I am typically the farmer in my duo or trio game. It’s super nice in that early-mid game stage when food is a problem, especially with 3 people. I typically make 3x3’s of farm plots for each food. It’s nice to grow aloe and yucca if you don’t live next to the desert too. We rock with the yucca smoothies because they give an extreme amount of water while costing just blue berries and yucca. I think farming becomes way more necessary with more people, but if you’re playing solo it’s probably not worth dumping points into.
Yup play about 95% solo, NEVER take points in farming. It’s totally not worth it for a solo player. Multiple people yes, I would consider it. But the Steak and Spuds meal is it for us! Not the best just a favorite of ours to make. Similar to Sham chowder for builds like Fortitude. Because I mean if you’re not using it during that build, well what are you gonna use it for ? 😂
yeah, i agree, i’m the farmer/cook usually and i go overboard, i get 5x5 farms for the main plants and tell my friends to not eat certain cans of food, specifically gumbo ingredients and spaghetti
I recommend using the Hunting Knife to gather crops quickly, the high attack speed makes for faster collection than with fists. It also doesn't have the height issues or gasoline requirement that the chainsaw you recommended does. Easier to acquire as well.
@@Spinlayer A tier 6 bone knife, and a tier 6 stone hatchet remain shockingly useful into end-game. Both benefit from flurry of blows (larger axes, steel pick, and auger do not), they're crazy easy to repair, and they get the job done rapidly. exploiting % chance to decap/break resource with a fast animation, or apply bleeds/snares super fast, or take out a metal/wood/metal door quickly without gear-swapping 3 times. And the stone axe does 3 things for one slot on the bar. I have zero shame blending a high-tier bone knife & stone hatchet with a maxed out auto-shotty/M-60/MP-5 in a general POI raid gear set.
Number one benefit of farming is not having to loot food items freeing up your inventory for other stuff. For me it’s 100% worth it. Yes it slows down my early game getting the perks and farm going but by mid game you have more food than you know what to do with
Rank 2 really shouldn’t be as underwhelming as it is. I think the seed crafting recipes should be 20% cheaper (from five plants to four) when you hit Rank 2. It also doesn’t help that completing The Hunter’s Journal series (which can be found in mailboxes in the Forest biome) increases the amount you harvest from animals by 50%. You’ll likely have more meat than you know what to do with when you have that bonus.
I don't bother with the food items that require loot items. I always end up with a small farm with potatoes and corn for Hobo Stew, and blueberries and yucca for my Yucca Smoothies. Hobo Stew isn't that much worse than the loot foods, and Yucca Smoothies are the best "water" beverage.
It's a shame because I would love to farm for immersion purposes. If the zombie apocalypse happened, most food would spoil within the first weeks or get looted by others. Without electricity, the bulk of the food out there would be spoiled in days. Learning to farm would be an absolute necessity and I would like to incorporate that into a base.
If apocalypse happened and anyone sees you are farming for food, you re probably getting looted and die or forced to work as a slave from any other people gang.
In multiplayer looting enough food is just ridiculously hard, especially if you like completing quests together. Not to mention the amount of storage said food items can take up. In single player you are probably right. In multi player, i can't imagine not to farm...
"the amount of storage said food items can take up" This is why I farm in singleplayer. I don't have spare spots for stuff I can make at home. All the weapon parts, tools, ammo, and rare items take all my inventory space. I'm sure in multiplayer there's space enough for every item, but of course you probably want more than the loot provides.
As of Alpha 21.1 with the massive increase of cloth requirement I think cotton is somewhat worth if you wanna mass produce duct tape or anything else that uses cloth
I love farming. I recommend a bone knife for faster harvesting. Also, I make the awesome sauce and learning elixir, but I'm a bit of a min/maxer at this point. You can also save a point with the +1 fortitude glasses to get the lvl 3 living off the land.
Occasional (often) min/maxer here too... With the +1 fortitude buff from Sham Chowder, you might be able to save another point, considering that you farm once only every ~2 game days (iirc). Particularly if you get that Wasteland Treasures book, acid becomes fairly plentiful, so eating one Sham Chowder every couple game days (to have the buff going when you need to harvest) might not be too unrealistic. I don't think I ever did this, but it's theoretically doable.
All those fancy dishes would be really cool if we had wellness. They removed wellness THEN added so many of the buggers, which were ultimately why I always monkeybrain and try to farm because it was such a big meta for survival prior to the trader meta. Commenter mentioning multiplayer increasing its necessity makes sense, the extreme surplus a farm generates will be really useful but this only applies on low-ish loot abundance and/or more than 2 players.
Farming is worth it. All you need are pts put into living off the land and that only has a max of 3. As far as farm plots go, you only need to grow corn and potatoes in them as mushrooms can be planted on any surface without a farm plot. Then you can live off of meat stew, oh you also need 1 bottle of water per meat stew. Supercorn is worth having I think, because it makes making glue cheaper than using bones, however it's not needed. If you only use farm plots already at POIs you'll waste so much time running around to those POIs to pick your crops. I farm in every game for myself and it's really cheap and easy to do and gets food off of your list of things you need to find. When you place a farm plot dig down 1 block then add it. That way the zombies or animals won't destroy it if it's in their path.
2 points in living off the land will give you mats for enough meat stew to never worry about food again. It's a must have imo. I don't want 8 different cans of crap clogging up my inventory.
I farmd a lot in the Xbox version. I just liked designing the rows of crops and eventually having huge stockpiles of food to categorize and store nicely.
Farming is altogether a nerfed alternative to the way that TFP wants you to play. Like if you don't want to use the trader, or loot a POI, you could theoretically be almost-self sustaining. But theres plenty of annoyances that were engineered to steer you away from playing like this
I'm quite new to the game and I'm annoyed I wasted time on certain things, whilst other players I'm playing against have leveled up better things because we didn't know all of this
i plant supercorn, potato, corn, mushroom cuz of meat stew and glue, sometimes veggie stew. i like the option of just being able to make anything at anytime.
Unless I'm going hard into Fortitude, I usually just put one point in Living off the Land, harvest plants I see in the wild and in POIs, and purchase any other ingredients I need from traders. They often sell stacks of mushrooms, eggs, potatoes, etc.
I've played Valheim so much that I legit forgot that food in 7DTD does not increase your max health/stamina. It only restores hunger + health and gives you minor to moderate buffs, so I completely get your 'bullying' on this topic xD I played around with it in Alpha 19, and it was fine there. But the changes they made to it... Yeah. Really makes farming just not really worth it. At least you don't have to bother with watering/protecting your crops or something. Great video, mate
I came from the console version. One of the best aspects of the early game was being able to craft a hoe day one and start a small farm. Switched to PC and it was a huge improvement. Just miss having a huge farm to harvest at night by day 10.
This is a solid review and understanding of the basics for starting out on a vanilla single player server. When you lean into multipliplayer (group) modded midgame, farming tends to make sense so one person can mass feed everyone while base sitting/building, and there may be a lot more cool recipes. Ironically its use easily falls off later game as you end up with a surplus and everyone gets perks to help them be more efficient, but hey, that's what the forget elixir is for!
Maxed out and with enough plots and mat and recipes, I found it easy to be self sustaining with farming by mid-game. Just have to get enough of a return on those seeds which means at LEAST ten of each or more per plot to break even. That chance always rolls a little more or a little less than even. A basic fast bone knife or hunting knife for processing was easy as it gets. The only issue? The damned drone always sat where I needed to plant :P
Download darkness falls, play on an appropriate difficulty for your abilities without self judging cause it’s probably not insane, enjoy massive quality of life adjustments to the game in almost every category, especially the farm ability of buffs and food. Great mod, just have to read the journal to understand the things that are different.
My friends laughed at me for making a farm build in this game. 40 days later and I haven't crafted a single food item cause I'm converting everything back into seeds and replanting with thousands of each ingredient and... they are still laughing at me. I just think it looks cool all the crops surrounding my house lol.
They should make farming exclusive foods unlocked via the perks. They don't need to be "the best" but "better-than-standard" would be a nice touch. At least that way you can farm foods exclusively on your farm and get early-mid game foods with some nice buffs. Obviously, the more advanced food-stuffs, should be found in the wild to encourage exploration. But you could give some unique buffs/combos for those foods. Might make it more appealing to people.
