Guides/Flowers for Dummies

For Dawner, who finally didn't know something.

Flowers

Egypt has two kinds of flowers currently available: Sea Lily and Orchids. (The third kind, Roses, will hopefully be available later in the tale.) All of these Flowers are planted and "grown" from flower bulbs in a very simple, fast procedure:

• Plant and precisely place a bulb, which will appear as a jug
• If it is a Lily, water it with 100 jugs of water. If it is an Orchid, just leave it alone.
• Come back in an hour and your flower will have bloomed

It is the making of the bulbs that is a long, drawn out, repetitive undertaking:

• Fertilize a flower. Fertilize it again. Fertilize it some more.
• After a given number of fertilizations, the option "Check the bulb for signs of budding" appears
• If it is an Orchid, this is the signal to check the flower, and a bulb will immediately go into your inventory. Hurrah!
• A Lily will tell you "There are signs of budding, but the bulb is not yet ready to split" through several more fertilizations
• Eventually the Lily will finally split, putting a bulb in your inventory. Hurrah!

In all cases, when the bulb comes off the flower and into your inventory, the original flower you have been fertilising remains intact, where you planted it, and you can start the whole process again.

Fertilizer

Obviously, once you decide to do flowers, you life becomes all about fertilizers, fertilizing and getting bulbs as fast as possible. Making basic fertilizer is pretty simple, which is good because you'll be doing a lot of it, no doubt smelling delightfully of Eau de Poisson. Here is how to make a basic small starter batch:

• Catch 96 debens of fish
• Hold it in your inventory for more than 2 hours
• Fillet it in a kitchen
• The result will be Rotten Fish
• Put your rotten fish in as many kettles as you have with 5 water and 5 wood to get 50 fertilizer

Your 96 debens of fish will eventually result in 1,600 basic fertilizer. This is not nearly enough, but it's a start!

Enriched Fertilizers

You will genuinely need loads of Basic Fertilizer (we go through about 15,000 a week) though if you actually use the standard Basic Fertlizer to fertilize your flowers, you'll be fertilizing approximately forever: you will need to fertilize each lily approximately 48 times at a maximum rate of once every two hours, and every orchid approximately 24 times at a maximum rate of once every two hours. You will also never sleep.

Luckily, we can take the Basic Fertilizer and enrich it to make much better, more efficient fertilizers. Enriched fertilizer cuts the number of fertilizations in half. Enriched Fertilizer is made in a kitchen and requires that you have Advanced Horticulture, which is free. Happily, enriching fertilizer is a simple one click process and you can enrich huge amounts of fertilizer at the same time, so this part is fast and easy.

There are a variety of enriched fertilizers available, but all except two use very expensive additives for enrichment with no more benefit than the cheap fertlizers. Therefore, the standard procedure is to use all of your Basic Fertilizer to make two kinds of enriched fertilizers, and exclusively use the enriched fertilizers to get your new bulbs to be born much more quickly:

• Sticky Sun Fertilizer: counts as 2 fertilizations and is applied a maximum of one every two hours.
• Harvest Elixir Fertilizer: counts as 8 fertilizations and is applied a maximum of one every eight hours.

Over the course of a day, that is 64 Sticky Suns and 80 Harvest Elixer per flower, so we enrich our 1600 fertilizer as follows:

• 320 Flower Fertilizer + 1 Camel's Mane Mushroom mushroom = 320 Harvest Elixer (4 servings of evening fertilizer)
• 1274 Flower Fertilizer + 26 Cobra Skin = 1274 Sticky Sun (49 servings of daytime fertilizer)

Optimal Fertilizing

Sticky Sun is cheaper than Harvest Elixer, so it is optimal to rely mostly on Sticky Sun to get the required number of fertilizations into each flower. The optimum fertilizing schedule is to use Sticky Sun every 2 hours during the day, and Harvest Elixer for the 8 hours you'll be gone overnight. In an optimal day that will basically never exist, you will fertilize each flower as follows:

• 8 am: 8 Sticky Sun
• 10 am: 8 Sticky Sun
• 12 pm: 8 Sticky Sun
• 2 pm: 8 Sticky Sun
• 4 pm: 8 Sticky Sun
• 6 pm: 8 Sticky Sun
• 8 pm: 8 Sticky Sun
• 10 pm: 8 Sticky Sun
• Midnight: 80 Harvest Elixer

Over the course of a day, that is 64 Sticky Suns and 80 Harvest Elixer per flower.

