Alpha 20 Dev Diary

[POCKET951]

10 minutes ago, Roland said:

You know, when the auto resprout function was first announced  all the farmers were upset that farming had taken another hit. The manual action of planting the seed was seen as one of the essences of "farming" just as manually hoeing the ground to make it garden sod used to be. What if they removed planter boxes and went back to hoeing the ground with a hoe? Would that suddenly be more tedious gameplay having to physically hit the ground instead of being able to have plots crafting in the background while doing other actions and then placing them quickly and tedium-free?

 

Hit the ground, plant a seed, chop a tree, mine an ore, hit a zombie, accept a quest...It's all the same button press. People who really enjoy farming want to hoe the ground by hand, plant the seeds by hand, provide water, add fertilizer-- I mean those are the pimp dreams requests for farming we've been getting for years and the the complaints we got when it no longer mattered if you planted near a water source or needed fertilizer or hoed the ground or planted seeds after the initial planting were from people who legitimately liked the farming aspect of the game.

 

Now you guys against this are calling it tedious-- but you'll spend all night banging a pickaxe against the subterranean walls or upgrade 150 frames to better blocks pressing the exact same button the same number of times if not more. Its only tedious if you aren't really into it. People who don't care about building much find it tedious. People who don't care about mining find it tedious. People who aren't into farming find planting seeds tedious.

 

You'll have to see-- but for every one of you who finds it tedious there will be others who love being able to plant each time and reconfigure their crops by grouping how they plant their seeds differently and they will be glad of the change because they don't find it tedious. There are some that would love for a blueprint feature to replace brick by brick building because they find it tedious. Gather the resources and feed it into the blueprint and voila automatic base without any of the tedious block crafting, placing, and upgrading. Do you think our builders would like to get rid of the "tedium"?

 

I think some of the suggestions I've read are great and I wouldn't be against the devs adopting them if they decide to step away a bit from this change and compromise somewhat. But if they don't change it then what I really suspect is that teams will be sharing the farming load more. There won't just be that one guy designated as the farmer dude. He'll be like--I'm not planting this entire field myself. Everyone come help and then we'll go do a quest. That would be less tedious for sure.

I don't find building or mining tedious because it also gives a very rewarding amount of xp.  If farming gave similar amounts of xp to building and upgrading blocks or mining Ibwouldnt mind it

[bdubyah]

53 minutes ago, POCKET951 said:

I just think the current iteration goes about it in a way that doesn't actually address the issue because it's still just as strong with full investment. Except it is way more tedious and frustrating to get there.

 

...Except it's not. Even at max level of LotL, there's still the 50% you lose the seed, which means having to use some of your harvest make more seeds. That wasn't a thing in a19.

 

[Roland]

Just now, Beelzebubs Ghost said:

So much black and white thinking with this either/or.

 

Wouldn't have had issues if we had wild farm and box plots as I said. But speaking of the whole seed argument, then for the purposes of internal consistency, surely this whole mechanic must also apply to trees, right?

 

They are just wood crops which can be wild planted 🤔

 

You're missing the reason why wild planting went away. Currently the terrain in a biome is forced to match that biome. If they reintroduced the hoe and you used it to change it into sod and then left the chunk, when you returned it would be back to the regular terrain forced by that biome. Trees can be planted into any terrain block so it doesn't matter that the terrain is forced to match the biome.

[POCKET951]

3 minutes ago, bdubyah said:

...Except it's not. Even at max level of LotL, there's still the 50% you lose the seed, which means having to use some of your harvest make more seeds. That wasn't a thing in a19.

...Except it's not. Even at max level of LotL, there's still the 50% you lose the seed, which means having to use some of your harvest make more seeds. That wasn't a thing in a19.

