Increase chance to get a seed when harvesting crops.

[Rumor7785]

IMO, level 3 of "Living off the Land" should not be the only level to make growing crops and crafting seeds viable.  Please either increase the chance to get a seed at level 2 or balance the cost to craft a seed, so farming is not a net loss.  Or like the Ravenhearst mod, add Fertilizer back into the game.  Make fertilizer expensive to craft and maybe locked behind level 3, but it results in 100% chance to get a seed.

 

 

[meganoth]

5 hours ago, Rumor7785 said:

IMO, level 3 of "Living off the Land" should not be the only level to make growing crops and crafting seeds viable. 

 

It should not be and it isn't. Even LotL 1 is enought to have on average 1.5 plants per farm plot. Really. If you want to calculate it, here is the math:

 

5 plants convert to 1 seed, so 1 seed is worth 5 plants, and vice versa.

 

Now per farm plot you get 4 plants and with 50% probability 1 seed. That is on average 4 plants + 1/2 seed that convert to 2.5 plants. In sum that is 6.5 plants.

 

You need 5 plants to remake a seed, so you get 6.5 - 5 = 1.5 plants out of a farm plot per harvest.

 

And yes, this is also happening in reality, I have produced food with LotL 1 in more than one game and it works.

 

 

 

5 hours ago, Rumor7785 said:

 

Please either increase the chance to get a seed at level 2 or balance the cost to craft a seed, so farming is not a net loss.  Or like the Ravenhearst mod, add Fertilizer back into the game.  Make fertilizer expensive to craft and maybe locked behind level 3, but it results in 100% chance to get a seed.

 

 

 

Edited December 12, 2022 by meganoth (see edit history)

[zztong]

Meganoth is right, though I myself have never experienced it.

 

Usually the availability of seeds and resources (brains, nitrate) to make farm plots means that I have LOTL 2 before I bother. I never seem to make Corn on the Cob or Baked Potatoes, despite always taking Cooking 1 with my initial 4 points. (Those recipes would have to drop the hydration loss before they were a tempting alternative to Grilled Meat.) In a single player game, I won't even harvest POI plants until I have LOTL 3. (Why get 1 now when you can get 3 later?)

 

Thus, the end effect for me again and again, is that conditions don't favor starting a farm until it's a sure thing... I can make many plots and I have lots of seeds. I've never been tempted to make a single farm plot and celebrate the growth of a couple ears of corn because I won't have Master Chef 2 until I have a farm producing a reliable inventory of ingredients.

 

Overall, the Farm economy of A20 is viable. It's different than A19, but the only significant difference is it takes more time to harvest and replant a large farm. Any numerical difference between the two systems is resolved by changing the number of Farm Plots you use and what minimum skill level you think you need before you start. You can dabble and gamble while unskilled in the early game if you want.

[Riamus]

It is always RNG, but you can make an overall positive increase in crops at LotL 1 if you plant enough to average out the RNG.  The problem is that due to RNG, it can be challenging to make a profit unless you have a large farm.  And knowing that you will do better at higher tiers, it feels like a waste of time farming at a lower tier.  Even if they increased the seed chance at tier 2, that would mean increasing tier 3 so it remains better and you will still feel like you must get tier 3 or you are wasting your time.

[Rumor7785]

Thanks for the explanation and advice.  I must be making my gardens too small.  How many of a single crop do you recommend having to always gain the net positive?

[RipClaw]

6 hours ago, Rumor7785 said:

Thanks for the explanation and advice.  I must be making my gardens too small.  How many of a single crop do you recommend having to always gain the net positive?

I have 10 plants of each type and that is more than enough. The traders sell seeds and always have at least 5 of a type. I think 5 plants per type is a good starting point.

Edited December 18, 2022 by RipClaw (see edit history)

[meganoth]

8 hours ago, Rumor7785 said:

Thanks for the explanation and advice.  I must be making my gardens too small.  How many of a single crop do you recommend having to always gain the net positive?

