Food Production Balance

[Uncrushed]

I spent my first 300-700 hrs of DST gardening because I liked it.  Then I played Warly for a while and did the farm plus the bees plus the bird.  Now, if I'm solo and not playing Warly or Wurt, I don't make a garden because it doesn't pay off.  Eggs from a caged bird are superior.  The egg recipies last longer before they spoil and have roughly the same benefits.  When I get lureplants, I'll make 1 beehive for Jelly Salad and that rounds everything out that I need.

Gardening is slightly superior to most of these recipes in every way, EXCEPT the cost.

Spoiler

Puffed Potato Suffle is the most balanced food in the game. Salsa Fresca, and Dragonpie are all great and you can grow just those seeds once a year in spring, all giants, and use bundling wrap.  Doing that means you have maybe 1/4 the time for exploring, building, fighting bosses as you would be with forraging and eggs.

I understand that some aspects of the game are a trap for the unwary.

Spoiler

Like wet goop in the crock pot.  I even like that some things fall apart so badly that it's funny (basing too close to a moose goose).  Or are so nearly useless as to be funny like the Fashion Melon or Whirly Fan.

The amount of complexity that goes into growing the crops you want...  If it doesn't pay off, it should be a separate game.

Spoiler

If you don't get the tam and walking cane in the fall and the eyebrella in winter, spring and summer are gonna suck.  You may not say that these are the quests, but they are.  Better still if you can fight Klaus and Moose Goose and harvest Volt Goat Horns so you can go after fuelweaver and toadstool.  You aren't doing those things with a garden hoe in your hand.

Brightshades make this worse.

Spoiler

I was just in a public server where I thought they wanted me to garden, and I did all the usual stuff.  In a 2 hour period, 3 brightshades invaded the garden Three Times (9 brightshades total).  This was not fun and I left.  I watched a video about a structure that covers an entire biome, where where you still have to kill the brightshades there periodically, but it keeps the rest of the world free of the things.  But it requires 10 garden plots of 36 dragonfruit each.  Plus structures.  Or I can make a ring around an already spawned brightshade and garden and base in a doughnut around it.  If gardening wasn't cost effective before, it's insane now.

Although, I will say that this makes Beefalo Treat farming much more reasonable, since you might not actually plant any of the plants involved.  Birch Nutters provide the nuts and twigs and you just dig up Forget Me Lots as they spawn.  It's fun, that there's a weird work-around.  But if you just need to grow a carrot late game... ouch!

Balance

Having multiple ways of achieving the same goal that are relatively balanced, give the player tough choices.  This is what makes the game fun (for me).  Once I determine that in all but a few cases, method A is superior to methods B and C, I'm going to take A every time I can.  At that point, it becomes a little boring.

What you got right WRT Balance

There is no best place to base.

Spoiler

Maybe 1 in 4 worlds have a truly superior place, with great wormholes and sinkholes to the perfect resources.  It's exciting to make an agonizing decision with 1/2 of the map explored, then find improvements as you learn more of the map.  A few characters are better on the lunar island or grotto, but IN GENERAL, base location has more to do with preference and world generation than one spot to rule them all.

Glass Cutter vs. Darksword vs. Thulecite Club

Spoiler

There are fights that favor one or the other, but you can't carry the entire world in your inventory, so you're going to have to make hard choices and live with the consequences.  It's brilliant that these come from 3 very different places: Mainland, Caves, and Lunar Island.

Above Average Tree Trunks

Spoiler

Best spring and summer protection in the game, but requires a lot of questing to get.  Pinch-n-Winch from Pearl, Glommer, Nuts from trees that you have to find.  Figs from same trees.  Careful positioning to plant.  Repeated enrichment.  But the reward is amazing.  Ultimately worthwhile, but only when you can do it without sacrificing too much - another delightfully hard choice.  I love that this doesn't involve killing anything.  I want to place them on every shoreline.

Hats

Spoiler

It's brilliant that the Thulecite crown gives no water protection.  That the Eyebrella gives no sanity.

These all create tough decisions.

Solution

Make gardening a little bit more rewarding (or slightly nerf the caged bird eggs).  The new Brightshade update does the opposite.

Maybe even just make the pumpkin lantern better - I just want a better light for my base and mushlights take a ton of work (volt goats and moose geese for 5-7 weatherpains for toadstool).  Astral Detector lights require a crab-king defeat, no?

What about a good armor or weapon from garden food?  Durian has a painfully spiky husk and might make a good helmet or mace.

I made suggestions in another thread about simplifying gardening, which would also work.

Aside

Spoiler

I couldn't believe the amount of work for Poly Roger's Hat.  Grow a pumpkin to craft the scarecrow to catch the bird to cage in the caves to release in the forest to get the feathers...  And that's after you defeat a pirate captain and take his flag and hat.  The lazy explorer seems much faster and quite a bit easier to get, but maybe doesn't have the range?  What am I missing?

