Seed Dibber & Seed Drill

[btaylor]

Since I've fallen in love with H&H farming all over again I figured I would suggest two new tools to the farming profession to make farming more enjoyable (and in some cases bearable for those with a large field.)

[Seed Dibber]
Size: 1x2
Skills required: Carpentry, Farming
Objects required: Block of Wood

Description: Since Roman times the dibber was primarily used for making holes in the ground as opposed to using your hand to plant seeds. A man would walk with a dibber and place the holes while another person filled each hole with a seed and covered it with soil. To implement this into a H&H mechanic, a dibber should be equivalent in use to a scythe but not as fast. Pros to using a dibber would be having a dibber in one hand and a traveler's sack in another and having early access to something to make farming easier even if you don't have access to metal. Cons would be it's not nearly as quick as a scythe and using it over and over degrades its quality until it breaks. Better quality means it lasts longer.

Also, yes I know a seed dibber is used to plant seeds, not harvest them, so it wouldn't make sense that having a seed dibber would make you harvest quicker. But lets face it, H&H isn't based on realism, otherwise we wouldn't be using a scythe to harvest our beets and carrots.

[Seed Drill]
Size: 1x1
Skills required: Carpentry, Farming, Metalworking
Objects required: Any metal x5, Block of Wood x5, Board x20

Description: A seed drill was basically a tool that was used to evenly distribute and cover seeds in a plowed field. To implement this into a H&H mechanic, I imagine this device to be a combination of a seedbag, plow, and wagon. Let me elaborate further about how this would work. You would place the seeds you want sown into the seed drill container. From there you can either push the seed drill by hand at the speed of a crawl, or leash a cow to it and drive it like a wagon at the speed of a wood plow. As you're pushing the seed drill it will plow in a 1x3 and automatically plant whatever seeds you have in your seed drill container. Pros to using a seed drill would be quicker large-scale farming. Cons would be it's still slow compared to other methods of farming i.e. metal plow and planting by hand.

[Foetuses]

Nice suggestions, I think. Instead of a Seed Dibber, maybe it could just be... clippers? Something that would make more sense than a drill harvesting crops. Stone clippers, maybe a regular ol' garden shovel made of stone. Something that only requires one hand.

And for the Seed Drill, with your cow vs. by hand thing, crawl speed is actually faster than using a plow, so using a cow would just be slower. Perhaps you meant the converse? When you say it would be quicker for large-scale farming but slower than the other methods, I assume you mean it would be simpler in terms of how much you would have to click, which would probably be the case. What about 4x4 or 8x8 fields, though? If I were to plant them with a Seed Drill in this way, I'd have to overlap previous rows, though I guess you could always do those manually, or with the same kind of zig-zag maneuver for plowing.

An interesting though, is that if we keep heading forward in this direction, Haven'll be a game that starts off as a wilderness survival and quickly evolves into an RTS. I wonder when we'll implement fossil fuels and begin having oil wars to power our factories that make our M16s we use to keep the stone-axed heathens out of our capital. (Just in good fun, not to undermine your ideas. A seed drill would be preferable to an army of bots.)

[krikke93]

I love the seed drill idea, but i don't know about the seed dibber. It seems so unnecessary with us having a scythe.
Once again, I fully support the drill however!

Also,

But lets face it, H&H isn't based on realism, otherwise we wouldn't be using a scythe to harvest our beets and carrots.

I lol'd hard! imagine cutting the carrots only having the plant of it in your hand xD

[btaylor]

Nice suggestions, I think. Instead of a Seed Dibber, maybe it could just be... clippers? Something that would make more sense than a drill harvesting crops. Stone clippers, maybe a regular ol' garden shovel made of stone. Something that only requires one hand.

Yeah, maybe the dibber wasn't the best idea. I was just thinking "farming tools" and thought "dibber!" but gave it a completely opposite purpose of what it's really used for.

And for the Seed Drill, with your cow vs. by hand thing, crawl speed is actually faster than using a plow, so using a cow would just be slower. Perhaps you meant the converse? When you say it would be quicker for large-scale farming but slower than the other methods, I assume you mean it would be simpler in terms of how much you would have to click, which would probably be the case.

Yeah. I was trying to think of ways someone might prefer using one method over another without one being automatically the best. A balance of pros and cons to make choosing one or another based on preference or situation rather than being a next-tier tool to make every other tool obsolete. Perhaps I didn't think out the speeds as well as I thought, but you get the general idea.

What about 4x4 or 8x8 fields, though? If I were to plant them with a Seed Drill in this way, I'd have to overlap previous rows, though I guess you could always do those manually, or with the same kind of zig-zag maneuver for plowing.

True. Perhaps just keeping it a single tile plowing tool would be best, or maybe being able to toggle different widths of plowing?

(Just in good fun, not to undermine your ideas. A seed drill would be preferable to an army of bots.)

As it stands people already use bots for large-scale farming. The seed drill would be a means for people who don't bot to have an easier way of farming on a large scale, even if they still have to harvest by hand.

[Ramul]

Why not have a sickle to harvest with, it uses 1 hand. Make the scythe harvest much faster. Have both tools use less stamina than hand picking. Maybe a scythe or sickle equipped should increase farming skill and give a slight modifier to quality with the scythe would give the largest boost to everything, sickle would be a compromise between speed, stats, stamina drain and pack size.

Seed Dibber could modify the quality of planted material slightly when planting, increase farming a bit and use less stamina to farm.

The quality modifiers shouldn't be a soft cap it should just increase the quality range. It could be -5+6 at q 10 instead of -5+5.

Seed Dibber would only effect quality when planting, sickle and scythe only when harvesting.

[AnnaC]

Why not have a sickle to harvest with, it uses 1 hand.

I know this has been suggested before, but I agree with this. It would be somewhat more fitting for other crops too. The only problem with this is balancing it with a scythe because having a 1 handed scythe you can wear a traveller sack with would make the scythe completely useless.

[Ramul]

Why not have a sickle to harvest with, it uses 1 hand.

I know this has been suggested before, but I agree with this. It would be somewhat more fitting for other crops too. The only problem with this is balancing it with a scythe because having a 1 handed scythe you can wear a traveller sack with would make the scythe completely useless.

I think it can be easily balanced by making the scythe have better base stats, faster speed & less stam drain. scythe could be more than 2.5x base stats of a sickle. sickle could have a stone & steel version, where stone sickle has no stats, just faster speed & lower stam drain, scythe is better than stone and adds good stats, steel sickle has a balance between stats and space. so nubs use stone, q pushers use scythe, mass producers can balance q and ease of farming. farmbots suffer from more stam drain if they dual t sack instead of using at least a stone sickle. this way a farmer downgrades stats for convenience if they use steel sickle.