User:Tlanthil

Howdy.

I'm the founder of SACFAR, and an elder in the Wanderers.

I'm the grandson of an oracle of body, and usually available for acro (or will be once it's released), sigs, intros, etc (but lemme know before travelling, in case I'm working on something).

My home CP is at 1310,1690 (Shabbat Ab)

My Herb:aList page is still in operation (though herb info needs updating for t4, which will happen as we find out): http://tinyurl.com/69vapj

Flax

Working solo, I used to be able to grow about 16 beds at a time. Since someone pointed out to me that, with flax hotkeys turned off you don't travel to the bed, I've been able to push that up to 40 (which takes slightly over 2 minutes, including time to refill jugs for NG, if growing next to the water). This method doesn't require you to overlap plants (it occasionally happens by accident, but since you're working to a grid, that means more space on the other side, so no net bonus) or anything dodgy/naughty like that.

Note: I use numpad-5 as a mouse click (it's an option for KDE in the control centre, on linux/unix, to control cursor with numpad), which may give a slight increase in efficiency over mouse clicking. Starting out with a smaller patch and increasing size until you find what works will avoid problems though.

Method

• Collect a heap of seeds. May as well do this with the flax hotkeys enabled (self->options->one-click and related), since it's a bit easier, and you will walk to the bed to collect the seeds either way. Collect jugs as well, if you need them (depends which seeds you use, of course).
• Go to a decent field, you'll need a bit of space. It's probably a good idea to travel away from home a bit for this, not just for the space, but in case of ecology problems. At least until we have a decent understanding of ecology, and know where/what/etc to grow.
• Disable the flax hotkeys.
• If you care about the flax beds lining up, you can use F4 to overlay a north-arrow on the ground, makes it easier to line the camera up to north or east.
• Open the self->plant menu, and pin it.
• Get in position to start planting. You'll be planting several rows, going camera-down (closer to the bottom of the screen) each time, so have room to move to your camera-bottom-right corner.
• Minimise chat (press enter, or click the active chat tab). Put the mouse cursor over the plant window you pinned earlier.
• This is the start of planting, so you need to be quick from here on. Click the menu, then tap your right arrow key on your keyboard twice. Repeat this as many times as you want for width of your flax field (I do 8 wide, 5 tall, but start with 4x5 or 6x4 or something, until you get a feel for it. size 40 requires you to be clicking quite quickly).
• When you get to the end of your row, tap the down arrow key twice, and then go back, planting in the other direction (left arrow key). Repeat this until you have all of your rows planted.
• Click the mouse on the opposite side of the flax field, and then right click when you're in the middle. This puts you in a position to be able to click every bed you planted without having to move.
• Check the top-left bed (the first one you planted), and keep checking until it's ready for watering/weeding. Once it is, do so, and keep going across. The reason you start on the left side of the field is that clicking left-to-right puts the cursor over the next field when you click to water/weed (depending on how far zoomed out you are. but you won't have to go right-left-right-left, as you would processing from right to left). Process each row in order, as many times as required (with our current flax, that's 2 times). If you find that one of the beds has gone to seed, skip down a line, and unless it was a large lag spike, you should be able to continue with what's left.
• The flax is now ready for the harvest, so you can take a break if you like. flax ready for harvest will stay available for a long, long time.
• Harvest your flax plants (if so inclined. you could grow 10 fields like this without harvesting until the end. But consider that you'd be using up space other people might want to use), then top up jugs or whatever, and move back to the starting position, if you have more seeds to grow. Rinse, repeat. :)