Farming not very viable even with living off the land 3.

[PoppaSmirk]

In response to the post above,  I am diligent in My tracking of My skills, and of course, as I stated I did wait until Day 20 to make any farm plots simply because I had wanted to wait until I had spent additional skill points to bring LOTL up to Level 2,  and another has made comment that they felt it might be a bug.  With that in mind,  and reading through the forums here, I did also notice the nice  royal blue notice along the top of the Forum Pages,  saying for best results in using Alpha 20 experimental, a person should delete all previous versions saves.  I instantly remembered that I had saved one very special Alpha 19 save,  possibly to revisit later (or just to show a friend or two..."how fabulous looking one of My prior game worlds looked", as I had renovated several buildings in a one block area of My base and made one into a pizza parlor,  one into a "Secure parking lot  --- for My Bdubs Mod vehicles",  and a Days End Hotel, transformed into an Aeroport, complete with gift shop and Player Vending machines inside to sell repaired surplus items.   So with a fond farewell,  last night I even deleted that save,  then restarted with a fresh install again of Alpha 20 experimental.  I'm currently on Day 3 of that new Random Gen world,  so not ready to do any farming yet,  and of course I will be paying close attention to the circumstances and the results when I start farming again.   If any are interested,  I will post later on the results.

[jams]

On 12/11/2021 at 3:47 AM, Roland said:

 

That's the mistake. If you aren't level 3 of LOTL then don't craft seeds. Just keep all the crops you can and only plant the seeds you get back or find in the world. Your farm will wax and wain over time. 

 

This is the stupidest comment in this thread.  If everything works correctly, even LOTL 1 on a sufficiently large sample size (like the one in the post you replied to), should make it impossible to "wax and wain".  That is if the 50% seed return works properly and you save enough seeds/plants to replace an unlucky roll.

So far my single test has been discouraging - 2 seeds from a 10 plant coffee harvest, just enough to replant everything with 0 surplus generated.  While this should be a rare occurrence, it will still has a 4.4% chance, or 1/22 harvests, so I'm OK with it.  However this happening so many times in a row that 36 plants dwindle to nothing points either to @Zeellott lying or a problem in the code (neither of which you responded to properly).

[Roland]

10 hours ago, jams said:

This is the stupidest comment in this thread.  If everything works correctly, even LOTL 1 on a sufficiently large sample size (like the one in the post you replied to), should make it impossible to "wax and wain".  That is if the 50% seed return works properly and you save enough seeds/plants to replace an unlucky roll.

 

It seems like a stupid statement to you because you are still trying to play the game with an A19 mentality. This happens every alpha update when a feature changes. People who stay stuck in the past and keep trying to do the same thing they've always done come on the forum and declare the new feature impossible because they are too rigid to adapt. But it doesn't take long for the wise and adaptable players to start sharing their experiences and eventually even the most dense player figures out the new meta and has success-- or they revert to the old alpha and call that the pinnacle of the game's success and never leave. (There are still A16 servers running after all)

 

Trying to farm with an A19 mentality where you turn all of your crops into seeds whenever possible while at LOTL 0 or LOTL 1 or LOTL 2 is definitely going to result in a diminishing farm until you have nothing left. You are correct that sticking to that old strategy that worked because 100% of plants regrew is going to result in failure now if you try it. You will waste all your crops on diminishing seed returns.

 

My comment about waxing and waning had to do with an A20 mentality. In A20 it is advisable to not try and grow your farm by turning all your crops into seeds when you are at LOTL 0, 1, or 2 but to instead keep all your crops for food and plant any seeds you get back. Your garden will start diminishing but then you will find more seeds in loot and also at the trader that you can then plant and when you do find these things your garden will grow again. Waxing and waning means to get smaller and then get bigger and then smaller and so on. The loot table change in A20 makes this possible as long as you are using what you grow for food and not wasting it on seed crafting. Only those who invest fully into LOTL 3 will be able to create a large self restoring farm and should be the only ones crafting seeds to maintain or grow the size of their farms.

 

Now, you will either grok this or not which will determine whether you think this comment exceeds my last in stupidity. But just know that I am planting every seed I find and every seed I get back at harvest and I'm accumulating enough crops to make some recipes. Sometimes my garden is larger and sometimes smaller. I do not have a stack of stews in my food crate but I have enough combined with canned food and bacon and eggs to survive day to day. In my MP game my Mom is LOTL 3 and is easily growing the farm and producing plenty of crops and we currently have a stack of 18 stews and 1 blueberry pie as well as a stack of bacon and eggs which is enough for the three of us to not have to worry much about food.

