[Poll] On Vegetables

[GetNerfedOn]

Next on my list of questions, do you think vegetables should be buffed? What vegetables would you wish added in Don't Starve Together?

As always, do answer of your own free will and discuss in the comments!

[Yuuko]

I think the food value of vegetables isn't bad.  The bigger problem is just how expensive farms are for growing vegetables.  What I'd really like to see is a better approach to farming.  Probably have more plants like berrybushes occur naturally in the world.  Maybe have some you can't dig up and move similar to cave bananas.

Then farms should probably work like this:  You build a base farm and once you seed something in it that plant just grows from that farm repeatedly until you clean it out and plant something else.

[wigfrids hat]

please give me pickable veg<3 even if they are just filler for meatballs i love plants in general so something like this would be lovely to see and as a bonus you can eat them XD

[Cheggf]

I don't think vegetables themselves need buffs, or at least not all of them. As Wormwood shows if you have them they're fine. The stronger ones can just be eaten with no crock pot recipe to restore up to 40 hunger or 20 health. The problem with vegetables and why they're not really utilized as a food source is their acquisition. You need to sink a large amount of grass, manure, and stones into making farms and then either gamble with the farm plots having about a 1/3 chance of getting a good crop out of it or giving 2/3 of your crops to the bird to guarantee good crops. You need to turn the seeds into the plants and need to spend time and effort harvesting them, feeding them to the bird if you don't like unreliable gambling, and replanting them. The stronger food sources allow you to harvest weeks' worth of food at once for barely any setup and only a few moments harvesting them from a fully automatic setup, burning them in an oven, or killing them via infighting.

If farming itself were reworked in some way to be more competitive with the stronger food sources I don't think vegetables would need to be buffed at all. I'm not sure how that would be done, though. Perhaps if instead of 1 seed granting 1 vegetable it would grow into some sort of automatic plant, periodically adding whatever it's growing to itself up to a limit allowing you to gather them all with the generic work animation, causing it to return to an empty state with 0 harvestables that will then regrow. You could shovel it up if you don't like the plant it is.

It sounds ridiculously overpowered compared to the current farms, but I don't think it would be too strong if you compare it to things like bunnymen. Everything I said is really vague, too, so you could still make it really weak if the delay between growth stages was some stupid number.

[ArubaroBeefalo]

The only thing i dont like of veggies are the danm farms. Are a time eater and make characters like warly or wurt boring and grindy

 

Edit: also all my birds are scumbags that eat my veggies and doesnt poop me seeds >:(

[wigfrids hat]

weird, i adore the farms(of course pixel farming sims are kind of my thing, haha)

[Mysterious box]

Personally i feel farms are fine as is they're fairly fast once you get the improved farms and those can be setup very quickly my issue lies in bird cages in a game where food options are over abundant having a chance to get nothing from something is never worth it in my eyes I feel like they should give birds a hunger cap and once they reach it they can't eat more that day but 2 seeds would be guaranteed.

As for the poll I feel normal vegetables are fine but vegetables from crockpot should be buffed as it stands most vegetable dishes are worthless even In wurts case there's not really a need to use crockpot and fruits and veggies are very available in the forms of berry bushes, stone fruit bushes, bull kelp stalks and bunnymen.

[Scrimbles]

I don't know about the raw ingredients being buffed, but the crockpot recipes could use some tuning for sure.

The numbers for things like stuffed eggplant and pumpkin cookies are pathetic, cooked eggplant heals 20 hp,  raw heals 8, both heal 20 hunger and stuffed eggplant heals 5 for some reason, and the raw ingredients could easily match its 37.5 hunger, in cases where you dont use ice it will VERY easily go over.

Cooked Pumpkin heals 8 hp, 37.5 hunger, and 2 honey heals 3 hp and 9.375 hunger each.

 

PUMPKIN COOKIES HEAL 0 HP, 37.5 HUNGER, with the extra little bonus of 15 sanity. What the hell.

[Well-met]

17 minutes ago, Ogrecakes said:

I don't know about the raw ingredients being buffed, but the crockpot recipes could use some tuning for sure.

