Nov 29 Hot fix!

[Happysailor]

Average grass use per day-relatively low, But I usually only live to about day 30-ish or so my opinion might not count for the "late game" though I can't see why it wouldn't.

I go through maybe 10-20 grass a day. I don't stockpile, I never take more than I need. I look at living for three days as my consistant goal, so my resource consumption is lower. I almost never need to trap between my other food incomes. I mapped out my current world completely by day 5, and built a small research and stockpile area to return to every so often. I have four Campfire pits in the main "districts" of my world, so if I ever need a place to stop, I have one. And I only use logs for fire and constantly replant trees everywhere. I don't dig up bushes or tufts or saplings, I think farms look ugly, I like thinking that the whole world is mine, so if my resources are a little further out, it doesn't bother me, it's just a different part of my home. (Yes I have a bridge BTW) Only problem I have is that my world spawned without a pig king so the nerf to gold tools kills me, considering I am running low on useable rocks. other wose part is I have a bazillion graves and tons of trinkets to give him, but no king.

In conclusion: I hope the non-replanted grass nerf gets removed cuz I really hate the idea of actually having tofertilize(despite it not being as detrimental as it is to others.) And my Grass per day is 20 or less typically.

My suggestion: Instead of fertilizing grass, why not make tufts randomly come back on your world? make grass die out after a number of harvests and have a new tuft spring to life elsewhere. Make it dependant on the number of useable tufts in the world. (example If (GrassTuftsOnWorld) < (60[Healthy number to have considering a good portion of them may have already been harvested and are in a period of regrowth}) then Spawn(GrassTufts)(10*RandomNumericalVariable between .5 and 3)

this pseudo code equation means if your world grass is running low, it makes a random batch more, and considering it shows up on your map, it's not too darned inconvenient.

[Sharlow]

The issue with the Poop (For me anyways) is that it's just an extra grind. All it does is make me take an extra day out of my week to run a few islands over, collect a bunch of flowers, and mass feed pigs for poop. It isn't really adding to the challenge, just the grind.

Also, with pigs now eating all foods, should that include sleeping Mandrakes? My pig is now trying to eat a Mandrake that is buried close to my camp. If I don't kill poor little Justin off every morning, he rushes over to my slumbering friend and gobbles him up, leaving a steaming pile in place.

[Nxf7]

Post-nerf I can survive easily with next to no grass income. Maybe need 5 a day if I was to give a number. My play style of harvesting bacon from testificates doesn't require much grass

Pre-nerf I used a decent amount, maybe around 30+, but only because I could derp around and make whatever I wanted. Looking at all these posts it's pretty damn obvious how to cut down on grass consumption.

I think you're all kidding yourselves when you say you're using up 1 or more logsuits (or football caps) EACH DAY. Almost everything in the game can be killed without taking a hit and they are clearly designed with this possibility in mind. You should have to pay the consequences of being lazy if you want to survive.

[NeedPants]

Should the need to manure grass stay in the game, i do have a suggestion of how to make this easier and less tedious.

A new farmbuilding: the grassfarm.

I would require grass tufts as one of its components. Other then that and comparing it to other farms it would need manure, rock/wood and some grass itself.

You could have different tiers as with normal farms. However instead of increasing the growth speed, upgrades would simply be more space efficient and/or require less manure to sustain.

So as an example: Grass farm: Requirements: 6 grass tufts, some grass, some wood, some manure.

Grows 6 grass at the speed grass currently regrows. Needs 1 manure per harvest.

Greater grass farm: Requirements: 8 grass tufts, some grass, some wood, some manure.

Grows 8 grass at current grow speed, needs 1 manure every harvest.

Grand grass farm: Requirements: 10 grass tufts, some grass, some rock, some manure.

Grows 10 grass at current grow speed, needs 1 manure every 2 harvests.

Looking at the 40-60 grass per day consumers: Grass currently regrows in 3 days i think. Not entirely sure, never really payed much atttention to it, but its certainly more than 2 days So assuming 3 days:

Current situation: 50 grass a day, means u need 150 grass tufts to harvest the first day so u have enough for 3 days, after which it regrows. After 3 regrows u need manure to fertilize the tufts. so every 9 days u need 150 fertilizer. This means that in order to sustain this grassuse, u need to collect 17 manure per day on average. Add to that the use of farms (3-6 is what i usually read on the forums), that goes to 20-23 manure per day. In my current world that would pretty much take me an entire day to collect, due to few beefalo and a large space.

