Lord of Reclamation: I Can Unlock Abilities By Building Civilizations

The people of Fontdmer Town picked out the biggest rye seeds they could find.

But honestly, the biggest seeds aren’t always the best for planting.

Seeds that are way bigger than normal rye are probably freaks of nature—their genetics are all over the place and won’t pass down to the next generation reliably.

Thane started with the guaranteed thousand acres of prime real estate.

Good seeds should be uniform in size, plump and round, with even coloring. No shriveled or damaged ones, and definitely nothing moldy or bug-eaten.

The most common old-school method for picking seeds is salt water screening.

You add the right amount of salt to clean water, then drop the seeds in. The bad seeds float to the top, while the good ones sink to the bottom.

But the Northern Borderlands are way too far from the east coast—salt is genuinely scarce as gold out here.

A thousand acres needs at least 44,000 pounds of seed, maybe even 66,000 pounds. Thane couldn’t afford to blow salt on all of that.

There are other methods like mud screening and diluted urine screening, but Thane went with wood ash water screening.

You mix wood ash with water to make a slightly cloudy solution. The screening effect is pretty close to salt water—you just watch which seeds sink and which ones float.