HELP! Give us your feelings for crop growing duration?

Likely to prevent confirmation bias. It that’s going to occur as we discuss regardless.

I would expect this to be longer than top tier forging.

So at least a few hours for the fastest and a few days for the longest.

I imagine crops to be something I sow and may forget for a while - come back later that day (maybe go hunting or building or just take a break from game), or check on it after a few days (in case of longest ones). There are other things to do in game than just farming, so why would we have a situation when we sow seeds and stand there impatiently waiting for it to grow?

I think, it’s better to have more time-consuming automated processes (selling and buying through stands and baskets, top tier crafting, then farming) that can be complimented by on-hand activities (building, hunting, mining) requiring mouse and keyboard activity. This way we can switch between them.

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Even if we vote on the time we dont know the process of it. Lets say it ends up at 24 min for the fastest. And if the process is so cheap and easy to do. you can just keep recropping a 10x10 plot. Ending up flooding the game.

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this is boundless tho if i wanted to deal crazy farming times and maintenance i will go play farming simulator 19 heaving to wait say 2 days for someting to grow just so that thing can then be used to make someting else that 9/10 will take anywhere form 10 min to 6HR’s to make just turns boundless into a waiting simulator and people who may have picked up the game cuz they saw they can farm will just get mad refund the game and play stardew valley.

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Your killing me kal! Youve been typing and typing and im soooooo curious

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I agree in the real world growing something takes a long time. But this is a game and supposed to be fun. If it takes days or weeks to grow something then that might reflect the real world, but why would someone want to spend that kind of time in a game to do it? If the game is going to require that kind of time commitment, then do the players interested in farming plant their crops and log off for a few weeks until their crops mature? I know some will say that is not what will happen but is that not what happens with crafting now? Consistently players have indicated that they put resources into the machines and log off of boundless and log back in the next day or later to get the items they needed to continue playing. Do we want players to stay in the game more or stay away from the game longer waiting for things to happen?

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Will we be getting optional notifications for when our crops are ready to harvest? I say “optional” because people might not want to be notified.

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how many players will play only to farm though?

Is farming replacing daylie hunts for wax yam? Then Hours for growth.
Do we get completly new items for the Food chain? Hours to days.

Timers by rarity would work too, but really not enough info as of yet. For me anyways.

From what I’ve noticed, there are actually a lot of vets that keep checking in to see if farming has been added & won’t be back till it has. Just like some people only build, some only mostly mine, etc…I’m sure some people will focus on farming only.

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I think a lot of players do this. They log in … Log out. And eventually stop logging in. But I think the idea is to avoid promoting that pattern. Right…?

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I do not know, how many players only run a shop or only forge? My point is, if a player needs the crops in order to progress on something, then do they plant them and then log off and do something else? If they have limited time to play games in a week, are they going to sit around and watch crops grow for days when they can play another game where they get quicker results.

Personally, I am hoping that farming will provide content where I might want to spend more time in the game. If it takes weeks to grow something then I am very likely to plant and log out until they are ready. And if this gets too boring or I find something more rewarding to play in the interim, then my boundless time will decrease again. The existing grind is enough, I do not see the need to artificially put up time gates on crops. That being said I do not think they should be instantaneous. They do need to take a little time but not days or weeks.

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For a general idea of works well, I’m going defer to what was done with another game: Farm Together, an absolute gem of a relaxing farming game, so much so that this impulse buy shocked me by how much I enjoy it. Everything also grows in real time in this game, though with seasons and you can speed things up (or with flowers, increase profits) with watering. I think their team did a really good job balancing everything. Here is a Google doc of the items, times, profit margins, ect. for it-

So, for those who don’t want to look, .17 - 48 hour range seems to work well, though I’m going to double the latter on this as this isn’t as causal a game and put my vote on the second at four days.

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I’m a current player who will decided if they continue playing based off how the farming update goes. It’s the one thing I have been asking for since day 1 when I landed in the ultima hub on finata and was told by serenity and Riley that there was no farming in the game. I was absolutely gutted when I heard that but I understood there was constant updates so I’ve been patiently waiting.

I quit playing for about 3 months from life and frustration with gameplay and came back maybe a month ago now? Farming info has become a little more regular and it’s the one thing I want more than anything in this game for my selfish personal enjoyment.
Some people love hunting, others love building, even more low running shops. A proper farming system is that thing for me . The thing that would have me logging in daily to play from excitement, entertainment, and enjoyment.

