The problem
At the moment, farming is a very long tedious process that has a few issues with it, that plague other systems as well in the game, but perhaps farming is the easiest to grasp for the entire haven demographic, as eventually even the casual players get to the point where they get some crops.
Players want to optimize their farming timings, as harvesting and replanting as soon as the fields are ripe results in the least amount of growing time wasted. When the crops are ripe and not harvested, they don't generate crops. Harvesting crops the first few times still gives the player the sense of satisfaction that they harvested their crops, and either replanted it all to increase the next harvest's yield, or they replant the same amount, reaping the full benefit without increasing the field size further. Here the problem is psychological. If I don't replant as quickly as possible, the field will produce less. This means that the player will have to shift their schedules around the game, instead of playing whenever they feel like. This factor can lead to burnout, or inefficient farming.
I would like to emphasize this: I personally feel that the first few replanting cycles are fun and engaging, up to a point when crops are no longer a "new thing". Once a player progresses to this level, the task of farming becomes more of a chore than a fun activity. Everyone wants big crop fields, but I don't think many people enjoy the act of working these fields once the task of handling a field takes half an hour even with the currently available tools, and quality of life systems in place.
So how do players deal with this? Some of you will jump to the immediate conclusion that players set up bots to automate this process. While this is true to a certain extent, most custom clients, and even the base client has functionality that automatically harvest and replant fields by drag-selecting (as far as I am aware at least). Crops are dropped on the ground, that have to be picked up, and thus inventory space limits the amount of replanting possible in one go before having to pick plants up again. By the way, contrary to popular belief, most established players do NOT bot their fields. The method usually used is that a farmer alt is handling the crops, but in a half-attended state, while the player is doing other activities on their main character. Villages usually have 1-4 dedicated farmer characters, and these characters just run on someone's second monitor, occasionally attended to as required.
The process becomes even more tedious when we factor the quality progression into this as well, because the crops have to be selectively replanted, thus the player has to sort the crops as well. The problem is that there are a lof of "unfun clicks".
So to summarize the issues:
- The act of handling farms becomes increasingly tedious with the size of the plot, to the point where it becomes a "background task" to players after a time. Farming cycles run on timers, making the player have to adjust their real life schedules around the game to achieve efficient farming, or "guilt tripping" the player that they did not harvest the field for x-y hours or days, missing a crop cycle, thus falling behind.
- Manually having to sort through the crops, setting up stockpiles etc. in order to progress in quality.
2. The solution to the tedium
2a. Make all crops work like trellis crops, having to plant them only once and then the field stays, but reverts to the first growth cycle after harvesting. This way, replanting can be taken out of the equation. The problem this presents is that now there is no way to sort the crops to optimally replant. More on this later.
2b. Introduce a new mechanic to the granary and the windmill, where these structures have an "area of influence" around them. Within this area of influence, fields are automatically harvested, and the crops are stored within.
These two adjustments would mean that small fields that are still manageable by hand could still be harvested as such, but larger fields would be automatically collected. The balance here is of course that windmills are expensive structures early on, requiring a lot of cloth that is better spent early for building village banners and snekkjas. The building costs could also be changed to include wax perhaps.
A problem might be apparent: If the player does not log in for a long time, the field would still automatically produce crops. To alleviate this, the automatized harvesting could require an active claim to function, or occasionally require the player to do something to the windmill, such as every harvest would damage them, making it require repairs, and after 50% decay, automatic harvesting would stop.
3. The solution for the quality progression
3a. Tie crop quality progression to seasons, and make it so crops are to be replanted yearly. If crop quality changes are in a bigger range, say, -4 to +20, but happening every season, that could provide an alternative.
3b. Another method is to just outright remove quality from seeds, and introduce a fertilization system, where the used fertilizer's quality will influence the next harvest's quality. We already have mulch and bat guano, we could have manure too maybe? Hearth magic spells could be introduced for this as well to bless the crops for increased quality or something.
The basic idea here is that the amount of clicks should not be linearly correlated to the size of the fields. In such a system presented, the amount of clicking would stay the same for small farms, but a more established, larger group's farmer would have to do the same amount of clicks as the player who only has a small field to work with.
