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

[ricp]

2 minutes ago, GlyphGryph said:

A potato is not a seed, and acting like it is is kinda weird? Potato seeds exist. They look kinda like pumpkin seeds, and come (unsurprisingly) from the flowers the potato produces. Saying potatoes are seeds is like saying apple tree branches are seeds.

 

That's simply not correct, if I grow a potato, chit it, plant it, it will grow a new potato plant.

[hiemfire]

Just now, GlyphGryph said:

A potato is not a seed, and acting like it is is kinda weird? Potato seeds exist. They look kinda like pumpkin seeds, and come (unsurprisingly) from the flowers the potato produces. Saying potatoes are seeds is like saying apple tree branches are seeds.

 

Take a potato, let it set in a dark, cool slightly humid cabinet till the eyes start to sprout roots. Cut rooting potato into 1-2 inch (25mm-50mm) blocks leaving the roots attached at the eyes. Plant in moistish ground...

[GlyphGryph]

That doesn't make it a seed, and is why I used the apple tree branch comparison. Most apple trees are grown from branches cut off other apple trees - you CAN do it that way (and should, if you're interested in a reliable, delicious product) but that doesn't make apple tree branches magically turn into seeds. Potatoes are stem tubers, they act like tubers, they do tuber things, but they are not potato seeds, which are a thing that very much exists. They store energy so the plant can regrow if damaged, and so you can regrow the plant from them (even multiple clones) - but they aren't how potatoes reproduce, which is by forming actual seeds.

 

4 minutes ago, hiemfire said:

 

Take a potato, let it set in a dark, cool slightly humid cabinet till the eyes start to sprout roots. Cut rooting potato into 1-2 inch (25mm-50mm) blocks leaving the roots attached at the eyes. Plant in moistish ground...

 

And in a matter of just a few months, it will grow flowers, and you'll have some potato seeds! :V

[ricp]

2 minutes ago, GlyphGryph said:

That doesn't make it a seed, and is why I used the apple tree branch comparison.

 

It's a flawed analogy, apples have seeds inside them that is part of the criteria for being a fruit.

 

There are seed potatoes, know what they look like? Potatoes, because that's what they are.

 

[GlyphGryph]

19 minutes ago, ricp said:

 

It's a flawed analogy, apples have seeds inside them that is part of the criteria for being a fruit.

 

There are seed potatoes, know what they look like? Potatoes, because that's what they are.

 

And potato fruit have seeds inside. What is your point? What is the difference?

"seed potatoes" are also not seeds. Potato seeds, are seeds. And they grow potato plants. Which produce potatoes.

Please, tell me you're just trolling me and don't believe this nonsense you're putting out here. What's next - carrots don't have seeds? Turnips don't have seeds? Are you going to straight up deny that potato plants even have flowers?

I honestly don't know what to expect at this point.

 

 

Potato fruits

 

With seeds inside:

 

[Roland]

Way too much gardening nerd rage in here. I'm just a filthy casual with thumbs that look as Caucasian as the rest of me.

 

Blood and bloody ashes, I'm out!

 

 

[BarryTGash]

10 hours ago, GlyphGryph said:

And potato fruit have seeds inside. What is your point? What is the difference?

"seed potatoes" are also not seeds. Potato seeds, are seeds. And they grow potato plants. Which produce potatoes.

Please, tell me you're just trolling me and don't believe this nonsense you're putting out here. What's next - carrots don't have seeds? Turnips don't have seeds? Are you going to straight up deny that potato plants even have flowers?

I honestly don't know what to expect at this point.

 

Most people are familiar with seed potatoes (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Potato#Seed_potatoes), rather than potato fruit, because we're generally used to 'domesticated' spuds which rarely, if ever, flower. I'd also wager that, from the icon TFP use in-game, that they are also referring to seed potatoes, not potato seeds. Which makes sense as they'll be a lot more prevalent. 

 

Rather than jumping straight to ridicule, why not try this approach in future: https://xkcd.com/1053

[PoppaSmirk]

On 12/17/2021 at 1:48 PM, PoppaSmirk said:

So,  I posted a few days back about My experiences with Farming.  Now,  I took steps to try again.   I cleaned out all old Alpha 19 Saves, and reinstalled the Alpha 20 experimental.  Then yesterday,  I received the newest update.  So I am just planting in the new Random Gen world I started,  Planting a variety of crops on day 14,  so My normal modus operandi is to allow 3 days until harvest.  I will let you all know the results.