 

Actually there is always a chance to get a net negative out of a harvest, it just gets smaller and smaller the larger your farm is. But on the other hand you continually find additional plants (especially corn and potatos in farm POIs) so even extreme bad luck never gets one really in trouble as the found plants can be made into seeds to fill up empty slots. In a recent game I had 8-10 plots for corn and potatoes each and I could supply 4 people with food. For all the other plants I only used around 4 plots each.

 

Sometimes I had to make all plants of one type into seeds for one or two harvests to keep them at 4. But it didn't matter because I could always cook different recipes when one of those plants was in reduced supply for a week. Even corn and potatoes could have a really bad harvest but I don't remember that I ever came into the situation that I didn't have enough plants to replant all pots. Or if it did happen it must have been so easy to correct that I forgot it did happen. I remember there were harvests where I just got a handful of corn or potatoes for cooking though. 

 

Each harvest was different. In most harvests at least one of the plant types had a relatively bad harvest, sometimes even the worst case, say 0 out of 4. That meant I kept the whole harvest for seed production, i.e. produced 3 seeds and even kept the 1 remaining plant to bolster the next seed production. But this never had even a chance to go into a downward spiral because I also found seeds and plants in the world or at the trader.

 

As a rule of thumb I would say any plant you consider indispensable should have 8 plots or more.

 

Edited December 18, 2022 by meganoth (see edit history)

[zztong]

10 hours ago, Rumor7785 said:

Thanks for the explanation and advice.  I must be making my gardens too small.  How many of a single crop do you recommend having to always gain the net positive?

 

With LOTL 2-3 you'll be set at any amount. I'd have to do the math for LOTL 1, but I'm not usually bothering with farming until LOTL 2 and I've got a bunch of other skills/perks in order. (Farming is a mid-game priority for me.)

 

I don't usually get a farm going until around the time I can plant about 3 of most seeds and at that point I'm mostly just building seed stock and working on having more farm plots, not harvesting for food. At a productive scale I'm usually shooting to harvest 5-10 plots of each seed. Maybe 10-20 plots of potatoes since I seem to use a lot of those.

[Rumor7785]

On 12/18/2022 at 3:49 AM, meganoth said:

 

Actually there is always a chance to get a net negative out of a harvest, it just gets smaller and smaller the larger your farm is. But on the other hand you continually find additional plants (especially corn and potatos in farm POIs) so even extreme bad luck never gets one really in trouble as the found plants can be made into seeds to fill up empty slots. In a recent game I had 8-10 plots for corn and potatoes each and I could supply 4 people with food. For all the other plants I only used around 4 plots each.

 

Sometimes I had to make all plants of one type into seeds for one or two harvests to keep them at 4. But it didn't matter because I could always cook different recipes when one of those plants was in reduced supply for a week. Even corn and potatoes could have a really bad harvest but I don't remember that I ever came into the situation that I didn't have enough plants to replant all pots. Or if it did happen it must have been so easy to correct that I forgot it did happen. I remember there were harvests where I just got a handful of corn or potatoes for cooking though. 

 

Each harvest was different. In most harvests at least one of the plant types had a relatively bad harvest, sometimes even the worst case, say 0 out of 4. That meant I kept the whole harvest for seed production, i.e. produced 3 seeds and even kept the 1 remaining plant to bolster the next seed production. But this never had even a chance to go into a downward spiral because I also found seeds and plants in the world or at the trader.

 

As a rule of thumb I would say any plant you consider indispensable should have 8 plots or more.

 

Hello meganoth.  I will give 8 a try.  Thanks again, buddy.
 

[Old Crow]

imo it shouldn't take five plants to get one seed. A single apple has several seeds in it. At the very least there should be a perk or book that reduces the number of plants required to make a single seed.

I get trying to make getting food harder - but there's challenging, and then there's plain stupid.

[Syphon583]

37 minutes ago, Old Crow said:

imo it shouldn't take five plants to get one seed. A single apple has several seeds in it. At the very least there should be a perk or book that reduces the number of plants required to make a single seed.

I get trying to make getting food harder - but there's challenging, and then there's plain stupid.

It's only stupid when you try to compare real-world logic to a survival horror game. This is not a farming simulator. I understand people's initial frustration with it, but players have proven time and again that with the proper strategy and investment, farming in 7DTD is not only possible, but completely sustainable. I could see that maybe spec'ing fully in LOTL will reduce the cost to 3 to craft a seed. Anything beyond that seems unnecessary.

