User:Timm/Timm's Opinions On Everything/Flax

Flax is important! You're going to be growing a heck of a lot of it, so you're going to want to know how to do it quickly. Here's how I do it.

First off, the planting of the flax is very important. It's necessary to have your flax lined up neatly in rows and columns. If you don't do this it will be very difficult to keep track of a large number of beds. In order to neatly plant flax, I use the double-F8 view (straight down view) and the arrow keys to move my character. Make sure you have minimized chat (to allow the use of hotkeys) and have selected the ability to move with the arrow keys from your options menu.

Now make sure you have a lot of space. Pin your "plant" menu. Every time you click plant once, follow it with two taps of the right arrow key. This should position you perfectly for another planting. Click, two taps, click, two taps, etc. Try not to allow the beds to overlap each other; you will get a warning if you do and even if you don't, it makes proper tending difficult if you can't be sure which bed you're clicking on. Continue in this manner until you have 10 beds. Now tap the down arrow key twice, plant, and start tapping your way back to the left. Continue this serpentine path of flax until you have as many beds as you think you can manage. This should result in a nice grid of flax.

When you've planted as much as you can handle the tending for, run back to the center of the grid. The easiest way to get in the center of the grid is to click just beyond the opposite corner from which you're standing. As you run to the other side, right-click on empty space to stop running.

Leave the camera where it is. It's unnecessary to actually see what's going on in the flax bed. Click on your first bed and continue to refresh the menu by clicking on it until it says "Weed this flax bed". Now you have to click through the grid, following the same path you planted along, as quick as you can. Your speed here will be what decides how many flax beds you can plant at once. As soon as you get to the end, quickly return back to the top and do it again (Old Egypt flax requires two tendings).

Practice makes perfect. I would suggest starting with only two rows, or 20 beds. If you find that you easily tend all of them, add another row. Keep doing this until you start seeing your beds revert to wild, and then step back a row. I can currently do 5 rows of 10 reliably without missing any weedings, and I think that's about as much as I'll ever get with these seeds. When we discover seeds that only need to be tended once, you'll be able to get through more beds because you won't have to worry about a second tending.

What about when you actually want seeds? I've discovered that 4 rows of 10 beds, planted using the above method, is the most efficient for me. By the time I get through all 40, the first bed has just grown some more seeds. Any additional beds won't result an equal increase in seeds per bed and will add the hassle of requiring you to pick up that many more off the ground.