PC Farming not very viable even with living off the land 3.

[Roland]

I don't think there's any challenge

Nobody ever likes the word challenge when a change makes doing something less easy. That's fine, we can call it whatever you want. The word people most often choose when they don't like the change is tedious. We can call it that if you like.

We used to be able to instantly craft stuff. 100 arrows...instantly in your inventory. Then the developers added timers to crafting so that you couldn't just get things instantly. Of course, everyone who hated the change also said that craft timers didn't add challenge-- just the tedium of waiting for jobs to complete. 

There are people who think gating abilities is dumb because we are going to get them eventually so why not right now. It is just tedious playing without Miner 69 level 4 and making us wait by gating the skill via an expensive cost that will just take time to make us wait to get what is inevitable is pointless.

The change in farming delays the large farm and the huge surplus stockpiles of food in much the same way. It makes it into more of a progression and imposes more choices and opportunity costs upon the player. It requires a bit of planning

Maybe challenging isn't the best word. Maybe it is rewarding. If you have to work for something or wait for something rather than getting instantly everything you feel like you accomplished something more meaningful. Its why most people brag that they built their base they are showing without the creative menu enabled. If it was inevitable that they would have that base and not really a challenge at all-- just time spent-- then why do we value bases built in a normal game more than those built using the creative menu?

This is where you lose me. You say failures and setbacks and misfortunes are things the player must overcome and adapt to - where is that element, here?

I'm talking general philosophy for survival games. Survival games should have chance of failure and also events that derail the player's progress and cause them to have to regain their momentum. It should not be a deterministic steady positive progression of reward after reward after reward after reward.

In terms of farming, A18 and A19 with the 100% auto-regrowth of plants made farming a steady deterministic positive short progression to final farm without any hiccups or bumps. A20 has changed that and some will see it as a rewarding change and others won't. 

I would love to see further obstacles and c-words to farming that would require player action to mitigate but I can guarantee you that even if you and I agree that allowing rabbits to attack crops or hailstorms destroy crops unless we build protective structures/hunt rabbits until their spawning mask activates that there wouldn't be others that would just call those measures more tedium and not challenging at all. I mean if eventually we are going to get a whole bunch of corn then why have rabbits diminish that....?

What's the intended core gameplay loop for the farming experience, I guess is what I'm asking, and wouldn't it make more sense to add some sort of challenges that require player interactivity to overcome instead? Most people seem to believe its the standard farm loop of "plant, grow, profit, repeat" with a steadily growing farm, where your skill and stats allow it to become bigger and more complex over time with more valuable crops, but it sounds like that's not actually the intended loop?

If you ask a developer that question they will tell you, "This isn't a farming sim". The farming loop is simply to plant and harvest food for recipes that keep your hunger at bay in a much more effective way than eating simple foods. If this were a farming game we probably would have a mechanic of increasing the tier of our crops and having super rare crops that could only be grown under certain conditions and seasons and disease and watering and soil quality, and...

But the developers see it mostly as one means to get the ingredients you need for the high value recipes. That is the loop. I really doubt Madmole cares about maintaining a large field of crops for its own sake so I know the loop is not plant, regrow, increase, regrow, increase, regrow just for the feeling of being able to see that you have a 200 plot farm and 30 crates full of max stacks of crops.  No, he is looking at how easily and quickly people were able to get stacks of the best dishes too early in the game.

The other thing is that there really is very little that is going to actually challenge veterans of the game. Any change for us is simply a small iteration and we have everything else nailed down. But there are going to be people who do see a random chance of not getting seeds back as an obstacle to getting food and the challenge will be how they adapt to that successfully. They won't be performing with as much efficiency and plans based on experience. 

Finally, I would just point out that the lionshare of complaints have been "How are we supposed to farm now!?!?! 50% seed loss is impossible!!!" Based on these responses it seems like farming is at least a smidgeon more challenging for some people even if it isn't for you. If it was just simply a tedious delay then nobody would be scratching their heads trying to figure out how it is possible and Meganoth wouldn't have needed to do his mathematical trials to show that it is possible. These complaints that claim farming is no longer viable definitely outweigh those who are only complaining that manual replanting is tedious. If A20 farming is not at all more challenging than A19 then there shouldn't have been any of these kinds of threads of disbelief and shock.

 

[Roland]

It simply should not be possible to grow a plant and not get a seed from it.

