I recently learned that crows only eats your crops if you have 16 or more tiles planted. That means you can plant 15 crops early without worrying about the crows at all.
What are other small tips and tricks you guys know?
Build a silo before building any coop or barn. Otherwise you’ll need to buy hay for your animals at the start, and Murphy’s Law says that you’ll reach Marnie when she’s busier staring the microwaves oven.
If the silo is full, you can pull out hay from the manual feeders and dump it into a chest. You can use this to build a single silo ever.
Don’t cut every single bit of grass on your way, once you have a silo. Leave some spots here and there, so it regrows. A good way to do so is to use the scythe on a full column or row of grass, then leave a small gap before the next column/row.
If your animals graze outdoors (I recommend it), you can protect bits of grass here and there with fences or lightning rods. It helps to regrow the grass faster this way.
If you’re a complete newbie: save money for the first Egg Festival, in 13th/Spring. Buy as many strawberry seeds as you can there. Strawberry is a cash crop, and if you plant them fast enough you’ll get multiple harvests.
Also, don’t ship every single strawberry that you harvest, leave some normal quality (cheaper) to make seeds later on. If you’re able to unlock the greenhouse early enough, you can fill your field with as many strawberries as you want right off 1st/Spring of the year 2.
The best season to mess with your farm layout is winter, as you’ll have less crops to deal with. “Less” doesn’t mean “none” though - be sure to use winter seeds, they’re highly profitable.
You can build sheds for your machinery if you want, but I find the best place to put them is inside the coops/barns with the animals producing the raw materials. For example, the mayo maker goes inside the coop with the chicken, the cheese maker with the cows, etc. It economises time this way.
With some exceptions, preserve jars are mostly for the fun. Kegs are where the real money is. Make wine/juice of everything expensive that you have.
You can put random machinery and chests outside your farm, just be careful where - NPCs destroy what’s in their way.
Never donate to the museum the first dino egg or prismatic shard that you get! Use the dino egg to raise more dinos, and the prismatic shard for the sword (more damage = killing monsters faster = more efficient mining = more prismatic shards).
Do donate to the museum the first ancient seed that you find though, as you’ll get the recipe.
Ancient fruit + keg = mad profits. Plant it on the 1st of Spring, then harvest it through three seasons. Make sure to keep some for more seeds later on.
On average the seed maker outputs 2 seeds for each sacrificed crop, being useful the most for things with multiple harvests (ancient fruit and berries). Plan accordingly.
The greenhouse isn’t that big, it’s just 120 plots of land, plus some space to plant trees around the plots. It won’t give you as much money as a certain endgame location, but since it doesn’t care about seasons it’s a great place to multiply seeds.
I see this sentiment a lot about silos, and I don’t agree.
I used to be the same. Always get a silo before a coop to… what, exactly? A silo does three things:
- Gives young animals food
- Give animals food on rainy days
- Give animals food in winter
But those three are the vast minority of an animal’s time on the farm, and by the time you get to winter you’ll have one anyway.
The 500g is much better spend on seeds or an earlier coop. The animals can eat grass anyway, it gives more friendship than hay.
Buy the silo when you have money, like after the first harvest in summer
Always get a silo before a coop to… what, exactly?
It’s mostly to store some food before you buy your first animals, so you don’t need to buy it from Marnie, and you have some time to set up some space for them to graze on later. (The early game farm is usually a mess, and it gets a bit annoying to get animals walking through all of that junk and your crops.)
That said it’s perfectly fine to ignore this piece of advice - as any other - if you already know the game a bit better.
Yeah, but why do we want to store food? The few days of early friendship isn’t worth it, and you’ll only really be seeing the benefits way down the line
I founded this pretty late in game. That you can shake trees for seed. No need to chop.
Adding on to that, this works with tree stumps as well. This is useful especially in the beginning of the game when you’re low on energy - you can chop a tree and leave the stump (stumps give very little wood for the energy it takes to chop them) and still come back to shake it for your daily seed chance.
You can place museum rewards in to the left of Pam’s house door and again in the middle of the path near the bus station to get her there faster than 10am.
Just watch out:
Later Game Spoilers
Make sure to grab the item by her house before doing the community project to upgrade it from mobile to permanent, as it gets destroyed otherwise
This works on any villager getting blocked in their normal pathing, I just found it helped me when doing skull cave dives in the early game.
That’s a hilarious and wonderful solution! How much quicker is she with that trick?
Its been a minute (I’ve been on a Timberborn tear for the last several months), but I recall a 30 “minute” speed up, so its minor but if you don’t have a lucky day every minute counts in those mines!
Pay attention to the rotating stock in the different shops - Oasis, Desert Trader, Krobus. I was too lazy to check regularly on my first runs and thought it was mainly decorations and all the useful stuff is available permanently.
Krobus sells one IRIDIUM SPRINKLER on Fridays! Amazing when you don’t have enough iridium yet. He also sells mixed seeds on Thursday (always running low on those to make tea bushes) and buff food on Saturdays.
Oasis has Speed-Gro for 80g on Thursdays instead of Pierre’s 150g and 3 Omnigeodes on Wednesday.
Desert Trader has stairs for jade on Sundays.
Early game mining is about energy management. The odds of a rock spawning a ladder go up the fewer enemies are on the floor. Combat doesn’t use energy like mining does. So kill as many enemies as possible before mining rocks without ore. This decreases the energy cost per floor by a lot.
A lot of the early game is limited by your energy.
Spring onions in the forest to the south of the farm are a great source of energy early game. They grow in the area near the gated sewer pipe.
If you don’t hate the fishing game it’s a good way to recharge energy by eating the catch.
If you are eating for energy silver and gold crops give more energy per coin value. So I eat gold then silver then regular for a given crop.
A big cash boost for the start. Not recommended for your first playthrough.
Plant 2 cauliflower on the first day. The extra is for crow insurance. That plus a potato, parsnip, and green bean gets you the spring crops bundle.
Planting cauliflower on day 1 means it’s ready on day 13 the egg festival. Plant two seeds for each of the other 3 plants as soon as you can.
For the first 12 days Do the spring foraging bundle (to unlock the crops bundle) and earn as close to 2500 as you can. On day 13 till and water a tile for every 100 gold you have up to 25 tiles.
Make sure you have one of each of the 4 veg in inventory when you head to the festival. Buy 25 strawberry seeds or whatever you can afford.
As soon as you leave the festival head to the community center and finish the spring crops bundle. You get 25 speed grow.
Head back to the farm and plant the strawberries and use the speed grow on them before bed. Time is tight but for every one you plant and fertilize on the 13th you get 3 harvests instead of two that season. It’s worth passing out to get them all planted.
On Fridays around 7pm, there’s 17 people in the saloon. Perfect to get your friendship levels up. I have a chest in the saloon with favourite gifts and just pass them around. The bar also sells coffee (universally liked by all adults) and some loved gifts: Salad (Leah), pizza (Sam & Shane), spaghetti (Robin) and beer (Pam & Shane).
Oh, as someone who hates doing gift runs this is a great tip!
I’ve been meaning to try this game for years. Thanks for all these tips!
Seconded, it’d be fun to follow along a new player!
Feel free to post your journey
Don’t bomb your mayonnaise machines like my wife did
How else are you supposed to get the eggs to emulsify correctly?
The coffee speed buff works while horse riding! I just figured this out and it’s such a difference.
