CRAZY IDEA : Crops improvements

Suggestions
38

Well look at gem prices. They used to sale for 300-500 a piece. Now it’s 35 - 120 for eme/amethyst.

Those pie prices were going to come down eventually due to regen farming (people already complained all the time it was better to sell the yams than make pies because people thought others were selling them at a loss).

All farming did was hasten it by making it something a newb could do if they wanted to play that way and not spend money on aoe tools and bombs to regen farm.

But still let’s be fair here. A person who is doing this has to do it on a large scale and it takes a fair amount of playtime to do this. There is still serious time investment applied here.

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39

True a lot of time investment will be needed.

I guess I’m just odd, selling gems for so cheep makes it unusual in my eyes. Gems in real life are normally expensive. But I dont know what boundless really needs.

Lower prices caters to newbies, so that could be good. But lessens the weight of “end game” mechanics and dedication

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40

To be clear, if the overall time/plot/equipment costs were not lower for farming than for ‘regen farming’ the prices wouldn’t be flooring to the point that people are minting them.

The two do not scale equivalently.

41

Yea I’m with ya. I don’t sell my gems. I’d rather use them to craft more equipment. At least at their current prices.

That’s also a thing with player economies. There is a lot going to be added to this game still. As recipes come in, and get tweaked and modified and new systems are implemented and create new economic systems… we are going to go through some changes still.

For me, I just try to flex on the economy. It’s still super young and it’s not remotely stabilized. We have such a small population that the slightest kick or nudge can cause wide ranges. It’s also why I keep everything stored. I never know when something’s going to happen that’s going to make me go through a resource.

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42

Before not everyone regen farmed. Now tons of people farm. I think that’s the only real change, honestly. Why do we see people more willing to farm than use what we had in the form of regen farming? I think that’s an interesting question. Maybe it’s totally unrelated and I’m just seeing something that isn’t the case.

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43

I think the process of farming is just more fun. There are a lot of farming sims out there

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44

That’s a great point, and in that case we might assume the system is a wild success and did exactly what the devs wanted in encouraging more activities for players to enjoy.

Now I wonder if they chose the items they did for farming and to see how it actually played out in the wild(ie:live server). With the knowledge they have now, maybe they can take time to create new crops and recipes and future items, like you suggested previously and then they have a better idea of how to implement them out the gate instead of having to have it on test for weeks.

It’ll be interesting to see where it goes from here that’s for sure!

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45

It’s part of the problem. But you can’t ignore the fact that, at much user outcry, they made farming not only sustainable but scalable with no external input or effort after setup.

You literally could not regen farm exo yams and sell them for 3c without either taking a huge coin loss, or farming mats/crafting tools/forging tools/harvesting ingredients/crafting food/farming the yams 100% solo and then ending up with basically nothing to show for all of that.

Compare those hours (or coin equivalent) to amortizing your farm setup time over 100 harvests at a 900 plant farm that generates both extra seed and 900 crops in a couple of hours. Several times per day if you have the playtime.

What’s that, a total community investment into farming 900 yams on an existing farm is nothing but maybe an hour of playtime? I haven’t farmed, even if it’s two hours vs the entire food and tool chain required to gather them from the wild, or a regen farm, there’s no equivalence.

I realize there’s a lot of love for farming sims. But it’s definitely not the whole story.

I’m not even saying it’s a bad thing. The largest effect on me personally from the change to yams particularly is cheaper food so, yay?

Though I still probably have more persisting pies from before the farming release than some players will ever use lol…

Less gathering and regen farming = less food and tool consumption = less market share for merchants and crafters and forgers = overall less actual economic activity and people who want to grind a farm sim vs a gathering game wind up minting their produce.

So the cooks and crafters and forgers and regen farmers fade out and that has a hard impact on players in EVERY profession, bringing us to a self reinforcing paradigm of a dead economy and needing to do everything yourself to get to a little bit of the part of the game that you enjoy.

Anyways I’d like to say this is sort of a side factor for me, a bit of discussion. I don’t personally want to play this kind of farming sim so on the surface it seems like i could ignore it. But as the impact spills out across the game and the fledgling economy, it definitely affects us all.

IDK not trying to be argumentative I’m enjoying the conversation, so there’s that.

Yep.

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46

I don’t since they aren’t all that easy to make and requires more ingredients than just yams…

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47

Yeap, on board with everything you said but the below I think is the key portion to all of it:

Personally I only get to harvest once a day, all my crops take me about an hour and a half to harvest, re-till, sow etc. That’s half the play time I get if Im lucky. lol. Sometimes I get to harvest once every 2 days. (thats actually the most common)

But you have people who have the ability to play all day and like you said they can get multiple harvests in as a result. That’s always going to be hard to balance against, those who play small amounts vs those who play a lot.