But this is the cost of manually replanting tufts at ur base.

Now with the farms:

Normal farms: need 25 farms that require 25 manure every 3 days. a little more than 8 manure a day is needed to sustain this, so including food farms: 11-14 manure a day. Thats less, but still alot imo.

Greater farms: 19 farms are needed that require 19 manure every 3 days. A little over 6 manure a day. 9-12 total manure a day required. This is about 2x the average need of manure prenerf.

Grand farms: 15 farms needed, 15 manure every 6 days, thats apprx 3 manure a day, 6-9 manure per day needed total. Looking at current manure use of 3-6 a day, this is an avg increase of 66% in the amount of manure we need, comparing it to the prenerf situation.

Pantsman

Edited November 30, 2012 by NeedPants

[Little Teemo]

well, i've been using almost the same amount of grass post and pre patch, the problem isn't the amount of grass i have to collect but the fertilizer for them, like i said before, my map is very big consist of 9 small and big islands with bridges....the pig king is on the total opposit side where the beefalo is....it took me almost 2-3 days to get to it....if we have to keep fertilize it then we need to walk back and forth the maps.....u kinda have to choose 1 or another =/ pig king or beefalo ...not everybody will have small overlaping maps...

[Chocolate Tree]

OOOh come on... pigs ate like 20 eggs I had all over my base ¬¬

The weed thing might be too cruel....

[LadyD]

Chocolate to assist the the negotiation over grass please give data on how much you use each day

[Chocolate Tree]

Chocolate to assist the the negotiation over grass please give data on how much you use each day

I was already typing some "data" my dear Lady, don't be rough on me I just got up

Basically grass is what I use for my fire pits, being at night (using about 14-16) or a quick cook (2 -3), I also use a big amount of rope crafting staff (make it 4 ropes/day, 24), all these without counting rabbit traps, which I don't generally employ that often.

Conclusion, about 40 grass/day, more or less

[PixiePopTart]

Since the nerf of the berry bushes I rely mostly on traps for food. My Average use of grass per day would be 20-35.

[Daru233]

The grass tuft nerf is way too harsh. I think that the best way to fix it would be increasing world size and making natural rufts (not replanted) require less manure ( say, 5 grass per manure )

Right now the game seems to encourage camping quite a bit due becouse of the world size. My world has about 7 medium-sized islands. After a while you just gotta settle down. On top of that there are A LOT of items that encourage camping ( Crock pots, pig houses,farm plots, tents, chests, fire pits etc.). These items are basically useless for a nomad gameplay style. I think that a way to make them more viable is too simply make them give you back the full item after being smashed down with a hammer.

Also to encourage nomad gameplay i'd suggest making it so that Islands get connected with shorter bridges, most of my islands have bridges that take up half a day to cross and that just forced me to turtle inside of my cozy camp.

[rojvol]

Well I sleep in bedrolls a LOT.. now I can forget on that I used about 30 to 40 per day.

[playfulkit]

I don't know if this is already implemented or not, but perhaps changing growth rate for all plantables (grass, berries, saplings - Heck maybe even trees's? ) based on where you plant them as well. Plains should be flat and pretty sparse of tree's, but I've collected a great number of pinecones and made a little forest right there on the beefalo plains. Again it goes back to the nomads and the turtlers. With poo so close and my berry bushes I really don't have much of a need to go out and do much save when I get the gumption to monster hunt. (also have a pig village right next to me, mmm meat!)

Kinda rambled on with the point, but yeah...

[OmegaJasam]

Looks to me with the current grass requirments, unless you set up a grass farm near a manure source, you're going to run out... Rapidly.

Personally, I would like the menuring removed and some other way of handling it. Either manure on re-location only (So you have an extra setup cost), or slower regrow times(so you have to scale up and risk fire hounds more).

I would definatly be for nurfing the firepit time on it. Perhaps buffing charcoal a bit too. And dropping the recipies. That way the game is less grinding poop/grass and more /everything else/.

On my last world I never got as far as setting up bees or the like. Was too busy setting up bigger grass farms.

[LadyD]

Sorry Chocolate. I should have looked harder to check if you had given data!

Thanks for the feedback everyone. Keep it up. Lets flood Kevin with data.

