Decorative Crops lasting less than 2 weeks?

General
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So with all this wipe and buffer zone talk, the Decorative Crops kinda flew under the radar.

As far as I’m concerned, I’ve planted at total of 23 decorative crops in my place as soon as the update was live, on the 14th, all fertilized with High-octane often enough so that none spent a day unfertilized. 6 are already matured.

What bothers me is that 1 of those 6 rolled a critical failure and will likely die in about 11 days, despite having been fertilized as often as I could. Yeah, if it wasn’t fertilized right now, it could die even faster than that!!!

WitheringDecorativeCrop
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So I don’t know about y’all, maybe it’s just me, but I find this concept utterly ridiculous. I said it months ago. I said it during testing. I’ll say it again.
First, it’s a waste of fertilizer.
Second, it’s a waste of a pretty design.

These plants are beautiful. @Minyi 's designs were looking awesome to begin with, and the 3D result feels pretty great. Honestly, I don’t give a cr@p about prestige, and I’d be fiiiine if I gained 0 prestige from them if it meant them being permanent.

I ask you this : why bother with them?
I’d rather put a dozen bricks or whatever equals the amount of prestige I get from one of these. I don’t even know how the calculations are made anymore, it’s like some arcane science at this point. It would be nice to know how much prestige something yields when mouse-overing in Debug mode, by the way.
Back on topic, yeah, I’d rather put the equal in prestige in permanent blocks. At least I won’t waste petrolim to make fertilizer.
Why don’t I do just that, then? Because these plants are beautiful! I’d like to have pretty flowers like these, if there wasn’t this huge drawback.

I would’ve said nothing if 3.5 weeks was the minimum possible for the withering time (and even then, I think 1 month should be the strict minimum, with a bonus if you have all the farming skills). But apparently, they can die almost as fast as they can be grown…

Everybody I’ve showed this tells me the same thing. It’s underwhelming.

It’s yet another layer of maintenance. IMHO, between power coils & machines to repair, portals & beacons to refuel, sparks to recharge, tools to re-craft and components to re-farm, I think we have more than enough time-sinks already.

Given time, I think people will stop bothering with this addition which could have been awesome for decorators. I give it 2 months, top. Then most players will be like “nope”.

I often mention how I can’t wait for the Furniture update, but at this point, I’m legit afraid that they might all need crazy components from T7 meteors and/or repairs every so often. No, god, no god please no, no, no, nooooooooooo!

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So, RNG is a factor. I wasn’t sure until this post. @Jiivita

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I feel the pain… I really do.

I just don’t understand why it hurts to just replant something that died. Or why when we ask for things to give us a better feel of atmosphere we don’t enjoy this great idea.

I guess if “prestige” is really what you are after then I can understand your frustration. I don’t play the prestige game and think personally it needs to go away (not trying to talk about that). I guess if people are using them for prestige maybe they do need to live longer… but I thought you could just feed them to keep them alive forever…

For me this was a wonderful option but not something I have to do. So I plan to use them where it makes sense. I know the Devs want work for reward and maybe that is just not what a lot of people playing want as much of. I can certainly see both sides…

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Did yours start out at 2w to wither?(is that normal for ancestor’s blade?) An Oortweed I have grew, and it says 4w to wither…

I definitely don’t like the fact that beautiful decorative plants can wither. Even more sad if it is a rare color

Tbh I would trade the plant’s prestige for it to not wither

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I think he was asking that the decorative plants last longer, not complaining about prestige.

I think that based on this part of his post:

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You should make that suggestion for just perm plants with no prestige.

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Darn missed that. Good point. So basically same as Gray’s comment on just wanting pretty plants to plant with no prestige that never die.

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Definitely a bug I just planted the same thing fertilized and all but it’s git 4w 5d

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So wait, these plants will eventually wither even if you fertilize them often? I havent planted any myself yet but if thats the case…

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They were always described as temporary. Two weeks is longer than I can keep a plant alive IRL though so maybe my opinion on the life span is skewed because of that.

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I think its fine having them wither plants irl dont last forever

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Perhaps in the future we could have the option to harvest them as a placeable ‘decorative’ version once fully matured (like wildflowers.) :thinking:

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I agree if you plant them and keep them alive and need to do things to keep them alive that they should never die until you stop trying to keep them alive.

Hope that made sense.

