Lemons/Shrooms Guide

Growth Medium / Compost Mixer Guide

Related Links

Vegetable Ecology Compost Mixer

Introduction

I will try to break down the 2 more complicated sides of growing mushrooms in this guide - learning eco values, using mushroom labs, and producing a medium to reflect them. Some prior understanding of Ecology is required as all eco values are manipulated using Vegetable Ecology

Once a medium fruits in the fungus farm, either a custom one or a traded Standardised Growth Medium, you will be able to recognise when the values on the compost mixer is in range. It is far easier to play with the values of a known shroom in the mixer than using mushroom labs.

Definitions

To avoid confusion, and having not seen any terminology elsewhere, I have used the below definitions:

• Attribute - One of the 7 possible ecology types (Heavy Metals, pH, Ground Water, Phosphorous, Soot, Potassium, Nitrogen, Salinity). Ecodensity and terrain will be referred to as such
• Nutrient - Specifically the 3 attributes Phosphorous Potassium & Nitrogen

Determining Eco Values

Recommended Items

• 50+ seeds of each vegetable (ideally with the most potent eco changes)– with 4 of each vegetable having 2 watering stages or more
• A few hundred jugs, more if testing far from water
• 10-20 Mushroom Labs of your choice
• 2-3x the above of eco kits

Travel to a known spawn location

I recommend travelling to any historic shroomdar location to ensure terrain is satisfied. It will either be unsuitable, 0-99% suitable or 100% suitable

• Unsuitable - Most likely the eco values are unsuitable. It's however possible that that exact spot reported on shroomdar has inappropriate terrain and it might be OK 2 cords in any direction. I recommend just moving to a whole new spot and trying again rather than searching here.
• 0-99% - Ideal starting point as you can see positive changes, as well as negative
• 100% - A lucky start and would cause a growth medium to fruit, however I recommend still investigating the nutrients to make creating the medium later easier

Changing eco values with vegetables

All vegetable seeds have different impacts for maturing, harvesting and killing. Refer to Vegetable Ecology for specifics.

• Maturing - Using your seeds with 2+ watering stages, it’s possible to let the plant enter its first growth stage, wait, and let it drop back down a stage. Then water it again. Keep doing this ‘hovering’ multiple plants. To end the cycle, do not harvest! Afterwards let the plants die so you don’t accidentally trigger a secondary unwanted eco impact from harvesting
• Harvesting - I rarely use harvesting unless I want to impact groundwater and often use vegjanitor.
• Killing – Turn on plant where you stand and spam click all your seeds waiting for them to die and pick them back up. You might need to do this a couple of times depending on how many you brought

Tips

• I recommend maturing, or lowering, the nutrients first. It is much harder to do this than the other way around, in case you overshoot into 30%. At that point, if it made it unsuitable, you may as well find a new spot.
• If a change reduces the suitability then it’s likely the opposite direction will be a positive – however sometimes the baseline value is required
• While most shrooms will be sensitive to small changes, some aren’t. Do not completely rule that attribute if you are struggling to get it to fruit and try again
• Keep tweaking the values until 100% suitability is achieved. You want to rule out as much as possible to give you flexibility in the compost mixer later

Making Mediums

Mediums can be quite expensive to make. To make a close match I use a lot of lime, salts of aluminium, sulphuric acid and sometimes khefre’s essence.

The compost mixer will give random starting values each time you use it. Because of this, for shrooms sensitive to ecodensity, it might be impossible to achieve a particular medium. The main culprit here is soot -removing it requires clay which increases sandiness and ecodensity, which can push you out of range of any low soot, low ecodensity grass/rocky shrooms.

Main Considerations & Tips

Terrain & ecodensity

• Try predict if the medium you want is even possible. For example, what was the highest suitable soot reading? How much clay (+ecodensity) would that take to bring it in range?
• Target changing these first before changing the attribute values because if you line everything up and have to add dirt or sand afterwards, it takes a lot more work to correct them again.
• If you want to make it more grassy but don’t want to reduce the nutrients with dirt, use either split/smashed stone or sand instead. Dirt only brings the terrain to the middle, but sand can be used to make rocky more grassy for example
• As a rule of thumb low ecodensity shrooms die over 3%, medium about 7-9%, with some seemingly unaffected like spiderlings. Unfortunately there are 2 known shrooms with a minimum limit of 17% (PF & HoA)

Nutrients are the most difficult to impact because:

1. Phosphorous – can only be reduced by dirt and increased by dung – which both ingredients effect all 3 nutrients simultaneously
2. Nitrogen – similar to above but can be reduced by expensive Khefre’s essence.
3. Potassium – This can be changed with potash (+) or water (-) and gravel (-)

Tips

• Most shrooms seem very sensitive and, for nutrients, only seem to care if they’re either <25%, 25% or >25% with a percentage or 2 tolerance. This means for most shrooms shouldn’t require too much lab testing. I tend to test about 22% & 28%. However, the one exception I’ve found here is Spiderling with <=17% nitro
• Not all attributes matter for each shroom. The most requirements I have seen is 3 so far, some only care about 1. Once recognised in the compost mixer, you will be able to ignore the irrelevant and expensive attributes altogether, often producing desired shrooms in a couple of clicks. Whilst learning for the first time, I recommend trying to match all values to the shroom lab

The Process

I follow the same process almost every time I want to recreate a whole shroom lab test. It will take you to near exact baseline values, where you can tweak each stages to cater to what you want. It’s unlikely for all nutrient values of 25% to be achievable, but that is partly why I test nutrients with mushroom labs to ideally around 22-28%.

1. Set terrain, ensuring ecodensity is achievable so you don’t waste loads of materials. If it isn’t, I recommend salvaging the compost into an otherwise known growth medium. If you need to reduce phosphorous, review this alongside step 2.
2. Set nutrient values next, prioritising phosphorous adding dung to increase to 25%, or adding dirt to decrease to 25% - or tested shroom lab values. Nitrogen (khefre's essence) and potassium (next step) can be reduced independently
3. Dump LOTS of water until both salinity is 0% (if you want some salinity it can be added back easily with salt/salt water) and potassium is low enough (add potassium with potash if too far) – GW will almost certainly be 100%
4. Dump clinker until GW hits 37% or slightly higher/lower as desired. This will likely bring HM to 100%
5. Dump sulphuric acid until GW hits 50% with HM hitting 0% at the same time, leaving a very low pH <1
6. Dump Salts of Aluminium until 7 pH or as desired

Planting & Fruiting

Plant your new custom medium grown with a jar of the correct spores in the fungus farm

If successful it will fruit in the next shroom cycle after 3 in game days (about 24h)

The fungus farm will microspawn a small amount of shrooms every 15 in game minutes at every XX:15 minute interval. This means if a spawn is at XX:31, it won't spawn until XX:45