Item: Hay Bale

[Gedrean]

I don't see that the "machine" would make the process less labor intensive. Besides, baling hay by hand has been done for many many decades by farmers world-wide so other than the idea of an actual hay-baler (which is a LOT of machinery normally) I think this works well - and agreed that there's no reason it shouldn't work like a signpost, internally (in game code) it could just destroy the straw-object (saving memory) and store a unit value that has the quality, when it's removed that unit is taken out. Also, no you couldn't put straw back in, the point of the bale is an object like a stone or boulder you can get stuff out of, for grabbing bulk straw. If you've ever worked with a bale of hay before in real life, you'd know it is nigh impossible without undoing and redoing the bale entirely to get straw to go in and stick, at least if you want the straw to stay in any form of usable condition (you could crumple it up and shove it in but hten you just have lots of shredded broken straw and that's useless in real construction other than as bed filler-- crappy bed I might add... maybe as animal feed or as hay for, well, cleaning up excrement).

EDIT: I can also see making the quality average out, after all as you pull straw out of the bale, you couldn't guarantee getting all the same quality, it'd just be a bundled handful, so yeah, make it average if that's how they work it.

EDIT2: I read over the linked comments, I ESPECIALLY liked: viewtopic.php?f=5&t=13582&start=10#p152796
And the fact that, if this is a bale made by hand, likely it only has so many straw units - most commercial hay balers are baling straw by quantities we couldn't even remotely handle, but 25 units baled together? It'd be liftable, only with the string tied but it is liftable. I like, however, the idea of 10 string for it, because a lot of string is needed to hold straw together.

[dra6o0n]

The problem is the image of it, because when you say hay bale, I think of a pile of straw that you can use a pitchfork to take out.
Unless it's those cube of hay that is tied up is what you meant, then you'd need to compress said straw before you can tie them up.


Round Hay bale:


Cube Hay bale:


So what do you call those stacks of hay? Oh right, a haystack.


Maybe you'd have to have a haystack FIRST before you can create a haybale.

Maybe two entities can exist:

A default container-like structure that you can put straw in. It should look like a haystack once you start placing straws in it.
A actual hay bale that is created after you tied it up, and used a "Tie up" option on it. It uses up all the straws in the process and can only be used when the haystack is full.
Then at the end of the process your character will lift up a cube hay bale, and the container will change it's sprite to empty.

So how do you extract straws from it? You have two choices:
- Drop it on the ground and right-click and "untie" the bale, thus causing 25 units average quality of straws to spawn on the ground where the bale was.
- Drop it on a empty hay container and it turns back to a full haystack.

[jgudge]

This would be a good finishing touch style thing, mainly graphically appealing. Like sab said, if you would like to keep higher q hay, but it in a chest, it keeps roughly the same area.

This is a nice addition for landscaping, i'd like to see this in the finished game, but at this point, it's probably better for the devs to make a way to counteract the easily grindable by macro system, imo.