Farming

Becoming a farmer

The farmer's trade needs a field: one you own (by owning the house, business or property it lies by - see below) or one whose owner has hired you as an employee. Without one, the town hall refuses the trade ("a farm field is needed") and the strips refuse the work; the staff on duty keep their access, and a crop you already sowed stays yours to tend and harvest. Stealing a ripe crop at night needs no field: it is a crime, not the trade. Everything about farming is in the farm window: F2 > Work & trade > Farming, the Farming card of the work window (F2 > Work), or /farm. Its How it works tab walks you through it step by step, with where you stand on each: get a field, take the trade at a town hall, buy seed (at a market, in the window's Crops tab, 1-2 groschen a strip; a harvest gives a seed back one time in three), work the strips with the use key (till, sow, weed, water with a bucket from the well, harvest), sell the loads at an auction house, keep animals, hire employees. A field with a yard keeps hens and pigs: buy them in My fields > The yard (or with the use key at the coop and the sty) - 5 hens for 100 groschen, fed a load of barley a day, an egg each every 6 hours; a piglet for 60 groschen (2 at most), fed two loads of cabbage a day and fattened in 24 hours into 6 pieces of pork and a hide.

The farmer's fields: whose they are

Where there are fields, each one belongs to the owner of the house, business or property it lies by (the nearest whose door is within 25 m of the field, in the same town; a business held by a faction: the faction's), and it follows that place when it changes hands. Its owner works it alone, with those the house or business lets in (its key holders, a business's managers) and the owner's party while the owner is there; the coop and the pigsty of its yard are theirs too, and at night a thief may take half of a ripe crop - a crime the watch hears of. A field by no owned place (or by one for sale) is the town's: a village field, where every farmer tills a strip and keeps it until the harvest. Fields are not leased any more. The town's leaders (its court's head or a steward, the Lord, the holding faction's leaders) see all the fields of their town in the town court's Fields tab (F2 > Town court, or /court): whether each is active (a strip tilled, sown, growing or ripe, or worked in the last 7 days), whose it is and why - and they can give one to a character by name, make it the town's, or hand it back to its land's owner. A crop sown before a field changed hands stays its sower's to tend and harvest. The farm window's My fields tab (/farm) lists the fields you own, work as an employee or through the house or business, each at a glance (its strips, its animals), and the one you open in full: every strip with its crop, the time left, weeded and watered and who sowed it, the coop and the sty (hens, eggs, pigs, fed or hungry), its employees and its log.

The farmer's employees

A field's owner (for a faction's field, its leaders) can hire up to 10 other characters by name in My fields > Employees, and dismiss them there. Employees work the strips and tend the yard just as the owner does: they feed the animals, gather the eggs and take the pork, which belong to whoever collects them. They can also buy hens or a piglet, paid by whoever buys them. Each employee is still limited to 20 strips a day. An employee can leave on their own. If the field changes hands, its employees stop working it. The field's log records everything, newest first and a page at a time: who tilled, sowed, weeded, watered or harvested which strip (and how many loads), the night's thefts, the animals bought, fed and taken, and the employees and owners who came and went. The owner and the employees can read it.

The crops

A crop grows in real hours: sow it, go about your business and come back. Pulling the weeds adds a third to the harvest and a bucket of water from the well adds half again (both: x1.84). The farmer's harvest also grows with the trade: +5% for every level above the first (+45% at level 10). Unlike the gathering trades, there are no double or triple loads. A harvested strip lies as stubble for an hour, then it is free again.

20 strips a day. A character can work at most 20 different strips each day (UTC): any work on a strip (tilling, sowing, weeding, watering, harvesting, or a ripe crop taken at night) counts it once, and the same strip again that day is free. Once you reach the limit, new strips are refused until midnight UTC, but you can still tend the ones you already worked. The farm window shows Strips today in its header, and each new strip shows the count in the chat. On 20 weeded and watered strips, a level-1 farmer earns about 250 groschen an hour over a crop's cycle (half that on 10).