Remove pepper completely, or fix

[Archiplex]

pepper's weird. it's something that needs to be farmed in massive swathes to make good use of, but the devs consistently seem to pretend that the game doesn't require you to farm things by the map-grid like this.

It's also ridiculously powerful, and extremely tedious to farm because of trellises being dumb

[Kaios]

pepper's weird. it's something that needs to be farmed in massive swathes to make good use of, but the devs consistently seem to pretend that the game doesn't require you to farm things by the map-grid like this.

I think that is rather a result of them adjusting farming for how players tended to plant and farm crops. I remember when farming lacked the quality of life mechanics that it has now and players complained that they would spend forever farming giant fields, sorting seeds, and so forth, and often the dev response to that was to simply plant smaller fields. Of course, if you don't plant in excess then you will have less opportunity to keep up with those that to do and naturally many players would prefer to put in the extra effort involved in maintaining larger fields instead of falling behind in the quality and stat race.

On the topic of Trellises though, they really suck and I am not too sure what the intention was with their addition. I mean, beyond the aesthetic and being appropriate for the type of crops that you plant on them. I guess perhaps it was to add some extra steps in farming more valuable crop types? I don't see why though as a major complaint regarding many mechanics is the number of clicks involved in the process of performing them. In any case, one of the simplest improvements I think could be made would be to give more of the crop per trellis. At the moment I believe you can obtain up to 2 pepper per trellis with Druidic Rite and 3 pepper with Farmer Credo (No clue honestly, I don't have the credo)? Maybe such a change would just help botters more, but they are farming all of what they need and then some anyways, it might as well be easier on casual players if it can be without causing too much issue.

[Mr_Bober]

The issue is that most players would rather spend 8 hours a day doing the fields than cooperating with someone to split the workload or focus on trading it.

This game would have a huge potential for large communities and villages focused on a specific product, trading for everything else. But right now it's just more convenient to do everything yourself (even for hermits). And the few things that would benefit from having multiple people doing it, like farming or mining, usually ends up being botted because there's no real attempt to stop it.

[DDDsDD999]

Since can't remove content, just massively increase the amount of pepper created when grinding it. I mean like .5 kg per grind. You really cannot increase the output too much, every step of it is a terrible mechanic. The less interaction needed to create the required amount of pepper, the better.

Unless it's like a 15 minutes job for a week's worth of pepper, it's just going to be botted. Maybe even then because trellises are terrible.

[VDZ]

At the moment I believe you can obtain up to 2 pepper per trellis with Druidic Rite and 3 pepper with Farmer Credo (No clue honestly, I don't have the credo)?

Pretty sure it's 3 with Druidic Rite. I know 100% that it's 3 for Grapes and Hops at least. (I only have one Peppercorn trellis and it's awfully slow so I'm not 100% certain about Peppercorn as I rarely harvest it.)

EDIT: Nope, I was wrong, see below.

[Nightdawg]

I cant think of a single mechanic that benefits the big boys with bots ever more.

People already have 1000+ stats base (white, without bonuses) and we're not even in the spam pepper stage yet

[Massa]

I cant think of a single mechanic that benefits the big boys with bots ever more.

People already have 1000+ stats base (white, without bonuses) and we're not even in the spam pepper stage yet

His point still stands? Completely.

Pepper is designed in such a way that the only people who can endure the tedium of pepper aren't people. The people who these mechanics were designed to hamper don't even notice it but the layman struggles immensely with it. It's another content/quality wedge. The way to balance pepper was with bum burn, not with whatever the current mess is.

Since can't remove content

Lorb and Jorb have gutted glass with a full rework, not sure why pepper is theoretically immune to a rework. I guess because glass didn't have like 5 stages to it.

The issue is that most players would rather spend 8 hours a day doing the fields than cooperating with someone to split the workload or focus on trading it.

8 hours of pepper isn't enough for one person, much less your vision of the game, and that's the problem. 8 hours is an absurd amount of time.

[jordancoles]

In order to make pepper in meaningful quantities you need literal map grids filled with trellises and as someone who made 1 bucket of ground pepper per session in a previous world I can tell you that it is really only used seriously by botting factions. The quantity, space and time required to make enough to make it worthwhile is just not attainable for the majority of players. The script I ran took like 6 hours from start to finish and the initial setup was insane... I would be down for a rework of pepper because it really is something mostly reserved for botting tryhards

[VDZ]

At the moment I believe you can obtain up to 2 pepper per trellis with Druidic Rite and 3 pepper with Farmer Credo (No clue honestly, I don't have the credo)?

Pretty sure it's 3 with Druidic Rite. I know 100% that it's 3 for Grapes and Hops at least. (I only have one Peppercorn trellis and it's awfully slow so I'm not 100% certain about Peppercorn as I rarely harvest it.)

Nope. Turns out I have two Peppercorn trellises and harvesting gave 2 and 1 Peppercorn. In other words, Kaios is right and Peppercorn's yield is even lower than every other crop's.

[Fostik]

See no problem having decent amount of pepper trellises, about 20-30 for a hermit, to have 0.05-0.08 ground pepper per production cycle and being able to double some valuable or rare food stats by using it as spice, or spicing food.
What is actual problem that requires pepper removal?