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In the colony sim Farthest Frontier, farming is a vital part of keeping one’s people fed. Alongside fishing, hunting, and harvesting, farming is what allows a village to survive and eventually thrive. With soil fertility, weeds, and harsh winters to worry about, however, it can be hard to figure out the proper crop rotation to keep storehouses full and fields healthy. Here’s everything the player needs to know about crop rotation in Farthest Frontier.
Farming Fundamentals
Rotating one’s crops means not growing the same thing season after season, year after year. Whereas some farming sims are perfectly happy to let the player plant the same thing over and over again with no negative consequences, that’s something that many farming simulators get wrong. In Farthest Frontier, just like in real life, failing to rotate one’s crops will cause diseases, deplete one’s fields, and make growing healthy and plentiful crops impossible.
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Farthest Frontier allows players to manage three years of crops simultaneously, handling the current year as well as planning for crops two years in advance. While this may seem like a small feature, understanding it is absolutely essential to a proper crop rotation. Row I represents the current year, Row II represents the next year, and Row III represents the following year. Critical field information including Weed Level, Rockiness, and Fertility appears below these rows, allowing the player to check the overall health of their fields at a glance. The player can also tweak the Soil Mixture here, adding Clay or Sand as necessary, since some crops prefer fields with more of one than the other.
The Best Crop Rotation
Building a successful village and choosing the best crop rotation is about juggling concerns. The goal is to produce as much food as possible without harming one’s fields or causing diseases to spread. Familiarizing oneself with each crop helps, because the better educated a farmer is, the easier it will be to know when to plant a certain crop, conduct Field Maintenance, or squeeze in an extra harvest before winter.
By clicking on the desired year, then choosing the desired crop, the player can schedule it for planting, dragging it in either direction on the timeline in order to adjust the planting schedule as needed. Some considerations are obvious–like not harvesting heat-sensitive Peas in the summer–but a good crop rotation takes more than that. As it is with any good real-life sim, the details are important.
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A given field can only hold so much, and some crops take longer than others, so it’s important to check how long a crop will take and when it must be planted in order to determine whether the field can sustain multiple plantings in a single year. If not, the player will need more fields if they’re determined to get more of that crop. There are a number of ways to approach crop rotations, but a simple and reliable method is to spend the first two years of each cycle planting a single crop in each field, plus a single Clover harvest to improve the field’s depleted Fertility. The last year of the cycle can be used for a second Clover harvest and two runs of Field Maintenance, keeping the field healthy for the next three-year cycle.
Peas and Beans improve the soil’s Fertility, and Buckwheat is an excellent weed suppressant, making those crops useful for passive field maintenance. Wheat, Flax, and Rye, on the other hand, are hard on the soil, lowering its Fertility, so it’s best to avoid planting these difficult crops too often in the same field. Once the player has set their three-year crop cycle, it will repeat indefinitely until the player changes it, so once the player has found a sustainable crop rotation, there’s no need to alter it much unless they’re an emergency.
Farthest Frontier is available now for PC.
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