I don’t think you’ve been argumentative at all. A lot of good points. A lot of various ways of playing in this type of game requires a flexible community I think.

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48

I’d like to put out a reminder here that for every processed fossil and minted essence, that’s essence that could have been inserted to the economy but wasn’t.

Some of my own thoughts on this as a result of writing that out…

The most likely effect of this is that the people who could be supplying a basic material could be reducing the price of things like super-enriched bonding agent and other complex products by adding more of one of the materials they need into the economy; but instead, because they get minted, the overall price of the final product will stay the same, or it could even rise.

I think this is interesting, because it suggests to me that the coin machine is both capable of adding inflation or deflation as required if the devs keep an eye on things, since how it affects the overall economy depends on how items mint values are set at any given time.

Overall, I believe this is an overlooked part of the Chrysominter in the sort of “meta-economic sphere”; it is not only a coin machine, it’s also an item sink. And not suggesting you haven’t thought of this @Nightstar, I would think you probably have. :slight_smile:

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49

For sure, to be clear I made 1.2m+ coins so far selling SEBA the last five days - my essence does not go in the minter. Also that’s mostly 2 sales thanks guys.

But plenty of people posting things like “mining for gems is the best way to make coins” when the fossils are worth more than the gems and they technically don’t even need to find a basket to sell them.

I post it again and again as a prime example of how misdirection and “following/quoting the meta” cause people to skip out on exploring the available options, and complain about how it’s so hard to get any coin.

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50

I completely agree with that. There are certainly many ways of getting coin now with the minter that still get overlooked; perhaps the best part of the current ways of getting coin with the minter is that with farming it no longer has to heavily involve mining or some other type of block-breaking – it can be a lot more passive which could be quite good for people who enjoy different ways of doing things.

Personally most of mine still comes from mining, but I could easily shift my focus onto farming sources for minting, personally I simply find that option too boring.

Also related to your own comment, posted this on another thread recently, for those who may be interested but that may have missed it. :slight_smile:

Edit: And I’ll stop hijacking a crops thread with economy talk now. :smiley:

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51

here it is: [Feedback] Testing 224 - Crop growth times

TL;DR: its either RNG, or we would have to make each individual crop much more expensive and migrate away everyones big farms and force them to just have a small number of crops instead.

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52

Voting rng!

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53

I personally wouldn’t want hunts to be the only way of getting Oort, but at the same time, I’d also rather not have a farmable crop exist that can give it.

However, if a crop was to exist, I’d argue it could give something like Oort shards, rather than full-on Oort ore.

I feel like that would be a good compromise, in a way, since one is weaker but easier to obtain through farming, whereas the better requires more effort through hunting.

Wouldnt exclude more options from coming to the table, either.

In fact, I’d love it if there was some thing like footfall that caused popular portals to be sustained a little longer through repeat, unique patrons. A sort-of thing like hiking trails in the woods being more solidified, the more people use them.

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54

110% seed yield is ridiculously easy to get imo. I’m personally just growing for seeds right now to expand my farm, so it’s really just a waiting game for me.
In a week or two, I’ve had my 20 seeds get to 36.

55

Sorry to say, but it’s still not a great design, though. :frowning:
Currently, it’s RNG to decide how long the plant takes to mature, RNG to decide if the plant dies early or not…

It’s frustrating. Ultimately, it’s a waste of expensive fertilizer, a waste of effort, and a waste of time compared to all the other ways one can make prestige. If you want to have these pretty plants in your beacon but have other things to deal with, you’re boned. Mark my word, in the long run, most players will ignore them.

I’m keeping my vote for a way (any way) to turn these crops into plants that don’t die once they’re fully grown, like all the other farming crops. Remove the withering component, balance-it out by greatly reducing the prestige value if needed. Just don’t ask your players to do more daily chores just for decoration!

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56

What about some kind of “preservative” fertilizer that lets you freeze a plant at whatever growth stage it’s in (i.e. set the probability of moving to the next stage to 0)? Make it an irreversible change that takes away any other function like prestige or crop-bearing.

  • doesn’t need a ton of extra block info
  • could fit into the fertilizer models
  • keeps the stochastic appearance of growing farms
  • lets us use all the growth stages of plants for deco purposes (so we can make permanent stochastic-looking fields. also some of the seedlings are so cute)
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57

That would be a pretty cool option, as long as that new fertilizer doesn’t require more resin or petrolim. ^^
Although, it would make sense for it to use amber, because, you know, amber preserves insects trapped in it…
But maybe something more obvious like ice and/or glacier?

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