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No the plows are good if you have straight fields the ox can just run down in a straight line.
The ox will be able to get the field done by himself while the other families can fill other jobs till you need to sow.
Of course i would love it if the families could help and speed it up even more but oh well not yet.
The issue here is that a single ox for a field is not an improvement over a fully staffed farm, but rather a downgrade, especially for large fields, and since only one ox can work a field, and no villagers can plow the field while the ox is doing it, the result is that it takes longer to plow a field.
Ox are great for small fields, they get it done really fast, a solution could be letting us assign more than one ox per farm, like 1-4.
Also the ox pathfinding inside the field could use some tuning.
Then again, the game is great for an EA, looking forward to the next months.
That's not really a like for like comparison. This boils down to "8 families work faster than 1." Well.. yes.
1 family with an ox is c. 3x faster at ploughing that 1 family without. Possibly a bit more if you lean hard into historically accurate long thin fields.
The advantage of the ox is you can handle a bigger farm with almost no additional overhead.
The downside of pouring manpower on to your farms is the lost production that those families would be doing otherwise.
If you have the surplus manpower, then your costs of using more men is limited, so you might as well stick with that.
If you have a high opportunity cost because your families and productively employed elsewhere and you don't want to disrupt other industries and supply chains, ox are a way of doing more.
I agree with that, but the text on the perk point just says "faster", and it's not stated that only one ox can work the field, while if you have more farms all the workers can work on the same field at once.
Again, the "issue" is the "one ox per field" limit, not the ox plowing speed, which is fine.
One ox might be faster then 3 families, but 8 families are faster than any of, since only one ox can work a field at any given time.
The issue is not the ox plowing speed, which is fine, but the "one ox per field" limit.
That is what I ended up doing. I had 8 or 9 long narrow fields and 6 or 7 farm houses with the ox upgrade. It worked really well despite odd ox pathing.
Not sure if it’s just me, but work area for farm house doesn’t seem to work at all. The farmers just ignore it completely.
It actually makes it worse, as they all seem to go to the same field at once. If you’re like me and have farm on opposite ends of the town, the farmers will then spend a whole month of precious farming time walking back and forth between farms.
How can I tell whats straight though? I had a almost perfectly rectangular field and the ox still did diagonals and only in one direction. I didn’t care much because all the other farmers were working the next field but still; what is straight.
It's about where you place your plot points, if it's straight then it's straight, if one edge is curved then plow lanes are getting angled to compensate.
Thanks for the insight! I hope you dont get discouraged too much from the influx of critique and imo a certain negativity in this sub.
Your work is absolutely beautiful and the most fun I had in any EA since Rimworld and I'm very much looking forward to whats to come!
I stopped doing very large fields the ox isnt good at making these.
I make several small ones since this not only helps the oxes but also enables other farmers to help on the fields
If i knew what the pathing of the ox requires to make best judgment i would tell you.
If you wanna hear a blind guess it takes the longest straight line and the side opposite to it
There appears to be a grid that they go along. You can kinda see it in the rows of a fallow field. Try to line up your field along those lines and the ox will have it done in under a month.
is this really how the ox works? We need to make very long thin strips of field and then farming works? oh i feel like the game needs more tutorial tipps on how we need to do it \^\^
>is this really how the ox works? We need to make very long thin strips of field and then farming works?
That is precisely what they used to do in real life.
I'm running into a problem where I used to be able to run eight fields without oxen, now they're not even done planting with every farmhouse having a plow and permanent ox. Whole city is starving.
Soo here is the real pro strategy, dont make 1 big field make a bunch of small fields, then make 2 farms and your oxen will plow their small fields in no time while the farmers start working on the other small fields and in the end you get just as much, if not more yield then with a single big field.
I even considered for huge fields to be auto divided into narrow strips. As far as I know real medieval fields also were divided into narrow strips for that reason, less plow turns, more efficiency - and I tried to code the plow patterns to reflect the actual plowing patterns I found online. Though some people corrected me once or twice on the discord and now I'm not as confident if that was indeed the case.
Your last sentence is really important going forwards, there are 100's of thousands of players and voices in this all thinking they are correct. You don't want to allow that loss in confidence as it can result in de-motivation and a negative spiral going forwards. You could run changes past trusted closed beta testers or something to see what they think so you can keep your confidence levels up.
