Dano’s Almanac — A Guide to Farmland Foraging // Part 2: Farming for Lumber 🪵
This is part two of a 10-part series that aims to teach the Chikn community how to become an efficient forager for each of the 10 different resources. You can read part one of the series, foraging for Veg, here. The views within this article are my own and not from the Chikn NFT team. As always, this article does not constitute financial advice and it’s always a good idea to do your own research!
Bok bok! Welcome back to Dano’s Almanac — A Guide to Farmland Foraging! First of all, thank you so, so much to everyone who read my first ever Medium article, the one that started off this series, Part 1: Farming for Veg. Your support means a lot to me! 🙌
Your feedback has been tremendous. Hopefully, I’ll be able to incorporate all of it as this series progresses, bringing you better content with each and every article!
Without any further ado, let’s kick off Part 2: Farming for Lumber! 🪵
Just as we covered the importance of Veg, and how you will be using a TON of it in crafting, a productive crafting machine will be using Lumber by the truckload (pun intended). 😂
Note: For a breakdown of what foraging actually is and all the different resources that can be found, please see Part 1: Farming for Veg. Also, keep in mind that the goal of the Almanac series is to help you get your birds to 100% efficiency.
Let’s start chopping! 🪓
Choosing a Farmland 🚜
Keep an eye out for a Farmland with a lot of natural Lumber tiles. This will help you bring in more Lumber every time you forage. Every Lumber tile on your Farmland is equal to a chance that your bird comes home with Lumber! 🪵
Note: As I explained in Part 1 of the series, foraging is a game of chance. If you have 10 Lumber tiles, you essentially have 10 die rolls to claim Lumber. If your birds are at 100% they will each come home with 10 Lumber. If you forage with four birds, your yield would be 40 Lumber.
Natural Lumber tiles give you a Tile Rarity Bonus — a percentage boost to your ability to collect Lumber. All-in-all, there are eight tiles that will give you a Tile Rarity Bonus for Lumber.
Pictured below are the natural Lumber traits — nice (1% bonus): Woodlands (there are 4 variants of this), and common (0.5% bonus): Orchards and Scattered Trees (both of which have 2 variants).
Note: As mentioned in Part 1, you can reveal more tiles on your Farmland by increasing its Bigness. Once your farm is 120 Bigness, you will have revealed the maximum number of tiles — 24. Add in the barn and you’ve got 25. The native marketplace for Farmland can be found here.
Remember, the goal is to get to 100%. All Lumber tiles have a 45% Base Percentage for forage success rate. If we’ve chosen our Farmland well, we should be able to reasonably add a 3% Tile Rarity Bonus, bringing our starting total to 48%! Let’s keep going!
Resource Fertilization 💩
Fertilization is one of the easiest and most effective ways to boost your output for all resources. Target fertilizing a resource yields a jaw-dropping 10% Fertilized Resource Bonus boost! 🤩
For Lumber, fertilizing is super cheap. It only costs 1,000 $FERT to upgrade! This is highly worth it. This 10% bonus will last 28 days.
I like to fertilize Veg on my Lumber Farmland as well. This has to do with maximizing a certain Farmland sip we’ll be utilizing. More on this later!
Note: If you are short of the required $FERT, I recommend picking some up at TraderJoe. They have by far the most liquidity for all of the tokens within the Chikn ecosystem!
Now that we have fertilized our Farmland for Lumber and accounted for our Tile Rarity Bonus, we are at 58%! Let’s keep building!
Farmland Sips 🌾
Like Veg, there is a god-like Farmland sip that will bring your Lumber production to beast-mode. In fact, it’s the same one! By using the Crop Rotation sip, you can forage every Veg and Lumber tile TWICE! 🤯
Remember, foraging is a game of die rolls. With each Crop Rotation that we add, we get to roll an extra die! If your bird is at 100% efficiency rate, you are now taking home an extra Lumber on every single Lumber tile that you have on your Farmland!
Let’s do some simple math for extreme results. If you add the maximum five Crop Rotations, you’ll be getting six rolls on every Lumber tile. If you have let’s say five natural Lumber tiles and 15 blank tiles equipped with Lumber Farmland equips, and forage with a fully stacked 24 birds that are each at 100% efficiency, you could bring home a hypothetical 2,880 Lumber per forage. 🤯
If your Farmland is fully dug out and deployed with $WORM, you could theoretically reduce your foraging time to four hours. Time it out right, forage with that squad six times in 24 hours and you’ve just hauled in 17,280* Lumber. In a single day. 🤯🤯🤯
*Results not typical! Breaking 100 Lumber in a single forage is a great haul!
Note: To unlock a sip slot, you will need a minimum Bigness and to burn a one-time fee in $EGG. 1st sip slot — 0 Bigness — 24 $EGG; 2nd sip slot — 60 Bigness — 200 $EGG; 3rd sip slot — 120 Bigness — 500 $EGG; 4th sip slot — 180 Bigness — 1,000 $EGG; 5th sip slot — 240 Bigness — 2,000 $EGG.
