When we got back, I decided I needed to choose my class.
Before I entered the selection screen, I asked Emily and Colin if they had any advice. They explained I should choose the Farmer subclass. That was good information. I didn’t realize quite how the classes worked.
Each class had subclasses that served as the focus for a class.
The classes gave boosts, but didn’t make you OP, at least until after level 20. It seemed like there was a big quest or achievement that you had to complete at level 20 in order to unlock a class evolution, and most people couldn’t manage it. That meant few people ended up over level 20.
My UI showed it was possible to have three classes active at once. A primary class, a support class, and then a combat class. Many poor people didn’t have a support class, and very few had a combat class unless they joined the army.
Colin didn’t have any classes at all yet. You had to be sixteen to receive your first one. If you didn’t receive a prompt from doing something like claiming a new homestead that granted you a class, you had to go to the System temple the first time to activate one.
My first guess at his age had been correct. He was still three months away from his sixteenth birthday.
Emily also had the Homesteader class, but, in a move that sure seemed sexist to me, she’d been told to take a set of skills in the Farmer subclass that basically made her a support class for a male farmer. The skills were based on making food last longer, growing a garden, and crafting related things.
She was now Level 14, very respectable, especially for the relatively short period they’d been out here. Having to make do with very little helped a lot there.
Apparently, the homestead package was also supposed to include a support class for the head of the household, as well as the militiaman combat class. Those two things alone had filled the lottery list. The classes were somehow controlled by the empire, and she didn’t have support or combat classes. As a general rule, women didn't receive combat classes.
I figured I’d have to ask more about that later.
Emily said there were several support class options that would be helpful. Her husband had taken Butcher.
After talking for a bit, I thanked them for their advice, and I clicked on my class tab on my UI.
Congratulations. You have qualified for the Homesteader class. Would you like to accept this class?
Warning: You may only have three classes active at a time. A Profession, Support, and Combat class. Each class will contain a subclass skill tree.
Well, I was now a homesteader, so I took the class.
Congratulations. You are now a Homesteader Level 20. You can farm up to 500 acres of land at level 20. Every 5 levels you will gain access to an extra perk, or upgrade ?your existing perks.
Note: You have been granted XP for past achievements. However, you cannot evolve past level 20 until you have met the conditions for a class evolution track achieved while on Talamh.
You now have the following perks, and you may choose four new perks or upgrades.
- Bartering - 10% off any goods deemed essential for your homestead in the Albion Merchant Shop.
- Gardener - Your garden crops will yield 10% more produce.
Holy hell! I was not expecting that!
These levels were going to give me a tremendous boost over what I had been expecting for my first year here.
I wanted to ask Emily about what skills I should choose, but once again, I couldn’t leave this screen without making my choices. I couldn’t sense anything outside ?this screen. It was as if my physical body had just ceased to exist. At least this time, I didn’t feel disoriented.
The two starting perks seemed fantastic. They also presented me with an extensive list of perks to choose from, including, but not limited to:
Homestead repair - You will need 10% fewer materials to repair your property.
Easier Tillage - Your ground will require 10% less energy to prepare for crops.
Clothing Hardiness - Your clothes will last 10% longer.
Easy XP - Gain 10% more XP doing homestead-related quests.
Crafter - Use 10% fewer materials to craft goods used on the homestead.
There were a bunch more, but a lot of them seemed like Emily could fill them. Things like the clothing and crafting stuff she’d already mentioned. I doubted she had the homestead repair skill, but I was a farmer; that was what I needed to focus on.
I chose Easier Tillage first. Then I saw it was 20% easier for level 2, and 30% easier for level 3. I didn’t know if this was a stupid idea, but I interpreted this to mean less fuel usage for the tractor. Fuel was going to be my biggest issue. Just in case that didn’t work, I also took my Bartering bonus to 20% with my fourth choice. I couldn’t see that going wrong.
Next up, I could see the three subclasses:
- Farmer - You focus your efforts on farming the ground and growing crops. You will gain the perk: Higher Yield. All of your row crops will produce 10% more than they otherwise would have. Your bonus will stack with other production bonuses.
