Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-24108228-20150912002302/@comment-24108228-20150918202144

Skullcrusher115678 wrote: you can always farm prickly pear leaves and make your self a giant fortress made out of Cacti walls. Heh. I take it you've never tried this? I made a cacti fort once. Went all the way around the desert mountain peak. It was the produce of about 1 to 2 hours of solid cactus farming and wall making; and it was an impressive 5 studs high, plus it wasn't reinforced to cover up the holes.

I wrote the exact numbers in a thread somewhere I think, but I think it was something around 75ish walls. I'll admit I made it before sickles, but I had my cactus foraging method pretty efficient after a couple harvests of my 5x5 plot, and even then it would only cut about a second off each crop with a good sickle. Most of the time was just spent crafting, placing and replanting things, the harvesting was actually a rather welcome change of pace as far as I remember. In other words, you can't make cacti wall forts, especially not giant ones.

Anyway, more on topic I would say that desert is actually pretty good, so long as you prepare. And by prepare I don't mean "Compost, berries, and enough architecture to make a well when I get there.", I mean bringing a forge, lantern, coin press (for levelling smithing with the gold), a few half-decent pickaxes for mining gold with, as well as the usual farming supplies and a free afternoon (and preferably most of the night too).