If it’s executed poorly, then I’ll likely take a longer break this time. I don’t doubt the team will do well though as each system they have put in as been pretty awesome(forging, exos, events, etc) they just haven’t been things that make me personally goo ‘sweet, time to do some of this!’

Yet I’m one of the weirdos who doesn’t mind longer timers but it’s an activity that I’ve been looking forward to since I literally bought the game :man_shrugging: People is so unique

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then again, how many players playing only boundless we can have?
it’s normal people play multiple games - so, activities that can be done within half an hour and left for 2 hours or a few days to go back to them are good to attract players who still want to play other games and don’t want boundless to be a second-job-like game (same for people that can’t play in long multi-hour sessions)

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while true there needs to be balance that right now boundless is missing i find you send way more time loged off then playing at points… my self in early access boundless was my dominant game(when crafting times where nice and you did not need to spend days farming mats to make AOE hammers) then when the grinding skyrocketed with release i found my self loging off more and more waiting for things to craft my time was now split with WoW/OW where i was able to do alot more without being forced to wait.after a week of releazeing i was playing those games more then boundless i uninstalled boundless and now WoW is my dominant game

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Probably not a lot, but we do not have enough people playing boundless to begin with so I am not sure this is a good way to look at it.

Eventually players just do not come back to a game that does not keep them engaged or that they find to be boring or unrewarding. So putting in a mechanic that encourages players to play other games does not seem to be in the interest of growing this game.

I already find boundless to be a second job sometimes. The time it takes to create a block to build with in sufficient quantities is already too long compared to all the other building games I own where you still have to craft the building materials. And in one case (Medieval Engineers) they lowered the grind so that players could make progress on builds more quickly. So if farming is just more of the same time consuming grind, then are the developers making the case that their game is only for players that want to spend 10-20 hours a week playing the game? Are the reviews that mention the grind just to be ignored?

When I first started playing Boundless I felt that the time I spent in game actually resulted in my accomplishing something and I spent even more time in game. As the game has progressed, everything seems to take longer due to more complex recipes, nerfing game mechanics, adding machines that added more time to get similar tools. I know I am spending less time in game and hoping for a good reason to play again. Currently it seems Boundless continues a trend of fewer average players each month (at least as far as Steam players). Personally the only reason I am in game at all is for guild members.

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Also - if all activities in game are instant or close to instant effect, than how many things can I really do?

If I know I have 2 hours to play and start the session with planting crops and then before I’m finished with all some are already full grown and I start harvesting and before I’m done also other ones get ready to harvest, and then I would want to make stuff from what I harvested… entire 2 hour session is taken by farming.

When will I mine or hunt or check my shop?

Better to sow in first minutes of my session, and knowing it takes a few hours or a day to before harvesting, I can go and make sure I have fuel for my portals or that I re-stock my shop, or I run a community event, or I go around to make some coin (gathering, hunting, mining). Etc. etc.
Then I harvest in my next session (maybe later same day, or the day after).

If know that I need to wait for harvest till Friday evening, then I know my Thursday morning can be a hunt, and my Thursday evening can be checking my shop or building something, and Friday morning I meet people and we do an episode of Storage Wars together.

It’s also healthier not to be stuck to the screen in one spot because something is going to be ready in 2 minutes so no point going doing something else. If gameplay was made of multiple short sow-reap activities, would it be really enjoyable?

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I voted entry level for 24min and end level for 4 weeks.

As I don’t know what stuff we can farm and what kind of mechanics farming will have I just expect that we game would have option to farm something like oort stones or something else valuable like that. So passive growth time should take much time with possibility to speed of farming by active care, like coils do with machines.

As balancing wise it is also for developers easier to make farming times shorter after feedback than make those longer :smiley:

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I do want to be clear that I agree with you that it should not be instant. While we probably do not agree on the exact amount of time it should take to grow crops, instant is not the way to go. I do not think that makes sense or fit into the game.

Since the non-prestige crops do not die, does it really matter if you are not there the instant they mature? I would say it does not. But if I am waiting for them in order to make something else then it would be nice to not have to wait days or weeks to move on to the next step.

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