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As a player over a period of in-game years, what magic items and spells would allow me to create as much food as possible for a large town (~1000 people) assuming most of them are farmers/could help, and space is not a concern. The town is being created with this goal in mind, so this can be factored in (eg. circular fields for the effects of plant growth).

This is not including spells that are very small individual buffs (Haste, Enlarge/Reduce, etc). They do not need to be explicit about food/farming, something like the Decanter of Endless Water would also work. Lower magic is preferred (1st-5th level spells), but higher-level options are also good to know.

This question has a broader application than this related question that is only about the plant growth spell's applicability.

Someone_Evil
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EMTGO
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    Would an existing effect/phenomenon from an official campaign world be good for you, or do you want to restrict this to what is available in the general rules (creatures, spells, published magic items) of the official books? Ie something the players could achieve without house rules, given enough money? – WakiNadiVellir Feb 08 '21 at 14:52
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    So, you could imagine this being a 100 year downtime project for a group of high-level, rich elven PCs, and the DM does not allow researching custom magic? – WakiNadiVellir Feb 08 '21 at 14:57
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    WakiNadiVellir thinks closer to a decade and the pcs are more midlevel( max level ten) but otherwise yes, you hit the nail right on the head! the dm often gives out higher-level magic items than would be normally available so that's why I asked about the items also – EMTGO Feb 08 '21 at 15:17
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    You say RAW, but are you including optional/variant rules? – NotArch Feb 08 '21 at 16:15
  • sure? I didn't see any I could imagine helping though – EMTGO Feb 08 '21 at 16:28

2 Answers2

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Farming is work! Using magic can do a lot to improve efficiency, much like industrialization can in non-magical ways. I've divided the most relevant spells I could think of into some broad categories of farm work:

Field and Equipment Preparation

Fabricate (4th level spell)

  • Create tools and equipment
  • In some cases harvest and process in one step

Move Earth (6th level spell)

  • Prepare soil (includes tilling, plowing, mixing to evenly distribute nutrients)

  • Prepare high-labor growing areas (like rice paddies) more easily

Stone Shape (4th level spell)

  • Equipment production, especially precise irrigation systems

Create Food and Water (3rd level spell)

  • Easily produce water for irrigation

  • Create fertilizer precursor material, possibly with precise chemical characteristics

Create or Destroy Water (1st level spell)

  • Create large volumes of water alone

Levitate (2nd level spell)

  • Lift large weights for loading and transport

  • Move water into a position for passive irrigation systems

  • Potential power generation, with some other setup

Field Work

Guidance (Cantrip)

  • Better execution of all tasks (may be awkward to scale)

Speak with Animals (1sts level spell)

  • Recruit special-task employees

  • Dissuade or redirect pests

Conjure Animals (3rd level spell)

  • More workers, suitable to a variety of tasks

Conjure Elemental (5th level spell, Earth elemental specifically)

  • Helpful for dealing efficiently with burrowing pests like voles or gophers

Unseen Servant (1st level spell, ritual)

  • General-purpose workers

Animate Objects (5th level spell)

  • Workers, especially for specialty tasks (think magical machinery)

  • Workers, especially for finely detailed tasks (workers can be tiny)

Alter Self (2nd level spell)

  • Always have the ideal physical form and scale for field tasks

Freedom of Movement (4th level spell)

  • Easier to move through the fields, which may be very helpful with certain crops

Druidcraft (Cantrip)

  • Potentially a quick, effective method of harvesting crops (very crop-dependent)

Growing Conditions

Dancing Lights/Light/Continual Flame/Daylight (Various spell levels)

  • Provides light, which can supplement light on days with poor weather or extend light during non-ideal growing seasons
  • Unclear if the light is useful for plants, though Daylight likely is

Plant Growth (3rd level spell)

  • Doubles harvest

Control Winds (5th level spell)

  • Seed/pollen dispersal

  • Strengthen stalks of some crops

  • Dissuade or redirect some pests, particularly flying insects

Control Weather (8th level spell)

