Seeds from crops

[Wahazar]

Agriculture, inherited from TFC, is relatively easy: mature crops give food and seeds, repeat.

My proposal is, that seeds can be collected only from immature or dead plants, while mature plants give only crops.

These crops (grain, bulbs, tubers) can be crafted into seeds or eaten - your choice. In case of carrots, cabbages: destroy immature plant for seeds or pick food only from ripe one.

[Thorfinn]

Why move from unrealistic to even more unrealistic? Carrots, parsnips, cabbages and turnips are all biennials in nature, that is, they produce seeds the second year. I could see allowing them to grow longer for seeds, but shorter?

[Wahazar]

Yes, of course you are right. I just was not sure if biennials crops are not too harsh and playable.

Maybe not a second year, but second vegetable period, so let carrots etc., die and respawn again, to collect seeds. 

[Thorfinn]

Right. A second year is out, but an extra 50% for maybe triple or quadruple seed output might be ok. Its already way down on soil nutrition so without fertilizer...

Can't see myself choosing that option over the status quo.

[Doctor Antiquarium]

On 6/30/2024 at 2:44 PM, Thorfinn said:

Right. A second year is out, but an extra 50% for maybe triple or quadruple seed output might be ok. Its already way down on soil nutrition so without fertilizer...

Can't see myself choosing that option over the status quo.

The reality is that some of those crops would lose productivity if left to seed, but I like the idea.

My proposal:
- Crops such as cereals (rye and spelled), legumes (soybeans) and industrial crops (flax) do not produce seeds and grains separately (grains are seeds!!!), but they will produce massive quantities of seeds (grains) that can be sown or meals.
- Biennial crops such as cabbages and roots (carrots, turnips, parsnips, etc.) do not produce seeds, unless they are grown twice as long, in which case they will produce many seeds but no food.
- You can transplant edible roots (carrots, turnips, parsnips), but growing them will not produce food, instead they will only produce seeds.

These proposals would improve realism but also gameplay, making farming easier to massify and less tedious.

Edited July 5 by Doctor Antiquarium

[Thorfinn]

Cool idea for a mod. It would be fun to see how well received it is.

I am a little concerned about increasing the yield of grains etc. from where they are to "massive". How many tiles of crops are you expecting to need? Currently you can get by with a few dozen, possibly less, excluding flax, of course, which is it's own issue...

 

[Maelstrom]

All that needs to be done is balance how much grain is created.  Force the player to determine how much needs to be retained for planting vs. grinding into meal.  The hard part is balancing how much to grind into food before there's a large enough pool of grain to sustain the competing objectives.  What would make it even more realistic is if yield was more variable, say 100% +/- 25%

[poncho]

7 hours ago, Doctor Antiquarium said:

The reality is that some of those crops would lose productivity if left to seed, but I like the idea.

My proposal:
- Crops such as cereals (rye and spelled), legumes (soybeans) and industrial crops (flax) do not produce seeds and grains separately (grains are seeds!!!), but they will produce massive quantities of seeds (grains) that can be sown or meals.
- Biennial crops such as cabbages and roots (carrots, turnips, parsnips, etc.) do not produce seeds, unless they are grown twice as long, in which case they will produce many seeds but no food.
- You can transplant edible roots (carrots, turnips, parsnips), but growing them will not produce food, instead they will only produce seeds.

These proposals would improve realism but also gameplay, making farming easier to massify and less tedious.

I agree with your proposal. The current system of obtaining crop seeds is unrealistic and not enjoyable.
However, if acquiring seeds becomes easier, agricultural production could increase explosively, making the game too easy. If this change is implemented in the game, additional labor or resources should be required for farming to maintain balance.

Here is my suggestion: pests and disease

If there are too many of the same type of crop within a certain range, pests and diseases may occur. Randomly selected crops will become infested, changing appearance and reducing yield. If the infested crops are not removed quickly, the infestation will spread to adjacent crops.

[Wahazar]

Of course it should be balanced, for example crafting few grains into one seed. 

[Thorfinn]

Sure, but "balanced" means different things to different people. My  "standard" farm is 33 blocks long (just over half a stack, so I don't have to count it out), so a "row" of crops is 91 plots (baseed on the 8-around-1 design). That makes several stacks of grain. Even at current drop rates, you would rapidly be swimming in food at even 3:1 "loss" during ramp-up.  Which seems unrealistic in itself -- the grain is the seed, right? The only ones that should be "lost" are the shriveled grains, which might not germinate. Which is not going to be anywhere near a third of the crop. If we want to make the change for the sake of realism,  we shouldn't probably toss out realism just to make it "balanced".