 

If it really bugs you that much, mod it. The fact remains that the farming is balanced as it is, and it seems to me that some players only want it changed to make it easier.

[Roland]

42 minutes ago, Old Crow said:

and then there's plain stupid.

 

There may be another explanation. It could be that the world after the zombie apocalypse is different than ours and that due to the atomic bombs, while a harvested crop may still have multiple seeds,  perhaps those seeds are most inert or just not viable. It is not unreasonable to suppose that off camera we've planted all the seeds from five crops and only one seedling came up out of all of that which we then transplanted to the planter box.  All of that is abstracted into using five crops to craft one seed since this isn't a farm sim game so the devs weren't interested in going into so much depth of having the players act out all the intermediary steps.

 

At any rate, I think there could be some reasonable explanations that fit with the setting. If by "stupid" you simply meant "I don't like that much scarcity" then that is certainly understandable. But in the sense of whether it could makes sense, I think it certainly can.

[Old Crow]

4 minutes ago, Roland said:

 

There may be another explanation. It could be that the world after the zombie apocalypse is different than ours and that due to the atomic bombs, while a harvested crop may still have multiple seeds,  perhaps those seeds are most inert or just not viable. It is not unreasonable to suppose that off camera we've planted all the seeds from five crops and only one seedling came up out of all of that which we then transplanted to the planter box.  All of that is abstracted into using five crops to craft one seed since this isn't a farm sim game so the devs weren't interested in going into so much depth of having the players act out all the intermediary steps.

 

At any rate, I think there could be some reasonable explanations that fit with the setting. If by "stupid" you simply meant "I don't like that much scarcity" then that is certainly understandable. But in the sense of whether it could makes sense, I think it certainly can.

 

See, that's a reasonable response and explanation. I can vibe with that.

[FA_Q2]

 

On 12/18/2022 at 3:49 AM, meganoth said:

 

Actually there is always a chance to get a net negative out of a harvest, it just gets smaller and smaller the larger your farm is. But on the other hand you continually find additional plants (especially corn and potatos in farm POIs) so even extreme bad luck never gets one really in trouble as the found plants can be made into seeds to fill up empty slots. In a recent game I had 8-10 plots for corn and potatoes each and I could supply 4 people with food. For all the other plants I only used around 4 plots each.

 

Sometimes I had to make all plants of one type into seeds for one or two harvests to keep them at 4. But it didn't matter because I could always cook different recipes when one of those plants was in reduced supply for a week. Even corn and potatoes could have a really bad harvest but I don't remember that I ever came into the situation that I didn't have enough plants to replant all pots. Or if it did happen it must have been so easy to correct that I forgot it did happen. I remember there were harvests where I just got a handful of corn or potatoes for cooking though. 

 

Each harvest was different. In most harvests at least one of the plant types had a relatively bad harvest, sometimes even the worst case, say 0 out of 4. That meant I kept the whole harvest for seed production, i.e. produced 3 seeds and even kept the 1 remaining plant to bolster the next seed production. But this never had even a chance to go into a downward spiral because I also found seeds and plants in the world or at the trader.

 

As a rule of thumb I would say any plant you consider indispensable should have 8 plots or more.

 

The only real downside here for me is that the RNG can really screw you over with super corn because it is pretty damn rare.  Finding a few super corn seeds is jut aggravating because there is a reasonable chance that they fail and you are left with 4 super corn and noting to do with it.

 

I really hate the new farming system but I understand what they are going for and the other changes in 20 just flood it out so overall I think it was a really fantastic update.  I actually preferred much older versions where we could simply 'take' the plants rather than having to re-plant them every time.  I would much prefer if they kept that in but changed the harvest itself to possibly yield nothing or just one crop until you perked it up.  Replanting my garden every time is just boring IMHO.

 

[zztong]

7 hours ago, Old Crow said:

it shouldn't take five plants to get one seed. A single apple has several seeds in it.