Well, here I am,  staying true to my word.  I hope this doesn't bore anyone.   I've actually harvested a total of 3 times now.  Its now Day 25 and here is the result.  I am still using LOTL Level 2:  Corn - 4 seeds planted,  Yield was 18 ears and 2 seeds. (Used 10 ears to replant back to total of 4)  Final yield: 8 ears of corn  Next Planted 8 potatoes (they did very well during 2nd harvest),  Yield was 37 potatoes and 4 seeds.  (used 20 to replant back to 8 bulbs) Final Yield: 17 potatoes.  Planted 4 Pumpkin seeds, harvested  19 pumpkin and 2 seed, (used 10 pumpkin to replant back to 4 seeds again)  Final Yield 9 Pumpkins. Now Mushrooms for some reason are just not doing well.  My first harvest I started with 2 spores,  I was only able to replant 1 spore for 2nd Harvest, This Harvest I only gained 4 mushrooms,  so not even able to replant this 3rd time. Will have to hope I find more shroom spores or at least 1 mushroom so I can replant using the needed 5.  Lastly Blueberries 3 seeds planted,  Harvested 14 berries, and 3 seeds,  so Final Yield was -- 14 blueberries.  Thanks to the edit/updates that the Fun Pimps placed into the game last week, giving a 50% chance to bring in an additional item when harvesting each plant,  I am pretty close in most crops to averaging 2 items per plant.  Mushrooms aren't thriving but the Blueberries are doing very well --- This Harvest.   So overall, I think that the Developers did listen to the Players, and by putting a little extra thought into things,  made farming to be at least "workable".  Its mission accomplished if the goal was to keep "seeds"  as being an item that you still search for in loot,  much longer into the game play.  Farming takes a little longer as you do have to replant,  and the harvest yield can be highly variable,  but it does seem to be working (after last weeks update to Alpha 20 experimental)

[pApA^LeGBa]

For me it´s more than just workable. Trough looting, stopping for every plant i see and buying every fruit from the trader, i got a farm going, finally doing my first harvest on day 22. Replanted all the seeds i got, crafted seeds to get the same amount of plants as before. Then i went cooking. And i am swimming in food, more than enough for a week. The good T4 stuff plus Meat and Hobo stew.

 

You can´t have early farming now, it needs time and investing some points. But that´s just a logical step tbh. The A19 version was so easy and produced a huge overflow on food with nearly  no time or work invested.

[Rince]

On 12/17/2021 at 2:52 PM, Roland said:

So then why not build a few farming chests out of wood, clay, rotten flesh and nitrate and store a few seeds in those periodically...?   

 

No! That sounds like a job! And I play 7dtd to forget about my job!! 🥲

 

And just travelling to the snow biome and hunting a lot of puma, wolves and bears is more fun. And I have to go anyways, all my nearby Tier V buildings are in the snow biome. Lucky me.

[Limdood]

farming is an even more annoying chore than it was in A19.....but its still perfectly viable.  But ONLY if you can craft seeds.

 

1 point in LotL means an average positive yield of 1.5 plants (or 6.5 effective plants obtained before replanting) per harvest. 

 

Its annoying to do the crafting and replanting.  Its annoying to need to spend a skill point in it...

 

But it is, after all, only 1 skill point, and you can start growing more and more and more up to an endless amount of food.

 

 

The real problem with this change is that it cuts out "casual farming" that existed in A19 by locking you out of farming if you can't craft the seed.  By that, I mean just doing your own thing, questing and looting, and happening to come across a corn seed....so you make a planter and a few days later you can harvest it.  A few days after that you can harvest it AGAIN!  without finding another seed!  It wasn't sustainable, but it was a nice supplement to the scavenged and hunted food, and you could make the occasional nice recipe.  Heck, after enough POIs and looting, you might have a small hodgepodge garden giving a small variety of small amounts of produce.

