Welcome back!
Today we will learn how soil quality affects growth time of different food crops, and about the design and desirable species composition of a food forest.
First of all: What you can see below, growing on rich soil, easily feeds the 100 sapiens living in the village behind it, and is still way too big in my experience... (Over 300 beetroots, and I planted them quite sparsely!) The small area of newly planted things in the front was not necessary and just for "screenshot grooming".
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But let's get on with it and look at the soil science of Sapiens.
Here's a table to show you which plants take how long to first harvest on rich, regular and poor soil:





























Here you also have a graph to visualize the plant growth in dependance from soil quality a bit better:
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All those values are approximations, sometimes not all the plants of the same species in a test patch were ripe the same day!
As you can see, most of the "fast growers" (incl. the new "medicinal" crops) have the same numbers of days they need to grow for the first harvest, but that is to be expected, since the formula behind plant growth needs to be "strong" enough to make a noticeable difference for such a short growth time.
Which is probably also the reason why the growth time for the bigger plants (bushes, pumpkins and trees) scales so hard with soil quality. It is a steep increase of growth time between rich and poor soil!
You can also see there is 2 types of fast growers, beetroot and most of the new medicinal crops take only 5 days on poor soil, but flax, sunflower and wheat take a bit longer with 7 days. Aloe is an exception and has a growth cycle that stands apart from all other plants: From all the "herb like small plants" it takes longest to grow on any soil type.

I tried, but lost track of second and third harvests at some point, but I remember that raspberry, once established, grows back faster than gooseberry, which is just earlier ripe the first time.
The tropical tree crops, banana and coconut are good options when you only have regular soil available. Interestingly, peach, the "cheated" crop, grew fastest of the classical trees (as compared to palms), which makes me suspect temperature might actually play a role, too, but that had to be tested, or maybe someone more code-savvy can dig out the actual formula for plant growth in dependence of soil quality in the game's source code...
As it turned out, and is somewhat visible in the graph, plants on rich soil take about half the time than on regular soil, and about double the time on poor soil. Trees are bit earlier ripe on poor soil than expected, but it already takes ages for them on regular soil, so there might be some sort of "cut off" in the formula and we got that going for us, which is nice.
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My general conclusion is: Try to go for rich soil every time, what ever you want to grow. Remember: You can dig out and transplant hexagons of rich soil! If you don't have any near your settlement, that is always an option once you discovered the digging skill.
I haven't included sand types in the test, because also IRL I'd try not to grow anything on sand at all, it's just not prudent. If it's not agave or something adapted like that, which we don't have in the game (yet). If you have experimented with growing crops on sand, let me know in the comment section!