 

Spoiler

So it seems I misunderstood what you were saying with most of my focus when I did read it being on the way you said it instead of what you were actually saying.

 

So the answer I should have said was that even though the guy was mistaken (or lying) about his farm failing with LOTL 1 and that it is possible to maintain and grow a farm even with LOTL 1 as long as you reinvest most if not all of your crops back into it, there is also another way to play with farming which is to simply eat all the crops you get which will result in a fluctuating farm size.

 

My advice to him was not stupid-- merely another pathway that people can choose to take that works if your goal is to have a garden that provides ingredients for recipes. I was wrong to say that it is the advisable way to farm. It just depends on your goals for your farm.

 

Now if the goal is simply to grow a large scale farm then, you are correct that you should use all or most of your crops to craft seeds and that even on really bad luck harvests you should be able to still maintain your farm size by using all of your crops and then hope for better luck on the next harvest. In this manner it does appear that you can eventually achieve a large farm and that the risks of completely losing everything is very low.

 

[warmer]

With the update, it's nice there is a chance to find an extra crop, but it's entirely unrealistic to not guarantee a seed from every harvested plant plot. I grew some onions last year and have over 1000 seeds from the 12 seeds I initially planted.

It is just SO counter to reality. A chance for 1 additional seed makes more sense, and making it take longer to grow is how you nerf it in my opinion. Not make seed harder to find.

[ricp]

Got to say, while I haven't read the full thread, what I have reflects my opinion on this.

 

It simply should not be possible to grow a plant and not get a seed from it. It's a shame that TFP have chosen farming as a way to affect the difficulty, as it's a very basic implementation as it is, and any changes only highlight how basic it is.

 

I get it, most people like PvE/PvP rather than farming, but there are a lot of us farmers out there. Either take the whole thing away or replace it with a better (and more complex) system. Taking what we had and chipping away at it further is just frustrating as hell for the player.

 

If it means nothing changing in A20 regarding the farming, and I have to manually edit the config files, so be it... so long as A21 has the farming addressed properly, or completely removed.

 

Just for clarity, I am not ignoring the amount of work needed to properly address farming, but it's something that desperately needs some serious love, not to be hacked apart to affect progression - to me that would be the wrong solution for a different problem.

[meganoth]

1 hour ago, Roland said:

 

It seems like a stupid statement to you because you are still trying to play the game with an A19 mentality. This happens every alpha update when a feature changes. People who stay stuck in the past and keep trying to do the same thing they've always done come on the forum and declare the new feature impossible because they are too rigid to adapt. But it doesn't take long for the wise and adaptable players to start sharing their experiences and eventually even the most dense player figures out the new meta and has success-- or they revert to the old alpha and call that the pinnacle of the game's success and never leave. (There are still A16 servers running after all)

 

Trying to farm with an A19 mentality where you turn all of your crops into seeds whenever possible while at LOTL 0 or LOTL 1 or LOTL 2 is definitely going to result in a diminishing farm until you have nothing left. You are correct that sticking to that old strategy that worked because 100% of plants regrew is going to result in failure now if you try it. You will waste all your crops on diminishing seed returns.

 

And you are wrong and that has nothing to do with some A19 mentality. With LotL 1 the farm will on average grow and with say 10 seeds found (at any time) it is almost impossible to get to the point where you have nothing left. I calculated the math and I wrote a program to simulate it as well, I'm as sure of it as someone can be

 

It still may be too much work to grow a large farm with LotL1 and therefore someone may come to the conclusion to not produce seeds from food. No question about that. But if he wants a farm, LotL1 is enough

 

 

 

 

[GlyphGryph]

I guess I still don't understand the farming changes in terms of making the game more enjoyable to play. If it really does basically amount to "You need max level farming to actually maintain a farm" which, you know, fine, I guess? But that doesn't seem like it actually changes much except that it means any player not going full bore into that tree isn't going to be able to reliably make good food and drinks, and... is that really the desirable outcome? It feels like its mostly a nerf to cooking for strength specced folks than anything else at this point. It's also odd that it works the same way for all crops. You'd think simpler and less valuable crops would be easier to farm, from a gameplay perspective, you know? So if you want a huge farm of supercorn lv3 is important, but if you just want to maintain a small potato and berry garden then lv1 would be enough.