Well in a19 you 10 plants would always yield 30. With lotl3 10 a20 plants would yield 60. Say you lost 5 of the seeds. You would net a yield of 35. Lategame A20 farming is stronger than a19 farming, even if you only got 5/10

 

Heck you'd break even if you only got 4 seeds back 

[Roland]

1 minute ago, POCKET951 said:

I don't find building or mining tedious because it also gives a very rewarding amount of xp.  If farming gave similar amounts of xp to building and upgrading blocks or mining Ibwouldnt mind it

 

So it's all about the xp. You don't find the crops that can be turned into dishes that keep you fed to be rewarding and connect that with the planting? Perhaps they should add a small xp reward for planting a seed. If that little number in the lower right hand corner is what your eyes are always glued to then that is a simple and easy fix to make people love planting seeds.

 

Can't be big enough so that people just start making 1000 plot farms and just plant all day to keep up with people killing zombies. Maybe 2xp per planting. Just so something pops up in the corner and says to those who find it so, "This is a rewarding activity"

[POCKET951]

4 minutes ago, Roland said:

 

So it's all about the xp. You don't find the crops that can be turned into dishes that keep you fed to be rewarding and connect that with the planting? Perhaps they should add a small xp reward for planting a seed. If that little number in the lower right hand corner is what your eyes are always glued to then that is a simple and easy fix to make people love planting seeds.

 

Can't be big enough so that people just start making 1000 plot farms and just plant all day to keep up with people killing zombies. Maybe 2xp per planting. Just so something pops up in the corner and says to those who find it so, "This is a rewarding activity"

If it was something like 25 I'd be okay with it. 2 would be laughable.  Something reasonable. But not "I want to abuse farms all day to level"

[Roland]

10xp final offer

 

[Aldranon]

Maybe have A19 farming BUT each harvest takes 30 days!

 

Or make 30 days the default and have another slider?

[POCKET951]

3 minutes ago, Roland said:

10xp final offer

 

Deal

[Roland]

Just now, POCKET951 said:

Deal

 

I actually have no power to make this happen...lol

 

 

@Gazz would have the best sense of how much xp would be too much and he would be the one most likely making that particular change if it got approved.

[Blake_]

33 minutes ago, Roland said:

You know, when the auto resprout function was first announced  all the farmers were upset that farming had taken another hit. The manual action of planting the seed was seen as one of the essences of "farming" just as manually hoeing the ground to make it garden sod used to be. What if they removed planter boxes and went back to hoeing the ground with a hoe? Would that suddenly be more tedious gameplay having to physically hit the ground instead of being able to have plots crafting in the background while doing other actions and then placing them quickly and tedium-free?

 

Hit the ground, plant a seed, chop a tree, mine an ore, hit a zombie, accept a quest...It's all the same button press. People who really enjoy farming want to hoe the ground by hand, plant the seeds by hand, provide water, add fertilizer-- I mean those are the pimp dreams requests for farming we've been getting for years and the the complaints we got when it no longer mattered if you planted near a water source or needed fertilizer or hoed the ground or planted seeds after the initial planting were from people who legitimately liked the farming aspect of the game.

 

Now you guys against this are calling it tedious-- but you'll spend all night banging a pickaxe against the subterranean walls or upgrade 150 frames to better blocks pressing the exact same button the same number of times if not more. Its only tedious if you aren't really into it. People who don't care about building much find it tedious. People who don't care about mining find it tedious. People who aren't into farming find planting seeds tedious.

 

You'll have to see-- but for every one of you who finds it tedious there will be others who love being able to plant each time and reconfigure their crops by grouping how they plant their seeds differently and they will be glad of the change because they don't find it tedious. There are some that would love for a blueprint feature to replace brick by brick building because they find it tedious. Gather the resources and feed it into the blueprint and voila automatic base without any of the tedious block crafting, placing, and upgrading. Do you think our builders would like to get rid of the "tedium"?

 

I think some of the suggestions I've read are great and I wouldn't be against the devs adopting them if they decide to step away a bit from this change and compromise somewhat. But if they don't change it then what I really suspect is that teams will be sharing the farming load more. There won't just be that one guy designated as the farmer dude. He'll be like--I'm not planting this entire field myself. Everyone come help and then we'll go do a quest. That would be less tedious for sure.

