Farming and the Seasonal Cycle

The field preparation loop, season-gated planting and harvest, and how the Barn, Windmill, and Field Workers automate farming as your village grows.

Farming is one of the four genres Medieval Dynasty blends, and it runs on the same clock as everything else: the seasons. A field is not a one-and-done plot. It must be prepared once when new, then worked each cycle, and crops only grow when planted in their season. Get the loop right and you feed your village, fuel a fertilizer supply, and produce trade goods. Get the timing wrong and a season passes with nothing to harvest.

The four seasons as a clock

There are four seasons, Spring, Summer, Autumn, and Winter, each lasting a default 3 in-game days, so a default year is 12 in-game days. You can set season length anywhere from 1 to 30 days at new game or in Customize Game. A longer setting gives you breathing room on a first run, because crops, quests, and stockpiling all take real in-game time. Taxes come due every Spring, so the seasonal clock is also your financial deadline.

Preparing a field

A new field must be grubbed up once before its first use, then worked through a repeating cycle each season:

Grub up the new field with a Hoe. This is a one-time step per new field.
Fertilize the soil.
Plough the field.
Sow the right seed for the season.

After the first grubbing, you repeat fertilize, plough, sow, and harvest each cycle. Skipping the grub-up step on a fresh field is a common reason planting seems to do nothing.

Season-gated crops

Crops are season-dependent. Planting and harvest windows are tied to the seasons, so you sow and harvest at the right time of year or the crop fails to grow. Chapter V starts you on this path by having you get a hoe, a bag, and carrot, wheat, or cabbage seeds, then place and prepare a field.

Exact per-crop planting and harvest windows live on the wiki. Verify them before you commit a whole field to a crop, because sowing outside the window wastes both the seed and the season.

Automating with the Barn and Windmill

You can work fields yourself, but the point of a growing village is to hand the work off:

Field Workers are assigned through the Barn, which automates field work each season. The Barn also handles threshing and related farm tasks.
A Windmill grinds grain into flour, worked by a Miller, once you are growing grain.
Orchards grow fruit.

All of this draws on the Farming skill, both yours and your villagers’, and a villager’s Farming level sets their yield. Place fields near the Barn so the workers you assign can reach them efficiently.

Fertilizer from rot and manure

Fertilizer is part of the field loop, and the game gives you two cheap sources:

Source	How it works
Rot	Let berries and vegetables rot to produce fertilizer. A cabbage field can supply both food and fertilizer.
Manure	Keep pigs in a Pigsty. Pigs produce Manure, a key input for Fertilizer.

Combining pig Manure with rotted vegetables and berries gives you a steady, self-sufficient fertilizer supply that keeps your fields productive without buying inputs.

Surviving winter

Winter is the season the whole cycle is built around. Some foods get scarce and certain foods can be unsafe at certain times of year, so you stockpile food and firewood before Winter arrives. A village that enters Winter with full storage coasts through it; one that does not watches Mood and health slide.