When the balance has not been set and the developers have clearly communicated that it is not set. Can people explain why we keep hounding on and constantly saying that the numbers are wrong?
I just don’t understand… We put 1 seed in and almost get 2x the return and almost half the seeds back at this point. So you will still always get more back than the seeds you ever have to put in. Constantly increasing returns and having to do less work that before.
Maybe the numbers need to be adjusted but the devs fully understand and will look at setting it to what they feel is right.
im starting to get out get the feel that this is the satisfactory of updates where optimization is going to be king
to be fair i did not say the update is going to be trash numbers are too it was more of a may need to be twaked even if we are not aiming for a 1:1 above 60% shod be the target seed yield so that you are not spending more time hunting for seeds then farming its self and if we don’t express that the numbers are off then how do the devs know that it may need to be changed
I dont think you got any estimated time how Long it would take to Gather all, set up all and then wait for all crops?
Still that allready gives a good idea. Thank you for the time doing this.
The time to gather is about the same as old surface gathering for those mats with various wait times tacked on after getting the seeds. The setup time is very similar to setting up a public regen farm. Planting/harvesting gets extremely boring when doing large fields.
Gathering the seeds I have no estimate. I tried on the first day to gather raw earthyam and it took me 5 minutes to find 10. I did not even try on the other plants but I believe for some I would have to go to a higher tier planet to find them in any numbers (I am on a t1 planet on test). This is the part that could keep me from farming in the live game.
For the 6 fields of 132 tilled blocks each, it took me about around 20 minutes to plant everything. The area was already prepped so it is merely planting which means I planted one seed about every 1.5 seconds. Prepping the area only has to be done once, so I am not sure that has to be figured into the time. Since you do not have to retill it really is one and done to have the land ready. It took me a while due to chiseling and just wanting it to look nice. I will get more stats on harvesting tomorrow. I am not using any brews or AOE tools to do any of the farming. I am waiting overnight to even harvest the plants. If I do not give them plenty of time, I seem to have too many that do not reach maturity.
Sorry I was very unspecific. . Just having to gather seeds to replant the same field each time is what I meant. With the returns I have gotten so far, I would be regathering longer than I think it would be worth it.
To your question. I do not really expect every seed to be found on every tier of planet or in an abundance on every planet. That does not fit the game (as much as I do not like to have to trek through 50 planets to find something). I think the developers do want to make sure the seeds are abundant enough over the entire universe, but I am probably not the right person to test this part of the game.
For me the game is about bringing civilization to a hostile world. For me it’s not a survival game, survival is “the pain” I want to remove by colonizing the worlds.
I think it’s rather cool. You have these dangerous worlds, but thanks to players you have a fully protected area where you can collect the resources without the danger. You can even go afk for a while and all the spitters can do is walk up and down in front of the window like the lion in a zoo.
I understand that other players play the game completely different, they love the danger and thrill of survival. And for them there are exo planets where it’s impossible to bring civilization to them.
Leave the exo planets to the warriors, and the normal planets to the engineers.
It seems like you are upset that we are discussing balance? I think this is a bad read of the discussion on this thread. Most of these comments are not about balance, but about feel. How does it feel to farm on the test realm right now? The answer for a lot of players is “not as good as I had hoped.” The balance discussion comes as players try to express why it feels bad and what might be done to improve it. Which I think is what most of us assume the test server is for. (aside from practicing forging of course.)
So you look at the comments and see: “oh people are obsessed with this 67% number, but that number is arbitrary and so I am not interested in that discussion.” But what is really going on in my view, is that players are using that seed drop number to express their bigger dissatisfaction which is: “I want to be able to be a farmer and only a farmer. I don’t want to have to be a gatherer in order to be a farmer.” The players are expressing that through balance, but that is only because it is the simplest, most straightforward way to fix it. If you engage with the underlying problem, you can address it in terms of systems. In fact, most people would probably prefer it be fixed on a systems level, but we know that a request for the seed drop rate to be increased is much more likely to be granted than a request that the way farming works is fundamentally changed.
I think the discussion in this thread is primarily around sustainability of farms and the fact that people don’t want to do things they see as un-fun (either running around planets gathering plants or running around planets looking for a vendor selling seeds) in order to thing they want to do (grow crops). If you are opposed to farms being self-sustaining can you explain why? Can you explain what you see as the role of farming in the game and why it isn’t just gathering that takes extra time and plots as some have claimed? Feel free to answer these questions on a systems level.
(Sorry to only address this specific part of your post and what @James is saying, just a bit too tired to go into a full reply right now.)
Maybe I’m making a bit of a leap, but perhaps something that can be taken away from this is that the new game systems around farming are actually fine, since people generally don’t seem to be discussing that.
I mean, at a very basic level, from what I’ve been doing on testing, most of the systems do seem to function fine and generally make sense to me.