I personally didnt know the trick of getting a farm quest and then be able to perma farm the crops there using the disconnect option. That said, i always use atleast SOME farming from the get go, simply because there is so much food you need along the way skilling up to max cooking, and you always need either potato or yucca for juice or some kinda stew. Once you're at max cooking, you dont need to farm as much anymore because you got better options at that point. But early to mid game, id say farming is really effective, even more if you're doing multiplayer. If solo you can just stick to bacons and eggs untill max cooking, but its more immersive to also try better recipies, than just bacon and eggs. If you really want to, you can argue that farming is still important because supercorn makes for the easiest glue recipie.
I think you can pick up the farm plots. I had some I wanted to move so I used my shovel to destroy them but they were picked up instead of just giving back clay.
I like to horde food. I will try to make the best dish and then use the rest to make lesser meals so that I don’t waste more of the bigger food. Even though pumpkin bread is pretty mid. It pairs well with food that are higher food. Rationing is how I play this game. The rationing aspect allow me not to worry about food. Because my noob ass keeps dying from everything else. Or the rng gods decide to mess with me
Thanks for the video. Appreciate the coverage of 7 days. Every time I get tired of farming; I remind myself I live off steak and potatoes and wash it down with a yucca smoothie.
For me a point in Living Off the Land is part of my standard build, if only because it doubles wild harvesting. I don't do more than that unless I plan to go all the way to level 3 and farm seriously.
A unique way of looking at farming thanks for the video. I usually end up with a farm in the mid to late game, mostly because I seem incredibly unlucky at finding things like canned peas and pasta. Which suggests I'm doing something wrong. Since I usually spend a lot of time building and maintaining a base setting up a little farm, with fortitude glasses and sometimes sham chowder, is usually pretty easy. In my next play-through, I may try living off a diet of just boiled meat and see what I think.
Buy those canned goods from vending machines. By mid game you should have enough dukes to be able to stockpile canned goods while running a moderately successful farm.
I only play on a multi-player PVE server and farming has been great as I have food and can sell it in a vending machine for extra dukes while keeping the other players fed. You also didn't touch on veggie stew as you can carry 1 stack on you at all times and it both feeds and hydrates you and can be crafter from farmable items like corn, mush, potatz and water. No foraging required. On top of that it gives you a quick way to level up as my farms have about 200 plots so it turns out to be a lot of XP and you get products. Also, super corn and cotton are extremely helpful as cloth and glue become quite vital and having 1 rotation of crops can give you enough to have all the duct tape you could need for a while and you can sell a lot of that in a vending machine to other players on the server. I don't think farming was added for single player but more for multi player. Personally, I wish they would allow for animal farming so that animal fat wouldn't require going on hunting trips in the winter land and require expending ammo to get it.
Glad I usually play on Darkness Falls, where plants auto replant with 100% chance, and high quality food is the only way to get wellness, being the only way to increase max hp and stamina, which don't grow with level. All this makes farming not only much more efficient, but actually necessary to grow stronger.
The farming changes are 1 of the reasons I stopped playing pc and play only console now. I did mod the pc version and added new perks as well as re added meat stew from before the updates making corn and potatoes once again key components of the best foods in the game with some tweaks. I also modded in some more recipes for blueberries. This helped keep me on pc for a little but I wasn't the best at moding so I eventually just gave up on pc entirely. The changes they made to farming is one of the things that ruined the game for me. I like the idea of adding a crop plot block item that could be implemented in building and not look out of place but I didn't like getting rid of the original farming aspects and hate the seed crafting cost added. Most of the reason they ruined farming is because people complained it was too O.P. But by destroying farming I stopped playing the game so I'm not rushing out to buy the updated version for Xbox series S/X when it's available. I like the current XboxOne version just wish I could pick the updates I actually like while not getting the updates that ruin the game for me.
One thing the mods i have messed with got right is that once you plant the seed that plant stays there. You go around collect the crops and plant reverts back to an earlier version then regrows.
Is farming useful? not really, beer and super corn for elixirs aside. By the time you invest pts and get it all up and running with plots etc you will be swimming in food/drinks from other sources :) thx for the vid tho.
I totaly agree, everything that is farmed can just be looted or bought, farming is basicaly unnecessary, but I will say I start a farm in like every playthrogh, usealy midway in the playthrough when I really don't even need it anymore mostly out of laziness. I will grow a little bit of everything just so I don't need to run to the desert for a few aloe or yukka, or try to find some goldenrod for tea. and it will give me something to work on if I ned to kill an hour or so before sunrise.
Since I play multiplayer, LotL lets me just set up enough food for everyone in the party at the base for our group of 5, and keep me in enough beer to keep me constantly drunk without much effort. The yield, to me, is a bit less important than the consistency of the farm giving us everything we need to stay on top of the survival mechanics with ease.
Meat stew is good for long term sustainable food with minimal effort once you have it all set up. You can mass produce it, just need corn & potatoes. You should have plenty of fat & meat. It gives you a lot more benefit than just cooking the meat as grilled or boiled meat. Also, if you're doing brawling, you 'need' those hops. I think it really boils down this... do you want to be stopping all the time to hunt for eggs (bacon & eggs) as you travel around? Or do you want to spend a bunch of points & resources to farm? Neither answer is particularly attractive. What's worse, for farming, is that most farms aren't 100 plots. They're like 10 or so. Then you go harvest... lets say the first time, you get a good crop, and make a couple extra meat stews. Great. Now lets say the second time, you have bad luck and your harvest is below average... All of a sudden, even if you craft no food at all, you can't even replant fully. So you end up in this situation where even if "on average" you have a sustainable farm, in practice (on a small scale), it's not actually sustainable at all. Bad luck will eventually nuke your farm unless you go all the way to rank 3 of LoL, and even then you'll have some fairly unimpressive harvests based on RNG. I think the cost to make a seed should be perhaps 3 (for game balance), or 1 (for realism). Granted, it's not realism-based, real farms don't produce food the same week you plant ;) LoL rank 2 needs a buff as well. There is never a good reason to sit at 2 points in LoL. You either don't take it at all, or it's just an obstacle to clear on the way to LoL3. I play with the A19 farming mod with zero guilt and zero regret. With A20 farming, the only time you'd consider points in LoL is 1 point (to harvest double from natural plants), or going all 3 points to make a halfway viable farm (which only makes sense if you're a brawling/machinegun build). So yeah, farming only makes sense if you're already intending to go deep into Fortitude anyway. If not, then it's probably not even worth looting seeds when you find them, unless you're swimming in inventory space anyway. The main reason farming is like it is, is that in A19 people were talking LoL to set up a farm, and then mind-wiping out of LoL. So it's a nerf, but a bungled one. Personally, I wouldn't mind seeing farming take much longer in 7D2D, but have a much larger payoff when it finally is harvest time. That might be fun. Farming is a mess in vanilla right now though. Most of the overhaul mods handle it better.
@@IzPrebuilt +10 fullness vs +36 fullness, for the same amount of meat, just add eggs? Depends on your biome I guess, and build. Not every play-through is swimming in infinite meat. 3.6x isn't "slightly" though. Don't know where you're getting "slightly". And sure, boiled meat saves you having a stack of drinks... but i prefer red tea or coffee for the bonuses. And if you're using drinks, the water in boiled meat offers no meaningful benefit. When I don't have bacon & eggs, I'm using grilled meat generally, not boiled.
I dont think farming is the actual problem. Traders are. Everything is far too easily acquired from them. That said, i enjoy farming even as a solo player. The food buffs from the higher tier recipes is nice, and if I wanted to I could spend the rest of the Apocalypse hunkered down in my base just living off the food I grow.
So its like investing lol, start small, make some losses but eventually equal it out. Thanks for the info, got enough supplies and seed to grow a walmart soze farm, all the materials i need just stockpile.
Also, if you have 0 loot respawn, eventually the coffee grounds are going to run out, the yucca plants won't regrow in the wild etc. and farming is your only way to in effect respawn something.
If there's anything Zombieland taught me its rule #32: Enjoy the little things. My gf seems to love the farming and making all different kinds of food and i adore it lol.
I always hate how game developers will nerf things to change the meta into something they would want rather then just buff other things to provide a diversity of play styles. Whether you loot and trade for your food or farm it should be a decision you make based off your play style and interests rather then being lead by the nose down a certain path.
I recently got back into this game with a friend after years of not playing and thought having a sustainable food source would be a good idea, but after spending hours with it and grinding to get farm plots I was haRDLY GETTING A RETURN ON INVESTMENT EVEN WITH MAXED SKILLS INTHE DEPARTMENT. I have found many extremely annoying ways the game works and make the game a chore to play. its really sad to see that this is the state of the game after all the years spent in development...