Keep it small, especially if your tribe is still small! If you have already collected a few different plants, you do not need so many individuals of the same species, especially on rich soil.
You do well to leave enough space between trees (especially if you haven't gathered all the different species in your area yet!), and to put the bushes and pumpkins close to them. Try to emulate a "semi-natural randomness", since you want a visually appealing mix of plants, but also patches of the same thing closer together, so you can more easily and specifically multi-select for harvesting.
Below you can see a few more detailed images that should give you a feel of what the end result can look like:
Warm temperate test food forest on rich soil, containing apple, banana, coconut, orange, peach and birch trees, raspberry and gooseberry bushes, pumpkin vines, beetroots, wheat, flax and sunflowers. Banana and coconut were gathered from the nearby rainforest, peaches "summoned" with the lua console.
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The test forest contains all the food crops, and a few birch trees for branches and seeds. The trees are loosely grouped together, but not always so many trees of the same species. As you can see, the trees are distributed in a pretty regular manner, which is always a hint on humans (or sapiens) having had a hand in this.
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Let's quickly visit Kiitospäiva again:
Detailed view of species distribution in a cold temperate food forest
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Since peaches and apples were the only tree-fruit we could find in the colder biome, there was more space for wood trees: Birch, aspen and pine. If you leave some bigger gaps in some places for the smaller plants, you get a sort of clearing when the foliage is developed later on, in which you actually might be able to see the smaller plants on the ground level, even if it's not winter.
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The next image shows you the species distribution the warm temperate/tropical test forest in detail:
Test food forest without foliage: Lots of wheat, flax, beetroots and pumpkins in patches between the trees!
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You can see how many of the faster growing ground level plants can be found between the trees and bushes. Coconut trees have quite a small footprint, so you can easily put them between other trees.
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Try not to, especially if you are too easily bored or triggered by "planting expeditions into the undergrowth", which might make you bump into tree trunks, get slapped in the face by foliage and whatnot. Sometimes, though, you might have to, because you haven't yet found all the different plant species in your area, or you have to wait for the next harvest of the wild patch you're sourcing your seeds from.
If you do this, it's easiest in the cold season, because the deciduous trees don't have leaves then (Except for... Yes, I'm looking AT YOU, orange! No, fun fact: Citrus trees/shrubs are somewhat evergreen...).
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Also: Try not to plant too big patches of food forest at the same time, because if you put down all the trees, bushes, pumpkins, AND the fast growers, you can get quite a lot of planting orders for your saps to follow and work on! And as you know, that might take ages...
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Since I couldn't figure out how to reliably and exactly measure distances and areas ingame, we can luckily skip the more complicated biodiversity math, and will only look at species count per hexagon.
Below you can see 2 images of marked hexagons and numbered plants in them:⠀
In this hexagon we have 2 different trees, 1 type of berry, pumpkin, and all the fast growers except for sunflower, which gives us 7 different species.
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Here we have 7 different species, too, but the distribution is slightly different: Only 1 tree, both types of berry bushes, and all the fast growers incl. sunflower, but no pumpkin this time.
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The rule of thumb for your Sapiens food forest is: Your species count can never be too high!
An ecosystem with a higher species count is more healthy than a mono-crop system, and can usually react more robust to environmental changes, but that just from the side of real eco sciences...
So, the desirable composition of a Sapiens food forest hexagon is as follows:
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Trees
1-3 trees, the more different species, the better, but don't plant more than 2 trees of the same species into the same hexagon. Perhaps you can sqeeze in some coconut, to even go as high as 4 trees per hexagon.
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Bushes
1-4 bushes close to the trees. If you want to put more than 3 bushes in one hexagon, try to make at least 1 of those the other berry species.
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Pumpkins and fast growers
1-3 pumpkins per hexagon are enough (3 can become pretty stuffy already), but you don't want them in all of your food forest hexagons. Try to squeeze in all the fast growers if you can, sunflower maybe not being so important (except for the looks, obviously), so you can plant less of them, or none at all in your hexagon. This of course becomes more difficult with the 7 new medicinal plants, but most of them have a really small footprint and can easily be put inbetween other plants or at ragged edges of patches you have already planted. Depending on your personal preference, you can group patches together or plant them spaced apart more singularly.
All those new plants, especially the flowers, make your food forest look really alive now!
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If you want to push the biodiversity of your food forest to the absolute maximum, you might want to spawn fruit and/or seeds for plants that usually do not grow in the biome of the tribe you're playing.
I personally "roleplay" that some nomadic trader like Kokopelli came around and brought stuff from "faraway lands", but that is just to make me feel better about what other people would call "cheating"...
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To actually spawn objects or creatures, you need the socalled object ID, which you can find in the resource.lua file of the game's files. But don't worry, I will give you the according object IDs for food plant seeds and fruit, so you do not have to go looking for them yourself!
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First, you have to call up the chat window by pressing Ctrl+/, and then enter the console by typing Enter confirms your input.

You can exit this console again by entering and exit the chat window again by pressing Esc.
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The format for the spawn command is as follows:
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Example:
This spawns a mammoth and places it to your feet/below your cursor to go on a rampage.
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But we want plants, not animals, so here is a list of the object IDs for seeds and fruit of plants you might want to grow in your food forest (capitalization matters!):
If you do everything correctly, your chat window should look something like this:
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Now exiting the chat window again, a banana should drop to the ground in front of you! That's it.

That's also it with the advanced food forest guide for Sapiens. We hope you learned something, and also had some fun and entertainment while doing that.
If you liked what you read, please leave us a thumbs up and/or comment!
Maybe one day we will have potatoes in Sapiens (mods might make many things possible!), but so far I can only give you a virtual one for your patience... Here you go, it's even organic!
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Many thanks also to the Sapiens Modding Wiki, and to the many people trying to achieve a different, maybe more native and creative way of doing agriculture.
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Cheers,
Ben and forestfey



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