Jump to content

My opinion & observations on the new farming mechanics


Recommended Posts

So I've been playing around with this new update a LOT. I've been mainly interested in how viable different strategies to see how viable they are - even at different stages of the game. The opinions I've built from all this playing seems vastly different than many I've seen in these forums, so I figured I should write my own post about it.

Since this post is so long, I'm going to write a TL;DR at the bottom for those who don't want to read all this.

I'd like to start by explaining the basics of what I understand of plant stress.

There's 6 stress categories (I won't go through them in detail, but these are water, nutrients, interaction/music, family, weeds and season). Every time the plant progresses a stage, it gets 1 stress point per category unfilled. So for a plant's entire lifetime, it'll get 4 points of stress for each stress category completely unfulfilled.
If a plant has 0 or 1 stress points, it grows giant. 
If a plant has up to 6 stress points, it'll give back 2 seeds.
If a plant has up to 12 stress points, it'll give back 1 seed. Any more stress and you get no seeds back.

What this means is, while you need to grow plants perfect (or neat perfect) to get giant ones, getting a positive return on the crops you plant isn't hard at all. You can fail up to 3 categories and still get a crop and seed back.

I think this system is great, because it lets players make use of farming depending on how involved they want to be in the process. Constant care of their plants awards them with giant crops, which can double or triple the amount of crops you get. Growing a plant well, even if you can't afford/be bothered to clear a stress category (or two for half the plant's growth cycle), awards you 2 seeds to further expand your farm. If you're any lazier than that you can still get good profits from just planting the seeds and harvesting them when ready, since the family, weeds and season requirements are pretty much passively fulfilled if you plan well.

On my end-game world, I've been giving my crops constant care, and the rewards are amazing. Entire fields of giant pumpkins, potatoes, peppers, and whatever else I decide to spend my time caring for.
On a world with friends, where we've currently reached the mid-game where resources are available but not in bulk, I've been growing a good amount of giant crops as well as a ton of regular ones for food. Especially dragonfruit. I can plant a stack of dragonfruit seeds and go take care of other tasks and come back to 1-2 seeds per plant harvested.
On public servers, which are eternally stuck in the early-game for me, I've grown enough produce to feed a good amount of people even with the lack of resources available later in the game.

So I want to make it clear that I don't think growing crops GIANT is necessary to grow a good harvest. The stress system lets you be pretty hands-off and as long as you're willing to invest the time into tilling, planting and harvesting, you can benefit a lot from farming.
This also makes me believe Wormwood is currently a good character as-is. His ability to plant without tilling is great - It saves so much time when you replace the tilling and planting animations with a simple pick-up animation.

Now, I want to talk about nutrients. I feel like the nutrient cycling mechanics are the most interesting part of this whole thing.

They're pretty much the biggest obstacle when farming. The different types of nutrient requirements for each plant place the plants at different viability points in different parts of the game:
I'll start with high consumption vs low consumption plants.  Low consumption plants are ones that take 2 arrows of nutrients instead of 4. Providing for these plants isn't too hard - you can often gather enough poop from beefalo to grow a few giant manure-consuming crops, and getting a compost bin up would probably let you get some giant compost-consuming crops by late autumn/winter.
High consumption crops are a lot harder to grow giant. Considering they use twice as much as low consumption ones, little bits of fertilizer picked up while adventuring probably won't be enough to grow more than a few giants, so depending on the type of fertilizer in question, you need to spend a good amount of time gathering it - which isn't a bad thing, since some of the crops in this category are really good.

Next I wanna talk about growth formula, compost and manure.

