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Changes To Farming


Moldy Bread

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On 12/28/2021 at 6:49 AM, Moldy Bread said:

Is there a reason why there have been changes to farming? When harvesting crops the crop no longer reverts to a seedling, instead you have 50% chance to get a seed. What is the reason for this change? From what I have seen most people hate this change and I agree. At five plants per seed, farming isn't very viable and I don't see why you wouldn't get a seed from a crop. Luckily there is a mod to revert it back to Alpha 19 style but I still don't know why this was changed.

I am not sure where you're seeing that farming isn't valuable. Farming was broken before and is still very powerful now, do some basic math to see. At perk lv1 you average more than 6 crops per seed, that is minimal investment with no points in fortitude. Any lower and you still find plenty of seeds in the wild to plant around. 

On 12/28/2021 at 5:10 PM, bloodmoth13 said:

Non fortitude specs should be able to farm without losing resources.

1 point in living off the land makes 1 seed average more than 6 crops, making it worth it, just slower than previous alphas.

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2 hours ago, Survior said:

The reason they nerfed farming is simple, they made animals spawn all over the place and they somehow thought this was the balanced solution.

 

If they are lying about that, sure. But why should they lie about such an inconsequential thing?

 

https://community.7daystodie.com/topic/22366-alpha-20-dev-diary/?do=findComment&comment=451634

 

Why invent developer reasons when you simply can read what they were thinking. Use the search function of the forum or follow a developer to get notified when they post in the forum

 

They may be wrong about player motivations, like madmole here saying that players would be motivated to go for the better foods for the bonuses. We will see, that is why they have EarlyAccess. They can find out what players actually do and if everyone is just hunting and mass-making boiled meat then they surely will turn a few dials so that players will appreciate farming more.

 

 

Are you playing with feral sense by the way? Without it, i.e. with default setting, it could well be that animal spawing is unchanǵed from A19. With feral sense you get too many tasty wolfes, coyotes and bears in foresty towns, sure,

 

Edited by meganoth (see edit history)
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7 hours ago, Survior said:

Orclover reposted some good advice that he found from a steam thread, to change that 50% into something else.. for me it's 100% because of the extra time to manage it.

 

I would recommend learning how to do this as a proper modlet rather than changing the base xml. There are resources for that here on the forum, and on Guppy's discord. Actually, I think there are already a few modlets that do this or something similar in the mods subforum here and probably on the other mod sites as well. There's been a glut of farming adjustment modlets since the change.

 

Advising people to change the base xml just leads to chaos the next time the game updates the relevant file.

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12 hours ago, meganoth said:

 

If they are lying about that, sure. But why should they lie about such an inconsequential thing?

 

 

Gee sorry I missed page 185 of the dev notes, but the timing is too conspicuous, OK,, they thought farming was too easy (it wasn't, you had to grind for materials and spend time on it and use levelups to be effective), and x3 the animal spawns, added more seeds in the wild and so just nerf city on farming. Are these things causes or effects? If food was just too easy why add so many more animals and seeds? Because fun pimps doesn't want us to play the game 'that way' but 'this way'. That btw, is a horrible horrible horrible way to game dev a sandbox game.  IMHO.

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8 hours ago, Survior said:

 

Gee sorry I missed page 185 of the dev notes,

 

You could just have asked for the reasons and then checked the plausibility of those reasons first before inventing new theories on incomplete information

 

8 hours ago, Survior said:

 

 

but the timing is too conspicuous, OK,, they thought farming was too easy (it wasn't, you had to grind for materials and spend time on it and use levelups to be effective), and x3 the animal spawns, added more seeds in the wild and so just nerf city on farming. Are these things causes or effects? If food was just too easy why add so many more animals and seeds? Because fun pimps doesn't want us to play the game 'that way' but 'this way'. That btw, is a horrible horrible horrible way to game dev a sandbox game.  IMHO.

 

The timing argument, sorry, has a big hole: It is a new alpha, all big changes happen at exactly the same time. So the addition of a drone, the RWG changes, the difficulty to find beakers, feral sense, ... all conspicuously happened on the same day. 😉

 

Edited by meganoth (see edit history)
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I am currently fence sitting on the farming changes. What the person who I play with the most and I DO like a lot is that we have to be craftier (hah!) with what we have on hand. It forces us to branch out to other foods that we either ignored before or made only because we wanted to make something different.  What we don't like is that seems to make Living off the Land 1 and 2 close to irrelevant.  It takes 5 plants to craft 1 seed.  At 1 and 2 you get 2, maybe 3 back from a punch.  But if you lose the seed, you're now at  a net two loss (or 3!) loss.

