Dano’s Almanac — A Guide to Farmland Foraging // Part 1: Farming for Veg 🥦
This is part one 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. It was originally published as a thread on Twitter/X. 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 is always a good idea to do your own research!
Hello Chikn world! Let me start off my first ever Medium article with a bok to the bokity bok!!! It is great to be here with you all and I am very happy that you have chosen to join me in this space as we go down the Chikn wormhole together!
It is my great honor to present to you: Dano’s Almanac — A Guide to Farmland Foraging. To set the stage, allow me to give you a brief introduction of what foraging actually is.
Foraging is the act of sending your chikn or Rooster off-chain to gather resources from your Farmland. These resources can be used to craft all kinds of Items for your Farmland and/or birds that, for now, will allow you to become a more efficient forager. In the future, it is widely speculated that we will be able to craft CoqFight Items with our resources, or perhaps even other NFTs.
Players that are able to efficiently collect resources — and craft Items — will have an advantage in the game.
There are currently 10 resources to collect, with some being quite common and others being quite rare. Pictured below, we have Mech, Avaxium, Lumber, Mana, Tungsten, Liquidium, Stone, Dark Matter, Gold, and Veg.
It is also speculated that more resources will enter the game at some point in the future — *cough, cough* Bonium anyone? This would make sense if/when we can forage with MadSkullz, a premier partner project of Chikn.
The goal of this almanac is to help you get as close to 100% success rate as possible, while foraging for specifically targeted resources. The game of foraging is like rolling a die. If your bird is at let’s say 86%, it may very likely collect the resource, but it also may not. If you are at 100%, you are guaranteed to come home with that resource.
Please keep in mind that there is a generalist strategy too, but I’ll save that for a later article!
Now that the stage is set, let’s dig in and learn how to forage for Veg!
Often overlooked, Veg is actually one of the most important resources within the Chikn ecosystem! Once you start crafting Items, you’ll quickly realize how much of it you use!
Choosing a Farmland 🚜
All Farmland are not created equal. Some have many Veg tiles, while some have very few. You’ll want to choose a Farmland that has a lot of natural Veg tiles, as this will help you bring in more Veg every time you forage.
Every Veg tile on your Farmland is equal to a chance that your bird comes home with Veg! 🥦
If you have 10 Veg tiles, you essentially have 10 die rolls to claim Veg. If your birds are at 100% they will each come home with 10 Veg. If you forage with four birds, your yield would be 40 Veg.
Natural Veg tiles give you a Tile Rarity Bonus — a % boost to your your ability to collect Veg! A Fenced Bitcorn Patch, for example, is an extra 1.5%! All-in-all, there are eight tiles that will give you a Tile Rarity Bonus for Veg.
Pictured below we have the rares (1.5% bonus)— Fenced Bitcorn Patch, Fenced Cabbage Patch, Fenced Feed Patch; the nice (1% bonus)— Bitcorn (there are 4 variants of this), Bitcorn Patch, Cabbage Patch, Feed Patch; and the common (0.5% bonus) — Tasty Feed (there are 4 variants of this as well).
You can reveal more tiles by increasing the Bigness of your Farmland — a process that requires burning $EGG (you will start to notice we do this a lot!). Once your Farmland is 120 Bigness, you will have revealed the maximum number of tiles — 24. Add in the barn and you’ve got a beautiful 5x5 plot with 25 tiles.
All Farmland tiles for all of the different resources can be viewed here.
The native marketplace for Farmland can be found here.
All Veg tiles have a native 45% Base Percent. From here, we will start building up towards 100%.
Resource Fertilization 💩
Fertilization is one of the easiest and most effective ways to boost your output for any resource — Veg included. Target fertilizing a resource yields a whopping 10% Fertilized Resource Bonus boost! This is YUGE. 🤩
For Veg, fertilizing is super cheap, only costing 1,000 $FERT. This is highly worth it. This 10% bonus will last 28 days.
Note: Make sure that you check your fertilization often so that you don’t accidentally forage for like a whole week without it. Yes, I have done that. 🤦♂️
At this point you should be in your foraging section under the the Farmland tab of your Chikn farm. It can be found here.
We know that your Roostr squirt $FERT — as long as you feed them an $EGG a day. But you’ll likely be spending a lot of that $FERT on foraging. When I fertilized my resources for the first time, I had to buy some $FERT off the secondary market. I always use TraderJoe, as they have by far the most liquidity for all of the tokens within the Chikn ecosystem.
Now that we have fertilized our Farmland for Veg, we are at at least 55%! Keep in mind that if you chose your Farmland well, you will have gotten a really solid Tile Rarity Bonus. For me, my best farm is a whopping 8% bonus for Veg!