The only reason I level up Living off the land perk is to get two wild plants from each harvest with a bone knife. I harvest plants on my way from somewhere to somewhere else in the early game because each plant is worth about 2.5 coins and with 2 plants that's 5 coins with EACH harvest. You can get about a hundred of plants just by running towards a traider at the start or when running somewhere that isnt a city. Very useful if I want to buy Cooking Pot and grill early game. That's it. After a get those and maybe some water filters I basically never farm ever again because grilled meat just works. Animals are everywhere and with 20 meat from each chicken or rabbit, that's 5 grilled meat from each animal. Meat stacks and heals and that's all I need. Foods in this game are not bad but to farm them is a waste of time imho (except for coffee, but you get plenty of coffee powder from broken coffee machines which are in every single house anyway). I might even have grill thingy so I can craft campfire on the spot and turn some raw meat into grilled meat on the go.
The thing is, is when you have a team of inconsistent players who refuse to loot kitchens and grab food items. Even players who eat canned foods regardless of the importance and powerfulness of food recipes, farming is important. ESPECIALLY the vegetable stew. Think of it as if you build a large enough farm and invest the ridiculous 7 points it takes, farm the entirety of one nitrate node and get enough rotten meat goo piles, or just in general farming the zombie dogs and bears you will come across normally as you play in your first week you should have enough recourses to dedicate a small farm plot. 7 days, and 7 points and you essentially will have enough food to feed a small team consistently that will keep them alive.
So I’ve got some issues with your takes, but overall I think it’s valid to say that overall farming is NOT worth it unless you are committed to the system. Anyways, my issues are as follows: 1.) While yes you can buy pretty much everything you can farm, the traders still charge way too much for basic supplies and especially food. 2.) If you want to make medical supplies on the fly and not pay extortionate prices, farming is pretty much the only solution. And I just wanna say, it’s pretty nice to heal literally any injury and still have 60 first aid kits to spare. 3.) (and this is the big one) Food. Now I know that this was made before A21 came out, but food always has been a major issue to overcome and farming is without a doubt the best way to overcome it IF you put in the time. Now yes, you can survive using nothing but grilled meat and bacon and eggs, but it is a pretty nice thing to be able to make 50 gumbos at once if I feel like it. My point is, farming is annoying, but once you do get into it, it allows you to craft 20 metric tons of the most valuable and overpowered consumables in the game which is why I’d say it’s still worth getting into.
Even though briefly mentioned in the video, this only applies to a game with regular droprates. I feel like the emphasis in this video is too much on playing "regularly". If, like me and my friends, you want to really challenge yourself, put the loot abundance to 25% and then revise how necessary this skill is. Without crops early game and with little to no food items from looting, we would have starved several times over. The "time travel" method is valid, but it does feel very much like an exploit and unless you enjoy playing the game like that, isn't really a proper way to gather (food) materials. The main thing I agree with is that it costs too much crops to craft just a singular seed. Especially if you invested so many skillpoints to get to LotL3, you would expect the recipe cost to be a bit lower.
The newer seed mechanic is insane. 50% chance to harvest a seed. Totally breaks farming unless you constantly buy more from a trader. Continual loss of crops is just stupid. Especially since the idea is you will be eating some of your profits just to stay alive. So no actual gain unless you replant everything over and over, and then, what is the purpose if you can't eat what you grow? The last part of this video has some really solid information. I would like to know what most people are actually eating early to mid game. Other than relying on vending machines, rations, or basic grilled or boiled meat, what is everyone actually eating? I always eat cornbread, or steak and eggs early on. Having to manage all these ingredients makes cooking quite a pain.
If you are using a brawling build the moonshine is way too strong an effect to pass on just because acid. Its a late game build. You arent blowing through moonshine unless its horde night or you are doing something like tier 5 infestation. For other things beer is enough. If you go fists you need super corn and that is a rare crop that comes from like 2 specific POIs. So that means you want living off the land.
Farming is totally worthwhile, in multiplayer. The more people you have, the harder it is to find enough food. If everybody splits up and does different POIs/missions, you'll find enough food to survive. However, the most efficient way to multiplayer means sticking together to get the maximum benefit from a quest and max your trader rewards. In that situation, the extra food from Farming comes in real handy. Though, considering the changes to vending machines in A21 you might not need farmed food. Using the dukes you get from missions to buy some canned goods is a good idea. If you pile up all the cooking books on a single player, they can get to the point of making good food items quickly. The first week will still be a struggle, but after that cooking from what you can loot + buy should be fine. Especially if you have another vending machine near your base that you can use or better yet, multiple traders. A Rekt really eliminates the need for a farm.
Before watching this video, I say yes, based on my experience. I often create a farm on the roof of whatever base I choose, or make. It's a relatively simple thing which pays for itself quickly, by freeing up time that would be used for scavenging.
my last game, I used farming.. I had whole storage crates full of cooked meals, FULL crates for each veggie type, and I was collecting seeds out my arse when I got bored of the run. I like making use of the buffs from high end meals I mean, I play fist builds most of the time, so I'm already going for beer, so might as well farm food too. if you're going to farm get farm 3 before you start though. 1 and 2 are absolutely a rip off. I had 20 rows of 10 plants, which does suck up some time on harvest day, but good lord I had food. I wish I had friends to share it with. 🤣
Ever since the nerf, I have started to ignore farming, though occasionally planting Aloe Vera. In multiplayer, we only planted what we find in loot and skip the perk. Seed loot is often tossed away when the inventory is full, so it's often ignored. All the food we find is loot and the traders. No need to farm anything besides Aloe.
I have played this game from the start and farming is absolutely needed to have a sustainable food supply. In a21 dew collectors and farms are crucial for the long haul.
Until you get living off the land 3, it's just the old fashioned marshmallow test. Your inventory is limited, do you take the ear of corn, or the corn seed back to base? Plant the seed, get 2 corn.
In darkness falls, you need 5 croops too for make 01 seed but the plant is permanent, you can take again from the plant after wait the croops growing again
i strongly disagree with the notion that blueberries and pumpkin are useless. both allow for the avoidance of hunting, since so many recipes require meat. getting fat at the trader is easy, and eggs are nearly everywhere, and they give really good food points to the character. also, the chrysanthemums, yucca, and goldenrod are only available if you have a map gen that favors the biomes. furthermore, the dew collector means that better water is needed for drinking, due to the cost of them. pure mineral water is worth 3x of the standard water, reducing water demand for fewer collectors and other crafting. in fact, the only core reason why crops are lower in importance, is based on a player with the chef traits, but that is on another skill tree. the can goods are found, but the chances are low, and chef is needed to find more.
Is there a need for an update here? Because I just planted 6 Pumpkin, I have rank 1 living off the land, got 2 seeds. Planted them back, got zero next harvest. That was with the Farmer hat on for both. I know thats gotta be pretty bad luck but I also feel like 1.0 did change some things here.
It will be interesting to see what happens to farming in the future, the new vision the devs have for this game is one where you keep moving and keep looting so I doubt farming will play into that very well.
I don't know how they intend to incentivize players to 'keep moving' as it were. Future farming only exists because they fear the community backlash if they were to remove it. But they might as well rip that bandaid off
@stevdor6146 I believe they will be making story driven POI's that may require some travel but if you are set up in a good location you will just convoy around and return after you are done
You can grow Super corn and sell it, probably not worthwhile if your an active player, but I played with someone that was kind of a pacifist and did this instead of doing POI's Please don't tell the fun pimps. I'm sure they would patch it, if they found out someone is having fun playing the game in a way they don't approve of.
I use the farming mechanics to my advantage daily and it's also quite profitable. when you learn to grow super corn you can sell to each vendor three full stacks per day. You'll soil yourself when you see how profitable it really can be. Title: Is Farming ACTUALLY Useful? Answer: Yes, it is... in ways you do not yet understand. A friend and I are running a dedicated server and we are farming. We split responsibilities and tasks. Yesterday we took the MD-500, 15 stacks of super corn, 5 grandpas awesome sauce, a cigar and lvl 3 better barter to 5 traders selling each 3 stacks of super corn. we split over $200,000 dukes for 15 minutes worth of work. try it You'll like it. We are running mods on the server and we're loving it. :D Among those mods are craftable books and it's a huge quality of life time saver. Still, if you choose not to mod it can still be done when you've found the recipe for super corn. Also, food keeps you alive which is quite useful in a survival game.
