As of now, as soon as food in fridges rot, vegetarian characters rund out of morale harming food unles you kill trifflids or manage to get Marloss berries. There should be a system where you can till soil and plant stuff, or at least some system that spawns fruits on trees and shrubs.
The only way I see of getting farming to work is with an entity, it would show as a friendly on-screen and have an intrinsic that spawns food in a 3x3 area around the plant. It doesn’t sound hard, goo canisters spawn entities so why not spawn an immovable entity for farming? There would be no skill for farming though, this idea is just a placeholder.
Maybe a “Foodbearing” mutation for people who are mutated like trees? This may also be how the entity spawns food.
I’d actually like that. But it wouldn’t be feasible, you can’t feed out of yourself. Isn’t there a photosynthesis mutation? There should be one. I’d surely love to be a post-apocalyptical Ent.
If you have (green) leaves then you should be getting a slowing of food requirements, it wouldn’t be feeding yourself. It would be a food tax return style thing. Of course you would still need other foods, living solely off sugars produced from leaves wouldn’t sustain a human body. It would just assist calorie intake.
But an entity is really the only way I know to spawn foods.
You can make an active item that updates and can produce things. The main problem I see is what to do when you’re away from it, it no longer updates. What I’ve come up with is that it could manipulate its own age parameter to track progress toward producing food, and when you move back in range it uses this age to calculate whether it’s time to produce or not. In other words, it’s a solvable problem.
The more important questions to me are what is its story and how should it act.
Is it a regular crop plant? is it a magic or mutant plant? Does it reproduce?
How much interaction does it need? How many does it take to support someone? How many varieties are there? Can the player plant them? Can the player make more of them? Can it die if the player ignores it?
I’m just not sure that post-apocalyptic farm simulator is a good way to go. That having been said, there could be a niche for it. I’m thinking medicinal plants might be a better match than food-producing plants.
I was hoping for goo infected seeds so that they produce many foods somewhat slowly, and when destroyed they drop at least one seed and maybe two seeds. They would be found in labs, also they would kill scent like a fire. And when near some you get the message “Your nose burns with an intense sweet smell”. I’m not aiming for realism here, I’m aiming for sustainable food. It would assist with turtling and also make for some choices: eigther “I hunt squirrels to get enough food but I’m certain my plant will provide food” or " I don’t want to hunt so ill cut down my plant and attempt to get two seeds, but if I only get one then ill need to hunt until it starts producing again.". I also think it should take 2-8 to sustain a person.
Tl;Dr I don’t want realism I want sustainability for turtling and food production. Find seeds in labs. Derp Derp Derp.
Personally, I think this would be a pretty idea. Do we /want/ to promote turtling and sustainability? That seems contrary to the core premises of the game, and leads to the optimal platstyle being incredibly unrewarding. That’s just bad game design.
If anything, I’ve recently been thinking of ways to diminish the power of food stockpiles and easy sources of food the longer the game goes on. (I was thinking rats might make an appearance at some point).
IF we did farming, I feel like it should be truly long term - at least weeks on the return, and then you’ve still got to preserve the stockpile if you want to get full benefits from it.
Kevin: As for the “no longer updates”, that would basically just be an expansion of the spoilage approach, right? I’ve been wondering if there isn’t a better way to handle things like this…
How about there’s a chance parks inside towns will have fruit and vegetables in them that provide things that can be used in recipes (zuchini, potato, chunks of veggy)? That wouls still mean you have to go inside cities to get your food, but doesn’t mean you’d run out of vegetables. Also; farming should be something really long term, it’s not so much as encouraging turtling as rewarding players that manage to survive that long.
There was no time put on the growing, it should also be tended to a lot. Needing to be watered, by rain. I guess acid rain would kill them. I’m just wanting something to have to go back too, and to not be scent tracked to my base.
We would also need a canning machine or something for preserving food, it would be a different item that doesn’t rot but gives the same nutrition as the food put in.
If I do add farming (and it’s definitely something I’m interested in) the maximum term I’d probably place on growing would be about two weeks. Two weeks is a damn long time to survive for most players, and farming won’t produce an immense amount of food, so it won’t be an instant win button; but at the same time it will be fast enough to prove useful.
