This is why it was so important to maintain both mechanics.
I would say (total matter of opinion) that being in a predefined space planting seeds plunk plunk plunk is much more grindy than running around gathering stuff across various terrain and environments.
This 
. I’d much rather go cave diving or running across planets to gather some opposed to being stuck in a confined space plunking things down. At least I can gather beans, orbs, and fragments at the same time where as a farmer can’t
Yep totally agree with this and it’s why I’m happy running my farms at a seed loss, because it keeps farming time to a bare minimum and I actually enjoy going out cave diving to gather things like goo and kindling and at the same time collecting decorative exo coloured rocks.
Me and @AmandaPan built a huge underground kindle farm, that she farms sporadically.
It’s 20x20 plots, and 2 plots high, so an 800 plot farm.
Holy ■■■■ and I thought the one I was building was extravagant.
That looks awesome. SOO much chiseling isn’t it?
That place looks amazing! Where is it located?
I think not everyone has to play the game in every way. But there does need to be balance of a sort in areas where fairness need apply. Also I believe in hard work deserves to be rewarded. So there is that also. I love how complex the system is when it comes to farming. I don’t do and very likely never will. Same with forging. I enjoy doing what I love and paying for the mats. 
So what needs to be balanced is keeping the players interested in that market. If they are not interested then I don’t get mats. That simple. Lol
For me the grindy part is the disparity in time needed to harvest vs plant. I can harvest 9 blocks in 1 swing but can only plant 1 block. So planting is 9 times the amount of work.
And that is kind of the problem I see with them creating a 3x3 planter… suddenly farms will be nearly 9 times as fast to harvest and replant. Seeds and crops will become even less valued, suddenly I will be able to harvest 9000 kindling mass in 5 - 10 minutes or convert/rebalance my farm so that I never need to collect another seed again.
Basically it will be a massive balance shift. Currently you have choices, smaller farms to save time, larger farms to produce more, seed % vs crop %, etc. The only factor that currently limits players from having self sustaining farms is the time required, if they make it 9x faster then I feel a lot of those choices will be taken away from us and the only choice will be to decide how big you want to make your farm.
It takes me just over and hour to harvest my inorganic crops, i I set it up in sections so I can do a rotation and have a fully grown crop everyday. I have 57k combustion and 21k kindling planted. Half of the combustion is planted for seeds and other half for crops which makes it sustainable. Kindling is planted 2/3 seeds and 1/3 crop which also makes it sustainable. It wasn’t easy to get to that point but I am reaping the rewards for that effort now.
Yes, a mind numbing amount of chiselling, but done over many weeks.
Imoco. Not really all that accessible to the public right now, but there’s a portal there from the PS HUB on Imoco.
I actually didn’t realize until recently that grass seeds can’t be used for flour bags and such, so now I’m considering setting something up for food crafting. Other than that it’s fuel crops. I do about a stack worth of seeds for both types and have the seed return balanced to give me just over 100% return. Once I start getting a decent surplus of seeds, they’ll go into a max yield farm.
Exotic yams aren’t quite full, but the starberries are actually overflowing into one of the end caps of that storage.
LOL I actually had a starberry storage like that before farming.
They’re mostly syrup now though.
Exactly, farming took a lot of grind out of gathering. Not long after I started getting a sense that I’ll get the hang of it, I took my first Exo Shuttle to Perseph then Al-something with the umbris and dark red igneous, had a death party that gave me some new ideas wrt gathering, and I started making bricks, which turn out to be way more fun than making marble b/c mud is awesomesauce.
Farming is a great excuse to make technicolor crop beds with the pile of mismatched bits of seed boosting blocks from all over that I’ve been accumulating for months thinking one of these days I’m gonna try farming…
Once I’ve got all the crops humming along I’m going to add lots of chisellly trees and such and replace all the local stones making up most of the infrastructure with marble checkerboards & other shiny things, add some rivers and waterfalls and other spooky shiny sparkly things – with lots of grapple towers.
It looks like a bunch of cloning vats with two copies of Beaker in each tub and their hair sticking out of the top. Now we need blocks that give off ambient industrial sounds.
This.
I’ve started doing goo, and i would LOVE 3x3 planet/harvester.
However, that will only result in the above. Farms will only get 9 times larger and crop prices will drop significantly, and in the end people will likely still have the same issues with farming as now.
I reckon farming is taking a similar place as forging, in the game. Scarcity through effort. And i’m ok with that.
I’d rather forge than farm 
I’d rather farm than forge!
Thankfully we can both make coin 
I just wish I could make more coin than u…
I enjoy farming. I see you sell the inorganics? Didn’t know there was a market for that. Haha but someone buys a lot of my regular seeds at the Menagerie Coast. Not sure who. They must come in the middle of the night. Never saw anyone by the stands but I’ll randomly have coin. Especially from kraunats.