Dig a 2x2, one block deep hole anywhere. Take a metal bucket, fill it from an existing/natural water source, then place the water from that bucket into your 2x2 hole. You can now fill a stack of empty jars from the water in that hole one time. After doing that, there will still be a little puddle of water in the hole (occupying one of those 4 blocks in the 2x2 hole). Switch back to your bucket and pick up that puddle with it. You'll have a full water bucket again. Pour the water back into the hole, rinse/repeat.
Whilst i understand the point that you are making with this video, i completely disagree with what you say. Farming isn't a 'waste of time' it's an essential part of the immersion and gameplay depending on how you are playing the game, you could say the same about crafting - weapons, ammo, armour & tools, these can all be found in loot so is crafting them a waste of time too? However if like myself you play with zero loot respawn and loot abundance turned to lowest, then this makes the game so much harder and makes farming a much more viable option for your food source. Personally i would like to see TFP completely remove - weapons, ammo, armour & tools from loot and make them craftable items only, thus finding the parts for these items in the main loot, this coupled with no loot respawn and low loot abundance would make the game much more challenging by default.
well if you want to 'reset' fields with quest or reload trick, you can, just 'create' food onto your bag in creative mode.. or just off with it - play in god mode, why need eat, or heal - those zombies will just die anyway.
Disagree on the blueberry and yucca. Yucca only since I am not much in the desert, but the Yucca smoothie is so nice since you do not need water which is quite hard early/ mid game unless you want to put down crazy amount of of dew collectors which you need to find/buy first.. Yes you can up the loot abundance.. but that just pace the game too much for my liking... But sure I am also on multiplayer server (2-3) players . and with charismatic buff and the sham chowder I do not need to waste many skill points. And the Gumbo stew is not worth before very high level since 50-60 food is basically enough to fill your food from hunger state.
Ah yes, why worry about farming when you can just cheat? I mean listen, I don't judge what people do on their singleplayer games, if it makes it more fun for you then cheat all you want. But at that point, just save yourself the blatant exploits and enable the creative menu to spawn yourself in tons of food.
Farming as it is now sucks. The ratio of crops to seeds for crafting is still garbage, and (at least with my luck) a maxxed out LOTL seems to be on the negative side of that 50% chance of getting a seed back. In recent experience, farming with maxxed-out LOTL and harvesting 20 of the same crop, we'll say potatoes, only returned about 6-7 seeds. That wouldn't be so bad (though still pretty bad) if the crop to seed crafting ratio was more realistic, or at least say, 2 or 3 crops per seed.
I've only just started playing this game with a mate, and sometimes i question why the Devs have done certain things in this game. If 1 seed can make several corn, 1 corn should make several seeds if you're not going to eat it? Things are so unbalanced in places, especially the food and farming.
I completely agree with you... in single player. However farming and cooking becomes essential when you have a 2 guys that swing pickaxes and jump 20 hours a day, 1 guy who loves machine guns and can't help but take the fast healing perk. The glue tax becomes quite bit higher in this case too.
@@IzPrebuilt oh. I absolutely agree that the farming perks are terrible. I enjoy farming in most games but it feels useless here. I'm just saying if you're gonna abuse game mechanics like you do with the time travel thing, spawning it might be better since it's much faster and less work.
@@brokemage1395 spawning it isn't AS legit as relogging. You're basically cheating by going creative or godmode, whereas 'time travel' is a exploity form of double dipping, which is not cheating. It is infinite cheese that does cost you one resource, real life time, so using the exploit is not the same as cheating since you are still working for it.
@@stevdor6146 abusing game mechanics like logging out to restart a quest so you can get more stuff is pretty cheaty. Saying it's not cheating because it takes real life time is like saying going through the deck and making my Uno hand full of +4's isn't cheating because it takes time. It makes no difference. I'm not saying you can't do the time travel method. It's obviously your game, you can do what you want. I'm just saying if you are abusing game mechanics that much, might as well just spawn them.
I doubt anyone that has played the game hasn't "pre-cleared" a POI before. Besides, the real enemy everyone is fighting in the game is time, so if that time is wasted then there's no going back and fixing it.
Farming is good for when you don't want to loot food or drinks. Save a little space. But endless mushrooms sort of fixes that. Without including the steak, eggs and other resources that you get alongside others like when you're looking leather
I think like one point jammed into LotL is worth it just for the tripling of items, although I wish there was an item that could increase drops over putting a point in.
It's just like real life , if you're alone farming is not worth it as you can scavenge or hunt plenty but as you get more mouths to feed farming becomes more valuable.
Do I actually need to farm to survive? Nope. Will I ever build a base solo or join a team multi where no farming happens? Hell no! There's just something absolutely lovely to me about grabbing it out of your own yard. And Yucca Smoothies are OP, since they are also food, somehow. Granted they are basically on par with boiled meat for nutrition, but it will keep you from seriously debuffing due to hunger while you look for something to eat. And I don't like having to depend on looted items either. Yeah I can find enough cans of pasta generally to make spaghetti, but that's no fun. That said, the cost of planters is insane.
This is probably the A20 version and below. Farming in A21 is pretty much 50% useless due to limitation of water production (dew water collection) giving 3 water per day and T1 quests gives only 2 and the rest has to be purchased at trader. So no use mass farming and hoping to cook a large quantity. Then there's the new crafting system you have to tackle in getting the cooking crafting skills
Playing it on PS5 so fairly new to the game and thought I was going mad with the 5 item to 1 seed ratio. Really unless you're on living off the land 3 it's not worth the effort outside of getting the challenges done as 50% isn't guaranteed so you can quite easily get nothing on small farming plots as I've done. Maybe it's more realistic but in the game it kind of makes farming pointless as it's the early game when you need it most when money is tight. Meat is fairly plentiful anyway and I'm always finding other ingredients 🤷♂️
I am on day 52 (A21) and I have not cooked a single item; everything I have eaten was from finding and buying the food. I have a lot of meat, fat, farm plots, vegs, everything, but I've been too lazy to make anything because I don't need. to. I play on the hardest settings. Not bragging; I'm just wondering why can't it be harder to survive?
I am typically the farmer in my duo or trio game. It’s super nice in that early-mid game stage when food is a problem, especially with 3 people. I typically make 3x3’s of farm plots for each food. It’s nice to grow aloe and yucca if you don’t live next to the desert too. We rock with the yucca smoothies because they give an extreme amount of water while costing just blue berries and yucca. I think farming becomes way more necessary with more people, but if you’re playing solo it’s probably not worth dumping points into.
Absolutely
Yup play about 95% solo, NEVER take points in farming. It’s totally not worth it for a solo player. Multiple people yes, I would consider it. But the Steak and Spuds meal is it for us! Not the best just a favorite of ours to make. Similar to Sham chowder for builds like Fortitude. Because I mean if you’re not using it during that build, well what are you gonna use it for ? 😂
yeah, i agree, i’m the farmer/cook usually and i go overboard, i get 5x5 farms for the main plants and tell my friends to not eat certain cans of food, specifically gumbo ingredients and spaghetti
@@nender8408 oh yeah, my friends arent allowed to eat any cans if they are an ingredient in anything XD
All I do is farm in soloplay.
I recommend using the Hunting Knife to gather crops quickly, the high attack speed makes for faster collection than with fists. It also doesn't have the height issues or gasoline requirement that the chainsaw you recommended does. Easier to acquire as well.
But the bone knife, not the hunting one. The bone one is the fastest in animation.
And the cheapest to repair
@@Spinlayer A tier 6 bone knife, and a tier 6 stone hatchet remain shockingly useful into end-game. Both benefit from flurry of blows (larger axes, steel pick, and auger do not), they're crazy easy to repair, and they get the job done rapidly. exploiting % chance to decap/break resource with a fast animation, or apply bleeds/snares super fast, or take out a metal/wood/metal door quickly without gear-swapping 3 times. And the stone axe does 3 things for one slot on the bar. I have zero shame blending a high-tier bone knife & stone hatchet with a maxed out auto-shotty/M-60/MP-5 in a general POI raid gear set.
i never considered that! thanks for the pro tip
I’m using the Katana, works wonderfully
Number one benefit of farming is not having to loot food items freeing up your inventory for other stuff. For me it’s 100% worth it. Yes it slows down my early game getting the perks and farm going but by mid game you have more food than you know what to do with
I have never ever starved.
@@Barnaclebeard ok
@@Barnaclebeard You have never ever played it on that hard of a difficulty then with low loot
@@armyboy694227 just go hunting lmao really not complicated
Rank 2 really shouldn’t be as underwhelming as it is. I think the seed crafting recipes should be 20% cheaper (from five plants to four) when you hit Rank 2.