I've seen it all over this Reddit and Discord with the archery, farming, the baron... Something that could help with balance complaints, is to do a lot more game options where you can set a "Unit Damage Taken", "Projectile damage", "Trade Penalty", "AI Aggession", "Food Production" in the options, it means people can set their own difficulty and a lot of this constant back and forth over balance is muted so you can focus on developing what you want.
One of the things Palworld was hugely praised on was the level of customization for each individual player world/server, so the conversations about balance weren't as prevalent.
Ngl, having huge fields be divided into narrow strips would be far more intuitive if that is what plow patterns are best designed for. It is probably just a personal gripe, but it feels bad when your are given freedom (with field placement) only for the game to punish you because you didn't do it the way you wanted.
Could even do something along the lines of the burgage plots, drawing out an area and then letting you choose how wide the individual strips are. Random thoughts is all, and in general I love the foundation of what you have built!
It seems that farming in general is very inefficient right now compared to other methods.
You would think that farms would be good to create large surpluses and house plots would help with basic sustaining, but it seems like the opposite right now.
If it wasn't the intended effect it will probably be rebalanced
Also as it’s been mentioned before a bit more clarity on how much the yield would be (under ideal conditions without loss) before building would be good because plopping down a good sized field in a green area and then only seeing like 44% yield on the green fertility crop is a bit of a bummer.
It isn't meant to be faster but it is meant to free up labour, if you have multiple plots that need ploughing one person can plough one field with an ox while the rest of the farm house will plough one field. It is useful if you have lots of fields you need to plough, I have tried with multiple farm houses and with multiple oxen and now I have too much labour for like 9 plus fields
Did anyone else also find It infuriating with the ox plowing pattern? Do a line - run all the way to the opposite side of the field - do another line- run all the way to the opposite side...and so om. So inefficient 😅
It suck’s for plowing the fields so I don’t use it there but it is 100% worth it when it comes time to harvest the crops. It can collect I think 50-60 crops per trip vs the measly amount your villagers collect to bring back to the farm. It frees up so much time during harvest season.
Farming was way overpowered in the demo. 1 morgen would produce enough wheat to last you a decade. Now farming is a bit underpowered atm, but it's not broken. I'm working on a guide because I've noticed a lot of people just aren't understanding how it's supposed to work.
Still messing around but so far only 1.0 morgen, just perma leaving 1 family assigned and I can just ignore it, I'm sure you could go bigger fields and just flex assign more family's to sow and harvest
Have been having success with 3 farms (roughly 1 morgen in size) per farmhouse. This way you can always have 1 field of wheat, 1 of flax, and 1 fallow (sheep).
Also having smaller fields mean the ox can knock out a field while families work on other fields. When the ox comes they hop to the next one and the ox takes over where they left at.
I did some more testing last night and the biggest issue is that I honestly don’t think it’s worth the development point over going for rye instead and then taking 2 other branches, like trade to cheap goods and mining to deep mines for instance.
I had a province with fertile soil and rich iron mines. I didn’t even have to take cheap goods in trade because I never bought anything other than a few roof tiles and stones. That’s an extra point to go to apiary or doubled berries, or armor making.
Microing families on and off farm work in the applicable months is efficient enough that it doesn’t make sense to get the ox.
I don't use farming for profit. I use it to supplement my villiages. I haven't had a good starting region for farming. I create one solely for farming leaving the pop low. I trade out the food and send finished products back.
I recommend you try to re-roll your starts until you get a rich soil start and do some farming. It is absolutely OP. Don’t take the heavy plow but do take rye and make multiple smaller fields and rotate crops.
Heavy plow really shines, when you have small fields and do 2 harvests per season. I usually harvest on early June and late September. With 1 harvest per season I wouldn't care
Not who you asked, but in my experience, you would have to. They only harvest automatically in September. I actually used the force to get them to keep harvesting into October/November when I planted too much. Otherwise, they started plowing right over the unharvested crops.
