I think this is where things can get lost in translation. For some, there are aspects in game that are a chore and feel like a job but others love it. I don’t disagree with your overall sentiment but there will always be people that aren’t happy with a particular system and just avoid it because for them it’s just daunting or joblike. (Building large buildings and towns for example. Lots want to do it, but a smaller group is actually capable of doing that because it takes time, and resources, and motivation. Like a job.)
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I personally am not looking at farming as a way to get mass crops/food/items. I’m looking at farming as a means to make/grow items that I can’t get otherwise.
If I’m going to grow a beautiful rare sparkly oort decor tree, I would expect that to take a long time to mature.
If I’m going to grow a food item that will be used in a recipe, that requires more processing, I expect it to take a much shorter time before I can harvest it.
Will we have to water crops?
Will we have to fertilize crops?
Will they give us seeds? More of the same plant?
Will they be dependent upon character level? (ie: in RS, you can’t grow magic trees until you’re like level 70)
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This is slightly off topic but I would LOVE to see regen bombs removed from the game.
Yes, we have no info on how demanding this will be, yet. But as long as the activity windows are large enough (i.e. not having to water ona 24 hour schedule +/- 1 hour ) this should benefit the couple hours a week players.
I don’t plan to be farming much right now. I know some people are so ready, building giant farms, etcetera … With the information we have, this poll is basically random noise.
I have 108 tables on hand for processing stone. Trying to use more than one for timber is silly. This poll is basically asking “how long should it take to process a block” without telling us what kind of blocks we will process, what the inputs and outputs will be, or what the ‘value’ of the processed block is in experience, prestige, or usability.
So FWIW, they have my opinion.
EDIT: Totally agree with what MajorVex posted while I was typing. There are too many questions to try and give a meaningful answer here.
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This x100. But it’s one of the first big ones they’ve asked about related to molding the farming system so it’s good to cover all the bases regards to farming timers and the needs they require.
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Yes and the specificity of the question against a vague body of information is encouraging people to reveal their thoughts or expectations in more detail as well.
I don’t think it’s a bad move. I just think the value is limited.
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I don’t talk about feeling of grind - that’s a state of mind when you can’t enjoy something that takes more time to complete. It’s subjective.
I meant specifically designed stages in activities (be it crafting or farming), where one needs to be logged in specific time windows to successfully complete action. A design where steps A, B and C are needed, but each one of them have expiry date and if you don’t log in on time to complete it, you go back to step A and must start from beginning.
That’s what I see as “second job” danger - not actual time spent in game, but necessity of playing the game in specific hours. So, in my understanding a game becomes someone’s second job when it dictates how one organizes his/her life. Very dangerous thing and hopefully Boundless will never become that.
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Oh man, that’s a lot of posts that reading will make me go insane 
The few I skimmed, I definitely agree that the time frames are altered by yield and ‘care’ of the crops.
It may be useful to know peoples logging patterns. Myself, I can only log on for anywhere between 1-3hrs a day, and only in the afternoon/evening, due to family commitments.
So 24mins is good, and a day (20hrs) is alright.
At no point do I think a crop rotation should ever fail because you didn’t meet its next requirement. I thought I specified that in one of my posts but maybe I didn’t and likewise there has been a lot of posting so it may have been skipped or I just didn’t finish the thought.
Here’s how I see it for long timer plants (who knows what we actually get) however if any point is ever failed then it just reverts to the last successfully completed stage. The way I was envisioning it, the new stage just flat out didn’t start until you decided to initiate it or decided to stop the process there and harvest your crop. This would require you to log in to check on various stages at certain points but that no different than queuing up a bunch of mass crafts and having to log in to repair coils and what not, is it?
Ps: @james it’d be super cool if you had the time to make a post about how you guys envision farming being implemented or maybe the system is already designed and you’re just looking to get input on a few small things before you deploy to test. There is clearly a lot of thought and discussion to have but so much is speculative based on what we know so far
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For the last half hour I’ve been trying to envision how I’d set up a farming system in this game to grow already existing plants that could coexist with gathering. It seems a very fine line to me and I’m stuck.
On the one hand you could front load the farming requirements with needed resources like seeds, appropriate soil, fertilizer, weed control, pesticide, water–I know this is kinda overkill–then require periodic maintenance in order to successfully grow them.
On the other hand lets just plant stuff and walk away.
I can’t see a good solution that doesn’t either make me hate farming or somewhat obsoletes gathering and subsequently devalues things like inky leaves or beans, for example.
Edit: Maybe farmed plants, example Desert Swords, don’t drop both leaves and beans to offset?
Edit: I want to like farming! Help!
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I smell fertilizer bombs …
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I second this wholeheartedly!
@James, firstly you are very brave for opening this can of worms and you have my respect.
I’d also like to say thank you for the poll and getting a feel what the community wants.
Ok, now I’m gonna explain my choices and some opinion.
