Wild planting

[oosyrag]

Would it be too much to ask for to be able to plant "wild" plants in flower pots? Or an option for farm tiles to disable fertilization/enable "wild" growth. Cooking algae/slime to turn into dirt blocks or leaving unmined blocks in specific places, then moving seeds by constructing and deconstructing storage or farm roles is pretty clunky, troublesome, ugly, and not really fun.

 

After all the ability to relocate wild plants is already available, just the variance of effort required to do so is a little absurd.

[Tytan]

works fine to me

[Eternal Firesea]

The question of where you can place "wild" plants really worries me.  Expanding my base tends to displace the natural spoil in the area.  Maybe we could build a park/soil block?

[Grimgaw]

11 minutes ago, oosyrag said:

just the variance of effort required to do so is a little absurd.

No upkeep food, cooling, power etc SHOULD require effort. LOTS of it.

[wronny]

If wild plants in flower pots would just grow and satisfy the corresponding room requirement, while not producing anything, sure why not.

In terms of wild plants that are actually used for farming, I'd rather have them add some restrictions to them than making wild farms even more powerful by making them easier to setup: e.g. restrict the materials they can plant themselves on to a subset of the materials available in their biomes.

 

[Nebbie]

What I'd like to see changed in general on farming:

• In general, plants should "breathe" instead of wanting to be in a particular atmosphere, so that wild plants do need some maintenance (like bristle blossoms turn CO2 to O2, mealwoods the reverse, need to carefully balance them or pump gasses around), and so a pocket of natural gas wandering by doesn't instantly mess with growth. Same goes for light requirements, just require so much time in the light per cycle so bristle blossoms only need wandering shinebugs.
• To further require some maintenance, plants should die if placed in ungrowable conditions for too long (2 cycles in a row) or in very extreme conditions, but drop a seed.
• Seeds should not self-plant unless growable conditions are detected (no more annoyance of some bristle blossoms up in hydrogen without a shine bug continually replanting after every uproot command).
• Plants in pots, farm tiles, etc. should be able to grow just as in the wild, with only gas consumption, light consumption, pressure, and temperature needs met to grow. You can then specify to irrigate, and further to fertilize, for extra growth rate.
• Plants should be able to absorb a liquid on them if it would satisfy their irrigation requirement. Note that this would mean your wild-planted bristle blossoms could actually become a bit better than wild if you use them to mop up leaking water.

I also think Waterweed needing bleach stone for fertilization is crazy, it should only need saltwater irrigation for full growth, and there needs to be things that produce saltwater in the tide pool biomes.

[mathmanican]

1 hour ago, oosyrag said:

After all the ability to relocate wild plants is already available, just the variance of effort required to do so is a little absurd.

The ability to duplicate liquid matter is already available (make dupes go to the bathroom as often as possible).  It's also possible to duplicate matter using icemakes or aquatuners, conveyors, and power, but requires a lot more effort.  Maybe they should add a "matter duplication" machine as the variance of effort required to duplicate matter is a little absurd.

I guess "wild planting" may enter the realm of "you can use an infinity bug, if you want to." Who knows.  I do like the suggestion here. It's very obvious to a new player that getting pips to replant seeds is a great way to farm. New players will naturally ask, "how can I create new natural tiles" after they watch the pip plant a seed in my farm tile and wonder why they have to pay resources now to upkeep it (as the pip did the planting, not them). The current mechanic is a little wonky.

[Hechicera]

43 minutes ago, Grimgaw said:

No upkeep food, cooling, power etc SHOULD require effort. LOTS of it.

It is the same upkeep as wild, and the existence of wild is not an issue. And has the same corresponding lower output. I can see a problem if getting domesticated output for free, but this wouldn't be.

It would add to Pips annoyance. I don't want them planting on a tile I do want the domesticated output. So I think the addition may be fun.

[oosyrag]

Likening wild seed planting to matter duplication bugs/exploits is quite a stretch when it comes to developer intention.

"Seeds self-plant after sitting on the ground a certain amount of time." was a documented and intentional change with update 346893.

Regarding the amount of effort "free" resources should require I don't have much input. Its the variance between having an un-dug tile, say in the early game or outside your base to wild plant, as opposed to in the middle of your shower room in an already built out area. For the balance of having free resources, they already cut the production to 1/4 for balance change in the same patch as when seeds could be wild planted.

If we're talking about bugs, I'd say cooked resources turning into blocks is more of a bug than anything else. Cooked dropped entities turning into dropped entities of the new element would be more intuitive to me.

[Coolthulhu]

2 hours ago, Grimgaw said:

No upkeep food, cooling, power etc SHOULD require effort. LOTS of it.

Dupe effort, certainly not tedious player effort.

Intentionally making the game worse for players who use strong tactic to "punish" them would be incredibly dumb, so it should be assumed it's not intentional.

[nakomaru]

I like how wild plants are now. It really shapes how you build if you want to use them. You need to sacrifice your build freedom, decor and movement speed to be able maintain natural plots for later expansion, and if you mess up or rethink it there's still a way to bend the game to your will.

[MustardWarrior]

It's really easy right now.  Build a bunch of planters or farm tiles, plant all of your crops, deconstruct the buildings.  I mean this is NOT effort intensive whatsoever.  You can create farm tiles by dragging, you can plant things by dragging, you can deconstruct things by dragging.  So stop complaining because it's very straightforward.

