Are harvesting plots worth it?

Once you get your tail to Thayd and are ready Protostar will be all over trying to sell you a patch of land to call your own. It's all terribly exciting but you may be worried over spending too much money on getting your plot just right.. and trust me your gold will vanish quickly when you have a house to furnish.

So let's take things slow and look at the harvesting spots for your plot first. For a Tier One Mineral Deposit, Relic Excavation or Thicket it costs 1 gold. Now depending how your saving up is going (and how tempting those mounts look to you) one gold may seem like a lot to you but from what I can tell it's generally worth it!

I chose a Thicket for myself, expecting to get some trees to chop down, which I did get, along with a Tanning Rack for hides and a Butcher's Block for meat - I was terribly excited. Protostar really do go above and beyond (for money!). My excitement only grew when I came back thirty minutes later to find a new tree in my thicket - a Galeras Tree! Something I'd never seen in the wild and it gave me Ironbark Wood. I took my wood, leather and meat to a trader in Thayd and got offered just over 1 gold and 4 silver - my thicket had earned its keep in less than an hour!!

Then there's my friend Malachyte, in case the big sword didn't give it away she's the warrior type. she makes heavy armour in her downtime (mostly 'ass-kickin' boots' according to her) so it made sense for her to get a Mineral Deposit. At first she found iron deposits but when she came back later there was titanium and zephyrite. If she took them to your average vendor then it would have taken her a little longer to pay off her addition to her plot (but she'd have still easily done it within a day) but as demand for metal is pretty high right now with like half of the tradeskills using it she went and sold it on the commodities exchange for a healthy profit and once she'd earned back her gold investment she started saving her ore for future projects - I kind of worry what they might be!

I don't really know anyone who gathers relics.. I should try to meet a proper treasure hunter one day! But I can only presume it'd work the same. a gold outlay may seem a fair bit but it easily pays for itself within the time you have it and maintaining it costs even less than your initial outlay, yay!

And what about gardens? I hear you ask. That one is a tricky one. The questions you need to ask yourself are 1) Do I need Herbs/Produce? and 2) How often am I going back to my sky plot? The first question is pretty straightforward, are you going to use what you're growing or are you wanting to just sell the results. If you're going to be selling then you need to go to the commodities exchange and do some serious maths - you might be able to make more over selling the seeds to other people who are more actively farming. Speaking of more actively farming that brings me to the second question, basic plants grow in about 30 minutes and other plants take a while longer, but you need to take a think on how productive you'll be - how often do you intend to plant and harvest? Some people love farming, others are driven nuts by how repetitive it is so choose wisely!