Glyphscape/Farming

Farming Overview
Farming is probably the skill with the most delayed rewards. By leveling up this skill, you can plant, harvest, and identify a variety of crops and herbs, as well as domesticated animals. Although farming as a skill is mostly leveled on personal plots of land, its benefits apply to foodstuffs that you forage.

Before you can farm anything, you must first buy farmland (as opposed to residential land, which is what you can build houses on). You do this by speaking to any of the several real estate agents, present at each major settlement. Land on any particular Runescape server is rather expensive, but generally, farming is done away from hot spots (towns and urban areas), where there is comparably more land, and thus farmland is generally much cheaper than residential land. Generally, the plot will cost you at least 250 gp per tile. If you're not rather rich, it may be best to stick to a small plot of land, say, a 4x6 plot. However, wealthy players will want to immediately buy large patches of land to speed-train their farming. And if you are getting any farmland, be sure you're actually putting it to use: You have to pay a 10% property tax on each tile every real month you own it, which is 25+ gp per tile. Very cheap, but if you buy a lot of land it really adds up. Farm ownership is different on each world; your farm only exists on the world you bought the land in. This means that in order to farm, you must go back to the particular world in which you own farmland.

Reaping the rewards of farming takes considerable time, which makes it a rather discouraging skill to train. But if you're rich you can train farming very quickly, since some of the time spent waiting and the cost of the land is taken into consideration when deciding the amount of experience rewarded.

The maximum number of tiles you can farm at one time is 300.

As you gain in level, you will be able to succeed more often with your crops and thus gain more experience for the same effort. To offset this, the experience you get decreases by 1% compounded per level. In the tables listed below, the experience only applies if you are on level one. For almost all of them you will be receiving only a fraction of the experience points listed depending on the level you are when you undertook an action. You should be able to make around 300 k - 500 k selling the produce you need to farm in order to get from level 1 to 100.

Planting
Before you may plant anything on a tile, you must first make it more arable by getting adjacent to the target tile and tilling it with a plow, which takes time. You must do this prior to planting, every time. Then of course you actually sow the seeds. These actions must be done separately but for all intents and purposes should be done together.

Each crop takes 10 seconds to plow and plant per tile. Larger crops thus take a proportionately longer time to plant; a crop that spans 2x2 takes 40 seconds to plow the land and plant it. No matter what you are planting, planting a farm still takes the same amount of time. When you are choosing where to plant, selecting a tile will show you which tiles you are choosing to plant on. You can't, of course, plant any crop so that any part of it overlaps with non-arable tiles or on tiles already assigned to another individual crop. While this is happening, a progress bar shows up at the bottom of the screen that shows its progress. Gaining levels does not speed up this planting process. If you make a mistake, you can always remove the sown seeds or young plants, but by doing so prematurely (as opposed to harvesting), you lose out on any experience you might have gained.

There are a great variety of seeds you can plant. You can only get seeds from the plants that the seeds produce, or indirectly from certain NPC's or other players. The seeds are all quite cheap, though certain plants may require a lot more seeds per tile (per plant) than others. You can generate seeds very quickly once you have a lot of tiles dedicated to growing a certain crop, since each tile produces many times as many seeds as was put into it, provided you have a reasonable rate of success. Unlike most produce and plants, the seeds do not expire or decay, so you can stockpile them.

Planting tools:


 * Plow
 * the proper seeds

Tending
Once planted, many crops (those that take under 36 hours) do not need to be taken care of; for those, you don't need to water them, or weed them. All plants do however have a chance of failing, in which case you don't gain the experience (which you only get when you harvest). With higher levels in farming, the chances of all crops failing are decreased. If you are unable to farm a certain crop, it will have a 0% chance of success no matter what, and you will just be wasting seeds, since the game will still allow you to go through with the motions of planting a crop if you have the proper tools and seeds.

Crops take different amounts of time to fully grow. Once they've grown, they remain for twice the time it took them to grow. So if a plant takes 24 hours to mature, it will only wilt if you don't harvest it within 72 hours of planting. This does not apply to trees, which can last indefinitely once fully grown. You don't get an experience for attempting to harvest a wilted or failed plant, though you do gain produce for harvesting a multi-term (lasting longer than one real-day) plant before it's wilted. So it's important to be timely with getting back to the game every day or so if you're doing farming at around that time. Once fully grown, they also don't need to be tended to.

