New variations in farming.

[Dataslycer]

These ideas are to add some new features in the farming procedure, some beneficial, some obstacles.

- Weeds. These plants will randomly spawn over a crop at a 1:12 ratio. After a 24 real life hour, they will start to decrease the plant quality by 5% per hour. If left uncheck for 8 hours, the crop on the square regardless of quality.

- Enriched/Wither. Each plant will have a .5% random chance of producing crops that are +10 the quality that they would normally be, this percentage will increase to 1% for full future and will not occur at all for full industry. In contrast, there is also a 1% chance of the crops to wither and become useless indicated by browning color hue unaffected by belief sliders.

- Soil quality effect. High quality soil spots will grants small bonus to quality of crops that they are set upon by +sqrt(soil quality*2). However, farming on these quality soil will cause them to decrease based on the number of plants that are sown upon the area. The soil will constantly decrease as long as plants of particular type is replanted there. The effects of soil reduction can be countered by leaving a particular area fallow for a given period of time, ala crop rotation to allow the soil quality to increase back to its original number (or close to it). The other counter to this is to use fertilizer created by constructed compost heaps (suggested by someone in this section of the forum). Fertilizer will halt the soil reduction on a period based on the quality of the fertilizer but with diminishing return each time it is used so eventually crop rotation will be needed later on.

- Irrigation. Allow you to carve a pathway from a water source to your crops. This will add quality bonus based upon the quality of the water. This will also work with water found by dousing rods giving them a more useful benefit than sub par water source that is more convenient..

- Gophers.

[Jackard]

- Weeds. These plants will randomly spawn over a crop at a 1:12 ratio. After a 24 real life hour, they will start to decrease the plant quality by 5% per hour. If left uncheck for 8 hours, the crop on the square regardless of quality.

game shouldnt force you to log in every day just to break even

[theTrav]

- Weeds. These plants will randomly spawn over a crop at a 1:12 ratio. After a 24 real life hour, they will start to decrease the plant quality by 5% per hour. If left uncheck for 8 hours, the crop on the square regardless of quality.

game shouldnt force you to log in every day just to break even

True... a slow atrophy would be a better target... perhaps if the weeds had a chance to spread disease amongst your existing crops?

[Avu]

No more tedium!

[Dataslycer]

- Weeds. These plants will randomly spawn over a crop at a 1:12 ratio. After a 24 real life hour, they will start to decrease the plant quality by 5% per hour. If left uncheck for 8 hours, the crop on the square regardless of quality.

game shouldnt force you to log in every day just to break even

- Weeds. These plants will randomly spawn over a crop at a 1:12 ratio. After a 24 real life hour, they will start to decrease the plant quality by 5% per hour. If left uncheck for 8 hours, the crop on the square regardless of quality.

game shouldnt force you to log in every day just to break even

True... a slow atrophy would be a better target... perhaps if the weeds had a chance to spread disease amongst your existing crops?

Maybe a smaller ratio or a slow decaying as Trav suggested. These ideas are still being fleshed out at the top of my head but I think we kind of get the idea. And I think Avu exclaimed what I was aiming for.

[theTrav]

Maybe a smaller ratio or a slow decaying as Trav suggested. These ideas are still being fleshed out at the top of my head but I think we kind of get the idea. And I think Avu exclaimed what I was aiming for.

Perhaps you misunderstand me...

I feel that IN ADDITION to the effect of the weeds, your REMAINING crops should be adversely effected in some way. Preferably in some way that is self sustaining and largely undetectable by the players until AFTER it had spread

[Peter]

Maybe a smaller ratio or a slow decaying as Trav suggested. These ideas are still being fleshed out at the top of my head but I think we kind of get the idea. And I think Avu exclaimed what I was aiming for.

Perhaps you misunderstand me...

I feel that IN ADDITION to the effect of the weeds, your REMAINING crops should be adversely effected in some way. Preferably in some way that is self sustaining and largely undetectable by the players until AFTER it had spread

Why? WHY? WHHYYYYYYY???

[Jackard]

Why? WHY? WHHYYYYYYY???

[ImpalerWrG]

Jackard has a point that requiring or reward constant checking on something is a bad idea. I think once every 24 hours is as often as you can possibly expect a player to tend to crops simply because it can't fit into most peoples daily schedules otherwise. So any kind of random malady that could affect a crop (lack of water, weeds, bright etc etc) should always be preceded by a minimum 24 hour 'warning' phases in which the malady can be detected and removed before it dose any actual harm. If anything I think you would need to be looking at longer growing times up into the range of a week with yields on the order of two dozen seeds per plant, that's the only way intermediate tending or weeding tasks can really be inserted in the process without forcing the player to be constantly online. Rather the player check and tends infrequently over a longer duration for a larger payoff at the end. Better item management (big seed bags, granaries) would probably need to come into play to make this viable.

Also some of the suggestions on having area-effect based planting/harvesting with something like the Ctrl + L menu would allow these actions to be added without out them being horribly tedious, it would do for farming what auto-fishing did for fishing. Soil quality/depletion sounds reasonable but I'd rather see regional effects such as a large area that grew particularly nice carrots or onions (like Vidalia onions) but it's hard to see how that gets worked into the very monolithic quality system. Adding fertilizers to soil before planting also sounds nice but it would need to be something that's specific to the crop/soil conditions not a generic fertilizer as your just adding a step everyone has to take.

[sabinati]

what the FUCK is wrong with you