[Lyrrin]

If you have zero farming skill you can not pick flax or cotton, in a really buggy way. If you double-click one of them, it says "you begin harvesting the crop", and your character will make farming motions forever until you walk away, but you never get a success or failure message.

I believe you can do all other harvesting skills (albeit poorly) with zero skill, for example I think you can lumberjack with zero. All of my other harvesting skills have a base of 0 but a 'fake' value of above zero, so maybe that's why?

[NirAntae]

Can you farm other things, though?

Flax/cotton may be a higher skill level? I seem to recall having to work at it a fair bit before you could harvest them on Grimm.

[Daisy]

I remember attempting this in the first few days with no success as well. I tried again today to harvest, (cabbage, another veggie like Nir suggested), with the same results. I harvested for ten minutes and did not get anything.

Like Lyrinn, I also have a fake value above 0 for another harvesting skill (herding), and a flat 0 for farming. I have been able to get feathers out of chickens I have butchered from the start. I always get 30 feathers and two or so pieces of meat from the chicken. To show the contrast if you kill a bird and use a knife on it, it always gives you 25 feathers, so the gain was not significant and matches with what Lyrinn said about getting something thought your base skill is poor.

I'm not sure what the bug is here, but I thought I would offer as much info on the subject to help figure it out.

[Lyrrin]

In my opinion you should be able to (inefficiently) pick low-level things with 0 farming just like you can get resources from all other harvesting skills with 0 skill. So that's one issue, pending Lara's approval.

The other is a definite bug, that it is somewhere failing a skill check but not telling the player, and getting stuck in a perpetual state. It should either say "you are not skilled enough to harvest this crop" and stop, or it should be failing the skill check by saying "you X for awhile but fail to harvest...". It's doing neither.

[Lyrrin]

Okay so the issue here is that:
a) The code is not robust at handling 0 skill in general, and
b) All other craft and harvesting skills have a little bit of a skill bonus based on your character's stats. So skills like lumberjacking aren't actually 0 for players with 0 skill, it's more like 10-ish, so it passes skill checks. Farming and Artistry did NOT have this skill bonus added because we created the skills.

So the options are:
1. Have farming gracefully fail at 0 skill, but players with 0 farming skill can't pick basic crops at all
2. Add the low-level stat bonus to match other craft/harvest skills. Players will be able to pick basic crops

I would prefer option 2 because it's friendlier to newbie players. What is your opinion Lara?

[Lara]

2 is fine, but I have to ask why are we farming with 0 skill?

I figure this is low down the totem pole because a) we get 60 when we spec and b) there is the ability to train for just a little gold. So not a priority.

[Lyrrin]

Fixed for next update.

One reason I can think of for farming (or any harvesting skill) with 0 skill is that you have 3 craft skills already spec'ed, but you're a newbie and need to be able to pick flax to make cloth or bandages to sell because you have no money It becomes less important once you have enough money to buy supplies from other crafters.