That said, there have been systems suggestions for the general balance/feel issues, and I guess it’s possible that they are now considering those solutions, but haven’t told us yet… Well, that would be my hope anyway.
And in any case; knowing the exact design intent behind crop-farming (especially considering that it replaces regen-farming) would probably be helpful in setting the bar for expectations? I would find it easier to deal with factors I don’t like if I had a reason for them to be that way, anyway.
I think this is part of where the problem lies… people don’t necessarily want to just be farmers. They want to be self-sustaining. They don’t want to have to work to gather food. They see it as a necessary item to be able to do the other things they enjoy, such as (but not limited to) crafting foods for themselves or to sell in shops.
Absolutely none of the other professions in game are self sustaining. You don’t automagically have tools to just be a miner, or weapons to just be a hunter, or building materials to just be a builder. You need to either purchase them from someone else, or gather the materials and make them yourself. I don’t see why farming should be any different?
Personally - if we’re now talking about the balance around seed drops - I feel that the current drop rates are too low. That’s fine though, as James has mentioned, those are adjustable values on a spreadsheet. They can be tweaked to be better or worse as needed. My gut feeling on optimum seed yield would be to set it at about an 80-85% return rate. So you’re able to get a few decent yields out of a big plot of crops before you need to replenish your seed stocks. I feel a 15-20% drop off rate is acceptable. That’s only a requirement to gather another 15-20 seeds per 100 (as opposed to the current values of 33 per 100).
For other jobs you have the acquiring phase (hunting for Oort, mining for gems) and the processing step (extracting Oort shards from the Oort, compacting diamonds for compact diamonds, refining diamonds for refined diamonds).
People don’t want to play “the extractor”, they are fine with a machine doing that part. (At least I hope… I really hope nobody every said “I wish I could just play as the extractor”).
Now with farming, the game play is supposed to be in the processing step. That’s completely different from everything else where your workshop just processes the stuff. Of course we expect that now the acquiring step is automatic.
Suggesting people should just buy seeds is like suggesting that you shouldn’t compact your own diamonds.
I’m not suggesting that they buy seeds (although buying them is a viable option)… I’m saying that people don’t want to have to go an gather more, which is wrong.
Funnily enough though, I have bought Compact Diamonds as well as mined and compacted my own Options are fun.
I’m still an advocate for keeping regen farming for the foods that have been replaced by the new farming mechanic, but I still think it should be at a greatly reduced rate than currently. It needs to be a less viable option to actual farming… much like current surface gathering is a less viable option to regen farming.
Yup, I feel the same way. Don’t make the regen farms obsolete but balance it in such a way that farming is clearly the best way to get the most materials, if this means changing the drop rate to something that is way lower than currently is the case I would be ok with that.
I even believe it might a good idea that the plants themselves have a small chance to drop the produce and not just the seeds because then there are 3 ways of obtaining them and I feel the more ways the better!
I don’t think this is quite true. It isn’t that they don’t want to work, its that they want to do the work of farming, not the work of gathering.
2 things:
Now you are back on balance. Farming has to be balanced with the other professions. I don’t disagree necessarily, but saying “it’s fair,” is cold comfort to those saying, “it isn’t fun.”
I get the impression that many were looking to farming to be an alternative to gathering specifically. So for those people, the realization that half of farming is gathering is particularly unsatisfactory.
Farming is a new system, it shouldn’t just copy older systems but improve upon them. When players say, “this isn’t that fun,” and your defense is, “well none of the other systems in the game are fun either so why should this be any different?” you aren’t on the most solid of ground.
EDIT: The more I think about this, the more I think the fundamental problem with this and many (most?) other issues with this game come down to lack of systems to support the in-game economy. If it were easy to find what other people were selling and to get your goods in front of other people. Everyone would be able to specialize how they want, but as it is engaging in the economy is such a chore that most players want to be independent.
I’m pretty sure it doesn’t copy most other systems in a lot of ways… you’re not AoE mining for one. The issue here comes from those that want to be farmers, but they wouldn’t really have to do much else, after initial setup, other than plant and harvest crops… that’s it. It’s a case of balancing farming with the other professions, thus it needs to have some dependencies on the other professions… which every one of the other professions already has.
Also, please do not try and put words into my mouth about what I find fun. I have never said that something should not be fun. What someone finds “fun” is subjective and we all have different ideas of what we find fun. Straw men are never on the most solid of ground either.
I feel this can turn into a very circular argument … the more independent people want to become, the less reason there is to have an economy. If people had to rely on shops more to get the stuff they need, and that area is not supplying them an easy or intuitive way to do that, then they’ll probably shout on the forums much more for something to make that process easier, instead of shouting louder to become self-sufficient. Maybe that should be the something the next update needs to focus on? An easier way to advertise or find shops and the produce that people want/need from the areas where they cannot be self-sufficient.
Options are fun.