Seed Spot
| Seed Spot | |
|---|---|
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| Type | Mechanic |
A Seed Spot is a tuft of windblown grass sitting on bare ground, and a Hoe swung at it always turns up a small handful of seeds. It behaves like a dig for buried treasure that only ever buries one kind of treasure. The seeds it holds are decided by the calendar rather than by the map, and the four crops they grow into are the ones that come out of the ground rather than off a shop shelf. A good day's luck adds a seed to the handful. For a farmer who likes walking the valley, a Seed Spot is the free start of a Carrot patch, a Summer Squash row, a Broccoli bed or a Winter field of Powdermelon.
Overview
Telling a Seed Spot from an Artifact Spot is a matter of looking at the shape on the ground. An Artifact Spot is a cluster of brown stems that look like worms. A Seed Spot is a small tuft of grass bending in the wind. Both take a Hoe and nothing else, and both sit on fallow tillable soil, which is why the two are so often confused. Winter is the easiest time to tell them apart, because the ground is bare and a green tuft stands out.
Seed spots form the same way, overnight, and they take the place of an Artifact Spot now and then rather than spawning on their own schedule. The chance is small, so a long walk that turns up half a dozen digs will usually hand over one lot of seeds at most. The Quarry spawn table shows the scale of it: an Artifact Spot appears there several times more often than a Seed Spot. The exception is the Backwoods, where a Seed Spot is guaranteed on the ninth day of every season, always in the same square, which makes a short detour on that morning a reliable way to collect a batch.
The date is what decides the seed. The window for each one opens in the season before the crop can be planted and closes partway through its own season. Carrot Seeds run from the last stretch of Winter through most of Spring. Summer Squash Seeds take over from late Spring into Summer. Broccoli Seeds follow from late Summer into Fall, and Powdermelon Seeds from late Fall into Winter. The overlap is the useful part: the final week of a season hands out the seeds for the season after it, so the digging done while one crop is still in the ground stocks the next planting. That matters most for Broccoli and Powdermelon, which take the longest to mature and so want planting on the first day of their season.
Each dig gives two or three seeds, and the day's luck decides which. Two or three is rarely enough for a field, but it is enough to start one. Putting a single seed into a Seed Maker returns a larger batch, and the batch can be sown and run back through the machine again, so one lucky tuft of grass turns into a proper crop inside a season. Mrs. Raccoon's shop at the Giant Stump trades for the same four seeds, and she asks for forage rather than gold: a Maple Seed for Carrots, two Pine Cones for Powdermelon, five Moss for Broccoli and a pile of Sap for Summer Squash.
The four crops earn their keep in different ways. Carrots come up in three days, which makes them the fastest thing a new farm can plant and a sensible filler in the gaps between slower crops. Summer Squash and Broccoli both keep producing after the first harvest, so a single sowing lasts a whole season instead of one week. Powdermelon grows outdoors in Winter, which no ordinary crop does, and that turns the quietest season of the year into a farming season.
Notes
A Seed Spot pays seeds and nothing else, so the enchantments and professions that sweeten an Artifact Spot leave it alone. That cuts both ways: it also means a Seed Spot never wastes a swing on a lump of Clay.
Golden fishing treasure chests, barrels in the Skull Cavern, crates in The Mines and Mayor Lewis's prize machine all hand out the same four seeds in their own seasons, so a farmer who fishes or dives will often collect them without digging at all.
All Mechanics
Every entry in this group, with its key details.
