Reap What You Sow - Some suggestions and my opinion

[ADM]

Hi everyone, I've been testing this first version of the new beta for some hours now and like always I have to make that little topic to say what I think of it.

First, cause it's important to remind it for some, this is just a global feedback from what I've experimented with the update so far, with recommendations / suggestions that you are invited to discuss about as we have all unique point of views. I think we're all looking to help for such an important update.

(Cause yeah, gardening with farms is my favorite food source in the game so far, it was just boring sometimes so I tried to make it more entertaining my way, so this update is very appreciated for veggie buddies like me.)

 

Before getting in the soil... I'd like to express my disappointment about the decision with disease on this update.
It's not really out of context but as I believe this topic can be tiring I'll include it exclusively in the spoiler bellow if you want to skip that part, but I encourage the devs to check it real quick...

Spoiler

HOW DARE YOU, KLEI ?!
Nah just kidding...  but I'm in fact very unsatisfied about the Disease removal, not because I'm a big disease fan (or maybe I am ?), whatsoever but I've aaaalways said that disease could use crucial improvements to make it something good, technically interesting.

I'm not talking about cures, but simple changes like applying disease depending of the plant conditions, exploitation and so on.
And judging how the plants development works now in this update... this could have been working out so I can't understand this decision, and not only I but other players have been mentioning this for ages with detailed new disease functioning behaviour ideas.

So of course this change doesn't bother a certain and important part of players as practically half of the community wasn't playing with disease, thanks to the world presets. And they were right to do so cause nothing's fun about shovelling a plant every X days whoever you want to decorate or farm.

Really after years of sticking with disease I feel bad for its history, it has been annoying, ignored, then removed.
Don't let disease to wastes, Klei. There's so much to do with something like this and you have all the material on the forums to a 2.0 Disease that make the basic plants detailed, cause right now they are the plants that lack of attention so this could save you the time for another plant update.

Okay now to get started with the new farming features we have to place a Garden Rigamajig :
And I instantly noticed this thing and it seems off :

When I place something in Don't Starve, however the string is Deploy, Place, Build... I expect it to have that green aura, so I think this isn't intentional has it has a very specific placer but I hope this will be fixed cause it looks... super weird, it also turns red when you can't place it but the filter is weird looking too.

Other than that I'm getting used to this Garden Rigamajig and soil turfs, maybe some players will miss the Farm Plots but a very detailed gardening system is the kind of changes I love to see, I think it gives more purpose to multiplayer as well if someone feels like being the green hand of the group.


Giving role option to players in this game is very interesting, not mandatory, so depending of the approach you'll get a different reward from your agriculture methods, neat !

Now yeah I like that new gardening stuff and all but it's... confusing at some key points. Starting with, nutriments :

Here, I'm growing Eggplants, when I've first seen this plant grow on my tests, I thought it was going to be a thistle by the look of it btw, not important but its one of my favorite plant and it growed into the vegetable I hate the most lol.

Anyway...

If you look into your Gardeneer Hat logs, you can see that sort of info :

 

 

 

You can see the best seasons, water consumption, and nutriment cycles of the plants you've previously cultivated. Yet as you can see on the two screenshots, the eggplant logs seems to suggest you to fertilize the ground with a lot of "Compost" (the yellow one) and dislike (?) the Growth Formula (red), with a neutral opinion about the "Manure" (blue).

Maybe I'm the only one around who doesn't get how it works but the eggplants here are unhappy with the nutriments regardless of the amount of each types, UNLESS the 3 of them are all together. Maybe I'm doing it wrong but interpreting it the way I did made more sense to me, filtering the nutriments depending of the plant preferences and quantity sounds good at require more of the player attention to grows plant faster (especially as you can't fertilize plants directly now).

 

Now on concern to another of the plant happiness requirements :

The Tending action, it has to be done everyday to make the plant happy... I don't really like that.
Well, sure it has been proven some plant species have good responses from certain interactions such as talking and stuff so it's a good attention to detail but this one is a bit too much, plants already require watering, nutriments, plus meet other plant social interactions such as avoiding rooting neighbourhood or friends of the same species around, those are good, and on top of planting and harvesting your farming fields at the same time, I don't think telling dad jokes to your plants can fit on the schedule.
But if however we manage to make it fit on a moderate field size, it's a bit clumsy and uninteresting, this can probably reminds of the time ONI had the excellent yield status for plants. The idea of growing huge vegetable is nice, but if it can be done the fun way it's better !

I still have a suggestion for this one tho, tending plants should be done exclusively and automatically when you inspect the plant with the Gardeneer Hat or as Wormwood to make the job twice as fast, you examine the plant mood + tend it (both actions looks the same anyway), this saves time instead of doing 2 actions, plus removing the left click interaction while you don't have this hat will probably make it more clear for everyone between the tend, examine and inspect interactions. Sometimes less is more.

