Mulching

[Peter]

What on earth could be more exciting than mulching?!?!?!!
I know I can't think of anything!!!!!!!!!

!!!!

Basically, a sink for extra tea leaves, string, seeds, poppy flowers, and other organic farming debris. It produces "dirt" items that have the average Q of the items that go in, or some variation thereof. May include producing worms as well, but that's not really the point of this.

I suggest this for a few reasons. For one, good dirt really shouldn't be hard to find, and yet it is. Two, we need something to do with the farming garbage, and this makes quite a lot of sense. Third, High-Q dirt is needed to produce high-q trees. As it is, one needs to upgrade your herbalist table every few generations, which seems odd.

Some may say that this would end the vital dirt trade, but A: What dirt trade? Do people really buy dirt? Does this seem like a stimulating and essential part of the game? And B: access to infinite amounts of high-q dirt will still be an advantage over what is provided by waiting at least a whole day and consuming moderate quantities of high-q miscellanea.

What I imagine is that one would build or dig a compost bin or pit. Let me stress that the quality of the construction materials really shouldn't matter in the output, since when it comes down to it, who in their right minds tears downs and rebuilds their trash pit to upgrade it? One would then put pretty much any organic thing in there, which would increase some kind of meter. The pit then slowly decreases the meter and puts out soil or mulch that has a Q equal to the average of the items put into it. I'm not sure how that is to be balanced, but I'd suppose that more recent items would have the most effect, dropping off as they get older. All that would be behind the scenes; all the player would see is is the "fill" bar and the inventory screen where it pumps out dirt and possibly worms.

Now, here's a brainstorm for our exciting, dynamic new composting paradigm: I'm not sure how it would work, but I want to put it out there: The bin has an area of effect like a beehive, but rather than increasing growing speed, it has a slight quality enhancement in that area, dependent on the quality of it's contents. So, you can't spam the area with compost heaps (and like beehives they wouldn't stack) without spending huge amounts of resources on filling them.

Now, let's see how long it takes for this to become a flame thread, starting... NOW!

[sabinati]

i like the idea of composting for treeplanting, but i don't think i like the area of effect idea. it's easy enough to get crop q up just by raising farming skill, and i honestly don't like the idea of making that any more complicated.

[theTrav]

I like the idea if you can just get dirt out of the mulch pile and use it to increase crop quality.

If you wanted to go super realistic, make it a temporary effect on the local soil that takes a while to take effect and make it so that soil quality reduces as you remove precious precious top soil, but also increases as you replace that top soil

[Peter]

I figured it would be least complex to just have the area of effect spread out from the pit or heap, rather than having the player have to go to each plant and use dirt on it. But like I said, I'm not sold on that part. I'm fine with this just producing high-q dirt.