Plant balancing

[Coolthulhu]

Currently plants aren't done well. Mealwood is free calories at no effort, shrooms are the only non-mealwood plant that can be farmed early on, berries are only useful in established bases with temperature control. Pinchas are luxury. Sleets are currently useless.

 

Here are some very simple suggestions to make plants better:

• Mealwood should require fertilizer. That would pad them with some labor, to make them good early on, but fall off later. As a compensation, they should grow faster. Note: fertilizer is useless right now, there is literally no reason (other than personal challenge, such as planting sleets) to keep it.
• Berries should tolerate temperatures up to 30C. At the moment they always stop growing within few cycles from the start, because the starting biome and neighboring biomes are just too hot. Hydrofan is not worth it for the berries (and also bugged). To compensate, they could stop tolerating any gas but clean oxygen or start requiring fertilizer again.
• Sleets should require only irrigation with polluted water. Polluted water, because regular water is solid in their environment. They already require a separate biome or air conditioning, and also processing to become edible. They can't be turned into anything tasty enough to give buffs to experienced dupes. They are worse than berries in most ways, so letting them use polluted water would help.

Shrooms are good, they don't need any adjustments. Pinchas are only there for stress relief, so they can't really be compared.

[brummbar7]

Sleets also need to be changed so that they don't drop 25 seeds every harvest.

[Michi01]

I think plant balance will be a lot better once they properly balanced food quality. It seems like mealwood's role is supposed to be being an easy food source early on that players will want to abandon as soon as possible because of its bad quality, but because that food quality barely matters as of now, it's just easy food. I think the current plant balance was made with proper food quality balance in the future in mind and perhaps they don't want to mess around with farming balance too much for now because they'd have to balance it again once they properly implemented food quality.
Before the Outbreak Upgrade there wasn't much of a reason to switch from outhouses to lavatories other than saving duplicant time and the right way of solving that was to properly implement the negative effects that it's supposed to have. I think similarly, mealwood shouldn't be made harder to grow, but instead the negative effects which it's supposed to have should be properly implemented.

[Coolthulhu]

4 hours ago, Michi01 said:

I think the current plant balance was made with proper food quality balance in the future in mind and perhaps they don't want to mess around with farming balance too much for now because they'd have to balance it again once they properly implemented food quality.

Simple fixes that are easy to revert do not block complex redesigns.

The balance got changed heavily with the farming simplification. No need to wait for a huge overhaul just to fix the problems that arose from the changes.

[Sprixus]

Food balance is way out of whack right now. 

Mushrooms are just FAR to good, with mealwood being not that bad either. 

I did some math comparing sleet wheat to mushrooms in terms of water required. To allow for these calculations, I assumed polluted water and water are completely interchangeable. Also either algae or water will be used to produce oxygen in the base and therefore algae is a replacement for water. Fertiliser is produced from polluted water, with all natural gas converted back to water via gas generators. These assumptions greatly favour sleet wheat as setting up all the processing for slime and water cleaning is much more of a hassle than just fertilising with slime. 

The unit of comparison will be relative water (RW)

Mushrooms uncooked (0)

10kgs of RW per 1000Kcal

Mushroom -> Fried Mushroom (+1)

20kgs of RW per 1000kcal

Sleet wheat -> FrostBun (-1)

80Kg of RW per 1000kcal

Sleet wheat is MUCH harder to set up and maintain because of temperature requirements and cold biomes not spawning near the start location.

Mushrooms are so good its kinda stupid.

[Coolthulhu]

Berries are slightly better than mushrooms in the late game, provided you can spare the geyser water. They don't require fertilization, which is a dupe time sink.

Mushrooms aren't really overpowered. They take slime (covers dupe hands with slimelung unless stored in chlorine), daily fertilization jobs, semi-enclosed space. They have their niche, but they don't dominate anything, being beaten by mealwood in most roles and by berries in the rest of them.

Mealwood is 800kcal for just two jobs: plant and harvest. Mushroom is 3200 kcal for 12 jobs. That's not counting having to collect the slime, building the enclosed shroom room, wheezing breaks due to CO2.

Meanwhile sleet wheat is just plain bad no matter how you look at it. Lower kcal/cycle than mushrooms (which have lower kcal/cycle than berries), requires as much setting up as berries, more fertilization per kcal than mushrooms (although using fully renewable and safe fertilizer), requires processing, not as tasty as berries.

[BlueLance]

I do have to agree especially on the grounds with mealwood, I currently run mealwood as my main crop it takes 4 of them for a dupe per cycle and takes literally no time at all to plant/harvest.

For 800 calories which i can just dump on the ground (Thanks to a carbon pit and farm) I would personally prefer if they made it they required fertiliser it wouldnt stop me using mealwood but it would at least make it a bit less appealing.

[Thiosk]

I don't like the idea of fert requirements for mealwood. There is very little fertilizer in the starting biome. However, that said, I still think mealwood shouldn't spawn so many seeds- i like the idea of a colony based on mealwood slowly grinding itself into starvation.

[Botaxalim]

Just wait till they implement more food stress , more food disease, more cooking recipe, water germ for plant effect, more food variant plant type

For now its very alpha just mealwood all the time, very imbalance

[Coolthulhu]

7 hours ago, Thiosk said:

I don't like the idea of fert requirements for mealwood. There is very little fertilizer in the starting biome.

Starting biome is the only one with any fertilizer. Each dupe produces ~8kg of fertilizer when visiting an outhouse (assuming compost piles exist).

At 2kg/cycle, it would take 6kg of fertilizer to grow 800kcal of meal lice. 800kcal would feed a dupe long enough for the dupe to produce ~6.4kg of fertilizer, making the whole thing more than just perfectly renewable.

Even at 4kg/cycle, only a really bad player would starve due to lack of fertilizer. There are at least hundreds of kilograms of fertilizer in starting biome, meaning hundreds of harvests, each of which satisfies 80% of dupe's daily kcal requirement.

Every other plant is much harder to farm than 4kg/cycle mealwood would be. Even shrooms, which are very straightforward and highly rewarding. Old farming was much harder.

[BlueLance]

On 03/09/2017 at 0:08 AM, Thiosk said:

I don't like the idea of fert requirements for mealwood. There is very little fertilizer in the starting biome. However, that said, I still think mealwood shouldn't spawn so many seeds- i like the idea of a colony based on mealwood slowly grinding itself into starvation.

Yeah your dupes give you fertilizer for free, and you can get it from fertilizer sythesizers. I would definently be ok with them wanting it since i do not use either of these buildings, which is a waste.