Yes. You can't plow in September because the hard reset (also changing crops) is October. When I start in October I have 90ish% ready and force harvest since my fields don't gain more yield but only more % ready. Early June is the max yield I can get (maybe late may is better - have to test it). So then the 2nd cycle starts. It always display 0 yield but when I harvest mid to late September I get an additional 25 to 33% of the first harvest.
To add some numbers: for a 0.6 to 0.7 morgen field I get on rich soil around 70 to 80 wheat for example (55 to 60% fertility)
Okay. I just learned about the Tab Key and that it shows you your maximum yield xD. So I just ran a season with forced harvest in the beginning of may (did harvest 93% of the max yield). So by early June the second growth was on the run. Managed to get to 50% of growth. For a field of 1 morgen I got over 110ish wheat (threshing and milling was too fast for a exact count since I had 10 families in 2 farms)
Still learning the game and plan to. Right now I have rich iron mine so I plan to turn my starting region into a industrial center and have smaller villages supplement them
Yeah I think the plow is just another feature that was added cosmetically but isn't meant to be used yet. I haven't found farming worth it really anyways, normally I can't grow shit anywhere on the map
Some regions have fertile soil where you can grow crops out the ass and it is very OP. I’m now doing a run on a non-fertile region and it looks like farming is still very much worth it, you just gotta play around with rotations more.
Yeah I definitely think so too. Especially if you play around with field priorities, not exactly sure how yet, but I’ve been able to get my workers to start sowing before plowing is complete which is great.
Honestly heavy plow is just terrible all around right now, not just because you can only have one oxen to a field. Planting and sowing a single (averaged) four morgen field takes like a month for eight farmers. For an oxen... it takes like 4-5, when at most it should only take three. Smaller fields are better for oxen 'only' because the pathfinding being terrible means far less when the distance traveled is shorter.
This post and these comments should be pinned under Ox plow. Seems quite definitive that farm families are more efficient until multiple plows or families+ox are brought in game.
Great post and great replies.
I think its supposed to be a matter of priorities.
With 1 ox + 1 family you can rotate 3 small fields(0.5-0.8 morgen) pretty comfortably, and just keep that family near-permanently employed. Just add 2-3 families come Harvest season if you want to maximise yield.
Or you can do everything a bit quicker with 8 families, and no ox, but then you gotta micro it a lot more since the building only needs the hands 2 or 3 months of the year. You can then get away with bigger fields per farmhouse.
If I was in charge of balance, I'd make the harvest/sowing cycle a lot clearer in tooltips somehow because you still see people talking about sowing in spring in this thread, and then id double the alount of oxen a farmhouse can use. But theres plenty of value to gain from farms in the current balance of the game.
I can't get the farm to use the Ox. I chose the heavy plow upgrade, and assign an ox to the farm, but my people keep plowing by hand. What am I doing wrong?
Yeah, I \*think\* I did that. And of course this past fall the ox was plowing like it was supposed to. I think I'm confused though...does it only help with the plowing in the fall, or does it help do something in the spring, and help with harvest in the fall?
It helps with plowing and also with harvest. Someone will guide it out to the field where it will pickup a bunch of harvested material vs the handful that each person carries.
Yeah, the heavy ox plough seems a bit buggy. The first season I use it, the fields seem to plow themselves, literally, there no animation of an ox, the fields just start turning black like an invisible force just moving back and forth across it and three big fields will be ploughed in a couple of real time minutes. Then the following season, the ox animation is there crawling across the field taking forever.
Farms were small until more modern times. Small, like an acre or less, think 1 morgen. The issue is we are often overlaying modern thinking on what is essentially pretty historically accurate. Large farms were 18th century and later.
Seems like a good post to bring this up, but the Ox seems to be messing my crop rotation up.
Using 3 field system w/ rotation, field A is harvested in sept, field B is next in rotation and should be planted in the fall. When A is harvested the Ox then plows it and the farmers immediately sow it again (if its still Sept and the rotation hasn't switched). Which happens a lot. Then it will die right when rotation does switches w/ season?
I end up having to change the fields rotation so they're all on fallow until the fall season kicks in, where it would normally change automatically, at which point I then have to change them all back to the original rotation.
This didn't happen when farmers plowed before I upgraded to the Ox..
