1.0 - Crop Disease Spreading Theorycrafting

Farthest Frontier General Discussion
1

With crop disease spreading being a thing in 1.0 (rather than something claimed that didn’t actually happened), I think it’s a good time to open discussion on what the most efficient field setups will be, particularly in Vanquisher difficulty.

To make a start, I’ll refer to the setups I was using when I wrote my game guide about a year and a half ago (can’t say if I will ever get to updating it through all the patches since).
First off, you want fields in groups of 3, covering an area of high Environment Fertility Factor (what determines the percentage of the percentage of Fertility gains). 12x6 can be a good rule of thumb, but utilising the space may require more (or less, in some cases). If you can’t spare the workers for that size fields, you can split the fields by pausing, plopping down 2 half size fields in the space you eventually want one, plan your fences/gates around everything, then delete the half size fields furthest from your settlement/path/Temporary Shelter. When you need to expand, use each field to expand to their respective space within the fencing.

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Keep groups of Fields 4 squares apart (not including fencing). Each field does different crops, of the same rotation plan, at a time. This prevents spreading, while providing efficient crop yields.

In high Environment Fertility Factor maps (80%+, Lowland Lakes) you will be able to grow Peas, Turnips, and Flax on the same Field group. These crops balance high vegetable production (some inflated food stocks before the food spoils) Your fertility should be in a slight positive, but you can adapt by replacing a Peas or Turnip with more Clover if you want to raise the Fertility higher quickly. None of these crops have diseases that spread to the others, and it is more efficient to leave the Fields alone (rather than cancel crops) if one gets a disease. The disease will be gone by the next time it grows those crops again, and can’t spread if they’re not growing the relevant crops.
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Your low Environment Fertility (Arid Highlands) will separate vegetables from Flax, and instead grow one lot of Beans in place of the Peas, and one lot of Carrots instead of Turnips (fitting Clover where possible), then full Clover in the 3rd year. This will very slowly raise Fertility.

Wheat field groups have 2 crops that don’t spread to each other; Wheat and Buckwheat.
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This setup will produce the most Wheat possible in high Environment Fertility Factor while being slightly Fertility-positive.

Unless something has been changed, Hay has no Disease interaction, so growing Hay should be a matter of adapting the other Field groups based on your needs. When starting out with Wheat you shouldn’t have much use for higher amounts, so it can replace Buckwheat. Or if you’re putting down your second lot of Vegetable fields and still have lots of Flax, Hay can replace that. (This is also assuming High Fertility Factor)

Now what I would like to see from this is people figuring out higher yield, non-spreading rotations, better plans for Arid Highlands, and also rotations that involve Greens for those who just think Greens are neat (and your Vanquisher games aren’t going too difficult).

2

Your first setup is bad for diseases, because you have consecutive peas. A better rotation is:
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Note how it has the same crops as yours (swapping one turnip for a pea), but also fits in field maintenance and spaces crops out better to prevent diseases. It also prevents Stem Rot, Bean Wilt, and Powdery Mildew from spreading completely, because those are only contagious from August onwards and the peas are done by June. If you want some grain, you can replace peas+flax in the last year with clover+rye.

Why would gaps of 4 make a difference? The spreading range is in the hundreds of metres for many diseases.

As for all the fertility calculations, you’re not taking into account composting, which absolutely should be a huge source of fertility for you later in the game.

3

That’s going to keep your Fields permanently diseased lol. Also, most of those Peas are going to spoil and so that won’t result in food that actually gets stored and used, especially later on after you start being able to spare the Glass to preserve Root Vegetables. If you don’t have Hay yet, you’re going to lack Root Vegetables also since your first cow/goat farm will eat what limited stores you have.

You’re also forgetting how you’ll be starting other fields which will begin taking your compost (unless you’re growing very slowly).
Also, it was patches ago when Farmers would automatically do any needed maintenance when you have gaps in your grow orders. They’ll help other Fields if they don’t need to do theirs.

4

Try it, and you’ll see it will do the exact opposite lol. I’m basing all this off looking at the code, pulling out the game data, comparing notes with other players in the discord, and many experiments. If you think there’s a factual mistake in the wiki, please point out where so we can collectively fix it. After all, isn’t that what theory crafting should be about?

Yes, in the late game, you’d want fewer peas/beans and more root vegetables for exactly that reason. And it’s why growing greens is usually a waste of time. In the early game however, that’s barely a consideration. Peas last for 9 months base and that’s easily doubled (and then more) with adequate storage. Enough to smooth out the seasonal fluctuations and prevent excessive spoilage. If you have 6 fields in a similar rotation (2 groups of three), you can always have one group with each year running backwards to spread things out even more.

Firstly, no, they’ll eat grain before root veg. But broadly yes, growing hay is a good idea once you have animals. Like with the previous point, there’s no single-size-fits all solution, I was just giving a general (early game) example of a rotation that doesn’t have the issues that yours does. Plenty of others in the wiki, and plenty more again that are possible and productive.

Not really, it’s easy to have enough compost to fertilise everything every few years once you get going. Especially once you have animals. Also, once you have animals, you can set them to graze on areas before you turn them into crop fields, so they already have high fertility before anything is even planted.

True, but having field maintenance ensures that it gets done rather than leaving it to the unreliability of how the game assigns jobs to farmers. I have the feeling (though unproved) that you can get away with fewer farmers if you have field maintenance in your rotations than if you don’t. For example, I can keep the one I posted working fine with under 1/3 of the maximum workforce without any trouble.

5

Correction: I’ve just checked the numbers and they’ve changed massively in a recent patch (p10 or p11, not sure). Specifically, the rate at which disease magnitude drops per new planting has been halved across the board.

All of the rotations posted so far in this thread will have infinite stem rot and club root just from within those fields themselves, not even taking into account diseases spreading between fields.

Playing around with the numbers, I think the following should all be disease safe, including both internal disease progression and spreading between fields. Between them they cover all the crop types (apart from greens, which on Vanquisher are rarely worth it) and are fertility positive on high enough EFF, so a mix of these should be suitable in the early and middle game.

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starter_rye

These are, sadly, significantly less productive than the best we could do before.

6

Having fields together growing peas and carrots together will spread Powdery Mildew to each other.

I think you’re overestimating the crop loss from contained fields. For the diseases affecting Turnips, for example, for those to make one of my Turnip years inefficient it would have to be causing 50% crop loss on both times Turnips are grown, and the fields would have to be diseased every year. Actual game experience is it’s been rare even to reach 50% on the final grow. For example, an average of 33% crop loss on 2 grows in a year is still more crop than a lower crop loss on one grow.

Containing a disease to one higher yield of more lasting crops would still result in higher crops on average (given diseases don’t simply appear right at the beginning of a grow year, and appear randomly when a relevant crop is being grown).

I didn’t pay attention to how they could affect Wheat production, however. Firstly, Wheat and Buckwheat can’t be grown anywhere near each other, neither can Wheat or Rye. Growing Carrot in a Field group near one growing Wheat or Buckwheat has spread risk, as does growing peas near Buckwheat.

How crops are grown would have to depend on the patch of high (or “high”, in Arid Highlands) Environmental Fertility Factor and how close your Field groups are.

7

You’re massively overestimating the importance of diseases spreading from one field to another, and massively underestimating how (with the new numbers) some diseases will persist forever on the same field while endlessly gaining in infestation magnitude.

I’ve put the numbers out there on the wiki. You can use them for your theory crafting, rather than relying on hunches.