Guides/Flowers for Dummies

Flowers

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
• Water it with 100 jugs of water
• 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.
• After a given number of fertilizations, the option "Check the bulb for signs of budding" appears
• The flower will tell you "There are signs of budding, but the bulb is not yet ready to split" through several more fertilizations
• Eventually the flower will finally split, putting a bulb in your inventory and leaving intact the flower you have just spent half your lifetime fertilising.

Fertilizer

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

• 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 15,0000 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 do 48 fertilizations at a maximum rate of one 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 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 fertilisers available, but all except two use very expensive additives for enrichment. Therefore, the standard procedure is to use all of your Basic Fertilizer to make two kinds of enriched fertilisers, and exclusively use the enriched fertilizers to get your new bulbs to be born much more quickly:

• Sticky Sun Fertilizer: 24 fertilizations, a maximum of one every two hours.
• Harvest Elixer Fertilizer: 24 fertilizations, 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

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.

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
• 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 1 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.