A (Reluctant) Farmer's Plea

[WitchKiller]

+1. Stagger planting gets old super fast. You feel tethered to timers so you can make your farm somewhat efficient in its output. Adding insult to injury is that you end up having to hand sort and manage tons of barrels and stockpiles since each stagger will yield a different quality seed for the most part, and replanting must be done with the highest quality of the old harvests which can be a 5-10 hour window of every 2.5hrs checking quality and waiting until the end to see what turned out the highest. Add to that you have crops that run the entire gamut of some being done in a day and others multiple days as well as everything inbetween means farming is a 2nd job if you want to make any serious headway.

Nobody is forcing anyone to play max/min.

An irrelevant point. Just because you're happy to eat rotten q7 apples and let sword wielders trudge off with your things whenever doesn't mean conquest and quality pushing aren't also part of the game, and with it the need to maintain cutting edge industry. I'm speaking to balance in this regard, that is balance in the sense of reigning in extremes. Right now there is extreme tedium in farming that need not be there. It can be changed for the better without negatively affecting the aforementioned parties who simply don't care to "max/min." I would be similarly dissatisfied if farming were too easy or effortless, difficulty brings meaning to things. But again, a balance must be struck.

[dageir]

There should be regional differences. Not every climate is good for grapes for example.

So if I want to get a good place to plant grapes I should randomly put pclaims, walls, build treillis, plant stuff wait like a week, measure every growing time and then pick the best place.
Hoping that my region is not just generally bad or repeat the same across continents.

Doesn't it sounds just a bit insane?

Bescause it would make sense in real life does not mean we should implement it. If you want to go full realistic, crops should not even grow or be found in some regions.

In real life you would know you live in France or Italy and not in Finland. Basically you would know that you live in a good climate zone for grapes.
I suggest climate zones With obvious Clues in the landscape what would work and not work. For instance living on a tundra in the North (or South) would give strong hints that grapes would be a no go.
If someone living in siberia wants wine one would need to trade for it or pillage it. Arctic areas would be better for furs and timber etc. Temperate zones would be good for regular crops and so on. Tropic areas would be good for fruits??

[dageir]

+1. Stagger planting gets old super fast. You feel tethered to timers so you can make your farm somewhat efficient in its output. Adding insult to injury is that you end up having to hand sort and manage tons of barrels and stockpiles since each stagger will yield a different quality seed for the most part, and replanting must be done with the highest quality of the old harvests which can be a 5-10 hour window of every 2.5hrs checking quality and waiting until the end to see what turned out the highest. Add to that you have crops that run the entire gamut of some being done in a day and others multiple days as well as everything inbetween means farming is a 2nd job if you want to make any serious headway.

Nobody is forcing anyone to play max/min.

An irrelevant point. Just because you're happy to eat rotten q7 apples and let sword wielders trudge off with your things whenever doesn't mean conquest and quality pushing aren't also part of the game, and with it the need to maintain cutting edge industry. I'm speaking to balance in this regard, that is balance in the sense of reigning in extremes. Right now there is extreme tedium in farming that need not be there. It can be changed for the better without negatively affecting the aforementioned parties who simply don't care to "max/min." I would be similarly dissatisfied if farming were too easy or effortless, difficulty brings meaning to things. But again, a balance must be struck.

No matter what the devs do they can not find a system that everyone is happy With. It is hard to satisfy botters, no-lifers and Casuals all at the same time.

[MagicManICT]

I never had an issue raising qualities last world, and I didn't play the RNG timer bullshit. It's RNG. You're just playing random odds, and playing odds more doesn't make you win more, it's just more work. It's fine if you're in a village and you have several people on at various times in the day that can help manage it, but if you're alone or one of just two or three farmers, then don't kill yourself with the stress it can cause.

At the end of the day, it doesn't matter if you pull the arm of the slot machine 100 times or 10,000 times, you're still down 10% because that's the house cut. The truth is that the more you pull it, the more likely you are to actually be down that 10% rather than be up or down from the asymptote. When it comes to crops, there is a positive bias of like 1-1.5q per generation, so playing the odds less frequently does mean you're going to have wider swings while raising quality, but in the end, everyone ends up at the same location assuming they farmed on the "server schedule" of the ideal growth times for a particular crop.

[Robertzon]

Change this stupid system of planting crops at separate times, I don't even have big fields but why the f should I have to plant some shitty crops after some time just to make sure I don't lose 1-3 quality.
Growing grapes f'ing sucks now, takes 2 weeks to grow one crop, how retarded is that?

[Granger]

This 5 hour / 500 tiles (or whatever obscure metrics it might have) system is also extremely bad for plot based villages as the neighbours can (and likely will) affect each other.

Also you can't have your little quality garden and some bigger fields nearby where you plant for quantity, the latter will mess up the former.

This system is shit and has to go, also see here.

[iamahh]

Farming is TEDIOUS - every time I log in and see my crops have finished growing, i'm filled with dread.

gotta say this is very subjective... maybe a sign you've been playing too much the game...

personally the part i like the most is farming, to the point i keep thinking of farm designs, where flower fields would look better, where wheat fields would shine the most beautiful...

granted, i've been playing way less than last world, have no mine yet, no animals yet... just some chickens and small hermit farms, i plant very small batches and try to consume all as it goes

[SaltyCrate]

Where do you get this " 5 hour system" from? As far as I know you can plant your crops with 1 hour intervals, which take slightly more than 2 hours total, and get the same efficiency.

[SnuggleSnail]

As far as I can tell literally nobody in this thread knows how farming works xd

[Sevenless]

This 5 hour / 500 tiles (or whatever obscure metrics it might have) system is also extremely bad for plot based villages as the neighbours can (and likely will) affect each other

Granger... loftar has repeatedly explained that's not how it works. Crop RNG is based on your location, and by the time you get X tiles away it's an entirely new RNG. But it has nothing to do with whether or not you're planting something, so you don't impact your neighbours.

Where do you get this " 5 hour system" from? As far as I know you can plant your crops with 1 hour intervals, which take slightly more than 2 hours total, and get the same efficiency.

Loftar has explained the mechanic behind it, but it's kind of mathy so people simplify it. Basically every 5 hours the game rolls an RNG value and your crop +/- is based on it. As time passes, you gradually shift from that roll to the next one.

So if I roll +5 for the first roll and +/- 0 on the second (in 5 hours), right now planting will give me +5, in 2.5 hours planting will give me +2-3, in 5 hours it'll give me +0.