 

If the point was that farming was too easy, to automatic, it seems like the actual plan should be to introduce some level of actual thought to the process? Blights or pests or something where you have to think about how to best solve or prevent the problem, maybe some level of maintenance work where you do less of it at higher and the bigger your farms get the more elements there actually are to interact with, both positive and negative.

 

Anyway, yeah, as is I just don't get it, the change seems solely to make it so farming happens later and is more annoying when it does and that's about it, and I guess I don't really see the point.

[Roland]

2 minutes ago, meganoth said:

 

And you are wrong and that has nothing to do with some A19 mentality. With LotL 1 the farm will on average grow and with say 10 seeds found (at any time) it is almost impossible to get to the point where you have nothing left. I calculated the math and I wrote a program to simulate it as well.

 

It still may be too much work to grow a large farm with LotL1 and therefore someone may come to the conclusion to not produce seeds from food. No question about that. But if he wants a farm, LotL1 is enough

 

 

 

 

 

One person says that my statement about farms increasing and diminishing over time is stupid because at LOTL 1 your farm is just going to diminish until you have nothing left.

 

You say that my statement that people should not use crops to craft seeds at LOTL 1 is wrong because mathematically the probability that your farm will diminish to nothing is very very small and that you should be able to maintain/increase your farm at LOTL 1 if you are dedicated to that goal.

 

<shrug>

 

I will take back my claims that the farm won't completely diminish and my claim that the farm won't grow since I haven't in fact personally experienced either path to its conclusion. 

 

I will just state that I have been having a lot of fun simply planting seeds I find, buy, and get at harvest and using 100% of my crops for food. I have seen some variation in the size of my farm. Sometimes I don't refill all my plots and they stand empty until I find more seeds. I think it is a good LOTL 1 strategy to do gardening in this fashion. If anyone is frustrated because their farm is failing or frustrated because all their crops are going to maintaining the size and/or growing the farm, then I recommend trying this out.

 

Wrong or stupid, I am having fun and finding success.

[GlyphGryph]

It might be worth making that more obvious? Maybe throw it in a tooltip or the perk description? I think most people that enjoy farming enjoy the sustainability aspect of it and that's what they generally aim for even when its inefficient to do so, and it might just not occur to people to farm in such an atypical way. I'm not sure if there's anything in the game that would indicate thats the intended way to play either. There's no actual in game mention of the seed chance that I could find.

[Roland]

23 minutes ago, GlyphGryph said:

I guess I still don't understand the farming changes in terms of making the game more enjoyable to play. If it really does basically amount to "You need max level farming to actually maintain a farm" which, you know, fine, I guess? But that doesn't seem like it actually changes much except that it means any player not going full bore into that tree isn't going to be able to reliably make good food and drinks, and... is that really the desirable outcome?

 

Your goals for farming probably determines whether it is enjoyable. If you get pleasure out of the achievement of seeing a large 100 plot farm and like to achieve that easily and quickly then the new farming may not be as enjoyable. @meganoth says that anyone should be able to grow a large farm at just one point investment but that it will take work and patience and won't be as easy as A19. For people who like a challenge and gradual progression then the tougher and slower climb to 100 plot farm is definitely going to be more enjoyable and rewarding.

 

Meganoth claims that you don't have to go all in to maintain and increase your farm size. A single point will do it which means that the devs are not requiring people to get to level 3 if they want a big farm.

 

As for making things less reliable, I do believe that is something the developers value in their survival game. They don't want things to just be deterministic and 100% controlled by the player. They do want some risk of failure and setbacks and misfortunes that the player must overcome and adapt to as they play. If a player does go full bore into a perk they should have a significantly better advantage within that sphere than other players who chose not to do so.

[quyxkh]

I don't get it.

 

If you want a sustainable farm, drop a perk point into LotL and build/maintain a substantial reserve for when your character's rookie mistakes cost you, which they will. If you get lucky your character won't screw up too much before you've got a reserve, but nobody's *always* lucky except little boys in their dreams. If you want a steady, reliably profitable farm, turn pro: drop seven perk points into Fort5/LotL3, that's like four-five-six days of leveling, plus four of those points amortize into other good things.

