Hey all,
In an effort to help my group get as much wood as possible as efficiently as possible, I came up with a basic tree farm.
The farm relies on two principles: 1. Using the momentum of trees to knock down other trees and 2. Keeping tree trunks as contained as possible. Both of these allow for "optimized" gathering. I say this loosely because the method is still largely imperfect/manual.
Step-by-step guide, with referenced pictures:
- Find a hill and landscape it. I went with the terraced look but a straight slant down would probably work just as well and potentially better. You could also accomplish this by digging down into the ground instead of using a hill, which would save you the rock needed to raise the ground. Picture references: Empty 1, Empty 2.
- Build a rock wall around the area using the hoe (stone foundations/walls could potentially be used as well). This is to prevent trees from escaping the slant downward as you begin to chop them. Again, you could dig into the ground instead to avoid some of this, but I had a lot of rock to use and wanted to try this way. Picture references: Empty 1, Empty 2.
- Grab as many of the thousands of beech seeds I know you have sitting around as you want and plant your trees in a grid on the terrace/slant. I went with a 5×5 but this seems scalable to as big or small as you want. Make sure each sapling has space. If one dies, replant it in a slightly different location. Trial and error.
- Wait for the trees to grow. I haven't figured out the exact number of days/overall conditions, but it doesn't take too long, especially if you're doing other stuff around your place. Picture reference: Filled.
- Beginning with the row at the top, start chopping and let them rip into each other. There is no guarantee for the trees to break each other each time, so be patient with it and be willing to chop about half of the trees. Eventually the storm will arrive and they'll all get knocked down. Picture reference: Chopped.
- Chop/pick up all of the wood.
- Repeat 3 – 6 forever.
A few last notes:
- This is probably not anywhere close to efficient as having a group go out and chop a ton of wood in the forest, and that's fine–the goal is just ease of access and maintenance of natural trees.
- My 5×5 farm generates roughly 650 wood.
- There's some trial and error in this. If you start to do it, make note of where trees tend to escape outside of your walls and build those sections up.
- This is very useful if you don't want to destroy the trees around your base so you can maintain a more natural look. Just hide the tree farm well.
- This whole process is surprisingly quick outside of waiting for them to grow. Planting takes maybe 30 seconds and chopping takes maybe 3 – 4 minutes if you have the power from the second boss.
I'm always looking for feedback, suggestions, etc., so let me know what you think!
Happy chopping.