Wheat Growth Inconsistency

[kobnach]

So, with a beehive I can have new wheat in less than 24 RL hours - but sprouting it on a herbalist table takes more than that. This probably makes sense for game balance - makes beer harder to make - but it's amazingly silly looked at in terms of realism.

[Yolan]

In this game we have quite a lot of processes which take considerable time. For example, it takes one game week to turn grape juice into wine, and another to turn wine into vinegar. Correct me if I'm wrong, but to produce vinegar from scratch takes nearly five full days IRL.

Now, personally, I think this kind of long term stuff is great, as it gives settled, patent players something to do. Not everybody wants to/has time to do more intensive/frequent activities. You can set up a few processes, and log in every other day for a while to tend to things.

Given that we have these kinds of processes already, I strongly suggest that Wheat growth time is substantially increased. I am ok with bees giving a slight boost, but a less than 24 hour wait time is just crazy imo.

I would even go so far as to suggest that it should take one week IRL on average to grow a crop of wheat. (I would love to see season based farming down the road, but for the nonce..) This might be a bit of a kick in the balls perhaps, but I think it could be balanced with a few other expansions/goodies.

For example:

Scythe. I know you guys have the graphics for this done already. Gimme gimme gimme! I am guessing this would be used to make harvesting possible. Could it also give us a bonus to make the whole thing less time consuming? I.E. Multiple squares at a time.

Grain. Re-name wheat seeds as grain. Give us three to four grain per square instead of current one to two. Reward the investment of effort.

Grainery. Suggested elsewhere.

Sacks. Unique object for holding massive amounts of grain. Say, it takes up four squares, but can hold ten or twelve squares of grain.

Windmills/watermills. Grab a filled bag of grain, right click it on the powered grinder inside the building, and watch as the whole bag of grain turns into a whole bag of flower. Nice.


I think you have the bones of a whole nights dev session there guys!

[theTrav]

scythes and seed bags are planned as you probably know.

I love the idea of coupling greater harvesting capability with longer grow times.
I really like the idea of making a short in the autumn and spring, and then kicking around idly for the rest of the in game year doing crafting or just kicking back.

Snow would be especially good, make it worth while hanging out in big common rooms in inns at night (cold exposure)

[kobnach]

Do you folks farm? As in do you have characters dependent on farming for food? A newb setting up a basic homestead will have few seeds,and be unable to hunt. They need fast turnaround on their early cycles of farming, to get enough seed to finally be able to use some for more than just replanting.

[jorb]

I agree with the gist of this thread. Farming should be given an expanded representation in several respects. No threshing or serious plowing is done atm, crops never rot away if left unharvested, lots of possibilities for weather interaction when we get around to that, to name a few.

Edit: Wheat was one of the first things we implemented. At the time, we were less clear than we are now on what would be a playable growth rate.

[kimya]

I agree with the gist of this thread. Farming should be given an expanded representation in several respects. No threshing or serious plowing is done atm, crops never rot away if left unharvested, lots of possibilities for weather interaction when we get around to that, to name a few.

Edit: Wheat was one of the first things we implemented. At the time, we were less clear than we are now on what would be a playable growth rate.

you can clearly see that. you need like no wheat compared to other plants, as it grows back hithin 8 hours. its crazy... but i like it

[Sacro]

If we have significantly longer growing periods on crops, I hope we see significant increases on the returns of the harvest. Making farming prohibitively difficult because of the time involved would be silly if you only get a couple seeds for your weeks (months?) of waiting and defending the crop.

[theTrav]

If we have significantly longer growing periods on crops, I hope we see significant increases on the returns of the harvest. Making farming prohibitively difficult because of the time involved would be silly if you only get a couple seeds for your weeks (months?) of waiting and defending the crop.

I think the OP idea is to make the return of harvest approximately the same as it is now, but rather than short grow, painful slow harvest, we have long grow and short harvest, probably with larger crops.