Growth formula is an interesting type of fertilizer. Since it needs bottles, it requires that you have a boat decent enough to sail for a long period of time, which isn't very easy to get early game. but as you get farther into the game, you can collect more bottles. This makes it a "permanent upgrade" type of fertilizer, since the kelp and ashes cost get less and less significant as you collect kelp stalks and get better sources of ashes (such as the ungodly amount of late-game rot).
The only way I've been grow some of the low-consumption crops giant early-game was through nutrient cycling (not grouping plants so they fulfill each other's nutrient requirements - I'll explain later).
In the mid-game world I've been playing with my friends, we collected a few bottles and kelp stalks from the ocean and now we're able to grow a decent amount of crops that need it. The formula from those 5 bottles are enough to feed small plots completely, as long as we didn't go overboard with packing crops together (none of us had the tilling mod, so it wasn't easy).
On my late game world, though, I feel as though I have infinite growth formula. I have a ton of bottles, so even when I grow big plots of high-consumption plants, I can still have a couple of spare bottles and a bunch more fermenting.

Compost is probably the simplest nutrient type here. Since the only source of them is a structure you can make with regular resources, how much you can produce scales with how many of that structure you can build. The amount of compost-requiring plants you can grow pretty much scales with how much time you're willing to gather wood, and how many spare food items (including rot) you have.

Manure is one I have a little problem with. A single manure item or a use of the bucket o' poop only restores half as much as a compost item or a use of the super growth formula. There's no good source of manure. Even in my late-game world where I have an odd skeleton, shadow atrium, thurible, tons of bundled monster meat and tons of pig houses, I'm not able to feed a full plot of high-consumption plants consistently if I spend all my spare time between watering sessions gathering manure. I feel like it needs a buff - increasing the amount of nutrients manure gives to match other types is one option, and making sources of bone shards more consistent and increasing the effectiveness of a poop bucket use to match other types is another. But I wouldn't be too upset if there was no buff - manure is mainly consumed by the more niche crops (as of the latest update) so the chances I would feel the need to grow a plot of high manure consumptions plants aren't high enough to make the manure gathering feel like a huge chore.

The reason I like the nutrient changes in this update is that I feel that it's better balanced. Dragonfruit was moved from manure to growth formula. Since dragonfruit is such a generally useful crop, I think growth formula makes sense for it since it would allow players dedicating their time to farming to grow lots of it, more than before. The removal of plants that take two types and restore one type also makes the system simpler, since it eliminates these oddities in the system (there was only 2 crops that worked like that). Onions were changed to manure, but I think that's fine since they're one of the more niche crops that I don't think many would need big amounts of regularly (and again, farming without fertilizer is viable).

I also want to take this opportunity to suggest a compost wrap buff. I know its health and compost value was recently been buffed, but considering it takes nitre I don't think that warrants using it. I think a good buff would be giving the wrap slightly less HP but giving it multiple uses and high nutrient value. Something like 5 uses and 8 compost & manure from each would make the compost wrap really good fertilizer, and thus would make Wormwood really good for farming plants that need those 2 nutrients, assuming the Wormwood is willing to get the nitre. Reducing its healing to 10 per use (and reducing the animation length to compensate) would give it 50 hp total, not far from the current 45 hp it gives.

I also want to mention nutrient cycling a little.

As of the latest update, every crop only takes one kind and gives back the other 2 kinds. If you grow full plots of one kind of crop - as I like to do - this mechanic gets an interesting use case. Since the plants convert one type of nutrient to another, you can grow a type of crop that uses a more easily obtainable nutrient - like compost - to fill that plot with the other types of nutrient. This provides a head start on the nutrient requirement of the next crop you plant in that tile (as long as it doesn't need the same type of nutrient). If you plant small amounts of crops, that head start can be enough to grow the crops giant (which is what I typically end up doing for growth formula plants early-game). For larger amount of crops, supplemental fertilizer will be required, but considering the plot would start with up to 100 of that nutrient, you can imagine the cost will go way down (by up to 12 composts, 12 uses of growth formula or 25 manure).

