[Guide] How to be an LOTC farmer (and be good at it!)

[NotEvilAtAll 9927]

Farming Guide

Hey there! Do you have a plot of land somewhere on the server? No clue what to do with it? This guide will teach you how to be a farmer and obtain both passive & active income from your farming!

 

PRO TIP: Right click mature crops with a hoe to harvest and auto-replant them! This doubles wheat yields!

 

Contents:

~Field setup~
~Does lighting matter?~

~Crops to consider~
~Selling your crops~
~Animals are important~

~Controlling your cattle~

 

~Field Setup~

~Each block of water hydrates a 9x9 square (4 blocks in every direction) around it~

Fields, how do you set them up? By far the most important thing to consider is hydration. Without hydrating your farmland, your crops will grow very slowly! However, if you spam water everywhere, you might miss out on space that could otherwise be planted on with a more efficient water setup!

~Cheeky water-block hiding under the farmland, hydrating the farm without wasting any space to do so!~

On a flat surface, the most efficient water layout is to put 1 block of water in the center of each 9x9 square on the field, leaving 8 blocks of farmland between each water block (not counting the water blocks themselves). However, if you are farming on a slope, you can hide water blocks underneath existing farmland to hydrate everything without any exposed dirt left un-planted!

 

~Does lighting matter?~

No! Unless you are farming underground (which isn't allowed on LOTC), block lighting has no impact on crop growth.

Crops grow based on the SKY light level, not the block light level. The block light level only matters if the sky light level (which remains at 15 even at night if the block is exposed to open sky) is too low for crop growth. As long as the crop can be planted, it will be able to grow there during daytime AND nighttime.

 

Don't believe me? Look below:

Spoiler

Source 1 (look at the section on light level):

 

Source 2 (my own testing):

(test was done at nighttime, night vision used for better clarity)

field on the left has no block lighting, field on the right is lit up with a torch

If any difference between crop growth with block lighting and crop growth without block lighting exists, it is very minimal.

 

~Crops to consider~

Wheat: Wheat is used to craft bread, cake, cookies, and hay bales. Hay bales are useful for healing horses and as a decoration block, and bread is a common travel food. On LOTC, each harvested wheat crop yields 2 wheat, 2/3rds of a loaf of bread. Wheat is easy to process into a sellable form, easy to store by crafting it into hay bales, is vital for horse breeding and horse combat (in hay-bale form), and is needed to breed cows and sheep (high-value animals). This is why wheat is the most common LOTC crop, and thus it's highly worth planting on your LOTC farm.

Potatoes: Potatoes can be smelted in a furnace to make baked potatoes, providing 6 saturation and 5 food points just like bread, or fed to pigs to breed more of them. On LOTC, each harvested potato crop yields 2 potatoes, each potato capable of being smelted into a baked potato. Thus, potatoes are 3 times as efficient at producing food as wheat, assuming you have enough fuel to smelt them. If you plan to sell food in bulk, don't have tons of space to farm, and have access to cheap or free fuel, potatoes are worth farming, perhaps even better than farming wheat if you're only producing foodstuffs. If fuel is expensive or otherwise unobtainable, don't bother.

Carrots: Used to make golden carrots and breed rabbits and pigs. Carrots themselves are a horrible food item, but golden carrots are the best food item in the game, hands down. Golden carrots provide 6 hunger points and 14.4 saturation, the most saturation out of any item in LOTC (steak only provides 12.8 saturation). Golden carrots heal you faster than any other food item in LOTC as a result, on top of being necessary for horse breeding. Carrots are worth farming if you have access to lots of gold or plan to breed horses. Otherwise, don't bother, you'll just fill up your storage with useless carrots you'll never be able to sell. Only a small carrot farm is necessary to produce golden carrots, as you'll likely be limited by gold instead of carrots, so don't go overboard with carrot farming.

Beetroot: Used to craft beetroot soup and red dye or to breed pigs. Unless you need a lot of red dye, there is no reason to farm beetroot. Beetroot soup is nice for feasts at least, but for that purpose even a tiny farm will provide plenty of beetroot. Probably the worst crop in LOTC.

