by Dondy » Wed May 01, 2019 12:34 pm
The implementation of soil depletion should not add opportunities to bot, drudgery and yet another mechanism for the poor no lifers to stay awake until five AM.
Soil depletion would perhaps effect the improvement of crops. If you want to keep the chances of crop improvement going you need to avoid soil depletion. However, the means to do so could be either passive, present further rewards or active for those who want to play relentlessly to get every possible point. For best results the game has to be rewarding for multiple playing styles and goals, so that we have multiple types of players.
If your crop decays between harvesting and picking up it could prevent soil depletion. Simply fail to pick up the straw and it resets the soil depletion tick, to emulate the practice of ploughing the organics under. Any organics dropped on ploughed soil and allowed to vanish would work this way. Better yet, if you click on unplanted ploughed soil with organics it should accept it and add it to the prevention of soil depletion.
Crop rotation doesn't need to be a pain. I never played Salem so I don't know why it went awry there. But if your ploughed soil had a memory of what was previously planted, planting something else could prevent that soil depletion tick. If it were feasible to code, have the soil remember three ticks back. An ideal rotation would be unploughed so reset to full soil health, then a legume to fix nitrogen, then a crop that produces straw, hemp or flax, then any other crop. Leaving your leeks and turnips in the field after harvest would give another reason for growing them. I find myself growing low value crops only to raise their q - such as apples - on the off chance that a new recipe will mean I am glad I did so. This would provide extra incentive to grow more than the basic few high value crops.
Allowing the land to go back to unploughed land could reset soil deletion.
Add a new crop, beans or field peas. Better yet, add them both. They are nitrogen fixers and would reset soil depletion also. Beans and peas are both protein sources so they would be str or con food, probably both. Pease porridge and yellow peas soup with ham both sound delicious. So when do we get chimneys so we can start smoking the the pork anyway?
Add a new form of clay, very rarely found in quantities of one to five while digging. This clay would be lime clay, usable for pottery but also capable of being clicked back into the soil. If it were rare enough it wouldn't require us to spend hours botting for lime clay. Lime clay would jump the ploughed soil back to max quality.
Or else have lime clay found in larger quantity but not so effective so that it could have additional purposes. It could be processed to remove the lime, useful for multiple purposes including mortar for those long requested stone village curtain walls.
When a bull calf is castrated it should grow up to be an ox instead of a castrated bull. Two bull calves, teamed with a yoke could be hitched to a wheeled caracute plough. A hermit could plough straight lines with this plough, but to turn the oxen would require two cooperative players, one guiding the plough and the other with an ox goad, guiding the oxen. The poor hermit would have to unhitch the oxen and take them out of the yoke and put them in place again to turn without the assistance of the player with the ox goad. Oh, and of course you can hitch up to four teams of oxen to your plough - each pair requiring the helper with the ox goad. When ploughing with a total of eight oxen maximum good results can be had, not to mention simultaneous special events for every member of the team.
How about adding manure to the game? If certain animals are wandering through the landscape they drop manure. If manure decays on ploughed soil it is absorbed and prevents soil depletion. All you have to do is have mouflon, sheep, aurochsen, cows, goats or horses of any type wandering around loose on your ploughed field. But to offset that advantage, they should also eat some of your crop, or even trample it. What you gain in allowing the animals in the field you lose in having them eat a certain portion of it. So leaving five cows in your barley field for three weeks will result in the barley disappearing but really good soil with no work on your part. Pigs on the other hand will eat up your crop much quicker than any other animal, but will also root so that they dig the soil deeper and decrease the soil depletion better than other animals.
Damn, this barley isn't worth harvesting. Let's just move all the sheep in here and plant the north forty with barley from the grainery instead. The north forty is a strip of land which is two by forty, and was ox ploughed.
Pigs could also be used to change terrain. Pigs pastured on un ploughed land will stomp it to dirt, to emulate the way that pigs will degrade marginal land by eradicating the vegetation while rooting.
Since stray animals wandering through your prize q development field could be a pain in the neck you can also collect the manure when it drops in your feedlot, if you want to be that vigilant and get it before it decays, and then drop it on your chosen field manually. But it should be a passive process for everyone who is not cramming for q.
With multiple methods of preventing soil depletion it could make the mechanics and the play more interesting for those that would enjoy the variety.
The biggest difference might be that we would want more extensive fields. And this would result in it being harder to put a defensive wall around our fields, which would add new possibilities. What with the difficulty turning the plough we would end up with long strips of field - just like they did in medieval times. Areas would go under cultivation and then get abandoned to go fallow again. Some of these plots would perhaps end up far away from the village centre and have to be outside the defensive wall where they would be vulnerable to theft. It might be very worth your while to put together an alt with the theft ability to raid the higher q fields of a larger well organized village to get higher q crops than you can produce yourself and this would increase the possibilities of low level conflict. If there are some plants missing was that a thief or just a wandering wild goat?
