Would be nice if, with high enough survival skills you should be able to get plant seeds from said plants, similar to how you can get poppy flowers from the poppy plants. Then you could be able to plant them with gardening tools.
And to prevent it from making the game too easy, they should require high survival skills, and or certain plants can only be planted during certain seasons.
Or they could always just mutate and eat your ass.
Time constraints and balance are the main reasons this isn’t implemented yet.
Also, first.
[quote=“gtaguy, post:2, topic:1442”]Time constraints and balance are the main reasons this isn’t implemented yet.
Also, first.[/quote]
True, I’m sure it would be a pain to balance out.
Farming would be a cool addition. I don’t see how balance is a major concern, really, given how trivial hunting and cooking make the entire food situation at present.
Consider that it would typically take a season to get a harvest. And an orchard would only produce once per year. Now depending on how much of a harvest you get, you would probably have to store some of that in some way to make it last until your next harvest. So I don’t think it would be too unbalanced, especially if you have to maintain your fields and keep varmints out of the crop.
Also zombie chickens please?
[quote=“GunnerX, post:5, topic:1442”]Consider that it would typically take a season to get a harvest. And an orchard would only produce once per year. Now depending on how much of a harvest you get, you would probably have to store some of that in some way to make it last until your next harvest. So I don’t think it would be too unbalanced, especially if you have to maintain your fields and keep varmints out of the crop.
Also zombie chickens please?[/quote]
Zombie farm animals ftw.
Well, if you wanted to make the food situation more realistic, which the devs appear to slowly be doing. You’ll have plenty of animals during the spring, summer, and fall. But autumn you’re going to get a lot less animals out there. Food will be a lot less common. Eventually I expect the farm plants to start to rot away eventually. You’ll have to plan and preserve for winter.
Cataclysm: Plants vs Zombies :p.
Yeah, thats kinda what I was thinking, reminds me a bit of Unreal World
Don’t get me wrong, I would love farming. But it’s rather hard to get the balance right.
What’s unbalanced about it?
Well, if you get too much food everyone will do it. But if it falls short and isn’t good enough, people just want use it.
It needs to be a precarious balance to where its good, but other methods could generate the same outcome so that not everyone is compelled to do it.
[quote=“gtaguy, post:12, topic:1442”]Well, if you get too much food everyone will do it. But if it falls short and isn’t good enough, people just want use it.
It needs to be a precarious balance to where its good, but other methods could generate the same outcome so that not everyone is compelled to do it.[/quote]
I know how to balance it, but I don’t know if it would be balanced enough.
You have to prepare the ground for farming.
Every tile on the map has a random value of farming effectiveness. Farming effectiveness would alter growing time.
Plants have to be watered with clean water.
Plants should have access to sun. Also they would grow with half the normal speed at night and when it’s cloudy.
Normal rains have a 1/10 chance to kill a plant every let’s say 2 hours of raining. (This is because water from funnels have 1/10 chance of poisoning you so it should have the same chance to destroy the plant. Or turn it into withered plant at least.)
For thunderstorms it would be the same but with 1/5 chance.
Acid drizzles 1/2
Acid rain would destroy plants instantly and have 1/5 chance every 2 hours to destroy prepared ground.
I think this way farming would be a good source of food BUT you have to keep an eye on these farms and continuously maintain them.
If it would turn out to be unbalanced it would be possible to re-balance it by changing the time needed for them to grow completely.
Under PiotraperPL’s proposed framework:
Random field-effectiveness seems unduly punitive, especially if players happen to know basic farming skills such as “fertilizer” and want to use surplus Meat or somesuch to improve yields. (Triffid chunks ought to make particularly good fertilizer–IIRC their byproducts were good for that in the book, which is why humans let them grow.)
Requiring Clean Water seems extremely tedious. Now you get to boil even more water!
Weather effects, though “realistic”, are pretty much outside player control so applying too harsh an effect there seems problematic. Further, there’s currently no practical way to persistently log weather patterns inside the game. Spraypaint is the only method that comes to mind, and that won’t effectively do the job. (Whether we want to encourage out/game notetaking is another question.)
I’ve had entire days of Rain during Summer, so that’s 12 separate 10% chances for crop failure. So much for that season!
In the absence of greenhouses or other such protective measures, Acid Drizzle/Rain as an instakill*, though perhaps “realistic”, is overly harsh. Remember that in order for farming to be worth adding, there has to be a decent percentage for the player: low chance of enough food to last a year, decent chance of enough food to last the Winter, or some comparable payoff.
*Same idea as the Rain. How many 50% chances is the player expected to pass in the grow period? 2 (25% success)? 4 (6.25%)? 5 (3.125%)?
[quote=“KA101, post:14, topic:1442”]Under PiotraperPL’s proposed framework:
Random field-effectiveness seems unduly punitive, especially if players happen to know basic farming skills such as “fertilizer” and want to use surplus Meat or somesuch to improve yields. (Triffid chunks ought to make particularly good fertilizer–IIRC their byproducts were good for that in the book, which is why humans let them grow.)
Requiring Clean Water seems extremely tedious. Now you get to boil even more water!
Weather effects, though “realistic”, are pretty much outside player control so applying too harsh an effect there seems problematic. Further, there’s currently no practical way to persistently log weather patterns inside the game. Spraypaint is the only method that comes to mind, and that won’t effectively do the job. (Whether we want to encourage out/game notetaking is another question.)
I’ve had entire days of Rain during Summer, so that’s 12 separate 10% chances for crop failure. So much for that season!
In the absence of greenhouses or other such protective measures, Acid Drizzle/Rain as an instakill*, though perhaps “realistic”, is overly harsh. Remember that in order for farming to be worth adding, there has to be a decent percentage for the player: low chance of enough food to last a year, decent chance of enough food to last the Winter, or some comparable payoff.
*Same idea as the Rain. How many 50% chances is the player expected to pass in the grow period? 2 (25% success)? 4 (6.25%)? 5 (3.125%)?[/quote]
My idea is rough and needs polishing, but I think that there should be at least a little bit of randomness in the whole process. Eventually some CBM’s that could tell you how good local dirt is or like you said, fertilizers to maximize farm effectiveness. Maybe rains shouldn’t be dangerous, and plants would require any water. But those acid rains should destroy farms, or at least damage them.
Also, you mentioned absence of greenhouses. Farming is still not implemented, so it would be possible to implement greenhouses along with farming. (I can imagine greenhouses being an item in inventory that can be activated and placed on the ground)
I’m for the low road here, making the player work for it. Overall, the climate is very wet so flora has to flourish, only the thing is - it does in the heart of the wild. Having some sort of sustainable ecosystem surrounding the triffids would power up the mechanism behind farming. If you could get +5 to speed in compensation for minimal radiation received, it’s sweeter than finding three pots on the same tile. The only aftermath could supposedly yield some seeds, for the trouble should be rewarded, yet in a less appreciative manner.
[quote=“gtaguy, post:12, topic:1442”]Well, if you get too much food everyone will do it. But if it falls short and isn’t good enough, people just want use it.
It needs to be a precarious balance to where its good, but other methods could generate the same outcome so that not everyone is compelled to do it.[/quote]
I disagree. Acquiring food simply isn’t so challenging that a farming system could break anything, no matter how much food it threw at you. Feeding yourself already becomes trivial with 2 points in survival and a knife. I would argue that the necessity of staying in one place to farm anything, rather than just clubbing the nearest rabbit to death, justifies giving players a very high incentive to farm.
In other words, beer.
Yes.
We must loot the Bee hives for their honey comes, then we could make Mead.