Edited July 5 by Thorfinn

[Thorfinn]

2 hours ago, 정재훈 said:

If there are too many of the same type of crop within a certain range, pests and diseases may occur. Randomly selected crops will become infested, changing appearance and reducing yield. If the infested crops are not removed quickly, the infestation will spread to adjacent crops.

That means you need to be a homebody and pay closer attention to your farm instead of going out exploring and mining, but how would that be more fun?

[Doctor Antiquarium]

22 hours ago, poncho said:

I agree with your proposal. The current system of obtaining crop seeds is unrealistic and not enjoyable.
However, if acquiring seeds becomes easier, agricultural production could increase explosively, making the game too easy. If this change is implemented in the game, additional labor or resources should be required for farming to maintain balance.

Here is my suggestion: pests and disease

If there are too many of the same type of crop within a certain range, pests and diseases may occur. Randomly selected crops will become infested, changing appearance and reducing yield. If the infested crops are not removed quickly, the infestation will spread to adjacent crops.

We should make a collaborative suggestion

[Doctor Antiquarium]

20 hours ago, Thorfinn said:

That means you need to be a homebody and pay closer attention to your farm instead of going out exploring and mining, but how would that be more fun?

Or you can avoid monoculture and apply rotations, or make and apply primitive pesticides, so you don't have to worry about pests

[LadyWYT]

In regards to pests, diseases, and crops, that's an actual thing in the game Banished. Sometimes pests or disease will strike one of your crops(either seed crop or orchards), and you'll lose the harvest for that field. If you don't deal with it quickly, it can also spread to fields nearby. In the case of orchards, if I recall correctly, you have to cut down all the affected trees and plant new ones(which will take a while to mature). Disease can also affect your livestock(though they can't catch it from diseased crops), which will kill all the ones in the affected field and possibly spread to other livestock pens, unless you move the animals out of the affected field. The disease and pests are rather random when they appear and can't be prevented entirely, but having different crops and livestock next to each other helped mitigate the spread when disaster did strike.

In any case, I could see there being a chance for something like crop disease or pests, in addition to the pesky rabbits we have already. Not for livestock though, as the last thing you want is to go on an extended trip and come back to no livestock, because you weren't there to treat the disease. In the case of crops, I'm not sure that there would be a good way to stop the issue once it begins, aside from possibly removing the affected crops once noticed, or applying simple pesticides should that be an option.

I do agree with @Thorfinn though--it's a neat idea, but can easily become a tedious. I think it'd work best as a toggled option or mod, that affects planted crops only and not orchards or livestock. Livestock and orchards are tougher to get going and require a larger time and resource investment, which means it would be highly discouraging to lose them to circumstances that couldn't be prevented or otherwise dealt with due to the player being absent. Planted crops aren't as big of a deal, because you get the seeds back and they have a shorter growth period.

[Thorfinn]

So far as I can tell, all pests and blight would do to the game is nerf the scythe. Instead of planting in 8-around-1s butted up against each other, you would separate them by paths or packed dirt or other non-spawn blocks. In the current game, you can harvest two plots with three scythe swings, under this suggestion it would be 3 scythe swings per plot. Or 1 scythe and 2 knives, whatever trips your trigger. So long as it doesn't spread across the path, who really cares if you lose a plot here and there? The big deal is the vastly worse harvesting.

[EDIT]

Or, I guess, if you are willing to lose 2 of the 8-around-1s (there's got to be a better way to say that) you don't have to change a thing. Now the pestilence would have to jump at least 3 full blocks. But it does make planting much more tedious, for very little benefit.

Again, how about making this into a mod? Maybe it would add to the enjoyment that I'm just not seeing.

[/EDIT]

[EDIT2]

Been a while since I played Banished, @LadyWYT. It's not even installed on the machine I've had for nearly a decade, so it was before that. Might have to fire that up again. It's been long enough that I will have to figure most of it out again, apart from the first few minutes, which were always the same game to game. Thanks for the reminder.

[/EDIT2]

Edited July 6 by Thorfinn