It also doesn’t help that completing The Hunter’s Journal series (which can be found in mailboxes in the Forest biome) increases the amount you harvest from animals by 50%. You’ll likely have more meat than you know what to do with when you have that bonus.
I think the seed crafting recipe should be 1000% cheaper (from 5:1 seed to 1:2 seeds ) but to each their own
I don't bother with the food items that require loot items. I always end up with a small farm with potatoes and corn for Hobo Stew, and blueberries and yucca for my Yucca Smoothies. Hobo Stew isn't that much worse than the loot foods, and Yucca Smoothies are the best "water" beverage.
Not to mention, they also give a small amount of food as well when you 'drink' them.
It's a shame because I would love to farm for immersion purposes. If the zombie apocalypse happened, most food would spoil within the first weeks or get looted by others. Without electricity, the bulk of the food out there would be spoiled in days. Learning to farm would be an absolute necessity and I would like to incorporate that into a base.
Wish there was more variety in the plant / mushroom foraging
If apocalypse happened and anyone sees you are farming for food, you re probably getting looted and die or forced to work as a slave from any other people gang.
In multiplayer looting enough food is just ridiculously hard, especially if you like completing quests together. Not to mention the amount of storage said food items can take up. In single player you are probably right. In multi player, i can't imagine not to farm...
"the amount of storage said food items can take up" This is why I farm in singleplayer. I don't have spare spots for stuff I can make at home. All the weapon parts, tools, ammo, and rare items take all my inventory space. I'm sure in multiplayer there's space enough for every item, but of course you probably want more than the loot provides.
As of Alpha 21.1 with the massive increase of cloth requirement I think cotton is somewhat worth if you wanna mass produce duct tape or anything else that uses cloth
I appreciate the shift from focusing on farming itself and the associated "nerf" to what you can actually do with the output...which is very little!
I think pre-nerf it wasn't so bad, like if it was something you liked doing then it was okay. However now with the nerf it is just terrible.
I love farming. I recommend a bone knife for faster harvesting.
Also, I make the awesome sauce and learning elixir, but I'm a bit of a min/maxer at this point. You can also save a point with the +1 fortitude glasses to get the lvl 3 living off the land.
Occasional (often) min/maxer here too...
With the +1 fortitude buff from Sham Chowder, you might be able to save another point, considering that you farm once only every ~2 game days (iirc). Particularly if you get that Wasteland Treasures book, acid becomes fairly plentiful, so eating one Sham Chowder every couple game days (to have the buff going when you need to harvest) might not be too unrealistic. I don't think I ever did this, but it's theoretically doable.
God I miss just planting it in the ground, it looked so clean
All those fancy dishes would be really cool if we had wellness. They removed wellness THEN added so many of the buggers, which were ultimately why I always monkeybrain and try to farm because it was such a big meta for survival prior to the trader meta.
Commenter mentioning multiplayer increasing its necessity makes sense, the extreme surplus a farm generates will be really useful but this only applies on low-ish loot abundance and/or more than 2 players.
Farming is worth it. All you need are pts put into living off the land and that only has a max of 3. As far as farm plots go, you only need to grow corn and potatoes in them as mushrooms can be planted on any surface without a farm plot. Then you can live off of meat stew, oh you also need 1 bottle of water per meat stew. Supercorn is worth having I think, because it makes making glue cheaper than using bones, however it's not needed. If you only use farm plots already at POIs you'll waste so much time running around to those POIs to pick your crops. I farm in every game for myself and it's really cheap and easy to do and gets food off of your list of things you need to find. When you place a farm plot dig down 1 block then add it. That way the zombies or animals won't destroy it if it's in their path.
2 points in living off the land will give you mats for enough meat stew to never worry about food again. It's a must have imo. I don't want 8 different cans of crap clogging up my inventory.
I farmd a lot in the Xbox version. I just liked designing the rows of crops and eventually having huge stockpiles of food to categorize and store nicely.
Farming is altogether a nerfed alternative to the way that TFP wants you to play. Like if you don't want to use the trader, or loot a POI, you could theoretically be almost-self sustaining. But theres plenty of annoyances that were engineered to steer you away from playing like this
Yea I think I liked it better when u didn't need the trader
I'm quite new to the game and I'm annoyed I wasted time on certain things, whilst other players I'm playing against have leveled up better things because we didn't know all of this
I'd make a argument for cotten and aloe because you can grow health supplies and coffee for the mining bonus
i plant supercorn, potato, corn, mushroom cuz of meat stew and glue, sometimes veggie stew. i like the option of just being able to make anything at anytime.
Unless I'm going hard into Fortitude, I usually just put one point in Living off the Land, harvest plants I see in the wild and in POIs, and purchase any other ingredients I need from traders. They often sell stacks of mushrooms, eggs, potatoes, etc.
This is what I do too. farming just isn't worth the hassle since the changes.
I've played Valheim so much that I legit forgot that food in 7DTD does not increase your max health/stamina. It only restores hunger + health and gives you minor to moderate buffs, so I completely get your 'bullying' on this topic xD I played around with it in Alpha 19, and it was fine there. But the changes they made to it... Yeah. Really makes farming just not really worth it. At least you don't have to bother with watering/protecting your crops or something.
Great video, mate
Actually a lot of the foods do increase your max stamina, but its like a +10 to +30 so you don't really notice it
@@stevdor6146 That does sound familiar, actually
I came from the console version. One of the best aspects of the early game was being able to craft a hoe day one and start a small farm. Switched to PC and it was a huge improvement. Just miss having a huge farm to harvest at night by day 10.
No lie the old console 7 days to die way better than the new PC version
@@foreverxoul8541 just got it on PC. Played back in the day on console. PC way better! Loving A21
This is a solid review and understanding of the basics for starting out on a vanilla single player server. When you lean into multipliplayer (group) modded midgame, farming tends to make sense so one person can mass feed everyone while base sitting/building, and there may be a lot more cool recipes.
Ironically its use easily falls off later game as you end up with a surplus and everyone gets perks to help them be more efficient, but hey, that's what the forget elixir is for!
Maxed out and with enough plots and mat and recipes, I found it easy to be self sustaining with farming by mid-game. Just have to get enough of a return on those seeds which means at LEAST ten of each or more per plot to break even. That chance always rolls a little more or a little less than even.
A basic fast bone knife or hunting knife for processing was easy as it gets. The only issue? The damned drone always sat where I needed to plant :P
Download darkness falls, play on an appropriate difficulty for your abilities without self judging cause it’s probably not insane, enjoy massive quality of life adjustments to the game in almost every category, especially the farm ability of buffs and food.
Great mod, just have to read the journal to understand the things that are different.
My friends laughed at me for making a farm build in this game. 40 days later and I haven't crafted a single food item cause I'm converting everything back into seeds and replanting with thousands of each ingredient and... they are still laughing at me. I just think it looks cool all the crops surrounding my house lol.
They should make farming exclusive foods unlocked via the perks. They don't need to be "the best" but "better-than-standard" would be a nice touch. At least that way you can farm foods exclusively on your farm and get early-mid game foods with some nice buffs. Obviously, the more advanced food-stuffs, should be found in the wild to encourage exploration. But you could give some unique buffs/combos for those foods. Might make it more appealing to people.
I personally didnt know the trick of getting a farm quest and then be able to perma farm the crops there using the disconnect option.
That said, i always use atleast SOME farming from the get go, simply because there is so much food you need along the way skilling up to max cooking, and you always need either potato or yucca for juice or some kinda stew. Once you're at max cooking, you dont need to farm as much anymore because you got better options at that point. But early to mid game, id say farming is really effective, even more if you're doing multiplayer. If solo you can just stick to bacons and eggs untill max cooking, but its more immersive to also try better recipies, than just bacon and eggs.
If you really want to, you can argue that farming is still important because supercorn makes for the easiest glue recipie.
I play 25% loot, so, food is an issue. Level 2 is all you'll ever need. You will be able to make as much vegetable stew as you can ever use.
Isn't level 2 a scam? Its basically 3 more points than level 1 for 12.5% better yield
@@stevdor6146 You have to have it so you can craft seeds. You also get 2 crops per plant, so you will eventually have enough to make seeds.
I think you can pick up the farm plots. I had some I wanted to move so I used my shovel to destroy them but they were picked up instead of just giving back clay.