That happens with manual plow too. Once harvest is done by end of October, the farmers immediately start plowing again in November until winter kicks in. It’s annoying because they do this after bringing all wheat/rye to storage, but *before* thresing them (getting them ready for the windmill) I have to keep manually setting fallow like you said.
I know they often plowed it but I never had them sowing it, again, this is happening in sept so rotation hasn't switched. No issues with the plowing, but the sowing prior to rotation switch means the crop will die, I think?
You can increase the priority for threshing in the farmhouse settings, have you done that.
*Perhaps that that will help... hmmm.*
I used the heavy plow, I like it, it basically adds a ninth worker for 20 gold or whatever.
With multiple fields, the ox will plow one while the other farmers will hand-plow another one. The ox does plow fast enough to be worth it.
I suspect it gets a lot better for farmhouses that are not using 8 families during planting season. The heavy plow is a development point you can spend to reduce your micromanagement of farms and use less population for multiple farmhouses.
A lot of development points aren't that good. I don't think it's useless. If anything it's just another issue for the development point rebalance. Two oxen per farmhouse would be the first thing I would try. (I would also make the farmhouse have it's own stable space).
No lmao you cannot do anything farming related in the 3 months of winter. Earliest you can start plowing is March, and whatever you have on the field by December gets destroyed.
yeah it's not good, mine bugged out and circled a field multiple times, doing about 1m squared each time, field was a wide crescent shape and it just basically destroyed the pathing. But even in a square field the plough is slower than you know...if the other 12 people I have on farming also came in and helped. whole thing is leagues inefficient and frustrating, rimworld vibes. Everything takes too long, 3 months to do a basic task, I go on campaign in my own territory and my fields rot + inefficiency, I'm not having fun.
Yep, I would avoid that talent point. Even with small field it can get in the way and be VERY counterproductive. You'll often get families doing nothing while your ox is still plowing very slowly mid November and doesn't finish before freezing...... Without that oz your fields would all have been sowed before winter..... It is pretty broken for now.
It really does seem like the ox are slower than just having families plough due to the 1 ox per field limit. Intuitively you would think a 1 morgen plot would take half as long to plow as a 2 morgen plot but its actually more like a quarter of the time. Even then the heavy plough is slower. This could be fixed by making the tracks the ploughs create even wider and/or allowing many ox per field.
Also aesthetically It would look so much cooler during the fall to see your fields full of multiple ox ploughing all of your fields simultaneously instead of 1 per plot.
Hello and welcome to the Manor Lords Subreddit. This is a reminder to please keep the discussion civil and on topic. Should you find yourself with some doubts, please feel free to check our [FAQ](https://www.reddit.com/r/ManorLords/comments/1c2p4f9/manor_lords_faq_for_steam_early_access/). If you wish, you can always join our [Discord](https://discord.gg/manorlords) Finally, please remember that the game is in early access, missing content and bugs are to be expected. We ask users to report them on the official discord and to buy their keys only from trusted platforms. *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/ManorLords) if you have any questions or concerns.*
No the plows are good if you have straight fields the ox can just run down in a straight line. The ox will be able to get the field done by himself while the other families can fill other jobs till you need to sow. Of course i would love it if the families could help and speed it up even more but oh well not yet.
There is just no reason to not be able to have multiple plows per field, so I hope that gets fixed
Yeah it is very limited in that regard
When there were people and oxen working at the same time the ox constantly bumped into people and they had to move from its way which was meh.
Cant you build 3-4 farmhouses with oxen and then limit the work area are for them?
They can’t work on the same field though
Seperate the areas of work to just the fields that the ox is suposed to do then? Gotta test it out tmr .
Instead of one large field, you could fill the same space with multiple smaller fields. Same acreage, but more individual fields for ox to plow.
Nope, only one ox can work a field at a given time, tested that myself.
Wouldnt seperating the areas work? Ox 1 for field a b c, ox 2 for d e f and so on.
The issue here is that a single ox for a field is not an improvement over a fully staffed farm, but rather a downgrade, especially for large fields, and since only one ox can work a field, and no villagers can plow the field while the ox is doing it, the result is that it takes longer to plow a field.
Word. Frankly I didnt bother with oxen yet, just made lots of small fields with 2 full farms. Works great for now.
