HELP! Give us your feelings for crop growing duration?

I don’t think farming should replace gathering, so hopefully we won’t only get the same items as when we gather. If I can grow 200 starberries in 4 hours, that is fine with me anyway. That way it becomes easier to get stuff when you are not playing. Cutting trees becomes quite boring too in the end.

Yeah I have to agree that my answer may change based on the specifics. Personally I’d like to see a farming skill set that could help with time and efficiency. Much like the crafter skill sets.

Without more information you could very well be correct and farming could be very passive. However we have seen watering cans so there very well could be tools needed to plant and tend the crops. I would expect time will be needed to gather seeds and plant seeds at a minimum and these will require tools of some sort. Tending might accelerate growth so you could argue that is the same as using a more expensive tool (forged) to do the gathering.

I think if it takes seconds to plant a crop and a few seconds to gather the same item then the effort is equal and the difference is the time for the crop to grow.

I think the first response is very interesting. If a lot of what they allow us to farm are items already in game then this could very well be the case. The regen is also interesting. Are they wanting to reduce certain resources but they come from the same source as other resources where there is a shortage? Are we going to grow the items where there is a shortage to allow for a tweaking on the regen of certain other items?

My god, 24 minutes is way too short. You could start building out a big field and by the time you finish planting, your first plants are ready to harvest?!?!

No way, I voted 8 hours for the min, and 1 week max.

You have to consider that most farm mechanics self inflate, meaning that if you plant a vegetable, that vegetable can allow you to plant more than one plant next time.

A too-short maturation timeline would cause the resources generated from it to be essentially worthless on the market.

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I’m kind of the same… think stuff should be much longer … but all of this is based on WHAT it is we are growing.

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As always, speculation is my forte. It could be way off base though but it makes sense as they are using exo planets to gather data and we’ve been through several cycles now and they may have an idea of changes they want to implement .

Speculation.

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I voted one day, and one week.

i have only some ideas on what will be grown, only some ideas what the growing will require. There’s really very limited information to ask for community feedback on such a balancing point.

So the poll is between “I want it NOW” and “You should have to work for it” I guess. Can’t wait to see the votes.

Bluntly i don’t believe that farming should be a single-session activity. You don’t grow strawberries while you’re pouring your cereal. Or go out after lunch and plant tomatos for dinner.

hEre we go again…

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Yeah, I mean if you DEDICATE your time to farming, you should be able to generate a prolific amount of product. If anyone can just wait 24-60 minutes and have the same product, then what value does your work and dedication have?

If you have a max of 1 week to mature, then you have plenty of time to build in efficiencies and synergies to your farm structure to edge out competition.

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I agree in the real world that is how it works, but if Boundless was the real world then we would not be able to build a house in a few hours, we would not come back when we die. It is a game so making it link to real life for this one mechanic seems wrong to me.

If I can gather starberries in an hour should they take a week to grow? If they do then why even make the effort to program farming into the game?

We can both go out and with the same tool harvest a couple of smart stacks of leaves and given the same skill set come back with roughly the same amount of starberries. So if we can both do the same thing in the same amount of time what value does our work have? As long as players with the same skill sets and tools can accomplish the same things in the same amount of time, why does it have to take weeks?

Edit: I have never understood why time alone equals reward. If I plant something and leave it alone for 2 weeks before it matures, why does this make it more special than if I plant something and harvest it in a day? Is the intent to once again put a mechanic in place that rewards the players that can play for hours everyday and not provide anything of value for those that cannot?

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Something that hasn’t been mentioned. Watering. As much as it rains, why would we need to water the plants?

its possible that weather may not effect plants IE you could be on a world that rains 24/7 but still need to water the plants

Conversely, some planets don’t have rain at all.

hence the introduction of water sources and lava sources so you can water or lava your plants?

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my guess it it would allow for irrigation/mob,player traps

ding ding!

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It shouldn’t be time alone though, and crops shouldn’t be set and forget. They should require care and maintenance. Not everyone will like nor want to do that level of care.

I really dislike forging. I do it a bit but I still buy a majority of my tools. I dislike rng that much.

I suck at building but build my blocks with some slopes.

I don’t see why the farming system should/would be any different. The fact that some people (myself included) suggest a long timer doesn’t inherently mean nothing to do. There should absolutely be criteria met to continue the crops/plant growth. But if you have a list of things to do to care for the plant, some folks will be put off because it’s ‘a job’. But how is that any different from anything else in Boundless.

If anything there are Boundless ways to do things in this game. It’s one reason there are such variable prices on things. We all value the time we do specific tasks in game wildly differently from our neighbor.

So far all we really have so far is this poll info and there’s been quite a discussion ranging all over the map. That’s good to see. I can’t wait to see what the system they’re working on actually looks like and plays like.

I’m just excited period :grin::smiley::nerd_face:

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Sorry to trim the quote but I want to point out the contradiction there.

A crop that grows in an hour keeps you impatiently waiting for an hour. A crop that grows in a day means you can comfortably log out, and come back later.

In My Opinion, farming should ultimately reward patience. I guess plenty of people are just looking for a way to get mass stuff with low effort, which is fine. But I don’t believe it should be instant.

You compare growing times to harvesting times, but perhaps they should at least be compared to regen times. You can’t harvest the same tree every 24 minutes.

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let’s remember boundless is not a farming simulator, nor mining simulator, nor crafting simulator

none of the features should be over-complicated and need continuous attention as it would seriously impede many players’ ability to achieve desired results - we want large fan base to make this game more fun and for that no feature should become a second job

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Well I’d say you shouldn’t be able to get the same result farming as you can gathering leaves. If you can, then you don’t need both and should get rid of one of the sources.

Instead, farming should provide an elevated quality/quantity of existing resources, or provide access to entirely new resources.

Time doesn’t = reward, but we’re talking about farming, the concept of which is essentially propagation and multiplication. 1 corn becomes 10 which becomes 100. If the turn around is too fast, then you will have an explosion of certain resources.

Someone who spends their entire week farming, with no other activities, should be able to roughly generate the same amount of wealth as someone who spent that same week mining or gathering or hunting, at least once you take in to consideration tools and danger. A short timeline will imbalance that. Why gather leaves if you can just plant vines and be done with it?

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That is a fair point but I can use regen bombs and then I can do it over and over again. That is how players are getting hundreds of resources in a short period of time.

Fair enough maybe I am assuming some maintenance that is either required or will make things grow faster and should have stated such instead of plant it and leave it for 2 weeks.

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