I like to horde food. I will try to make the best dish and then use the rest to make lesser meals so that I don’t waste more of the bigger food. Even though pumpkin bread is pretty mid. It pairs well with food that are higher food. Rationing is how I play this game. The rationing aspect allow me not to worry about food. Because my noob ass keeps dying from everything else. Or the rng gods decide to mess with me
Thanks for the video. Appreciate the coverage of 7 days. Every time I get tired of farming; I remind myself I live off steak and potatoes and wash it down with a yucca smoothie.
Don't you just love when videos age like fine wine. 1.0 Hype.
For me a point in Living Off the Land is part of my standard build, if only because it doubles wild harvesting. I don't do more than that unless I plan to go all the way to level 3 and farm seriously.
Nice
A unique way of looking at farming thanks for the video. I usually end up with a farm in the mid to late game, mostly because I seem incredibly unlucky at finding things like canned peas and pasta. Which suggests I'm doing something wrong. Since I usually spend a lot of time building and maintaining a base setting up a little farm, with fortitude glasses and sometimes sham chowder, is usually pretty easy. In my next play-through, I may try living off a diet of just boiled meat and see what I think.
Buy those canned goods from vending machines. By mid game you should have enough dukes to be able to stockpile canned goods while running a moderately successful farm.
hunger actually feels like an issue sometimes so i like having access's to a farm
I only play on a multi-player PVE server and farming has been great as I have food and can sell it in a vending machine for extra dukes while keeping the other players fed. You also didn't touch on veggie stew as you can carry 1 stack on you at all times and it both feeds and hydrates you and can be crafter from farmable items like corn, mush, potatz and water. No foraging required. On top of that it gives you a quick way to level up as my farms have about 200 plots so it turns out to be a lot of XP and you get products. Also, super corn and cotton are extremely helpful as cloth and glue become quite vital and having 1 rotation of crops can give you enough to have all the duct tape you could need for a while and you can sell a lot of that in a vending machine to other players on the server.
I don't think farming was added for single player but more for multi player. Personally, I wish they would allow for animal farming so that animal fat wouldn't require going on hunting trips in the winter land and require expending ammo to get it.
Glad I usually play on Darkness Falls, where plants auto replant with 100% chance, and high quality food is the only way to get wellness, being the only way to increase max hp and stamina, which don't grow with level. All this makes farming not only much more efficient, but actually necessary to grow stronger.
I'd say Living off the Land is only useful for buff food in solo, but becomes worth it in multiplayer.
It's never hard to keep one player fed.
Agreed, just put 2 points in iron gut and never go hungry again
The farming changes are 1 of the reasons I stopped playing pc and play only console now.
I did mod the pc version and added new perks as well as re added meat stew from before the updates making corn and potatoes once again key components of the best foods in the game with some tweaks.
I also modded in some more recipes for blueberries.
This helped keep me on pc for a little but I wasn't the best at moding so I eventually just gave up on pc entirely.
The changes they made to farming is one of the things that ruined the game for me.
I like the idea of adding a crop plot block item that could be implemented in building and not look out of place but I didn't like getting rid of the original farming aspects and hate the seed crafting cost added.
Most of the reason they ruined farming is because people complained it was too O.P.
But by destroying farming I stopped playing the game so I'm not rushing out to buy the updated version for Xbox series S/X when it's available.
I like the current XboxOne version just wish I could pick the updates I actually like while not getting the updates that ruin the game for me.
One thing the mods i have messed with got right is that once you plant the seed that plant stays there. You go around collect the crops and plant reverts back to an earlier version then regrows.
Is farming useful? not really, beer and super corn for elixirs aside. By the time you invest pts and get it all up and running with plots etc you will be swimming in food/drinks from other sources :) thx for the vid tho.
I totaly agree, everything that is farmed can just be looted or bought, farming is basicaly unnecessary, but I will say I start a farm in like every playthrogh, usealy midway in the playthrough when I really don't even need it anymore mostly out of laziness. I will grow a little bit of everything just so I don't need to run to the desert for a few aloe or yukka, or try to find some goldenrod for tea. and it will give me something to work on if I ned to kill an hour or so before sunrise.
Perfect ad placement:
“I wouldn’t bother farming hops unless I want to have a huge amount of beer just…”
Ad: “Find a pub near you!”
Since I play multiplayer, LotL lets me just set up enough food for everyone in the party at the base for our group of 5, and keep me in enough beer to keep me constantly drunk without much effort. The yield, to me, is a bit less important than the consistency of the farm giving us everything we need to stay on top of the survival mechanics with ease.
Nice comment, constantly drunk indeed
Meat stew is good for long term sustainable food with minimal effort once you have it all set up. You can mass produce it, just need corn & potatoes. You should have plenty of fat & meat. It gives you a lot more benefit than just cooking the meat as grilled or boiled meat. Also, if you're doing brawling, you 'need' those hops.
I think it really boils down this... do you want to be stopping all the time to hunt for eggs (bacon & eggs) as you travel around? Or do you want to spend a bunch of points & resources to farm? Neither answer is particularly attractive.
What's worse, for farming, is that most farms aren't 100 plots. They're like 10 or so. Then you go harvest... lets say the first time, you get a good crop, and make a couple extra meat stews. Great. Now lets say the second time, you have bad luck and your harvest is below average... All of a sudden, even if you craft no food at all, you can't even replant fully. So you end up in this situation where even if "on average" you have a sustainable farm, in practice (on a small scale), it's not actually sustainable at all. Bad luck will eventually nuke your farm unless you go all the way to rank 3 of LoL, and even then you'll have some fairly unimpressive harvests based on RNG.
I think the cost to make a seed should be perhaps 3 (for game balance), or 1 (for realism). Granted, it's not realism-based, real farms don't produce food the same week you plant ;)
LoL rank 2 needs a buff as well. There is never a good reason to sit at 2 points in LoL. You either don't take it at all, or it's just an obstacle to clear on the way to LoL3.
I play with the A19 farming mod with zero guilt and zero regret. With A20 farming, the only time you'd consider points in LoL is 1 point (to harvest double from natural plants), or going all 3 points to make a halfway viable farm (which only makes sense if you're a brawling/machinegun build). So yeah, farming only makes sense if you're already intending to go deep into Fortitude anyway. If not, then it's probably not even worth looting seeds when you find them, unless you're swimming in inventory space anyway.
The main reason farming is like it is, is that in A19 people were talking LoL to set up a farm, and then mind-wiping out of LoL. So it's a nerf, but a bungled one.
Personally, I wouldn't mind seeing farming take much longer in 7D2D, but have a much larger payoff when it finally is harvest time. That might be fun. Farming is a mess in vanilla right now though. Most of the overhaul mods handle it better.
I have no idea why you want to gather eggs for bacon and eggs when it's only slightly better than boiled meat
@@IzPrebuilt +10 fullness vs +36 fullness, for the same amount of meat, just add eggs? Depends on your biome I guess, and build. Not every play-through is swimming in infinite meat.
3.6x isn't "slightly" though. Don't know where you're getting "slightly".
And sure, boiled meat saves you having a stack of drinks... but i prefer red tea or coffee for the bonuses. And if you're using drinks, the water in boiled meat offers no meaningful benefit. When I don't have bacon & eggs, I'm using grilled meat generally, not boiled.
I dont think farming is the actual problem. Traders are. Everything is far too easily acquired from them.
That said, i enjoy farming even as a solo player. The food buffs from the higher tier recipes is nice, and if I wanted to I could spend the rest of the Apocalypse hunkered down in my base just living off the food I grow.
So its like investing lol, start small, make some losses but eventually equal it out. Thanks for the info, got enough supplies and seed to grow a walmart soze farm, all the materials i need just stockpile.
Also, if you have 0 loot respawn, eventually the coffee grounds are going to run out, the yucca plants won't regrow in the wild etc. and farming is your only way to in effect respawn something.
I never make gumbo stew. Unfortunately the beef rations are fairly rare, so they all go towards spaghetti.
If there's anything Zombieland taught me its rule #32: Enjoy the little things. My gf seems to love the farming and making all different kinds of food and i adore it lol.
I always hate how game developers will nerf things to change the meta into something they would want rather then just buff other things to provide a diversity of play styles. Whether you loot and trade for your food or farm it should be a decision you make based off your play style and interests rather then being lead by the nose down a certain path.
Thanks for collecting and sharing so much farming data. You do seem very upset by the numbers but I am excited to start a farmer role play session.
