Farm Fertility Exploit (0.9.7)

[scynox]

hi, first post here. I could not find if it is reported already. it is simple and low value but still a bug in my opinion.

this is not a bug but more like an exploit I found during arid highland setting. leave it if it is intended
scenario:

• you have a farm. first you put a short-time plant, ex: buckwheat. after that put clover (probably first crop is not a requirement)
• wait until buckwheat finish. check fertility on farm and carefully from now on
• wait clover start (right after buckwheat). you will see that all fertility updates happen around %10-20 range, positive or negative. in my game I see only %1 increase because clover adds %3 but EFF is %40 so I think it would at most increase %1.2
• at %10-20 range of clover you will see the fertility increment (+%1.2, or %3 if EFF is %100)
• at that point (once you get the fertility increment), remove clover and use something else for double bonus, like beans/peas for example. in normal rotation they might not fit with clover (buckwheat+clover+peas) but since you got bonus of clover and removed it now you exploited fertility bonus and can now grow another fertility increasing plant plus get the crops as result, and triple bonus with using clover/peas/beans. you can definitely use other crops to gain benefit of clover using a very short time or would not fit clover (like clover+hay).

so basically by manually mingling with crops (clover especially) you get fertility bonus around %10-20 time spent instead of full coverage. I guess I can trick game to gain %5 fertility bonus and then go with rye with net %0 fertility change for that year in an EFF %100 setting.
I guess it might be hard to fix since negative (fertility drops) also happen at same time (%10-20, quite early) and I have ideas why it is implemented like that.

I tested the behavior in a setting with EFF %100 and I could get +%5 fertility in a season starting with clover and then remove it to add peas and beans to get both fertility bonus and also crops as result.
double clover (clover+clover) does not do same behavior so I do not get %6 bonus by the same trick buth clover+peas+beans work.

I am sorry if this is not a bug or already reported/fixed in 1.0

cheers

[Olleus]

@scynox

double clover (clover+clover) does not do same behavior so I do not get %6 bonus by the same trick buth clover+peas+beans work.

Yes, I saw a specific check in the code that prevents a second clover from adding fertility too soon after the first one did. So I presume the general exploit is known to the devs, and fixed in this case, but there isn’t a general way of doing it for all crops. It seems baked in to the way that farming works, specifically, that the full harvest can (even must) be collected within the time reserved for a crop.