Thoughts on All Crops

[Felius]

Been trying my hand at farming on my current URW game, and decided to share my thoughts on each plantable crop. As a minor disclaimer, I am using BAC crafting mod, so I have access to a few recipes that allow more efficient usage of flour than vanilla's flatbread and porridge. Also, some more variety in how to prepare everything else too, but that's less important. More importantly though is that it allows me to turn yarn into cloth and from there into actual clothing, thus giving more reason for more extensive planting and harvesting of textile plants.

Barley: Great nutrition. Takes a pretty long time to grow, but generally can grow to maturity when planted planting as soon as it's possible on spring unless you are too far north, and it can have quite large stacks of plants per square, which means you can either prepare less soil or use more soil for everything else. Harvest window is pretty narrow though, so people just dabbling in agriculture will likely have trouble.

Rye: Nearly functionally identical to Barley, except a bit little worse. Very slightly less nutrition, takes slightly longer to grow. You might want to plant it in fall instead to winter the crop and see it sprout earlier next spring, specially if you are not really to the south. Very narrow harvest window, specially if planted on spring instead of wintered. I somewhat Rye flatbread in specific being used in some ritual, but my current characters don't have that one so I can't confirm. It might be easier to just trade for some bags of Rye instead if that's the case though.

Turnip: Relatively low nutrition for its weight, but very heavy. Grows really fast, and if you can often get two harvests per year if your timing is good. Great filler for when you are already on abundant nutrition, or if you really need something to help you last until the better crops are ready for harvest. Do seem to bring pretty large stacks of crops per square. Seems to work as bait for Elks and Reindeers in traps. Seeds not worth trying to make into food though, unless you are desperate.

Broad Bean: While not the most nutritious per weight, it's more than enough to keep you very healthy. Takes relatively long to grow, but has a very large harvest window, only withering a month after winter already started. Good if you are only dabbling in agriculture and/or like to travel and might miss a narrow harvest window. Not very large crop stack per square, but each plant does get threshed into five large bean pods, so it's remains a solid option. Worth mentioning that 3 broad bean pods will just exactly fill the meat soup requirement for vegetables (and the meat stew option for it) without any leftover.

Pea: Low nutrition, takes pretty long to mature, small plant stacks, only produces 2 small pea pods per plant. Honestly, rather useless to plant. Harvest them if you find them on the wild, sure, and you can always try to trade for it (although villages seem to only have half bags of it for sale, but that's just a matter of consolidating them in a single bag later). Honestly, I don't know why you'd plant this unless it's for roleplay purposes.

Hemp: Very versatile. Textile crop, making one fibre per about 8 dried retted straw/plant. Each plant also produces 2 fistful of seeds, at about 100g each, with pretty good nutrition, in addition to 2 fistful of leafs (with pretty low nutrition due to thresh multiplier, but not quite insignificant), at about 2/3 of the weight of the seeds. Takes very long to grow, and depending on where your farm is, they might wither before maturing unless you winter them. Like all other textile crops, can be harvested early just for fibre, but that's something of a waste given how good they are for food. Relatively small stacks.  Also [insert jokes about weed/police attention/420/whatever here].

Flax: Very good for textile, at 1 fibre per 5 straw/plant, matures pretty quickly and survives quite a bit of time. Flowers before full maturity, which might be worth if you want to brew some flax tea or something. Fully mature plants produce 2 seeds per, at about 10g per seed. Quite nutritious, but simply not enough weight to live off it unless you really go out of your way to make massive flax farms and take a massive time threshing everything. I generally find it worth planting to make textiles, with the food as a nice bonus out of it.

Nettle: Textile, at 1 fibre per 15 straw/plant. Plant produces leafs and seeds, with seeds barely more nutritious than turnip by weight, and leaf insignificant other than the medicinal properties. After you get a bit of a leaf stockpile to use for their properties or as seasoning filler, might be worth to just harvest young instead of waiting for maturity. Honestly not worth planting. It does have one big advantage though, in that it's incredibly common in the wild, specially on river and lake banks. Just take a boat trip and can get massive quantities of it very easily.

Clayweed: Nutrition is pretty good, but stacks are pretty small, and each plant doesn't produce much. Definitely better than peas, but then again, just about everything is. There are better crops, but might be worth for a challenge and/or roleplay. But honestly, just harvest it on the wild.   