I recently got back into this game with a friend after years of not playing and thought having a sustainable food source would be a good idea, but after spending hours with it and grinding to get farm plots I was haRDLY GETTING A RETURN ON INVESTMENT EVEN WITH MAXED SKILLS INTHE DEPARTMENT. I have found many extremely annoying ways the game works and make the game a chore to play. its really sad to see that this is the state of the game after all the years spent in development...
The only reason I level up Living off the land perk is to get two wild plants from each harvest with a bone knife. I harvest plants on my way from somewhere to somewhere else in the early game because each plant is worth about 2.5 coins and with 2 plants that's 5 coins with EACH harvest. You can get about a hundred of plants just by running towards a traider at the start or when running somewhere that isnt a city. Very useful if I want to buy Cooking Pot and grill early game. That's it. After a get those and maybe some water filters I basically never farm ever again because grilled meat just works. Animals are everywhere and with 20 meat from each chicken or rabbit, that's 5 grilled meat from each animal. Meat stacks and heals and that's all I need. Foods in this game are not bad but to farm them is a waste of time imho (except for coffee, but you get plenty of coffee powder from broken coffee machines which are in every single house anyway).
I might even have grill thingy so I can craft campfire on the spot and turn some raw meat into grilled meat on the go.
The thing is, is when you have a team of inconsistent players who refuse to loot kitchens and grab food items. Even players who eat canned foods regardless of the importance and powerfulness of food recipes, farming is important. ESPECIALLY the vegetable stew. Think of it as if you build a large enough farm and invest the ridiculous 7 points it takes, farm the entirety of one nitrate node and get enough rotten meat goo piles, or just in general farming the zombie dogs and bears you will come across normally as you play in your first week you should have enough recourses to dedicate a small farm plot. 7 days, and 7 points and you essentially will have enough food to feed a small team consistently that will keep them alive.
So I’ve got some issues with your takes, but overall I think it’s valid to say that overall farming is NOT worth it unless you are committed to the system.
Anyways, my issues are as follows:
1.) While yes you can buy pretty much everything you can farm, the traders still charge way too much for basic supplies and especially food.
2.) If you want to make medical supplies on the fly and not pay extortionate prices, farming is pretty much the only solution. And I just wanna say, it’s pretty nice to heal literally any injury and still have 60 first aid kits to spare.
3.) (and this is the big one) Food. Now I know that this was made before A21 came out, but food always has been a major issue to overcome and farming is without a doubt the best way to overcome it IF you put in the time. Now yes, you can survive using nothing but grilled meat and bacon and eggs, but it is a pretty nice thing to be able to make 50 gumbos at once if I feel like it.
My point is, farming is annoying, but once you do get into it, it allows you to craft 20 metric tons of the most valuable and overpowered consumables in the game which is why I’d say it’s still worth getting into.
Even though briefly mentioned in the video, this only applies to a game with regular droprates. I feel like the emphasis in this video is too much on playing "regularly". If, like me and my friends, you want to really challenge yourself, put the loot abundance to 25% and then revise how necessary this skill is. Without crops early game and with little to no food items from looting, we would have starved several times over. The "time travel" method is valid, but it does feel very much like an exploit and unless you enjoy playing the game like that, isn't really a proper way to gather (food) materials. The main thing I agree with is that it costs too much crops to craft just a singular seed. Especially if you invested so many skillpoints to get to LotL3, you would expect the recipe cost to be a bit lower.
"This video only applies to the 99% of players who play on normal loot settings"
@@IzPrebuilt Nice way to handle constructive feedback.
The newer seed mechanic is insane. 50% chance to harvest a seed. Totally breaks farming unless you constantly buy more from a trader. Continual loss of crops is just stupid. Especially since the idea is you will be eating some of your profits just to stay alive. So no actual gain unless you replant everything over and over, and then, what is the purpose if you can't eat what you grow? The last part of this video has some really solid information. I would like to know what most people are actually eating early to mid game. Other than relying on vending machines, rations, or basic grilled or boiled meat, what is everyone actually eating? I always eat cornbread, or steak and eggs early on. Having to manage all these ingredients makes cooking quite a pain.
If you are using a brawling build the moonshine is way too strong an effect to pass on just because acid. Its a late game build. You arent blowing through moonshine unless its horde night or you are doing something like tier 5 infestation. For other things beer is enough. If you go fists you need super corn and that is a rare crop that comes from like 2 specific POIs. So that means you want living off the land.
Farming is totally worthwhile, in multiplayer. The more people you have, the harder it is to find enough food. If everybody splits up and does different POIs/missions, you'll find enough food to survive. However, the most efficient way to multiplayer means sticking together to get the maximum benefit from a quest and max your trader rewards. In that situation, the extra food from Farming comes in real handy.
Though, considering the changes to vending machines in A21 you might not need farmed food. Using the dukes you get from missions to buy some canned goods is a good idea. If you pile up all the cooking books on a single player, they can get to the point of making good food items quickly. The first week will still be a struggle, but after that cooking from what you can loot + buy should be fine. Especially if you have another vending machine near your base that you can use or better yet, multiple traders. A Rekt really eliminates the need for a farm.
Before watching this video, I say yes, based on my experience.
I often create a farm on the roof of whatever base I choose, or make.
It's a relatively simple thing which pays for itself quickly, by freeing up time that would be used for scavenging.
I legit can't the last couple of uploads are just perfect timing to my game
my last game, I used farming.. I had whole storage crates full of cooked meals, FULL crates for each veggie type, and I was collecting seeds out my arse when I got bored of the run. I like making use of the buffs from high end meals I mean, I play fist builds most of the time, so I'm already going for beer, so might as well farm food too. if you're going to farm get farm 3 before you start though. 1 and 2 are absolutely a rip off. I had 20 rows of 10 plants, which does suck up some time on harvest day, but good lord I had food. I wish I had friends to share it with. 🤣
Ever since the nerf, I have started to ignore farming, though occasionally planting Aloe Vera. In multiplayer, we only planted what we find in loot and skip the perk.
Seed loot is often tossed away when the inventory is full, so it's often ignored.
All the food we find is loot and the traders. No need to farm anything besides Aloe.
I have played this game from the start and farming is absolutely needed to have a sustainable food supply. In a21 dew collectors and farms are crucial for the long haul.
Until you get living off the land 3, it's just the old fashioned marshmallow test. Your inventory is limited, do you take the ear of corn, or the corn seed back to base? Plant the seed, get 2 corn.
In darkness falls, you need 5 croops too for make 01 seed but the plant is permanent, you can take again from the plant after wait the croops growing again
i put one point in it, and i just plant the seeds i scavenge/collect. tons of food and drinks, making a lot of meat stews
i strongly disagree with the notion that blueberries and pumpkin are useless. both allow for the avoidance of hunting, since so many recipes require meat. getting fat at the trader is easy, and eggs are nearly everywhere, and they give really good food points to the character. also, the chrysanthemums, yucca, and goldenrod are only available if you have a map gen that favors the biomes. furthermore, the dew collector means that better water is needed for drinking, due to the cost of them. pure mineral water is worth 3x of the standard water, reducing water demand for fewer collectors and other crafting.
in fact, the only core reason why crops are lower in importance, is based on a player with the chef traits, but that is on another skill tree. the can goods are found, but the chances are low, and chef is needed to find more.
Is there a need for an update here? Because I just planted 6 Pumpkin, I have rank 1 living off the land, got 2 seeds. Planted them back, got zero next harvest. That was with the Farmer hat on for both. I know thats gotta be pretty bad luck but I also feel like 1.0 did change some things here.
So, Prebuilt, do you need the Living Off the Land Perk if you start a Garden in Real Life?
Why would you ever want to garden irl, you can just buy your food from the grocery store, or loot snacks from a friends house
FWY in darkness falls logging out and back in after activating a quest counts as a fail and you have to get a new one
It will be interesting to see what happens to farming in the future, the new vision the devs have for this game is one where you keep moving and keep looting so I doubt farming will play into that very well.
I don't know how they intend to incentivize players to 'keep moving' as it were. Future farming only exists because they fear the community backlash if they were to remove it. But they might as well rip that bandaid off
@stevdor6146 I believe they will be making story driven POI's that may require some travel but if you are set up in a good location you will just convoy around and return after you are done
You can grow Super corn and sell it, probably not worthwhile if your an active player, but I played with someone that was kind of a pacifist and did this instead of doing POI's
Please don't tell the fun pimps. I'm sure they would patch it, if they found out someone is having fun playing the game in a way they don't approve of.