Farmland Sips 🌾
This is where you can enter god-mode. Properly utilizing Farmland sips will take your farm to a whole new level! By using the Crop Rotation sip, you can forage every Veg and Lumber tile TWICE! 🤯
Remember, foraging is a game of dice rolls. Well, now you get to roll two dice! If your first roll comes back with Veg (it will if you have your bird at 100%), you still get a second die to roll! Now that bird is taking home two Veg on every single Veg tile that you have on your Farmland!
To unlock a sip slot, you will have to burn a one-time fee of 24 $EGG. The bigger your Farmland gets, the more sip slots you can unlock. At 60 Bigness, you can unlock a second sip slot for 200 $EGG, and at 120 Bigness, you can unlock a third for 500 $EGG.
Each time you equip a Crop Rotation, you get an extra roll — i.e. three Crop Rotations will give you four rolls on each Veg and Lumber tile.
You can stack these to get even more foraging power! At 180 Bigness, you can unlock a fourth slot for 1,000 $EGG, and if you dare get your Farmland to 240 Bigness, you can unlock a fifth slot for 2,000 $EGG. Yes, that would be an insane six rolls.
You can craft the Crop Rotation Farmland sip by entering the game at chikn.farm, going to the Farmland tab at the top of the page, pressing Forage, selecting Craft from the left-side menu, making sure you are in the Wormbench tab, and then the sub-section Farmland tab, and in there, the sips tab, and then scroll down to the bottom and BOOM, select Crop Rotation. It is so good it seems the devs tried to hide it!
Note: You will need to have foraged a bit before you can craft this Farmland sip, as it does require resources. Also, all farmers have the Crop Rotation “Blueprint” in their native set. No need to dig this up in the WormFarm or buy it in the marketplace.
Once you’ve got it crafted, you can simply hit ‘Add Sips’ on your Farmland and find the Crop Rotation in your inventory.
Note: Using the Crop Rotation does increase your foraging time by one hour, but it is TOTALLY worth it. Also, Crop Rotation can be used for 48 forages. Meaning, if you send out four birds, once a day, you will have to replace it after 12 days. It has no value once it is all used up. Make sure you check it often to make sure you are not foraging with an all used up Crop Rotation.
Crop Rotation will not increase your percentage, but it will totally increase your yield, and in the end, that is what we want right? A lot of resources to craft a lot of cool stuff!
Note: There are other Veg Farmland sips, but I just can’t see why you would use them instead of the OP Crop Rotation. I won’t get into what they each do specifically, but I wouldn’t be surprised if these other ones are discontinued for Season 2.
Blank Tiles 🟩
Alright! Let’s get back to playing the percentages game! It’s a bit counterintuitive, but blank tiles — in most cases — are your best friend!
Some peeps (short form of “Chikn people”) would even say they are better than natural trait tiles! 😱
This is because they allow you to add Farmland equips to target a specific resource even more. I recommend equipping as many blank tiles with Farmland equips as you can! Not only can you add Veg-related Farmland equips to get more Veg, but really you could add any Farmland equip that you want!
Note: If a blank tile is not equipped when birds forage, the birds will simply be throwing a die at nothing, and they’ll collect absolutely no resources from the tile, no matter what percentages the birds have.
Farmland Equips 🪴
Farmland equips are absolutely essential to boost your farm, and eventually your birds, to get to a 100% success rate.
There are three Farmland equipable Items that are related to Veg. They are:
• Shrubbery — Common (gets you a Veg tile)
• Mystical Cornucopia — Rare (Veg tile with a 2% bonus)
• Vegetal Hydroponics — Legendary (Veg tile with a 4% bonus)
Now remember when we mentioned the value that blank tiles bring to your farm? This is where these tiles really come into play!
Let’s suppose for a second that you have five native Veg tiles on your Farmland for a 5% Tile Rarity Bonus. This would put you at 60% for Veg on your Farmland — 45% Base, 10% Resource Fertilization, and 5% for Tile Rarity Bonus.
By crafting and equipping five Mystical Cornucopia to your blank tiles, you could add an aggregate 10% bonus to your Farmland for Veg! Congrats fren, you are now at 70%! 🥳
In order to craft Farmland equipable Items, you will need to own the Blueprint. Blueprints can be found by digging in your WormFarm (which, you guessed it, burns $EGG) and then deploying $WORM to claim. If you don’t have the Blueprint, check out the Blueprint market here. 🛍️
However, much cheaper than buying the actual Blueprint, and sometimes even cheaper than crafting, you can usually buy the Items directly off the Item marketplace (found here). 🛍️
Legendary Chikn community member Gribbly, aka gribbly_fire on Twitter/X, has put together an outstanding resource that let’s you get notified every time a Blueprint or Item gets listed on the Chikn marketplace! Make sure to follow his Discord channel, EGGZ, and keep notifications turned on for sniping opportunities!
