Cactus Culture

The following information is by courtesy of Stone !!!!

Grateful thanks from the whole guild !!!
Numptyz

Some observations about cactuses
Over the past months I've been working hard to get my first series of cactuses so I can turn them in for a yield bonus. I chose to go with "Tree Refinement" which gives massive boosts to harvests of Cherries, Plums, Mirabelles, Apples and Pears.

I made some bad choices over time due not exactly knowing what and how to approach this. So here's some tips:

- there are 4 series of quests, one series for each of the 4 different cactuses
- you can do ONE of the cactusquests every 48 hours, I recommend looking into which bonus you want and then plan wisely (!!) which questseries to do
- many of the quests do not give a seed as reward, you will have to grit your teeth and suffer through those
- the cactus quests and regular quests exist next to each other, unlike the 4 different cactus species quests which share their quest timer
- after you have done 10 quests in one series you can purchase seeds for that cactus species, Bigheads cost 28.000 gB or 1 coin per seed so it's not cheap

- caring (water, fertiliser, love or light) for your plant is expensive and time consuming as the top ups don't add up
- you can pay for caring for your seeds with gB or coins, I only used gB for now
- cost to grow a cactus: between 200.000-400.000 gB per cactus depending on cactus level and how many of the required plants you need to buy from the store or market
- example: if you have 1 hour left on water and pay for a top up (time: 10:00:36), you will not have 11 hours left but just 10 (and a few seconds), this means that in order not to waste too much money you should let the time run out on every meter before buying a top up for that meter, this is a massive pain and increases your growing time to much more than the time you initially think a cactus will need
- make sure you have plenty of money when you start growing your cactus, just buying it and crossing the plants is only half the job

The bad news:
- it's bloody expensive, but then so are a lot of the regular quests and they often give bad rewards, you're working towards the better rewards though, same here
- I suggest to only do these quests if you have reached Fertilizer Research level 15 as that is still by far the most important boost you can get


The good news:
- bonuses from turning in cactuses (like 8 weeks increased yield) take effect immediately when activated, all appropriate plants currently on the fields will benefit right away (may not be so for plants that are done growing but not harvested, dunno tbh)
- while you're growing cactuses to turn in some will be done much sooner than others as you likely will have to space growing them over time due to money constraints, meanwhile already harvested cactuses when planted on your fields will regularly yield large amount of points

- while it took me ages and a LOT of gB it was exciting to work towards my first bonus and I can't wait to see how fast my stocks of trees fill up now, a few hours and my first pear tree with a yield of 18 will be ready!

Stone.
.
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- caring (water, fertiliser, love or light) for your plant is expensive and time consuming as the top ups don't add up
- you can pay for caring for your seeds with gB or coins, I only used gB for now
- cost to grow a cactus: between 200.000-400.000 gB per cactus depending on cactus level and how many of the required plants you need to buy from the store or market
- example: if you have 1 hour left on water and pay for a top up (time: 10:00:36), you will not have 11 hours left but just 10 (and a few seconds), this means that in order not to waste too much money you should let the time run out on every meter before buying a top up for that meter, this is a massive pain and increases your growing time to much more than the time you initially think a cactus will need

I am now keeping my growing cactuses happy with coins.
Coins do add up when used for caring so the above example then becomes:
example: if you have 1 hour left on water and pay one coin for a top up (time: 30:48:00), you will have 31:48:00 hours left, making it easier to grow over longer periods while AFK.

This makes it infinitely more doable to grow cactuses and furthermore because of the price of coins at the moment (around 14.000 gB) it's a lot cheaper.