Breaking the Artisan-Keg-Jar meta with Jurrasic Park Farms

[riklaunim]

Artisan is solid for money making, Kegs and Preserve Jars usually don't fit in the quarry and on the road and they take ages to make anything sensible, and then you have to dump it in your cellar for half a year...

But there is another...

If you want to go Rancher and Coopmaster you can and with a secret strategy, you will be raking in the big money. The trick consists of Dinosaur Eggs and Treasure Appraisal Guide.

The egg is an Artifact so the Guide 3x the price, which makes the egg sell for more than the mayo.

You can get a dinosaur egg from artifact spots in the mountains, but also from fishing - and if you fish a lot early it's very likely you get one early.

To get the Appraisal Guide you will need Artifact Troves and you get those from Desert Trader for Omni Geodes (so stock all of your geodes), or sometimes from Panning.

It's slow to ramp up initially, but then it should be rather easy. You need at least a big coop but that's rather easy to do. Then with deluxe coops, you can have 12 per coop and get an egg every week or double with animal crackers. To get a lot of crackers I would recommend Pirate for fishing and doing a lot of fishing treasure chest hunting after the required farming master is unlocked.

And when you get your casks don't even bother with wine, but get a Barn or two and fill it with goats and age golden goat cheese to iridium which is the quickest to age while having solid value ;)

Meanwhile while panning:

 

[Lew Zealand]

Until the Treasure Appraisal Guide arrived with v1.6, my Coop endgame was 10 Dinos, 1 Bunny and 1 Chicken with a few Mayo machines in there for when I remembered that animal husbandry is a game feature. Luckily someone here noted that Dino Eggs are quite valuable nowadays with that buff and anything that is less work is a great thing.

One thing I love is to have a Mini-Shipping Bin in the Coops set right next to the Auto-Grabber. In and out in a matter of seconds! If only the Hopper could do this job automatically.....

I'll add that to fully realize this optimal strategy, an Autopetter in each Coop is essential to save your fingers from the time consuming and skin-destroyingly arduous task of petting Coops full of Dinosaurs. The savings in skin moisturizer alone makes the little shopping trip to Skull Cavern worth it!

 

[Giant Octopodes]

Yeah I was actually looking at exactly that with the current playthrough I'm doing which is on the meadowlands farm (which also helps accelerate this as the blue grass leads to faster happiness gain and thus faster quality improvements). To be clear though on what we're looking at monetarily:

1 Dinosaur = 2 eggs per 7 days (with cracker, 1 without), at max hearts and mood with coopmaster it's on average 1.85x base sell price, 1050 base sell price with the Treasure Appraisal Guide
1050x1.85x2=3885 gold per week per Dino. A full coop of 12 is 46,620 gold per week.

That's really quite good. Awesome, even. Especially since it only requires harvesting once a week and requires no machines. But to give it context, let's look at some other top options for animals:

Chickens (with Artisan, also with Crackers, converting eggs into Mayo): 399x2x7 = 5586 per week per chicken. With a full coop of 12 it's 67032. Note that it's much more labor intensive, requiring 168 eggs to be processed per week, but since they only take 3 hours to run you can actually process 6 coops worth in a single mayo maker shed if you, once per week, spend most of the day in there turning over eggs. Which may or may not be worth it to you since it's 43% more money.

Cows (with Artisan, also with crackers, converting into Cheese): 483x2x7 = 6762 per week per cow. With a full barn of 12 it's 81114. The same notes apply as with Chickens and Mayo Makers, as it also takes 3 hours to make the cheese.

Ostriches (also with crackers, with Artisan, converting into Mayo): 1.73x average base for this one; the quality directly converts. So it's 266*1.73*10*2 = 9203 per week per Ostrich. With a full barn it's 110,443 gold per week. This one is MUCH less labor intensive than Chickens or Cows, requiring only 24 eggs to be processed per week per barn.

Pigs (with Botanist, no animal crackers): 1250*3*1.2 per pig per day at max happiness if it's not raining, so on days they produce on average 4500 per pig. That's roughly 80% of the days in spring, summer, and all, or 67 days of the year, or averaged out 18843 per week. Mind you this assumes adequate available tiles, frequent harvesting, and so forth. But with a full barn of 12 it's 226125 per week. This is by far the most labor intensive of them.

So, the pros of this one: Doesn't use artisan, not at all labor intensive, no machines to fill, with an auto petter and auto grabber you just pop in from time to time, ship it and call it good. Very nice.

If you want faster ramp up and higher profits and are willing to do the work, chickens hatch in less than half the time, though you would want to coopmaster it up while gaining chickens, storing all the mayo produced, then switch to Artisan when it's time to sell.

If you want to look at Barn animals, Ostriches have low (but not zero) upkeep, and more than double the profit. Pigs are super high maintenance but ramp profit to the moon. Even cows, with artisan, will outperform it.

So the tl;dr version is that with the enhancements Dinos close the gap a bit, but I personally didn't feel like they're a meta breaker going to knock artisan off its perch so much as a nice, low maintenance, decent profit option these days.