 

Finding seeds hasn't been super productive and most of the seeds we have found are yucca, cotton, goldenrod, and the red plant that I don't want to spell out.  All of which are useless for crafting food. We're more than willing to ride it out a bit longer and see if things even out, but right now we both feel that either the chance of getting the seed back needs to be increased to 60-70% OR the cost to craft seeds needs to be reduced.  The other possibility would be to lessen the need for corn either in tweaking recipes or more recipes that don't rely as heavily on corn/farmed foods.

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50 minutes ago, ktr said:

What we don't like is that seems to make Living off the Land 1 and 2 close to irrelevant.

I thought so too at first, but I do find it useful if I'm in the "farmburbs" common at the city outskirts. While I've got LotL 1/2 at least I can get some extra from those "wild" farm plants, and still hold some back to make seeds with later if I don't find enough before I get LotL 3. I rarely start planting my own crops before I've got 3, though.

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1 hour ago, ktr said:

I am currently fence sitting on the farming changes. What the person who I play with the most and I DO like a lot is that we have to be craftier (hah!) with what we have on hand. It forces us to branch out to other foods that we either ignored before or made only because we wanted to make something different.  What we don't like is that seems to make Living off the Land 1 and 2 close to irrelevant.  It takes 5 plants to craft 1 seed.  At 1 and 2 you get 2, maybe 3 back from a punch.  But if you lose the seed, you're now at  a net two loss (or 3!) loss.

 

Your numbers are not totally correct:

 

Wild corn plants

LoTL 1:  2 ears of corn

LoTL 2:  2 ears of corn with 50% chance of 1 extra

 

Once you convert 5 ears into a seed, it now becomes a planted crop and these are the correct numbers:

LoTL 1:  4 ears of corn with 50% chance of a seed return

LoTL 2:  4 ears of corn with 50% chance of 1 extra, plus the seed chance

 

Personally, I would recommend just planting and harvesting at LoTL 0 and 1, and not start converting plants into seeds until LoTL 2/3.  I tend to hold off on any farming / harvesting until I got LoTL to the first rank at least so I am harvesting 2 for each wild plant and 4 for each planted crop I do.

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On 12/28/2021 at 9:51 AM, Slaasher said:

 

Just the people you see complaining about it on these forums.

 

I would say that most people are happier with this change than the way it was

 

I love these statements on forums.  Makes the big rock in back yard feel good about it's IQ

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22 hours ago, BFT2020 said:

 

Your numbers are not totally correct:

 

Wild corn plants

LoTL 1:  2 ears of corn

LoTL 2:  2 ears of corn with 50% chance of 1 extra

 

Once you convert 5 ears into a seed, it now becomes a planted crop and these are the correct numbers:

LoTL 1:  4 ears of corn with 50% chance of a seed return

LoTL 2:  4 ears of corn with 50% chance of 1 extra, plus the seed chance

 

Personally, I would recommend just planting and harvesting at LoTL 0 and 1, and not start converting plants into seeds until LoTL 2/3.  I tend to hold off on any farming / harvesting until I got LoTL to the first rank at least so I am harvesting 2 for each wild plant and 4 for each planted crop I do.

I'll have to recheck, but I'm pretty sure I'm not getting 4 from a planted crop on lotl1 or 2.

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The new changes didn't make farming fun or challenging, just tedious.  Just build 10 farm plots per crop, and with 3/3 Living off the Land you can always have a net gain per yield.  This is more two steps forward and one step back approach.  And are the people complaining that growing crops are OP, the same people actually like growing the crops ?

 

I prefer needing to fertilize every few yields, watering stardew valley style and throw in bug infestation or a drought / disease randomness when you do not attend to fields frequently enough.  These suggestions are coming from a player that loves farming in any game. Make farming an important role for a group to respect and rely on the farming player.  When I said I was not farming this new run (When a20 went stable and restarted a new world), they gave up trying and ate boiled meat and quested tier2 farm runs for potatoes and corn instead and killed the ever spawning boars.

