My favourite crop rotations

Farming, and especially which crops to farm, is one of my favourite aspects of the game. It feels mostly historical, has substantial mechanical depths, and things depend on the situation enough that there is no simple “one is best” solution. Things to consider are (in rough order of importance):

  • Output: No point growing crops that provide resources you won’t use or will spoil before you can use them.

  • Seasonal dependency: No point growing a crop if it’s going to freeze / burn in the ground. In practice this means peas, turnips, and carrots need to go at one end of the farming year; while beans, buckwheat, and wheat need to go in the middle.

  • Weeds: Having 1 crop maintenance per 3-year rotation is a simple, fast, and effective way of keeping weeds close to 0 no matter what the other crops are.

  • Crop diseases: While diseases don’t currently spread between fields, they do randomly appear whenever you plant a crop. If a crop is planted when a disease is already present, the infestation strength will increase (or decrease if it was not susceptible to it). This means that you need to plant a minimum of 1 other crop between crops that are susceptible to the same disease (for some, like stem rot, having at least 1 gap of two in your rotation is better because the infestation decreases very slowly). Crop maintenance does not count as a gap, and neither does winter between the end of one year and the start of the next, and neither does planting nothing at all (although clover does count)

  • Fertility: The negative fertility impact of plantings (and also crop deaths) have their full impact on every field, but the positive impacts are modified by the EFF (Environmental Fertility Factor). So with a 65% EFF, clover would only give +2 rather than +3. Besides crops and grazing animals, compost also gives +8 fertility (modified by EFF) each time it’s used, irrespective of field size.

  • Soil Composition: Different crops prefer different soil types. This can be adjust easily for a small amount of clay or sand and only makes a +10% difference (unless you get it violently wrong) so it’s not very important, but it’s a nice extra bonus when you can have it.

  • Work Distribution: Being able to use as few workers as possible for the same amount of farming is nice. This can be achieved with crop rotations that scatter when the “off” times are, such that farmers always have somewhere to work and you rarely need them all at the same time. Note that crops require work to plant and harvest, but not in the middle, and there’s a fair amount of leeway given.

For the rotations below I’m assuming an EFF of 75% or more, which is about as low as you need to use on every map except arid highlands, which is a completely different ball park. I’m also assuming that you’ve had 1 year of x3 maintenance to get rid of rocks and most weeds before starting these.

STARTER PACK
starter
This is by far my favourite early game crop rotation. It’s hugely fertility positive and provides everything you need in the early game. It’s also easy to tailor to your exact needs on the fly. Need more fertility? Replace one of the peas with clover? Need to feed animals? Change the first year to maintenance → hay. Need more food urgently? Replace flax with cabbage. Need some grain? Replace the 2nd year with flax → buckwheat or peas → rye or peas → wheat. Need more food to pickle? Change that year to carrots → rye. If you’re not fussed about optimising farming or using lots of fertiliser, these variations can have you covered for the whole game.

GRASS & GRAIN
grass&grain
In the middle game, balancing fertility is less of an issue because your fields should be highish already (either from running Starter Pack for a while, or opening new fields on land where animals have been grazing), and compost is regular enough to make a real difference. At that stage, this rotation is a great way to complement the above. It’s also customisable depending on your fertility, replacing clover with peas and/or rye with wheat works well.

GREEN HAY
greenhay
For the late game, this rotation (a variant of the above) provides a lot of food to be eaten in the short/medium term for both your villagers and your animals. 4 out of the 5 crops also like the same clay-heavy soil for extra performance. It does need to be composted every ~5 years to balance fertility. Sadly, getting villagers to actually eat their greens and beans can be tricky in vanilla, but I find the Balanced Diet mod really makes the eating priority and food delivery logistics make sense.

