@Kal-El @Xaldafax I really like this idea and think it’s a lot better than my own ! You guys should take a look
Current balance makes the whole deal just surface gathering with an extra time gated step involved. This can be resolved in alot of ways.
-letting you reinvest crops into seeds.
-adjusting seed returns.
-adjusting crop returns.
There are alot of good ideas, end of the day farming is separate from surface gathering and thats fine. Arguing that smacking 1 shot plants with a basic totem should be protected because it is a part of “gathering” is a false equivalency, it just is not the same.
Current balance needs another pass and thats what this thread is about.
An alternative to adding another machine would be to bring a little more depth to the crop layout.
Some catalyst blocks could boost crop yield (as they do currently) whilst others could boost seed yield. The farmer can then decide on the balance they want.
(In game development it’s common to use placeholder assets in early prototypes. The trick is to make sure that the placeholder assets are cubes and spheres. If you use low quality assets that are crappy versions of the final assets then players can get extremely distracted by the assets. Show them a prototype with spheres and cubes and they’re think the gameplay is cool. Show them the same prototype with low quality assets and they’ll think the gameplay is rubbish. The learning is that if the models aren’t final quality, make sure they’re no-where-near final quality. The same is true for balance.
Many comments are based around the return of 67% of seeds. We should have made this 6.7%. Then the conversation could have then been around the system and not the balance. Balance is balance. Balance is numbers in a spreadsheet. Systems are weeks and weeks of coding. Take the current systems make the crops yield 95% seeds and make wild crops yield 5x seed then you radically shift the time balance from gathering to farming. Balance changes, not system changes.
The learning is: only release to Testing with cubes and spheres for balance, or release to Testing with final quality balance. Nothing in between.)
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I really prefer this because of the increased player investment when they have to make decisions that result in a tradeoff and the outcome gets personalized. It’s not “I have a crop of earthyams and bulbs ready, I guess I gotta go harvest it” it becomes “my crop of earthyams and seeds is ready! I have to go harvest it!!”
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I’m not fussed about reduced seeds on harvest. Just a few more things when I’m relaxing gathering glowing lamella, beans, and shadow orbs.
Yeah, I like this idea… simpler to implement than what I was thinking for sure. Also on the layout, maybe what you grow near to it could play in as well, like how IRL some stuff will help if you grow them together like tomatoes and basil, others can tend to kill another off, that could be interesting.
The idea that the player can decide what to post on the farm with blocks sounds workable.
Cause then the player can decide do i do a crop run on the field or do I do a seed run on the field?
But this would only work if the seed run would return more than 100% sowed in, so the seed run would sustain the crop run afterwards.
On the other notion, the design that seed return should always be below 100% no matter what the farmer does, is kinda confusing to me. From my understanding this means if a player wants to be a farmer and sell food items, he also needs to be a surface gatherer cause he cannot provide enough seeds for farming to work.
You could argue that the farmer could hire a surface gather to gather the seeds for him, but that doesn’t really work cause the farmer has nothing that he can really give to the gatherer. Compare that to the arrangement between craftman and a miner and or hunter, craftman forges the weapon or hammer sells it to the hunter/miner and they go of doing their thing, the miner brings back minerals the crafter wants to buy, the hunter has creature drops the crafter needs and will buy.
The farmer has what for the gatherer? maybe, finished food but then he would be a baker/brewer (you can do that on top of farming) but even then the gatherer already has the food items from gathering in the wild, so he doesn’t need to buy them of you, he just sells them straight to the baker/brewer and gets the food of them. So the farmer is left out, or it becomes a semi hobby for a baker/brewer or anyone who has seeds lying around, but for that it seems to involve way to much work.
TL,DR: So please make the farmer a sustainable job/character option, that doesn’t need to surface gather to do the thing they want to do in the game.
EDIT: The system itself sounds really nice and tinkering with the layout to get optimum results sounds amazing, cause that means I have to think about the layout for efficiency and how to make it beautiful at the same time.
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Additionally the gathering that the new wild crop plants consist of is very different than standard surface gathering, if you have to do it for every crop then in effect it is not farming but a different form of surface gathering.
This solves all concerns.
People that want to set up endless farming can…it is all in the design.
Those that want to run and gather then plant can do it.
Seeds keep value and product keeps value! Win win
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I’m not sure about the specific suggest you mean but I am truly sorry if I missed something. Sometimes I might be very focused on a certain context and I don’t deviate or respond to other parts. But if I supported whatever you’re talking about from someone else’s statement then I can certainly support or at least clarify why I might not have said something on your comment.