 

Low-skilled farming has risks now but even a 1PP spend is enough to make it sustainable in SP if you're smart about it.

 

And you don't have to farm at all if you're playing mmo-style with npc quests and all that hoohah.

[meganoth]

3 hours ago, Roland said:

 

One person says that my statement about farms increasing and diminishing over time is stupid because at LOTL 1 your farm is just going to diminish until you have nothing left.

 

You probably have misread the message of that "impolite" person. He was saying the same as I did.

 

Your advice is still something to consider even for LotL1 just because it is a viable strategy to get the food for the least possible work

 

3 hours ago, Roland said:

 

You say that my statement that people should not use crops to craft seeds at LOTL 1 is wrong because mathematically the probability that your farm will diminish to nothing is very very small and that you should be able to maintain/increase your farm at LOTL 1 if you are dedicated to that goal.

 

<shrug>

 

I will take back my claims that the farm won't completely diminish and my claim that the farm won't grow since I haven't in fact personally experienced either path to its conclusion. 

 

I will just state that I have been having a lot of fun simply planting seeds I find, buy, and get at harvest and using 100% of my crops for food. I have seen some variation in the size of my farm. Sometimes I don't refill all my plots and they stand empty until I find more seeds. I think it is a good LOTL 1 strategy to do gardening in this fashion. If anyone is frustrated because their farm is failing or frustrated because all their crops are going to maintaining the size and/or growing the farm, then I recommend trying this out.

 

Wrong or stupid, I am having fun and finding success.

 

[Roland]

8 minutes ago, GlyphGryph said:

It might be worth making that more obvious? Maybe throw it in a tooltip or the perk description? I think most people that enjoy farming enjoy the sustainability aspect of it and that's what they generally aim for even when its inefficient to do so, and it might just not occur to people to farm in such an atypical way. I'm not sure if there's anything in the game that would indicate thats the intended way to play either. There's no actual in game mention of the seed chance that I could find.

 

Meganoth says you CAN sustain and even grow a farm at just one point into LOTL. Its just that your margins will be razor thin so you have to most likely make a choice for your crop use between either seeds or food and not expect to have both. If you choose seeds then your farm will maintain and grow but you won't likely be eating very much from it. I took the other path and always eat my food and never turn them into seeds so my farm diminishes and increases as luck has it-- but I'm eating well and for me the farm is serving its purpose.

[GlyphGryph]

25 minutes ago, Roland said:

 

For people who like a challenge

I don't think there's any challenge to farming even now with these changes. It's the same outcome, it just either takes a lot longer or takes more point investments, right? Yeah, you can suffer a random crop failure and its more likely early on but that's not really a challenge, because there's nothing for a player to overcome there, the solution is to just keep doing the same thing and hope it works next time until it does because it will, right?

Of course, I also don't think the people who like to farm are generally playing to be challenged to begin with, but that's a different question altogether. I do think it would be nice if farming offered some challenges, though!

 

Quote

As for making things less reliable, I do believe that is something the developers value in their survival game. They don't want things to just be deterministic and 100% controlled by the player. They do want some risk of failure and setbacks and misfortunes that the player must overcome and adapt to as they play. If a player does go full bore into a perk they should have a significantly better advantage within that sphere than other players who chose not to do so.

This is where you lose me. You say failures and setbacks and misfortunes are things the player must overcome and adapt to - where is that element, here? What's the counterplay a random coin flip seed loss? You can put 3 levels in farming, but that's not exactly an accomplishment where you can say you adapted and overcame, you know? It's obvious some failure risks and setbacks add to the gameplay experience and some don't - a random chance of a heart attack unless you maxxed your cardio skill could be justified the same way, but I think we both agree that would be a terrible mechanic.

If a player maxes out, say, their spear skill, they're gonna do a good deal more damage, they're gonna be better at overcoming the actual challenges offered by fighting, but they'll still be engaging with the mechanic and actually using that advantage to overcome said challenges, perhaps in different ways with different builds.

I guess I don't see any of those elements coming into play for farming or the farming skill progression. What's the intended core gameplay loop for the farming experience, I guess is what I'm asking, and wouldn't it make more sense to add some sort of challenges that require player interactivity to overcome instead? Most people seem to believe its the standard farm loop of "plant, grow, profit, repeat" with a steadily growing farm, where your skill and stats allow it to become bigger and more complex over time with more valuable crops, but it sounds like that's not actually the intended loop?