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All items being consumable is the nature of this entire game and the only way any sort of economy would even exist, the plants aren’t difficult to make and this way the sought after colours become even more valuable.

Gardening is a hobby, desirable plants (i.e. orchids or roses) require attention in order to survive and will die if neglected, hence the need to check on them occasionally and fertilize I guess.

As to why you only have 2 weeks on that plant… I am unsure.

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Of all people, I knew you wouldn’t, when I posted the thread.
And like I said in the OP, individually, this wouldn’t be too bad. But there’s already many things that you have to maintain, such as beacons, portals, machines, power coils, tools, weapons. We do NOT need more.
When the furniture update comes out, I swear to god, if you have to apply wax on them to keep their prestige up, I’ll find James in-game, and I’ll feed him to a Titan. Yes, I will find a Titan just to feed James to it.

To reiterrate, I enjoy their graphical design. But the idea to make them wither is just plain bad.
The fact that these plants wither and die has NOTHING to do with giving us a better feel of atmosphere.
I give it 2 months before most people stop bothering, before it becomes a feature only used by people who enjoy having to deal with more chores.
I will plant the remaining seeds I have, and most likely where I don’t mind having withered decorative plants, but that’s it. They are a waste of time and ressources.

Like that’s going to work… :roll_eyes:
IF such a suggestion was to be done, and IF the devs thought it was good idea, it would only happen many years from now.

Yeah, sure, why not. That could work.

I’d be fine if I had to keep applying fertilizer to keep them alive forever. Like, at one point, say 4 weeks, the fertilizer disappears and you have about 1 week to re-apply it, and once re-applied, the it’s back at 4 weeks of fertilizer.

AGAIN, as I’ve also said in my OP, I’d be fine if the withering time was a fixed duration, with NO RNG. But it’s not.

Game ≠ Real-life
I get that some people play video-game because they want them to get closer and closer to real-life, Matrix-style, and on a graphical stand-point, I share that point of view. But video-games don’t have to also copy the chores! I do enough chores in my life as it is, thank you very much.

As I said, some of these are also set to wither in more than 4 weeks, but it’s a totally random thing. You too can totally have some that will wither in 1 week on any of these decorative plants, forcing you to check on them often, because they won’t mature at the same speed, and during growth, fertilizer with wear-off, so you’ll need to re-apply it sometimes during the same day, and in the end, they will probably not wither at the same speed either.
It’s (from what I can tell) NOT a bug.
They’re behaving as the devs intended.

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Hey so I had a thought about this… It might be clutching at straws a bit but still worth asking as I am yet to see a decorative crop do this to me.

Did you happen to fertilize this one plant with a character that doesn’t have the farming epic? Or perhaps on the right character with the wrong skill sheet? Because the farming epic doubles the effectiveness of fertilizers and it looks like you’ve lost basically half of the fertilizer effect.

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In this particular case, I’m 75% sure I did it with the correct character. There’s ONE plant yesterday which I forgot and indeed did on another toon which doesn’t have the skills, but that’s not this one.

But then, there’s no way to fix that mistake. The game won’t be like “oh right, you applied fertilizer without the right skills on, so there, you can re-apply it since you now have the right skills on”.
If you do that mistake, you’re boned.

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Well if it turns out that the 25% option has occurred then in reality you’ve only lost maybe a day or 2 at most of it’s lifespan right? I mean it’s life is currently whittling away faster with the reduced fertilizer effect on it but until the fertilizer wears off some time in the next few days and then you can apply the fertilizer with the correct character.

Just out of interest, did you note the time to wither when you did spray that other plant with the wrong character?

Sorry I’m not trying to have a dig if in fact the RNG thing is correct, I’m just yet to see this critical failure thing occur myself.

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The plant I fertilized with the other character yesterday wasn’t matured yet. Like all others that aren’t fully grown, it says “2d 4h”.

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OK I apologise for my doubts, I see what has happened now. I guess the plant periodically (no idea how long each period is) has a chance of progressing to the next stage of it’s fully matured life cycle, of which there are 3 stages before it withers. Yours has… very unluckily RNG’d to stage 3 in a short time, I’m guessing it failed to stage 2 and also lost the fertilized status and then failed again to stage 3.

Here is one of mine that failed a roll of the dice once with the debug info on.

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Interestingly though it does say (fertilized: medium-grade) when fertilized with a high octane cultivator. I wonder does that mean there is a higher grade fertilizer on the horizon?