The numbers for things like stuffed eggplant and pumpkin cookies are pathetic, cooked eggplant heals 20 hp,  raw heals 8, both heal 20 hunger and stuffed eggplant heals 5 for some reason, and the raw ingredients could easily match its 37.5 hunger, in cases where you dont use ice it will VERY easily go over.

Cooked Pumpkin heals 8 hp, 37.5 hunger, and 2 honey heals 3 hp and 9.375 hunger each.

 

PUMPKIN COOKIES HEAL 0 HP, 37.5 HUNGER, with the extra little bonus of 15 sanity. What the hell.

klei probably takes perish time in account when balancing foods.

[Cheggf]

1 minute ago, Well-met said:

klei probably takes perish time in account when balancing foods.

Pumpkin cookies has the same spoilage as a pumpkin. Stuffed eggplant has a shorter spoilage than an eggplant if you freshen it up by cooking it, or if you don't count that then it's 15 days instead of 10 for the raw eggplant. I can't see any situation you would make those foods other than being Warly, or if for some strange reason you're about to starve and you have a bunch of spoiled ingredients that've already been cooked and can be re-refreshed by crock potting them.

[wigfrids hat]

i use cookies for emergency sanity AND because i just like having my char eat cookies sometimes. honey and pumpkins are plentiful

[CaptainChaotica]

5 hours ago, Shosuko said:

What I'd really like to see is a better approach to farming.  Probably have more plants like berrybushes occur naturally in the world.  Maybe have some you can't dig up and move similar to cave bananas.

Then farms should probably work like this:  You build a base farm and once you seed something in it that plant just grows from that farm repeatedly until you clean it out and plant something else.

5 hours ago, gaymime said:

please give me pickable veg<3 even if they are just filler for meatballs i love plants in general so something like this would be lovely to see and as a bonus you can eat them XD

YEEEEESSSS this is why I use Pickle It and Birds and Berries!  I want to see stuff like potatoes and radishes and pineapples and apple trees just...growing around!  I also like plants, and variety of them.

Also Shosuko's second point sounds like the Harvest Moon/Stardew Valley method of doing things, where sometimes a crop's main plant will stay in a farm plot for an entire season (or two) and regrow just its actual fruit part repeatedly.  Heh.  Being a longtime fan of those kind of games...I have no problem whatsoever with this idea. 

...Notorious

[wigfrids hat]

7 minutes ago, CaptainChaotica said:

YEEEEESSSS this is why I use Pickle It and Birds and Berries!  I want to see stuff like potatoes and radishes and pineapples and apple trees just...growing around!  I also like plants, and variety of them.

Also Shosuko's second point sounds like the Harvest Moon/Stardew Valley method of doing things, where sometimes a crop's main plant will stay in a farm plot for an entire season (or two) and regrow just its actual fruit part repeatedly.  Heh.  Being a longtime fan of those kind of games...I have no problem whatsoever with this idea. 

...Notorious

i downloaded gobs of custom crops and made a few recipe mods when i still played that game...actually if i am correct i still have a mod for teas and fish dinners that isn't finished haha

 

all in all i am still down for more veg about

[Ohan]

6 hours ago, Cheggf said:

If farming itself were reworked in some way to be more competitive with the stronger food sources

tbh id like to see the 'stronger food sources' brought down instead of farming buffed to their standard. a single bunny hutch giving one large meat and 2 carrots every single night is way too good.. buffing farming to compete with that would make food acquisition an even more trivial thing than it already is 

[Cheggf]

7 hours ago, Ohan said:

tbh id like to see the 'stronger food sources' brought down instead of farming buffed to their standard.

Well as it is right now "stronger food sources" is everything except rabbits, which tie farms for the worst food source. Kolaefants, berry bushes, lichen, bananas, splumonkeys, pig houses, bunnyman houses, stone fruits, and plenty other are a lot stronger than farms.

7 hours ago, Ohan said:

a single bunny hutch giving one large meat and 2 carrots every single night is way too good..

It would be interesting to put the Starve in Don't Starve, but I'm sure the majority of the playerbase would disagree with you and tell you to install mods to make the game harder instead of making the game harder on everyone else. I also doubt that would ever happen since Klei keeps making the game easier and easier with every patch, never harder.