Nutrient cycling can also be used to have plants growing together feed each other. The common strategy on these forums seems to be planting them precisely so that the crops completely fulfill each other's needs, but I don't particularly like that strategy. It takes too much precision for the tilling mechanics in this game, and I'm not a fan of growing crops I don't want. I tried it once with peppers, garlic and onions when the update was first released, but getting all those crops together in a proper setup was more trouble than I would've liked, and I didn't have a use for peppers. My preferred form of this strategy is planting 2 crops together so they reduce each other's nutrient needs, even if they don't completely eliminate it. For example, in earlier parts of the game I would plant corn and potatoes together since they're both good hunger crops, and since corn needs compost and potatoes need manure, growing them together would effectively reduce their consumptions to 1 arrow of each. which was VERY manageable early game.

All in all, I really, really like this beta. The mechanics of it and their simplicity allows for all kinds of players to benefit from farming, and the really dedicated players are rewarded with gigantic crops and equally gigantic rewards from them. For the most part, it's well balanced. I don't find the latest patch to have any issues other than tilling becoming REALLY annoying to do (a friend only lasted 30 seconds before getting too frustrated to continue tilling). The potential nerf to fully self sustaining plant setups is something that doesn't impact me personally since I find it to be too complicated to set up for the rewards involved.

One more thing I'll mention is seed spoilage. With so many different kinds of seeds and different preferred seasons for different plants, seed storage has been haunting me. I have 3 fridges just for seeds, and even then I can't preserve all the ones I need without bundles since it's too much planting, harvesting and storing again. I've been throwing them in bundles, but that's been a nightmare too. I'm currently making a mod that adds seed pouches, reusable bundle-like items that can store only one kind of seeds and keeps them from spoiling. If Klei wants to take this idea, though, please be my guest. I think the Lord of the Fruit Flies could use a blueprint drop anyway.

Lastly, I wanna include a small screenshot showcase of my end-game world since I've been farming like an addict:

Spoiler

 

After trying self-sustaining setups once, I decided that that was too much trouble and started experimenting with manually fertilizing crops. My first idea was a small plot of giant carrots:
discordscreenshot1.thumb.png.a3bd9e68390d91595b2b6d94c10b9bdf.png

After trying this once and noticing how much fertilizer I had leftover, I realized that I was onto something.

It didn't take too long for me to make a full giant crop collection:

discordscreenshot2.thumb.png.8325d376e1168c5ab582d1534afaff8b.png

After that was done, I spent the rest of my time seeing how much dopamine I can get from growing giant crops:
discordscreenshot3.thumb.png.b9bd46447b51633db6d26b3cf01a4723.png
Growing these is what made me realize how bad manure is as fertilizer.

discordscreenshot4.thumb.png.fb665ed17bedc988018f96604b63ea10.png

This is my attempt at growing them without nutrients - seeing how much loot I got from this made me realize that this is definitely viable as a food source.

discordscreenshot5.thumb.png.a8248d988d5e586e48b86432e43c5fa0.png

This is the first time I grow multiple plots of crops simultaneously. You can see a lot of peppers didn't grow well because they need manure.

image.thumb.png.776147a1aaefca3a47dfe6f59c4d9952.png

Once this patch hit I got right back to farming giant crops, experimenting with some old and new strategies. The potatoes were grown with little manure - I had already filled the plot with poop from growing the tomatoes in it (and also cause the seeds were spoiling). The pumpkins in the bottom right aren't the same as the ones from the previous screenshot - I grew 2 plots of pumpkins to see if the change from growth formula to compost impacted them negatively late-game (it didn't, really. It just made them easier to grow earlier on).