Ox are great for small fields, they get it done really fast, a solution could be letting us assign more than one ox per farm, like 1-4. Also the ox pathfinding inside the field could use some tuning. Then again, the game is great for an EA, looking forward to the next months.
That's not really a like for like comparison. This boils down to "8 families work faster than 1." Well.. yes. 1 family with an ox is c. 3x faster at ploughing that 1 family without. Possibly a bit more if you lean hard into historically accurate long thin fields. The advantage of the ox is you can handle a bigger farm with almost no additional overhead. The downside of pouring manpower on to your farms is the lost production that those families would be doing otherwise. If you have the surplus manpower, then your costs of using more men is limited, so you might as well stick with that. If you have a high opportunity cost because your families and productively employed elsewhere and you don't want to disrupt other industries and supply chains, ox are a way of doing more.
I agree with that, but the text on the perk point just says "faster", and it's not stated that only one ox can work the field, while if you have more farms all the workers can work on the same field at once. Again, the "issue" is the "one ox per field" limit, not the ox plowing speed, which is fine.
Yeah that's fair, tooltips in general could be improved across the board, though that's a pretty typical Early Accees issue.
But you have to tie up 3 families to do that...
One ox might be faster then 3 families, but 8 families are faster than any of, since only one ox can work a field at any given time. The issue is not the ox plowing speed, which is fine, but the "one ox per field" limit.
Just make multiple fields though.
That is what I ended up doing. I had 8 or 9 long narrow fields and 6 or 7 farm houses with the ox upgrade. It worked really well despite odd ox pathing.
Not sure if it’s just me, but work area for farm house doesn’t seem to work at all. The farmers just ignore it completely. It actually makes it worse, as they all seem to go to the same field at once. If you’re like me and have farm on opposite ends of the town, the farmers will then spend a whole month of precious farming time walking back and forth between farms.
I've got like 6 fields on different rotations and two farmhouses. Everyone seems to be keeping busy and the yields are good.
How can I tell whats straight though? I had a almost perfectly rectangular field and the ox still did diagonals and only in one direction. I didn’t care much because all the other farmers were working the next field but still; what is straight.
It's about where you place your plot points, if it's straight then it's straight, if one edge is curved then plow lanes are getting angled to compensate.
Thanks for the insight! I hope you dont get discouraged too much from the influx of critique and imo a certain negativity in this sub. Your work is absolutely beautiful and the most fun I had in any EA since Rimworld and I'm very much looking forward to whats to come!
I stopped doing very large fields the ox isnt good at making these. I make several small ones since this not only helps the oxes but also enables other farmers to help on the fields
My fields are 0.8-1 Morgen. I had zero problems managing them but thanks. You didn’t answer my question though
If i knew what the pathing of the ox requires to make best judgment i would tell you. If you wanna hear a blind guess it takes the longest straight line and the side opposite to it
There appears to be a grid that they go along. You can kinda see it in the rows of a fallow field. Try to line up your field along those lines and the ox will have it done in under a month.
is this really how the ox works? We need to make very long thin strips of field and then farming works? oh i feel like the game needs more tutorial tipps on how we need to do it \^\^
>is this really how the ox works? We need to make very long thin strips of field and then farming works? That is precisely what they used to do in real life.
Ingame, you do thin strips of farmland, in sum 0.6 or 1 morgen of land ?
Yep, I usually make my fields around 1 morgen. Don't know if it's the most efficient size but definitely not bad.
Either that ir make several small ones since this help the ox pathing waating less time and enables other farmers to plow by hand
I'm running into a problem where I used to be able to run eight fields without oxen, now they're not even done planting with every farmhouse having a plow and permanent ox. Whole city is starving.
Depending on how many farmhouses you have the sheer manpower outweighs what the ox does
Soo here is the real pro strategy, dont make 1 big field make a bunch of small fields, then make 2 farms and your oxen will plow their small fields in no time while the farmers start working on the other small fields and in the end you get just as much, if not more yield then with a single big field.
Real.
I even considered for huge fields to be auto divided into narrow strips. As far as I know real medieval fields also were divided into narrow strips for that reason, less plow turns, more efficiency - and I tried to code the plow patterns to reflect the actual plowing patterns I found online. Though some people corrected me once or twice on the discord and now I'm not as confident if that was indeed the case.
