Having some trouble with farmed food design

jasonrohrer · 2018-06-04 21:43:16

I'm adding more farmed foods this week.

But the instant change to food meta last week (with popcorn) and then after I hotfixed it Friday (with berries) shows how fragile this stuff is.

I also feel somewhat limited in the granularity of the levers that I can pull here.

I really want each food to feel different to grow and eat, not just be a visual skin on the same underlying systems. Corn, berries, and carrots, and wheat are great examples of this, because they are very different in how they behave. Carrots and berries can be eaten fresh, but not cooked on their own into anything. Corn can be cooked on its own. Wheat cannot be eaten on its own at all, but boosts other ingredients.

The way they generate seeds is also different, which is good.

But growing them now feels very similar. Berries are a bit slower, but the other three crops are almost identical. Till soil, plant seed, water, wait, harvest. You can grow more berries without more tilling, and you get to chose either soil or water for future crops.

Wheat used to also behave differently (consuming soil always, where carrots did not).

I'm hoping to have cultivation differences like this, but I'm now seeing that a small advantage (like not needing soil for future crops) can swamp all other considerations, leading people to monocrop berries and ignore the rest of the food systems.

I thought about making berries 2 water per crop (and no soil). Maybe some other crops can be 2 soil and no water. That seems like an interesting approach, but also pretty coarse. Twice as much water?

Since you need a bit of water to produce a unit of soil, it seems like the crops needing 2 soil and no water are way better in terms of water usage in the long run, but slower to work with in the short run.

So, should berries consume 1 water and 1 soil per crop just like everything else, and just leave the differences in the use/consumption?

Future crops can also produce more food for more water. Like something that produces 1.9x food than carrots for 2x water, and maybe takes a little less time to grow.

I was hoping for some crops that consume no soil, and some that consume no water, to let you modulate what you grow based on the changing situation. I guess those crops will have to produce a lot less food, though, so perhaps berries aren't a great candidate for this.

Potjeh · 2018-06-04 22:11:52

Sounds like a decent way to limit the berry meta. But IMO the main point of differentiation for crops would be how they're used rather than how they're grown. In a game that revolves around eating and crafting, complex food recipes are a natural way to go. These can be made useful by having them consume extra resources from other production cycles. For example, you could make carrots great again by implementing carrot pie which would be a sink for all the extra wheat you get farming straw for compost and baskets. But then you'd need eggs or butter which would leave you with an excess of their own, so another recipe can come in to be a sink for them, etc. I do worry about the design space for different recipes, though. There's only so much you can differentiate with containers, bite sizes and numbers of bites. Maybe consider temporary status effects from different foods? For example chili peppers could increase your temperature so you'd eat them when exploring snow biome, and watermelon would cool you down so you could more easily explore desert. Or fatty food like bacon could reduce your base hunger drain rate for five minutes. Or heck, go crazy and have healthy food like olives postpone aging (you still die at 60, but the timing of losing pips of max hunger is more towards the end).

YAHG · 2018-06-04 22:11:53

Main thing I notice is that moving this much soil is a TON of labor. We always used to build towns near wells because
we had to move more water than soil overall. Now we can't even move water sources so pond based towns are pretty
much mandatory. As more and more towns actually get compost cycling up I think it will balance out and water will
be more important again.

Berries are just so much less walking involved, you can easily spend 1-3 minutes running round trip for each unit of soil.
Yes, you can get a cart + pack to bring up to 5 per trip but that is high tech stuff. Carts are also super rare as milkweed
is a very expensive plant. That carts decay in ways that do not allow us to repair them also makes people wary of making
them.

Milkweed costs as much as food plants and you need it in very high quantities. If there was some way to convert sheep
threads to ropes that might make rope based items more common but that would make milkweed farming even less common
than it is now. Another problem with milkweed is that the community at large is trained to just pick them when they are
fruiting and never worry about it. People still tell me not to leave the ponds dry, even if it no longer matters.

When we are making planting decisions other than farming for compost or for sheep etc. we will just run the numbers. It
doesn't matter what you pick I think, people will find a best crop for the current state. Berries are king because they are
so much less labor to grow, corn is better than carrots because there is no seed row drama.

I am mostly seeing places starve out still, soon there will be growing cores of stable towns about. It has only been about a
week since the map wiped.

Realcooldude · 2018-06-04 22:17:53

Potatos in a bucket of soil. No water required. They like it dry. Cant be eaten alone can be added to pie or maybe make crust must be masshed. Can be baked in a bowl?

Just came to mind. First spud needs dug from the ground.

Realcooldude · 2018-06-04 22:20:07

Ow maybe make grown milkweed give 2 so you can make one thread. Changes nothing but the usefullness of grown milkweed. More likely to grow it if i can get enough.