Lazy Fertilizing

Also known as "I Have a Life" Fertlizing, the other option is to fertlize all flowers every 8 hours only using Harvest Elixer. You will use more fertlizer (240 Harvest Elixer per flower per day), but will also fertilize much less often. It also means you only need to make one kind of enriched fertilizer.

Flowers for Formal Gardens

The Test of the Formal Garden requires a minimum of 7 flowers. One of these must be a flower you have cross-bred. (This sounds terrifying but is in fact the easiest part of this entire endeavor.) You will therefore require 8 flowers: 6 flowers you plan to keep, plus 2 flowers you plan to cross breed and destroy in the process of creating your 7th, cross-bred flower.

Cross-Breeding Your Flower

• Make a Nut's Essence (you can Automato this!) and take it into your inventory
• Put two different bulbs of the same type in your inventory (for example, a Vampire Sea Lily and an Energy Sea Lily)
• Find a greenhouse you can use. A public greenhouse works fine.
• Click the greenhouse and if you can, under Utilities, name the greenhouse.
• The name of the greenhouse is what your flower will be called, so something like Eimear x1 will at least be clear.
• Click the greenhouse and choose Crossbreeding.
• Choose Set the right splint type and shove in a flower from your inventory.
• Choose Set the left splint type and shove in the other flower from your inventory.
• Come back in an hour and remove your new flower.

Botanist's Touch

Although not required for bulbing flowers or for the Test of the Formal Garden, Botanist's Touch allows you to pick up flowers and move them:

• Without Botanist's Touch: You plant a bulb and while the flower can be moved under Utilities, you can never take that flower into your inventory again.
• With Botanist's Touch: You can uproot a flower from the ground, and it will go into your inventory as a bulb. You can then give it away or plant it again wherever you like.

Botanist's Touch costs as follows:

• 150 Flower Fertilizer (You will already have this)
• 100 Sticky Sun Fertilizer (You will already have this)
• 50 Harvest Elixir (You will already have this)
• 100 Liquid Sun Fertilizer
• 1 Khefre's Essence

Liquid Sun is made by mixing 180 fertilizer with 1 Scorpion's Brood Mushroom to get 180 Liquid Sun. If you do not have a SB shroom, you can trade for one. It is also worth asking if anyone has any spare Liquid Sun; since it is made in multiples of 180 and really only used for Botanist's Touch tuition in blocks of 100, flower people tend to have extra around that they're not going to use.

Khefre's Essence is made from smushing 500 bettles. Yes, 500. Read on...

Breeding Beetles for Botanist's Touch

The fastest way to get to 500 beetles without dying of costs is to run two Beetle Terrariums and one Khefre's Locker.

• Grow 5,000 cabbage
• Put 2,500 cabbage in each tank
• Put 3 female and 2 male beetles in each tank
• Leave them to breed for 8 hours
• Every 8 hours, the population in each tank will eat approximately 200 cabbage
• Every 8 hours, the population in each tank should grow from 5 to 18 or 20 beetles
• Leave 3 females and 2 males in each tank and mulch the rest in your locker

You can produce a Khefre's Essence in about four days this way.

If you do not have enough beetles to breed to a breeding population of 10, you can borrow beetles for this purpose. There is a public beetle locker in MV by the CS at 930, 4835. Please replenish the locker.

WARNING: Do not run out of cabbage or all of your beetles will escape and you will cry. Do not leave beetles for more than 8 hours; they will begin eating each other to diminish over-crowding.