The Starver's Guide to Self-Feeding Farms

This guide is now fully up to date and, hopefully, finalized.

Guess who had a ton of free time on his hands and decided to compile a list of all the "major" crop combinations that require a grand total of zero nutrients to grow, meaning you only need to take care of tending and watering.

Note, the combinations listed here must exist within each individual soil tile for this to work; crops in one tile cannot feed crops in an adjacent tile.

But first, have a free table of farm plant stats as of the latest patch. (The wiki's page had not been properly updated when this was made, so I had to make my own table to figure things out.)

Now, on to the possible configurations of a self-feeding farm...

Type A: Three Different Crops in Equal Amounts (1:1:1 Ratio)

Note: Apparently, using the snapping till mod allows you to place the plants close enough that they all meet the family criteria, but I am not sure whether this is possible without that mod. Theoretically, it should be, but it would take some insane precision. Also, I replaced my original column design with the one proposed by @kuroite a few comments below.

This is by far the most common configuration. Unfortunately, it's also got a tiny imperfection: the 4 plants at the corner of this layout will always fail to meet the family requirement, meaning they will grow slower and will not become oversized. However, the imperfection does not scale with the size of the farm, so a 10x10 farm plot will produce a max of 900 plants, of which only 4 will be non-giant.

Combinations that can be done with this layout:

Type B: Two Crops in Equal Amounts

The minimalist of the bunch, contained entirely in a single tile, with 4 of each plant. I've arranged the plants in L shapes to ensure the family requirement is met. It goes without saying that you can copy-paste that same tile to make this farm as big or as small as you want.

Combinations that can be done with this layout:

Type C: Two Crops at a 2:1 Ratio

This one requires a 1x2 farm plot (and multiple of that, of course). The minority plants must be facing others of their kind to meet the family requirement and grow giant.

Combinations that can be done with this layout:

Type D: Three Crops at a 2:1:1 Ratio

This one is a tad more complicated than the previous three, but I figured it was worth adding just because of the amount of combinations it brings to the table.

Speaking of which, the combinations you can do with this layout:

All the above combinations in concise plain text, for those who want to Ctrl+F their way to them:

But what about all these other combinations?

I had considered throwing a bunch more layouts into this guide, but all it would have achieved is create a ton of bloat. The above 4 combinations will probably cover all your farming needs anyway. And if they do not, you can find most of the more complicated combinations (that will still give you giant crops) simply by partially replacing one crop with another that has the same stats.

For example, if you got 3 carrots in your setup, you can easily replace 1 or 2 of them with a Pumpkin, provided those are in season. And just like that you have a 3:3:2:1 combination. Which is a bad example, cause I don't think it's actually possible for that to give you all giant crops. :P

That's all, folks!