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Rusty’s Retirementis a chillindie farm simthat you play at the bottom of your monitor. It’s so chill, in fact that the game pretty much plays itself until you pop in to check onyour little farm. As such, it’s perfect to play between tasks on your computer.
However, if you want to speed it up a little and increase your involvement, one really good way to do that is to start on the road of fertilizing your crops. If you’re interested in upping the efficiency of your farm and getting yourself some cuddly farm animals in the process, then we have the guide just for you.
How To Start Fertilizing Your Crops
There are a few steps to get the infrastructure for fertilizing your crops going. First and foremost, you have to recruit Slate to your farm. You do this by building Slate’s Barn,which costs 3,000 Biofuel and 10,000 Spare Parts.
Building Slate’s Barn will unlock the Animals tab, represented by a bird. The tab holds all the buildings and units you’ll need to get crop fertilization going:Animal Feeders, Feeder Bots, Waste Bots, Fertilizer Facilities, and Fertilizer Bots.This tab also has resource trackers for animal waste and fossils, which is related to the production and distribution of fertilizer.
What Are The Benefits Of Fertilizing Crops?
While the initial price to add Slate to your farm might seem steep at first, by the time you can afford it, you’ve likely got a good enough infrastructure that you can recoup your losses pretty quickly, and even quicker when you start fertilizing your crops.
Fertilized crops will grow 25 percent faster.This means that you’ll be growing crops and profit that much quicker, and once the infrastructure is built, it’ll quickly pay for itself.
For example, the Carrot takes 200 seconds to finish a growth cycle and produces a Carrot after four growth cycles. While growing on fertilized soil, each cycle takes instead 150 seconds. Over four cycles, you save 200 seconds,so you effectively remove a whole cycle’s-worth of time, not accounting for the time it takes for the crop to be watered.
Fossils And How To Get Animals
Once Slate’s Barn is built, Slate will wander around your farm, looking for fossils which will now spawn randomly. You can’t build or place crops on a fossil node, soyou’ll have to wait until Slate harvests it to free up that tile.
You’ll want to alternate between buying Cattle and Swine. Even though they do the same thing, every time you buy one, the next one gets more expensive. However, this isn’t counted across the species, so the next instance of buying the other animal is unaffected by the increasing prices.
Harvested fossils and Biofuel are what’s used to add animals to your farms. You do this bybuilding an Animal Feeder.Once it’s built,pick an animalfrom the animals tab andassign it to one of the slotsin the Animal Feeder. You can build multiple Animal Feeders, but at increasing cost.
Your animals will wander around your farm but never stray too far from their Animal Feeder.
What Do You Need To Generate Fertilizer?
Once you have animals, there are still a few steps to start generating fertilizer, which we’ll outline here:
How Do You Fertilize Your Crops?
Now that you have the infrastructure you maintain a steady stream of fertilizer, all you need to do is distribute it to your crops. This is done by building theFertilizer Bot.Once built, the Fertilizer Bot will make its way to unfertilized, unoccupied (so no crops on it) soil. Each tile of soil fertilized uses up one unit of fertilizer.
Unlike most bots in this game, there is no need to build the Waste Bot near any sort of storage facility. Simply plant it in the vicinity of as many plantable tiles of soil as possible and watch the magic happen!
When fertilized, soil will look different, being speckled by brown and white dots. They will stay this way for about an hour and will benefit any crops planted on it for that duration. Once thedurationisup, thesoil will revert until it’s once again re-fertilized.