Also, Renowned Chikn community member Search, aka avaxchikn on Twitter/X, has put together an excellent resource called Item Investment Advisor to help peeps find good deals on crafted Items. It will literally tell you the cost to craft the Item in terms of resources and tokens used, and if you should craft it yourself or buy it off the marketplace. I use it almost everyday!
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. Items have value as they get worn down as well, as they can be scrapped for 5–75% of the resources it cost to craft them. Visit the crafting appendix of the Chikn docs to learn more about how much it cost to craft Items, and how many resources you can get back from decomposing them.
The Birds 🐔
Whew! Now that we have mastered our Farmland, let’s talk about birds!
Just 30% more to go before we get to our ever elusive 100% success rate!
For the cost-efficient farmer, foraging with Roostr is the best strategy. Roostr cost between 60–120 $FERT, depending on how many you deploy, to forage. The exact numbers can be found in the appendix here under the Foraging Rules tab.
chikn, on the other hand, cost 6 $EGG per forage. At today’s conversion rate, that is equal to about 200 $FERT. That is 2–3 times more expensive than Roostr! For the long-term, efficient foraging game, it’s best to save those $EGG for crafting, digging, LPing, and many other things in the Chikn ecosystem.
Note: Roostr must be at least 24 kg to forage. Also, for every kg that Roostr/chikn weigh, they forage one minute faster. Therefore, a 60 kg bird can cut 60 minutes off their foraging time. Foraging time is a variable of kg and the WormFarm. The more $WORM you deploy, the faster your birds can forage. Minimum foraging time is hard capped at four hours. Check the Foraging Time tab in the crafting appendix for more information.
Bird Traits 🐓
Check over your squad to see if any of your birds have a natural Veg bonus.
I recommend making a spreadsheet for this, listing all of your birds and their percentages for each resource. It is time consuming to manually index all of your birds, but it will be worth it later on when you want to create your most efficient foraging flocks, and will allow you to adapt quickly on the fly.
Using a birds natural trait boost is essential for smaller farmers that are just starting out and can’t really craft much else to boost their percentages yet. This is how I started playing the game!
Some birds could get up to a 2–3% bonus just by having a lot of Veg-related traits! If you want to explore birds, go to the Roostr marketplace and play with the filters. With some tinkering around, you can find birds that have a great Veg-related natural bonus.
Some good traits to look for are Quarter Pounder head trait (2.5%), Feed Bag head trait (2%), and of course any traits that include a Veg boost!
Note: Although traits can help, I mostly ignore them now for the easier to get, more common resources. The bird equips, which we will talk more about later, are a far more powerful way to boost your bird!
Bird Sips 🧃
All birds start out with zero “sip slots” unlocked. However, by burning just 12 $EGG, you can unlock your first sip slot! 🔥
Here you can equip the Corn Meal sip for a 5% Veg bonus! Similar to Crop Rotation, this sip is already in your existing set. No need to dig for it or buy it in the marketplace. You simply need to craft it to use it!
Note: There are other bird sips for Veg too, but I honestly think Corn Meal is the best. It does increase foraging time by one hour, but that is not such a burden. Veggie Scraps, the alternative choice, increases Veg by 3%, but decreases Lumber by 3%. 😬
Bird sips can’t be used as much as Farmland sips — 24 uses vs. 48 uses — but they are used in a very different way. Farmland sips are used by every bird that is foraging so they go very quickly. However, bird sips are used only by that bird. This means that if you are foraging once a day with four birds, you will have to replace your Farmland sip after 12 days, but your bird sip will last 24 days.
Note: Check these often to make sure that you are not foraging with a worn out sip. Nothing is worse than finding out you’ve been foraging away, but getting absolutely no benefit from that sip! Yes, I’ve done this a few times before too. 🤦♂️
60 kg birds can unlock a second slot, but it’ll cost you a whopping 600 $EGG. 120 kg birds can unlock a third slot for 1,200 $EGG. This actually does make sense for some of the harder to get resources — like Mana. However, it’s not necessary to go this big for Veg.
Attaching bird sips can be a bit of a grind with the current UI. Go to the Farmland you want to forage, click ‘add a chikn/Roostr to forage,’ select a bird — or flock — that you want to forage with, press ‘Manage Sips’ and find the Corn Meal sip in your inventory. If you are foraging with a lot of birds, you’ll have to wait 3–5 seconds before you can scroll down or else it will automatically reset to the top.
With 70% on your Farmland, a few natural Veg traits on your birds (lets say 3%), and the use of one Corn Meal bird sip, you have just got to 78%! We are well on our way fren!
Blank Traits 🫥
Birds will always have between one (the coveted Unique’s) and six (the coveted two-traits) equip slots open.
Choose your birds wisely, as empty slots is one of the most important decisions of 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 there. Choose a bird with too many, and you’ll be wasting those slots on a bird foraging for Veg, while you could have used those slots on harder to get resources — like Dark Matter or Tungsten.