Potjeh · 2018-06-04 22:20:51

Maybe instead of generic hardened row each crop could leave different stumps, and you could vary the time it takes the worms to recycle different stumps.

Lotus · 2018-06-04 22:46:17

Grapes. Could require skewers to grow on, similar to berries in soil consumption and maybe consume more water. They should be more expensive to grow and be much like popcorn, with each grape filling three pips but a lot of grapes per plot.

Anshin · 2018-06-04 22:46:59

It makes sense for different plants to modify the soil traits - nitrogen(N), phosphorus(P), potassium(K). Have each crop raise or lower these traits. Make the current soil traits read as high, medium, or low - with words, or symbols, or put them in different colors. Or maybe simply scrap the NPK values and just have a single soil PH value.

Make crops depend on the starting state of the soil they are planted in, and leave a different state (or no change for some).

Add fertilizers like bone meal, or dead lambs, or leaves, or dung water, or added clay or sand.

Tying animals into the equation also really makes things interesting.
Pigs being omnivores could eat plant "garbage" and/or animal "garbage" like burnt goose and dead lambs. - but they're ornery and hard to kill compared to a sheep. But they give BACON, which makes it all worth it.
Bees could be required to run an orchard of fruit trees, and make honey.
Domestic geese could eat insects that might otherwise ruin a crop, and lay eggs.

Some crops should be left behind as civilization advances. Wool is better than milkweed thread. Trying to balance them defeats the purpose of innovation.

EDIT: clarification

Last edited by Anshin (2018-06-05 00:26:28)

Thecolorthursday · 2018-06-04 22:58:45

Add hopniss. It would need a lot of water and soil to plant, but after a bit, it would just grow quickly. There would be one hopniss plant in a tilled row, and then a bunch of smaller hopniss plants randomly growing around it. To dig up the hopniss (and eat it), you would need a shovel. You would have to cook the tubers, too, probably in an oven. Hopniss would provide a good food source for more advanced villages. And maybe sometimes, it would just die suddenly, balancing it more and meaning that villages would have to secure secondary food sources if they didn't want to starve suddenly.

In conclusion, hopniss would require a lot of balancing, but its growing system would be entirely different than any other crop currently.

Tarr · 2018-06-04 23:24:25

The thing with berries is that they're always making food for you. If you water and take care of a bush you're getting food every eight or so minutes vs carrots which is either four minutes + an hour (or just the four minutes if you put soil back on the hardened row but why would you.) vs Corn which takes eight minutes and leaves you with hardened soil as well.

Having a crop that is constantly producing food is going to be king vs crops that require you wait before producing more. Maybe have berries require fertilizer when it's languishing (Ground sheep bones + wet compost pile.) so that if you just spam berries you eventually just kill all your bushes.

Also different food should fill different niches with soil and worms. Carrots are the fastest usable crop (Four minutes from planting to picking) vs corn (Longer prep time but better than carrots.) Have each one leave the soil in a different state of hardened so you have a reason to not just plant one or the other.

TL;DR: Berries are good because you always have food. Other foods are bad because it's better to just make more tilled rows rather than dumping on hard soil.

jasonrohrer · 2018-06-05 00:54:41

"Better to just make more tilled rows?" How? Dumping on hard soil does exactly the same thing, right?

And yeah, I don't mind if there's "one best food" in the tree, and if people find that. That's probably impossible to avoid.

But I probably want it to be some kind of multi-ingredient pie at this point, or sheep meat at least, and not the lowly berry bush.

Berries also involve no tilling, currently, so they use no iron over time. I guess that should really be their only advantage. Also they don't need any seeding to produce more crops. I think they need to be made quite a bit slower.

But what advantage do carrots have? They are faster than berries and can be eaten immediately and are more compact to carry in a pack.

Popcorn is slower and less portable, but produces more food than either with a small bit of cooking. Also easier to seed.

Wheat is easy to seed, too.

Anyway, I think that growing speed is the most granular and easy lever for me to pull.

But carrots already produce way more food per hour than berries....

I'm not sure that you all really care about that, because the name of the game is NOT supporting a large population after all.

Seems like resources per unit food matter, and human energy per unit food matter (like how much of my lifetime do I have to spend).

Potjeh · 2018-06-05 01:12:53

I still think that berries should have a limited lifespan, like a generation or so. Their downside could be that they don't leave hardened rows, ie soil used for them can't be recycled. Also this would mean that if you're not quickly harvesting and watering you're being inefficient with soil by getting fewer harvests than you possibly could. This would naturally place a limit on berry farm size.

YAHG · 2018-06-05 01:31:42

Berries are already grow at half the speed of other crops. You invest a lot of time till you can eat from them.

