LostVale guide

Farming, bees and livestock

Tilling, soil and its nutrients, sowing seasons, weeds, pests, frost and rotation, pollination, beekeeping from skep to top-bar hive, and keeping beasts for wool, milk, eggs and manure.

Tilling and the soil

A hoe turns a metre of ground into a plot (a plough and a team turn whole strips: see Horses, hounds and carts). The plot’s soil keeps five things, each starting from what the ground was (loam, clay, peat, sand, machair and so on):

• Moisture
• Nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium
• Organic matter

Each crop wants its own share of water and of each nutrient, and draws them down as it grows.

Sowing and growing

• Seeds go in only in their sowing seasons (the table below gives them).
• Crops grow through their stages by the day: faster with water, nutrients, warmth and the Artisan’s crop growth speed; slower under weeds and pests; halted out of season.
• Frost kills a crop unless it is hardy.
• Rain waters the fields; dry spells parch them. Between rains, water by hand with a watering can or a bucket.
• The days in the table are days to ripen at best, at the world’s season length of 24 days; growing times follow the season length you chose.

Tending

• Feeding the soil: compost, manure, bone meal and kelp fertiliser.
• Weeding by hand.
• Rotation: the same family twice running in a plot breeds pests; legumes (peas, broad beans and white clover) feed the soil with nitrogen for what comes after.
• Companions: alliums (onions, leeks, garlic) keep pests off their neighbours.

Harvest

Harvest by hand, or with a sickle, which reaps every ripe plot round the stroke. Yields follow the plant’s health and the Artisan’s harvest yield, and some seed is saved back. Strawberries, hops, apple trees, meadow grass, white clover and lemon balm are perennial and bear again after a harvest.

Pollination

Crops that set fruit or seed from their flowers (pumpkins, apples, strawberries, beans) bear by how well insects worked them while they were in flower: the kept and wild colonies near by, and the wild bees and hoverflies of the country. A hive near the orchard pays twice.

Beekeeping

There are three hives: a straw skep, a log hive and a top-bar hive.

A colony is so many bees, a queen (or none, while a new one is raised), comb drawn in its hive, honey and bee bread stored in that comb, and a temper.

• Foraging. Through the day its foragers fly when the air is warm and dry and the sun is up, and bring in nectar from the flowers about. What they bring is honey, less what the colony eats: more in winter, when the cluster burns its stores to keep warm, and more while there is brood.
• Swarming. In spring the colony builds up. Crowded in a full hive at the turn of spring and summer, it swarms: the old queen leaves with half the bees, they hang in a cluster on a branch near by for a while, then fly off to a new home, an empty hive baited with lure if one is near. Catch a swarm in an empty skep and set it down where you want it.
• Starving. Left with too little honey for the winter, a colony starves. Take only what it can spare.
• Taking honey. A skep’s comb comes out with bees crushed in it; a top-bar hive’s combs lift out from the brood untouched. The bees sting: less when the hive is smoked first, and hardly at all through a veil.
• Wild nests in the hollows of old trees can be robbed.

Honey and crude wax come from the honey press. Wax makes beeswax candles; honey makes mead, salves and sweet dishes. A colony’s year follows the world’s seasons like the crops’.

Livestock

Feed a beast what it likes to tame it. Kept animals:

• stay by their home or a stocked trough;
• give wool (shears), milk (a bucket), eggs and manure;
• breed when well fed;
• are saved with the world.

Cattle, sheep, goats, pigs, hens, geese and ducks can be bought from a settlement’s farmers and sold back to them. Horses, ponies, donkeys, oxen and bulls are covered in Horses, hounds and carts.

Vermin

Rats and mice come to your stores of food and eat from them, more each night that no cat or terrier keeps them down.

The table below lists every crop, read from the game’s own content.

Written from the game's source and content as of commit 02e81b2 (2026-11-01).