  • Enforce ideal growing conditions for crops

  • Can customize weather within 5-mile blocks for crops with different needs

  • Can extend the conditions of crops' ideal growing season indefinitely

Upper_Case
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  • Excellent and exhaustive! I would add also Conjure Animals: more labor force for plowing the fields, or more animal guardians for cattle and sheeps herd, if present. – Eddymage Feb 08 '21 at 21:16
  • Maybe add Conjure Elemental Earth. They have burrow speed, which could help too work the land, if the DM allows it. – stupidstudent Feb 08 '21 at 23:52
  • No love for the mold earth cantrip? – Joel Harmon Feb 09 '21 at 00:31
  • @JoelHarmon Too limited in application, in my view. The effects seem hard to apply for farm work, and are temporary anyways except for instant 5x5x5 excavation (which is a bit big for farming). – Upper_Case Feb 09 '21 at 00:46
  • @stupidstudent I'm not clear on whether or not the Earth Elemental's burrowing is accomplished through Earthglide exclusively or if they have a tunneling option. I'd bet that the elemental would have some relevant, useful knowledge or intuition regardless. – Upper_Case Feb 09 '21 at 01:23
  • Maybe summon swarms of insects that would attack insect pests. Ladybugs, grasshoppers, etc. – user3294068 Feb 10 '21 at 02:03
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The 'easiest' way to do so would be to create a magic item based on the GoodBerry spell. this spell creates from nothing 10 berries that can sustain a creature for a day. Creating a magic item that casts this spell an unlimited amount of time. In that way, for the cost of one magic item you can create enough food for 144,400 people a day. Even with some inefficiencies (berries must be consumed in 24 hours) you can still feed a lot of people.

We can even make some adjustments to reduce the rarity of the item, such as making it gigantic (e.g. a Goodberry Fountain that can't realistically be moved from the middle of the town). I can't find a good source on figuring out rarity of new magic items, but what this has going for it is that it is a first level spell effect.

If we were to go by 3.5 rules, which did thoroughly codify things pretty well, we end up with a cost of about 2000gp (equivalent to a +1 weapon). There's already an example of this item, the Sustaining Spoon, which costs 5400gp, but which only feeds four people. 3.5 had some notoriously broken magic item pricing. In my opinion, this item would end up being an uncommon magic item. It is 'powerful' but it isn't particularly useful to a player, especially if you made it immovable.

If you are wanting food for export, then you're probably better off using the GoodBerry Fountain to feed your people and using the farmland for cash crops.

Marshall Tigerus
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    I don't think OP is looking for homebrew solutions here. Is there a way to do this fully within the rules of 5e and not 3.5? – NotArch Feb 08 '21 at 16:14
  • I was using 3.5 to get a rough cost basis to compare rarity. You could also find/hire 3600 lvl 1 druids and accomplish the same thing, it's just more expensive (though probably cheaper than casting higher level spells). – Marshall Tigerus Feb 08 '21 at 17:03
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    This answer made me thing of a horrified town leader realizing, one day, that Soylent Green is Goodberries! – KorvinStarmast Feb 08 '21 at 17:20
  • The whole town is fed by mysterious bottles of red juice called Goob. – Marshall Tigerus Feb 08 '21 at 17:23
  • @Odo it would, I suspect, violate bounded accuracy and this editions powering down of magic items, though I think there are some legendaries and artifacts that have at will powers .... – KorvinStarmast Feb 08 '21 at 18:20
  • I would not permit an at-will item of Goodberry. Anything you would like to cast more than 5/day is probably abusive as an at-will. The only reason at-will should exist at all is to avoid recordkeeping hassles of how many times you used it today. The prices of the food-creating items seem to agree with my conclusion here. – Loren Pechtel Feb 09 '21 at 01:56
  • @LorenPechtel +1 magic weapons are basically at will/continuous versions of the Magic Weapon Spell. +1 Armor is the same for Magic Vestement. TBH, the GoodBerry Fountain has very minimal abuse potential (which is why most real limitations are placed on magic items) since the berries themselves have a 24 hour window of use. However, you could further reduce this window to a couple hours from being removed from the fountain if you wanted.

    You could also make many more, smaller fountains that create fewer berries, which would allow for town expansion.

     – Marshall Tigerus Feb 09 '21 at 14:12
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    @MarshallTigerus +1 (or + any)magic weapons, and specifically swords, are a foundational element of the swords and sorcery genre, epic and legenday blades (like Roland's Durandal, Arthur's Excalibur, the Singing Sword, Narsil, Gil Gilad's spear Aeglos, and so on). Accusing them of being a spell emulation is actually a backwards fit. The spell showed up to emulate a magical weapon. – KorvinStarmast Feb 09 '21 at 20:37
  • FWIW, some extended lore on Aeglos is here – KorvinStarmast Feb 09 '21 at 20:49
  • @MarshallTigerus The immobility considerably reduces it's value compared to the other food-creating items but it's still far more valuable than the simple spell * caster * 2000gp would indicate. – Loren Pechtel Feb 11 '21 at 16:08