7 hours ago, Ohan said:

buffing farming to compete with that would make food acquisition an even more trivial thing than it already is 

If you want to make more than 1 or 2 farms you're probably going underground anyways to get the light bulbs to turn into manure, so I don't really see how it would make it even more trivial. It would just allow you to actually craft farms for non-roleplay reasons.

[pedregales]

For most of it I am undecided. Sure, most veggies are awful, but are amazing filler for most crock pot recipes and seeds are fairly easy to come by. For the last one I wanted cabbages or spinach (either is fine) because the game lacks leafy greens ATM (me thinks).

The main buff they need is currently in the hands of The Gorge and Wormwood: plant them for cheaper in tighter spaces. Currently, to plant just 1 seed you need a basic/improved farm, which are fairly expensive to make early game and, most importantly, take a fair amount of space (plus both are useless in winter anyway). But add 2 new items and you will see more vegetables being farmed: hoe (made from 3 flint + 2 twigs, and has ~20 uses) and soil turf (made from 6 manure + 6 bone shards, you can plant up to ~6-9 seeds at a time in them, but becomes barren land after growing ~100 plants in there; do note: plants will rot if they are not harvested in time). Bonus points if we get unique plant designs and seeds for each veggie. The improved farm can be kept as a more efficient (veggies grow much faster in them, and last much longer before they rot -or last indefinitely-) and they are also winter-friendly.

Edit: forgot to mention: seeds planted the "Gorge way" would take longer than if planted by Wormwood.

[SoupRiced]

I mean, potatoes and toma roots restore 20 health, pumpkins restore 37 hunger (if I'm not wrong) so I think they're fine as they are. It's just that farms require investment of time and resources, veggies have rather little use for non-Warly players and won't sustain you during the winter, so most players don't bother with them and just rely on meat instead.

Perhaps if there was a way to perserve veggies for longer, for an example pickling (yes, I know there's a mod for that), and more non-Warly crockpot recipes.

[Cheggf]

3 hours ago, pedregales said:

 Sure, most veggies are awful, but are amazing filler for most crock pot recipes and seeds are fairly easy to come by.

Investing the same amount of time as you would farms into ice, stone fruit, cactus, berries, lichen, mushrooms, twigs, butterfly wings, monster meat, or kelp would give dozens if not hundreds as much filler.

3 hours ago, pedregales said:

But add 2 new items and you will see more vegetables being farmed: hoe (made from 3 flint + 2 twigs, and has ~20 uses) and soil turf (made from 6 manure + 6 bone shards, you can plant up to ~6-9 seeds at a time in them, but becomes barren land after growing ~100 plants in there; do note: plants will rot if they are not harvested in time)

That sounds considerably more expensive than the current farms, especially if by "barren" you mean "needs to be crafted again" which would require you to commit suicide about once every other week to keep up with the bone costs.

3 hours ago, pedregales said:

Edit: forgot to mention: seeds planted the "Gorge way" would take longer than if planted by Wormwood.

I really like the idea of planting crops in the ground like the Gorge, but I think you got too specific in your idea. The issues with farming are how much effort the player has to spend at the base to get them and how expensive they are. Your suggestion would be fun, but not really that good. It doesn't fix either of the issues and adds a new one where the crops grow really really slowly.

You still need to feed a bunch of seeds to the bird so even if they grew at the exact same rate Wormwood crops grew instead of slower you'd only get 75-112 hunger over the duration you lose 300 hunger. Or, if you gambled a lot and got dragonfruits while you have a big ol' twig farm, you'd get 150-225.

So you'd be investing a ton of time, flint, manure, and bone shards into something that only slows your hunger by 25-37% with pumpkins or at best if you're lucky 50-75% with dragonfruit. The other food sources don't simply slow your hunger drain, they give you weeks' worth of food at once for a single low effort harvest.

[Brubs]

If anything i would like more crockpot recipes that add the cooked veggies effect: for instance a tomato soup that amplifies roasted tomato +20 hp.

I usually run farms everytime i play (i mostly use wurt) and realized farms arent that bad... the problem is dragonpie and salsa fresca or the garlic potato pure being the only cos efficient meals to prep, and all of them are rather rare.