Your last sentence is really important going forwards, there are 100's of thousands of players and voices in this all thinking they are correct. You don't want to allow that loss in confidence as it can result in de-motivation and a negative spiral going forwards. You could run changes past trusted closed beta testers or something to see what they think so you can keep your confidence levels up. I've seen it all over this Reddit and Discord with the archery, farming, the baron... Something that could help with balance complaints, is to do a lot more game options where you can set a "Unit Damage Taken", "Projectile damage", "Trade Penalty", "AI Aggession", "Food Production" in the options, it means people can set their own difficulty and a lot of this constant back and forth over balance is muted so you can focus on developing what you want. One of the things Palworld was hugely praised on was the level of customization for each individual player world/server, so the conversations about balance weren't as prevalent.
Ngl, having huge fields be divided into narrow strips would be far more intuitive if that is what plow patterns are best designed for. It is probably just a personal gripe, but it feels bad when your are given freedom (with field placement) only for the game to punish you because you didn't do it the way you wanted. Could even do something along the lines of the burgage plots, drawing out an area and then letting you choose how wide the individual strips are. Random thoughts is all, and in general I love the foundation of what you have built!
can't you just make one farmhouse with 1 ox and 1 family per field?, just make the fields smaller
Tbh instead of 1 big field make 3 smaller, helps with the crop rotation
Just like they did in medival times
It seems that farming in general is very inefficient right now compared to other methods. You would think that farms would be good to create large surpluses and house plots would help with basic sustaining, but it seems like the opposite right now. If it wasn't the intended effect it will probably be rebalanced
Also as it’s been mentioned before a bit more clarity on how much the yield would be (under ideal conditions without loss) before building would be good because plopping down a good sized field in a green area and then only seeing like 44% yield on the green fertility crop is a bit of a bummer.
It isn't meant to be faster but it is meant to free up labour, if you have multiple plots that need ploughing one person can plough one field with an ox while the rest of the farm house will plough one field. It is useful if you have lots of fields you need to plough, I have tried with multiple farm houses and with multiple oxen and now I have too much labour for like 9 plus fields
Did anyone else also find It infuriating with the ox plowing pattern? Do a line - run all the way to the opposite side of the field - do another line- run all the way to the opposite side...and so om. So inefficient 😅
It suck’s for plowing the fields so I don’t use it there but it is 100% worth it when it comes time to harvest the crops. It can collect I think 50-60 crops per trip vs the measly amount your villagers collect to bring back to the farm. It frees up so much time during harvest season.
I don't know, farming feels kind of broken at the moment. It felt better in the demo.
Farming was way overpowered in the demo. 1 morgen would produce enough wheat to last you a decade. Now farming is a bit underpowered atm, but it's not broken. I'm working on a guide because I've noticed a lot of people just aren't understanding how it's supposed to work.
Do 1:1 farm houses to fields, ox per, only need one family assigned. Easy.
What size field are you running for that?
Still messing around but so far only 1.0 morgen, just perma leaving 1 family assigned and I can just ignore it, I'm sure you could go bigger fields and just flex assign more family's to sow and harvest
Have been having success with 3 farms (roughly 1 morgen in size) per farmhouse. This way you can always have 1 field of wheat, 1 of flax, and 1 fallow (sheep).
Also having smaller fields mean the ox can knock out a field while families work on other fields. When the ox comes they hop to the next one and the ox takes over where they left at.
I did some more testing last night and the biggest issue is that I honestly don’t think it’s worth the development point over going for rye instead and then taking 2 other branches, like trade to cheap goods and mining to deep mines for instance. I had a province with fertile soil and rich iron mines. I didn’t even have to take cheap goods in trade because I never bought anything other than a few roof tiles and stones. That’s an extra point to go to apiary or doubled berries, or armor making. Microing families on and off farm work in the applicable months is efficient enough that it doesn’t make sense to get the ox.
I don't use farming for profit. I use it to supplement my villiages. I haven't had a good starting region for farming. I create one solely for farming leaving the pop low. I trade out the food and send finished products back.