[rojvol]

Its kinda interesting how not even one person like the grass idea! I think it shows its not good idea unless its changed a bit. I really like the concept of not replanned grass that one should notneed to fertilize. Have you ever seen someone fertilize grass (of this kind) on his garden? You can barely cut it all down IRL!

[Marak]

I dunno, the problem - to me - is that you guys are going out of your way to use up stacks and stack of grass each and every day, when there are other resources available. Why are you using 20 Grass when 2 trees' worth of logs yield the same result? Trees generally give 2 acorns, so each full-size tree you cut down eventually becomes 2 full-sized trees... you could harvest stack after stack of logs and never have to worry about your grass dying and needing fertilizer. Gold Axes still last for 30+ trees, which is at least 120 logs, all for 4 Morsels fed to the King Pig.

Before Kevin goes off on a rebalancing-the-grass tangent, I hope everyone takes that into account. Sure, grass might be convenient for a lot of things, but instead of saying "Manure is ruining the game!" maybe you need to take a close look at your playstyle and why you're using so much grass.

I use about 20 grass in 10 in-game days. I only have to fertilize my "grass farm" once every blue moon. Why? Because I use Pine Cones and Logs for nightly fire fuel; I've practiced combat so I don't have to make as many Log Suits and Football Helmets; and because I mainly used Cooked Monster Meat (12 points) to fuel my research instead of Grass Tufts (20 points).

Now while I tend to agree that trying to re-fertilize 30+ grass that you planted all right next to each other is a pain in the rear... well... fertilizing a field of anything is time-consuming, tedious work without machinery.

TL; DR: Try using ALL your resources instead of abusing 50 grass/day to do everything with it. You can survive on 0-8 grass per day just fine if you put your mind to it, and then the "Grass Nerf" is suddenly no big deal because you're only wasting manure on your Grass Farm once every few in-game weeks.

[MrEntity]

I use grass for very little aside from making logsuits once I've found a place with mineable rocks. Consequently I use grass in very small quantities (and even smaller now that rope costs less).

However - using an assload (heh) of manure on an assload of grass in a patch is really irritating. Not because it wastes manure, but simply because I plant my grass as closely together as possible. It is difficult to manually place a poop on each dead grass thing.

Maybe if, while holding an object, pressing space caused you to use that object on the nearest sensible target this could be remedied.

[J03]

OK lets see here I probably use around 20-25 grass a day if that. I make 4 rabbit traps and in one day i can catch 15 meat with those traps, but thats trapping all day and using them up. I like to burn 1 board a night as it takes 4 logs to make and burns better than if i was to use 4 logs(and the logs barely make it through the night). 1 Log suit last awhile so I don't have to make them to often.My thing is i want to explore more but the maps are small and bridges are to long, It don't take long to explore the whole map and then I'm back to turtling at camp. Ok the grass thing has slowed me down on my trap making a bit and it is a pain to revive the grass every 3 pulls. I think making traps last a bit longer would help some. And maybe making sleeping bags last 2 nights could help the people that use them, Me I like the night. I really don't know what to say I love the game and I'm going to play it through the good and bad (until it get to bad or to boring)lol. What i do know is the developers for this game have been there for the people more so then any other game Ive played and read the forms. And I would like to say thank you Developers for listening to your fans.

[Oatek]

This update is great! The grass nerf is fine, I use 0, yes zero grass each day, the only times i will use grass is if I'm venturing out and wish to make a fire, which is only 3 grass, or make a logsuit, which is a powerful item and the cost and effort required to make it is fair. I don't understand all these people using grass for fires, logs/acorns can be gathered in huge abundance easily and 2-3 logs will keep the fire lit through the night. In one day I can gather about 7 stacks of logs plus loads of acorns, that lasts me for ages! Beds are a luxury and you should have to live through the night most of the time. The only thing I don't like, is that berry bushes are still overpowered, I have about 30 bushes in my base, and they easily keep me sustained without much effort.

[D7X]

You get three cycles of grass per poop.

I think that a good guiding principal is that nothing in the game should be free. Pre-nerf berry bushes and grasses were free, you just had to wait. Worse, you could consolidate them from all over the map to have an unending supply of food / burnables. By tying them to another resource (in this case poop), you have to actually do something to keep the cycle going. The fire hounds (and anti-wall stuff) are meant to make you think twice about putting everything all in one place.