Exactly right. Farming is something that I enjoy, and while I acknowledge that planting seeds isn't really a nice task, I understand the choice for balance and for making farming "more personal" (and actually how it should actually work).

 

Seeds had very little importance in a19. The "just plant them and forget" mechanic was nice, but you are throwing down the window ~17 items too soon. And I'm not talking in a similar way to how primitive weapons stop being useful after 30 hours. I'm talking COMPLETELY useless. Once you plant your farm, which is usually either huge or small (but limited nonetheless) then it's over for those items.  I can't think of a recipe that has seeds in its list of ingredients, so that makes it even more tough to value them.

 

In my opinion and from what I've seen the statistical yield of a farm is still profitable as long as you have enough starting produce, and -for a survival game-, it fits. Right now you oughta put 1 point in farming if you want to have guaranteed increased yields. In a21 you won't even need the point to make a profit, as the farmer outfit will take care of that for you.

 

There are other ways to do the change, like Gazz suggested:

 

-Instead of touching the seeds, you can instead reduce the statistical yield of the overall crop plants, and the result would be mostly the same BUT, the seeds being a useless item would remain.

 

So this change IS the better change. It looks well designed in the streams, and I believe it has been done by someone who knows what he is doing from personal experience, which happens to be my personal experience too.

 

Remember that 1 point in Animal Tracker is enough to keep us fed from day 1 with a bit of active hunting. A guaranteed amount xp from planting would be nice, but there's no such a thing programmed in the game so it cannot be used from existing code and it would potentially have dupe problems in multiplayer, so that's a new feature request.

[Beelzebubs Ghost]

43 minutes ago, Roland said:

 

You're missing the reason why wild planting went away. Currently the terrain in a biome is forced to match that biome. If they reintroduced the hoe and you used it to change it into sod and then left the chunk, when you returned it would be back to the regular terrain forced by that biome. Trees can be planted into any terrain block so it doesn't matter that the terrain is forced to match the biome.

 

I'm not missing the point at all, sir. I pointed out the principle; or lack thereof, of black and white thinking, when having both was an option.

 

If there were functional issues with wild farming and that was a legitimate reason for binning the wild planting, then for glaringly obvious reasons, you have no argument from me.

 

Perhaps it could have been fixed, perhaps not. Perhaps distant rendering may have influenced it, perhaps not.

 

But extra crops to make seeds which compensate for the disappearing acts of other seeds really looks like more of a tiresome and tedious minigame than anything else. A bandage on a gangrenous wound if you like, fixing a symptom; but not the underlying cause, which is food in general.

 

But my question, aren't trees subject to the same? Or is having a potentially unlimited amount of wood by planting Sherwood Forest on your doorstep (and getting two seeds for every tree you fell) legit, in a world where A19 farming isn't?

 

And what of Cotton, Goldenrod, and Chrysanthemums...

[POCKET951]

16 minutes ago, Blake_ said:

Exactly right. Farming is something that I enjoy, and while I acknowledge that planting seeds isn't really a nice task, I understand the choice for balance and for making farming "more personal" (and actually how it should actually work).

 

Seeds had very little importance in a19. The "just plant them and forget" mechanic was nice, but you are throwing down the window ~17 items too soon. And I'm not talking in a similar way to how primitive weapons stop being useful after 30 hours. I'm talking COMPLETELY useless. Once you plant your farm, which is usually either huge or small (but limited nonetheless) then it's over for those items.  I can't think of a recipe that has seeds in its list of ingredients, so that makes it even more tough to value them.

 

In my opinion and from what I've seen the statistical yield of a farm is still profitable as long as you have enough starting produce, and -for a survival game-, it fits. Right now you oughta put 1 point in farming if you want to have guaranteed increased yields. In a21 you won't even need the point to make a profit, as the farmer outfit will take care of that for you.