Why do you believe this? Can you elaborate on why in a post-nuclear apocalyptic world every plant should give a viable seed every single time? I think it is reasonable that you wouldn't get seeds every time.

so long as A21 has the farming addressed properly, or completely removed.

Why does it have to be addressed properly according to your criteria or completely removed from the game? If you hate the change enough to want farming completely removed couldn't you just stop farming? I've done complete playthroughs in which I never farmed once. Why can't it exist in a form you don't like and you just ignore it as if it had been removed from the game?

I don't want to argue with you over these to POVs. I just want you to explain them and I promise I won't counterpoint you-- I'll just thank you for sharing and drop it. Because I am curious.

 

[Roland]

With the update, it's nice there is a chance to find an extra crop, but it's entirely unrealistic to not guarantee a seed from every harvested plant plot. I grew some onions last year and have over 1000 seeds from the 12 seeds I initially planted.

It is just SO counter to reality. A chance for 1 additional seed makes more sense, and making it take longer to grow is how you nerf it in my opinion. Not make seed harder to find.

Those onions you grew last year were in irradiated soil and trampled by zombies from time to time?

Counter to reality is that there are no seasonal effects and the plants stay in their last stage indefinitely and never wilt or die and they are completely ignored by insects and animals and they require no irrigation and they can grow equally well in a planter box no matter what biome they are in. Not getting an occasional seed back in a post apocalyptic setting bothers me way less than these other things.

I bet if the growing time had been changed to be longer without any of these other changes there would still be a lot of outrage.

Not everyone is going to like these changes but if you were happy with A19 farming and want things to return to that, then "Counter to reality" really can't be the argument can it?

 

[warmer]

Counter to reality is that there are no seasonal effects and the plants stay in their last stage indefinitely and never wilt or die and they are completely ignored by insects and animals and they require no irrigation

I actually live in Oregon and it rains so much I don't have to water and it never freezes. The onions have come back year after year for 3. The 12 I did plant, weren't actually from seeds, but from the bottom of the onion with the root section. Plants are INCREDIBLY resilient and no plant on the planet would survive or evolve if they produced a single seed from multiple plants.

But... I see you point

 

[meganoth]

I agree challenge is the wrong word here. Maybe gamble fits better. At the moment any farm plot is a one armed bandit and you can either eat 5 potatoes or gamble them in a mini-game where you actually have better chances as the casino . And I think that is the first real mini-game for farming that 7D2D ever had. Sure, it only consists of throwing lots of dice and counting heads and tails. But people have fun at the casino as well with simple games of luck

Now farming in reality is hard work and a simulation of it in the game may have a lot more steps and cost more time. But it surely will be difficult to design anything that will be intellectually challenging or testing your hand-eye coordination and still be called farming. You can make it complicated enough that people have to study recipes for a while. But Farming just doesn't provide a good model for challenging game mechanics.

 

[HungryZombie]

I actually live in Oregon and it rains so much I don't have to water and it never freezes. The onions have come back year after year for 3. The 12 I did plant, weren't actually from seeds, but from the bottom of the onion with the root section. Plants are INCREDIBLY resilient and no plant on the planet would survive or evolve if they produced a single seed from multiple plants.

But... I see you point

I believe there are companies that are producing crops that grow without seeds so you can't replant and have to buy more seeds. Perhaps those are the only seeds available. 

 

[Roland]

I agree challenge is the wrong word here. Maybe gamble fits better.

I like that. I also agree that the process of farming is not going to be challenging. Even in farming games it isn't challenging to do the farming. I guess instead of saying that this change makes farming more challenging, I would say that it makes it less certain and adds new choices and opportunity costs that weren't there before. When you gamble you can win or lose. If you win then you feel good that you made the right choice. When you lose that loss is the setback that you then have to work to mitigate. That forms a mini-objective or micro-quest of making up for the loss. It may not may not involve challenge. If you walk around opening garbage bags in the world looking for more seeds that isn't going to be challenging. If you explore some POI's that are likely to have (or that you know has) seeds then that will be possible more challenging.

At any rate, losing the gamble delays messes up your plans. You may have to change some things that you were going to do. Disruptions like these will be annoying to some people but to others it gives them a bit of opposition to push back against. 

IMO, no progression line should be a linear purely positive slope in a survival game. There should be some gambles and some random events and unforeseen setbacks to what we are doing. I think the new farming does a pretty good job of that. I'd like to see more events that push against us getting a farm up and running as well as similar mechanics in other areas of the game that are just completely 100% positive upward slopes to their finish.