At the high level, I'm trying to cut back on the steamroller of victory that goes on right now. The game should get harder as you get farther, not easier.

I'm going to make a post later in the day that will outline the game's roadmap to release, and I'll talk a bit about the end game. What we have planned for that will also help by providing a release-valve for people who get really stable in their first camp.

More later...

I'm really worried for this game. You yourself have said that you don't want it to be a grind. Yet changes keep being made that make it more and more grindy, just in different ways than before.

The time it takes for the grass to regrow is enough, it's just within that time there should be more chance of death, more things threatening your life. It should be harder to survive from one grass regrowing to the next. I said elsewhere that each day is just turning into a checklist of things to do before the next night. It seems a lot of those things are now "put poop on all my plants."

You're fixing things in what I was assuming was the early game and claiming that they're fixes for end game situations, it worries me that that means not a lot more is going to be added.

Honestly though, do you really want the main focus of the game to be literally sh*t?

[Trainer_Zero]

I'm currently not very far into my first liveable game, but I guess I'll share a newbie's perspective.

I spawned next to an enormous bunny plain, with natural grass being very plentiful, and not much else in the way of food around. I believe I've only seen 4 or 5 berry bushes, and carrots are random, as are seeds. So my main source of food is delicious rabbit morsels. Pre-nerf, I would have been fine using almost no grass, due to the attacking exploit.

Now though, I'm using running through about 7 traps every 2.5 days (assuming 2 catches per day, 5 uses per trap (sometimes birds increase the number of catches)). That's 56 grass every 2.5 days, or 23 grass, just on traps per day.

There is also rope, which is needed to make the log suit. I think it's 4 grass per rope, at 4 rope per log suit, right? I'm still on my first one after 5 days, but 3 packs of hounds and a visit from Optimus Pine combined with my newbie skills means that I'm currently down to about 30% on my suit. That means that given my current skillset and relative avoidance of monsters I'd run through a log suit roughly ever 7 days. At 16 grass per suit, that's a bit over 2 grass per day, which for the sake of not finding partial grass, I'll call 3 grass per day.

Grass is also used in torches, which I use to venture out and reset my traps at night, since there are no monsters near my bunny fields. I also forage for more materials as well, and make charcoal via campfire (my computer won't let me light trees with a torch for some reason) so that I can grab it in the day. 2 torches per night, at what, 3 grass per torch? That's 6 grass each day on torches.

I also use grass as my main filler in my crock pot, as it's the most abundant thing in my current area (I'm actually hurting for sticks, and I use all my extra pine cones for charcoal trees). 3 filler per cook, at 2 cooks per day is 6 grass per day, if I'm making stew.

Per day grass use:

23 - Traps

3 - Log Suit

6 - Torches

6 - Crock Pot Filler

-----------------

38 Grass Per Day

(If some of the recipe amounts are incorrect, sorry, as I've only played a couple hours and I'm at work, so I can't check in-game)

[etherealwtf]

Create some toilets where we could gather pigmen poop in stacks instead of lurking after bufalos.

[Maupin]

Registered just to post in this thread. My girlfriend is a big fan of the game and is playing nonstop. Seriously addicted.

I believe any naturally-occuring plant requiring a constant source of fertilizer to be silly and a wrong game design choice from a world-building perspective. How did those plants get there in the first place? I can understand requiring a one-time transplant fertilize requirement but anything more seems to go against common sense.

As others have suggested, a better nerf would be to simply reduce the rate of regrowth. Or Happysailor's suggestion of the grass only lasting a few cycles with tufts randomly respawning on the map.

[D7X]

I honestly think the best solution would be to scrap fertilizing. But instead have a hostile mob spawn from grass. Even better would be for it to be more likely the more grass there is in the area.

There should be a risk of death, not a risk of running out of manure. No one wants "Died from poop shortage" on their gravestone.

[Excess]

I don't get why people are using grass as filler on the crock pot. Why use 1 meat and 3 grass on four different lame meat stews when you can use 4 meat on one kickass meat stew that feeds you a lot? I think using grass as filler is a "first world problem" kind of situation.

I do understand the use for logsuits and now for traps (post rabbit curved-running/scaring) though.

Anyway,fertilizing ONLY when replanting has my +1. Nomads shouldn't be running around with manure in their pockets.

No one wants "Died from poop shortage" on their gravestone.

This HAS to be added to the list of random things that appear when examining gravestones