- Rancher - You focus your efforts on raising domesticated animals. You will gain the perk: Animal Husbandry. Your domesticated animals will follow your commands.
- Woodsman - you will have an innate sense of where you can find animals in the wilds. You will gain the perk: Marksman. Your aim with a bow or musket will be 10% more accurate.
The obvious choice here was Farmer. Even if my tractor only had a limited lifespan without more fuel, I should be able to get a decent amount of work done with it first. I had plenty of fuel for this year. Maybe even enough to let me do some work next year if the bonuses worked like I thought they should.
I clicked on Farmer, and a skill tree popped up.
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It started off with only 2 options, and then each of those options had 2 choices that opened up at level 5. The two choices were:
Row Cropping - your row crops will require less water and weeding, and have a 10% better yield (stacks with any other growth perks).
Pottager - your garden vegetables will require less water and weeding, and have a 10% better yield (stacks with any other growth perks).
I chose Row Cropping. It was the obvious choice. My crops needing less water was always a big thing. It didn’t even matter if I managed to dig a ditch; it was going to be nice.
Fewer weeds was also going to be a big deal here. Colin and I were no doubt going to be in a field with hoes, clearing weeds. Hoeing could be backbreaking work.
Back home, corn, sugar beets, and alfalfa were all Roundup Ready. That meant that we just sprayed them with Roundup herbicide, and it killed the weeds without killing the crops. Of course, even on crops that needed hand weeding, I was never the one who did the weeding. We hired crews who came in and did it. I doubted I was going to be hiring a crew to come out and weed out here.
Farmer was also level 20. It looked like the main class and subclass were the same thing for level purposes. That meant I had 3 more selections there, too.
I decided I wasn’t going down the Pottager route at all.
Unlike my Homesteader class, it didn’t look like I could choose to take a skill from level 1 to level 2. If I could, then it seemed like just taking my crop bonus to 40 or 50 percent would be pretty hard to beat.
My first choices were thus:
Crop loss- you will lose 10% less material to wastage during harvest.
Less seed- you will need 10% less seed to plant your crops.
This one was easy. I bet that the Less Seed skill was based on hand sowing. Before modern equipment, people just threw grain seed out and hoped it would take. My seed drill was going to mean I didn’t have to worry about seeds being eaten by birds, or not landing in the soil properly. Every single seed would be at the same depth and the same distance apart when I planted with my grain drill. Every. Single. Seed.
I also remembered that corn was still being planted like it was when the Pilgrims showed up all the way until the late 1800s or maybe even the early 1900s. This world seemed to mirror the mid to late 1800s on Earth. They made mounds in a grid pattern and then put about eight seeds in a single mound.
My corn planter was every bit as good as my grain drill, so I was already going to be using less seed than usual for this time period, or if I wasn’t, then I wasn’t losing seeds.
I didn't have harvest equipment of my own, so I'd benefit greatly from the Crop Loss skill.
If I learned one thing from watching episodes of Little House on the Prairie as a child, it was that these old reaper/thresher machines lost a lot of seed as they worked. I remember watching an episode where they had a poor harvest because of storms knocking the wheat down, so the women went back and gathered up grain off the ground after the menfolk had gone somewhere else to find jobs so they’d have money to feed themselves that winter.
Even in modern times, seed loss could be an issue. I’d never seen it myself, but my dad talked about how they’d once had the moisture content of their pinto beans fall too low before they were able to harvest. When they combined them, the pods broke open, and they lost a lot of seed. They had to hire a crew to come in and gather ?a significant amount of beans off the ground. It was a time-consuming and labor-intensive project.
Next, I looked at the third tier on this side. The first message was:
Congratulations. You have now accessed Tier 2 row crops.
Please select from the following skills, or choose a previously available skill.
Fertilizer- you can now grow a crop for an extra year before the ground needs to be rotated into pastureland, or left fallow to recover.
Crop Specialist - you can choose 1 crop that will gain an extra 25% yield once every four years.
