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Planting seeds wild breaks balance


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I feel like the self planting seeds are a great mistake for the entire balance of the game. So far achieving self sustainability required a careful balance, you could achieve water positive and power positive systems, but it was generally hard.

With the trees you can get free power forever, with free water along with it, and with free food on top what is the challenge left in the late to endgame?

After a few hundred cycles using 4 times the seeds and planting space is a trivial issue.

The same I don't consider it good that the nuisance of planting seeds is getting rewarded, the whole constructing/deconstructing business of planters is an awkward workaround that somehow suggests that this is not an intended mechanic.

 

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18 hours ago, Whitecold said:

The same I don't consider it good that the nuisance of planting seeds is getting rewarded, the whole constructing/deconstructing business of planters is an awkward workaround that somehow suggests that this is not an intended mechanic.

Why would you plant seeds this way when pips exist?

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2 hours ago, Sasza22 said:

Why would you plant seeds this way when pips exist?

It doesn't matter how you plant them, it is still free resources, farming without any of the cost. Neither would I consider setting up the pips entirely hassle free.

 

2 hours ago, natanstarke said:

You can get to this same state using oil or whatever, and trees like a little more space and even more space for more generators, more heat and so on. The lumber ammount is a little high per branch could be 100 or 50 kg.

Oil is limited by the throughput of the oil wells, you don't get infinite food for no cost at all.

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I like the basic idea though... Perhaps there is a way to keep natural planting somehow.

 

I think each natural plant should only occur on certain terrains. Otherwise the seed rots or whatever. So this would limit the placements

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2 minutes ago, dearmad said:

I like the basic idea though... Perhaps there is a way to keep natural planting somehow.

 

I think each natural plant should only occur on certain terrains. Otherwise the seed rots or whatever. So this would limit the placements

An alternative would be heavily limiting the maximum density of natural plants. If they are too close, they stop growing.

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3 hours ago, dearmad said:

I think each natural plant should only occur on certain terrains. Otherwise the seed rots or whatever. So this would limit the placements

I feel like it would be nice if wild plants only grew on the tile it uses as fertilizer or as irrigation. So sleet wheat would grow on dirt or ice. Pinchas on phosphorite, dusk caps on slime and bristle... well maybe make dirt and clay work for all plants.

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I played the forest biome and i think its rather hard.

You use the wood instead of coal- good? - no it makes dupes endlessly carry things around.

Make pips plant enough plants to sustain the colony?

The problem is that wild plants have way lower yield, its only supplemental.

The real imbalance is lettuce which is essentially free food when just supplied with salt water.

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17 minutes ago, Rainbowdesign said:

The real imbalance is lettuce which is essentially free food when just supplied with salt water.

Lettuce is ok as wild with the 48 cycle lifecycle. It would take you forever to make a large wild farm with just 10% seed chance.

But tamed should use some sort of fertilizer. Or make it require salt water irrigation (like reed fibers require pwater despite growing in it).

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11 hours ago, Sasza22 said:

Why would you plant seeds this way when pips exist?

Because when pips exist, you have to deal with pips existing. All that wasted time due to compactor reloading jobs. I acquired a special hate for pips when I built my first large scale lettuce farm and pips kept planting non-lettuce seeds in my farm plots and dupes then fertilized those. One of the devs implicitly confirmed that my hate is warranted by saying that this is the intended behavior.

Also, it's much more reliable and less tedious to plant monocultures with rows of 1kg compactors. Still way more tedious than it should be, but nowhere near as tedious as keeping pips around.

The only reason to bother with pips is wildplanting pinchas.

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5 hours ago, Rainbowdesign said:

I played the forest biome and i think its rather hard.

You use the wood instead of coal- good? - no it makes dupes endlessly carry things around.

Make pips plant enough plants to sustain the colony?

The problem is that wild plants have way lower yield, its only supplemental.

The real imbalance is lettuce which is essentially free food when just supplied with salt water.

It is only supplemental as long as you are limited by available seeds. Once you have been farming a bit, you easily have 4x more seeds than you need, as long as you can afford to wait the first long cycle to harvest, you just got rid of all upkeep for your farms.

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Disagree, seeds planting wild as well as lettuce are clearly intended to be a low labor method of getting food. The tradeoff is that it has slower payoff and requires more space. Food had never been a challenge late game and infinite sustainability hasn't been a question since they introduced geysers.

Flavor-wise, it gives forest starts the unique perk of being able to rapidly plant seeds with the help of pips... once they fix the seeds disappearing from storage bug. I'd say Arboria for example is a rather difficult map without taking advantage of this early on.

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On 7/1/2019 at 8:56 PM, dearmad said:

I like the basic idea though... Perhaps there is a way to keep natural planting somehow.

 

I think each natural plant should only occur on certain terrains. Otherwise the seed rots or whatever. So this would limit the placements

Limiting terrain type wouldn't work well. You'd just get players making "strips" of monoculture plantations and still wild farming sleets, since those would need either ice or dirt tiles, both of which can be created with temperature manipulation.

To effectively limit "wild farms", wild plants should compete with other plants of same type for space. For example, every wild plant checks 20x20 block around itself for wild plants of same type. If there are too many, the one with biggest number of neighbors first withers and later uproots itself. This would prevent mass farming wild plants of one type.

The player could then either cover a massive area with sparsely planted plants, mix it up creating a "realistic" looking blend of different plants, or give up and set up a domestic farm.

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Sometimes their rummaging deletes seeds from the storage or causes some kind of floating seed glitch. It's mostly annoying because you have to do stuff like float a container so pips can't reach and then just deconstruct everything to drop the seeds.

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11 hours ago, Coolthulhu said:

Limiting terrain type wouldn't work well. You'd just get players making "strips" of monoculture plantations and still wild farming sleets, since those would need either ice or dirt tiles, both of which can be created with temperature manipulation.

To effectively limit "wild farms", wild plants should compete with other plants of same type for space. For example, every wild plant checks 20x20 block around itself for wild plants of same type. If there are too many, the one with biggest number of neighbors first withers and later uproots itself. This would prevent mass farming wild plants of one type.

The player could then either cover a massive area with sparsely planted plants, mix it up creating a "realistic" looking blend of different plants, or give up and set up a domestic farm. Overcrowding should probably also prevents seeds from planting, to prevent infinite uproot/replant cycles.

Yeah, this could work nicely, and would even have an adequate explanation that the resources/water you add provides the nutrients it can't get from soil due to being so crowded. I'd probably make one check for all plant types, that would make it simpler

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