Crops redesign

[Potjeh]

Loftar has recently mentioned that he'd like to redo the crops, so I reckon this is a good time to discuss how it could be done.

First, I think the whole method of raising crop q should be scrapped. As I understand it, seed sorting is supposed to be a minigame, but if it's got just one solution (and an obvious one, to boot), it's not really a game. So, all seeds should be the same quality if the crops are grown in the same conditions.

Next, scrap the item representation of seeds and replace it with "liquid" representation (works like liquids do, but uses kg as unit of measure). Give seed bags a fairly large capacity (100kg or something), and have them average out the quality of their contents (but really average, none of that what happens with troughs). Allow grinding of whole bags of wheat at a time if one is using a millstone as opposed to a quern (windmill or watermill required). Have flour work the same way, so that instead of using 1 flour (seriously, what is 1 flour?) different recipes call for different amounts of flour (.5kg for a loaf of bread, .2kg for a cake etc.). In addition to sacks, a new silo building should be able to store stupidly large amount of seeds.

Now, on to raising q. Quality of crops should be the average of the seeds and the soil quality, dragged down by farming skill if it's lower than the result. Soil quality should be improvable with manure, compost etc. It should be possible to push crop q beyond the soil's q through a minigame of sorts (how else do you get compost better than your soil?). Basically, your crops demand certain things (water, weeding, soil ph adjustment with limestone etc.), and each time you fill one of these demands they get a point or three of quality beyond what they would normally be. The number of these demands you can fulfil in one crop generation is limited by your farming skill (has to be higher than crop q to get any at all). Much like numen you can forfeit a demand, but that would still expend one of your q raising chances, and maybe even knock out some of the progress you've already made. Like numen, you should get a new demand (if you're eligible for it) as soon as you fulfil the previous one, so that you're not forced to log in at specific times to tend to your crops.

Due to the above thing, growing time needs to be longer. I think something like 2-3 RL days would work fine for wheat, so you can squeeze in two crops per year if we get seasons (I reckon a game year will last something like 10RL days). The crops' yield should be increased so you get roughly the same return for invested work, only now there'd be work other than ploughing, planting and harvesting. The general idea is to increase diversity of tasks involved in raising crops, which I think would make farming more fun.

[Potjeh]

As promised, here is the over the top stuff. This could probably be fun, though, if it's simplified to the point where you don't have to have a farmer's almanac next to your computer.

First of all, make grapes tree-like rather than wheat-like. I've suggested some ideas on how trees could be handled in my Trees expanded thread. Grapes should probably grow faster than any tree, though.

Multi-stat crops, inspired by cattle. Crops have three stats: quality, yield and hardiness. When you plant a crop you choose which of the three you want to raise, and any improvement points you get go to that stat. The sum of all three is used to determine total crop quality for purposes of further improvement. So, you could just raise quality and get really good flour, but you wouldn't get much of it and your wheat would be really sensitive to sub-optimal growing conditions. Or, you can balance all three and get crops that are decent at everything, but don't really have an edge in anything (since total of stats is used for softcapping, a farmer focusing on quality will make flour that beats yours hands down). Now, if we really want to go crazy, we can break these up into substats.

Quality does pretty much what it does now. It could be broken down into qualities for individual plant products - straw and grain for wheat; fibre, seeds and flowers for hemp.

Yield is exactly what it says on the tin. The higher the crop's yield stat is, the more products you get per tile of the crop. Yield could be broken down into yields for individual plant products, just like quality.

Hardiness is the measure of how resistant the crop is to poor growing environment. As Loftar said, the plan is to model soil nutrients, PH and stuff like that, and I believe that seasons are also planned. So, all crops will have their comfort zone, ie range of conditions in which they thrive. Hardiness extends this range, which means that you could grow a certain crop where it wouldn't grow naturally, or you could squeeze in an additional harvest into a year. Hardiness could be broken down into temperature extremes resistance, nutrient imbalance resistance, PH imbalance resistance etc. If we really want to take this into sim territory, have separate resistance stats for cold and heat, nutrient deficiency and over-saturation, and acidity and causticity.