You will need to have foraged a bit before you can craft sips, as they do require resources. All farmers already have the sips in their native set. No need to dig them up in the WormFarm or buy them from the marketplace!
However, in order to craft a sip, you do need to activate your WormBench. Activating your WormBench happens automatically when you have completely dug out the first row (five tiles) of your WormFarm. Then you can put those wriggly little buggers to work!
Although there are several different sips that you can use to increase your Lumber yield, I have found that Crop Rotation is far superior to all the others. Although it doesn’t give you a percentage boost, it effectively doubles your yield. Pictured below are the six different sips that can be used for Lumber.
Once you’ve got your sip crafted, simply hit ‘Add Sips’ on your Farmland and then find the one you want to add in your inventory!
Blank Tiles 🟩
As we mentioned in the Veg article, you need blank tiles in order to really increase your percentage for success.
Blank tiles allow you to add Farmland equips, further boosting your resource haul! Equip as many blank tiles as you can!
Note: If a blank tile is not equipped when foraging, the birds will simply be throwing dice at nothing. They’ll collect absolutely nothing from the tile, no matter what the percentages are.
There are four different styles of blank tiles, and with a few variants of each, there is a total of nine different blank tiles you could see on your Farmland. As the name states, they are blank and have no natural resource associated with them — therefore no percentage bonus for anything.
If you flip one of these, lucky you!
Farmland Equips 🏠
Alright! Now let’s get back to increasing our percentages and equip those blank tiles! Farmland equips are an absolute must to boost your farm — and eventually your birds — to get to a 100% success rate.
There are three Farmland Lumber-related equipable Items:
• Log Cabin — Common (gets you a Lumber tile)
• Sawmill — Rare (Lumber tile with a 2% bonus)
• Tree Spirit — Legendary (Lumber tile with a 4% bonus)
Now remember when we mentioned the value that blank tiles bring to your farm? Let’s start to get those bad boy’s equipped!
With the 45% Base Percentage, 3% Tile Rarity bonus (over perhaps four Lumber tiles), and the 10% Resource Fertilization bonus, we are already at 58%.
Let’s assume your particular Farmland has eight blank tiles. Let’s add three Log Cabin’s so that you can collect more Lumber, and then let’s add five Sawmill’s to get that sweet, sweet 2% bonus per. With these additions you now have an added a 10% bonus to your Farmland for Lumber — bringing your aggregate total to 68% — and are foraging Lumber on 12 tiles! Doing good fren! 🥳
In order to craft Farmland equipable Items, you will need to own the Blueprint. Blueprints can be found by digging in your WormFarm and then deploying $WORM to claim. If you don’t have the Blueprint yet, check out the Blueprint market here. 🛒
However, much cheaper than buying the Blueprint, and sometimes even cheaper than crafting, you can buy the Items you need directly from the Item marketplace (found here)! 🛍️
Note: Farmland equipable Items last 1,000 forages. Meaning, if you send out 10 birds a day, you will have to replace it after 100 days. Also, Items still have value as they get worn down. They can be decomposed for 5–75% of the resources it costs to craft them. Visit the crafting appendix of the Chikn docs to learn more.
The Birds 🐔
Now that we have mastered our Farmland, let’s get our Roostr onboard!
Just 32% more to go before we get to 100% on Lumber!
Note: In Part 1 of this series, I broke down the reasons as to why Roostr are the clear choice for foraging. In a nutshell, they are much cheaper! But remember, they must be 24 kg to leave the coop, so get some eggies in their chookie bellies!
Bird Traits 🐓
Check over your Roostr to see if any of them have a natural Lumber bonus. Some could have 2–3% just by having a few of Lumber-related traits!
Note: I recommend making a spreadsheet to index all of your birds. This way, you can sort by column (Tungsten, Avaxium, etc.) to quickly find your best birds for each resource. I’ve added a new tab to the bottom of our master spreadsheet, which you can use as your index. It includes an example from one of my birds.
Using a birds natural trait boost is essential for smaller farmers that are just starting out. If you can’t craft much yet, using these natural bonuses will help you get on your way!
To explore birds, go to the new (oh yeah! 😎) Roostr marketplace and play with the filters. With some tinkering around, you can find birds that have a great Lumber bonus.
Some good head traits to look for are Box Head (2.5%), Green Party Hat (2.5), Panic Buy (2.5%), and of course any other trait that includes a Lumber boost.
Adding to our already achieved 68%, and assuming we’ve found a bird in our flock with a 1% Lumber bonus, we’re now at 69%! Giggity, giggity.
Bird Sips 🧃
Although bird sips are a great way to boost your percentage, none currently exist for Lumber.