I use the farming mechanics to my advantage daily and it's also quite profitable.
when you learn to grow super corn you can sell to each vendor three full stacks per day.
You'll soil yourself when you see how profitable it really can be.
Title: Is Farming ACTUALLY Useful?
Answer: Yes, it is... in ways you do not yet understand.
A friend and I are running a dedicated server and we are farming. We split responsibilities and tasks. Yesterday we took the MD-500, 15 stacks of super corn, 5 grandpas awesome sauce, a cigar and lvl 3 better barter to 5 traders selling each 3 stacks of super corn.
we split over $200,000 dukes for 15 minutes worth of work.
try it
You'll like it.
We are running mods on the server and we're loving it. :D
Among those mods are craftable books and it's a huge quality of life time saver.
Still, if you choose not to mod it can still be done when you've found the recipe for super corn.
Also, food keeps you alive which is quite useful in a survival game.
Farming Yucca allows you to make water (yucca juice) with EMPTY jars. I think it's worth farming Yucca to do away with traveling to a water source.
Dig a 2x2, one block deep hole anywhere. Take a metal bucket, fill it from an existing/natural water source, then place the water from that bucket into your 2x2 hole. You can now fill a stack of empty jars from the water in that hole one time. After doing that, there will still be a little puddle of water in the hole (occupying one of those 4 blocks in the 2x2 hole). Switch back to your bucket and pick up that puddle with it. You'll have a full water bucket again. Pour the water back into the hole, rinse/repeat.
@@g3synth205 just don't pour lava bucket into your 2x2
Whilst i understand the point that you are making with this video, i completely disagree with what you say.
Farming isn't a 'waste of time' it's an essential part of the immersion and gameplay depending on how you are playing the game, you could say the same about crafting - weapons, ammo, armour & tools, these can all be found in loot so is crafting them a waste of time too?
However if like myself you play with zero loot respawn and loot abundance turned to lowest, then this makes the game so much harder and makes farming a much more viable option for your food source.
Personally i would like to see TFP completely remove - weapons, ammo, armour & tools from loot and make them craftable items only, thus finding the parts for these items in the main loot, this coupled with no loot respawn and low loot abundance would make the game much more challenging by default.
well if you want to 'reset' fields with quest or reload trick, you can, just 'create' food onto your bag in creative mode..
or just off with it - play in god mode, why need eat, or heal - those zombies will just die anyway.
Deep philosophical thoughts, why even play the game in single player , you're just going to win eventually
Disagree on the blueberry and yucca. Yucca only since I am not much in the desert, but the Yucca smoothie is so nice since you do not need water which is quite hard early/ mid game unless you want to put down crazy amount of of dew collectors which you need to find/buy first.. Yes you can up the loot abundance.. but that just pace the game too much for my liking... But sure I am also on multiplayer server (2-3) players . and with charismatic buff and the sham chowder I do not need to waste many skill points. And the Gumbo stew is not worth before very high level since 50-60 food is basically enough to fill your food from hunger state.
I only have 2-3 plots and only use seeds I find. Granted, I used to love the farming aspect and would love for them to fix if!
Ah yes, why worry about farming when you can just cheat? I mean listen, I don't judge what people do on their singleplayer games, if it makes it more fun for you then cheat all you want. But at that point, just save yourself the blatant exploits and enable the creative menu to spawn yourself in tons of food.
🧂wouldn't get me banned on a server so it's not a cheat is it?
Farming as it is now sucks. The ratio of crops to seeds for crafting is still garbage, and (at least with my luck) a maxxed out LOTL seems to be on the negative side of that 50% chance of getting a seed back. In recent experience, farming with maxxed-out LOTL and harvesting 20 of the same crop, we'll say potatoes, only returned about 6-7 seeds. That wouldn't be so bad (though still pretty bad) if the crop to seed crafting ratio was more realistic, or at least say, 2 or 3 crops per seed.
I've only just started playing this game with a mate, and sometimes i question why the Devs have done certain things in this game.
If 1 seed can make several corn, 1 corn should make several seeds if you're not going to eat it?
Things are so unbalanced in places, especially the food and farming.
I just find it fun to do, it's on my way to clear out my dew collectors, and I only loot seeds not craft them
I completely agree with you... in single player. However farming and cooking becomes essential when you have a 2 guys that swing pickaxes and jump 20 hours a day, 1 guy who loves machine guns and can't help but take the fast healing perk. The glue tax becomes quite bit higher in this case too.
wait'll i tell you about the snow biome and all the meat running around it
@@IzPrebuilt snow biome is the hardest start lol. Worth it once you can get a foot hold though
With the time travel method, you might as well just spawn in the food at that point.
the mechanic is intentional and doesn't require console commands or third party modification.
It's legit.
Cry about it.
@@IzPrebuilt oh. I absolutely agree that the farming perks are terrible. I enjoy farming in most games but it feels useless here. I'm just saying if you're gonna abuse game mechanics like you do with the time travel thing, spawning it might be better since it's much faster and less work.
@@brokemage1395 spawning it isn't AS legit as relogging. You're basically cheating by going creative or godmode, whereas 'time travel' is a exploity form of double dipping, which is not cheating. It is infinite cheese that does cost you one resource, real life time, so using the exploit is not the same as cheating since you are still working for it.
@@stevdor6146 abusing game mechanics like logging out to restart a quest so you can get more stuff is pretty cheaty. Saying it's not cheating because it takes real life time is like saying going through the deck and making my Uno hand full of +4's isn't cheating because it takes time. It makes no difference.
I'm not saying you can't do the time travel method. It's obviously your game, you can do what you want. I'm just saying if you are abusing game mechanics that much, might as well just spawn them.
I doubt anyone that has played the game hasn't "pre-cleared" a POI before. Besides, the real enemy everyone is fighting in the game is time, so if that time is wasted then there's no going back and fixing it.
if you spec into farming, the cost to build plots reduces significantly...at least that's what my friend said as he was specced into it
Farming is good for when you don't want to loot food or drinks. Save a little space. But endless mushrooms sort of fixes that. Without including the steak, eggs and other resources that you get alongside others like when you're looking leather
My go-to is farming potatoes, corn and mushrooms and making Steak and Potato meal.
I think like one point jammed into LotL is worth it just for the tripling of items, although I wish there was an item that could increase drops over putting a point in.
Like Farming goggles? Not a bad idea. And 1pt doesn't triple, it just doubles- but yea thats where you get the most impact for only 1 pt
In PVP underground farm is pretty essential if u want to raid. Supercorn for rockets
It's just like real life , if you're alone farming is not worth it as you can scavenge or hunt plenty but as you get more mouths to feed farming becomes more valuable.
I'm still learning appreciate all the informational videos really helps 👍
Get first perk then scavenge crops when needed
Nice
I hated farming until Darkness Falls. Darkness Falls farming is soooo satisfying and a lot of the meals give some really groovy perks.
Do I actually need to farm to survive? Nope. Will I ever build a base solo or join a team multi where no farming happens? Hell no! There's just something absolutely lovely to me about grabbing it out of your own yard. And Yucca Smoothies are OP, since they are also food, somehow. Granted they are basically on par with boiled meat for nutrition, but it will keep you from seriously debuffing due to hunger while you look for something to eat. And I don't like having to depend on looted items either. Yeah I can find enough cans of pasta generally to make spaghetti, but that's no fun.
That said, the cost of planters is insane.
This is probably the A20 version and below. Farming in A21 is pretty much 50% useless due to limitation of water production (dew water collection) giving 3 water per day and T1 quests gives only 2 and the rest has to be purchased at trader. So no use mass farming and hoping to cook a large quantity. Then there's the new crafting system you have to tackle in getting the cooking crafting skills
farming is important but only farm potato and mushroom which you use more often on most recipes
Playing it on PS5 so fairly new to the game and thought I was going mad with the 5 item to 1 seed ratio. Really unless you're on living off the land 3 it's not worth the effort outside of getting the challenges done as 50% isn't guaranteed so you can quite easily get nothing on small farming plots as I've done.
Maybe it's more realistic but in the game it kind of makes farming pointless as it's the early game when you need it most when money is tight. Meat is fairly plentiful anyway and I'm always finding other ingredients 🤷♂️
I am on day 52 (A21) and I have not cooked a single item; everything I have eaten was from finding and buying the food. I have a lot of meat, fat, farm plots, vegs, everything, but I've been too lazy to make anything because I don't need. to. I play on the hardest settings. Not bragging; I'm just wondering why can't it be harder to survive?