OMNI CARROT
omnicarrot
To balance out the short term food provided by Green Hay, it’s good to have long term food for stockpiling. For crop fields this mostly means root veg for the preservist. We also need grain and flax for various production chains. This rotation provides copious amounts of all of this with 4 crops that all like the same sandy soil. The draw back is that it’s a heavy drain on fertility, needing composting every ~3 years, though this can be reduced if you let animals graze on it during the fallow year (I’m to forgetful to rotate my pasturing so regularly). No point focussing so heavily on carrots if you don’t have the preservist and glass supply to pickle them either. A less taxing variant is to replace one of the carrots with peas to makes this a very well rounded rotation.

The negative fertility requirements of those later two rotations might seem off putting, but they’re easy to handle. I was able to do so on a custom map (max 70% EFF, starting fertility ~40%) with a mod (Further Farming) which severely nerfs composting. I found that a ratio of 2 Omni Carrots per Green Hay, with some slight customisation when needed) works very well; this is what my fields look like around year 40.


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My Addenda:
Output: Merchants buy Flax cheaply. That’s it. If you want to use the Trading Center as a weird Root Cellar back-up, you can, I guess. But don’t farm with the idea of selling. Hides/Hide-based items, Clothing, Soap, and Candles usually do much better for fewer Workers.

Crop Diseases: These suck because you don’t get notified until AFTER they cost you some output. Good news is that you can shift to a different crop or part of your crop-cycle once notified, AND most diseases affect categories like “Beans”, “Root Vegetables”, “Greens”, Flax, and “Grains.” Powdery Mildew and Stem Rot are the main two that can cross over.

Soil Composition: Greens like Clay, Roots like Sand. Grains and Flax are a little more on Sand than Clay. Clay soils typically have a higher starting Fertility and EFF. 10% yield ain’t nothing because that percentage is the equivalent in Fertility to 1-2 years of nothing but Clover.

Work(er) Distribution: When you start the field, the game uses a Recommended Worker formula and AUTOMATICALLY assigns that many Workers to become Farmers GENERALLY. For example, if you have 12 Farmers and add a 10x10 Field (6 workers), you now have 18 Farmers until the new field is built. This lets you scale new fields very quickly but makes starting off a Laborer-intensive process.

Apiaries: Beehives, basically, do better with Orchards now (thank you for fixing that!) but do well with farmed fields, especially since Farmers are the ones who collect the Honey and Wax. I prefer to build the Apiary first if possible, since it saves on field construction (not a lot). You can build the Apiary over a Farm, as needed.

Roads: I like all Fields to have a road on at least one side. You’ll have a lot of people moving to/from your Fields, so, it helps.

Fences: I try to fence IN the deer rather than fence them out of the Fields. Deer will roam quite a ways and try to get around a fence, even if they have to wander a large portion of the map. Their pathing is tile-by-tile, with no tether on their spawn point, so they will follow a fence however far it takes.

Livestock: They help fertility, a lot. They like your crops, a lot. They don’t like sticking to their area, at all. There are no 15x15 Fields for Cows and Chickens’ 7x7 size is okay. Honestly, I use them to boost Forrester Camp replantings more than Fields just to avoid the wandering livestock eating your crops.

My Farming Cycles: When I build a field, I do Maintenance x2, Clover or Maintenance x3 until the Weeds are below 20%, then I do ONE year of Clover x2/Maintenance or Peas, Clover, Maintenance before settling into a rotation.
I also try to come out positive on my 3-year rotations. I do not want to depend on crap (literally) to pull me ahead.

ROOTS: Use Carrots for Soil Composition
Peas, Clover, Maintenance
Carrots, Beans
Turnip, Clover, Turnip

GREENS: Cabbage for Soil Composition
Peas, Clover, Maintenance
Clover, Cabbage
Clover/Peas, Cabbage (Higher EFF fields can use Peas, just beware of diseases)

FLAX:
Peas, Clover, Maintenance
Clover, Flax
Clover, Flax

RYE: I prefer Rye to Wheat for easier growing and field/fertility requirements, and over Buckwheat since fewer nasty diseases.
Peas, Clover, Maintenance
Clover, Rye
Clover, Rye

And honestly, that’s kinda it. I don’t hoard Beans since Root Vegetables keep better and Greens have larger yields. Two 10x10 fields for 4 Rye crops/3 years has kept 2 Flour Mills and 2 Breweries going 24/7.

tl;dr version: HOW CAN WE GET CONTROL OF THE WIKI???!!???