However, this could change! The devs have previously said that they will be keeping a watchful eye on sip usage. They could introduce new sips, nerf old ones, or even get rid of some altogether.
Note: Like Farmland sips, you don’t need a Blueprint to craft bird sips either.
Keep an eye on announcements, especially when Season 2 Blueprints are released. This would seem like a good time to introduce new bird sips!
Blank Traits 👤
Choose your birds wisely, as empty slots are one of the most important factors in the foraging game. Figure out exactly how many equips you’ll need to get to your bird to 100%.
Choose a bird with too few slots and you won’t be able to make it. Choose a bird with too many, and you’ll be wasting those slots on a bird foraging for Lumber, while you could have used those slots on harder to get resources — like Avaxium or Tungsten.
Birds will always have between six (the coveted two-trait) and one (the coveted Unique) equip slots open.
For me, when foraging for Lumber, I like to choose birds that have three empty slots available. Lumber bird equips are some of the most powerful in the game. Anything over three would bring my birds past 100%. Remember, anything over 100% doesn’t matter. Just try and get as close to that number as you can in order to be as efficient as possible!
Note: Edit to my first Medium article — Not only do Unique birds have a 5% bonus for literally every resource, they also get an extra die roll for every tile, meaning that they are collecting twice as much of every resource compared to their counterparts. Boom. 🤯
Bird Equips 🪓
These are the real game-changers! Adding bird equips is perhaps the biggest edge you can gain in foraging. Lumber bird equips are uber-doober powerful.
Each Lumber equip adds an astonishing 10% to your success rate! Adding just three of these champs gives you a 30% bonus!
All bird equip Blueprints are rare, meaning that they are found in rows 3–9 (aka tiles 11–45) in your WormFarm. They are as follows:
• Lumber Hat — Head
• Lumber Plaque — Neck
• Lumberjacket — Torso
• Lumberdacks — Tail
• Lumberjaxe — Feet
Note: Each equipable Item has 200 uses. You can send your bird out foraging 200 times using just one equipable. Once it runs out, it can be decomposed for resources.
Here, I’ll introduce another strategy that I have seen used by some in the community:
Have the Blueprint, but don’t have enough resources to craft it yet? By buying and scrapping Items, especially Farmland equip Items, you can get up to 75% of the resources used to craft that Item back! This can be 100’s, or in the case of Tungsten Farmland equips, 1,000’s of resources! Sweet Lord have mercy!
Craft bird equips if you have the Blueprint or go and get them off the marketplace 🛍️ if you don’t. Just make sure that you are not foraging without them. They are that important!
Note: Community member Search, aka avaxchikn on Twitter/X, has put together an excellent resource, called Item Investment Advisor, to help find good deals on crafted Items. I highly recommend checking it out!
Bird equips are what’ll get your bird near 100% success rate on Lumber. We were already getting pretty worked up at 69%. Equip three Lumber equips to your bird and suddenly you’re at 99%! Boom!
Getting Over the Hump ⛰️
If you’ve read Part 1 of this series you already know what I’m going to say here… Time to add to your Farmlands LP Farm Fertility for a bonus!
Burning a little $FERT will not only increase your Farmland LP multiplier for farming $WORM, but it will also give you a percentage boost for foraging! At 6x Farmland fertility, you’ll get a 1% foraging bonus!
And with that 1%, we’ve reached 100%. Congratulations! You have truly mastered your Wood! 🥳 🥳 🥳
Note: Feel free to use this spreadsheet to calculate what sips and equips you need for Lumber. The spreadsheet also includes an index to list your birds, and an optimizer for Veg. As this series continues, I’ll continue to add the other resources!
Continuing with the tradition I established in my first Medium article, I’d like to wrap up by giving a few shoutouts to some peeps in the Chikn community!
Firstly, to piweb! Your enthusiasm for what I am working on with these Medium articles and accompanying spreadsheets gives me a tremendous amount of energy and excitement to write the next one! It’s awesome to see a big dog from the MadSkullz community get deeply involved in foraging. Thanks for your support, brother. 🙌
Secondly, to Teithead! You’ve been super helpful in sharing your knowledge with new foragers and helping them learn the lay of the land. To see a fellow forager like yourself get so hyped up about my Medium articles is an inspiration. Thank you too ser. 🫡
And finally, the Chikn NFT team. If I was to truly share how much I love what you guys have built, it would get real creepy, real fast. Sherbok, KFC, Gravy, Cluck, Hen Solo, BBQ — your support, comments on Twitter/X, dialogue on Discord, and general interaction with me and with the community at large always keeps us engaged and excited for the future of Chikn. You rock! ❤️
Speaking of rock, that’s it for Lumber! 🪵
In the next edition of Dano’s Almanac — A Guide to Farmland Foraging, we will be covering our next resource.
This one may be pretty hard to guess. 🤔
#bokbok fam.
Dano out! ❤️ 🐓