TL;DR
- Growing giant plants isn't necessary. You can grow crops without nutrients and you'll get 2 seeds back if you water and talk to them and 1 seed back if you don't. Growing a large amount of crops that give you back 1 seed will provide a large amount of food as long as you're willing to till, plant and harvest that much. Wormwood benefits more than other characters from growing non-giant crops because he plants much faster and farm soil isn't needed to get 1 seed back from the plant.
- Nutrients are mostly well balanced. Growth formula shines late-game, Compost is good all around but picks up pace around mid-game, and Manure could really use a buff (I mentioned a couple of suggestions earlier)
- I think the compost wrap could use a buff. My idea is to give it 5 uses, 8 compost and manure nutrients per use, and 10 hp per use (with a shorter use animation).
- Nutrient cycling is neat, and self-sustaining plots isn't its only relevant use. Filling a plot with a type of nutrient by cycling it through another is one option, and growing two plants together to make their nutrient costs cheaper is another.
- The only part of the most recent patch I don't like is the change to till spacing, because it's really frustrating to get a good amount of crops per tile when tilling. Maybe this just takes getting used to, though. The changes to nutrient requirements of plants makes the game better, in my opinion.
- Seed spoilage is kind of a nighmare, since there's 14 kinds of seeds and seeds are best planted in specific seasons.
- A lot of these things are just my opinions. I don't mean to imply that self-sustaining plant setups are BAD, just that I really dislike them. If you disagree then that's understandable, since there's a lot of different playstyles that this game supports.

 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I am... iffy on Growth Formula Starter. The super variant gives out a whopping 40 points of formula, making it the fertilizer that is most densely packed in nutrients. But even at its best, you need roughly 4-8 Super Starters to fully feed a tile of 9 crops (assuming they all drain formula). And each of these Super Starters needs its own separate bottle, cause you need to let each bottle stew for 3 days. You can just use 1 super starter, then retrieve the bottle and make another one.

Compost is problematic too. At best, it takes 18-36 Composts to fully feed a single tile. A Composting Bin takes 1.5 days to produce 3 Composts, unless you babysit it so you can turn it every 2.5 minutes, which reduces the time to roughly 1 day. So, it would take 6-9 days to produce enough Compost for just that one tile. And while it's true you can use multiple Composting Bins, 6 Composting Bins are a tad ridiculous.

And what happens if you wanna do farms that are larger than 1x1 tiles? I just... I don't see how this is any less tedious than the previous farming system to be honest.

I don't think a lot of people are even gonna bother with fertilizers because of this, and I hate to see interesting mechanics (which I consider both Formula Starters and Composting Bins to be) fall into irrelevance like this. Every other stress category takes far less time to deal with, so chances are people are either gonna do everything but nutrients and get 1 veggie+2 seeds per crop, or they are gonna rely on nutrient cycling to get giant crops. Cause clicking on the same tile 30+ times just doesn't sound appealing.
 

Also, I might or might no have gone on a tangent here... :P

Link to comment
Share on other sites

35 minutes ago, QuartzBeam said:

I am... iffy on Growth Formula Starter. The super variant gives out a whopping 40 points of formula, making it the fertilizer that is most densely packed in nutrients. But even at its best, you need roughly 4-8 Super Starters to fully feed a tile of 9 crops (assuming they all drain formula). And each of these Super Starters needs its own separate bottle, cause you need to let each bottle stew for 3 days. You can just use 1 super starter, then retrieve the bottle and make another one.

Compost is problematic too. At best, it takes 18-36 Composts to fully feed a single tile. A Composting Bin takes 1.5 days to produce 3 Composts, unless you babysit it so you can turn it every 2.5 minutes, which reduces the time to roughly 1 day. So, it would take 6-9 days to produce enough Compost for just that one tile. And while it's true you can use multiple Composting Bins, 6 Composting Bins are a tad ridiculous.

And what happens if you wanna do farms that are larger than 1x1 tiles? I just... I don't see how this is any less tedious than the previous farming system to be honest.

I don't think a lot of people are even gonna bother with fertilizers because of this, and I hate to see interesting mechanics (which I consider both Formula Starters and Composting Bins to be) fall into irrelevance like this. Every other stress category takes far less time to deal with, so chances are people are either gonna do everything but nutrients and get 1 veggie+2 seeds per crop, or they are gonna rely on nutrient cycling to get giant crops. Cause clicking on the same tile 30+ times just doesn't sound appealing.
 