For me, I chose birds that only have two empty slots available. The reason is simple. Veg bird equips are extremely powerful and anything over two Veg bird equips would bring me past 100% on my birds. Anything over that doesn’t matter. Just try and get as close to that number as you can to be as efficient as possible.
Note: For the record, Unique birds have a 5% bonus for literally every resource. They are ballers! Lord knows what they will be capable of in CoqFight, ChiknQuest, and breeding! 👀
Bird Equips 👒
This is where the real game-changer is! Adding bird equips is one of the biggest edges you can gain in the foraging game. And boy-oh-boy are Veg bird equips powerful.
Each Veg equip adds an astounding 10% to your success rate! You could literally add up to 60% just from bird equips alone! Of course, you wouldn’t do that because you don’t need to go over 100%!
All bird equip Blueprints are rare, meaning that they are found in rows 3–9 (tiles 11–45) in your WormFarm. They are as follows:
• Head — Farmer’s Straw Hat
• Neck — Farmer’s Bandana
• Torso — Farmer’s Dungarees
• Tail — Farmer’s Snip Snips
• Feet — Farmer’s Gumboots
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!
Note: Once again, don’t forget about the amazing tools built by community members Gribbly and Search! They are free to use at their basic levels, which is actually already a crazy amount of value! Memberships can be “upgraded” by holding their NFTs, but it really is not necessary until you are well-established as a diehard Chikn forager.
Bird equips last a long time. You can basically equip them and forget about them. Come back in six months and they will still be good! Each equipable Item has 200 uses. You can send your bird out foraging 200 times using just one equipable. 🤯
Like Farmland equipables, they also have value as a decomposable. If you decide you don’t need it anymore, you can decompose the Item and get up to 75% of the resources back!
These bird equips are what’ll get your bird to 100% success rate on Veg! We were sitting pretty on 78%. Equip two of these bad boy’s and now you are at 98%! Amazing!
Getting Over the Hump ⛰️
So you’ve got this far. Your bird is close, but not to 100% yet. You could add another Mystical Cornucopia Farmland equip, that would surely do the trick. Or if your bird is over 60 kg, you could unlock another sip slot and slam back some more of auntie’s delicious Corn Meal. Surely it would be easy enough to add another bird equip, those things are a godly 10% after all!
But, there is a reason I left our bird short here. It has to do with your Farmland’s LP Farm Fertility Bonus! Any time I am really close on a resource, within 1% or so, I just like to burn a little bit of $FERT To get that Farmland multiplier up, which gives me an increased LP Farm Fertility Bonus.
Your probably already have an LP Farm Fertility Bonus if you’ve been LPing. In fact, did you know that that bonus applies to all resources on that particular Farmland! Pretty cool, huh?
With a modest 2% here, we’ve reached 100%. And that folks, is how it’s done! 🥳 🥳 🥳
Note: I’ve created a spreadsheet that will help you fill in your percentages. It is a real example from one of my farms! The spreadsheet just has Veg for now, but I plan to expand it to contain all resources in the near future. It’s view-only, so make a copy for yourself. I recommend viewing it at 75% zoom, as there is a lot of data here!
As I finish up my very first Medium article, I’d like to give a huge shout out to those in the Chikn community that have come before me.
Firstly, to chikn.farm, the OG’s. Without you, none of this would be possible! Thank you for creating such a thought provoking project that we can all geek out on. I can’t wait to see you guys again in Barcelona!
Then, to Grenville Riley. Grenville has a fabulous series called Ramblings of a Humble Chikn Farmer. He reached out to me on Twitter/X after my latest thread with the idea that my Almanac series would make for great Medium content! Grenville, I hope this Medium validates your thesis!
Next, to The Thoughtful Chikn Farmer, who has started his own Medium series complete with an accompanying Podcast. I’ve enjoyed reading your work and listening to your podcast! You rock!
I’d be remissed if I didn’t mention Gribbly, who has started a must read series titled Ramblings of a Security Conscious Chikn Farmer, on all things cybersecurity in the Web3/crypto space. His work is amazing and will surely save a few of our community members from malicious actors.
And finally to OneThird Nerd, who has served as an inspiration to me and my ambitions to contribute to the Chikn community. We had a great phone call the other night, and it just reminded me how much I love Chikn and how great we, as a community, are doing in this space. We rock!
And mad respect to all of you who write your own Medium articles! Writing this has been way more fun than I thought it would be, but it certainly does take a “little bit” of time! 😁
That’s it for Veg! 🥦
In the next edition of Dano’s Almanac — A Guide to Farmland Foraging, we will be covering our next resource!
Any guesses what it is? 🤔
HINT: If you are using the Crop Rotation Farmland sip, you should definitely be fertilizing this too!
#bokbok everyone.
Dano out! ❤️ 🐓