Pumpkins: Used to craft jack o' lanterns and pumpkin pie. If you have a lot of eggs and sugar, growing pumpkins is worth it for the pie, which makes for an excellent base food item to make RP-item food with. Useful in October for seasonal decoration. It might be worth stocking up on some for when Halloween season comes around.

Melon: Eating this restores 2 hunger and 1.2 saturation. The main use for melon is as glistering melon for potion-making, which isn't a thing on LOTC. Decent decoration block for jungle settings. As a whole, melon is down there with beetroot as a terrible LOTC crop. Only worth farming for variety in feasts, honestly.

Sugarcane: S tier crop. Sugar can be used for cakes and pies, but the main reason you want to grow sugarcane is for the paper. 3 paper can be crafted into a book on LOTC. Books are very easy to trade or sell to librarians who always need more bookshelves to expand their libraries. If you plan to do writing on the side for extra minas, sugarcane is a must-have crop, but even if you never write any books or journals, sugarcane is worth growing along any bodies of water near your farm for easy paper.

 

~Selling your crops~

~Bread selling on the auction house~

Bread, baked potatoes, and other such travel foods are easy to sell on the auction house. It's common for players to run out of food when traveling and by more from said auction house. If you're producing a lot of wheat and potatoes, auctioning them off is a good way to make some minas. Keep in mind that auction house prices for food are often cheaper than shop prices. Thus, you'll make more minas selling your farm goods in a shop than you will selling them on the auction house.

~A typical bread shop~

Shops that sell bread or potatoes for 0.1 minas each are also a common way farmers unload their goods. Some nation capitals don't have auction houses anymore, and thus players are forced to buy food from these shops, giving the farmers who stock them a good amount of minas in return. If shops are cheap to buy in your nation's capital, it's absolutely worth getting one.

 

PRO TIP: You can sell wheat both as hay bales or as bread. Take a look at the typical prices for each and see what will make you more money. Each hay bale takes 9 wheat and each bread takes 3 wheat, but sometimes hay bales sell for more than 3x as much as bread does.

 

You can also barter your goods directly for things you need. This is especially the case with leather, hay bales, or wool. The next time a traveling merchant enters your city, consider offering them some of your farmed resources in exchange for the weird trinkets they carry.

 

~Animals are important~

~Sheep, cows, and a chicken coop~

While crops are cool and all, most of a farmer's money comes from animals instead! You can breed up to 4 animals every restart, so make sure to get the best value out of this limited ability as you can! Some animals provide passive income whereas others only produce valuable goods once killed.

 

PRO TIP: You can breed animals during high serverload by feeding them first and then putting the animals you've fed on leads. The leads re-activates their mob ai and lets them breed!

 

Produces value when killed:

Cows: THE MOST VALUABLE ANIMAL! Cows can be killed for leather and raw beef that can be processed into surge PvP gear and steak, a common PvP food, respectively. If you don't know what to do with your 4 animal breeds, just breed cows! You can never go wrong with cows! Since cows don't produce any value until they die, there's no reason to stockpile too many cows at once. A good rule of thumb is to breed up to 8 cows and then kill any adults off past 8. This way you can always breed 4 more cows and receive a steady stream of valuable steak and leather.

Pigs: Meh. They provide more food when killed then cows, but since cows drop leather and pigs don't, they are easily outclassed by cows.

Rabbits: Rabbits can be bred during high serverload when other animals have their mob ai turned off, so if you only ever log online during peak, weekend hours, it might be worth it to have some rabbits (the pro tip above nullifies this advantage, sadly). You can make rabbit stew from their meat, a pretty decent stew item which sadly does not stack. Otherwise, they're just cows but significantly worse. 

 

Produces value when alive:

Sheep: Sheep are great for making minas. Wool sells pretty well, since builders need lots of it for decoration and often don't have sheep of their own. Sheep need the following to produce wool:

-Serverload isn't on high (mob ai is on)

-Grass block for them to eat

Sheep's minas-producing capabilities are destroyed by high serverload more than any other animal. Furthermore, grass blocks won't grow during high AND medium serverload, making sheep more of an off-peak sort of animal. To maximize the value of your sheep, give them lots of grass in a big pen so that they don't run out when random tick speed is turned off in medium-high serverload.

