Crop Types
There are four standard and one special type of crops available in 3rdWorldFarmer. Corn, Wheat, Cotton, and Peanut are always available for the player, whereas Poppies are only available when a certain rare event is triggered.
Crop Requirements
Only money is required in order to purchase crops from the top-left menu. While tools may enhance the outcome of each crop, they are not strictly required for buying them. Likewise, the family members’ combined workload capacity acts as a modifier, affecting the final revenue from crops, but there’s no actual minimum workload capacity requirement for sowing.
Crop Placement
There are 18 fields where crops can be sown.
Crop Vulnerabilities & Countermeasures
Crops are vulnerable to a number of random events in the game. Some events, like Peanut Harvest Fails, affect individual crops, while others, like Dry Season, affect all crops.
Building a well and investing in Crop Insurance are the best ways to protect the crops against most of the random events, which can otherwise seriously impact the crop revenue.
A less obvious strategy is diversifying the types of crops in the fields, which lowers the risk that any one event will wipe out all crops in one season. Of course, investing in livestock as well as crops adds another dimension of diversification, since few events have impact on both crops and livestock at the same time.
Crop Boosters
All types of Tools owned by the player will boost the outcome from crops by different amounts. The combined bonus from tools is shown on the Annual Report under ‘Tools bonus’.
Additionally, there are two events which will boost the revenue from all crops, namely Good Season and Splendid Harvest.
Other events related to Crops
If a player totally neglects his fields and plants no crops for a number of seasons in a row, he is prone to experience the Angry Mob event, which can only be triggered in this way.
In the event of a Civil War, roughly 75% of all crops will be lost.
The Market Prices Drop and Crash of the National Bank events both mean that revenue from crops is lower than usual, around one third of the expected value.
Poppies are a special crop only occassionally available via the Growing Opium special event.