Guides > Thistles

The french page is a bit outdated - Sun-Aj

Growing Thistles

Thistles are grown in a Thistle Garden.

One thistle seed is used per planting. The growing period is 40 ticks of about 6 seconds each during which the various reactions occur. Thistles take roughly 4 minutes per batch to grow. The yield is 5 thistles of varying attributes (ex. Thistle:A-B~C+F~N-P+T~) and 2 seeds. Aborting the process early yields no thistles or seeds.

The three symbols used to represent vitamins levels are:

-	Low	< 22
~	Average	>= 22, < 80
+	High	>= 80

Water, Dung and Saltpeter are used to change the levels of H20, Nit, and Pot respectively.

One resource is used each time you click on the nutrient. (So one Dung per Nit click.)

Are you looking for current Thistle requests ?

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Thistle Gardens provide the following information on thistles by selecting "Info: Read about Thistle Gardens" from the menu.

Thistle is a weed that is impossible to kill: if you plant it, it will grow. Thistle is edible to many insects and animals, and it can contain a surprising variety of vitamins. The amount of vitamins produced depends on how the thistle was cared for.

The readout shows five nutrients. You can adjust these directly by pushing the appropriate button. They are:

* Nit (nitrogen, a nutrient, from dung)
* Pot (potassium, a nutrient, from saltpeter)
* H20 (water, a nutrient, applied directly)
* Oxy (oxygen, a nutrient, from aerating the soil)
* Sun (sunlight, a nutrient, controlled using the canopy)

The readout also shows seven vitamins:

* Asc (ascorbin, a vitamin)
* Bio (biotin, a vitamin)
* Car (carotine, a vitamin)
* Fol (folin, a vitamin)
* Nia (niacin, a vitamin)
* Pyr (pyroxiding, a vitamin)
* Thi (thiamine, a vitamin)

As it grows, the thistle converts nitrogen or potassium into vitamins, and it converts vitamins into other vitamins. For example:

* If H20 is high enough, thistle converts Nit to Asc.
* If Sun is low enough, thistle converts Asc to Car.
* If Oxy is high enough, thistle converts Car to Asc.

It will take experimentation to learn all the things that thistle can convert. Once you know what it can convert, and under what conditions, you can encourage it to produce the vitamins you need.

Thistle is affected by day-to-day weather variation. On certain days, thistle just won't do certain conversions. Each morning, you will have to test the thistle to see which conversions it will do, and make your plans accordingly. Active conversions change at Midnight.

Thistle Requirements and Recipes

Silkworms? require specific amounts of 4 different vitamins in the same thistle such as: A~B~C+N~

• Silkworm farmers may list their current thistle requirements on the thistle requests page.

You may find useful thistle methods on the Thistle Recipe Page.

You may also wish to find out which conversions are inactive on the given day and use the data to play around with the Thistle Simulator.

An example of how to find out the inactives could be found here

Thistle Conversions

There are 21 possible conversions of which some (seems like 1-5) are inactive each day. 7 of the conversions are water-dependant, 7 are sunlight-dependant and 7 are oxygen-dependant. There are 3 ways for producing each of the 7 vitamins. There are a few key features which can be stated simply:

• No Asc at night or when the garden lid is closed. Although Asc is being created at any sun it is immediately converted away at low sun values so practically you won't even see it appear in your garden.

• You can't get rid of Bio. There are no conversions in which Bio is reduced. If you need B- then you have to avoid producing it in the first place (often difficult).

• Nit and Pot are pure inputs. The only reason the garden uses them for is as resources for certain reactions. You don't need to have them in the correct range in order to make things happen. What you DO need to keep in correct ranges are water and oxygen (and Sun, but it is almost impossible to control (you can play with the garden lid but that's it).

• All conversions follow this rule: 10 of one thing -> certain amount of another. Whenever there's more than 10 of the required nutrient available, only 10 is taken. When there is less than 10, everything is taken and the amount of product is also smaller proportionally. Example: if 10 Nia gets turned into 30 Fol, having only 5 in your garden would result in it turned into 15 Fol.

• The vitamin leves are real numbers, even though they are displayed as integers. What it means in practice is that with the conversion 10 Pot -> 2.5 Bio for an example you could seem to get 2 Bio out of 10 Pot every odd tick, and 3 Bio every even tick

Conversions Details (in order of them happening, see below)

Water*	Oxygen*	Sun*	Conversion
> 79	Any	Any	10 Nit -> 3.33 Asc
Any	< 49	Any	10 Car -> 5 Asc
Any	Any	> 69	10 Fol -> 20 Asc
Any	Any	< 20	10 Pot -> 2.5 Bio
< 29	Any	Any	10 Asc -> 20 Bio
Any	> 89	Any	10 Pyr -> 10 Bio
Any	> 69	Any	10 Pot -> 3.33 Car
Any	Any	> 79	10 Asc -> 10 Car
< 39	Any	Any	10 Thi -> 20 Car
Any	Any	> 69	10 Pot -> 2.5 Fol
< 59	Any	Any	10 Nia -> 30 Fol
Any	< 49	Any	10 Thi -> 20 Fol
Any	Any	< 20	10 Asc -> 20 Nia
> 69	Any	Any	10 Pyr -> 5 Nia
Any	< 39	Any	10 Thi -> 10 Nia
< 39	Any	Any	10 Nit -> 3.33 Pyr
Any	Any	> 59	10 Car -> 10 Pyr
Any	> 79	Any	10 Fol -> 20 Pyr
Any	Any	< 40	10 Asc -> 10 Thi
Any	< 49	Any	10 Car -> 20 Thi
< 49	Any	Any	10 Nia -> 5 Thi

 *The table above uses the displayed (truncated) values rather than real ones for H, O and S. The real ones are something like 99.99, 49.99 etc.

Aperio has a graphical chart of that table.

The Thistle Cycle

Each tick something happens, and you see things change in your thistle garden. Below is our theory on what exactly happens.

• 10 is subtracted from the values for Nit, Pot, H2O and Oxy (the nutrient uptake)
• The program performs all Asc creating conversion that are active this tick. Conversions that happen are determined by 3 things:
  • The conversion must not be inactivated (voided) this day.
  • Before the uptake, the water, oxygen and sun levels have to be in the required ranges for the conversion to happen.
  • There must be more than 0 of the resource needed by the conversion available at this point of the cycle. Should there be less than 10 of the required resource available, a reaction will happen only partially (ie, if the conversion is 10 Asc-> 20 Nia then 8.3 Asc gives you 16.6 Nia). All conversions seem to require 10 of some kind of resource, and resources can be either Nit, Pot or different vitamins themselves.
  • Something being already at it's maximum value doesn't stop the program from trying to produce more. The conversion will still happen, but the value of what is being created stays at the maximum (99.99%) even though the resources are being used up. Also adding the H, P, O or N can never make the value in the garden for these 4 higher than 99,99.
• The program moves on to creating Bio. No more Asc is created this tick, even if some conversions to create it become available through other conversions later on.
• The same thing is performed for all the vitamins. The last one to be created is Thi.
  • The order of reactions performed is therefor reactions creating Asc, Bio, Car, Fol, Nia, Pyr & Thi.
• After the program is done with conversions creating Thi, the resulting amounts in the garden are displayed on the next row.
• The whole process takes about 6 seconds
• Everything starts all over again using the data on the new row (a new tick).

Research

If you'd like to participate in one of the current research efforts, check out Twisted Thistle

Sunset Enterprises also used to work on Thistles.

Also the old research page still exists, although it is a bit outdated.