As for the turtling discussion, I very much do want to encourage turtling. It’s my own preferred playstyle, and one that I find the most rewarding. I’m sure there are other people out there like me who prefer the idea of beating back the hordes and carving out their own stronghold, rather than fleeing from the hordes, scavenging along the way and worrying about nothing more than where their next mouthful of water is coming from.
That’s why I suggested crops cancel out scent like smoke, you still have to be quiet and unseen. But if you manage those two things you can remain undetected.
But yeah, I want turtling support. I hate having to always kill off all zombies chasing me. I guess the two week growth could be because of Interdimensional Goo. If people have a problem with that then tell them how the zombies came to be.
But yeah, farming would be something a lot of people would enjoy.
Also: if you can, make them require water every 2-3 days if it doesn’t rain. So people can’t just use them as zombo brand scent remover.
re: turtling, I’m totally fine with supporting it, and also making it more rewarding by adding roving bands of monsters (not constant, just every once in a while).
I also like the scent remover idea, I’ve been thinking scent isn’t interactive enough, but the only thing I had come up with was having the wet condition reduce scent temporarily (take a bath you savage!)
The aging thing isn’t that big a problem, it was, but then I figured out a workaround 
Also maybe an air freshner item? Cancels out scent to normal zeds but other zombies still chase you.
But yeah, a building would be the only way of doing this. It would probably have a GUI when 'E’xamined to water it and pick from it. It would also show the plants statistics, like if it was ready for picking or if it is infested or dead.
That’s the best way I see of doing it. Turrets are entities and they disappear/move when not watched, buildings on the other hand.
IF we decide to go down a route that encourages turtling, we need a way to make turtling more enjoyable. Right now, if we introduced farming, a player could set up (or find) a base, reinforce it, and … that’s it. They’ve one.
It would be boring.
If we introduce some sort of continuing thread that poses an occassional challenge (I suppose Triffids do that now), that would be fine. Perhaps extended periods of growing crops could attract worms and flying monsters that want access to the delicious food? And while they may not be that dangerous, they could destroy the crops and kill you if you aren’t careful?
Triffid raids… Lets do it!
Haha, I’m just imagining a half a percent chance of any crop turning into a triffid queen.
Sure, why not? There needs to be some risk for growing crops.
But how often does acid rain happen? That would almost certainly kill off all but the hardiest of plants.
Also: Plants should have intristics, and from the GUI you should be able to harvest seeds and cross pollinate. So you can combine all the traits of plants you like and grow some cool plants.
[quote=“GlyphGryph, post:14, topic:46”]IF we decide to go down a route that encourages turtling, we need a way to make turtling more enjoyable. Right now, if we introduced farming, a player could set up (or find) a base, reinforce it, and … that’s it. They’ve one.
It would be boring.
If we introduce some sort of continuing thread that poses an occassional challenge (I suppose Triffids do that now), that would be fine. Perhaps extended periods of growing crops could attract worms and flying monsters that want access to the delicious food? And while they may not be that dangerous, they could destroy the crops and kill you if you aren’t careful?[/quote]
Kevin’s quote is relevant 
Also, if and when NPCs are eventually improved to the point of playability, we can have bandit types whose sole purpose is to find you (and other NPCs) and take all of their shit. A big ol’ base is going to be like a huge neon sign screaming ‘There’s some good shit in here, come kill me and take it’
I can imagine it now.
Looter: Look at that giant wooden fort, must be some good shit in there. Opens garage size door
On-vehicle turret: Target Aquired.
Me: Why is there a corpse in my garage? Goes back to sleep
But yeah, farming shouldn’t be too fancy for now. The system I was talking about should be fine. But if we wanted to get fancy we could add a buildable Moonshine Still, which could run corn (very inefficiently, only about 1 bottle per corn harvest) into vehicle grade Shine you could run with a gasoline engine. Not that it would be healthy for the engine, but if you keep the spark plugs clean it should run fine. But running shine would reduce the top speed since shine doesn’t burn as cool as gas. Run the engine to hard and it would explode.
Oops, wall of text.
Roving monsters would probably include triffids too, good point about making them grow in your crops though, the original triffids would just sprout anywhere and everywhere, they had dandelion-like seeds, except even better at dispersing. I think plunking a full-grown queen on someone would be a bit over the top though
Actually there’s no reason we couldn’t make a/some bandit monster type(s) that avoids the bugginess of the NPC code.