Please bring in an “Auto Harvest” Boon

I’d like to see a tractor type machine that rides on a rail (or you ride it in a rail) that harvests crops and replants seeds as you go. Have it run on Petrlim. That way you can place down a track above your farm and just chug along replanting all of the stuff, assuming you have enough seeds.

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I’d rather just have a specific tool for harvesting that could have a larger aoe put on it.

The tiller would be ideal for this, as it would also allow for tilling large areas of soil.

OK I just tried this to avoid wearing out tools that have other uses. I managed to harvest 1011 plants in about 10 minutes. this includes the times I had to stop and re-till soil and let my energy recharge and kill a few spitters (might have to wall in my farm).

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Is there a reason you cannot wait for all of the crops to be done?

It just seems simpler to plant and come back much later to get everything one time. I set up different crops on different rotations so I don’t have to worry about the few plants that didn’t finish yet.

I have over 1000 seeds planted. Some of them take a couple of hours. Some a day, some 2 days and want to keep a constant cycle. Seems the goo just grows a lot more random.

I’d lean to them smoothing out the maturity cycle on all the crops so it is a bit tighter. Or at least have the long ones just fail or something if it is looking to be at the far end of the cycle. As long as everything finishes in the full cycle time it is given then I’m ok for people to wait because that is the growth cycle set by the Developers.

I can understand the amount of work but I’m against a boon personally over just tweaking crop cycles. I feel if people are planting crops and watching them closely that the maturity cycle becomes a pain that they should do other things in the game or plant crops at different times. We have to let nature take its course if we have a system that isn’t set to a specific “ready for harvest” time.

Unfortunately they can’t do that. The crops don’t keep an individual timestamp of when they’re planted (otherwise they’d be able to grow in exact times anyway). They only know the current growth stage which may or may not change at the next growth tick.

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Thanks… I forgot about that.

But, when it says grows in 3 days or whatever it does fully finish by then correct? Basically the outer range is a hard limit?

It is just estimation, it can grow faster. Every 24min there is chance to grow next step and some plants have higher chance to advance next stage with higher probability …so I have understood this farming :smiley:

Yeah, but I mean the end point. For me it is more important when it is DONE for real. The crop info should show the exact longest point that it would take.

So if it shows 1 day everything should be done. 3 days - come back 3 days later and they all should be done, etc.

At least with that valid information then people can plan accordingly. We need stuff like that so at least people know when it will truly be done outside of all the RNG stuff.

No this is not the end point. I can wait two days when all my kranuts should have matured and there might still be some at the initial stage. Or nine hours for my exotic yams and they will not all have matured. I end up waiting a good bit longer than the initial time given to have a complete field. I wait at least overnight (planting in the morning) to get the crops that take less than a day and I still end up with some that have not matured.

Unfortunately they are fully rng with a percent chance to progress.

I think each crop has 4 stages.

The growth times are expected, not maximum.

Lets say 4 stages and each stage ticks every minute.

If you want crops to expect to grow in 8 minutes, you make them have 50% chance to advance on each tick.

Some could grown in 4 minutes, most will grow in 8 minutes, potentially some could never grow.

There is a name for the curve, but I can’t remember it (or be bothered to look it up!)

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I found these detailed explanations by developer, what I understood it farming uses RNG and with certain formulas to save data on server.

This morning was 36-48 hours after planting around 200 computation crops. I had 6 fully grown ahead of the estimated 3 day timer. A large percentage are around where I would expect. And about 1/4 haven’t progressed a single stage yet.

Thank you @Kal-El, @fidach, @almund for the clarifications regarding the farming RNG. I did some testing but not extensive at that level especially regarding the “poisson process” that was talked about.

I think it just never sunk in that the time shown in the Info field was “estimated” and not a hard time frame. @lucadeltodecso I don’t think it ever was clarified on if there was a true hard time limit for growth. In the post Almund quoted you listed days that were hundreds long. I assumed that was an example but is there some truth to those numbers? I guess I am confused on why the GUI could not have just shown the true end date unless there really is none. I get the RNG process but certainly there must be some end point.

There isn’t. Of course it gets more and more wildly improbable the more time passes; but it is possible (*) for a crop to ‘never’ tick. And also possible for a crop to mature in 1 tick too.

(* of course, it’s a prng, not a true rng, so ‘never’ tick isnt truly possible, but still roughly holds…)

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Auto harvest wouldn’t be bad.

I mean, we have auto-loot from monsters. We COULD just click on them all to get their loot, but that isn’t the fun part. The fun part is killing them and surviving.

I think an Auto Harvester item would be cool. The fun part of farming is building the farm and planting (at least for me). The harvesting part being a little easier would be nice (and keep me from accidently clicking the almost full stuff).

However, I am not sure how auto-harvest would work. There would be problems with it working compared to the auto-loot.

Enemies auto-loot but are all individual and there are no permission issues.

Auto Harvester would need to check to see if you have access to the plant and what if two people approach with an Auto Harvester? Who gets priority? there is only one loot in this situation. If it was an enemy both would get loot… but that doesn’t happen with plants.

Can you auto harvest in the wild? Wouldn’t that reduce the ‘gathering’ thing?

Okay, so Auto Harvest…only on planted crops, in your own beacons…hmm

Seems a bit trickier to put together then I think. I will just keep smacking crops! hehe

Thank you. I had a feeling there was technically no end date even though the RNG odds are set so it likely would never happen.

Due to bit length issues is there any way to have some type of failure point where a crop just fails at some point after X number of unsuccessful maturity cycles? Or really does that not help the overall challenge of the few planted crops that can go days before maturity compared to the rest of the crop.

From what I’ve seen from the berries at least, they tick over in 15 minute intervals. As in, the estimated time left decreases by 15minutes or multiples thereof.

From this i assume that berry crops get “ticked” every 15 minutes.

Basic starberries have 4 stages, and grow in 3 hours. 3 hours = 12 “ticks” of 15 mins. So if a berry would ripen on average in 12 attempts, it has roughly 1 in 3 chance of growing each tick.

If the process is truly random, then the probability does exist that for a single berry, it could succeed each tick and complete growth in 4 consecutive jumps. This would mean the absolute fastest maturation through 4 stages would be 1 hour for any crop.

On the other hand, there exists an unfortunate related berry that fails each tick ad infinitum; and never matures. The probability tends to 0 as total grow time reaches infinity, but it is open ended nonetheless.

In this model we do have a fixed fastest time but not a slowest time.

One way this could be modelled differently to give a fixed max growth time is as follows;
Instead of giving the starberry a 1/3 chance each tick, it can be given 3 ticks to reach the next stage. This means that it will take between 15 and 45 minutes (fixed) to grow 1 stage.

If grow (1) and grow(2) ticks both fail, then grow is forced on tick 3. As soon as growth is successful, the berry’s “growth memory” is wiped and it starts a new 3 tick cycle.

In this way, the best berry can still grow 4 stages in a single hour, but the worst case scenario takes 3 ticks for each stage, or all 3 hours.

As you can see from the above, probabilities will need to be reshuffled so that max growth time is in fact 2x expected average (6h), meaning the grow (forced) should only happen after 6 ticks and not 3… but this is one way to limit slowest possible growth to double the average time.

I have no definite idea of how growth is coded atm, just sharing my understanding and thoughts on possible other systems that may have been considered to limit such fringe cases.

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There’s a lot of discussion about this in here

Essentially it boils down to the bits needed to count the unsuccessful attempts. There’s not enough space in the block metadata to do it in an efficient manner.

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