These were both big skills, and if my next tier wasn’t really impressive, I was going to come back and choose the other skill.
I was definitely going to need the almanac to figure out crop rotation in this world. At home, crop rotation was helpful, but it was often more of a “suggestion” than a necessity. Certain crops helped other crops need less fertilizer the next year. Beans were a great example of this. They added nitrogen to the soil, so when we planted potatoes the next year, we needed less fertilizer. But if we had a contract to grow a certain number of acres of corn for a feedlot or dairy, then we were going to plant corn in the field in the year we didn’t plant potatoes, even though it meant we needed more fertilizer.
We also rarely left a field fallow. I imagined that adding another year before we needed to do that would be important in the absence of commercial fertilizers.
Despite the potential benefits of Fertilizer, I chose Specialist first. I was going to use it on my potatoes right away. I wanted as many potatoes as I could get. If I were going to be getting 12 gold per bushel, and I could do 200+ bushels per acre, then I was going to be rich if I actually got paid for them. At home, we were doing 600-700 bushels per acre easily, but we used a lot of products on potato fields I would not have here.
I knew from speaking with my grandpa that they were doing 150-200 bushels back in the 1970s with mostly modern potatoes and the same level of groundwork I’d be able to use. My potato had been genetically modified to be resistant to the blight, too, if that ever became an issue.
Specialist opened up into a second tier of skills.
Crop Specialist II- You may now choose a second crop to gain an extra 10% yield. You may not choose two crops to gain ?the specialized bonus yield in the same year.
Ground Specialist - You instinctively know which crops will grow best in any given field each year.
I decided on Ground Specialist. Not sure why; it just seemed like the correct choice. This wasn’t based on any info I had, but I was going to choose it instead of Fertilizer because my gut said so.
Now I had the final choice for this evolution of my class. They appeared to be a second level for one decision I had already made. It looked like I didn’t get to go back and choose an old one either. Oh well, it seemed a bit harsh, but there were games I’d played with harsh rules as well.
My three choices were:
Soil Expert - Your soil will degrade at half the rate it otherwise would. If you choose a complementary crop rotation, it may become possible to avoid ever leaving a field fallow.
Crop Master - You may choose 1 crop that will gain an extra 10% bonus every year. This will stack with the Specialist bonus.
Harvest Master - You will lose 25% less seed to harvest.
My gut was once again telling me that Soil Expert was the correct choice here. Crop Master was tempting, but in the long run, not needing to leave fields empty was the way to go.
This year only, my potatoes would have a 45% bonus to yield. I could get 275 bushels per acre without trouble… That’s 5,500 bushels. If I get paid a full 12 gold per bushel, then that’s 66,000 gold.
That would be a few extra farmsteads!
I didn’t appear to have any stats, so no Intelligence or Strength rating. If I could gain any other skills outside of those gained by leveling, I didn’t see them on my tab. I’d be sure to ask Emily.
Once I was done, I saw the following Character Tab:
Name: John Jacobson
Age: 35
Main Class: Homesteader Level 20 - At Level 20, you may farm up to 500 acres per year and have access to Tier 2 crops in the Albion Shop Interface.
Perks:
Bartering II - 20% off any goods determined necessary to improve your homestead in the Albion Merchant Shop. (Upgraded once)
Gardener - Your garden crops will yield 10% more produce.
Easier Tillage III- Your ground will require 30% less energy to prepare for crops.
Subclass: Farmer Level 20 XP: --/--
Skills:
Row Cropping - Your row crops will require less water and weeding, and have a 10% better yield (stacks with any other growth perks).
Crop loss- you will lose 10% less material to wastage during harvest.
Crop Specialist - You can choose 1 crop that will gain an extra 25% yield once every four years.
Ground Specialist - You instinctively know which crops will grow best in any given field each year.
Soil Expert - Your soil will degrade at half the rate it otherwise would. If you choose complementary crops, it may become possible to avoid ever leaving a field fallow.
Supporting Class: None
Combat Class: None