 

Edited by Ripflex (see edit history)
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15 minutes ago, Ripflex said:

I prefer needing to fertilize every few yields, watering stardew valley style and throw in bug infestation or a drought / disease randomness when you do not attend to fields frequently enough.  These suggestions are coming from a player that loves farming in any game. Make farming an important role for a group to respect and rely on the farming player. 

Please no. I would mod that out so fast. LOL I'm happy with the A20 level of farming tedium. It's a bit more than it was before, but not so much that I feel stuck at base more than I'd like.  Sure, if you're in a group and you're the farmer, you have time for that because it's your job, but I don't play MP anymore and I really don't want to add much more to the "at home" task list. 

 

I love farming. Farming and fishing are my two favorite game activities. (Yet I don't like either in real life.) As someone who played several hundred hours in the now-defunct Life Is Feudal MMO, I consider myself a professional video game field tender. The crops I grew kept everyone else fed and provided millions of yards of linen rope for their various needs. The fertilizer... oh lord. It was endlessly tedious but also rewarding, and it was also pretty much the only thing I had to do on my main, and one of my alts also handled fishing to supplement the food stocks so we could weather the off-season.

 

In 7DTD, I've got zombies to kill, loot to obtain, cars to wrench and whatever quests Rekt wants me to do that day, then I come home, work on my base, check on my meal planning situation and fix my gear while monitoring my perimeter for annoyances. (I installed the Friendly Rekt mod and now he's my favorite.) I then check my med stocks and my resources to see if I need to stock up on anything the next day. I love farming in this game but anything much more than "plant it, punch it, plant it again"... Please, no. I would even accept an overall volume reduction without complaint but I don't want farming tedium. I'm just one person. Let me have my backyard garden in peace. Farming in this game is not the main gameplay, so it really shouldn't be complicated. 

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I'm currently on day 11 and have got all the perks for farming, plus i have a farm plot where each item will be 4x4 in blocks/seeds.

With all the perks, im getting 7 [iirc] items per farm block so enough to replant a seed and have a small excess.  Obviously this only becomes a viable food source if you have a large enough plot of land with plenty of farm blocks but it's well worth it imo.

 

[I'll still prefer the old method of farming with a hoe but this isn't too bad i think]

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  • 2 weeks later...

In alpha 19 you could craft a seed from veggies or flowers or whatever, plant it, and the seedling would be left behind when you harvested it. This was a NICE thing. Harvesting was super quick and enjoyable!


Now, in alpha 20, you have this RNG amount you can harvest from a plant that YOU planted and the plant disappears, because we can't have nice things apparently. Oh and you get a seed back 50 percentish of the time, wow, thanks so much. I get a seed about 40% of the time and have gotten as little as ONE seed back from 12 plants of that type. So I had a very low profit from my plants even with all LoL perks. WHY RNG had to be added to this, I do not know, but it is quite frankly straight up bad. It feels bad to play, especially when it was so NICE before. 

The major problem with this is they ALSO made hunger and thirst worse, so in early game your hunger is dropping like a rock, and you don't have ANY food, and you have to just, FIND seeds apparently and plant them and have a net loss of veggies for food, so you're constantly starved trying to loot for food while fighting zombies but ALSO you have to prepare for horde night.
Why? Why make this so miserable? In the end at high levels it doesn't matter anyway as I have nearly 100 crops growing and I still have tons of food for everyone on my server. HOWEVER, even though I now have lots of food, it takes an absolutely stupid amount of time to harvest and replant. This is going to burn people out quicker. I mean to be honest I am sick of being the farming person and I used to always enjoy it. If the goal of wimping the player like this was to get more played hours out of people, this was the exact wrong way to do that. People play your game because it's fun, not because you squeeze more time out of them with crap like this. 

 

Wimping is negative game development practices used to reign in player power, not because they make the game better, but for some arbitrary reason that the devs think players have "too much", too much power or too many abilities or in this case apparently we had too much enjoyment so they had to squash it. This is what you are doing TFP, wimping, just stop it please. Let people enjoy the game. The changes to farming are overall a huge nerf and it wasn't necessary and it just feels bad. The ONLY positive thing is that we can find seeds more often I guess, but it isn't often enough to make up for how bad this is.

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I am perfectly fine with farming, we are safely at well over 200 of every plant on day 10, aside from mushrooms because we haven't had a lot of use for them just yet.

 

All you do is take the time to get the materials for a farm plot while buffing up your living off the land park. Simply play the game and you'll get the perks in no time, for best results start crafting farm plots the moment you can and shoving your seeds into them without harvesting until you hit level 3.

