Thread: About Westfold Farming

Well, Turbine promised us less working time in the fields and all we get is do stacks of five which dont even give us the equivalent ep of 'post processing' 5 x 1 crop?

And if I really wanted to save time during Farming regardless of any ep, they didnt give us the faster option for producing crops for all lower farming levels, so no timesaving whatsoever on lower levels.

And last but not least - the fact that we only get 1 Westfold veggie out of 1 crop during the working stage at the workbenches, not 4 or more like with crops of lower farming levels really pisses me off.

Any idea, HOW MUCH TIME IT TAKES now to produce a decent amount of Westfold wheat and veggies?! >.<

Epic Fail, I would say, and I really wonder why no one pointed this no(n)sense change out during the beta testing phase.

I don't have a farmer who can craft that tier yet, but is it possible that, like other tiers, there are different 'qualities' of the same item?

For example, prospectors make low-grade Skarn ingots initially, but then you can use those low-grade ingots to craft medium-grade, and then medium into high.

Its possible there might be a system like that for Farming but, like I said, I don't have a farmer to confirm that.

Also, the prices for the basis ingredients are ridiculously higher than the ingredients for the old highest level of farming (playing a German Client, sorry I dont know how they are called in English).

For producing 1x crop at the highest farming level so far, it costs 42 copper coins, all 4 ingredients to get a critical success crop field.

Now we pay at least 2,68 silver for a normal Westfold crop (seeds+water) and incredible 12,28 (hearty seeds+water) for a 'hearty' crop field which doesnt yield a satisfactory amount of anything at all.

Feels like D-Mark to Euro conversion all over again...


Comeon, no one but me mad about this new rip-off farming?!!!

I'd be happy if we could just plant and pick in one motion. We could set it for 50 and walk away.

Originally Posted by geexter

For example, prospectors make low-grade Skarn ingots initially, but then you can use those low-grade ingots to craft medium-grade, and then medium into high.

Sorry for the off topic but how do you get to make High grade skarn ingots? do you have to buy a receipt? last night had crafted ingots to complete westfold 1st tier but i still dont see the high grade option anywhere.


Thanks and cheers

Originally Posted by VentoPT

Sorry for the off topic but how do you get to make High grade skarn ingots? do you have to buy a receipt? last night had crafted ingots to complete westfold 1st tier but i still dont see the high grade option anywhere.


Thanks and cheers

Yeah reputitaion with the men of dunland think it is friendly or aquaintance you get the racipe from a rep trader in the new 21st hall (gartrev or something like this)

@ Geexter: With farming, we dont have items of different quality. It's all about how much of one crop you are able to produce/harvest in one farming processs. After harvesting, you post-process the crops at a working bench (like the woodworkers and tailors and goldsmiths do) and normally get 4 end-product veggies or wheat/corn out of 1 crop.

When sowing, you have the option of using a crit booster to harvest more crops (eg. 7-12 instead of 1-6 out of one seed) , like the different sorts of wax which you can use to get a critical woodworker weapon or musical instument etc. This booster item can only be used after you have activated the yellow/golden anvil, like with other professions.
This crit booster can be bought at the farmer npc for a few copper coins - the low price for the farming ingredients made up for the time you spend in the fields. A wood or ore collector needs more time to get his basic items but he at least can go questing or hunting at the same time and collect his stuff on the fly while getting ep and loot money. For a farmer, farming means zero ep and zero income while working in the fields.

For Westfold farming, this crit booster needs to be manually composed out of items, which you get by chance as "critical success items" during harvesting. Like you have a non predictabel chance of finding gems and grindstones in an oremine or wax or flax fibre in branches of wood.
So the amount of available crit boosters is extremely lower than for older farming levels.

To sum it up: Westfold farming is much more expensive and time consuming compared to old-fashioned farming - in contrast to Turbine's promise to introduce a new, simplified and time-saving farming level, I really feel like taken for a ride here... :/

Yeah, the end result of the farming update was to increase the grind rather than reduce it. To level farmer, it took about the same amount of time as before but with about 1/10th (? "guesstimate") the product received.

More realistically, what they did is to balance farming crit item acquisition with other professions that have to farm them from nodes. We've been lucky to be able to purchase crit items for fields in the past and that sped up the output tremendously for our final product.

Now as you said we have two options for converting crops into actual usable ingredients, and neither one gives sufficient output for the amount of time to get there.


In other words, no. They did not succeed if they were trying to simplfy or speed up farming - the outcome is exactly the same or even more grindy because the faster option reduces the amount product received. Either way you end up spending a lot of time in the planting/harvesting phase to get more crops/crit ingredients to process for the faster processing option.


Also, I would like to add that changing the soil over to the crit items is ridiculously slow and as mindnumbingly dull as planting and harvesting fields.

