A trick to fully exploiting raspberry bushes / agave (and trees)

[stigma]

I recently discovered something in the growing mechanics that I find interesting and potentially quite useful:

Pawns that are set to growing will automatically harvest fully grown plants inside a growing zone (assuming they can be harvested, in other words not bushes, grass ect.)

"Well, duh!" I hear you say, that's how growing crops works.
Yes, but the thing is - it doesn't HAVE to be domesticated crops!

If for example you have a handful of nearby berry-bushes near to your base, those yield like 30 berries compared to 5-6 units of potatoes, rice ect - and they grow fast. If you set a growing zone on that tile ( !! and set it to disallow growing !!) then your growers will automatically harvest that bush whenever it is fully grown. That's about 5 (or even more, considering the fast maturity time) tiles worth high quality food (joy bonus + can happily be eaten raw), but concentrated down on a single tile.

I think that in the long run in an optimized base this will eventually become less useful as there is a little more running around involved compared to concentrated farming fields - but it seems like it is a very useful trick in the early-mid game. After all, almost everyone does the "harvest nearby bushes" tactic to survive the initial few days. Now you can automate and optimize this operation (only harvest fully grown bushes) using the method described above.

EDIT: I've confirmed that it does indeed also work for trees (although some slow-growing treees seem to wait a little past 100% before triggering - I assume that's just a matter of rounding the number in the UI meaning that it's not really 100% done yet).

Trees aren't renewable without plating of course, but it's still a nice thing to know about if you want to optimize the use of nearby trees so you get the maximum yield out of them. On tundras and ice-sheets were wood is scarce this is probably quite useful. Instead of manually selecting each tree to find fully grown ones to cut you can just select a whole area of trees, disallow planting, and automate the process.

I found this kind of interesting at least, I welcome thoughts and feedback
(maybe this has been a well known technique for the old-timers here, if so then excuse me for being so excited hehe)
-Stigma

[SpaceDorf]

I think its absolutely good to know
And even when the oldtimers allready know this its always nice to find those tips for newbs

[Havan_IronOak]

Great tip. I never thought to try this.

[Naeem]

Thank you for the tip! I never knew that.

[FalconBR]

Thanks for the tip!

[Dante King]

Playing since A8 and I'm just learning about this, thanks!

[b0rsuk]

I think this should be more obviously communicated and possible to do with harvest zones. It's not an exploit, but clever use of interface.

[Draconicrose]

I feel stupid for not realizing this. Thank you very much.

[SpaceDorf]

This trick also helps with Trees.

They still get cut down so you have to set replant, but it then is tasked by the grower work, not plantcut

this is where it might get exploity .. you can make pawns cut trees who cant do plantcutting ..