Feedback & Ideas: Bees, wax and honey

[LadyGoo]

SWO of the current situation of bees and beekeeping:

Strengths:
- You can harvest 5 or more times more wax from the beehives, than in legacy. This has reduced the sizes of the carrot fields, that were used to generate the wax.
- The extremely annoying bug, that was forcing you to keep a character online (otherwise your wax would have bacis quality) was removed.
- Wax is used in curiosity craft, gilding, gear crafting, leather spiraling (affects all steel armor, cutthroat cuirass, ranger boots). Therefore, wax-making is very important for the villages.
- Wax is used to construct great halls and mineholes. The last one is extremely important early-game, therefore people have been killing and trading for the wax.
- Honey is used for Brodgar Rings and Honeybuns, easy-to-make and highly rewarding baked goods, that allow you to increase the agility. My village has been producing a lot of them.

Weaknesses:
- In the early-game players have to basically wait for a week or more to get the first straw for the beehives. Therefore, all other crops of theirs grow in a really slow rate (grapes especially). You might have the gold and silver, even the suckling maws, but the vinegar comes as the last thing. It might be considered as something positive in terms of slowing down the player-base before they will reach the end-game. However, there could be some ways to allow the players to harvest more wax and strategically plan the plantation areas.

Opportunities & New ideas:
- Biome type affects the growth rate. When you do not have the beehives, you have to wait for a long time for the plants to grow. In real-life, the biomes affect the growth of the plants. For instance, coffee grows well in highland areas, cucumber does not require high humidity and grows well everywhere and etc. The plants could grown faster in the meadows (higher bee population) as well and etc.
- Wild beehives could be introduced in the same way as the anthills: bees could fly around the beehives and attack anyone who would attempt to raid the beehive. Alternatively, they could aggro anyone around them, including the animals. This could lead to some interesting hunting strategies as well. The beehive could drop loot in forms of bee curios (bee empress, soldier, queen, prince and etc.) as well as propolis (used for healing wounds) and the beewax. This makes foraging more interesting and opens more ways to gather the wax needed for the traveler sacks and mineholes.
- There is certainly a need for more curios that would require wax (as well as gilds). My wax storages have finally started depleting after the last update with the great wax seal. Having item sinks like this improves the desire to farm as well.




#biome #farming #newcreatures #bee #wax #earlygame

[Enjoyment]

Biome type affects the growth rate

This. Including trees. I was always confused why should I plant all the trees on wald (forest) if they don't grow in the forest in the wild (like plane trees or cypress).
Also, if biome type will affect crop growth rate, we need to overhaul seed-getting system. Let the WWW spawn only on plain and generate only "plain-crops" seeds. And there should be other objects for different biome's seeds (like some kind of moss/bushes for forests/highlands). So if you got some seeds from WWW, gathered on plain, you know that you should plant in the same biome to get growth rate bonus.
But technically, when you plant some crops - you plant it always on one biome - plowed ground, so it could be very hard to implement suggested system.

P.S. Wild beehives idea seems neat, and easy to implement.

[bojackson]

Wild beehives would be awesome, kind of like anthills yea but we could gather wax/honey from them (new curios too yay!). Should probably make them pretty rare tho so it doesn't conflict with current mechanics too hard. Also make them a little harder to fight than ant hills, also it would be interesting to have the bees able to fly over deep water so you had to be more careful on how you engaged them in combat, maybe requiring a few people to pull it off. Also make them move a little faster than ants to be more threatening. Great idea.

[Audiosmurf]

Everything about this seems good, but I don't like the idea of the bees just aggroing indiscriminately. On raid just feels like repainted ants, so maybe they attack anything that comes within a few (3-5?) squares of the hive?

The idea of crops growing differently per biome is also really appealing to me. I'm not sure, though, how I really feel about it mechanically. It could add some more meaningful decisions for an experienced player to make starting out (though settling where wheat will grow fastest would always be the best idea initially,) but it could also just add another obfuscated mechanic that new players would need to look up or have explicitly explained to them.

I'm not at all for reducing the complexity of the game for new players, in fact I would like to see a lot of the systems expanded, but I'm not certain if the crop thing would be easily digestible.

[Enjoyment]

I'm not at all for reducing the complexity of the game for new players, in fact I would like to see a lot of the systems expanded, but I'm not certain if the crop thing would be easily digestible.

Funny fact: I do think the oldest players like Lady Goo (who start to play at 13 years - 'cause she's still 18) are bored due to some systems "simplicity", and do want even higher complication ('cause it's a nature of this game)...

[Audiosmurf]

I'm not at all for reducing the complexity of the game for new players, in fact I would like to see a lot of the systems expanded, but I'm not certain if the crop thing would be easily digestible.

Funny fact: I do think the oldest players like Lady Goo (who start to play at 13 years - 'cause she's still 18) are bored due to some systems "simplicity", and do want even higher complication ('cause it's a nature of this game)...

I feel as though you think we're not on the same page, when we are. I've played since 2010 and while I still find the game very rewarding, performing almost the same loops every world for 6 years does get tiring.

[ekzarh]

I agree with the post as a whole but I'd like to add that too much 'free wax' may cause lots of things available faster than they are now, which means reaching endgame faster.

So these 'wild hives' should be balanced in a way that already establsihed carrot field is more effective (assuming player farms manually) than walking around and gathering wax for the same amount of time.
Approximately (2 hours for 4 wax at carrot field) more rare than glimmermoss

[jorb]

Ideally you should have to first capture a wild swarm for your first skep. We have wanted wild hives for some time, but it is dependent on a system for equipping things (bird's nests, &c) to trees.

Nice post!

[ricky]

Ideally you should have to first capture a wild swarm for your first skep. We have wanted wild hives for some time, but it is dependent on a system for equipping things (bird's nests, &c) to trees.

Nice post!

would floating point/ object oriented objects allow you guys do add nests/hives/etc to trees?

[jorb]

No. Unrelated.