Other, longer-living crops, including all trees, need to be tended to (sometimes multiple times before they're fully grown). Any still-growing crop that you do not tend to within 36 real-time hours of planting will wilt (fail), regardless of your base chance of failing with any particular crop. This gives a 12-hour leeway for players who log in about once a day, but if you miss the deadline, too bad: your crop will fail and you won't get the full experience and produce from it. To tend to your crop, you need to get a watering can (preferably many) and fill it up; each plant will require all the water in the watering can, but by carrying buckets instead, you can nearly quadruple the number of plants you can tend in one trip since a bucket holds, at maximum, 4x the water a watering can holds. Tending to a crop takes exactly as long as tilling/planting it (10 seconds per tile of the plant). Since trees last many cycles and span a 25 tiles, they will need considerable care.

Tending tools:


 * Watering can
 * Gloves

Harvesting
Harvesting is simple. The equipment for harvesting is quite limited (some crops can be hand-picked), and the time taken per crop is negligible. You can harvest crops even if your inventory is full, but you won't be able to take it with you in that case. All one-term plants die after you harvest them, clearing the area so that you may grow a new batch of produce. Plants that take longer to grow give produce every term they are planted until they're fully grown, and then they die after you harvest them for the last time. If you want to keep a tree around for decoration, simply don't harvest them the last time.

Most plants give you a main produce and seeds each time they are harvested. The last time you harvest trees, you can also use an axe to get 1 low quality log from them each - not a very valuable thing, so you might be better off just letting it wilt on its own.

Harvesting tools:


 * Ladder (for trees)
 * Sickle (for grains)

Choosing what to farm
Farming isn't about knowing what you want to get, planting it, and then picking up the produce. Crops can be divided in three general categories:


 * Harvest crops exhaust your farmland, reducing productivity of successive crops by 15% (for a minimum of 0%)
 * Legumes fertilize your farmland, increasing productivity of the next crop by 15% (for a maximum of 115%)
 * Protective crops reduce the chance of plague killing off your crops by 15% for the next 48 hours (for a maximum of 115%)

So it's best to crop cycle, with protective crops, then legumes, then harvest crops, and then protective crops again to get the most out of your time and effort.

Legumes include green bean, black bean, chickpea, snow pea, soybean, lentil, and peanut.

Protective crops include blackberry, blueberry, cranberry, strawberry, grape, and mustard.

Farming Crops
All times in the tables are real-time. They pass even when you're not logged in.

In the tables below, if "chance crop fails" is above 100%, this means that you have no chance of harvesting a crop until you have gained a few levels (since leveling causes the chance of failure to decrease by 2% per level).

Table of Food Crops
Produce per tile is the total produce by one plant in one period (24 hours); plants that take longer to grow produce several times the produce. Experience is total experience obtained through one plant. Seeds to plant is the number for one plant. Trade value each is the trade value of a single one of the primary produce.

Table of Dye Crops
Trade value is for a full bottle of dye.

Farming Skill Cape
Once you reach level 100 in farming, you will be able to equip a farming skill cape. You can buy the one you want at the market prices listed below, or you can perform a guild assignment given by the Farming Guild and be rewarded one of these varieties (better ones are rarer rewards of higher tier assignments). You can only perform a guild assignment when at level 99+ in that skill. Be warned, however: guild assignments take a long time, are very difficult, require skill instead of persistence, often give you money instead of any cape at all, and require that you put a great deal of experience points in the skill at risk, which can even make you lose your level 100 skill status.

You cannot make, dye, trim, or enchant a skill cape. Anyone can, however, trade it. The Farming Guild will always be willing to buy back farming skill capes (any variety) at a flat 10,000 gp each. Prices are as follows:

A skill cape gives insignificant defense benefits but is of course desired as a way of showing that you've reached level 100 in that skill. While you are wearing the skill cape, you are 10% less likely to discover that a crop you own has been destroyed by plague and your crops will live 25% longer before they wilt. In addition you will have access to a unique emote that features you setting up a fence part with flowers and grapes rapidly growing to cover it, followed by your plucking them up, smelling the flowers and eating a bunch of grapes.