 

Overtime your surplus will start to grow to astronomical levels. You'll reach a point where you don't have to plant that much crops anymore and you can actually take a break for a while. Spend the nights replanting instead of precious time during the day for quests or whatever else you don't want to do when zombies sprint.

 

I'd argue me and my group are doing way better for farming than we ever have in alpha 19. We're sitting pretty on over five of every food in the game aside from tuna fish gravy. We're doing very well for food. There is so much more seeds and POIs with crops that we can start eating directly from those before even thinking about planting.

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1 hour ago, Darklegend222 said:

I am perfectly fine with farming, we are safely at well over 200 of every plant on day 10, aside from mushrooms because we haven't had a lot of use for them just yet.

 

All you do is take the time to get the materials for a farm plot while buffing up your living off the land park. Simply play the game and you'll get the perks in no time, for best results start crafting farm plots the moment you can and shoving your seeds into them without harvesting until you hit level 3.

 

Overtime your surplus will start to grow to astronomical levels. You'll reach a point where you don't have to plant that much crops anymore and you can actually take a break for a while. Spend the nights replanting instead of precious time during the day for quests or whatever else you don't want to do when zombies sprint.

 

I'd argue me and my group are doing way better for farming than we ever have in alpha 19. We're sitting pretty on over five of every food in the game aside from tuna fish gravy. We're doing very well for food. There is so much more seeds and POIs with crops that we can start eating directly from those before even thinking about planting.

 

Astronomically? Are you sure you're playing A20 and not a previous version? :D

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1 hour ago, Kasad said:

 

Astronomically? Are you sure you're playing A20 and not a previous version? :D

Yes. Everyone cleaned their files and I'm hosting a dedicated server. Our first world we had to delete because of poor world generation, made it to day 9 and we had a decent farm, 70ish of EVERY crop, and now we're on day 18 of which I put the results up ^^

 

For our second world, I refreshed windows since i finally managed to get a large USB drive, and redownloaded the server. We're pretty much doing the exact same thing as last time and we're much further along. The only reason we don't have a lot more plants is because I'm consuming them for all our meals. We've got 8 blueberry pies, 7 sham chowder, 15 chilli dogs, 18 meat stew, and a few bits and odds of food here and there.

 

We're on 1 hour days. With 200% loot abundance, but we don't harvest seeds from loot NEARLY as much as we rip farms apart for potatoes, corn, and blueberries. We buy every crop we can from the trader for planting and it has never failed us.

 

Not sure what all the hate for farming is, we're never gonna run out of food. I'm not the dedicated farmer, but he says it's a much better system and that we've never done better. So I can vouch for him liking it. I'd even go as far as to post the world file on Google Drive along with coords for the base if it's requested.

 

Edit: by refresh windows 10, I mean I threw the media creation tool H2H1 I believe on the USB, then entered the setup and completely formatted the drive windows was on and deleted all its partitions then reinstalled it to the same drive.

Edited by Darklegend222 (see edit history)
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This game isn´t designed for massive multiplayer (8 players is the max supported number). Also it was never intended that one person feeds a whole server. I would tell your players to get their @%$# together and care for their own food.

 

1 hour ago, Kasad said:

 

Astronomically? Are you sure you're playing A20 and not a previous version? :D

 

Yeah, in A20 on day 28, single player, i had tons of cooked meals. Enough to sell half of them to the traders and i would still have had enough to feed 2 more people.

Edited by pApA^LeGBa (see edit history)
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3 hours ago, Lunaura said:

In alpha 19 you could craft a seed from veggies or flowers or whatever, plant it, and the seedling would be left behind when you harvested it. This was a NICE thing. Harvesting was super quick and enjoyable!

.....

No, no, i don't agree.

In both a19 and a20 - farming is bad, compared to when you had to cultivate the soil with a hoe to get a crop.

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9 hours ago, Lunaura said:

Wimping is balance changes I don't like. negative game development practices used to reign in player power, not because they make the game better, but for some arbitrary reason that the devs think players have "too much", too much power or too many abilities or in this case apparently we had too much enjoyment so they had to squash it.

 

Fixed.

 

9 hours ago, Lunaura said:

in early game your hunger is dropping like a rock, and you don't have ANY food, and you have to just, FIND seeds apparently and plant them and have a net loss of veggies for food, so you're constantly starved trying to loot for food while fighting zombies but ALSO you have to prepare for horde night.

