new crop magic/fertilizer

[Thedrah]

the new crop magic i consider to be volatile and prone to bot abuse. first off, personally my farm fields have seen higher production in most fields (cause i tend to be lazy) other than a few crops that i prefer to harvest at an earlier stage. my carrot and turnip field is now oddly planted due to the crop magic times and not using the same square, i just need to adapt to it though. i do see a loop hole in it for bots to capitalize on as the old crop q doesnt matter and acts as a way to speed up crop growth

so for a scenario, lets say i have a turnip field. i plant low/any quality turnip over the entire field. it matures after a day or two, then i let it sit for 3days or whatever the calculated shortest time is for crop magic to reach max for turnips. now the turnip field is prepped, harvest and dispose of the low quality turnips and plant high q turnips. the newly planted turnip now grows much faster, from 16hr to reseed to whatever the new time is. this would work for any crop as far as i can foresee. idk how the crop magic affects stuff, if it makes every minute count as 2 until it uses up the saved time and if it only counts for the next crop or for the tile itself. will be testing it as i write down the times of planting/harvesting

so while it's to help lazy or unorganized people (like myself, should write stuff down or something) to combat bot use/necessity, it is ripe for bot/powerplayer abuse to raise quality fast
instead, can we get the ability to inspect plants and get how long until it finishes growing? either realtime, gametime, or as a %. so to encourage keeping a log or a schedule of sorts for farming

[DDDsDD999]

so for a scenario, lets say i have a turnip field. i plant low/any quality turnip over the entire field. it matures after a day or two, then i let it sit for 3days or whatever the calculated shortest time is for crop magic to reach max for turnips. now the turnip field is prepped, harvest and dispose of the low quality turnips and plant high q turnips. the newly planted turnip now grows much faster, from 16hr to reseed to whatever the new time is. this would work for any crop as far as i can foresee. idk how the crop magic affects stuff, if it makes every minute count as 2 until it uses up the saved time and if it only counts for the next crop or for the tile itself. will be testing it as i write down the times of planting/harvesting

so while it's to help lazy or unorganized people (like myself, should write stuff down or something) to combat bot use/necessity, it is ripe for bot/powerplayer abuse to raise quality fast

Guess that could exist. Make the timer based on the seeds then, not the tile.

[waga]

Are you talking about the new farming mechanic ? (crop magic ? ^^)
if you do , yeah , they're aware of that

[Thedrah]

ok, good. well looks like we can farm turnips at 8hr intervals. i got turnips to stage 3 after 12hrs

[Luanes]

Don't if it's properly to do this, but i'm avoiding to create another topics about things that were already discussed.

I got a suggestion that is kind of a fertilizer / some land treatment.

The problem:
Bots exists and will always exist, a bot will always have the advantage on planting and harvesting crops. So I guess it's time to add some "automation" to keep the player, that is not a bot, not too far a bot.

Goal:
Make crops increase quality in some automated way that will increase quality "passively", but in a slower pace than people that plant / harvest "actively" ( bots and players ).

Suggestion:
Since I know now that the devs already have some control on the seeds / crops based on the tile I want to propose that we should be able to create some kind of farming plot that are "fertile".
How it could work?

First: We keep the way that crops works now ( everytime you plant you got the [-2,+5] quality change, and we still keep the buffer for "replant" without the need to be there the right time that the crop is there.
Second: We create some treated plot were it's maximum quality would be the final quality of the fertilizer; ( Recipe like 20 units of fertilizer for 1 unit mulch/soil + 1 unit swill)
Third: The player go and plant the seed. IF, and ONLY IF, the player take too long to harvest the crop ( more than the buffer time plus a full cycle), the crop try to increase the quality. How would work this increase? The crop would check the treated plot quality, if the quality of the land is HIGHER than the crop, the crop increase it's quality and the fertilizer timer should be reset until another full crop cycle.
The increase amount should be discussed but I guess that a flat +1 or a random value betweent [ -1, +2] should be enough.

This is an "alternative" way to keep the players on the game. It's not game breaking because, if the player keeps planting, it should increase it's quality at a rate of 1,5 per cycle ( or more if he plants in multiple times, but i'm looking for the worst case ) while this should keep at a average increase of 1 quality per cycle and not exploited by multiple times planting and so on. Bots would have no benefits with this, since mass planting would be way better than sitting and waiting.

For the suggested recipe for the fertilizer ( soil/mulch + swill ) the quality bottle neck is usually higher than the best seed on the world, since for high quality mulch we already use crops and for high quality swill we use crops too, while on the early game it would be different since we could use animal meat for mulch and swill.

The pros: It should be cheap to fertilize an entire plot, and players that quit the game would still have more reasons to come back. If he has q100 seeds right now and manage to fertilize his land, in 90 days without playing he could get q130 seeds, it's not awesome, but it's better than nothing.
For players that don't quit but has some life / village issues ( like being unable to play for 10 - 15 days ) would not have the time just wasted.
People could be less "hardcore" and just set a small piece of land to grind seeds quality while the other piece of land would increase slower for further use, when the grinded seeds reach some difference between the mass planted crops, the player could just choose to "reset" the base quality of the mass planted crops.

the cons: This feature is useless for players that plays the game regularly;
This feature is "useless" if the player like to make trades. In 90 days the player will probably be able to buy better quality seeds on the market for a fair price ( since the minimum average quality gain is 1,5 per cycle ).

So, what do you think?

[DDDsDD999]

You have 3 days plus whatever time it takes to grow the crop. I think that's perfectly fine. The only thing that is keeping bots as required for quality gains is the variable quality gains, since the bot just harvests and plants every hour or so for maximum quality gains. Jorb just refuses to change that for some reason.