A (Reluctant) Farmer's Plea

[ricky]

EffortPost inbound (tl;dr at bottom)

This is a plea for some QoL additions to farming.

Let's make a few assertions:
Farming is critical to this game = unlike other industries (say, cheesemaking or silkfarming), farming is critical to any player wishing to achieve any sort of advancement in the game. wax production, fine fibres, a wide variety of food are all tied to farming. advanced industries, such as cheesemaking, tree farming, and silkfarming, are all directly support through farming - In this case the fodder used to feed animals and the compost used to create high quality soil. this assertion rings the loudest: Farming is critical to the game

Farming is boring, and that's okay - nothing about farming is really that fun. There's no dangerous consequences to farming - and their shouldn't be either (looking at you beestings). there's no random trolls spawning, no agitated hearthlings running you down, no wolf packs... and that's okay! Farming isnt meant to be a constant struggle against the forces of nature and man. (let me make it clear here that this is NOT what i'm asking for)

and last:
Farming is TEDIOUS - every time I log in and see my crops have finished growing, i'm filled with dread. There is absolutely nothing engaging or fun about harvesting crops. The two aforementioned assertions solidify and drive this point home. I know it has to be done, i have horses and sheep to feed and STATS to grind and cloth to make and flour to mill.. and ... and... the list goes on. All of these tasks are directly tied to how often I get my farming "chore" done. it's a tiresome pain in the ass to farm even small plots of land. (for reference, I have 10 9x9 plots, I dont even care about trellis crops)

So what am I asking (begging) for? Please end the tedium of farming. I look at farming as a necessary evil, it's not engaging like hunting, there's no random prizes to be found like mining, it's just something that needs to be done.

some solutions that have been mentioned by various parties over the years:

Farming flags:
Identical to survey flags. The perfect version of this allows a player to plant from a stockpile or barrel located within the farming flag's marked area. it allows the player to harvest crops directly to stockpiles and barrels. There's no meaningful substance gained from having to do these tasks manually. Harvesting one 9x9 plot of beets takes me about 10 minutes. the planting-harvesting-stockpiling cycle isnt fun. it shouldn't be. it just is. give us farming flags with three options: harvest, plant, remove. this automation will cut that down to probably... 3 minutes if it works identical to survey flags.

Random values:
I know you guys love RNG, and that's fine, but the "plant crops every 5 hours or fall behind the curve" is quite simply bad gameplay design. I don't do this. I can barely muster my willpower to harvest crops every few days, let alone doing it Every 5 hours. it's cool when I get a good crop roll, meh when it stays the same or goes down. Asking your players to be available every 5 hours to plant a portion of their crops is asking too much. this type of mechanism lends itself to botting. it needs to be botted if you can only play 3-4 hours a day.
multi part solution to keep randomness and spare farmers:
- bound randomness from -2 to +5 to a new range of 0 to +3. negative rolls quite simply arent fun. muh realisum says "maybe sometimes your crops dont do well, sucks." that isn't fun. This doesnt hurt villages with farmbots and this still has that a dash of RNG. The current range just kneecaps the normal players who dont want to or cant adhere to the 5 hour random system. speaking of...
- remove the 5 hour system. incentivizing players to log on every 5 hours is bad, almost predatory. it lends itself to be botted. "but seed sorting!" hopefully, if farm flags are implemented, farm flags could auto sort and auto plant the best crops. Maybe this is computationally expensive or difficult. if that's the case, increase the system to 12 hours. 2 plants a day is (sweaty, but) tolerable IFF farm flags are implemented.
- Increase the randomness and variability of crop growth speed. Have the lower bound be 1x speed, have the upper bound be 2x speed (or higher, even). geographic luck will determine which villages have the best carrots, not their farm bots. if you want to create an economy where certain dedicated villages can excel and maintain a certain niche market, geographic variance is your safest and most logical bet. You've started to do this with trees (and I praise you for it, it's a great idea), but it needs to be carried further. It shouldnt be a race to maintain quality levels 'that are expected of a world this age', it should be a blessing your village's flax grows twice as fast as your neighbor, but damn if their barley doesnt grow fast as hell. Another byproduct of this is the safety of knowing you can trade your goods away without having them steal your market advantage.

Universally slow growth speed, increase output.
i've asked for this before, and you almost did it this world before the usual suspects drove you to undo your actions.
decrease crop growth speed x-fold, increase crop yield x-fold. The results: farmers have to farm less often and quality growth speed (of the whole world) is slowed as a result. if farmers want to farm all day, every day, they'll go back to staggering crops to every (hopefully) 12 hours, so they'll have to harvest their fields at least twice day. people like me who view farming as a chore will be able to farm half as often and have the same results in terms of output.

These things have all been mentioned before (someone feel free to link relevant threads), but please dont view these changes as making farming "easy" farming is already easy. it's simply a soul crushing experience. there's 1001 things i could otherwise be doing in this game, but I always find myself logging in, harvesting my goddamn carrots, and logging out.

tl;dr:
farming flags that work like survey flags ; remove (or increase) the 5 hour seed cycle ; increase geographic randomness, decrease crop q randomness ; slow down crop growth speed + increase crop yield.

If I had to choose 1 and only 1 to be implemented: farm flags. please.

