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. 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.

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.

Planting and Harvesting
Before you may plant anything on a tile, you must first make it more arable by tilling it with a plow, which takes time. You must do this prior to planting, every time.

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.

Each crop takes 15 seconds to plow and plant per tile; a crop that spans 2x2 takes 60 seconds to plow the land and plant it. 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.

Once planted, the crops do not need to be taken care of. You don't need to water them, or weed them. They 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.

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.

Harvesting is simple. The equipment for harvesting is quite limited, and the time taken per crop is negligible. All the plants die after you harvest them, clearing the area so that you may grow a new batch of produce. You can harvest crops even if your inventory is full, but you won't be able to take it with you in that case.

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.