unwittingly from someone else.

Okay, so now that we've got that out of the way...

Outright, I want to say that the message of this thread has not been "pies bad, don't make." As you say, pies provide a dense source of food; it's easier to store than carrots, and once you turn 25, you can carry a lifetime food supply of them in a basket (assuming you've laid down 10 milkweeds on clothes). This does, I admit, allow non-farmers to do more things by making fewer trips to the carrot basket. Farmers don't see this difference, because they're already so close to it that it wouldn't make a difference. I should also say that while my language about pies was blasé, I don't completely dismiss pies, nor do I say they're bad. I redid some calculations above and found they were really just a little more efficient, water-wise, so I don't think they're bad. I just avoid them for other reasons.

Regarding your comments on absolute efficiency and breakneck speeds: Yes, these models of farming calculate for optimal efficiency, and the time it takes to make water runs can be highly variable. 1.1 waters per min, admittedly, sounds like a fast speed. Lets allot 2 seconds for water unloading, and 2 for water loading: that means you need to have 6 ponds within a maximum average of 25 seconds, if you're carrying only one portable water source (PWS). A 10 year old could make this journey on a full stomach. Further, if you carry a basket with 3 PWS's (and if it takes 10 seconds to fully load, unload), that increases the time per one-way trip to 70 seconds. With a backpack of 4 PWS's, that becomes 90 seconds.

When you have a dedicated water carrier, that's not an unreasonable speed. The other tasks (planting, composting, harvesting, storing) can all be done by one person, a "farm master" if you will.

But why is water the primary efficiency measure? Because it is the only external input to the system (besides a negligible number of reeds), it is the primary predictor of food output: the rate-limiting step. You can roughly predict food output (and thus people supported) of a farm based on its water usage. When a carrot farm is sustainable and modeled after the diagram, it uses 1.1 water / min and generates roughly 35 food / min. A naked person uses 12.5 food / min, so this could support 2 naked people. If there are only 3 ponds nearby instead of 6, then max food output is roughly going to be halved to 17.5, and you can only support one naked person. The sustainability increases the number of ponds you need by 20%.

This is the point I want to hammer home.

====IF YOU READ ONLY ONE THING IN THIS WALL OF TEXT, PLEASE READ THIS!!!====

The sustainability costs of pies make them less viable. Without composting, carrot rabbit pies can give you some serious water efficiency. You use 2.67x less water per hour than carrot farming! You'd be crazy not to do it on those stats alone. However, soil consumption is a huge problem. Making only carrot pies, you use 23.5 soil per hour. This is halved when making only rabbit pies, but its still twice as much as the 6.6 soil needed per hour when carrot farming.

asterlea wrote:

I don't know if that makes it more or less efficient to make pies, but if there are already people doing the carrot farming, then why shouldn't I aim for the thing that is more efficient in regards to space or portability instead? It's more fun if you're not just doing the same thing every game anyway.

I mean, I think everyone should play the game how they want to. But the potential downside of making pies is that it increases water usage, which is high as it is already. Here is something I can say on that subject, though. 1 wheat makes 3 pies. A non-berry pie requires 1/3 water per pie (when using wild wheat), OR 2/3 water per pie and 1/3 soil per pie (when using domestic wheat). Since we use 5.5 ponds per hour, that leaves us with 6 spare water in the system (because a pond generates 12 water an hour). We also have 2 soil leftover in the system. We can combine that 6 spare water with 6 wild wheat, 18 rabbits and 18 carrots to make 18 pies (wow!). However, this isn't sustainable. Wild wheat does not grow back.

The pies that you eat now prevent other people from eating pies in the future.

If we want to be sustainable and plant wheat, that halves our pie/water output (9 total pies). The soil cost of growing three wheat for 9 pies is 3 soil, but we only have 2 per hour available. Without growing more berry bushes for composting (2 water per 3 soil), we're stuck at only making 6 pies, which can sustain you if you're fully clothed. You get 5 soil / hour surplus, but are now stuck with 4 spare water per hour, which keeps us at 6 pies.

So any more than 6 rabbit carrot pies on a regular hourly basis will give you a resource deficit somewhere, in water or soil, and cue the eventual downfall of civilization.

Overall, I would say this thread has convinced me of the benefits of pies, but I still prefer carrot farming.

Last edited by ned (2018-03-13 22:46:45)

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#1 2018-03-12 16:47:35

[Sustainability] Modern Survival v63 (Volume 1): FARMING, UPDATED

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Re: [Sustainability] Modern Survival v63 (Volume 1): FARMING, UPDATED

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Re: [Sustainability] Modern Survival v63 (Volume 1): FARMING, UPDATED

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Re: [Sustainability] Modern Survival v63 (Volume 1): FARMING, UPDATED

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Re: [Sustainability] Modern Survival v63 (Volume 1): FARMING, UPDATED

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