Also, I might or might no have gone on a tangent here... :P

I see your point. It does seem like a lot of fertilizer for each plant. But here's my counterargument:

First off, it seems a little more reasonable when taking more factors into consideration. First off, like I mentioned in my original post, fertilizer is pretty much optional for growing crops. It's only necessary for giant ones.
Looking at giant ones, 4 compost/growth formula uses per plant doesn't seem particularly bad. They have a lot of benefits. They double or triple your loot, guarantee 2 seeds with a chance of 3, spoil much slower than their regular counterpart and give completely fresh loot when hammered (which I really hope isn't a bug!). To me, that makes it seem like fertilizing plants even starting from an empty tile is worthwhile. 

But nutrient cycling can also mitigate the amount of nutrient needed. As I mentioned in my post, if you cycle a more common type of nutrient into a rarer one through a plant or two you can use those existing nutrients in the soil as a starting point for your plant. A full plot of nutrients is 12.5 compost, 12.5 growth formula uses or 24 manure. So by having the tile be filled with nutrients beforehand, you can reduce the 18-36 compost need per tile to 6-24. And again, since giant crops have a lot of benefits to them I think this is a very worthwhile investment.

Another way of mitigating the nutrient costs is by planting 2 types of crops in one plot. Depending on the consumption levels, a 1:1 ratio or 1:2 ratio of crops will halve the amount of nutrients required per plant, so you only need 9-18 per plant (not accounting for pre-existing nutrients in the soil, which is important) I don't personally do this often because I haven't had an issue with producing enough nutrients for full plots of one crop, but I think it would work well for crops that use manure like onions or peppers. I'll definitely do it with dragonfruits and peppers during summer when I switch to Warly.

One last way you can mitigate nutrient costs is by making use of the margin of error allowed for giant crops. If you're sure you can farm well enough to get 0 stress points on a plant, you can use 3/4 of the fertilizer you'd normally need to grow the plant. That's how I grow giant potatoes, among other things.

Compost bins taking 1.5 days to produce compost isn't really that bad. They're relatively cheap to make, and you can continue stockpiling compost when nothing is going on for the time you'll actually need it. I've managed to grow all those pumpkins with only 2 compost bins, because I would periodically harvest and refill the bins. Not even consistently, I just harvested them whenever I noticed they were full. I imagine it'll be much easier to stockpile compost with more bins.

4-8 super starters per plot doesn't sound bad at all to me. Even before I realized you can make use of existing nutrients in the soil, I've been growing full plots of pumpkins and pomegranates (because for some reason I really wanted to see a lot of pomegranates). And again, giant crops are really good so I think they're worth the effort.

And again, giant crops don't feel like the necessary method of growing a good amount of crops. Growing the regular variants of a crop is perfectly viable. It's almost definitely less tedious than the old farming system. The disadvantage the new one has is needing to till land to plant seeds, but everything else is a disadvantage for the old system. Mainly, getting seeds back when harvesting. That was one thing that could've made old farms viable on its own. Another thing is, it takes 10 grass for a single farm plot in the old system. 10 grass for every plant. I have first hand experience with both farming systems to know that the new one is much, much, much better than the old one for actually producing crops.

If you disagree, though, that's completely understandable. 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

4 hours ago, Electroely said:

First off, like I mentioned in my original post, fertilizer is pretty much optional for growing crops. It's only necessary for giant ones.
Looking at giant ones, 4 compost/growth formula uses per plant doesn't seem particularly bad. They have a lot of benefits. They double or triple your loot, guarantee 2 seeds with a chance of 3, spoil much slower than their regular counterpart and give completely fresh loot when hammered (which I really hope isn't a bug!). To me, that makes it seem like fertilizing plants even starting from an empty tile is worthwhile. 

This is what ppl have to remind themselves of before they comment on the new farming IMO. You are not required to make giant crops. Farming as is has been made infinitely easier. Giant crops are a new introduction as a reward for above and beyond farming. What would be the point if they can be achieved with no extra effort and no material investment at all? 

4 hours ago, Electroely said:

The disadvantage the new one has is needing to till land to plant seeds, but everything else is a disadvantage for the old system.