Every farm I am born too is full of hardened rows already, if farming is just gonna be inherently unsustainable it becomes stupid again.

Uncle Gus · 2018-06-05 01:58:30

It might take a bit of work, but you could limit food types to particular biomes, no just for where they spawn but for where they can grow. It would be another reason for settlements to pop up in different places and trade with each other.

jasonrohrer · 2018-06-05 02:06:16

People are keeping hardened rows around to use worms on them, I suppose?

I see how this encourages people to not keep farming in the same spot, even if they don't have any worms. Putting new soil on that hardened row is like destroying one unit of potential soil.

jasonrohrer · 2018-06-05 02:31:16

Also, just realized that moving soil is way harder than moving water. Water is 3 per basket, 12 per cart. Soil is 1 per basket, 4 per cart.

This is an oversight on my part, especially in connection with the new farming system.

hihibanana · 2018-06-05 02:43:03

I think there's a lot of people who won't mind any new foods as long as it adds a lot of variety; most likely unique variety.

Balance in the food meta is definitely important.

Uncle Gus · 2018-06-05 02:47:56

Having lots of different foods that are fundamentally identical is still fine. It's an aesthetic thing and it opens up cool roleplaying opportunities like cabbage vs broccoli, not because one is actually better than the other, but just because of arbitrary side-taking.

jasonrohrer · 2018-06-05 03:22:42

Well, this is not a roleplaying game.

It's a realplaying game.

So there has to be a real difference between cabbage and broccoli for you to argue about. I don't want you pretending to have an argument.

I mean, obviously, sauerkraut is going to be huge in this game, so...

zennyrpg · 2018-06-05 03:34:50

Berry bushes have another advantage in my mind. They are a stockpile that lasts forever. A full berry bush has 30 food in one tile and never rots. Pie is better per tile but much more complicated. A basket of carrots requires a basket and its only 21 food per tile and heck, that basket will rot eventually. How many carrots can you really save? If someone sees 10 baskets of carrots they probably think its too many... time to start using them up! We don't need farmers, we have 10 whole baskets of carrots! But if a person sees 50 unpicked berry bushes they say "nice", eat a few, and walk away. Wheat is the worst, its practically untransportable and putting it in bowls is almost greifing. Dried corn is 36 food per tile, but it takes time to make that into popcorn, its not good for emergencies.

Theres no downside to having a 50x50 berry farm. If it sits idle, all the better. But its there, holding the civilization up in hard times.

Ways to balance berries:
* Buff other foods (carrots are not for eating)
* Give other raw foods denser storage (cough, granaries and bread would do wonders, cough)
* Increase the berry spawn to 15 or 30 mins
* Add any sort of maintenance
* Pruning?
* Have them not go languishing for 5 mins until after the last berry is picked (disrupts the driveby pick-n-water easy maintenance)

YAHG · 2018-06-05 04:12:03

Push berries back to 60 minutes the buff is just too much..

jasonrohrer · 2018-06-05 04:40:14

Okay, here's my plan:

All plants require at least 1 soil and 1 water to make a crop, berry bushes included.

Baskets/backpacks now move soil 3 units at a time, meaning 12 soil per cart. Soil is dumped in a "big pile" that then can be scooped with bowl or a large rabbit skin to split it into 3 small piles. This makes soil and water equal in terms of labor. And both are running out and require higher tech to make more. Soil requires slightly less tech to carry 3 units (water requires basket and 3 water skins).

Small pile of dirt needs to be tilled twice to turn bare ground into a tilled row.

Hardened row, after having more soil dumped on it, only needs to be tilled once, since it was tilled in the past. A few crops don't produce hardened rows currently, so they require 2x tilling again.

Berries require no tilling at all after initial growth, but still require soil and water to produce more fruit. Bush must sit idle for X minutes before it languishes and can be soiled/watered again.

Remove worms from the farming game (they're vestigial at this point). Keep them around for fishing, maybe, But they don't till anything.

Some plants in the future may require MORE soil or water, but everything requires at least one of each. It's really hard to balance any number against ZERO, because every other number is infinitely larger than zero.

For example, potatoes will require 2 soil (you rebury the plants halfway through their growth), but produce more food than carrots, but they must be cooked before eating.

I think this really sets the stage for a whole bunch more farmed stuff this week.

Why is my job so hard?

Uncle Gus · 2018-06-05 05:21:29

Those changes sound good to me, Jason.

Aurora Aurora · 2018-06-05 05:56:57

Leave our berries alone!

YAHG · 2018-06-05 05:59:11

Berries back to 60 minute respawn would not be bad. I think they got buffed 7.5 times or so recently.

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#1 2018-06-04 21:43:16

Having some trouble with farmed food design

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Re: Having some trouble with farmed food design

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