But eh, you don't really need to answer. I apologize if I'm coming off as frustrating or hostile here, I really am just confused. I don't even really hate the change! I have no strong opinion one way or another, it just feels lateral in a not great way.

[Roland]

13 minutes ago, meganoth said:

You probably have misread the message of that impolite person. He was saying the same as I did.

 

Your advice is still something to consider even for LotL1 just because it is a viable strategy to get the food for the least possible work

 

Ah...I went back and reread and got his meaning this time. I think both answers to the claim: "farms fail at less than LOTL 3" are fine. Showing them that they can slowly grow their farm size at the sacrifice of having very much to eat from it is good and also showing them that you can survive off of a luck garden if you use all your crops for food recipes and don't worry about seeds.

 

The thing is you can switch to either strategy at any time. 

[Roland]

1 hour ago, GlyphGryph said:

I don't think there's any challenge

 

Nobody ever likes the word challenge when a change makes doing something less easy. That's fine, we can call it whatever you want. The word people most often choose when they don't like the change is tedious. We can call it that if you like.

 

We used to be able to instantly craft stuff. 100 arrows...instantly in your inventory. Then the developers added timers to crafting so that you couldn't just get things instantly. Of course, everyone who hated the change also said that craft timers didn't add challenge-- just the tedium of waiting for jobs to complete. 

 

There are people who think gating abilities is dumb because we are going to get them eventually so why not right now. It is just tedious playing without Miner 69 level 4 and making us wait by gating the skill via an expensive cost that will just take time to make us wait to get what is inevitable is pointless.

 

The change in farming delays the large farm and the huge surplus stockpiles of food in much the same way. It makes it into more of a progression and imposes more choices and opportunity costs upon the player. It requires a bit of planning

 

Maybe challenging isn't the best word. Maybe it is rewarding. If you have to work for something or wait for something rather than getting instantly everything you feel like you accomplished something more meaningful. Its why most people brag that they built their base they are showing without the creative menu enabled. If it was inevitable that they would have that base and not really a challenge at all-- just time spent-- then why do we value bases built in a normal game more than those built using the creative menu?

 

1 hour ago, GlyphGryph said:

This is where you lose me. You say failures and setbacks and misfortunes are things the player must overcome and adapt to - where is that element, here?

 

I'm talking general philosophy for survival games. Survival games should have chance of failure and also events that derail the player's progress and cause them to have to regain their momentum. It should not be a deterministic steady positive progression of reward after reward after reward after reward.

 

In terms of farming, A18 and A19 with the 100% auto-regrowth of plants made farming a steady deterministic positive short progression to final farm without any hiccups or bumps. A20 has changed that and some will see it as a rewarding change and others won't. 

 

I would love to see further obstacles and c-words to farming that would require player action to mitigate but I can guarantee you that even if you and I agree that allowing rabbits to attack crops or hailstorms destroy crops unless we build protective structures/hunt rabbits until their spawning mask activates that there wouldn't be others that would just call those measures more tedium and not challenging at all. I mean if eventually we are going to get a whole bunch of corn then why have rabbits diminish that....?

 

1 hour ago, GlyphGryph said:

What's the intended core gameplay loop for the farming experience, I guess is what I'm asking, and wouldn't it make more sense to add some sort of challenges that require player interactivity to overcome instead? Most people seem to believe its the standard farm loop of "plant, grow, profit, repeat" with a steadily growing farm, where your skill and stats allow it to become bigger and more complex over time with more valuable crops, but it sounds like that's not actually the intended loop?

 

If you ask a developer that question they will tell you, "This isn't a farming sim". The farming loop is simply to plant and harvest food for recipes that keep your hunger at bay in a much more effective way than eating simple foods. If this were a farming game we probably would have a mechanic of increasing the tier of our crops and having super rare crops that could only be grown under certain conditions and seasons and disease and watering and soil quality, and...

 

But the developers see it mostly as one means to get the ingredients you need for the high value recipes. That is the loop. I really doubt Madmole cares about maintaining a large field of crops for its own sake so I know the loop is not plant, regrow, increase, regrow, increase, regrow just for the feeling of being able to see that you have a 200 plot farm and 30 crates full of max stacks of crops.  No, he is looking at how easily and quickly people were able to get stacks of the best dishes too early in the game.