I always seen conversations as evolving… it is a discussion to shift around and understand each side of the points being made…
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This has actually been a great discussion. I want farming to be something unique unto itself rather than just surface gathering with time gating. I really think being able to turn produce into seed stock is the right direction to go as it opens the option for both gathering and sustaining a farm.
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Thank you responding considering what I am sure is a lot of balance and bug work…
Well you know how much I like asset and feel we need a broader depth of tools and items to fill our workshops up with. But, I do understand that requires the modeling as well as in this case the additional mechanic of what to do with these seeds and is it worth the additional game play.
Personally I’d prefer the funds/modeling work to go to some of the other items we talked about that increase game functionality in a broader way (shop book, contract book, item based mailbox, etc). Due to that I’d say that we focus on the catalyst block game play. Since you already have that mini-game in the farming design then we certainly should improve it. It gives players options - more yield, more base resources, etc.
I do think the community is a bit hurt because some of the specifics aren’t being shared and to find true optimization might be a lot of work. But then again, I think people need to explore and try and learn more in this game instead of just doing a quick 4 things to get the biggest bang for their buck and finish the new content in 9 hours…
Love the game development details… I think the more the community understands on how to really contextualize themselves into what YOU ALL face, the better our feedback can be.
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From my understanding that is already in the farming… certain things help beyond just water and soil. I don’t know about the “kill off or hurt” aspect… but I do like things like that - risk/reward type models.
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I wouldn’t expect that in any form or fashion. We cannot have a perfect full loop. The game is already skewed due to regeneration. This would compound the problem. Even farmers today in full sustainability need to provide something into the system to keep it going.
Of course it shouldn’t be a high return but still need something of an input. Otherwise it will knock other things out of balance like bomb mining did, stone XP with xp buff, etc.
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someting like this update is also just next to impossible to properly test with the tools we are given someting that is so heavly time gated i would say is better tested in a QA environment where time can be manipulated has it stands right now for us to say test to see if the optimization is there we got to setup the farms plant everything then wait a few hours come back tweak and redo while in a closed QA world 2 or 3 tests could be done in the time span of 20 or 30 min.
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I know for like the Exo’s they build tons of worlds to see if what they got the liked and could work… so I am sure Farming was the same thing and what we see is where they felt it was a good fit after they spend hundreds of hours in QA.
This is one of the few scenarios where time can hurt but the design probably provides no ability to do a time adjustment since there are many worlds and players. They probably could give a “cheat bucket” type thing that would speed up the growth cycle but that would take coding and I’m sure their minds are other places. Plus part of the game play is waiting so that needs testing too… is the growth cycle right, etc.
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They could also change the numbers to allow the crops to ripen in an hour to allow testing of each. I will say, the method of using a test sever and working with feedback is VASTLY superior to other dev teams who just force a patch live with only a small amount of internal testing and no care to what the playerbase thinks and then taking months of patching to get said update to a playable state. What I have found is that farming is not sonething new, at least for the organics, but a direct replacement for an existing system. Overall the first iteration is just more surface gathering with time gating.
I agree 100%. I see farming as an entire boost to the economy. This will be a market in itself. I see people specializing in flowers, and I think pie makers will for sure find this a great resource.
I’m sure as time goes on, more seeds will come available in future updates.
I’m excited about this update… 
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Pie makers will go from being able to farm up as much seed as they need for flour ect to having to do the same amount of gathering and then having to wait 11 hours to get their mats. T)
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I think what you can learn from this is people want self-sufficient setups.
The question is why.
Is it too hard to get to other worlds and harvest resources? Do resources not give enough? Do they just want to be alone? Do players want to do something else? Do they not want to trade? What if you made trading easier?
For a long time I’ve felt, the number of worlds, combined with how hard it is to find shop stands of other players, AND how SLOW the default movespeed is, makes trading extremely boring and tedious. Even just raising the default run speed would simplify the feeling of grind.
But for me personally, if you’re going to remove regen-bomb farms, there needs to be a system in place to make finding shop stands extremely easy. The biggest obstacle for me, was I hated spending even 20 minutes searching shop stands, so I decided to just play solo, but then realized the grind is insane for solo players, and then burnt out.
edit I’ll add one thing, that I agree, if you do allow self-sufficient setups, the tradeoff would be more seeds and fewer yams, but by doing so you’d eliminate the need to trade. People would then be encouraged to be hermits. Why trade when they can slowly but surely grow all they need?
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