This is what it comes down to, bottom line cut and cry! :lol:

5 hours ago, Electroely said:

I think the compost wrap could use a buff. My idea is to give it 5 uses, 8 compost and manure nutrients per use, and 10 hp per use (with a shorter use animation).

Please no :lol:. Nutrient wise maybe it could be bumped up some but healing wise i finally feel like its moving in the right direction. At this point its safe to say the long animation is not getting changed. And ive come to agree that it shouldnt, its cute and would be a shame to remove it. The long animation thus makes it perfect for a big HoT that u can pop before or after combat, during downtime, as an alternative to sleeping. As Wormwood you already have access to salves and poultice for quick in combat healing, i say let Compost Wrap be something unique and different. If it was up to me id make it something like 20+30 or 10+40 (instead of 30+15) to emphasize the heal over time more. 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Just now, Ohan said:

Please no :lol:. Nutrient wise maybe it could be bumped up some but healing wise i finally feel like its moving in the right direction. At this point its safe to say the long animation is not getting changed. And ive come to agree that it shouldnt, its cute and would be a shame to remove it. The long animation thus makes it perfect for a big HoT that u can pop before or after combat, during downtime, as an alternative to sleeping. As Wormwood you already have access to salves and poultice for quick in combat healing, i say let Compost Wrap be something unique and different. If it was up to me id would make it something like 20+30 or 10+40 (instead of 30+15) to emphasize the heal over time more. 

That's completely fair, actually. I hardly use the compost wrap myself, so I wouldn't really know what its best use cases are. I'm repelled by the fact that it needs nitre for a benefit that other items have, especially with how much nitre I've had to use to keep my tame beefalo's domestication. But I'm perfectly content with the existence of an item that's not for me. I was just suggesting a change in case it seems like a good idea.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

2 minutes ago, Electroely said:

I'm repelled by the fact that it needs nitre for a benefit that other items have

yeah that 1 nitre sticks out like a sore thumb doesnt it :lol:. (and as someone who always rushes beefalo as Wormwood i definitely feel you on the nitre black hole that is the salt lick). I cant say ive crafted any Wraps at all either in the several solo worlds of a few hundred days ive played as Wormwood but the new buff has made me look at it in a new light. If the healing was bumped up by 5 more, to heal him from 1 to full, he would need:

  • 15 poop, 6 rot, 3 nitre which equals to:
    • 16 ash, 8 rocks, 8 spider glands (for healing salves) 
    • or 20 reeds and 10 honey (for honey poultice)

Might be time to dust off the old moleworm farm :D (i dont want to further derail this important thread on farming with worm talk sorry lol) 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I definitely wouldn't mind a nutrient buff to the Compost Wrap, but I don't want to see a health nerf. Absolutely agree that the nitre cost is a killjoy though. We really need a better way to acquire it apart from moleworm burrows. I stand by making the Saltlick take actually salt instead of nitre, though I'd prefer some domestication tweaks to balance it. It would add an extra detour but it would remove the counter-synergy Wormwood has with beefalo that should otherwise be a good synergy.

Fertilizer as a whole still feels a bit off to me. I'm just not really sure what Klei intends its use to be. 100% of a single type of plant in a plot seems discouraged due to the cost. I guess that might be why they nerfed existing self-sustaining combos? It seems like you need a much wider variety of crops now, so it makes minor nutrient loss combos more viable by extension?

I'm not really sure if that's the idea, and definitely unsure how I feel about it.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I understand you are not required to make giant crops.

I just don't understand in what other circumstance you could possibly want to take care of nutrients? They are the most resource and time intensive stress factor, so I imagine that, for people who don't want giant crops, it will be the first stress factor on the chopping block.

Watering takes a few seconds of your time per day (more or less). Tending can be fully automated via the friendly fruit fly or partially automated via instruments. Season and family need no maintenance to begin with. And killjoys also need virtually no maintenance.

