Agriculture - Dissapointment and Intended future use?

Sooo... am I just incredibly thick, that after almost two months of playing, it just occurred to me now that shards are probably (or explicitly, I haven't progressed the quests much or read a lot of background) blackrock?

Man. Unlucky and stupid. A winner is me.

 

Well, ,this thread answered my questions about the point of agriculture. Silly me, I assumed that growing one's own herbs would cut down on the cost. So I upgraded to a row home with a greenhouse on top. I purchased a large planting bed. I did not purchase a fountain, as my neighbor has a well outside his house. Perhaps I should have asked him why he has a large planting bed he never uses. Should have asked the question of quite a few folks in our POT, because I never see anything planted besides a few permanent decorative rose plants and all the greenhouses are barren. From reading here, it appears one needs to water plants at least 4 times a day at 4 hour intervals to actually turn a profit. Is that right!?! Yesterday I planted 20 garlic, which cost me 320 gold. I did not buy water, but spent the time instead getting 80 buckets of water and watering my plants 3 times over the course of the day: twice at planting, at midday, before retiring for the night. Got up this morning and found all the garlic I planted was mature and harvested my crop. I reaped 61 garlic, which would have cost me 244 gold if I had purchased them from the reagents vendor. However, I'd spent 320 gold for the seeds I had planted. So all my time and effort brought me a net LOSS of 76 gold and that is with spending time rather than gold on buckets of water! My little greenhouse is now joining the rest of the fallow fields throughout our little world. This needs to either be fixed or the skill removed as pointless.

 

Right now it needs a precise timetable to get the maximum out of your crops. You said it right - plants need 4 times watering during growing-cycle. If the plant takes 24 hours to grow, you water the first time by planting (you need a bucket of water for planting), the 2nd time shortly after the planting (when you are ready with planting you can start watering the 2nd time), the 3rd time shortly before end of the second third of the total-grow-time (in a 24h-cycle approx. after 15hours) and the 4th time short after second third ends (approx. 16 hours). This way your plants get the best water-supply.

The most disappointing for me was the knowledge that all growable plants get the same profit per day (and a random amount of the used seeds). Plants which take longer, are more expensive, grop more items but if you divide the sum by the necessary days you get nearly the same amount in gold. At the first look you have a wide varity but a closer look is disappointing.

 

This thread is a bit old, but I will echo what others have said: once you do the math you quickly find out agriculture is a waste of time unless you can hit every single water. Even then there is almost no profit compared to other activities in game that don't force you to set timers and wake up in the middle of the night to do.

 

I do not have my notes at hand but if I’m not wrong you should be able to harvest round about seven garlic out of full watered plant = 140 garlic and not 61.
Harvesting is offering a small profit but missing just one watering and you are loss-making and I fear this happened in your experiment.
And just to mention it not all plants need 24 hours to grow in a greenhouse. I'm not sure if there are some that need lesser time but I know that for some it takes e.g. 36 hours.

True but this could be said about most ingame activities as there is mostly a possibility to get more gold if you would do something else.
Nevertheless I hope too that over time this mechanic will be more rewarding.

 

Yes our poor agriculture system. Just like fishing updates were pushed although it did get a little more love than fishing. So now they are pushed out into the future for When the Devs can work on them again. As with many of our systems hopefully they will get the attention they deserve in the near future.

My truest desire is that one day we will stop adding scenes and take care of what is already in the game still missing or needs updates or upgrades in this game. For example the already mentioned fishing and agriculture updates and loot and Discovery systems added all over the world where there are too few of these in scenes. Adding things to do in scenes such as wondering NPCs and Quests that are dailies giving reason to keep visiting scenes and exploring the world other than grind or at least giving a purpose to the Grind. And many other ideas of course.

 

*cough cough* UO inspired Treasure Hunting * cough cough *

 

Lol yes of course I usually mention that too. I must be slipping. We must get our treasure hunting and ability to discover treasure maps through out the world. Perhaps you fish up a water stained map, or get a clue in a message in a bottle, perhaps you find a partially burnt map in a campfire, or you could get a map from a quest that npc will part with after you help them.

 

@Drya

Agreed on the dissapoinent.

However a small tip.

If you are like me and don't have the time to water that often then you can combine the different growth rates and use them to your advantage.

Like you don't want short cycle crops in a greenhouse. It requires too frequent watering.

For instance growing crops in your basement takes 10x the time.
For short cycle crops like a 24h one that means 10 days to mature. Giving you a 60h watering cycle. Something which is much more manageable since you only need to water every 2-3 days.

Then you can maximize the watering.

For greenhouses it only makes sense with fast crops on long weekend sessions, otherwise it's better to stick to the long cycle crops.

So there are ways of getting a decent profit. If it's a side business to some other crafting endeavor where you refine the crops into products. Like cotton into cloth armor.

But yea, farming doesn't make much sense as it is implemented. Where there are many ways they could adjust it to make it more fun.
It just doesn't feel finished yet.

Especially with how we are supposed to get water which is just plain silly.