 

That's completely gone in A20.  You can still make mass amount of food with a few skill points (at LotL 3 in my game, I'm gaining a profit of 105 plants each harvest from my 30 corn...and another 105 from 30 potatoes), but you can no longer just get a happy little garden to add a small supplemental food source without investing or getting lucky.  If you can't craft corn seeds, it doesn't matter HOW many plants you get per yield, you just can't keep the garden going.  Utterly gone are the days of finding a corn seed in the trash in a POI and knowing that with some crafting, placing, protection, and time, you've got a small sustainable food source.  Now you require skill point investment (at least one point) and significant luck (corn seed recipe) or significant skill point investment (LotL 2+, with its endurance requirement - because being tough teaches me how to find which kernels of corn I can replant!)

 

 

[iamnuff]

So where do yall put your farms anyway? 

 

I don't want mine outside my base or on the ground floor in case zombies get at it, but I can't put it on the roof because on horde-night its a huge pile of acid-spitting vultures up there. 

 

Can you plant crops underground? I could build a bunker, I guess.

Or put them on the roof and then build walls and a floor above them. 

[PoppaSmirk]

52 minutes ago, iamnuff said:

So where do yall put your farms anyway? 

 

I don't want mine outside my base or on the ground floor in case zombies get at it, but I can't put it on the roof because on horde-night its a huge pile of acid-spitting vultures up there. 

 

Can you plant crops underground? I could build a bunker, I guess.

Or put them on the roof and then build walls and a floor above them. 

I use a variety of methods.  I plant inside My walls often,  and on rooftops often as well,  the only crop that can grow without natural sunlight however, is the mushrooms.  If you have a rooftop that seems often targeted by Vultures, as I once had ,  then I arranged the trellis crafting piece to put up a barrier. Sunlight still gets into the trellis piece so it doesn't cut off growing if those are above your planters.  Plus the trellis pieces look pretty good overall to place them 2 frame lengths above the farm plots. as a semi roof,  adds a nice touch to a rooftop farm.  When trying to plant in a Snow Biome,  I have also crafted a greenhouse,  and used glass blocks inset to the roof to allow sunlight in,  that also works but is much heavier in using resources to make the building  completely plus glass blocks for rooftop "skylights"

[minisith]

On 12/8/2021 at 11:18 AM, IgnyteZero said:

With one seed a LotL 1 farmer can get 4 produce from a grown plant. It takes 5 produce to make 1 seed. As such the net gain of 1 plant is -1 produce, and a 50% chance of losing the first seed forever. As such it is extremely unlikely to be selfsustaining with LotL 1. Even if you had say 5 seeds you would suffer from diminishing returns. At 6 seeds you finally start to get positive produce as long as you luck out on seed loss. But the net win would be very small, only 4 produce, and you'd probably want to save them a number of ingame weeks to make sure you aren't unlucky with seed returns instead of eating them.

But even with the new loot system you won't get 6 seeds (or have 6 plots) for all the plants you need to be able to cook somethign worthwile.

This means that ALL lowlevel foods, such as baked potato, are now completely useless, food meant for the early game, because they burn the resources you will want to save to make seeds so that you later on can cook mid- and late game foods.

I am playing a two player co-op game with my wife, and we've played this game since A8/A9. She focuses on cooking and I on farming. We are now on day 15, and with LotL 3 we just started to get a positive net gain on potatoes, mushroom and blueberries. But we're still struggling with the corn. And that's with the new loot ratio for seeds in mind.
 

Day 15 is not very long in this game.  wait till day 60 then we can discuss.  I would say day 100 but that is really far into the game.

[pahbi]

"7DTD isn't a farming simulator"

 

I think I saw someone type that a while back, and I couldn't agree more, while farming is an interesting part of the game and adds flavor and depth, for me at least, I want to spend a minimal amount of time planting and farming.

 

While A19 farming might have been unbalanced, at least it didn't take up much time.  You could put it on auto-pilot and get what you needed without a lot of fuss.

 

Its ironic, that a zombie survival game that isn't supposed to be a farming simulator, creates a farming system that requires players to spend more time farming and less time killing zombies.  All the extra clicking, planting and replanting is just a nuisance, and really doesn't belong in what is otherwise an amazing game.

 

Whats doubly frustrating is that every other part of the game is super fun.  Building forts, exploring towns, mining ore and doing quests and of course killing zombies.

 

Thankfully we can easily create modlets to smooth over rough patches in the game.  I was able to return farming to an easy mode, so I can focus on the things that are really fun.

 

 

[pApA^LeGBa]

You are acting like you need a whole day for replanting. It takes like 2-3 mins for me. Also taking care of your food supply is part of the survival genre.