I haven't started on my farmer/cook yet, but I am not really following the issue. Can someone break this down for me? It actually takes longer now to get suitable end products OR it CAN take significantly longer if we buy and not produce the field crit item? I guess I will have to spend some time this weekend looking at it.

Originally Posted by Gillianrial

I haven't started on my farmer/cook yet, but I am not really following the issue. Can someone break this down for me? It actually takes longer now to get suitable end products OR it CAN take significantly longer if we buy and not produce the field crit item? I guess I will have to spend some time this weekend looking at it.

Let me see if I can enlighten you..............

Prior to RoI:

We purchase seeds and other items to make a Field.
We can buy the Crit item to make that Field a Well-Tended Field and increase the yield and possibly get rare items

We take the yield from the Field and process it at a Workbench: 1 Crop = 4 Produce
So we get 4 times the produce from our work at the Workbench.
This means we could Farm 5 Fields and get a Produce yield at the Workbench of 100-120 or so.

Short and sweet.

Rise of Isengard introduces the Westfold Tier.

We can no longer buy the Crit item needed for a Well-tended field.
The Crit item ONLY comes from Crits while harvesting the Fields we sow.
In other words the Crit item for Farming has been nerfed in that it is far less available to us now.

The next change is that in Westfold tier the Field recipes are all multi-output.
You can select to use standard Westfold seeds (which cost less) OR purchase Hearty Westfold seeds (which cost approximately 4 times as much) and get a slightly higher yield from your Field (3-10 instead of 1-5).
Not really a good return on your investment.

At the Workbench there are two more changes.
Change 1: 1 Crop now = 1 Produce
So output at the Workbench has been cut by 3/4

Change 2: You can now choose to process 5 Crops at once but again your Produce yield is only 5 (1 to 1 ratio still)
The thing is you only get the same amount of XP as if you had processed a Single Crop.
You do NOT get the same amount of XP as you would processing each Crop individually so keep that in mind while levelling up your Farming. It seems to me this choice is what was put in place to "save time" but it's not a very good option. A Bulk recipe option such as other Crafting Professions have from the Skirmish vendor would be much better. They should take the option for 5 and increase it to 25 and then we are talking time savings.

Speaking of which.....there are NO Bulk recipes for any Professions of the new crafting Tier at the Skirmish vendor.

CRIT Items: As I mentioned before these cannot be bought. They ONLY come from crits while harvesting fields.
In addition to that time sink there is also the secondary time sink of requiring us to Process these crit items at a Workbench in order to get the actual item called for in our recipes to provide the crit.

Overall the net result is a nerf to farming because we now have to spend more time Sowing and Harvesting Fields to get the same amount of Crops as before. Whereas before RoI we could Sow and Harvest 5 Fields to get 100-120 Produce we now need to Sow and Harvest around 20 or more Fields in order to get that same amount of Produce!

I have several supreme crafters of different professions and dislike the new crafting changes to the point I feel no desire anymore to craft. Several other mmo's have solved the problem of node harvesting by making the nodes instanced or phased so that there are more available for all gamers and people don't have to spend as much time out harvesting. Consolidating all the resources into simplistic nodes to refine is completely ridiculous.

Originally Posted by VentoPT

Sorry for the off topic but how do you get to make High grade skarn ingots? do you have to buy a receipt? last night had crafted ingots to complete westfold 1st tier but i still dont see the high grade option anywhere.

Recipe is available from the Dunlending Quartermaster in Galtrev. You need Friend reputation with the Dunlendings to learn it. On the good side, you buy it for cash (no barter tokens). If you do both Bonevales and Trum Dreng areas, by the time you get to Galtrev, you'll have enough rep with the Dunlendings to use the recipe.

And on topic...the same conditions apply to the "Field of Wildflowers" recipe that grows dye plants. For the equivalent pipeweed recipe, you need rep with the Riders of Theodred.

--W. H. Heydt

Old Used Programmer

Without paying attention to the number of crops output, I still leveled out my farmer very quickly. To gain the most xp, I chose the standard crop and processed individually, just like the previous tiers. Once my farmer was completed, I chose the hearty crops to get more mats quicker.

The crit item is either a drop from Dunland mobs or from farming output, and I had over 40 of the crit items before I even started farming, that I got from mob kills.

Farmer and cook were fully completed on Saturday morning.

Let's face it, in the almost five years I have been playing this game, all I have done is to brag about the quality and how wonderful Turbine has treated us and amazed us with the graphics. Westfold farming has turned over a new high in failure to help the lowly farmer out, what with astronomic seed prices, low yeilds no matter what timing sequence I use and the rip off 5 bundle (help for less field time) and the impossibility to gain enough peat or rich soil for any decent amount of harvest, it is a wonder there are any of us left farming. We also need more superior fields. Seems since Turner joined our group, the main emphsis has been to see how much they can get each player to spend in the store and shortcut to the next level in everything.
Very dissapointed in this latest expansion as far as the farming mode goes and look for some change to help us. Eriadan

So they nerfed farming compared to the old way farming worked. Have they nerfed it compared to other gathering professions?

