CRAZY IDEA : Crops improvements

[Goblinounours]

Ok, so this is going to be a follow-up to this previous thread I wrote a few weeks ago.
First, I wanted to compile some of my ideas and a few that other people wrote that I thought were pretty nice.
I’m doing this so that the devs like @james don’t have to read an entire thread worth of comments to find little tid-bits of good suggestions.

Improving Decorative Crops

• OPTION 1 : Allowing the player to convert a withered decorative crop into a non-withered decorative crop which gives no (or almost no) prestige, but lasts forever.

• OPTION 2 : Instead of the fertilizer being a one-time thing you put on a fully-grown decorative crop, make it something you have to apply once every month to reset a timer. If the timer runs out, the plant withers and die. If you keep fertilizing the plant, it never dies.

• OPTION 3 : Remove all RNG from decorative crops. You plant a crop and put fertilizer on it, the crop says the plant will die in a very precise time-frame, with no randomness.

• Option 1
• Option 2
• Option 3
• Other… (comment!)

Improving Farming Crops - Goo

• Rework the balancing for goo to allow the crop and seed yields to go higher.

• If putting 1 color pigment in the pigment processor equals 1 spray paint item, then mixing 2 color pigments in the pigment processor should produce 2 spray paint items. Conservation of mass FTW!

• OPTION 1 : Give a durability bar to the spray paint items like a tool or weapon, so that we can use them several times.

• OPTION 2 : Make it so that 1 color pigment always equals to X spray paint items (X being a number such as 10 or 50).

• OPTION 3 : Just increase the crop yield of goo so that we can craft more spray paints and make more color mixes.

• Option 1
• Option 2
• Option 3
• Other… (comment!)

Improving Farming

• Not that I think real-life is a good example for gameplay in video-games, in real-life, when you harvest something like tomatoes or beans, do you rip the crop out of the ground? No. You take the tomatoes and wait for the crop to produce more tomatoes.
  So, in Boundless, it would be nice if there was a chance for some crops, when harvested while fully grown, to give you produce and, instead of seeds, the crop would revert to its previous stage of growth.

• I believe that there should be safe-guards in place to prevent a fully grown crop to give nothing. It has happened to me several times to fall into that salt-inducing RNG spot where I got no produce or seeds when harvesting a crop.

• Add a new inorganic crop, which would produce oortstones. To make it balanced, it would have to have something like a max crop yield of 25% and a max seed yield of 100% (when fully optimized).
  These seeds could be extremely rare, only found during hunts on T6+ exo-worlds.

• Yay for oortstone crop!
• Nay for oortstone crop!
• Meh for oortstone crop… (comment!)

[AeneaGames]

LOL, I posted the following thread ten minutes earlier:

Goo and the new fuels

What does everyone here think of how goo and the new fuel crops work? Worth it? Not worth it? Meh? What? I myself love the idea of goo! Dye the blocks myself in the colour I want! But getting 1 spray can of a certain colour isn’t that easy. Not saying it should be, I am perfectly fine how the whole system works. I just can’t stomach the idea tho that all this work mean I can dye only 1 block per can! This is what I don’t like about it! If it was 50 it would be attractive to go to all the tr…

[Venom]

OPTION 3 : Remove all RNG from decorative crops. You plant a crop and put fertilizer on it, the crop says the plant will die in a very precise time-frame, with no randomness.

I chose option 3 here as a way to meet in the middle. The devs seem to be pushing for this to require some degree of effort to maintain. Probably as a way to stimulate the economy. Though if I went off what I wanted, option 1 would be best.

For the farming section option 3 would just mean more harvesting. I’ll take the extra spray cans lol.

I think the oort farming will be an obvious winner for most though

[Goblinounours]

I think the oort farming will be an obvious winner for most though

Oh no, some people clearly would rather have hunts as the sole way to get oortstones. You can find some comments like that in the recent thread about mineable oortstones.

Because hunts are perfect the way they are. #sarcasm

[Vurtadelic]

Because hunts are perfect the way they are.

I only group hunt a few times a month due to the horrible lag and frame rate drops. The hunt usually starts out okay then get to unplayable around the 5-6th meteor in. I get a lot of my Oort from dormants and roadrunners while surface gathering. I would appreciate another source of Oort.

[molav]

I prefer hunting for oort. But dont claim to speak for many.

