Entire field gone overnight, twice

[conanthecanadian]

I've been playing UnReal World for years now, though I've only done Agriculture a few times. My current file is on version 3.51, and now that my first winter is done with and I feel I have the free time to start planting fields, I'm encountering something that is either a bug, or something I've never encountered before. The first night of planting I only got about 15 planted in my 5x10 starter field, then when I came back overnight everything i had planted was gone. I figured it was just birds/hares clearing it, so I put 3 dogs around the field and planted all 50 plots with barley in late swidden. The next morning, all 50 were cleared. In previous games, I only saw a few tiles max get wiped out overnight by wildlife. Is this caused by wildlife, or something else? I don't really want to touch the save until I understand it because I don't want to miss cycles to use to level up my pitiful 18 agriculture.

[PALU]

I don't think it's a bug. For some plants you can start sowing seeds earlier than their sprouting time, and in those cases UrW provides a feedback that you've planted in the form of immediately sprouted plant graphics, but they're gone the next day. However, they'll sprout normally when it's time (and then they're at the mercy of badgers and other marauders that eat the growing crops...).

It can be noted that an exploit to increase the agriculture skill (at the cost of seeds and only a little time) is to plant the same field over and over again. If you want to maximize the gains without explicit exploits you can keep track of how many points you agriculture skill has increased in a day and cease the planting once you've gotten the maximum 3 points and then resume the planting the next day, for a new batch of skill points (although you rarely get 3 in a day).

Otherwise, agriculture is actually one of the fastest increasing skills, in my experience, as planting, in particular, is fairly generous with points per time spent.

[conanthecanadian]

Ah okay, I understand now. I had read about planting prior to when they actually start growing, but I hadn't realized that planting in Swidden was still in the prior, I thought it was only the autumn planting which I haven't tried yet. Thanks for the clarification.

[PALU]

When "autumn" planting the plants sprout immediately, grow, and then wither and dies, but they then regrow in spring (and for some of the earlier plants, they can sprout well before the ground thaws so you could sow the fields, if the spring is late in arrival). As far as I've seen, all the withered plants regrow in spring, without losses. It seems all plants I've tried can be sown late for a revival the next year.