Vegan characters?

[princebunnyboy]

Hello, as a vegan in real life I love when I can do it in games. I have seen posts of players farms and I want to do that too.

Problem is I have no idea how to farm right. My characters have always hunted and had tiny farms, 3x3 maximum. My current one is new so he's still hunting as well. So any farming pros how should I make it so i can only live off plants? I'm planning on downloading the cooking mod too.

Thanks!

[Galgana]

If your farm plot is away from your homestead, I recommend setting up a cellar on site and stock it up with fish or something before getting to work. I generally like preparing plot squares of 6x6, but it definitely takes time to clear away trees for the space. I think 36 tiles is the most possible you can prepare at once before the ashes disappear after two days. 3 branches is the minimum needed to start a fire and adjacent tiles are guaranteed to light up. Since preparing plots is heavy work, you can reduce your fatigue by keeping your character naked and have in your inventory only food, a water skin, and a shovel. Your character's warmth status will be sweating because of the ashes, but there currently aren't mechanics that involve moisture.

Turnips are a crop you can maximize with two plantings within a year if you can start the crop early enough, and the Njerp cooking mod boosts their nutrition potential with a roasted turnip recipe. But I guess you might not want to use milk for the mashed turnip recipe. Still, having cattle can help to move the higher yields made possible when your agriculture skill improves enough.

Barley and rye are the grain crops and will be most efficiently processed with a scythe and flail, but if you don't have them by harvest time then any cutting tool and a club will suffice. You can store the harvested Plant (that's the inventory category) indefinitely and won't have to worry about animals eating your crops. But birds can eat your grain Patches, so it helps to set up some traps on the perimeter of your farm or get a dog to scare them away. Sometimes cold weather prevents starting the spring planting soon enough before grain patches wither in the Fall month, but patches come back after withering and you can guarantee spring sprouts by planting a plot in late summer. Another benefit of autumn sowing is that your agriculture skill probably will be higher compared to when you start spring planting. See this thread for a discussion about calorie yields for flour. You'll see that it's better to avoid planting peas.

Sorrel can be threshed for leaves and seeds, but you can collect it in the wild from hills and mountains. It buffs appetite satisfaction as a seasoning herb and you only need one unit to improve your recipes. Bearpipe is also a useful plant to get your vigor status up when you have tasks you don't want to sleep through.

Hemp is a very handy crop if you get one of the sufficiency mods for weaving, but you might end up planting less since cords typically are used to prepare meat cuts. It still is a relatively nutrition-dense plant and has a higher yield than, for example, clayweed. Seeds can be ground into flour, and you can use hemp leaves as herb filler in the cooking recipes.

Training your herblore skill will help identify unknown mushrooms that can supplement your diet. If you're willing to 'grind' the skill, be sure to collect different herbs at your homestead so you can just pick up the whole bundle each day and use the keyboard shortcuts to examine your food inventory.

Berries have a longer shelf life than meat cuts, but they can still spoil in the cellar. Depending on what kind of berry, the time spent harvesting from a bush can become costly, so don't be in a hurry to harvest them as soon as they're ripe unless you plan to cook a lot. I like using them in the cheese mod, but again I don't know your attitude towards dairy livestock. You'll probably end up using berries to brew kvass for the okroshka soup on the Njerp recipe mod.

But if you do end up going for the cheese mod, I recommend using Stonelobber's Primitive World Mod for the clay pottery module to keep up with milking a dairy herd. Pot quality matters in cooking, but simply storing seeds in ugly pots won't hurt.

Check the Plants page on the wiki for nutritional information on herbs. Lake reed can be found at big lakes (bigger than one tile) and you can harvest a lot of it. It's not as nutritious as the grain crops, but you can make flour from the roots.

[PALU]

I prepare my farming area during the first winter (with my characters starting in "spring"). This is done by cutting the trees and moving the trunks (you don't have to do that, as you can burn the trees, but it's easier to prepare the soil with no trees around to spread fire in an unplanned manner). My farm "plots" are currently 9*9 tiles (in theory you can then harvest everything by moving up and down the plot three times, covering 3 columns on each pass, but in practice I harvest each tile as soon as it ripens).

Once the trees have been cleared away I prepare the future farming area with rows of 3 branches so a plot has 5 rows of tiles with branches, and make sure I've got branches available to put 3 branches on each of the remaining tiles. When the soils finally becomes free of frost so you can work the soil, I set all the branches in a row on fire (and lighting a fire adjacent to a tile on fire is much easier than the first one). Once the last (9:th) tile is set on fire the fire on the first one has died down, and I go back to the first one to prepare it, and then go through the rest of the row. In a typical day I can do 2-3 rows, depending on the preparation time RNG. Once all the 5 rows have been prepared, I place branches on the remaining 4 column and repeat the process.
The reason I don't cover the whole area with branches is that fire can spread spontaneously, and that would lead to ash that I can't work before it disappears.

As mentioned, various animals can eat your crops, badgers can cause significant damage, for instance, so I enclose the farm plot area with a fence (in my case with bear traps, but that's definitely not required), to keep large animals like elks and reindeer out, and then line the inside with small traps (light lever traps or snares) to keep birds out (which causes you to catch some of those. I suspect there's a lesser risk of damage to the bird with a snare than a lever trap, so if you plan on releasing the birds (and hares, etc.) you might want to go for snares.

Note that preparing a large number of fields is a LOT of work. I'm overproducing with 12 9*9 plots and working on scaling back (but most of it is yarrow, which has a fairly low yield), and I think that's more or less a full time job for 2-3 months (and you need to eat during that time, so food stocks are needed).
In terms of crops, I'd plant turnips early on, because they provide good volumes even with a poor skill. but I'm shifting over to broad beans for the bulk production.
You've probably realized it yourself, but you probably want at least one bulk crop, at least one herb crop, and at least one cereal crop (barley is more nutritious than rye, but rye provides a higher yield). Depending on how much you value role playing, you may have multiple crops for variation.

Unfortunately, mushrooms and berries aren't really worth the effort in the current UrW system: when my characters have had to make do with only berries they were just slowing their descent into starvation, although you may still pick them for role playing reasons (and if you use a mod to allow you to dry them you can get much better nutrition concentration levels).