Fertilizer

Fertilizer

Valheim is the only survival game of its kind with no way to speed a crop along. This adds one: grind bones into bone meal, spread it over a patch of ground, and everything growing there finishes sooner — planted crops, and the bushes and herbs that regrow after you pick them.

How to use it

1. Craft Bone Meal at a workbench.
2. Select it in your inventory, the way you would select arrows or bait.
3. Take out the Cultivator and choose Fertilize.
4. The circle on the ground is the area you will cover. Place it.

Grades

| Grade | Made from | Time saved | | --- | --- | --- | | Bone Meal | 5 bone fragments | -25% | | Enriched Bone Meal | Bone meal + fang + coal | -50% | | Enhanced Bone Meal | Bone meal + charred bone + sap | -75% |

Every recipe yields 2. On a crop that normally takes about three days, that is roughly two and a quarter days, a day and a half, or three quarters of a day.

The grade used is whichever bone meal you have selected. If the stack runs out mid-field it falls back to another one you are carrying, exactly as arrows do.

Crops

Each planted crop can be fertilized once, ever. Choosing which grade to spend on a field is the decision; there is no topping up later.

Look at any plant to see whether it has been fertilized and with which grade.

Plants that regrow

Berry bushes, climbing vines, and the herbs and mushrooms that come back on their own can be fertilized too, once they have been picked.

These can be treated once per pick cycle rather than once ever. Pick it again and it is eligible again.

Climbing vines

A vine is a network of branches and berries. It spreads across a surface a branch at a time, and a branch carries berries once there is vine on two sides of it.

Fertilizing anywhere on a vine treats the whole connected plant, however far it has climbed. Each branch gets whatever applies to it:

• Still spreading — it spreads faster.
• Berries growing back — they come back sooner.

Look at any part of a vine to see both, listed separately. Picking a berry starts it growing back from scratch, and it can be fertilized again, just like a bush.

Bone meal will not put more berries on a vine at once. A vine only allows so many berries close together, so bone meal brings them back sooner, not in greater number.

Scanning

While the Cultivator is out with Fertilize selected, plants that leave nothing behind when picked — mushrooms and thistle among them — show a ghost image of themselves within 6 m, so you can see where to spread:

• Teal — not yet treated this cycle.
• Amber — already treated.

The ghosts clear when you put the tool away. You can switch scanning off with EnableScanner, which is worth doing alongside a mod such as PlantEverything that already leaves a visual marker where these plants were.

Area

The area covered grows with your Farming skill — from 1.5 m at level 0 to 4 m at level 100.

Spreading bone meal trains Farming, counted per plant treated - so the skill that widens your reach is the one fertilizing builds.

What it will not do

• It will not fertilize an unhealthy plant. Anything too cold, too hot, crowded or on the wrong

ground is skipped, because that plant was never going to grow anyway.

• It will not fertilize the same plant twice. Already-treated plants show Already Fertilized.
• It will not treat a plant that has not been picked yet. There is nothing to bring forward.
• It will not charge you for nothing. If a placement affects no plants at all, the bone meal is

returned.

Settings

| Setting | What it does | | --- | --- | | EnableMod | Master switch. Off returns everything to normal. | | Reduction1/2/3 | Percent of growing time each grade removes. | | RadiusAtSkill0 | Area covered at Farming 0. | | RadiusAtSkill100 | Area covered at Farming 100. | | ShowFloatingText | The figures that appear over each plant as you fertilize. | | EnableScanner | Showing picked plants that would otherwise be invisible. | | PlaceEffect | Effect played where the fertilizer lands. Blank for none. | | DebugLogging | Writes what each placement did, and why anything was skipped. |