Why would anyone go through the effort of collecting rare bottles and waiting 3 days for them to turn useful, or set up a bunch of composting bins and wait 1.5 days for them to do their job or get a few stacks of veggies and turn them into manure via werepig, when they could expend way less time and way fewer resources on one of the other stress factors instead?

Link to comment
Share on other sites

26 minutes ago, Zeklo said:

I definitely wouldn't mind a nutrient buff to the Compost Wrap, but I don't want to see a health nerf. Absolutely agree that the nitre cost is a killjoy though. We really need a better way to acquire it apart from moleworm burrows. I stand by making the Saltlick take actually salt instead of nitre, though I'd prefer some domestication tweaks to balance it. It would add an extra detour but it would remove the counter-synergy Wormwood has with beefalo that should otherwise be a good synergy.

Just to be clear, in my post I meant that the compost wrap should heal 10 hp per use, since it would have 5 uses. That'd give it 50 hp total. But the slower usage speed, as Ohan mentioned, seems like a bad idea for anyone that liked the wrap before now that I think about it.
My personal suggestion for a salt lick buff would be to have it repairable with either salt or nitre, which would make beefalo pens a lot less of a hassle and give options on whether a player would like to use nitre like before or go collect salt crystals (which actually goes by really fast with a Strident Trident and a Lazy Forager.

28 minutes ago, Zeklo said:

Fertilizer as a whole still feels a bit off to me. I'm just not really sure what Klei intends its use to be. 100% of a single type of plant in a plot seems discouraged due to the cost. I guess that might be why they nerfed existing self-sustaining combos? It seems like you need a much wider variety of crops now, so it makes minor nutrient loss combos more viable by extension?

I'm not really sure if that's the idea, and definitely unsure how I feel about it.

I'm not sure if having a single type of plants in a plot is discouraged. Because of how I play, I love to see big numbers of one thing, so I've been doing that and haven't found it as hard as hard as I imagined it'd be.

21 minutes ago, QuartzBeam said:

I just don't understand in what other circumstance you could possibly want to take care of nutrients? They are the most resource and time intensive stress factor, so I imagine that, for people who don't want giant crops, it will be the first stress factor on the chopping block.

My view on fertilizers so far is that they're the lowest priority stressor you want to take care of, which is why I treat them as "the requirement to growing giant crops." But also, I think you can make use of fertilizers even without bulk crafting if you tune the amount of seeds you plant in a plot based on how much fertilizer you have, rather than the other way around. In early-game public servers, I usually plant a few eggplants at a time in their own plot to fertilize with Beefalo manure and manage to grow them giant. I don't see them as a necessity to farming other than that for giant crops at all, but I do think they speed up plant growth, so if that's an important factor to someone they might do it to plants they can't properly grow giant for whatever season (such as early game: when I only get one or two seeds of a crop, I'll usually use fertilizer or plant them with crops that'd feed them to have them grow faster and increase my chances of getting more seeds back).

26 minutes ago, QuartzBeam said:

Why would anyone go through the effort of collecting rare bottles and waiting 3 days for them to turn useful, or set up a bunch of composting bins and wait 1.5 days for them to do their job or get a few stacks of veggies and turn them into manure via werepig, when they could expend way less time and way fewer resources on one of the other stress factors instead?

To be fair, I often collect bottles just for treasure (which is why I had a bunch when the beta was released), and with the amount of rot you end up with I figure people would make compost bins just to get rid of their rot and get a nice reward for it.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

So does this mean if I wanted to plant Dragon fruit in Autumn (not it's preferred season, so a stressor) without tending to nutrients (another stressor) or watering (and another one), I would still get a seed back? If so, then would that mean I could harvest 20 of em and be ready to plant another 20? 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

8 minutes ago, Owlrus said:

So does this mean if I wanted to plant Dragon fruit in Autumn (not it's preferred season, so a stressor) without tending to nutrients (another stressor) or watering (and another one), I would still get a seed back? If so, then would that mean I could harvest 20 of em and be ready to plant another 20? 