 

Sounds pretty hard. The sort of thing that might require a group of people to cooperate to help the entire community survive. The more mouths there are to feed, the more people should be involved in keeping them fed. A perfectly cromulent game mechanic, and certainly better than "find one seed, be fed for life!"

 

But if it is too hard for your group, it is pretty trivial to turn on Super Easy Mode for harvesting. Just add the seeds back into the harvest (blocks.xml). They're only commented out in the code, so you don't even have to figure out where to make the changes. Just uncomment the seed harvest and *boom*, Super Easy Mode. I bet there's already a modlet out there for it. It'll be easier than A19 even since you get the A20 harvest boosts plus an extra guaranteed seed. Don't keep playing if it's too hard for your group, just make it easier.

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9 hours ago, Lunaura said:

 In the end at high levels it doesn't matter anyway as I have nearly 100 crops growing and I still have tons of food for everyone on my server.

 

See? You answered your own question. In the end you progress and overcome. That's what games like this are all about. You start out and it is a struggle and you are vulnerable but over time and with experience it becomes easy and you are virtually invulnerable. This is how you know when you are about done with that playthrough. You won.

 

Farming used to be easy and nice from the get go with no need for putting any points into LotL. It was essentially as easy to do on Day 1 as it was on Day 100. Where is the progression in that? Where is the struggle at first to make you appreciate the ease later? Chopping down trees with my chainsaw or steel axe later is EASY and NICE but not so much with my stone axe in the beginning. Why not change things up to make it alwyays EASY and NICE from the beginning. Just give everyone Steel axes and plenty of stamina to handle them from the very beginning? Because it would wreck the feeling of progression. Farming in A19 was out of sync with the rest of the game. Your own description of it being easy and nice at the very beginning confirms it. This game isn't about getting easy and nice for free from the start. The way you describe A20 farming as a struggle and always vulnerable of failure at first but then slowly reaching that end state where you have 100 crops growing and you aren't worried any long seems to be perfectly in line with the rest of the game. It is literally the over-arching theme of the game's design.

 

9 hours ago, Lunaura said:

HOWEVER, even though I now have lots of food, it takes an absolutely stupid amount of time to harvest and replant. This is going to burn people out quicker. I mean to be honest I am sick of being the farming person

 

Yeah, it's probably time to change having one "farming person" in the group. That ship has sailed. You know what else I don't do solo when I play with my group? Quests. We do them together. We also get together to mine and we get together to fight the blood moon horde. The game doesn't force us to do it but we just choose to do things together. Why not farming? Do it cooperatively so that no one feels like they are stuck doing the boring role. 

 

Come to think of it, the one task that the game forces you to do on your own is shop with the trader and take jobs from the trader. But we even do those things as a team through our conversations. We ask each other which reward we should take in case someone really wants one of the things being offered, we announce what we are going to sell just in case someone wants it instead, we ask about which quests everyone wants to do before selecting one. Even those parts of the game that are designed to be individually done can still be done as a team. Farming can be too.

 

10 hours ago, Lunaura said:

People play your game because it's fun, not because you squeeze more time out of them with crap like this. 

 

I think people play our game because they enjoy the journey of going from weak to strong. When you are used to starting out strong in an area and then it gets changed to allow you the opportunity to grow into your strength, that can be a tough change to swallow but people starting in A20 aren't going to have feelings of how easy it used to be compared to now. They are just going to get another enjoyable journey if their sense of fun comes from making that journey. Not everyone's does as you demonstrate. But that doesn't mean everyone thinks that having it hard in the beginning and then developing into being able to do things easily is crap. It's fun and rewarding.

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46 minutes ago, Boidster said:

(...)  it is pretty trivial to turn on Super Easy Mode for harvesting. Just add the seeds back into the harvest (blocks.xml). They're only commented out in the code, so you don't even have to figure out where to make the changes. Just uncomment the seed harvest and *boom*, Super Easy Mode. I bet there's already a modlet out there for it. It'll be easier than A19 even since you get the A20 harvest boosts plus an extra guaranteed seed. Don't keep playing if it's too hard for your group, just make it easier.


Thanks for showing me this. I'm still new to making mods, your post helped me a lot, I'll research more and delve into the subject, to make my own mods

@Boidster and @Roland

I think the same. I could write anything, but it would just be a wall of useless text. Thanks

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