 

The other thing is that there really is very little that is going to actually challenge veterans of the game. Any change for us is simply a small iteration and we have everything else nailed down. But there are going to be people who do see a random chance of not getting seeds back as an obstacle to getting food and the challenge will be how they adapt to that successfully. They won't be performing with as much efficiency and plans based on experience. 

 

Finally, I would just point out that the lionshare of complaints have been "How are we supposed to farm now!?!?! 50% seed loss is impossible!!!" Based on these responses it seems like farming is at least a smidgeon more challenging for some people even if it isn't for you. If it was just simply a tedious delay then nobody would be scratching their heads trying to figure out how it is possible and Meganoth wouldn't have needed to do his mathematical trials to show that it is possible. These complaints that claim farming is no longer viable definitely outweigh those who are only complaining that manual replanting is tedious. If A20 farming is not at all more challenging than A19 then there shouldn't have been any of these kinds of threads of disbelief and shock.

[Roland]

3 hours ago, ricp said:

It simply should not be possible to grow a plant and not get a seed from it.

 

Why do you believe this? Can you elaborate on why in a post-nuclear apocalyptic world every plant should give a viable seed every single time? I think it is reasonable that you wouldn't get seeds every time.

 

3 hours ago, ricp said:

so long as A21 has the farming addressed properly, or completely removed.

 

Why does it have to be addressed properly according to your criteria or completely removed from the game? If you hate the change enough to want farming completely removed couldn't you just stop farming? I've done complete playthroughs in which I never farmed once. Why can't it exist in a form you don't like and you just ignore it as if it had been removed from the game?

 

I don't want to argue with you over these to POVs. I just want you to explain them and I promise I won't counterpoint you-- I'll just thank you for sharing and drop it. Because I am curious.

[Roland]

3 hours ago, warmer said:

With the update, it's nice there is a chance to find an extra crop, but it's entirely unrealistic to not guarantee a seed from every harvested plant plot. I grew some onions last year and have over 1000 seeds from the 12 seeds I initially planted.

It is just SO counter to reality. A chance for 1 additional seed makes more sense, and making it take longer to grow is how you nerf it in my opinion. Not make seed harder to find.

 

Those onions you grew last year were in irradiated soil and trampled by zombies from time to time?

 

Counter to reality is that there are no seasonal effects and the plants stay in their last stage indefinitely and never wilt or die and they are completely ignored by insects and animals and they require no irrigation and they can grow equally well in a planter box no matter what biome they are in. Not getting an occasional seed back in a post apocalyptic setting bothers me way less than these other things.

 

I bet if the growing time had been changed to be longer without any of these other changes there would still be a lot of outrage.

 

Not everyone is going to like these changes but if you were happy with A19 farming and want things to return to that, then "Counter to reality" really can't be the argument can it?

 

 

[warmer]

1 hour ago, Roland said:

 

 

Counter to reality is that there are no seasonal effects and the plants stay in their last stage indefinitely and never wilt or die and they are completely ignored by insects and animals and they require no irrigation

 

 

I actually live in Oregon and it rains so much I don't have to water and it never freezes. The onions have come back year after year for 3. The 12 I did plant, weren't actually from seeds, but from the bottom of the onion with the root section. Plants are INCREDIBLY resilient and no plant on the planet would survive or evolve if they produced a single seed from multiple plants.

But... I see you point

[meganoth]

I agree challenge is the wrong word here. Maybe gamble fits better. At the moment any farm plot is a one armed bandit and you can either eat 5 potatoes or gamble them in a mini-game where you actually have better chances as the casino 😉. And I think that is the first real mini-game for farming that 7D2D ever had. Sure, it only consists of throwing lots of dice and counting heads and tails. But people have fun at the casino as well with simple games of luck

 

Now farming in reality is hard work and a simulation of it in the game may have a lot more steps and cost more time. But it surely will be difficult to design anything that will be intellectually challenging or testing your hand-eye coordination and still be called farming. You can make it complicated enough that people have to study recipes for a while. But Farming just doesn't provide a good model for challenging game mechanics.

 

 

[HungryZombie]

23 minutes ago, warmer said:

I actually live in Oregon and it rains so much I don't have to water and it never freezes. The onions have come back year after year for 3. The 12 I did plant, weren't actually from seeds, but from the bottom of the onion with the root section. Plants are INCREDIBLY resilient and no plant on the planet would survive or evolve if they produced a single seed from multiple plants.

