The way I see it, you can mine an exo in a day or get needed creature trophies in a day. You could even harvest a useful amount of any current plant in one day. Having worthwhile crops grow in a day would make sense too, assuming you couldn’t just mass harvest and blow the looting proportions out of the water 
Anyway, compared to other avenues of resource collection, I don’t think farming anything should take more than 24 hours.
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Here’s another thought, why should they have strict timers at all? What if they had various stages of the timer. Those who wanted to quick harvest could, but they’d get a lower yield yet still enough to justify harvesting early , those who wanted spend more time on the crops could do so and be rewarded for it. Tier a-e harvest timers in a tier 1-5 crop system. (Ie: spend time a - get default items, spend time b -get default x 1.5, spend time c - get default x2 etc etc)
I know some people will have the immediate argument of “well then I have to do the longest timer for the most yield”. No, you don’t. It’s a deliberate choice and you’re still getting crops, just not at the level you would have if you were willing to spend more time being finicky and meticulous about the time/care/work you put in to it.
I feel like that’s a happy medium but I know there are those out there who can’t take part in an action without committing to the maximum yield and if that requires more time then it’s off-putting to them.
Anyways, just a potential thought on how to find a middle ground.
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Can totally agree, am frustrated at times with how long it takes on some tasks. Make milk glands into milk, then make it into purified milk then make it into purified butter and that mass craft, that is not just 10 or 15 minutes, but several hours of waiting time.
I take that time to go and mine, gather, or crafting in the forging area, but for some that is just too much and even for me I get frustrated at how long it can take. And in forging, how many steps is needed. Why do we need so many recipes for making tools, and now more are being added.
My point, and I know you and others see it, is that in real life it does take time and while I and others don’t want that in a game, we expect it to take more than 10, 15 minutes for a plant to grow from seed and produce fruit or a veggie.
I am hoping that players, new and older ones, realize that there will be more to it than just stick a seed in the dirt walk away and a hour or some later come and pick the fruit and be a happy player who feels they did something special. I would like to see the need to add water, fertilizer and then harvesting that would take a bit of time. Not a lot, but some.
We Do Not need to have to wait several hours, such as 12, 24 or more from start to finish for a easy plant, nor do we want to have multiple steps. But I do want to see some work into it. Put down a seed, add some water to it and leave it for approx. a hour to grow and come back and harvest. To get a higher yield, we could add the step of when we water it we could add some fertilizer and then it will give more in the final yield, or maybe even a second yield of less fruit.
Finding that middle ground where you feel you have accomplished something and were it becomes not a game but a chore is the hard thing to do.
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I do not think this is a bad idea. I do think that it depends on how much harvesting early hurts the yield. If a plant take 48 hours to grow and you get 50% by harvesting in one day then would this be good enough? Could you make up for the lesser yield by planting a larger farm?
I agree it is a choice, but I also agree with you on how some players will react. It is like AOE tools. We have conditioned the player base that the only way to gather/mine is to use these tools and nothing else will do. The fact that they can be over 900% more efficient than an iron tools might be why.
Because of this I feel 1 day is suited for the fastest growing crop, Plants typically take a very very long time to grow, and I feel if you plant something, It should take a little bit of time and waiting for it to grow,
Also since farming has the potential for exponential growth and this depends on rather or not you can collect seeds from the harvest that enables that potential, and a few other things. I feel the high end crops should take about a week maybe two weeks or somewhere in between before they are ready to be collected
In the event it is possible to grow something of very high value then maybe even the full 4 weeks if you are growing something exceptionally valuable.
Lastly, Since I do not know the failure conditions for farming, If there are random events that can create problems for the crop, then I feel that might warrant the growth times I stated above, to be reduced down, By how much? That would depend on the different types of failures and faults that can happen and how hard or easy they are to prevent.
If the crop is easy to grow, then more waiting is fine, If the crop is hard to grow or is needy and needs a lot of attention to grow correctly, then less waiting might be in order.
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@Trundamere that is exactly how I was looking at it too. Glad I’m not as crazy as I felt there!
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Yaaay farming! Im hype, would be fine with the top end stuff (whatever it may be) taking a day or two to grow.
But i do have to think, will this bring along plant coils for faster growing?
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To me the “better rewards at the end” mechanic sounds like the only rewarding aspect is waiting, you don’t gain more by being finicky and meticulous if the only variable is time. I think we should get some wiggle room, eve’s PI system does an ok job of rewarding time, in it you can select the time you want your “plants” to “grow”, shorter times give more resources per hour, but the cap is low. On the other hand a long “growth period” gives less per hour, but the cap they can accumulate up to is higher.
Almost to 100 votes 
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Maybe having them close to a water source or lava source will make them grow faster?
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It’s not just waiting though. You’d obviously have to continue the care and maintenance of the plant. Perhaps as you hit the new harvest timer, you’d have to use a new fertilizer or light, etc etc.
We don’t have near enough info to properly suggest timers so I’m just throwing all sorts of stuff out there 
I enjoyed eves moon mining/ PI system thoroughly. I’d be quite happy with a system like that but oh my god could you imagine the griefing that would go in game if we had to find hot spots for specific crops? And what if the crop hot spots moved over time as it was used?
Ooof. Man that’s a whole new element t to crop farming I’m not sure I want to think about. Thanks for the eve ptsd 
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Didn’t take as long as I thought it would to get the 100 votes on each category lol
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I must be slowpoke. I said 4 hours - 1 week, to get at least a feeling of accomplishment, else you can just give away the farm items. Oh…and hopefully the high end crop is something really special.
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I do have a question. As was pointed out earlier, if I can go gather leaves and in an hour get 200 starberries, why would I want to spend 4 hours or a week farming them? I still have to plant them and possibly tend them so if this takes longer then other methods why do it at all?
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Please no more coils 
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The heard the plant coils take Umbris. . .
kidding
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If you can grow something that is already in the game, and you can mass farm as is, then in that case, I do understand crop times being faster, However for anything New that is added by this system, That should be slow.
However, It should technically take longer regardless, for the existing item you are growing, as if you go out and farm them the classic way, you have to use tools, maybe even forge the tools to get AoE on them, Drain those tools of durability, break those tools, make more, and spend the hour of actively breaking blocks,
Growing stuff is alot more passive (I think at any rate), and will most likely require alot less effort on your part to do, and therefore it should take more time for you to get the same yield as you doing it the active way. It frees you up to get other things done while you would otherwise be devoting 100% of your time to the collection of the berry, and with that, there should be a cost, and that is the time it takes for it to grow.
The bottom line from me is: When both Active and Passive choices are given to the player as an way to get something, The active path should have a higher yield given for X amount of time spent, and the passive path giving less yield for the same X amount of time.
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What if they want to get away from those ‘farms/footfall traps’ but can’t do anything about it until they get a farming system put in place?
I mean that’s just one reason. Maybe they want to tweak around with the way regen works for something’s but it impacts other things?
I don’t know you asked a question and those are the 2 things that immediately popped in to my head. Not that they would do that or are thinking about it.
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