Fertilizer
| Fertilizer | |
|---|---|
| Type | Crafted Item |
Fertilizer is the family of soil treatments a farm mixes into tilled ground, and the one name covers three quite different jobs. One group pushes the harvest towards silver, gold and iridium stars. One group shortens the growing time. One group keeps the soil wet overnight so the watering can stays in the chest. A fourth kind works on trees rather than crops. Each of the three crop groups has three tiers, the cheapest learned early in the Farming skill and the strongest bought on Ginger Island, and a tile of soil only ever holds one treatment at a time. Choosing between quality, speed and water is the real decision on any field, and it has to be made around planting day rather than afterwards.
Recipe
The ladder of recipes climbs with the Farming skill. Basic Fertilizer, Speed-Gro and Basic Retaining Soil all arrive in the first handful of levels, which means a first-year farm already has one of each job available. Quality Retaining Soil, Deluxe Speed-Gro and Quality Fertilizer follow in the high single figures, and Quality Fertilizer is the last of the nine to unlock. Tree Fertilizer sits outside that ladder and comes from Foraging instead, which suits it, since the trees it feeds are a forager's business.
The top tier of all three crop groups waits on Ginger Island. Qi's Walnut Room sells the recipes for Deluxe Fertilizer and Hyper Speed-Gro for Qi Gems, so they belong to a farm that has already worked through the island's challenges. Deluxe Retaining Soil comes from a different counter: the Island Trader takes a pile of Cinder Shards, which are picked up in the volcano, and hands the recipe over. None of the nine is locked behind a quest, so a farm that keeps levelling meets the whole family in order.
Buying is the alternative to crafting. Pierre's General Store carries the first two tiers of each crop group, the weaker ones from the middle of the first Spring and the stronger ones once a second year has begun. The Oasis in Calico Desert puts a couple of them out on fixed Days of the Week, so a desert trip on the right day can stock a large field in one go. Crafting beats shopping for almost every one of them, and Quality Fertilizer is the one case where the shop is competitive, because its recipe wants a fish as well as Sap. Several recipes also hand over a whole batch for a single set of ingredients, which makes the gap wider still. A Bone Mill fed with bone fragments turns out random fertiliser as one of its results, and that is a sensible home for the bones a mining trip leaves behind.
Use
Everything in the family goes onto soil or onto a tree, never onto a growing crop. The three quality fertilisers are the strict ones: they have to be in the ground before the seed sprouts, so the tidy routine is to till, spread and sow in that order on the same morning. Once a green shoot shows above the tile, the chance has gone for that planting. Retaining soils and the Speed-Gro line are relaxed about timing and can be dropped in later, though a late Speed-Gro only shortens the stages the crop has not reached yet, so the full saving needs it down at the start.
Quality is rolled when the crop is picked, not when it is planted. That has a pleasant side effect: a crop sown at a low Farming level and harvested after a few levels of practice benefits from the better odds. The quality group also behaves well on crops that keep producing, since every harvest gets the improved roll rather than just the first. The catch is on crops that give several items at once, where only one piece of each harvest carries the better star. Speed-Gro is the opposite case. It trims the time to the first picking and leaves the gap between later pickings untouched, so it is wasted on a plant that is meant to be harvested over and over.
Outdoors, a treatment lasts the season and then goes. The exception is worth planning around: a tile holding a crop that grows through the season change, such as Corn, Wheat, Sunflower, Coffee Bean or Ancient Fruit, keeps its fertiliser into the new season. Everything else needs a fresh dose at the start of the next planting, which is the main running cost of farming this way. Clearing a finished field has its own quirk, because chopping the plant out with a tool leaves the treatment sitting in the soil; a second swing with a pickaxe is what strips the tile back to bare earth.
The field can be read at a glance. Each treatment draws its own pattern on the soil, and the pattern looks different wet and dry, so a tile that was missed on planting day shows up without hovering over it.
Variants
The other fertilisers in the game, with what each one takes and where the recipe comes from.
| Name | Image | Ingredients | Recipe |
|---|---|---|---|
| Basic Fertilizer | 
|
Sap (2) | Farming Level 1 |
| Basic Retaining Soil | 
|
Stone (2) | Farming Level 4 |
| Deluxe Fertilizer | 
|
Iridium Bar (1), Sap (40) | Qi's Walnut Room (20) |
| Deluxe Retaining Soil | 
|
Stone (5), Fiber (3), Clay (1) | Island Trader for Cinder Shard (50) |
| Deluxe Speed-Gro | 
|
Oak Resin (1), Bone Fragment (5) | Farming Level 8 |
| Hyper Speed-Gro | 
|
Radioactive Ore (1), Bone Fragment (3), Solar Essence (1) | Qi's Walnut Room for 30 |
| Quality Fertilizer | 
|
Sap (4), Any Fish (1) | Farming Level 9 |
| Quality Retaining Soil | 
|
Stone (3), Clay (1) | Farming Level 7 |
| Speed-Gro | 
|
Pine Tar (1), Moss (5) | Farming Level 3 |
| Tree Fertilizer | 
|
Fiber (5), Stone (5) | Foraging Level 7 |
Notes
The quality group pays off in a narrow place. Stars raise the selling price of a crop and matter for gifts, cooking and the fussier bundles, but a Keg, a Preserves Jar and a Dehydrator all ignore the quality of what goes into them. A field grown for Wine or Jelly gains nothing from Deluxe Fertilizer, while a field of Starfruit or Pumpkins sold straight off the ground gains a great deal. Deluxe Fertilizer is also the only way an ordinary crop ever reaches iridium, and it never produces a plain unstarred crop at all, which is what makes it the one tier worth hoarding Qi Gems for.
The speed group saves days rather than adding to the price. A crop that takes a little over half a season can only be grown once, and shaving a few days off it turns one harvest into two. The effect stacks with the Agriculturist profession from the top of the Farming skill, so a farmer who took that branch gets more out of the same bag. Hyper Speed-Gro is the extreme version of the idea and belongs to island-era farms chasing several plantings out of one season.
The retaining soils are the group that fades with time. Keeping a tile wet overnight is a real saving while watering is done by hand, and it is useful in a Garden Pot indoors, but a farm with Iridium Sprinklers over every field has already solved the problem. The Deluxe version guarantees the overnight watering rather than merely improving the odds, which makes it the only one worth carrying once the farm has grown.
Large fields are easier with help. An Enricher clipped onto a sprinkler holds a stack of one treatment and lays it down automatically as seeds go into the tiles the sprinkler reaches, which removes the worst chore of the quality group. It has to be loaded before planting to do its job, and a sprinkler cannot wear an Enricher and a Pressure Nozzle at once.
Tree Fertilizer is the odd member of the family and the only one aimed at a plant rather than a patch of soil. It is sprinkled on wild tree seeds and saplings to drive them up to full height quickly, and it keeps them growing through Winter when untreated trees stand still.
All Crafting
Every entry in this group, with its key details.