Yarrow: Useless nutritionally. Somewhat common on the wild. Pretty good set of medical properties. Get a stockpile of it, ideally from the wild unless running a challenge or have roleplay reasons for not doing so, and there you have it.

Sorrel: Useless nutritionally. Incredibly common in the wild. Pretty meh set of medical properties, but not entirely so. I wouldn't even bother harvesting it unless I'm desperate or just want some to stockpile to roleplay more variety in food.

And as a bonus,

Lake Reed: Not plantable, but massively common across most lakes. Very good nutrition, with a root that can be used as a vegetable or ground into flour. Takes a bit of time to actually harvest, at 4 minutes per plant, and it comes in somewhat large stacks in very large clusters of plants. Take a week or two to go on a boat trip and come back when your punt is basically overloaded with them. Might have to make a few shelters around the lakes, because they mature around a very wet season, which makes just sleeping on the boat a bit annoying. And with the harvest time, you'll very much have to sleep during such expedition. 3 roots per plant, with each root about 50g.

Milkweed: Surprisingly decent nutrition on the root, pretty solid set of medical properties. Quite common in the wild. 4 minutes per plant to harvest. Wouldn't consider depending on it for long term survival, but it's pretty good forage during long trips and expeditions if you brought a pot.

[JP_Finn]

Nice writeup, and agreed on the peas, just not worth the effort.
Turnips make great hare bait when using loop snares. Weight can be reduced by using 1 turnip per pot of soup, then stockpiling the leftover turnips for use as bait.

Another wild crop (non-plantable) plant that I think should be mentioned is bog bean, almost as nutritious as lake reed (which is twice that of broad beans), definitely worth picking up. Makes great elk/deer/hare bait too. Sadly they're hard to find at times.

[Brygun]

In early games Lakereed saved my starving ass.

Lately I've discovered Hemp flour to be so damn awesome I added a recipe in BAC for hemp + other bread. Reason being is if you look up the nutrition in the Wiki Hemp is high in protien low in carbs. Rye and Barley are the opposite. So you combine Hemp + (Rye/Barley) you get a very well balanced meal.

Broadbeans is my own top contender for King of the crops. If you can get a harvest of Broadbeans you've basically won the survival portion. You can eat them as is without grinding and they don't decay. So they are also your emergency food without lengthy smoking or drying process.

For crafting Nettle and Hemp are good. Ive played Rain/Boudini a lot so Nettle was a great wild one to find as you could spend winter making clothes. Nettle is also handy for its use in physician.

Hemp now that Im baking it is the other contender for King. With it you get protien and can get clothing.

On Turnips handy in that they can be eaten as is making them a good to plant for bad times. The are also great bait. The are okay in carbs but weak overall. There times i've survived by trading for a bunch of cheap turnips. Turnips do very well with hunters by splitting the diet turnip-meat thus doubling the amount of days per animal kill.

[Plotinus]

if you thresh 1 barley plant, you get 2 grains, but if you thresh 1 rye plant, you get 3 grains, so the yield is quite a bit better, balancing out the longer growing time

[Felius]

if you thresh 1 barley plant, you get 2 grains, but if you thresh 1 rye plant, you get 3 grains, so the yield is quite a bit better, balancing out the longer growing time

Ah, I did miss that. Yeah, that does make Rye quite a lot more powerful if weight per unit of grain is the same

[Vahvapito]

This is great info. I have not paid enough attention to stack sizes previously. It definitely makes some plants much more efficient than others. I thought clayweed should be great but stack size is a bummer. Hard to find informaation on stack sizes too.

Very much agree on lake reed, it's great. It almost makes the game too easy. When lake reed is in season, you can quickly collect very large amounts of it and as far as I can tell, it does not spoil. It nearly makes cultivating other plants pointless.

I feel that In general plants should spoil faster. Roots might keep a year in the cellar but most others should be dried and then boiled before consumption. For example, dried beans keep very long but can't be used as is.

[JP_Finn]

I guess you mean produced quantity from plant with the 'stack size' (stack in general is all items in inventory or ground that has matching properties i.e. 590 lake reed roots or 16 fine arrows)
You can open flora_xyz.txt file and the harvestable amount is in parenthesis immediately after the plant's name. e.g.
.Turnip.     (20)
.Pea.        (5)

Hope this helps. Wiki also seems to be mostly up-to-date on that.