 

There are other ways to do the change, like Gazz suggested:

 

-Instead of touching the seeds, you can instead reduce the statistical yield of the overall crop plants, and the result would be mostly the same BUT, the seeds being a useless item would remain.

 

So this change IS the better change. It looks well designed in the streams, and I believe it has been done by someone who knows what he is doing from personal experience, which happens to be my personal experience too.

 

Remember that 1 point in Animal Tracker is enough to keep us fed from day 1 with a bit of active hunting. A guaranteed amount xp from planting would be nice, but there's no such a thing programmed in the game so it cannot be used from existing code and it would potentially have dupe problems in multiplayer, so that's a new feature request.

Anything wrong with compromising on the full  replant? For players that enjoy it they can replant half there fields. For those that don't like it as much, it isn't as tedious. Wouldn't that make more players happy?(50% chance to destroy a seed rather then gain 1 in invetory)

[SarkMCPFan]

Im sure all this farming problems will disapear with mods being made for it .

 

i guarantee it.

[Blake_]

4 minutes ago, POCKET951 said:

Anything wrong with compromising on the full  replant? For players that enjoy it they can replant half there fields. For those that don't like it as much, it isn't as tedious. Wouldn't that make more players happy?(50% chance to destroy a seed rather then gain 1 in invetory)

That.... is  almost exactly the same result. While the uselessness of the seeds would remain if you could eventually bypass that situation with armour bonus, it's the same thing with the current design, so it looks like what you are saying is sound..... but

 

There's also the performance problem. It's better for performance to delete a crop altogether than to maybe delete it or maybe swap models to something planted. 

 

So I still stand behind the current a20 design. 

 

[Beelzebubs Ghost]

9 minutes ago, SarkMCPFan said:

Im sure all this farming problems will disapear with mods being made for it .

 

i guarantee it.

 

Isn't there any way to get a good polling of the 7 Days community worldwide to accurately reflect gamers attitudes to recent changes?

 

I think it would be valuable developer feedback and give us an interesting insight to how the community values these changes.

 

I would love to see a community influenced vanilla with legit data. I know it's The Fun Pimps' game, but imagine if this was a car and after rolling it out on the production line your customers ripped out the seats, threw a new exhaust on it, altered the suspension and put tech in there that wasn't part of the factory build.. you see where this is going...

 

Just sad to see that a lot of the enjoyment comes from what the community has made to make up where the developers lack, or to remove things the developers put in and kept in through a mentality of 'since we made good decisions before, future ones will be as good.'

 

Don't get me wrong, The Pimps are competent and have created an amazing product, and I hope by gold it's not just a skeleton scaffold for modders to make the game something The Fun Pimps couldn't.

 

Again, just my opinion.

[SarkMCPFan]

maybe a21 will see a change to farming since it will be ages for that to release to get a better system going?

 

I barely farm but i horde seeds i find lol

 

i hope stable a20 isnt too far off tbh

[CoolJ]

On 12/4/2021 at 4:40 PM, Gazz said:

 

If you clear the entire map of super corn then you need to accept a quest to reset one of the Bob's Boars POIs.

 

If you are already farming it you only need 1 level in the farming perk to make a profit.

 

Statement 1. False: Not all maps have a Bob's Boars POI. I have had three random maps in A19 that had no such POI. I even looked up the name for it in the wiki and searched for it in the XML. Not there. So you MUST find a seed for super corn in this case.

 

So you guarantee that there will be a Bob's Boars POI on every single random gen map now?

 

Statement 2. False: If I only have one seed, and plant it with only one point into LOTL, then I don't get a seed back on harvest, that is not a profit. That is a deficit of one and pretty much no chance to ever find another super corn seed based on the above scenario.

