Farming critique and fertilizer

[shubla]

I enjoyed selecting the seeds I planted and watching my quality increase. Personally Id welcome it back. It is much more rewarding to select seeds that are leading than a group averaged.

Did you enjoy the physical act of sorting? Or did you enjoy the ability to influence how your crops were increasing in quality?

The sorting issue isn't fun for people with eyesight or wrist issues, and it's a lot of manual nitty gritty labour for everyone else. Most players used sorting bots to do it because of the hassle.

I agree with point that you cant affect much on your crops ql growth currently.

[LadyV]

Did you enjoy the physical act of sorting? Or did you enjoy the ability to influence how your crops were increasing in quality?

The sorting issue isn't fun for people with wrist issues like myself, and it's a lot of manual nitty gritty labour for everyone else. Most players used sorting bots to do it because of the hassle. If players are resorting to botting a mechanic, that's an indication the mechanic is flawed in nature. If it's good enough that most regular players don't feel the need to bot it that's much better.

Edit: Y'know what the eyesight issue could be solved with bigger font *glares at jorbtar*

I actually enjoyed both. To me it is rewarding to go through and find the best you have grown and then plant those. As a person with wrist and eye problems myself I understand your hesitation but was the sorting really that bad? Its not hard to scan through a group of seeds the real task was harvest and planting. And then more so if it was a two step crop like poppy where you had to go back to collect flowers. Yes I agree fonts could be nicer. lol

[chrisrock]

Trash piles could turn into compost. Worms feeding and compost bins were nice in Salem, but it was just an extra chore, and certanly a clickfest

i thought trashpiles would serve for something like that when i first saw them on videos, with flies around and all. looked nasty as something that would be a good fertilizer. also i agree about salem.

wouldnt it be kinda cool if our characters had a bladder or intestine bar and had to poop? so we could build crappy outhouses or fancy porcelain toilets. and then use the poop to fertilize our crops. depending on which food you eat, the fertilizer will have a different effect on crops. it would be cool, come on...

also how to pee on anthills

[Sevenless]

When you were doing large scale farming it did actually get pretty bad. Not so much the scanning, although that involved wrist motion, but the selecting what you picked actually took a lot of clicks. If you're farming 100-200 tiles, that's 100-200 extra clicks since each seed needed to be selected. And that's the easiest way involving dumping it into cabinets first. Most people threw out seeds they didn't want and that was even more clicking.

So I in no way want the sorting mechanic to come back. It was tedious in general, and a lot of extra click work. Sorry, I agree with jorbtar on that one.

[Shiala]

When you were doing large scale farming it did actually get pretty bad. Not so much the scanning, although that involved wrist motion, but the selecting what you picked actually took a lot of clicks. If you're farming 100-200 tiles, that's 100-200 extra clicks since each seed needed to be selected. And that's the easiest way involving dumping it into cabinets first. Most people threw out seeds they didn't want and that was even more clicking.

So I in no way want the sorting mechanic to come back. It was tedious in general, and a lot of extra click work. Sorry, I agree with jorbtar on that one.

I'm with you completely on that. It was not a fun system. Farming was a huge chore. Now I find myself standing around with tons of free time. It's weird but I like it! My tendinitis appreciates it too.

[Coriander]

This fertilizer idea has a lot of merit.

IRL chicken manure is probably the best followed by cow though both have different benefits - chicken for it's high nitrogen content producing lush plant growth and cow more for providing organic matter to feed the plant and replenish the soil. Compost is very similar to cow manure. Bat guano is too limited a resource to be viable, though it is used. An aside, "bat-shit crazy" is an accurate term due to disease caused from inhalation.

The problem I have with fertilizer is that it is a yield enhancer, it has no direct effect on plant genetics. Seed sorting and selective breeding are the only things that work, and farmers have been successfully using them for millennium. It is not about game mechanics as much as it is an immersion thing for me.

[Avu]

The only reason I maybe kind of like it's because it gives you control over quality and my ocd apreciates even stuff. Don't apreciate the extra work but the ocd wins anyway.

[Cranny]

For large scale farming we used the seeds taken from small Q fields. We had a mansion with cabinets for each type of seed where we used to place them in Q order and this only ment to roll the mouse wheel.
The small Q fields (2x5) manually farmed and the large scale (10x10) botted (each field renewed seeds once a month +/-), and we where among the owners of best Q seeds in the entire world.
Speaking of EC experience: We had nice crop Q with no botting, and we raised cattle Q with botting.

So I agree that it was tedious and required to much grinding, and Im up for new ideas contributing to lower over-clicking (to not get bored over time), but Im not so sure how is that this new system is to discourage botting, and sadly Im sure it does lower our ability to raise Q.
Ofc I might be wrong, but I think bots will continue to do large fields and for getting Q raise we now need to have several small fields in different (distant?) grids and b4 with just one small field for each crop we where happy getting nice Q raise.

I believe in W7 Q got insane high, I really did not like it cos it contributed to make stuff out of date so fast, that if we wanted to keep up, we had to be compiting in an insane Q race. Not that I say that compiting is wrong, but I believe is ok up to certain point, this was a race that conspired against enjoying the game and made the gap with hermits to wide. So I agree too, we needed a new system.

This compost/fertilizer idea might be good, what Im afraid is that it just replaces the amount clicking we had in W7, so if it is put in place, please make it a light chore.

Considering smthing I have not seen discussed yet in the forums and I have not done in W8, what I think deserved further review for improving farming chores, was the cattle feeding system we had, because what drove us to botting farms was cattle*, not at all grinding Q. Maybe someone has had experience with cattle now?.

Edit: * Cattle and wheat for cooking.

[Drevar]

Needs to be something besides straight up animal manure. Since it would require large scale animal husbandry to support large scale farming, it would leave those who aren't in large villages behind again (as if they aren't already).

Compost would be a better solution. Sure manure could be one type of item that could become compost, but it wouldn't be exclusive.

[Maiden]

Honestly? You need to do large scale animal husbandry, because if you have like, enough cows that they plot out a baby a day, you might get one worth keeping a month.

However, while animal shit in general is a good fertilizer, I would suggest pigs. Cows already give milk, sheep give wool, all pigs give is meat.