[RipClaw]

1 minute ago, pApA^LeGBa said:

You are acting like you need a whole day for replanting. It takes like 2-3 mins for me. Also taking care of your food supply is part of the survival genre.

Compared to A16, farming is almost effortless.

 

In A16, you had to hoe the soil. To increase the yield you had to craft and apply fertilizer. That took ages to craft in the cement mixer.

No seeds at all were returned. When you started out, you had to turn your entire crop into seeds to grow your garden.

 

[pApA^LeGBa]

@RipClaw Yeah, i remember that. The hitboxes for fertilizer, the hoe or even placing seeds were horrible too. And people actually want that back. Mostly due to the fact that one fruit would get you one seed though and the fact that you didn´t need farmplots.

 

I don´t get why people are so upset about farmplots. Rotting meat is basically everywhere to be found. Especially now with those trailers full of body bags.

[theFlu]

3 hours ago, pApA^LeGBa said:

I don´t get why people are so upset about farmplots.

I'm not particularly upset, but the mechanic was nicer, you were shaping the land itself. And the aesthetic was better, you had farms that look like farms and not like oversized house plants.

 

3 hours ago, pApA^LeGBa said:

The hitboxes for fertilizer, the hoe or even placing seeds were horrible too.

Just because a hitbox is horrible, doesn't mean adding a box below the horrible hitbox actually fixes anything. The current one may be slighlty better, but it's because some of the hitboxes got fixed. Could've been fixed for the old version as well.

[pApA^LeGBa]

You can always put them in the ground and get the same aesthetic now.

 

And yeah hitboxes can be fixed. But just look at the woodspikes, horrible to repair, for ages now. I gave up on believing they will ever be fixed.

[theFlu]

2 minutes ago, pApA^LeGBa said:

You can always put them in the ground and get the same aesthetic now.

With a horrible ditch+edge around, or a plate collar, making it look like a potted plant again, just bigger. ..

[hiemfire]

From: 

 

 

Quote

Living off the Land level 2 now has a 50% chance to harvest 1 additional crop 

This ups chance of being able to replant to 75% for each plot with LoTL2, taking both seed drop and chance at getting 5 crop into account. I can live with that.

[Limdood]

3 hours ago, hiemfire said:

This ups chance of being able to replant to 75% for each plot with LoTL2, taking both seed drop and chance at getting 5 crop into account. I can live with that.

But you already had that....as long as you weren't planting just 1 or 2 of a given plant, you had a reliable profit from LotL1.

 

2 plants give 1 seed and 8 crops.  turn 5 of those crops into a seed and you have 2 plants that give 2 seeds and 3 crops..  You could even break even with appallingly bad luck if you planted 5 crops and only got back 1 seed....1 seed & 20 crops, 20 crops = 4 seeds.  Total 5 seeds.

 

The change functionally does nothing....

As long as you can actually CRAFT the seed, Living off the land 1 gives unlimited crops.

It still doesn't address the real problem - if you can't craft a given seed, farming is worthless, while if you can craft the seed, 1 point is endless food.

 

In short, TFP did nothing to address people making mega farms to get endless food (except make it more time consuming, micro-managy, and annoying), but they broke farming the people who just started little farms with the seeds they found as a supplement to their scavenging (instead of their entire food for the entire game)

[hiemfire]

3 minutes ago, Limdood said:

But you already had that....as long as you weren't planting just 1 or 2 of a given plant, you had a reliable profit from LotL1.

 

2 plants give 1 seed and 8 crops.  turn 5 of those crops into a seed and you have 2 plants that give 2 seeds and 3 crops..  You could even break even with appallingly bad luck if you planted 5 crops and only got back 1 seed....1 seed & 20 crops, 20 crops = 4 seeds.  Total 5 seeds.

 

The numbers look great to you on paper. Then you actually try to grow a garden. And from what I remember you aren't replanting any yucca, corn, shrooms or tatos by converting the crops to seed without LotL2 unless you get lucky with the loot rolls and find the schematic for the seeds. A 1:20, if my quick estimate based on a 5 plot garden is accurate, of having 0 seeds drop isn't negligible and means there is still a good chance to end up in a continually decreasing loop ending up with no seeds and no crop to show for it.

[Itwaslagiswear]

This change wasnt well thought out. Stop breaking things that dont need fixing. My server will use the old farming system where they reset to seedlings.