i wanted to create a quick mini guide so people who may be struggling can get an easy leg up in the game early on for lots of easy money.
this is my first guide, i just love this game so freaking much i felt like i had to share!

so i found out early game you can make a ton of money in the new farming update. there are perhaps better ways later on, but this is my method of making easy money in a fun way early game!

all you need, is to make sure you have unlocked the tier 1 farming and brewing research in your research station. (costs 500 coin) and some coin for the shop to purchase barley and hop seeds (costing 1 coin each)

this will unlock all you need to get started.

you will need some wood to make the basic farm plots, 5 stone/iron ingot for the sprinkler, (and some coal to power it)
as well as a brewing station (15 wood, 5 copper ingots)

from what i can tell at the time of writing this, sprinklers cost 8 coal per cycle to run (a cycle being the time to grow a full crop from 0 to 100%)
i didn't run the numbers on the manual brewer, but from what i can tell its 1 coal = 5 Dwarven ale.

the sprinklers work 8 small farm plots from each direction from it, resulting in a total 16x16 squares of farm plot, (minus 1 square for the sprinkler)
if you fill half of these plots with barley seeds, and half of these plots with Hops, that will net you a total of over 100 seeds in return each cycle and around 300 ish of each crop.
turning this into dwarvish brew will net you approximately 1k coin per growth cycle (after you turn it into dwarven alcohol)

later on you are able to fully automate farming, but for now you will have to admittedly run up and down the field spamming the collect button each time.

i would say initial setup takes around 30 mins, to manually plant every crop. and it takes a couple mins to collect all crop/resupply the sprinkler.

if you only give the sprinkler 8 coal per cycle you aren't wasting any precious resources. and can ensure optimal efficiency.

later on down the line, not only will you have tons of money from the booze, you can also sell the seeds, that will amass in bulk. (i have admittedly been saving mine as i have plans to maybe create a mega farm at some point)

Each farm plot costs 5 wood to place. later on you can unlock better farming such as more powerful booze resulting in around 3k coin per cycle, and even better sprinklers/automatic farming.

(feel free to skip over this part, I'm just including it in an effort to touch all bases).
I am in no way an expert at organisation, being the more haphazard type myself. however there are multiple ways to plant your planters on terrain. The neatest approach by far is to add your own foundation, and place your planters on top. from there they should automatically align/snap as you place planters.

Finally for planting itself, the menus may not be super intuitive at first, so here is a guide to navigate them:
First you will need to press "E" to interact while looking at each planter.
Next you will want to navigate over to the right hand side of the screen where it lists all your crop types. select the crop you intend to plant, e.g. "Hops"
Now you need to look at the left hand side of your screen, and move one crop seed into the box on the right side of the screen. you only need one, so i suggest Shift + right click (from your inventory) to transfer.

As long as you have a water sprinkler in range, your crops should automatically grow. no further replanting is necessary. however for true larger scale farms i suggest waiting until you have unlocked the larger plots as it cuts down on initial setup time/inventory management significantly!
i hope this helps!

This was a fun way for me to amass a ton of early game gold, every time i return to my surface hut to store resources/craft i could collect from my farm, and when i went back to the mines it would just grow automatically in my absence!

I am sure there are more efficient ways of making coin later on in the game, but for unlocking things early on, i find it super easy and cheap to setup, plus you aren't wasting tons of precious finite resources that creating merchandise for the empire comes with!

thank you for reading my silly lil thing, I've never made one of these before... i hope it helps maybe <3