[Mayumichi]

If putting 1 color pigment in the pigment processor equals 1 spray paint item, then mixing 2 color pigments in the pigment processor should produce 2 spray paint items.

Isn’t this how it already works?

[majorvex]

Yup, you get at least one goo per pigment

[molav]

How do you get consistent colors? If seeds are not guaranteed and things mutate?

[majorvex]

You just plant as many as you can. There will be a few losses here and there.
I personally have not noticed any unwanted mutations yet (35% of my goo area is dedicated to mutating colors & the rest is to regular seeds & pigment).

[Firehazurd]

Yeah, you really gotta think about what the steps are to get to the color you want. Like, if you want Luminous Yellow, then you should have your row of Luminous Yellow gleam, but then to the side, a row of Stark Yellow, Crisp Yellow, Crisp Tan etc, where you have each successive generation mutating closer to the desired color, and providing you with excess pigments that are likely to mix in to your Luminous Yellow successfully. You have to strategize and build your mutation/yield chain appropriately. It takes a lot of work to realize what your best path is.

Also, @majorvex, gimme all them kernels.

Oh, that’s something I’m only just now really realizing, YOU MUST GATHER LOTS OF KERNELS. Always be gathering those kernels when a new exo comes out. Like seriously, it doesn’t matter what the color is, get like 5 smart stacks from every exo or you’ll regret it later.

[bucfanpaka]

Oh, that’s something I’m only just now really realizing, YOU MUST GATHER LOTS OF KERNELS. Always be gathering those kernels when a new exo comes out. Like seriously, it doesn’t matter what the color is, get like 5 smart stacks from every exo or you’ll regret it later.

If it is still up, one of the recent exos, Tegren, has the best goo collecting I’ve seen yet - long tunnels of it loaded within easy reach. Well, if you don’t hit a spot I’ve cleaned out already. Still, any needing to load up might consider a trip if it still has time on it.

[molav]

So you dont really farm for a specific color, just slap some rock up and see what you get? Just mass production?

Keep the kernals that fall, then replant seeds and get the next shade?

[Firehazurd]

Well, kind of. Use the gleam to target mutation, but take a small hit on seed retention to always get pigment at each harvest. Then just plant plant plant.

[Xaldafax]

I chose option 3 here as a way to meet in the middle. The devs seem to be pushing for this to require some degree of effort to maintain. Probably as a way to stimulate the economy. Though if I went off what I wanted, option 1 would be best.

Luca had a pretty decent post somewhere saying why set time frames were an issue and RNG was the way they had to do things.

[Trundamere]

Add a new inorganic crop, which would produce oortstones. To make it balanced, it would have to have something like a max crop yield of 25% and a max seed yield of 100% (when fully optimized).
These seeds could be extremely rare, only found during hunts on T6+ exo-worlds.

I am against the idea of a oortstone crop having a 100% max seed yield, For something like that I feel it should be 75% or lower

[Venom]

If you’re aiming for all colors it’s best to do a rock setup for 220% crop 80% seed then just mass plant. Some will mutate and you just replant. At this point i have at least one of about 150-200 different colors

To target colors you plant on gleam and it gets a bit trickier

[Venom]

Ah thats a shame then, well the option to have the plants with no prestige would be my next choice.

[Goblinounours]

But then, the crop yield needs to be above 100% to balance that out. Unless you find it cool to harvest and get nothing?

I think it’s ok to have a 100% seed yield if the setup is optimised, because not everybody enjoys the constant grind of farming seeds in the wild. The whole point of people having farms, in general, is to become self-sufficient.

[Trundamere]

I think it’s ok to have a 100% seed yield because not everybody enjoys the constant grind of farming seeds in the wild. The whole point of people having farms, in general, is to become self-sufficient.

I used to be in the same boat in regards to thinking that farming should be self sustaining, however now that I have had my hand at farming Exotic Yams and other crops in the new update, I feel it may have been a mistake, sooner or later because Exotic yams can done in a 100% self sustaining manor and with a decent crop yield on top of that…Raw yams used to have some value to them, Now over time I am sure they will lose all or most value as the game slowly becomes flooded with them from it being self sustaining.

I do not want the same thing to happen to oortstones, even if such thing would take 100 times longer to happen based on your proposed values, it would happen after awhile, once someone builds a farm large enough, so I am against 100% seed yield on items that are intended to have a moderate trade value.

I do not like the long term impact that 100% seed rate might have on the items value when there are people who are insane as myself who build farms the size of a small city.