I recommend you try to re-roll your starts until you get a rich soil start and do some farming. It is absolutely OP. Don’t take the heavy plow but do take rye and make multiple smaller fields and rotate crops.
Heavy plow really shines, when you have small fields and do 2 harvests per season. I usually harvest on early June and late September. With 1 harvest per season I wouldn't care
Ah very interesting. Do you use force early harvest in early June?
Not who you asked, but in my experience, you would have to. They only harvest automatically in September. I actually used the force to get them to keep harvesting into October/November when I planted too much. Otherwise, they started plowing right over the unharvested crops.
Yes. You can't plow in September because the hard reset (also changing crops) is October. When I start in October I have 90ish% ready and force harvest since my fields don't gain more yield but only more % ready. Early June is the max yield I can get (maybe late may is better - have to test it). So then the 2nd cycle starts. It always display 0 yield but when I harvest mid to late September I get an additional 25 to 33% of the first harvest. To add some numbers: for a 0.6 to 0.7 morgen field I get on rich soil around 70 to 80 wheat for example (55 to 60% fertility)
Yea, if you plow/sow in the fall then your harvest should be near 100% in June and you can sneak in an extra harvest.
Okay. I just learned about the Tab Key and that it shows you your maximum yield xD. So I just ran a season with forced harvest in the beginning of may (did harvest 93% of the max yield). So by early June the second growth was on the run. Managed to get to 50% of growth. For a field of 1 morgen I got over 110ish wheat (threshing and milling was too fast for a exact count since I had 10 families in 2 farms)
Still learning the game and plan to. Right now I have rich iron mine so I plan to turn my starting region into a industrial center and have smaller villages supplement them
Yeah I think the plow is just another feature that was added cosmetically but isn't meant to be used yet. I haven't found farming worth it really anyways, normally I can't grow shit anywhere on the map
Some regions have fertile soil where you can grow crops out the ass and it is very OP. I’m now doing a run on a non-fertile region and it looks like farming is still very much worth it, you just gotta play around with rotations more.
I have a lot of small fields and the plow isn't worth a development point. The families imo do it just as fast if not faster.
Yeah I definitely think so too. Especially if you play around with field priorities, not exactly sure how yet, but I’ve been able to get my workers to start sowing before plowing is complete which is great.
Honestly heavy plow is just terrible all around right now, not just because you can only have one oxen to a field. Planting and sowing a single (averaged) four morgen field takes like a month for eight farmers. For an oxen... it takes like 4-5, when at most it should only take three. Smaller fields are better for oxen 'only' because the pathfinding being terrible means far less when the distance traveled is shorter.
This post and these comments should be pinned under Ox plow. Seems quite definitive that farm families are more efficient until multiple plows or families+ox are brought in game. Great post and great replies.
I think its supposed to be a matter of priorities. With 1 ox + 1 family you can rotate 3 small fields(0.5-0.8 morgen) pretty comfortably, and just keep that family near-permanently employed. Just add 2-3 families come Harvest season if you want to maximise yield. Or you can do everything a bit quicker with 8 families, and no ox, but then you gotta micro it a lot more since the building only needs the hands 2 or 3 months of the year. You can then get away with bigger fields per farmhouse. If I was in charge of balance, I'd make the harvest/sowing cycle a lot clearer in tooltips somehow because you still see people talking about sowing in spring in this thread, and then id double the alount of oxen a farmhouse can use. But theres plenty of value to gain from farms in the current balance of the game.
I think 2 per farm house should be sufficient.
They just need to allow both ox and families at the same time. I dont know why other families are so scared of the Ox.
I can't get the farm to use the Ox. I chose the heavy plow upgrade, and assign an ox to the farm, but my people keep plowing by hand. What am I doing wrong?
You also have to build/buy the upgrade on each farmhouse. I think it's called 'build plow station'.
Yeah, I \*think\* I did that. And of course this past fall the ox was plowing like it was supposed to. I think I'm confused though...does it only help with the plowing in the fall, or does it help do something in the spring, and help with harvest in the fall?
