If I am correct in thinking that you need to be near the plants for them to grow, can I suggest the following.
Currently the tiles used for farming are part of the terrain.
I think a work around would be:
Creating a construct known as a “raised growing bed”.
Creating a “germinator”, a plastic sheet and some wood.
Applying water to the seeds to create '‘germinated seeds’'
Placing ''Germinated seeds" into an incubator, this creates plantings after a few days.
Then placing the plantings into the raised growing bed, then having the plantings ‘rot’ into the food.
This may be able to get around the problem with proximity. The only problem I can see with this is that the plantings could rot in your pockets.
But a better method of farming is needed, since you need to scavenge to get other items, and just waiting in the same place for days, just wastes the players time.
Maby also greenhouse. Built like a car metal frame that need glass walls and glass celling. Can use solar panel as celling to increase growth rate and growing winter time.
Wall metal frame with glass window
Celling metal frame with solar panel or glass.
Perhaps not use the solar panels for the direct source of light. But adding a grow lamp or similar, running off the power created by the solar panels would work well.
A green house could work all year round, whilst a growing bed could only work from Spring to Autumn/Fall.
Perhaps make growing dependent on heat and light, so that we could have a greenhouse full of plants all through winter, as well as letting us have things like bananas, pomegranate trees and similar.
Ok, so the green house acts like an indoor place but allows growing.
But what about adjacent to windows? Aren’t they viable if you have plant pots. Green houses and plants do have the disadvantage of needing to be watered, but have a higher output than out door plants (less plant diseases and pests, because of the closed environment).
I would like to expand on the indoor plants, by possibly adding hydroponics. It wouldn’t be surprising that in the next 10 or so years that we will grow a lot of plants using hydroponics since it is more efficient, so they should be relatively common, and the parts needed to create them e.g. PVC piping, pump could be found in hardware stores.
Hydroponics would need:
Metal frame (racks)
Planting containers (plant pots, cut bottles)
PVC piping/pipe
50L of water
Plant Fertiliser X 5
Tools needed, screw driver, hack saw / equivalents of previous.
Light would be needed, but daylight would be fine. And the temperature could be maintained by lighting a fire in the room. The fire could also be a light source, so you could make your Evac Shelter basement into a hydroponics store.
But I my self would like to be able to make a bio generator where I can put wood in, and get energy out, so I can have lights in my house.
(By the way, the bananas we eat are sterile, and every banana is a clone of each other)
The player MUST be near an object to have it be active. Which means don’t travel about 60 map tiles away from said object. Which is pretty bog, but that gets bad after havig a big save.
Plants grow just fine even if you aren't nearby. (Unlike for example fire, that will not do anything if you wander off.)
Unless I’m greatly mislead with some succubus’ charms, 0.A features more than a day/night indicator; the “ticker” is now a class.
But enough of that; development’s not a handicap to playing but a prospect for the community. If you look at the present farming stamp, it says “till-plant-harvest” and that’s just joyful for me, since I don’t have to dabble too much in order to have a steady supply of veggies. Now, I’ve noticed some improvements towards river and river bank “reality”, whereas rivers flood outside their beds. This is actually a perfect opportunity to practice irrigation farming at it’s foremost and the best stage. Since “swampland” has virtually no yield to explore and exploit, knowing that a nearby river boosts both growth rate and the chance of success greatly should keep the players at least curious. Knowing that organic substance spoilage and perishable flag stuck to foods means fewer assets to the player through year 2, 3 and so on - this could make the player eager and drive him to fortify near a running water source in order to stock up; reasoning with this concludes on a fact of trading with NPCs and product value (price), which rates surplus foods kind of a valuable commodity.
I’m not swinging the thread towards NPCs, just saying that, as for now, farming could use some tweaks and balancing.
Hydrophonics is quite a lot more efficient than regular farming. Since plants don’t have to grow root systems outwards for new nutrients. Just make sure to have the water pumping about.
Implementation wise, every item in the game has an “age” timestamp that says what turn it was created, obviously we track what the current turn is for seasons etc, comparing those gives you how long the plant has been growing.
Rotting and zombie resurrection both do the same thing.
The plan is to expand this to all kinds of things that change over time, with some notable exceptions (fire doesn’t just age, it does stuff, and even worse it can move around, and is very specifically tied to the contents of the map square its on, it’s a very problematic thing)
