By "industrial" farming, I mean large-scale farming that treats farming like a business, as opposed to a short-term approach you might call "casual gardening" where you're maybe just growing the things you need when you need them.
The key to really large scale farming on a budget is not how often you plant and harvest -- remember that we're also trying to spend as little time as possible -- but to maximize your harvests however often you do them. I quickly amassed over 200k in gold through just one planting/harvesting cycle per day.
(But how important is gold, anyway?)
Here's how I did it:
- Save up the gold you earn from other activities at first. It can be tempting to spend your first coins on gear or decorations, but if you use them instead to get your farming operation really going, the farming will eventually pay for everything else. When you reach the point where you can easily afford all the animals, feed, and seeds you ever need to buy, then you can start spending on other things.
- Work your way toward eventually buying all the animals that can be bought with gold. This might be a slow process at first, when you're starting off with almost no gold, but once you're able to farm more seriously, the gold will start pouring in, and once you have "infinite gold," there'll be no reason not to own every possible animal that can be bought with gold.
- Be aware that as you level up as a farmer, you'll be given more plots. Check from time to time to see if you have any new plots, and put them all to use.
- Every time you look at Johann's Job Board, immediately claim any jobs for which you already have all the products.
- Every time you're on the job board, winnow out the jobs that aren't worth your time. Delete every job that:
- Can't be done with the animals you currently have.
- Pays less than 500 coins.
- Requires 30 or more of a single product.
- For every planting session, look through the job board for the highest paying jobs and note what plant products are needed. Keep going until you've compiled a list of 2-4 different types of seeds, depending on how many plots you currently have. (Maybe one type of seed for every 4-6 plots?)
- Buy enough seeds among those types to fill up all your current plots. Don't worry about buying more seeds than you need to fulfill a given job; you'll just use the extra produce on future jobs. (It's very satisfying to see a new job appear on the board that you already have all the products to claim.) The important thing is to keep a maximal flow of produce coming in.
Note: the 500 coin minimum job size, along with the other rules of thumb, are the thresholds I use. There may be more ideal numbers. And it would certainly be more efficient to make finer distinctions, taking into account no only the value of a job but the relative cost of the items that are needed to complete it. But we don't want to spend too much time or mental effort on this. (Though if you can, then more power to you!) The general idea is to take only those jobs that give the biggest and most efficient returns per harvest, and these are simple guidelines that will mostly do that most of the time. Follow them (or similar rules of your own devising), and your gold reserves will grow with surprising speed.
This is the first step in my guide to playing School of Dragons on a budget.
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