Slowest, I chose 1hr because my brain does not like the 24min thing. It’s probably a coding thing, but it seems an odd time to me. If there was 15 or 30 minute choices I might have chose one of those.
Longest… this choice might get me verbally torn apart but I chose 2weeks.
These aren’t the only two times, and I have a feeling there’s one day going to be lots of different crops inbetween here.
I feel if someone is going to put in the time for Uber Crop then they want it to be worth it and not every player who picks up a rake should be able to do that without some dedication. They want to feel proud of nurturing it for that long.
I also wonder if this long time is going to be for continuous yield crops. Trees take a long time to grow but soooo worth it.
(Had an apple orchard once. Glad someone put it down years ago because it was frickin awesome sitting in a tree eating apples all day)
It has been mentioned non-prestidge crops won’t wither inbetween taking care of them so that eases my mind.
I do feel there should be a grace period inbetween care, if it’s time based. Weather’s would honestly be fantastic to help water.
Honestly, after taming and hatching/raising dinos in Ark, I am totally up for this.
Ever spent ALL day babysitting twin dragons because they need to be hand fed and given attention every 15 minutes for that perfect stat bonus? It’s so frickin exhausting and stressful but that feeling when you have this perfect all-destroying beast under your command… best feeling ever.
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I HAVE BEEN WAITING FOR THIS SINCE I BOUGHT THE GAME!!!
(deep breathes–pant pant)
Sorry, couldn’t stop Hyde-kun from escaping there.
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2 weeks. Loves the ark system. Sat in apple orchard all day vs sitting in a pecan orchard all day. Has waited for farming system since ever.
You might be my internet farming doppelgänger.
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I am not going to read every single post. That’s 140+. No thanks. lol
I did 1 hour for fastest and 8 hours for longest. Some of these crops can wither and die which means they would probably yield nothing. Although I do think there should have been a larger range of options available, such as smaller time frames than 24 minutes and something between 8 and 24 hours, such as a 12 hour mark.
There’s also another thing that balances out the time spent waiting for the crops to reach full maturity that I don’t see being said. That being the yield per crop maturity date. If you’re growing starberries and it takes 1 hour, does that mean you basically would get twice as much of a full maturity yield than 24 minute time frame? Does that mean you get 8 compared to 16 or 20 or 30? There’s also the amount of crafting material sinks these items would have too.
I picked the 8 hour time frame for the longest wait cause I don’t think 24 hours is going to work very well. It’s probably going to be more annoying for a lot of people than anything else. I said 8 because it’s the closest option that was available to what I would have picked; which was 10 or even 12. Players have lives outside of Boundless and taking into consideration the growing times of crops that can actually wither and die is stupidly important. Particularly when players risk losing a crop yield because they had to stay late at work or have to attend their kid’s basketball game. If there wasn’t crops withering and dying, then I wouldn’t even bother to bring it up but that’s something that apparently is going to be a thing with farming.
I think growing times between 1 hour and 12 hours is a good range to work with. If there’s cross pollination with farming where berries and beans can create something else, then perhaps those more complex crops can have much larger growing times, such as 1 day and some hours of change. I think that would be reasonable to expect.
Overall though, @james it’s pretty hard to gauge what a reasonable growing time is for the lowest tier crops all the way up to highest tier crops when we know very little in terms of game mechanics of how this content is going to work. Again, I didn’t read all the previous posts before this one so if it was actually answered I’d like to be referenced to those responses.
The quickest growing plant I imagine would be a beginner plant, such as yams.
Plants similar to yams in difficulty should take 10 minutes or less to grow.
The hardest plant to grow should take no longer than a day.
For plants that wilt: How long does it take for a plant to wilt? What causes the wilting(can weather affect them? animals/enemies?)? Are most plants going to be able to wilt? What is the upkeep on plants?
Questions: How would we obtain seeds? How would we harvest a plant? Can we harvest a plant? Can we make compost to speed up the process? Are we going to have a new tool, or would we be able to just whack a plant with anything, when it is “ready”?
I like to come home from work and enjoy my time on Boundless and other games. Farming is a fun activity in games. It is actually something I look forward to and love to do, along with fishing (please please please add fishing).
I don’t want to have to worry about my plants wilting/upkeep (upkeep meaning have to water every 5 hours or something), and then come home to a dead empty farm :’(
I want to enjoy farming, and add it to the things I mess with daily.
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I said 1 hour, 1 day.
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In several previous threads on this topic it’s been stated that crops with yields will not wither and die.
Wait. Why can’t I vote? Hasn’t even been 12 hours yet.
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Oh! That’s good to know.
I don’t think I personally will care then what the growing times will be as long as they aren’t days of waiting at a time. I like to be able to actively play a certain part of the game’s content pretty much whenever I am able to or can. I think what I said regarding the times still stands regardless if they don’t wither.
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