Sure you can only pla t potatoes and grill them for easy +20 hp. Thats not bad.

I agree more variety on crockppt recipes leaning towards the late game could be fun since eating raw carrots/ripe stone fruits its getting old.

[wigfrids hat]

on official pickling option would be great, actually since it does make farms more viable for autumn. maybe the meta players won't be as impressed since they will still go with the cheapest meatball option but for casual players, sim-ers and people who just like having options the idea of having a pickle(or six) to get you through part or all of winter while bushes are down sounds neat

[hyiltiz]

Gorge style Tilling would be a much better Farming mechanism. Wormwood can still just plant anywhere; others can use the Farm plots structures for faster farming, or Tilling for slower than Wormwood farming. 

[pedregales]

12 hours ago, Cheggf said:

That sounds considerably more expensive than the current farms, especially if by "barren" you mean "needs to be crafted again" which would require you to commit suicide about once every other week to keep up with the bone costs.

You can get plenty of bone shards without killing yourself, and they were made semi-renewable via spoiled fish (now we need a method to spoil a fish faster).

But let's do some math (do note, I got my info from the DS wiki).

Let's look at the improved farm first:

• The improved farm has 30 uses before you need to re-fertilize, and each farm costs 10 cut grass + 6 manure + 4 rocks. You can only plant 1 seed at a time. You don't need to craft a new one.
• Plants grow in 10 daylight-minutes, which, assuming 1/3rd daylight per day (1 in-game day = 8 real-life minutes; so 1/3rd of that would be 2.67 real-life minutes per in-game day), it would take roughly 3.75 days for a plant to fully grow in this conditions.
  • Say we are at autumn day 1 with an improved farm, and autumn lasts 20 days. You can get up to 5.33 veggies before autumn ends.

Now lets take a look at my idea:

• A soil turf has 100 uses (after that it becomes barren land and you need to craft a new one), each costing 6 manure + 4 bone shards. And you can plant 6 seeds at a time. Considering a perfect scenario were you are planting all the time, you will need to craft a new soil turf after 16.67 "uses" (planting 6 plants at a time, all the time).
• I said plants should grow slower than if planted by Wormwood (which takes roughly 4 in-game days according to the wiki -it seems it does not take daylight in consideration?-, just slightly less than an improved farm with 1/3rd sunlight per day). So we will say it takes 20 daylight-minutes for a seed to fully grow (same as a basic farm), so 7.5 days for a single plant to fully grow under the same conditions.
  • If we multiply that (7.25 days) by the number of "uses" (16.67), we get that you would need to craft a new soil turf approximately every 125 in-game days.
  • Assuming we are in autumn day 1 again, we can safely plant 6 seeds 2 times before winter comes, for a total of 12 veggies. You would need to make 2 improved farms for a similar net gain before winter comes.
• A hoe has 20 uses, each costing 3 flints + 2 twigs. So you would need 5 hoes for a single soil turf, with 1 hoe breaking every ~3.33 soil turf "uses", or every 25 days (assuming you are working only 1 soil turf at a time). However, you will only need 1 hoe before winter comes.

As a cost comparison:

• 2 improved farms cost 20 cut grass + 12 manure + 8 rocks; and yield 10-11 crops in roughly 20 days
• 1 soil turf + 1 hoe costs 6 manure + 4 bone shards + 3 flint + 2 twigs; and yields 12 crops in roughly 15 days.

The second option is overall more efficient to start with early game without making veggies the go to food source, making farms a slightly more interesting option before winter starts.

I agree I was a bit too specific though.

EDIT: forgot to mention. The most complicated thing of the idea, is to make it easy to understand by new players. More specifically: that a hoe needs soil turf. How can you make the players connect the 2 together when the game can be so "esoteric" and vague at times (for example, during the Gorge, the seeds didn't have the same name as the plants (say "potato seeds"), but instead had ridiculous names like "spiky seeds", "blue seeds", "round seeds", and so on; this was completely unnecessary, and only alienated the player).

[hyiltiz]

Seasonal seeds would be great; either dropped by Birds, or some percentages being outright 0%; e.g. watermelon only grows in Summer, Pumpkin only grows in Autumn and Winter(?) etc.