But... I see you point

I believe there are companies that are producing crops that grow without seeds so you can't replant and have to buy more seeds. Perhaps those are the only seeds available. 

[Roland]

12 minutes ago, meganoth said:

I agree challenge is the wrong word here. Maybe gamble fits better.

 

I like that. I also agree that the process of farming is not going to be challenging. Even in farming games it isn't challenging to do the farming. I guess instead of saying that this change makes farming more challenging, I would say that it makes it less certain and adds new choices and opportunity costs that weren't there before. When you gamble you can win or lose. If you win then you feel good that you made the right choice. When you lose that loss is the setback that you then have to work to mitigate. That forms a mini-objective or micro-quest of making up for the loss. It may not may not involve challenge. If you walk around opening garbage bags in the world looking for more seeds that isn't going to be challenging. If you explore some POI's that are likely to have (or that you know has) seeds then that will be possible more challenging.

 

At any rate, losing the gamble delays messes up your plans. You may have to change some things that you were going to do. Disruptions like these will be annoying to some people but to others it gives them a bit of opposition to push back against. 

 

IMO, no progression line should be a linear purely positive slope in a survival game. There should be some gambles and some random events and unforeseen setbacks to what we are doing. I think the new farming does a pretty good job of that. I'd like to see more events that push against us getting a farm up and running as well as similar mechanics in other areas of the game that are just completely 100% positive upward slopes to their finish.

[GlyphGryph]

Y'all should have "Harvest Moons" where a swarm of zombie rabbits and crows or something appear to eat your crops and you got to fight them off to protect as many as possible all night long. The bigger your fields, the more of the critters swarm. :V A higher farming skill helps by letting you rebuild much faster after the fields are wrecked.

Also, in terms of gambling, I think something that could be improved from a game-feel perspective is letting the player have some say in it. At the casino, you're allowed to bet on red or black or a specific number after all. Statistically, it's exactly the same as being assigned a number or color at random, but from a player perspective it makes all the difference in the world. I'm not sure how you tie that into farming, but people like to feel it was their fault when things go wrong, even if they went wrong due to luck, because they like being in control.

[meganoth]

24 minutes ago, Roland said:

 

I like that. I also agree that the process of farming is not going to be challenging. Even in farming games it isn't challenging to do the farming. I guess instead of saying that this change makes farming more challenging, I would say that it makes it less certain and adds new choices and opportunity costs that weren't there before. When you gamble you can win or lose. If you win then you feel good that you made the right choice. When you lose that loss is the setback that you then have to work to mitigate. That forms a mini-objective or micro-quest of making up for the loss. It may not may not involve challenge. If you walk around opening garbage bags in the world looking for more seeds that isn't going to be challenging. If you explore some POI's that are likely to have (or that you know has) seeds then that will be possible more challenging.

 

At any rate, losing the gamble delays messes up your plans. You may have to change some things that you were going to do. Disruptions like these will be annoying to some people but to others it gives them a bit of opposition to push back against. 

 

IMO, no progression line should be a linear purely positive slope in a survival game. There should be some gambles and some random events and unforeseen setbacks to what we are doing. I think the new farming does a pretty good job of that. I'd like to see more events that push against us getting a farm up and running as well as similar mechanics in other areas of the game that are just completely 100% positive upward slopes to their finish.

 

Actually mining had that once with the frequent collapses of sandy underground and the necessity to dig in the desert.

 

[GlyphGryph]

Basically, the current gameflow for almost everything is "Make forward progress, encounter a major obstacle and get set back, pick up the pieces and prepare for the next time it happens better to minimize losses" and I think if you could get farming to follow that same loop it would make it a lot more rewarding. Heck, even digging for buried treasure has this, by coupling every time you shrink the circle with throwing a wave of enemies at you to damage you and harass you! The Harvest Moon idea is mostly a joke, but something *like* that, some events you have advance notice of and can respond to and try to prepare for but will probably cost you resources and will effectively put a cap on how much farm you can manage, I think that's the real path forward here - I'm not sure introducing a gambling effect that mostly serves to slow the beginning of the exponential growth curve down helps.

 

But thanks for your responses, thanks for talking to your fans here in these threads, I've enjoyed reading this conversation and participating.