Can we get any information about the farming update. Or maybe can someone just tell me if tree saplings are going to be part of this game before I waste days hand building way too many trees.
Purely my personal opinion but my gut feeling is that saplings are unlikely to feature in Boundless. It wouldn’t surprise me if the future farming update will focus more on mob farming than crops or trees.
Nothing is publicly known… but (!) This is a good opportunity to share your wish list for the farming update! What else would you like to see in a farming update, and how can it be made something special, better than what we have had in games before?
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I’ll give my two cents in this. Not having anything to compare, my first MMO so no previous idea; but the farming to me would be grow something we can use for food, crafting and fuel.
Naturally, many are going to think of normal foods, corn where we can get corn meal, make sugar, use the stalks and such for fertilizer for growing more corn and have critters we can feed the corn to and butcher them for meat, bone, hide and other.
Raise “wild” animals, goats, make tame ones we can breed and have them to harvest so easier for low level players can get the meat, bones, tallow and more from them. We could “milk” the goats to get milk from them to make butter and cheese, that could go with crafting churns to make the butter with.
I’m a country girl, when you mention farm, I think of my dad telling of how he hooked up the mules to the plow and plowing for the garden for food during the depression. Of us kids helping in the family garden of green beans, corn, potatoes, tomatoes, cucumbers and more and canning them for the winter. My sister and I chasing the headless chickens and more canning for winter.
So, not much help, but maybe adding ruins and we find seeds of some strange food and we grow it to see what it will produce and get some wild and strange veggie and the imagination can run wild on what can happen.
Curious to see what others have to say.
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My only concern about farming is that it will either make gathering materials by hand (such as fibirus/inky leafs) redundant, or (much less likely) be so time consuming that farming itself will be not worthwhile
It could very well be they plan to release new crops, but this persists 2 problems:
A.) If the only use for crops is to make food, than most (with the exception of the one that provides the most hunger back) will likely go unfarmed
B.) If these crops can be used in substitute for other materials when making pies and other buff food, than other areas of the game may suffer if one person can farm thousands easily
My only hope is if they release farming, it adds to the game rather than taking away from other areas of it
I’d like to feel like my effort put into farming is rewarding.
I’m going to use the wildstock as my example. Say I get low level wildstocks. The longer i raise them, the stronger they get.
Maybe I can passive harvest for stuff that won’t kill them, like milk. Or I can kill them for loot. The tougher/longer raised = better items, maybe more in quantity too.
Breeding, so I can keep my herd going and culling a few here and there won’t wipe out my investment. This way I can also get variety.
Mutations or higher quality goods depending on what I feed them. Say mom and dad are blue, but I feed them orange foliage. Baby comes out orange. Or the element shards. I joked once about feeding it crushed gleam to glow, but why not? Haha.
Maybe mom is blue, dad is red, baby is purple.
Could these eventually be raised into mounts? Could I raise and cross breed wildstock to get higher stats?
Can I sell my wildstock? Will they have pedigrees and lineages? Can I sell a wildstock with the “blast element gene?”
I’m going to potentially shoot myself in the foot and say to avoid “raising everything” so certain tasks become obsolete, to possibly put an account cap on things to raise or grow. Like only 2-3, but that’s hard to decide bc I don’t know how much or what will be added.
EDIT I need to add, bc I have this nagging feeling due to a certain comment that a mob (like, say, the hunter) is going to show up and ruin my day, that we have a way to ensure our farm is safe. Be it certain blocks for protection, building underground, fully enclosed, or other. coughcoughguardpetcoughcough Whew, darn tickle in my throat.
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I hope there will be simple options that make it so I can have a farm outside and farm it endlessly while being 100% comfy as I watch it grow and sip tea tbh
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I love the idea of animal husbandry but i think it should be separate from crop farming.
I would love to see both but to contain it all in the “farming” update would be way too much content to put in one update or there would be major factors or features missing.
I’m way more interested in creature farming than crop farming. We already have atlases and player made farms for most if not all of the crop and surface resources. But if I could fill a meadow with domesticated road runners and raise them like in harvest moon or tamagotchi and sustainably harvest feathers, that would greatly improve my ability to forge solo.
I don’t wanna raise wild animals that I or others can kill (like slime farming in stardew valley) cuz the griefing would be hard to design around and accidental killing would be a constant worry.
If farming is just crops I would probably grow them only for decorative purposes so I hope there’s no wilting mechanic as well. This has nothing to do with Boundless, I find crop farming tedious in every game that does it. But that’s just me. I think many players would enjoy it.
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But sweet beans and most of the surface resources that come from plants would be excellent to grow as well. Collectng 576 sweet beans for 1 mass craft of teaching pies is not always fun.
I feel that both would be perfect. Raising animals and doing the crop thing! It just has to be difficult to do in large quantities. Am perfectly fine if after a year of intensive play time I can farm 100000’s of beans and 1000’s feathers in a day but I shouldn’t get there within a few days…
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On one end of the spectrum farming should provide an alternative path for gathering much needed resources (beans, orbs, waxy/exotic yams). But there should be more to it than “Stick bean in dirt, collect 5 beans in two days.”