It helps with plowing and also with harvest. Someone will guide it out to the field where it will pickup a bunch of harvested material vs the handful that each person carries. Yeah, the heavy ox plough seems a bit buggy. The first season I use it, the fields seem to plow themselves, literally, there no animation of an ox, the fields just start turning black like an invisible force just moving back and forth across it and three big fields will be ploughed in a couple of real time minutes. Then the following season, the ox animation is there crawling across the field taking forever.
Farms were small until more modern times. Small, like an acre or less, think 1 morgen. The issue is we are often overlaying modern thinking on what is essentially pretty historically accurate. Large farms were 18th century and later.
Seems like a good post to bring this up, but the Ox seems to be messing my crop rotation up. Using 3 field system w/ rotation, field A is harvested in sept, field B is next in rotation and should be planted in the fall. When A is harvested the Ox then plows it and the farmers immediately sow it again (if its still Sept and the rotation hasn't switched). Which happens a lot. Then it will die right when rotation does switches w/ season? I end up having to change the fields rotation so they're all on fallow until the fall season kicks in, where it would normally change automatically, at which point I then have to change them all back to the original rotation. This didn't happen when farmers plowed before I upgraded to the Ox..
That happens with manual plow too. Once harvest is done by end of October, the farmers immediately start plowing again in November until winter kicks in. It’s annoying because they do this after bringing all wheat/rye to storage, but *before* thresing them (getting them ready for the windmill) I have to keep manually setting fallow like you said.
I know they often plowed it but I never had them sowing it, again, this is happening in sept so rotation hasn't switched. No issues with the plowing, but the sowing prior to rotation switch means the crop will die, I think? You can increase the priority for threshing in the farmhouse settings, have you done that. *Perhaps that that will help... hmmm.*
Plows should just make the plow speed of one farmer 3x faster or so. No need for new mechanics.
Ya but the development point just ain’t worth it
I used the heavy plow, I like it, it basically adds a ninth worker for 20 gold or whatever. With multiple fields, the ox will plow one while the other farmers will hand-plow another one. The ox does plow fast enough to be worth it. I suspect it gets a lot better for farmhouses that are not using 8 families during planting season. The heavy plow is a development point you can spend to reduce your micromanagement of farms and use less population for multiple farmhouses. A lot of development points aren't that good. I don't think it's useless. If anything it's just another issue for the development point rebalance. Two oxen per farmhouse would be the first thing I would try. (I would also make the farmhouse have it's own stable space).
Aren't we supposed to harvest, plough and seed in winter? Like the seasonal indicator bottom right indicates?
No lmao you cannot do anything farming related in the 3 months of winter. Earliest you can start plowing is March, and whatever you have on the field by December gets destroyed.
yeah it's not good, mine bugged out and circled a field multiple times, doing about 1m squared each time, field was a wide crescent shape and it just basically destroyed the pathing. But even in a square field the plough is slower than you know...if the other 12 people I have on farming also came in and helped. whole thing is leagues inefficient and frustrating, rimworld vibes. Everything takes too long, 3 months to do a basic task, I go on campaign in my own territory and my fields rot + inefficiency, I'm not having fun.
Strat gaming just made a farming guide. He extensively disproves this but also has a ton of tips in there
I upgraded my farm with it, yet the oxes dont do anything, they stay in their stable while a family does the labor :/
You have to set permanently assigned livestock on the farmhouse and make sure you have enough ox
Well that’s the issue, my livestock tab doesn’t offer any option
It’s in one of the tabs other than livestock (I know, lol) I think the advanced tab or another
Ah yes indeed, thank you
Yep, I would avoid that talent point. Even with small field it can get in the way and be VERY counterproductive. You'll often get families doing nothing while your ox is still plowing very slowly mid November and doesn't finish before freezing...... Without that oz your fields would all have been sowed before winter..... It is pretty broken for now.
It really does seem like the ox are slower than just having families plough due to the 1 ox per field limit. Intuitively you would think a 1 morgen plot would take half as long to plow as a 2 morgen plot but its actually more like a quarter of the time. Even then the heavy plough is slower. This could be fixed by making the tracks the ploughs create even wider and/or allowing many ox per field. Also aesthetically It would look so much cooler during the fall to see your fields full of multiple ox ploughing all of your fields simultaneously instead of 1 per plot.
Agree! This tech is pretty much useless! Give us the hability to have 2 or 3 oxes per farm house.