Guide
Farming and soils
Every realm has its own soil, and some crops grow only on it. Plots know their soil, and planting a soil crop on the wrong ground is refused with a message naming the soil it needs.
- Soil type (frozen, loam, paddy and terrace, bog, ash, sand, or ordinary) comes from the biome. Soil quality is separate: Barren, Common, Fertile, Rich or Blessed, and it changes with fertiliser.
- Plots hold a moisture state: Dry, Normal, Watered or Flooded. Watering fades over 48 hours, and players or irrigation maintain it.
- Common crops grow in several biomes, with a better yield in their preferred biome and a poorer yield and longer growing time in an unsuitable one.
- Soil is a material that can be dug from a plot, hauled by wagon and used to build planters. A soil crop planted off its soil grows only in a planter of the right soil, at a very small yield.
- Date palms and rice need water to be planted: either beside water, or irrigated by hand from a well.
- Emberblossom and frostleaf are wild herbs that are gathered, not farmed.
| Realm | Soil | Grows only here |
|---|---|---|
| Vornair | Frozen soil: tundra and cold valley plots | Frostleaf (frost damage and frost resistance); snowberry and cloudberry (preserves, mead, salves); frostcap, farmed in cold cellars and ice caves (slowing and preserving alchemy). Rye is a common crop that does best here. |
| Veridia | River loam: the plains and the Golden Fields | Golden wheat (the best bread wheat) and orchard fruit (cider, preserves, horse feed). Hops, barley, flax and ordinary wheat are common crops that grow in several biomes, with a clearly better yield on this loam. |
| Kairyu | Flooded paddies and hill terraces | Rice (the staple, and rice wine); tea (focus and mana; an export); mulberry (the only source of silk); bamboo (building, tools, paper, shoots). |
| Morvath | Bog and peat | Nightshade (poisons); glowcap and deathcap, grown on rotting blackwood (flameless lamp oil; toxins); grave moss, on blighted or burial ground (shadow reagents, embalming); bog reed and marsh rice (thatch and mats; Morvath's staple). |
| Ignis Hold | Warm ash | Emberblossom (fire damage and fire resistance, emberblossom oil); emberroot (the staple tuber); ashvine grapes (dark wine and brandy); cinderpepper (warming dishes, incendiaries). |
| The Ashen Wastes | Sand and dry ground | Cactus (fibre and stored water); date palm, at wells and seeps only (long-keeping food); saltbush and thorn (fodder, fences, traps); sunspice (a rare spice, worth smuggling). |
| The Heartlands | Crossroads loam | Nothing of its own. Horses, fodder, vegetables and wine are raised here, but none only here. |