And how about cooking? If less products are needed for cooks, it would work out fine right?
Less output vs less need?


I have farmed a lot of non-westwold items the last couple of days, and am absolutely amazed by the amount of items I get from a short time farming, and i never bother with the optional crit item.
I averaged 3.6 from each field, times 4 when processing = 14.4 items for each field.
I'd say that's an enormous amount for the few seconds it takes to sow and harvest a field.

Maybe we were blessed with a farming craft that was simply to easy?

Originally Posted by Jarnos

Maybe we were blessed with a farming craft that was simply to easy?

While that is a possibility, it goes against what they mentioned in the Dev Diary just before ROI. This don't make farming faster by a long shot. I think that is where a lot of the confusion is, and as some have stated, there seems to be a lot of place holders in there too. Hopefully this was the bare bones way for Turbine to get crafting out there and it will be worked on very soon if that is the case.

I was working on my farming and cooking last the past 2 night on my Warden, and man, farming doesn't give hardly any materials at Westfold level compared to the other tiers. With about 20 crit farms worth of golden taters is it? for Leek Stock, I had to plant almost 100 farms of leeks. Cooking seems to take more mats and farming seems to give less. Very grindy and very annoying.

They did add the option to process 5 crops at a time instead of just one at a time, but still, that doesn't really make up for it.

I will also agree that planting and harvesting crops needs to be one motion.

Farming and Cooking doesn't need to be the same kind of time sink as other crafts because the result is consumed. Scholars don't have to put as much effort into making their consumables. Its not like grafted gear where you make it and it lasts weeks or even months of play time, maybe longer if you don't raid.

Originally Posted by Jarnos

And how about cooking? If less products are needed for cooks, it would work out fine right?
Less output vs less need?

It seems like the produce needs are roughly the same in total. Thankfully, most (but not all) recipes need one tier 1-6 item (which still operate under the old rules) and one tier 7 item. The tier 7 goods are frustrating to farm since I'm spending much more time and effort than I used to, but overall I'd estimate that we need fewer top-tier goods (on average) than we did in tier 6.

The thing that concerns me is that they might take this new set-up for Tier 7 Westfold Farming (ie the 1 crop = 1 produce) and make it the standard for all Tiers 1-7. That would totally suck. I swear the original Crafting Dev Diary for RoI had a blurb in there something along those lines but I went back and re-read the Diary and could not find it.

All the Westfold crafting is one big joke! Or nightmare?

Originally Posted by Rhavandir

Epic Fail, I would say, and I really wonder why no one pointed this no(n)sense change out during the beta testing phase.

Totally agree, I was appalled when I found that T7 produce yields one per crop item whereas all previous tiers yield 4.

Couple that with a large increase in the time take for each craft action, along with the large numbers of Black Barley that are needed for recipes and it's a huge 'opposite' from the way Turbine were describing T7 crafting before ROI's release.

Originally Posted by Daschande

It seems like the produce needs are roughly the same in total. .

I'm sorry, that's just not true.

Look at the recipes for T6 guild items and their equivalent T7s, you'll see the T7s need a huge number of Black Barley (both as a raw ingredient but also as a requirement to craft an ingredient the recipe needs). Given the significantly increased time it takes to make (due to the '1 not 4' yield change) and this is clearly a deliberate move by Turbine to make cooking into another significant time sink.

I think it would be nice if the character could auto-harvest crops, so I could set it up for fifty, walk away, make myself a sandwich, play Minecraft, whatever, and not be stuck watching my character do the crop planting dance.

Originally Posted by wannabe_falconer

I think it would be nice if the character could auto-harvest crops, so I could set it up for fifty, walk away, make myself a sandwich, play Minecraft, whatever, and not be stuck watching my character do the crop planting dance.

I wish my prospectors and foresters could auto-locate and collect their nodes, too. Makes about as much sense as auto-harvesting crops.

(Farming is--flat out--the *easiest* vocation to rank up. It's the "gimme" vocation of LoTRO crafting. It doesn't need to be any easier than it is now.)

--W. H. Heydt

Old Used Programmer

To eliminate the grindiness, you can get around 250-300-ish ingredients, click make all, and go take a nap.

Originally Posted by whheydt

I wish my prospectors and foresters could auto-locate and collect their nodes, too. Makes about as much sense as auto-harvesting crops.

(Farming is--flat out--the *easiest* vocation to rank up. It's the "gimme" vocation of LoTRO crafting. It doesn't need to be any easier than it is now.)

