Fertiliser and the Epic both accelerate crop growth.
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@James, could you clarify what part of the epic description refers to crop growth acceleration? I hadn’t really considered it had anything to do with crop growth time, despite having had the epic since I started testing.
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Doubles the effect of fertiliser. And fertiliser increases the chance of a crop progressing to its next stage. Speeding up the growth of crops.
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Will fertilizer have to be applied repeatedly as the crops grow to maximise speeding up plant growth or is it just a one off application?
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Fertiliser has a chance of turning off when a crop matures to the next stage.
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And fertiliser doesn’t need to be applied. It only effects speed.
New players can plant seeds and the crop will mature by itself.
But if you want to aggressively farm you have 2 options:
- Grow faster with fertiliser at a cost of the fertiliser and the activity.
- More efficient / bigger farm which will yield more crops.
(Or both.)
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But do you think the yield could be 1:1 (in terms of seeds recuperation during harvest) if you do things somewhat right?
They’ve already said that won’t happen since they want gathering to be a part of it. Now it’s just a matter of how big of a part it’ll be. What’s the max seed yield, how easy it’ll be to find the wild crops, what density are we talking about, and what the drop rates from them are. Before we know these numbers it’ll be hard to decide how big of a nerf this is.
Pro tip: stockpile while you can
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That’s exactly what I was thinking.
It’s incredible that we’re at this point where we’re suggesting among ourselves “stockpile now because it’s going to be a nerf compared to how we currently play”, and the devs are like “yeeees, yeeees, suffer my children, suffer!”.
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While I appreciate your sentiment, I would refrain from making that kind of statement about the developers. I don’t see eye-to-eye on many subjects with them, sure, but I do feel it is unnecessary to publicly poke at them like that.
I wouldn’t want it done to me, if I was a developer, even if I knew to expect it. 
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Well they know a sizeable chunk of their playerbase is casual, don’t they?
They know that going further towards grinding mechanics hurts said chunk, don’t they?
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I didn’t say I disagreed with your point. 
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This is replacing effectively 2 systems, surface gathering and AOE block farming. Surface gathering for these resources was always pretty slow and the AOE block farming easily the best way to get the mats. One thing both of the old methods had over the new is the fact that you got your mats immediately upon gathering them. Gather time will about the same as the old way of surface gathering but you then have to grow the mats increasing the time for most mats by a large amount. Overall, you will have to invest alot more in terms of plots and setup for the farms over AOE block farms. Basically everyone will have to invest the same amount of time and effort to build their own farm where as before you could use public farms or just farm in the wild. This new system also removes that social aspect of community farms in favor of solo farms. Overall I would favor keeping all 3 systems in place and balancing them together, have mats drop as normal from surface gather, have blocks still drop their mats with a slightly reduced drop rate and have the ability to farm with seeds giving you 90% seed return. This would give players maximum choice in how they go about gathering their mats. Balance all 3 to give about the same rate of return per day and you now have lots of choices about how players engage with these mats, more player agency is GOOD.
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Choices. That’s what it should always be about. Choices.
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IMO it’s ok to have a chance of 1:1 seed yield. But if a guaranteed perfect 1:1 yield is possible then it means any prior systems can become redundant.
There is a ratio of preparation and farming activity. (Preparation could be gathering, collaborating, trading or another generator.)
The ratio between them can be balanced: 1:100, 50:50 or 100:1.
As I posted elsewhere gathering could yield 100x seeds per wild crop. Farmed crops could yield 99% seeds. So the balance can be set to 1:10000 with regards to effort between prep and farming.
But a yield of >= 1 would eliminate the prep step.
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But if making prior systems redundant is not the intent, why remove other collbaorating/trading systems like the mud farms? Why not just reduce their effectiveness, like @redlegdaddy says, to make sure all systems (the new and the old ones) can co-exist?
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So the proposal is to set a farming yield rate of say N crops per hour, then rebalance the alt-drop rate so that regen-alt farming is equal to it?
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Well, that would give options.
As it is, do you think farming would make things easier for people than they currently are?
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I would say make farming a bit better, maybe 10% ahead of both surface gathering and AOE farming. You can still do the other methods but farming would be just as good or slightly better. I would love to have the choice. I would personally opt to farm some mats and gather others, would let me choose how and where I want to spend the time and money needed. I am inherently cheap so I would prolly opt for farming over AOE block farming for alot of my mats.
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Well written. For me, farming is purely a means of getting more cosmetics to my town. I could not care less for produicing anything, just want my town to look more beautiful. Imagine amazing trees and flowers, fountains and so on. Who cares what they produce, as long as they look bueno!
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