 

[GlyphGryph]

Y'all should have "Harvest Moons" where a swarm of zombie rabbits and crows or something appear to eat your crops and you got to fight them off to protect as many as possible all night long. The bigger your fields, the more of the critters swarm. :V A higher farming skill helps by letting you rebuild much faster after the fields are wrecked.

Also, in terms of gambling, I think something that could be improved from a game-feel perspective is letting the player have some say in it. At the casino, you're allowed to bet on red or black or a specific number after all. Statistically, it's exactly the same as being assigned a number or color at random, but from a player perspective it makes all the difference in the world. I'm not sure how you tie that into farming, but people like to feel it was their fault when things go wrong, even if they went wrong due to luck, because they like being in control.

 

[meganoth]

I like that. I also agree that the process of farming is not going to be challenging. Even in farming games it isn't challenging to do the farming. I guess instead of saying that this change makes farming more challenging, I would say that it makes it less certain and adds new choices and opportunity costs that weren't there before. When you gamble you can win or lose. If you win then you feel good that you made the right choice. When you lose that loss is the setback that you then have to work to mitigate. That forms a mini-objective or micro-quest of making up for the loss. It may not may not involve challenge. If you walk around opening garbage bags in the world looking for more seeds that isn't going to be challenging. If you explore some POI's that are likely to have (or that you know has) seeds then that will be possible more challenging.

At any rate, losing the gamble delays messes up your plans. You may have to change some things that you were going to do. Disruptions like these will be annoying to some people but to others it gives them a bit of opposition to push back against. 

IMO, no progression line should be a linear purely positive slope in a survival game. There should be some gambles and some random events and unforeseen setbacks to what we are doing. I think the new farming does a pretty good job of that. I'd like to see more events that push against us getting a farm up and running as well as similar mechanics in other areas of the game that are just completely 100% positive upward slopes to their finish.

Actually mining had that once with the frequent collapses of sandy underground and the necessity to dig in the desert.

 

[GlyphGryph]

Basically, the current gameflow for almost everything is "Make forward progress, encounter a major obstacle and get set back, pick up the pieces and prepare for the next time it happens better to minimize losses" and I think if you could get farming to follow that same loop it would make it a lot more rewarding. Heck, even digging for buried treasure has this, by coupling every time you shrink the circle with throwing a wave of enemies at you to damage you and harass you! The Harvest Moon idea is mostly a joke, but something *like* that, some events you have advance notice of and can respond to and try to prepare for but will probably cost you resources and will effectively put a cap on how much farm you can manage, I think that's the real path forward here - I'm not sure introducing a gambling effect that mostly serves to slow the beginning of the exponential growth curve down helps.

But thanks for your responses, thanks for talking to your fans here in these threads, I've enjoyed reading this conversation and participating.

 

[Roland]

Y'all should have "Harvest Moons" where a swarm of zombie rabbits and crows or something appear to eat your crops and you got to fight them off to protect as many as possible all night long.

Is that what they are or are they events where you can woo one of the local village girls in the hopes of getting married?

 

[jams]

It seems like a stupid statement to you because you are still trying to play the game with an A19 mentality. This happens every alpha update when a feature changes. People who stay stuck in the past and keep trying to do the same thing they've always done come on the forum and declare the new feature impossible because they are too rigid to adapt. But it doesn't take long for the wise and adaptable players to start sharing their experiences and eventually even the most dense player figures out the new meta and has success-- or they revert to the old alpha and call that the pinnacle of the game's success and never leave. (There are still A16 servers running after all)

Trying to farm with an A19 mentality where you turn all of your crops into seeds whenever possible while at LOTL 0 or LOTL 1 or LOTL 2 is definitely going to result in a diminishing farm until you have nothing left. You are correct that sticking to that old strategy that worked because 100% of plants regrew is going to result in failure now if you try it. You will waste all your crops on diminishing seed returns...

Spoiler

So it seems I misunderstood what you were saying with most of my focus when I did read it being on the way you said it instead of what you were actually saying.

So the answer I should have said was that even though the guy was mistaken (or lying) about his farm failing with LOTL 1 and that it is possible to maintain and grow a farm even with LOTL 1 as long as you reinvest most if not all of your crops back into it, there is also another way to play with farming which is to simply eat all the crops you get which will result in a fluctuating farm size.

My advice to him was not stupid-- merely another pathway that people can choose to take that works if your goal is to have a garden that provides ingredients for recipes. I was wrong to say that it is the advisable way to farm. It just depends on your goals for your farm.