Also one of the requirement : "Family" is the same for every plants, maybe this is a temp feature but it would be great to make some plants loners and other extra social or neutral. It's extra knowledge and it looks like a good one.

I'd be looking into that !

 

 

 

 

 

 

On a side note I feel like the Food Tab is getting dirty and a reorganization of the recipes by order of importance could be beneficial.

I think the recipes on top should be about food instead of the farming one, they're also quite more prioritized in-game than farming recipes. Maybe it should be more like that :

1. Crock Pot
2. Cook Book
3. Ice Box
4. Salt Box
5. Drying Rack
6. Bee Box
7. Garden Rigamajig
8. Mushroom Planter
9. Garden Hoe
10. Watering Can
11. Waterfowl Can
12. Gardeneer Hat
13. Composting Bin
14. ...

Now this is something I had difficulties to experiment with (for spawn requirement reasons), Fruit Flies,

I don't know a lot about them but I like the concept of  invasive species for plantations and that they have a lord with a new follower has a loot. but... uh... why are these mobs HP sacks ?

A Fruit Fly have 200 HP, the Lord have 4000 HP... o_o I mean, it's just a tiny insect, how can it have more health than hounds ? Also, okay it's not a boss or anything, but the lord doesn't have to be longer to kill than Bearger, 1000 is enough, it doesn't make a lot of damage or doge attacks, the fight is kinda uninteresting and the best thing to do so far is to focus on it instead of the flies it spawn around. So, maybe just lower the health and a proper kite & attack pattern would make it better for a proper fight. (also I wouldn't be against HD textures for this mob cause it is very blurry)

The reward out of the fight is interesting at least, it's a fly that automaticity tend your growing friends. If we follow the idea of the tending & inspect fusion idea suggested from earlier, this will make this follower a sort of tier 3 Gardeneer Hat ! For when you don't need the hat inspect feedbacks anymore cause you've already learned your plants preferences and nutriment symbols on the soil. All you need is this guy.

 

 

 

And I think that's it ! Overall I must say I like the update, that's for sure.

The gardening system is looking good, all it needs now is a bit of adjustments and tweaks left and right. Maybe this post will help, and I hope you've all made it to the end to give your own feedbacks. Have a good day, you little green thumbs.

[zarklord_klei]

Just a couple quick notes, while disease has been removed, all the code is still there, so that doesn't mean that in the future, it couldn't be added back in a better and more fun way(but we have no plans for that at the moment).
The nutrients system is getting some more strings to help clarify how it works better.
As for the plant happiness, you don't have to do it, but you might get slightly less yields from your crops, more effort equals better rewards, no effort though, still has a reward.
The lord of the fruit flies hp is still getting tuned, but his concept(and why he has a higher HP pool) is a correlation with his spawning requirements, and less about the difficulty of fighting him specifically.

We appreciate the clear and concise feedback, and will definitely take a look at what you have said though.

[-Nick-]

I would love more ways to get water. Wells could possibly be made or even pipe lines that connect to a pond. Many possibilities. I would also love to see sprinklers for more automatic farming.

[Gourmand]

1 hour ago, zarklord_klei said:

Just a couple quick notes, while disease has been removed, all the code is still there, so that doesn't mean that in the future, it couldn't be added back in a better and more fun way(but we have no plans for that at the moment).
The nutrients system is getting some more strings to help clarify how it works better.
As for the plant happiness, you don't have to do it, but you might get slightly less yields from your crops, more effort equals better rewards, no effort though, still has a reward.
The lord of the fruit flies hp is still getting tuned, but his concept(and why he has a higher HP pool) is a correlation with his spawning requirements, and less about the difficulty of fighting him specifically.

We appreciate the clear and concise feedback, and will definitely take a look at what you have said though.

Give Wormwood the ability to plant a seed on his head, after a few days it could bloom and be harvested 

[Ohan]

13 hours ago, ADM said:

Maybe I'm the only one around who doesn't get how it works

Idk if you've checked Zeklo's Farming 101 thread in the meantime but up arrows means the plant generates that kind of nutrient and arrows down means it consumes that kind of nutrient. So its a balancing game, you have to match the needs of different plants to achieve a sustainable equilibrium 

 

13 hours ago, ADM said:

as Wormwood to make the job twice as fast

I like ur suggestion regarding tending/inspecting. and Wormwood definitely should be more proficient at this than all the other survivors since his wild crops are kind of more of a downside now . btw you can also automatically tend to plants by playing music near them so: shell bells, beef horn, one-man-band, panflute etc