So I am currently working on a PR (More foliage by NetSysFire · Pull Request #54411 · CleverRaven/Cataclysm-DDA · GitHub) which adds and balances foliage in general because I want more variation and useful plants. There are a loads of fruits in the forest, but there is no way it is full of e.g cultivated garden strawberries and grapes and I do want to nerf that.
The important thing is to not sacrifice fun for the realism, so I would be interested what the community thinks about how far I should go.
Forest fruit spawn nerfing
Do not modify fruit spawns
Reduce cultivated fruit spawns
Uncultivated fruit spawns only
0voters
In reality, you might have cultivated fruit spawns near forest trails where folks left their garbage, maybe also near shacks and stuff. Maybe someone had a picnic in the wilds or a bird in the nearby city ate some fruit and spread the seed via its litter.
There is plenty of wild fruit that can take the place of existing fruit trees and berry bushes, including but not limited to:
Blackberries (already included, would be boosted)
Blueberries (already included, would be boosted)
Wild strawberry (smaller berry but sweeter, I might just reduce the existing yield of bushes)
The option I’d go for wouldn’t be any of those, but rather to restrict fruit bushes to grove spawning so you don’t have a bunch of randomly-scattered various fruit bushes a few tiles from one another. The areas that get populated by a single type of bush/tree seem more appropriate to how wild fruit tends to grow. There’s always a debate to be had concerning realism vs. bloat, but personally I’d focus on making fruit spawning make sense before thinking about adding yet even more various fruit.
Thats a good point I did not consider. I think the shrubbery/grove spawns are “hardcoded” to the terrain that spawns normally as part of the regional landscape anyways.
Maybe make only certain types of fruit spawn in groves when it makes sense (blackberies and blueberries make sense for example. But other types of fruit might only grow in single bushes in the forest (wild strawberries for example).
That definitely needs some C++ hacking and is therefore not trivial for me. On the other hand, I would really like a glade map extra, similar to a grove and shrubbery, where one flower of the same kind is spawned in a big number. Would be useful for cases like bluebell woods: Bluebell wood - Wikipedia
Introducing a couple of POIs like industrial-sized Greenhouses would perhaps help with keeping “certain” kinds of fruit in check, in case there are any you don’t want to be “wild”.
Idk, like a Strawberry Farm (we already have a wine/grapes farm for example).
Unfortunately, this is out of scope here. More worldgen settings would be awesome, but I do not have the skills to implement them. I am just a lowly JSON hacker.
Ah, so you’re wanting to nerf the amount of fruit trees and bushes spawning in the world, not their harvests. Personally haven’t seen enough of them in my worlds to say whether or not there should be less of them, but the harvests are pitiful compared to real life. I mean, 20 odd years ago my dad would have me and a few of my siblings picking up plums for our neighbour, and we’d spend a couple of days filling buckets from one (admittedly massive) tree. And in game we’re lucky to get what, 10 fruit from a tree? A bit more realism in harvest size would make it a bit easier on those planning on a vegan character.
Correct. Mostly at least. Depending on the result of the poll and overall feedback, I might add e.g a wild strawberry bush which is the same as a strawberry bush but with less yield.
I agree that the harvests of trees are a bit weird. Wild trees, there appear to be no non-wild ones, even in orchards, tend to have less and smaller fruit.
At my parents house, we do have an apple tree, too (approximately 3m high) and get at least a bucket or two of apples usually. The volume of the harvest differs significantly though. One year we get only very few apples, a year later we have so many we have to gift them to neighbors to even get rid of them before they spoil. The current randomness of harvests of fruits scales with your survival skill and not with height or age, parameters which do not even exist in the game for fruit trees yet.
There are a number of interrelated issues here that make things difficult to sort out.
Plant frequency. Some things such as blackberries really do grow all over the place in the right areas, others are rare outside of orchards. This requires a ton of research to get right.
Yields. This is the easiest to latch onto, as lots of people have direct experience in this area and it readily contradicts the game experience.
Availability of produce over time. IRL most fruits are much more narrowly seasonal than how we handle things on game, some berry bushes you can productively return to daily over a long timespan and some produce yields a si gle harvest that is 9nly available for a short time.
The goal of the game is that the overall scenario is as challenging as it would be IRL, so what we really want to be correct is the product of these different aspects.
Right now produce is available for a whole season, but doesn’t refresh itself, and yields are relatively low per plant, but produce bearing plant frequencies are through the roof.
Basically if you have evidence that some aspect is meaningfully divergent from reality, we’re interested in fixing it, but be mindful of the big picture of either tanking or over buffing ultimate yields when only changing one thing at a time.
Yeah unfortunately that takes a metric ton of work to get right but I think what I am doing is a step in the right direction at least.
Balancing is tricky indeed. I need to do some work to nerf foraging in some cases because if this continues, the world in the Cataclysm will be incredibly lush which it already is but oh well. A super important part would be making stuff poisonous sometimes but that is unfortunately bugged, I mentioned it in the PR description.
I can definitely confirm the thing about blackberries, either you have none or the entire area is overgrown. These mechanics will require C++ skills I do not have but the PR I am working on is still a draft which I definitely do want to finish in time for 0.G and I did some more research meanwhile. The current state is already an improvement.