[oosyrag]

25 minutes ago, MustardWarrior said:

It's really easy right now.  Build a bunch of planters or farm tiles, plant all of your crops, deconstruct the buildings.  I mean this is NOT effort intensive whatsoever.  You can create farm tiles by dragging, you can plant things by dragging, you can deconstruct things by dragging.  So stop complaining because it's very straightforward.

It is easy, until it isn't - when you don't have natural tiles where you want to have a wild plant. I'm complaining about the incongruity of straightforwardness from when you do have natural tiles available to when you don't. 

Or from another perspective... how would a newer player, who did not realize they needed to preserve natural tiles in the middle of their base to take advantage of wild plants, know that they can create natural tiles again only by cooking algae or slime?

Assuming relocating wild plants is meant to be an option due to the explicit change and the reduction of wild plant effectiveness.

[Technoincubus]

Yeah, at least then planter box would be useful because now it is obsole once you research farm plots, which meant almost instantly.

Plus it will have its use and remove the annoyances as players will always find a way to wild plant anything. Just you don;t have to make 999 storage compactors with 1 kg limit and seed selected.

[Grimgaw]

56 minutes ago, oosyrag said:

It is easy, until it isn't - when you don't have natural tiles where you want to have a wild plant.

It's called nature reserve for a reason. You don't go around planting them.

56 minutes ago, oosyrag said:

Or from another perspective... how would a newer player (...)

The same way old players did when they messed up - start new asteroid. We all did. Or deal with it, and go through the process of making those tiles like some of us did.

Stop trying to dumb this game for your imaginary new players. We all got into ONI in EA or Alpha and love it, do you really think that all new players are all simpletons?

[MustardWarrior]

3 hours ago, oosyrag said:

It is easy, until it isn't - when you don't have natural tiles where you want to have a wild plant. I'm complaining about the incongruity of straightforwardness from when you do have natural tiles available to when you don't. 

Or from another perspective... how would a newer player, who did not realize they needed to preserve natural tiles in the middle of their base to take advantage of wild plants, know that they can create natural tiles again only by cooking algae or slime?

Assuming relocating wild plants is meant to be an option due to the explicit change and the reduction of wild plant effectiveness.

Yeah making natural tiles is pretty tedious.  Oh no, god forbid we might have to face some kind of trade off and actually think about where we dig.  I think that the gaps in the natural tiles in every seed being different forces you to plan things out differently every time and increases replayability.  Plus it creates a use for sulfur, which has a low melting point.

[nakomaru]

6 hours ago, oosyrag said:

How would a newer player, who did not realize they needed to preserve natural tiles in the middle of their base to take advantage of wild plants, know that they can create natural tiles again only by cooking algae or slime?

They won't, and they shouldn't. If optimal planning was obvious from the beginning, for first timers, this would be a really boring game.

They will try and fail, and next time do it better. They will enjoy ONI. (At the very least, if they are me.)

[Gurgel]

16 hours ago, Eternal Firesea said:

The question of where you can place "wild" plants really worries me.  Expanding my base tends to displace the natural spoil in the area.  Maybe we could build a park/soil block?

Creating dirt tiles is tedious but not hard (quoting myself):

And here is a simple recipe for making a dirt-tile: Put down a granite tile, drop 50kg of Algae on it (35C or around that) and drop one 25kg helping of fresh liquid glass on top. The algae goes briefly to 135C or so and nicely melts into dirt. The granite tile helps with cooling it down. The glass gets buried in the dirt. And your friendly Pip will have no trouble planting a pepperplant seed after you remove the granite tile and assure 3 squares space below.

[Christophlette]

2 minutes ago, Gurgel said:

Creating dirt tiles is tedious but not hard (quoting myself):

And here is a simple recipe for making a dirt-tile: Put down a granite tile, drop 50kg of Algae on it (35C or around that) and drop one 25kg helping of fresh liquid glass on top. The algae goes briefly to 135C or so and nicely melts into dirt. The granite tile helps with cooling it down. The glass gets buried in the dirt. And your friendly Pip will have no trouble planting a pepperplant seed after you remove the granite tile and assure 3 squares space below.

The cracks on the dirt tile is bugging me to be honest. I'm searching for another "easy" solution to deal with dirt tile creation.

[Gurgel]

1 hour ago, Christophlette said:

The cracks on the dirt tile is bugging me to be honest. I'm searching for another "easy" solution to deal with dirt tile creation.

Well, they are an imperfection, yes. But there is probably no simpler way laying down a single tile. If you have a series of tiles, there is the option of heating everything via hot liquid (e.g. from the smelter) and then cooling it down again. A lot more effort, but you can do a number of tiles at a time. 

I do think that since it is possible to create these tiles artificially, Klei should give us an option to construct "natural" tiles.

[Grimgaw]

25 minutes ago, Gurgel said:

I do think that since it is possible to create these tiles artificially, Klei should give us an option to construct "natural" tiles.

Along the same lines why not let us convert abyssalite to tungsten in a kiln. I mean we can do that with way more complicated method, but since that's possible there should also be an easy recipe to do it too, right?