 

RNG in this case is lazy and frustrating for the player. Why would you intentionally include a frustrating mechanic in your game when you could easily find other ways to accomplish your goal of slowing down farming? There is no benefit in investing a single point into LOTL when one could put that point into the animal spotting perk and pretty much guarantee being fed. Let's just add 50% RNG to everything. Might as well add a 50% chance for the player to just spawn into a game over screen. You could really get that replay stat up with a strategy like that. I know, 50% chance for every round fired from a pipe weapon to blow the weapon up. Forcing you to make another. That sounds like loads of fun. Still better than the chance that you guys will learn how shotguns work, or to realize that there is a reason that you don't see guns with a tube magazine chambered in a caliber that has pointy bullets. In all my years of working around firearms, repairing them and selling them, I have seen exactly one tube mag gun chambered in a caliber that used a pointy bullet. The tube magazine was actually twisted down the long axis to keep the pointy end of one bullet off of the primer of the one in front. Clever design.

[POCKET951]

11 minutes ago, Blake_ said:

That.... is  almost exactly the same result. While the uselessness of the seeds would remain if you could eventually bypass that situation with armour bonus, it's the same thing with the current design, so it looks like what you are saying is sound..... but

 

There's also the performance problem. It's better for performance to delete a crop altogether than to maybe delete it or maybe swap models to something planted. 

 

So I still stand behind the current a20 design. 

 

How is this exactly the same result?  You are replacing half as many seeds and if you have extra in your storage you can use those instead of recrafting. Looting seeds still seems useful

[Beelzebubs Ghost]

1 minute ago, SarkMCPFan said:

maybe a21 will see a change to farming since it will be ages for that to release to get a better system going?

 

I barely farm but i horde seeds i find lol

 

i hope stable a20 isnt too far off tbh

 

Someone did mention new clothing sets and I think there's a farmer one, and a mining one too...

 

Some of the other guys on here will be able to set us straight with this because my memory is terrible. But if I do recall correctly, I'm sure there was mention of each set boosting their respective skills (Mining gear -> better mining performance) or something along those lines...

 

 

[Blake_]

1 minute ago, POCKET951 said:

How is this exactly the same result?  You are replacing half as many seeds and if you have extra in your storage you can use those instead of recrafting

True, the fundamental difference is in the beginning and/or the initial amount of produce you have as you say. Long term is the same thing if we are talking about the important thing here, yield that is. That's why I worded it "almost exactly".

[POCKET951]

I think alot of people would be happy with A20 farming as is if the supercorn seed recipe was made to 4 supercorn so you wouldn't get shafted if you missed the 50%, everything else is abundant and easy to get going. 

 

Or because supercorn is incredibly rare and only found in a tier 3 poi. Make it a bit more common to come by so getting shafted isn't a big problem

 

I'm aware you can get supercorn seeds in farmers bundles. But how often do you get these? I'd they always gave minimum of 2 of whatever seed,supercorn included it would be fine. You'd have 3 attempts to get it going on LOTL 1

[Beelzebubs Ghost]

I just thought of something...

 

If there is a net gain in the long term with seed returns, then wouldn't this whole change of mechanic inspire in others; as it's already got me, scheming to ironically produce huge farms (something I don't even do in A19) in order to reach the same potential goal of 'Crop hoarding...' 🤔

[Aldranon]

3 minutes ago, Beelzebubs Ghost said:

I just thought of something...

 

If there is a net gain in the long term with seed returns, then wouldn't this whole change of mechanic inspire in others; as it's already got me, scheming to ironically produce huge farms (something I don't even do in A19) in order to reach the same potential goal of 'Crop hoarding...' 🤔

 

Spoilage is the only real answer.

[Beelzebubs Ghost]

9 minutes ago, Aldranon said:

 

Spoilage is the only real answer.

 

It seems like a legitimate proposal but would have to be done well. Sort of brings us back to refrigeration and functional refrigerarors/ shop freezers etc which would add immersion, keep us searching for food, and aim for electricity.

 

Although it would beg the preservation question regarding tinned goods.

 

Seems a lot better than aiming a gattling nerf gun at everything and turning melting the barrels 😬