I’m just doing some randoms stuff today. Less hard grinding for blocks while I kick around some ideas for a mall shop build.
I’ve been making some compact farms and I noticed that @soju has some titanium axes for sale by a starberry/foliage farm and I decided to take a look at whether or not I’d like to make such a farm. The numbers from this will help me decide if I want to do further testing for a low level foliage farm set up for speed farming.
Some information about my costs:
- 1200c for a titanium 3x3
- 30c for a starberry pie
- 12 durability from a bomb bag (~ 36c @ 600c/bag)
I didn’t use any speed brew, even though I have some freebies from oortmas. It doesn’t take long to burn out a titanium tool. This leaves me with a cost of roughly 1266c for the run.
As far as efficiency, the Black & Blue berry farm has some spots where the foliage is only 2 deep. I decided not to worry about it. I just avoided doing anything that would net me less than 6 blocks per hit. So a moderate efficiency test.
I took 17636 blocks of foliage. I’m not sure where I hit a random mushroom but I also got 2 pulsating orbs and 5 edible lamella 
Foliage mints for .05 or .07 with coils. This is going to net me 1234.52 coins at the minter. Plus 16c for 2 orbs I wouldn’t mint) and 1c for lamella and I’ve just about made my coins back. Looking at the ‘junk’ here I’ve netted 35,272 XP (no teaching buff) for roughly a 15 coin cost.
This leaves me with 4964 raw starberries. At .14c each I could toss them in the minter for 274.96c and get on with my day. ~260c is a 20% profit but that’s a waste 
I have 2 options:
- Cook and Mint
- Make Syrup
To the web! Boundlesscrafting says that if I cook them I should get:
- 7856 additional XP ( I would pie this for 15712, 50984 XP for the session)
- Double the money (549.92c for roughly 40% profit)
This has a basic heat cost of 
50 heat per berry? Wow I usually do these numbers at base values but I had to check for this. With titanium furnace, efficient crafting, and spark & wear buffs, it’s down to 5 heat per berry. Much more reasonable, it’s still going to cost me 248c to cook them (At 1c/100 heat) putting me back to about 20% profit.
Let’s look at extracting syrup from this instead. It will make 13.6 mass crafts of syrup. I have some berries (who doesn’t?) to round this up but to look at the session I’ll do the math for 13.6 batches. There’s no spark cost so this makes 680 syrup and nets:
- 2720 XP (5440 with a pie but wow, cooking is better!)
- 856c for a 67% profit (680 syrup @ 1.26c each with coils)
So that was surprising to me, that the syrup produces less XP than just cooking the berries. However it’s cheaper/more profitable. In either case I didn’t try hard for efficiency, and spent about 14 minutes actually farming the berries, got the same XP as farming soil, and better secondary drops.
The foliage doesn’t have nearly the usefulness or demand of the soil, but for someone looking to grind quick coins out of the minter, this plays out, and the XP from cooking the berries is 2/3 that of the earthyams - more than compensated by a nearly 7x increase in drop rate (4.2% vs 28%) .
Altogether not incredibly productive 
However it did result in a 67% profit with minimal input and not really struggling for efficiency. I might do some other method comparisons later, but for now it would seem to justify a farm, at least.
If I’m ever looking for things to build I may go ahead and test how it plays out with a compact setup, but overall the follow on value of soil blocks (and trunk/sap) means that even if it pays for more durable tools and bombs - I won’t put a lot more time into this.