Maybe beans planted within 2 blocks of desert sword produce higher yields? Maybe a bean stalk that is surrounded by 9 unique other crops will produce rare and much sought-after rainbow beans that can’t be obtained anywhere else? Harvest crops early for higher leaf yields, harvest later for higher fruit yields, or tend instead of harvesting for more orbs after the plant matures.
Ultimately, farming should require a level of work on par with mining and should have no yield limits for anyone willing to put in all the work. There could even be hybrid plants that produce better yields but have to be “crafted” first.
I have no idea how animal farming should work.
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Animal farming could create ally pets that fight with you.
Creating a wildstock army would be impressive, but will probably be limited to 1-3
Pet roadrunners may just act like alarms. Or doorbells
Idk
but, if we go to farming, we will need more planets T1 and T2 because the blobs things.
No cap. We don’t need soft or hard caps of any kind in this game. It limits how much fun we can have.
I am assuming the larger the farm the more time it takes to manage it. This includes any sort of crops and/or animal style farm.
My concern with the Farming content update is that it will be a feature just as boring as crafting an Iron Hammer.
One way to balance things out if someone decides to have thousands of animals (if we can even do that with the upcoming farm update) is that these animals provide a penalty to the settlement’s prestige if it’s a part of the farm. Animals are filthy creatures so I figured that would make sense. I don’t really know if they would affect prestige at all or even should.
As far as crops, I would like to see a new tool with the update specific to farming blocks and some sort of watering source for the crops.
But if there was a hard cap on any of this game’s features I would probably just not do those things or quit the game entirely. We have no caps at all up until now and it wouldn’t make much sense to start putting them in place because of a single game feature, like Farming.
I can’t imagine how dumb that would be if accounts could only have 1 Air Ship once those are released. 
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Yeah, World of Warcraft you couldn’t pick a flower if you already knew how to mine and sew…
I honestly don’t like the idea of a cap, but put that thought out there as a solution to the potential problem that ppl might bring up of “everyone is too independent and don’t buy/sell from others.”
Personally, even if I could do it all, I wouldn’t want to.
Now that my migraine has cleared and it’s no longer 2am, I’ve given farming yet more thought!
I’m more interested in the ranching part of farming, but there’s benefits to the agriculture part as well.
Maybe we can have specified plants, like starberry bushes, sweetbean stalks, yam beds, etc. @Krollbar mentioned something that reflects on real gardens like planting certain plants beside each other for benefits. Like I plant onions on the outside to keep rabbits away, or marigolds to keep back pests. Runescape did something like that, and Animal Crossing did cross pollination for unique colors, including rainbow. Come to think of it, why not add flowers? Maybe fruit tree orchards. Ones we don’t have to chop down for items and continually yield crops.
We can make fertilizer from foliage, timber, maybe animal doodoo. Put it all in a compost bin, add certain items for special compost to get better crop yields.
Perhaps it’s in the player’s best interest to do a little of each. If anything, fertilizer for crops, or maybe the animal loves sweet beans for happiness.
Oh, I partially agree on the farming = <prestige, but farms are worth a lot of money!! Especially specialized ranches.
Now, I’ve seen the California farms, and those def aren’t happy cows. The farms are ugly and barren.
Travel someplace with more pasture land, with actual grass like the Midwest, and farms and ranches become more visually pleasing and even peaceful.
I live on a farm and am literally surrounded by bovine, and the only time it really smells like cow is in spring.
Horse ranches are actually very beautiful as well.
People already complain about others being too independent already and that nobody is really buying or selling from their shop even though there is an underlining issue with that and has zero to do with alts and skill sets. Yet there are plenty of players who basically asked to do everything on their account and got it yet complain about the appearance in which it was delivered to them.
There’s always going to be players complaining, whining, and moaning about something someone else is doing in the game.
I have big plans for the farming feature and would like to actually see farming being something actually worth doing instead of just a lackluster feature added to give us a feeling the game is being developed more. I really hate saying stuff like that and perhaps it’s my patience that’s being ran thin very quickly after being away from the game for 1.5 months. At least I’ve casually got back into the game to mine here and there.
Hopefully what we can grow for crops aren’t a bunch of the same stuff we can already get in the game. Would defeat the purpose of having a new piece of content. I’ll have to jump on test servers when it’s put on the testing server so I can check it out.
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List them! As mentioned near the beginning of this thread, now is the time to list our ideas. So put those hopes and dreams into words for consideration. I have big hope for farming too and am really looking forward to it. Have seen some great ideas so far. 
my new years hope is that we get water with farming. it would make sense.
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As long as what ever they make farming out to be is more in depth then just gathering resources and placing them in a machine block and out pops your whatever you click on. Because every part of this game is drop an item in a machine block and out pops another item.
Things that need to change is weapon crafting
Gem tools should be cut with lasers
Ore tools should be melted down in a furnace then pours into molds that we have to make and bound together
Stone and wood tools can be made by hand.
Then we can put these items into a centraforge to get the buffs that we want on them.
So farming of whatever caliber that they introduce really needs to be more in depth then just place and click.
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