Greenhouse

[9000gigabitePC]

What are the best seeds you should be planting for the first half on a maddening run?

 

[Zapp Branniglenn]

The Greenhouse is needlessly complicated. So the best generic advice is to make sure you plant something, anything, every Explore session. Nothing in the game reminds you to go there, so I'm always heading straight down there first thing when I explore. The Greenhouse supplies you with a bunch of professor exp, foodstuffs, and up to 1 stat booster each week. But it is possible to sink a lot of money into it for very little return because it's RNG at the end of the day. The bottom of this page indicates the seeds that yield which stat booster. Personally I don't spend more than 500 Gold on cultivation, even when I'm rolling in cash.

Here's a huge tip I got before my last run though. In the very first Explore session (Chapter 1, you're not given the option to do anything but Explore on that day), you can always find a blue sparkly over by the barrels where you host Tea events. That sparkly has one of two 5 star rank seeds (Angelica and Nordsalat, which yield Strength and Speed boosters respectively). Get that seed and plant it on the first harvest event (which I think is that day, or the very next explorable week, check your calendar for a plant symbol). You should get a lot of that same seed. In my playthrough I got 8, allowing me to keep planting it every week for a huge chunk of the game. Pretty sure you can save scum for more. It's just the stat booster that can't be save scummed without reloading to before you planted the seed. With all that Angelica seed, I came away with an absurd amount of Str+1 boosters, and was getting 500 professor experience each time which skyrocketed my professor rank to high levels fairly early on.

Edited February 4 by Zapp Branniglenn

[SnowFire]

I recommend not stressing over it at all.  Seeds won't make or break a Maddening run. 

While there are rules, I think the intent was for the harvest stars to be essentially random, just "consistently" random if given the same seed set, since good luck as a mere mortal figuring out the rules here.  Just plant random stuff every Explore and you're probably fine (well, maybe with an emphasis on the food-giving seeds if you're concerned about not having enough food to feed people at lunch share-a-meal).  If you want to really be fancy, you can seek out combinations of seeds that add up to rank multiples of 12 (or 12+1, 12+2, etc.) to make the https://serenesforest.net/three-houses/monastery/greenhouse/ calculations happy.  But only do that once, and once you find a set, just keep using it.

As Zapp mentioned, if you can get some high-rank seeds early, this can accelerate your Professor XP growth, because the higher rank seeds give more Prof XP.  Not really worth stressing on IMO, but it's there.  (And the high-rank seeds aren't even necessarily BETTER, just...  more XP when you care about that, so C3-C7 or so?).