Spoiler

Also, you should light up your sheep pens, even if they are outdoors. This is because grass regrows based on block lighting, not sky lighting like how crops operate.

 

Chickens: Chickens are the best animal for passive value. Chickens will lay eggs forever even if you completely ignore them, unlike sheep which requires you to shear them on occasion. If you put your chickens on top of a hopper, they will slowly fill the hopper up with eggs. It is worth having chickens in a chicken coop in order to produce eggs without you having to do anything at all.

 

~Controlling your cattle~

~Cows well secured behind iron doors and a piston wall~

Breeding animals has its risks and isn't just free, easy minas. There are people who kill other people's animals to fence their stolen innards on the auction house. These people are difficult to stop as they typically strike when you aren't online.

 

KNOW YOUR RIGHTS! Server rules dictate that thieves MUST leave an RP sign behind when killing your animals so that you know the criminal act was committed. Furthermore, they cannot, under any circumstances, kill or let-out animals such that fewer than 2 animals remain in a pen. If you notice a bunch of your animals disappearing without an RP sign left behind OR if all the animals in a pen suddenly vanish, MODREQ IMMEDIATELY!

 

Cows are the most common target of these cattle rustlers, as they drop high value leather when killed. Your cows should be the most secure of all of your animals. Sheep, on the other hand, need lots of grass to produce wool, and don't drop anything too valuable when killed, so it's probably fine to have sheep out in an open pasture (unless the castle rustlers are feeling cruel and kill your sheep just for the heck of it).

 

Your farmer character might want to cooperate with the local guard force to keep your animals safe from thieves. You could even hire mercenaries just to protect your animals, if you have the coin for it. Keep your most valuable animals in a barn if you can, protected by locks, walls, or even traps if you want to try out some redstone. A safe cow is a happy cow (until you kill it yourself, that is)!

 

-jumperhand3, longtime LOTC farmer

[Latelle 719]

my man jumper just wrote a multi page guide on mineman farming

 

well played sir i am going to create a farming empire

[Ankan 2712]

does collectivization increase the total yield? @NotEvilAtAll

[NotEvilAtAll 9927]

15 minutes ago, Ankan said:

does collectivization increase the total yield? @NotEvilAtAll

Historically, the privatization of commonly held fields improved production because private farmers could try new crops, different crop rotations, different farming methods, etc. to improve the field's output. Since these improvements don't exist on LOTC, private farm ownership has no advantages, and since public farms tend to get used more, public farms generally produce more food than private farms on the server.

 

That's implying, of course, that people don't just treat privately held farms as public farms anyways, which is frequently the case. Very few people care if you harvest a farm that isn't yours.

 

Private farms do have the advantage of making more people play farmer characters instead of just random city-dwellers who go out to harvest their own food on occasion.

[ReveredOwl 5326]

its sad that most places doesn't have proper big farms and the ability to rp farming properly

[Lomiei 1487]

get this to #1 please, it deserves to be there

[NotEvilAtAll 9927]

5 minutes ago, Lomiei said:

get this to #1 please, it deserves to be there

if we keep quoting each other eventually it'll hit popular topics

 

PRO TIP: Plant 2 different types of crops in rows (as shown in screenshot) for faster crop growth!

[Asuno 183]

This is a nice read

[Fwied 301]

I will not stand for the Watermelon Hate! smh

[Dasdi 658]

6 hours ago, ReveredOwl said:

its sad that most places doesn't have proper big farms and the ability to rp farming properly

Petra does 😁

[Sussy 126]

AYO WTF!!!! WHAT GIVES YOU RIGHT TO THEM ABOUT THEIR RIGHTS TO MAKE MY RIGHT FOR STEALING HARDER!!!

[salamanderfantasy 632]

FARM FARM FARM FARM FARM FARM FARM

[Hermit_Jack 513]

Jumper rep farming again I see.

 

Also:

12 hours ago, NotEvilAtAll said:

No! Unless you are farming underground (which isn't allowed on LOTC)

Maybe not for you 😏