[Sevenless]

Geographical randomness will feel like ass to most people, can almost guarentee it. Feels like ass with trees already. No one wants a turnip node, it's living location information invisible until a notable amount of investment goes into your base, etc.

5 hour cycle is really unpleasent to minmax, great for everyone else. I don't think seed sorting is healthy either. Might as well just go to flat crop increase based on time planted (since we have decimals now), it would be functionally identical from player point of view if the game starts auto sorting/planting. Literally.

I'm iffy on the slow down farming, it would be a pain for hermits and the like to try and adjust crop yields at all if fields started taking 5-7 days each. You're also talking about moving the yardstick on what's mass produceable. If 20 pies take the same effort 10 did, everyone's just going to make 20 pies instead. Or have more cows, etc. I'm not sure it'd have the effect you want unless the very heavy limit of X pieces of food per day like we have right now is maintained (and there's so much outcry I daresay at somepoint that will probably get reworked somehow).

I feel like to fix this system we need to separate crop quality from crop quantity. The method of increasing Q shouldn't be related to feeding Joe the miner. Either by making it so crops left to "overgrow" get bonus quality (everyone would have bulk fields vs little quality gardens), or by outright making a garden plot or some such that increases quality for crops planted within while bulk fields would get no bonus quality.

[Fierce_Deity]

I've been waiting for a post like this to come along so I can throw my support in for it. Didn't want to write it up myself. Increasing growth times of plants for more output is a +1 from me. That ideas come up before, and I still find it attractive. No one wants to harvest carrots every day jorb(and why do you think they grow so damned fast anyways).
As far as needing to replant every few hours to insure you keep up with the quality race, meh. I could see the randomness adjusted to about 8 hours, or an in game day.
Farming should absolutely have a way to stockpile automatically(so should mining for that matter). When I harvest the beets it takes more time to pick up everything than it does to harvest and plant them.

[stya]

increase geographic randomness

No no no, remove it, this was pure cruelty from the very beginning.

[dageir]

There should be regional differences. Not every climate is good for grapes for example.

[WitchKiller]

+1. Stagger planting gets old super fast. You feel tethered to timers so you can make your farm somewhat efficient in its output. Adding insult to injury is that you end up having to hand sort and manage tons of barrels and stockpiles since each stagger will yield a different quality seed for the most part, and replanting must be done with the highest quality of the old harvests which can be a 5-10 hour window of every 2.5hrs checking quality and waiting until the end to see what turned out the highest. Add to that you have crops that run the entire gamut of some being done in a day and others multiple days as well as everything inbetween means farming is a 2nd job if you want to make any serious headway.

[dageir]

+1. Stagger planting gets old super fast. You feel tethered to timers so you can make your farm somewhat efficient in its output. Adding insult to injury is that you end up having to hand sort and manage tons of barrels and stockpiles since each stagger will yield a different quality seed for the most part, and replanting must be done with the highest quality of the old harvests which can be a 5-10 hour window of every 2.5hrs checking quality and waiting until the end to see what turned out the highest. Add to that you have crops that run the entire gamut of some being done in a day and others multiple days as well as everything inbetween means farming is a 2nd job if you want to make any serious headway.

Nobody is forcing anyone to play max/min.

[MooCow]

Farming flags:
Identical to survey flags. The perfect version of this allows a player to plant from a stockpile or barrel located within the farming flag's marked area. it allows the player to harvest crops directly to stockpiles and barrels. There's no meaningful substance gained from having to do these tasks manually. Harvesting one 9x9 plot of beets takes me about 10 minutes. the planting-harvesting-stockpiling cycle isnt fun. it shouldn't be. it just is. give us farming flags with three options: harvest, plant, remove. this automation will cut that down to probably... 3 minutes if it works identical to survey flags.

A long time ago I thought 250 straw for a straw mansion was something that I would never reach. I had a field of 9 wheat, and there are so many other uses that I could never keep much. Occasionally, while adventuring I would see massive villages with 100-200 wheat and cringe at the hell they put themselves through, or just assume they botted. Now I like to maintain 250 wheat and 100 barley/rye and it is easier than harvesting the 10 straw before.

Now we have permanent plowed fields, auto harvesting, auto pickup, auto drinking, free "seed bags" that hold one extra seed, and almost no seed sorting, stock piles, and double the inventory size. Now that farming takes less than 1/50th of the work, people still suffer because their plots are 50x bigger. Jorb has mentioned this before, but it needs to be repeated.

People will expand their farms until they reach a point where they can't stomach it any more.

The only crop that really needs any help are the pumpkins. They used to be the easiest crop, and now they are the hardest.

[dageir]

Yeah,I always push the size of the fields too far and suffer burn out. I have restricted myself this world.

Edit: For the love of God fix the rabbit Hutch mechanics. When did Rabbits get litters of one bunny? Make it random between 3-7 or something.

[stya]

There should be regional differences. Not every climate is good for grapes for example.

So if I want to get a good place to plant grapes I should randomly put pclaims, walls, build treillis, plant stuff wait like a week, measure every growing time and then pick the best place.
Hoping that my region is not just generally bad or repeat the same across continents.

Doesn't it sounds just a bit insane?

Bescause it would make sense in real life does not mean we should implement it. If you want to go full realistic, crops should not even grow or be found in some regions.