Now, all these stats allow for one fun thing: hybridization. If you plant two different strains of the same crop close to each other, they will produce hybrid seeds when they ripen. Hybrids have stats that are the average of parents' stats. Going back to the stats raising part, maybe it would be a good idea to make certain environments more conductive to raising of certain stats. That way you'd have to buy seeds from far-away places to make that perfect hybrid.

Expanding on the hybrid thing, hybrid vigour could be introduced. Vigour could result always, when the parent crops are sufficiently different, or when the parents fit into some arcane formulae (and if they don't, you get the opposite effect), depending how hardcore we want this to be. Basically, a hybrid gets a bonus to it's stats. To counterbalance it, only apply this bonus to secondary products and give seeds grown on a hybrid plant a penalty, which could represent the hybrid's genetics falling apart in the second generation. This would mean that you'd have to get new hybrid seeds over and over again, which would make it possible to make a living selling hybrid seeds to farmers.

[jorb]

By and large I think you have some good ideas -- or the beginnings of good ideas -- going there.

EDIT: See? I responded to one of your posts!

[Pacho]

I give my full support to all of the ideas in the first post.

[Winterbrass]

Sounds like fun.

[Sever]

Perhaps the sort of improvement that already exists could still play a part to a lesser extent. While the crops you have might respond well to improved conditions, the seeds of a later generation can still do better just because.

[loftar]

Lots of reasonable suggestions, indeed. Representing seeds and flour as a fluid (or substance, as I have come to call them) is very reasonable indeed, but it would prerequire a remake of the internal substance representation in the server (which should, obviously, be done anyway; I just haven't found any new system that I'm quite content with in all ways).

Crop "wishes" is quite a fun idea, actually; I like it a lot. I'm just not sure how an entire field could reasonably be considered an entity that could have a collective wish, but there may be ways to fix that; read on.

Some of my own plans for farming remake incorporates at least the idea of breaking down soil quality into a couple of different variables (say about four or so) abstractly representing different nutrients, and changing the soil quality representation to be part of the census system. Doing so would entail the following:

• Various crops should grow differently well with the varying nutrients, and also affect them by growing. By doing so, crop rotation becomes meaningful.
• The nutrient factors should be affectable with various means, such as manure, limestone, &c. Mind you, even though they should be affectable, I don't mean infinitely so; various "base" nutrient values could be used effectively to make various areas worse or better suited for growing various kinds of crops.
• Alternatives to wheat should be introduced, such as rye and barley (many uses are obvious). Various beets would also be fun and meaningful for cooking.
• The census system works on units of 100x100 tiles, so to use it, fields would have to be larger and/or much more separated from each other than they currently are. To accomodate that, and to make the fields look more reasonable and life-like, I am considering making it so that one "atomic" crop object takes up 5x5 tiles or so, rather than the single tile it currently occupies. Of course, that would need some graphic optimization of one or another kind (even if I cannot manage to optimize the client, maybe the plants themselves can be optimized an various ways).
• As suggested by Jorb, when crops grow up to their final, harvestable, state on a tile, that tile should be converted into a fallow tile. The nutrient values of the census grid should be affected in some reasonable direction while the tile remains lying fallow. Fallow tiles should still decay back to what was there previously, of course.
• Having such large fields as suggested above would make it more meaningful to implement such things as cow-pulled plows and such.

By using the census grids for representing nutrient values, it might also be reasonable to implement crop wishes on that level, somehow. It is not obvious how it will interact with the boundaries of the census grids, of course, but something should be doable.

[Jackard]

To accomodate that, and to make the fields look more reasonable and life-like, I am considering making it so that one "atomic" crop object takes up 5x5 tiles or so, rather than the single tile it currently occupies. Of course, that would need some graphic optimization of one or another kind (even if I cannot manage to optimize the client, maybe the plants themselves can be optimized an various ways).

I like, larger tiles for the same cost/rewards as they would normally take makes for nicer graphics and less clicking. Farming could definitely use less tedium and more game!

[Pacho]

The clickfest that is farming is the main reason I've stopped playing altogether ._.

At one point, I was gonna grab trav's code for his auto-farming thingy he was making, but then I got lazy <.<

[loftar]

I do more or less plan on implementing area harvesting on the server, though. I just need to redesign a few things first.