Make plants great again

[Vanolis]

Some time ago I expressed my dissatisfaction with the new farming mechanic but I failed to contribute to new ideas so here it goes:

All plants should use water and fertilizer, with a simple solution

Fertilizer = more yield at the end of the harvest. The amount of the bonus yield you get is equal to the amount of fertilizer used in percentage for example if you used fertilizer for 2 days out of 3 you'll get 66% more yield rounded down off course.  Which for meal-wood is 500 kal of meal lice.

Water = instead of making water a permanent requirement, make it more like a wild card. For example you managed to satisfy all the other conditions of a certain plant  but you only need one more and you can't quite make it. In that case you can use water to fulfill the last requirement and the plant will continue to grow as normal. Also if you manage to satisfy all the conditions and you use water then you get a extra seed as a bonus.

Revert to the old system of limited harvests with a new twist: Planter boxes will allow the least amount of harvests before they are unusable for example 4. Farm tiles would allow more harvests (let's say 9) but to build them now costs lots of fertilizer as well as dirt.  Hydroponic Farms would provide unlimited number of harvests but they will not function without constant supply of water.

 

Make more complex meals:  To make players farm more than just mealwood and mushrooms, make more complex recipes like:

Liceloaf + Bristle Berry = Liceloaf veggie sandwich 2.500 kal and provides balanced nutrition buff which reduces calories burn rate at 50% slower rate for 2 cycles.

Liceloaf + Meat= Liceloaf meat sandwich 4.000 kal and provides the Soul Food buff. 

Other old recipes like  Stuffed Berry, Pepper Bread and BBQ provide increased metabolism buff which speeds up illness recovery time in sick dupes and provides a 50% speed buff in healthy dupes but it has a downside 50% faster burn rate of calories, which also lasts for 2 cycles.

I hope that this will help in making the future update better, or at least that it will be considered

 

[IvanX]

Current plant system is simplified beyond reach, so i agree it should be either rolled back or reworked differently. At the moment you could just go ahead and plant mealwood, about 4 per dup, and that's it... no more food required. It should be different, possibly have mealwood reduce harvest speed each time it regrows, unless properly fertilized:

- like first 3 harvests: ready in 3 cycles,

- next 3 harvests - 6 cycles, next 3 9 cycles

if fertilized, it reduces amount of cycles requires, pretty much same as the normal fertility of the soil, but since we can't make it a soil, we might as well bind fertility to the seeds.

[Reaniel]

I've actually suggested a modification for the farming system right here:

 

Where basically, you can go back to the old system of not irrigating or providing fertilizer to your plants, but they'll just grow at the same speed as wild plants, unless you put in some efforts into adjusting for temperature and air pressure to very specific range (the excellent yield range of the old system).  Using water and fertilizer will super-charge growth speed and you'd get a harvest at much shorter period of time.

Of course, the Devs could very well thinking to put this together with a revamp of recipe as well as food and stress, making balancing a whole lot more complicated.

[goboking]

I think a hybrid of the current and previous system would work well.  Keep the checkbox system to grow the plants where it is, but have ideal conditions speed the rate of growth.  That way everyone still has this path of least resistance if they want to take it, but ambitious players will be rewarded for engineering more complex farming systems.

[brummbar7]

15 hours ago, gobokin said:

I think a hybrid of the current and previous system would work well.  Keep the checkbox system to grow the plants where it is, but have ideal conditions speed the rate of growth.  That way everyone still has this path of least resistance if they want to take it, but ambitious players will be rewarded for engineering more complex farming systems.

I agree with this suggestion, though I would also add additional seed drops being dependent on ideal conditions.  So you can only expand your farm by making an effort, or exploring and gathering.   This provides additional motivation to meet ideal conditions, but without the catastrophic case of losing seeds if conditions slip and become very poor.  It will also motivate those who don't want to spend the effort on conditions, to branch out and use additional plant types, if they aren't getting enough of one kind to feed the colony size they want.