If you plant them in groups, talk to them every stage of their growth and make sure no weeds are nearby then yeah, they will give back a seed each, which you can replant. Lord of the Fruit Flies might throw a wrench into that plan, though, if he decides to spawn and upset some plants right before they grow. I don't think it's a huge risk, especially since the worst case scenario is just getting no seeds back and having to use a birdcage to make up for lost seeds. But I think plants growing off-season grow much slower than ones in-season, so that's something to consider when you think about how many of them you would plant.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

5 minutes ago, Owlrus said:

So does this mean if I wanted to plant Dragon fruit in Autumn (not it's preferred season, so a stressor) without tending to nutrients (another stressor) or watering (and another one), I would still get a seed back? If so, then would that mean I could harvest 20 of em and be ready to plant another 20? 

If you plant them together, with no weeds around them and tend them with music or by hand, yes.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Looks like the stress mechanics have been updated a bit. The requirement for getting 1 seed back has been adjusted to 11 stress points. This is pretty much a tiny nerf to hands-off farming. It's not too bad, though, since the the 1 extra stress point can be prevented by tending to the plants ONCE as seeds if farming in-season, or making sure they're watered or fertilized when they turn from seeds to sprouts (or any other stage, really) if farming off-season.

Also, the revert to the changes means Dragonfruit is back to using Manure instead of growth formula, which I don't really like. I'm still hopeful, though, since...

1 hour ago, ScottHansen said:

We have read the feedback about fertilizing being underpowered and will be addressing this soon.

I'm hoping this means that a crop that needs manure isn't automatically practically impossible to consistently grow giant anymore.

I don't like the overcrowding stress, though, since my preferred method of planting is throwing seeds onto plots at random. It affects Wormwood crops too, so there's another nerf to those.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I agree in all the points raised by OP (very good post) except the changes to the compost wrap:

On one hand making each one have durability would mean that it’s not a stackable item anymore, which would further make it an inconvenient item to carry in large quantities. And even if you solve this by splitting the crafting into more than one item obtained, it would also mean that with a stack of it you get a tiny healing compared to what is is now.

On the other hand the current healing value was a change very much needed practically since wormwood was ported to DST, which affects his gameplay as a whole, even for players uninterested to use farming.

As for the fertilizing problem, it could get instead a special over time effect EG: since it has healing over time, maybe applying it to a soil will slowly keep releasing nutrients at an X rate over 2 or 3 days.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

On 12/3/2020 at 9:06 PM, Electroely said:

Manure is one I have a little problem with

Just feed 2 stacks of lightbulbs to a werepig and you'll get 80 manure. Repeat if need more. Remember You can turn regular pigman into werepig with 4 monster meat

Link to comment
Share on other sites

6 hours ago, landromat said:

Just feed 2 stacks of lightbulbs to a werepig and you'll get 80 manure. Repeat if need more. Remember You can turn regular pigman into werepig with 4 monster meat

I've been feeding Werepigs 4 stacks of foliage at a time, which is way faster to get than lightbulbs (since you don't need to travel into the deep parts of the caves when you have 8 fossil fragments and a shadow atrium and since the picking animation is faster). And even then, the manure production from that hasn't been matching up to the demands of those plants very well. The amount of time that takes to collect vs how many plants it grows is really bad compared to compost and growth formula.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

20 minutes ago, Electroely said:

I've been feeding Werepigs 4 stacks of foliage at a time, which is way faster to get than lightbulbs (since you don't need to travel into the deep parts of the caves when you have 8 fossil fragments and a shadow atrium and since the picking animation is faster). And even then, the manure production from that hasn't been matching up to the demands of those plants very well. The amount of time that takes to collect vs how many plants it grows is really bad compared to compost and growth formula.

I really don't get why Guano at least doesn't give 8 points, considering it is literally "manure, but rare" and has always been a better fertilizer.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Archived

This topic is now archived and is closed to further replies.

Please be aware that the content of this thread may be outdated and no longer applicable.

×
  • Create New...