 

Yes, this has gotten a laugh out of me several times. For corn, we literally eat the seed. I do sober up when I remember plants grow to maturity in 2 days, because if I had to wait 60-100 days for corn to mature then I'd need a whole lot more farm plots, plus harvesting and replanting would take forever.

 

But I also like the explanation that a game seed represents having planted lots of seeds and conditions: altered climate, poor seed quality, and perhaps in 7D2D corporations sold "mostly-sterile" seed stock.

 

30 minutes ago, FA_Q2 said:

The only real downside here for me is that the RNG can really screw you over with super corn because it is pretty damn rare.

 

There is a POI dedicated to super corn. That's usually enough in a single player game, specially if you wait for LOTL 3 to harvest it. On servers that POI is popular mostly for all of the meat you can get from the boars found within. But on servers I usually find that farmers share seeds. I'm curious what your experience has been.

 

41 minutes ago, FA_Q2 said:

Replanting my garden every time is just boring IMHO.

 

Agreed.

[meganoth]

41 minutes ago, FA_Q2 said:

 

The only real downside here for me is that the RNG can really screw you over with super corn because it is pretty damn rare.  Finding a few super corn seeds is jut aggravating because there is a reasonable chance that they fail and you are left with 4 super corn and noting to do with it.

 

supercorn is entirely optional. But if you have a game where you absolutely depend on its availability then you should plan ahead and perk LotL3 before planting any of the seeds, then there is no chance of failure anymore, even with only one seed. 

 

41 minutes ago, FA_Q2 said:

 

I really hate the new farming system but I understand what they are going for and the other changes in 20 just flood it out so overall I think it was a really fantastic update.  I actually preferred much older versions where we could simply 'take' the plants rather than having to re-plant them every time.  I would much prefer if they kept that in but changed the harvest itself to possibly yield nothing or just one crop until you perked it up.  Replanting my garden every time is just boring IMHO.

 

 

I agree that the grind to replant everything is needless and could easily be halved.

 

TFP have said that that is intentional because it makes farming more "meaningful", which in my case didn't work, sorry. 

 

[Flycatcher]

Would be nice if they expand on the farming though, like adding a chicken coop for eggs  that you feed corn, blueberries, grass seeds (works like forge but autocraft eggs and manure) 

Then use the manure in an alt seed recipe, to set the requirement lower.

[Old Crow]

5 hours ago, meganoth said:

 

I agree that the grind to replant everything is needless and could easily be halved.

 

TFP have said that that is intentional because it makes farming more "meaningful", which in my case didn't work, sorry. 

 

 

Maybe they meant "tedious" instead of "meaningful."

 

A QOL idea I just had - instead of a 50% chance to get a seed back when harvesting, why not make it a 50% to leave a seedling? Then we're only having to replant any spots that didn't yield one. That we we still have to replant empty spots, but not spots that yielded a seed? It'd still give the same effect they were going for, with a little time saved.

[meganoth]

6 hours ago, Old Crow said:

 

Maybe they meant "tedious" instead of "meaningful."

 

A QOL idea I just had - instead of a 50% chance to get a seed back when harvesting, why not make it a 50% to leave a seedling? Then we're only having to replant any spots that didn't yield one. That we we still have to replant empty spots, but not spots that yielded a seed? It'd still give the same effect they were going for, with a little time saved.

 

Exactly what I had proposed many months ago and that is what I meant above with "easily be halved"

 

[Old Crow]

1 hour ago, meganoth said:

 

Exactly what I had proposed many months ago and that is what I meant above with "easily be halved"

 

 

Ah okay, I getcha. Hopefully the dev team might consider it?

[Riamus]

On 12/20/2022 at 9:30 AM, zztong said:

 

I do sober up when I remember plants grow to maturity in 2 days, because if I had to wait 60-100 days for corn to mature then I'd need a whole lot more farm plots, plus harvesting and replanting would take forever.

That in itself can be considered part of what is happening with seeds.  If you were to assume you got more seeds and planted them and harvested then in a few months, this is just a way to allow "early harvesting" of some seeds, but not all.  If you replant for a few months straight, you'd probably end up with the same results as a single planting that you had to wait a few months for, but where you could get many more seeds each planting.