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Funny, I do the exact opposite. I don’t like having holes in my fields lol. It’s an ugly and makes it wasteful if you want to rearrange apiaries later.

This is the mentality I really don’t get. Compost has a huge impact - more than a year’s worth of clover - and it’s literally free. You need the compost yard to keep your town clean anyway, why not take it into account? It lets you get more out of your fields, so you need fewer of them (hence you can stick to higher fertility / EFF areas), fewer farmers to work them, and have less far to walk to your furthest field. It’s a clear win-win-win. Having less clover and higher yield crops can double your output pretty easily, that blows any marginal 10% bonus for soil composition clean out of the water.

Checking fields (or the crop overview menu) regularly to keep an eye on diseases is pretty important IMO. It’s not essential, especially if you use self-healing rotations like those in the OP, but it is needed otherwise. For example:
Peas, Clover, Maintenance
Carrots, Beans
Turnip, Clover, Turnip
Has carrots and beans next to each other, so if you catch powdery mildew, it’s going to escalate quickly. Sure, you can manually change crops to deal with that, but it can easily mess up a rotation (either in fertility calculations or by having combos that make further diseases likely). Besides, I feel like the ethos of a good rotation is that you don’t have to manually intervene to cure diseases.

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No, you don’t. If you look when you put a field down no farmers are assigned until your labourers have cleared it. Only then will the farmers be assigned.

Since it’s a community made one the answer is to make your own if you don’t want to use that one.

We’re missing each others’ points. Labourers CLEAR the field (of trees, rocks, etc.), then Farmers get added and till/build the field from there. The Farmers added to your total are based on the size of the Field being tilled/built. So, before the Field is “ready for rotation”, you’ve lost a set number of people.

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I specialize my fields to fit needs and maximize outputs rather than create rotations that lose on the 10% composition bonus. If I get a disease, I will change the current/next rotation from output focused to maintenance or another set of crops.
I honestly think that self-sustained crop rotations are what small farms do. When you have 100+ farmers, you need a more factory approach.

Root vegetables in summer?

我有个疑问:牛羊鸡在多久的时间里才能对土壤产生较大影响?我开垦的速度可能太快了,我的农田总是处于较低的肥力状态,最近在尝试用牛提前准备土地。

Not sure how long it took, but I got my fields all in the green in Arid Highlands. At YR51 now. Second time playing Arid Highlands.

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And yet, looking at the rotations you posted, peas don’t share a soil preference with rye or flax IIRC. You should be using wheat instead of rye or carrots instead of peas if you want soil synergy.

But you’re losing for more than that by not taking into account the effect of comport to run negative fertility rotations once you’ve hit close to maximum fertility. That’s leaving far, far more than 10% on the table. In vanilla, you should be having as few fields that are as large as possible. Getting +8 fertility for free every year is going to massively boost yields while allowing you to replace clover with useful crops. The benefit of that, even if it uses one or two crops in a rotation that don’t have the same soil preference as the others, are huge. Way more than 10%. To give an analogy, it’s like driving 100 miles and burning a quarter tank of gasoline jus to save a fraction of a cent per litre on the price of petrol.

For example, turning your flax rotation into:

Peas, Maintenance, Clover,
Flax, Peas
Clover, Flax

Barely costs you any fertility (and is still positive for an EFF >50%), and doubles how many beans your producing, is more disease resistant, and spreads the workload around more evenly. You could even replace the 2nd year peas with carrots. Depending on your fertility budget I’m sure it could be optimised much further.

Having fields just for flax or just for grain or just veg makes planning easier, because it means you only have to think about one resource at a time. But it’s simply far less efficient. Just compare the output of 1 each of your flax and rye rotations with 2 of my Omni Carrots - it matches you in grain and flax output while roughly tripling the amount of edible food it makes. I’m also not sure that “a factory like setup” is congruent with “manually adjusting fields as diseases come up”.