[Uncrushed]

OK, I now have twice as much experience (1.3K+ hrs).  I hopped on a server and tried to be a base mommy as Wickerbottom.  Gardening was absolutely a full time job just for a single 2x2 tile square garden (one digamajig).  Even getting away to refill the watering can was difficult.  For it to work, the other players would have to bring me everything I needed.  What would possibly motivate them to do that?

I tried the same with the Wormwood rework and I was able to get out and explore the world a little bit, but not much.  I'm at a point where things are getting easier, but all that means is that I have a fridge full of all the best veggies - and I still prefer bacon and eggs because they are almost as good, but they keep longer.  Also Pierogi for healing.  Mid-game, I'd also rather have lureplants and bees (jelly salad) than a garden.  Or figs and kelp (figatoni).  Or banana bushes (banana shake).

The only way I could imagine gardening making a difference is if you had a team of Wormwood gardening and Warly cooking and some other characters doing boss speed runs.  I've seen Jakeyosaurus get a team together like that.  Probably a few other twitch streamers can generate that kind of enthusiasm and coordination.  But for the other 99.9% of players?  It doesn't make sense to even try.

Despite that, I like the idea of gardening.  Here's how I'd rebalance to make it competitive with the alternatives (I've suggested some of this before):

• Add some kind of auto-irrigation.  Like making a road (it could even be an irrigation turf), but instead you make a little stream from water somewhere to the center of your farm plot and never need to use the watering can again
• Do away with the garden hoe.  Every character should be able to plant without hoeing.
• Each garden tile should be subdivided into 3x3 tills so you don't have to painstakingly place each item.
• Give some character seed alchemy.  I want 5 seeds: dragonfruit, garlic, onion, potatoes, and tomatoes.  (In a server with a reliable Warly, I'd add peppers).  It's pretty typical to plant at least 100 seeds to get one each of those plants (yes, you could plant less if you waited to garden until Spring or summer, but... really?).  A shortcut to getting these seeds would be great.
• Add some kind of bonus for keeping a vegetarian or pacifist lifestyle.  The birdcage alternative is based on meat.  You can "fight" a lot of things by finding something else for them to fight instead.  That's one of my favorite parts of the game.

I could always learn to play better.  But I play well enough to see that the birdcage is at least 4x a better investment.  You could make gardening much easier and it would still be a difficult pursuit.

[Jakepeng99]

To make gardening better, they need to nerf banana bushes. They give you everything you want from farming but better. The bananas heavily out perform the sainity niche of watermelons(Needd a buff), and give great healing.

They could add fruit bats or something that spawn from banana bushes to attack you, like gobblers but threatning to you.

[ShadowbirdRH]

Personally, I think farming is fine, but I'm a Wormwood main and employ a lax farming strategy. Once your unidentified seeds yield at least 5 of one kind of crop, you can usually double that each generation, provided they're grown in a favorable season, even without plots, hoes, watering, fertilizer, or talking to them, even more so if you've got a friendly fruit fly. Between that, knowing that rotting plants will regrow, and preventing the LotFF from showing up by either keeping your crop clusters small (< 15) and separate, or by setting up a bait farm in the middle of nowhere, tending to it until the ugly bugger shows up, and just leaving it there, there's plenty of room for one with a green thumb to work smarter, not harder.

I do agree though that bananas and their related dishes are OP. It was one thing when you could only get them by raiding the ruins, but once it became possible to grow them in bushes at your base... ugh, that's not something I bother with, I don't like it when things are TOO easy.

[Uncrushed]

8 hours ago, Jakepeng99 said:

They could add fruit bats or something that spawn from banana bushes to attack you, like gobblers but threatning to you.

Oh God, please no!  Moon Quay island takes me at least half a season (to get rid of my tail) and is pretty dangerous.  I think it's a reasonable risk/reward tradeoff in the 2nd Fall.  It's pretty hard to rush without a ton of luck because it's so hard to find.

3 hours ago, ShadowbirdRH said:

Once your unidentified seeds yield at least 5 of one kind of crop, you can usually double that each generation, provided they're grown in a favorable season, even without plots, hoes, watering, fertilizer, or talking to them, even more so if you've got a friendly fruit fly. Between that, knowing that rotting plants will regrow, and preventing the LotFF from showing up by either keeping your crop clusters small (< 15) and separate, or by setting up a bait farm in the middle of nowhere, tending to it until the ugly bugger shows up, and just leaving it there, there's plenty of room for one with a green thumb to work smarter, not harder.

These are great tips - thanks!  My recent games may have been complicated by base building when I should have been gathering, but there wasn't another cook I thought I needed an Alchemy Engine for an Ice Box and no-one else was doing it.  Also, the other players gathered like 8 seeds total while exploring the world.  They didn't gather the first message-in-a-bottle that they found (for growth formula and Seed Pack-It) or tell me where it was.