If you believe clayweed should produce more, you can always edit the amount in the files, then when you sow new or load an area previously not visited, the new maximum will apply to the generated plants. After all, it's your unreal world.

[Vahvapito]

I guess you mean produced quantity from plant with the 'stack size' (stack in general is all items in inventory or ground that has matching properties i.e. 590 lake reed roots or 16 fine arrows)
You can open flora_xyz.txt file and the harvestable amount is in parenthesis immediately after the plant's name. e.g.
.Turnip.     (20)
.Pea.        (5)

Yes, number of plants in a single tile is what I meant. I did not realize that number in parenhtesis in the flora-files was the indicator for that. Now I know, thank you.

I think its okay value for clayweed because modifying that value will probably change both wild and player planted clayweeds. I think you should be able to grow more clayweed in one tile but then it might become extremely abundant in the wild. Too bad these can't be edited separately.

[Matti-patti]

The main thing that needs to change with Clayweed is that it needs to be an actual weed. While this was certainly eaten, I doubt it was planted (even now I can't seem to find Chenopodium album seeds in Finland, only for the closely related perennial Chenopodium bonus-henricus) but instead harvested away as pest in the fields. That you can use the leafs like you would use nettle or spinach is just a bonus.

[Brygun]

Hello Felius,

Brygun of the BAC here.

Glad you are enjoying the mod.

One of my go to cooking recipes is the swirl bread using Rye and Hemp. I recall looking up that Rye was good on carbs and Hemp good on proteins. (Query, was Hemp modded in?). Thus making rye-hemp swirl breads and hard tacks would cover the full spectrum of nutrition.

My current character Calle has gone through a cycle of agriculture. Some general findings for him:

Rye-Hemp mixes work great. They off set the needs for meat and balance nutrition.

Nettle is great for making threads which in turn is used in various crafting and in making loop snares.

A mixed diet of one meat cut, a turnip and some leaves worked as good diet. The leaves were nettle, hemp and flax. Those were grown for making cordage, thread and cloth. The leaves are a very useful byproduct. Turnips can be grown or traded for in big quantities. Turnips don't spoil (or rarely), they are a root vegetable. The most expensive is the meat which is now only about a third of the diet. This really strecthed out the meats from catching animals.

If you have fields you will attract animals. A good indigenous teaching is to plant more crops than you need for yourself. Expect the animals to eat some. Then you can trap or hunt the animals. This means your crops are also a big giant batch of bait.

A mix of light lever traps and loop snares will deal with rabbits, squirrels and birds. Fences with a pit trap here and there (maybe 1 per four or five fences) will at times catch you a reindeer or elk for a big meat harvest! Combine these meats with the diet of meat-turnip-leaves and you can go a long time.

Prior to some of the cooking mods, like swirl bread, broad beans were a big deal. They are still very handy. Broad beans don't spoil much and can be eaten as is. Probably not cooking them would suck to actually eat but it works.

Calle pretty much gave up on growing peas. He is though far in the north. Agriculture is a little affected by your north-south as the weather patterns are AFAIK different.

[Brygun]

In terms of medicines this is draft for a guide I've been working on but havent released. The idea was to come up with an in-character saying on what to carry for medicines:

>>>

Fighters medicine bag:

Caution: These are Unreal World results. Real world plants maybe different. Learn your local plants.

On consideration he comes up with new memory phrase: “Fighters need helpful medicinal herbs and bandages”.

Flax supports nutrition and recovery.
Nettles for binding wounds and sickness of the lungs.
Hemp is for eating.
Meadsweet tea reduces vomiting, reduces pain and lowers infection.
Heather is for washing wounds and as a tea for many internal illnesses.
“And bandages” means to have another two ready bandages.

A pot, be it iron or clay kettle pot, is needed to make the teas.

Flax, nettles and hemp leaves are all by products of agriculture. Threshing for straws also yields leaves so these can be grown in quantity or found around villages. Meadsweet needs to be gathered from the wild forests.  Heather flowers are light to carry for frequent offerings of peace with the spirits. When eating your daily leaves put heather out then.

For wounds and burns first wash with heather then include nettle in the bandage.
When wounded or vomiting have meadsweet tea.
Other illnesses have a heather tea.
Hemp for eating like when hiding to heal.


To make tea you need a boiling vessel like a pot with the BAC clay kettle pot being a light weight travel version.

Other herbs have their benefits. This set is a very good mix that is easy to remember, can be gathered in quantity and nutritious to eat.