--W. H. Heydt

Old Used Programmer

It is absurdly easy to level up on. The auto locate thing is bot-like behavior (program a charcter to stay at a node and harvest it whenever it comes back), and MMORPG's stay away from bot-like behaviors for balance (botting is illegal). If you had an auto harvest feature for farming, it would be a labourless gold mine. You set up a few hundred, come back, set up the processing, come back, sell it all, and make an obscene profit. And what do people do with a ton of gold? Sell it to other people for real money of course, despite its being banned by Turbine. As nice as this feature would be, it probably is a smart move for Turbine to avoid auto-harvesting.

Farming is in fact very easy, but I agree, it takes forever. I usually set my character to farm while I fold laundry or something, so I'm nearby and can click when necessary, but so that I can actually use the huge amounts of down-time for something useful.

Originally Posted by whheydt

I wish my prospectors and foresters could auto-locate and collect their nodes, too. Makes about as much sense as auto-harvesting crops.

(Farming is--flat out--the *easiest* vocation to rank up. It's the "gimme" vocation of LoTRO crafting. It doesn't need to be any easier than it is now.)

--W. H. Heydt

Old Used Programmer

I'm amazed you can't see the difference between harvesting nodes in the open world while doing quests or other things, and being pinned in one spot, watching the world's slowest bar go up, then watch a much faster bar go up (go max level crafting tools that only affect gathering time!) and then do it all over again.
Agreed, the total time invested in farming is much lower that what other crafting professions have to spend (unless you go through rarebit muffins at hobbit speed), but the difference is that farming is mind-numbingly boring and slow, while still requiring player input every 10-20 seconds or so.

I also don't understand your fascination with crafting being a slow, boring grind. Do you really want it to be like that, or do you just not want anyone to have an easier time crafting than you?

The fundamental problem is that farming is a gathering profession, stuck in a crafting profession framework. At least in my opinion. If there were reasonable world drops for farming (wow, a whole blueberry from one node), you could cut down on the grind involved. Sadly, this is not so.

Originally Posted by MannyCalavera

I'm amazed you can't see the difference between harvesting nodes in the open world while doing quests or other things, and being pinned in one spot, watching the world's slowest bar go up, then watch a much faster bar go up (go max level crafting tools that only affect gathering time!) and then do it all over again.
Agreed, the total time invested in farming is much lower that what other crafting professions have to spend (unless you go through rarebit muffins at hobbit speed), but the difference is that farming is mind-numbingly boring and slow, while still requiring player input every 10-20 seconds or so.

I also don't understand your fascination with crafting being a slow, boring grind. Do you really want it to be like that, or do you just not want anyone to have an easier time crafting than you?

The fundamental problem is that farming is a gathering profession, stuck in a crafting profession framework. At least in my opinion. If there were reasonable world drops for farming (wow, a whole blueberry from one node), you could cut down on the grind involved. Sadly, this is not so.

You miss my point.

Yes, farming is dull. It is also *safe*. The other gathering professions require you to go out and FIND the resource, with the risk of being attacked and defeated (if it's anywhere near level).

Farming is, as I said before, the "gimme" profession. *Anyone* can do it at any level and achieve Westfold Master...without ever leaving a beginning area and in complete safety. It's the craft for people who don't want risk or any real effort.

The downside is that it takes time and you have to sit there paying attention to it, at least if you want to gather the crops you grow.

If someone wants a risk-free craft, the penalty they'll pay is watching crops grow. Complaining about the time it takes won't generate any sympathy from anyone who does any other gathering activity.

--W. H. Heydt

Old Used Programmer

Can anyone write an update to this? I've just started Westfold farming. I'm using basic seed, and getting yields of an average of 4 fair per field. Each fair is yielding two, rather than the one in the OP, so I'm guessing it's been adjusted.

I noticed the XP given for processing 5 at once is 6, individually is 4. Time saving will be important after getting the gold anvil. Does the 5 at a time yield 10 now? What about processing the peat? Do I want to use hearty seeds? (what exactly do they do?). Anyone use the peat lately and can say whether it's worth processing now?

I can say that using the hearty seeds is definitely the way to go for Westfold. I seem to get more fair crops as well as more rich soil drops. If you've got a few stacks of the soil, feel free to use it to improve the fields even more. If you're planning on farming the flowers or pipeweed at westfold tier, then hold onto some of the rich soil for that. (Wild Flowers and Wild Pipeweed fields will drop seeds/crops and petals that would drop in lower tier flower or pipeweed fields respectively)

Harvesting a critted hearty field (Well-tended Hearty <Crop Name> Field) usually yields an average of 5 crops and a rich soil or pinch of westfold herbs every few fields.

Originally Posted by Sarmea

...What about processing the peat?...

Not only I process all Pile of Rich Soil I get from farming, I also buy it at the AH - if the price is reasonable.
Yes, it takes LOTS of time to process it, but I believe it's worthy. Well-tended fields can give you over 10 crops, each crop 2 bunches of whatever you are farming.