Now if the goal is simply to grow a large scale farm then, you are correct that you should use all or most of your crops to craft seeds and that even on really bad luck harvests you should be able to still maintain your farm size by using all of your crops and then hope for better luck on the next harvest. In this manner it does appear that you can eventually achieve a large farm and that the risks of completely losing everything is very low.

Well I didn't play alpha 19 so...  Anyway, what you're saying is completely wrong, and the way you're saying it is shameful.  Not understanding statistics is common and understandable, but you should at least try and be more open to input by people that do.

So, without going into details as that has been covered in other threads, A20 LOTL 1 farms will thrive just fine, providing enough of surplus crops.  This is proven both statistically and works just fine in-game (for me at least).  I've been paying quite a bit of attention to my yields, and my seed return are pretty close to 50% on average.  I'm still growing the farm at day 20, so the surplus of crops goes there (plus I don't have all the recipes I need), but I will stop once I have 10-20 seeds of the crops I need and with LOTL 1 that will provide plenty of surplus crops to support all of my needs.  Coffee is there already and I'm not even paying any special attention to the farming.

Only thing that is different from A19 is that now it requires a bit more thought (and a bit more clicking).  As I said previously, my first crop yielded only 2 seeds from 10 plants.  But I do understand statistics, and I know that is a fairly common possibility (about 4.5% chance).  What I also understand, for a farm to completely fail from for example 10 seeds, the probability is quite close to impossible.  My next yield was around 70% seeds, so far for me the statistics are winning over your claims of a "new meta".

 

[Aldranon]

With LOTL 3, you always make a surplus no matter the results.

Also, Machine gun is on the same perk tree and is the ultimate weapon now, having 5 points into Fortitude is a no-brainer , IMO, then for LOTL-3 is only 3 points more.

 

[pahbi]

Well I didn't play alpha 19 so...  Anyway, what you're saying is completely wrong, and the way you're saying it is shameful.  Not understanding statistics is common and understandable, but you should at least try and be more open to input by people that do.

I don't know what the moderators situation is, are they on the payroll or something?  Honestly, they seem more like fanboys than anything else.

Getting back to crops, for myself I want crops to be easy enough that I can take care of them with minimal effort, so I can focus on the things that are fun to me like exploration, building forts and killing zombies.

 

[meganoth]

I don't know what the moderators situation is, are they on the payroll or something?  Honestly, they seem more like fanboys than anything else.

Not on a payroll. So I must be a fanboy and you are a hater? Did I get that right or is that maybe a bit too simple?

I agree with a lot of stuff the developers do and I also know a lot about their constraints and design targets. So it easy for me to explain changes, i.e. why something was done by the developers, even if I might not agree with it ! Makes me look even more suspicious. 

For example I can explain why they put the seeds you get back into your inventory instead of into the farm plot even though I am saying at the same time that that is senseless grind and should be changed.

Getting back to crops, for myself I want crops to be easy enough that I can take care of them with minimal effort, so I can focus on the things that are fun to me like exploration, building forts and killing zombies.

And there is a way. Put or put not any points into LotL and just set any seeds you find or get in any way into farm plots. Do not convert produce to seeds. That is the way to farm with almost no effort and with the best ratio of result versus effort.

 

[Lemmers]

Only those who invest fully into LOTL 3 will be able to create a large self restoring farm and should be the only ones crafting seeds to maintain or grow the size of their farms.

This makes sense. Sounds like they set "self sustainability" to the highest tier and balanced the lower perks around that. And they removed the infinitely respawning crops which was a good quality of life change but bad for balance as it was pretty easy to get a farm going.

Things might be tough now, but I assume in A21 we'll have the farmer's outfit giving a buff to yields, possibly a new book series on plants, and of course a temporary buff candy/food/drink that does the same because that's how the meta in this game works for everything else lol.

 

[GlyphGryph]

Is that what they are or are they events where you can woo one of the local village girls in the hopes of getting married?

Why not both?

Anyway, not really related to the point of this thread, but I think the real strength of this game is definitely its ability to create "cool moments", with its beautiful POIs and its big invasion events and dynamic spawns and stuff. I love that it's always been willing to cast realism to the side and say "but wouldn't it be cool if...", and I think I'd just really love to see some of that brought to the farming dynamic somehow, create some actual "farm based content" for the player to engage with - either that or making farming trivial and quick so we don't have to spend much time thinking about it, which it feels like we're closer to right now but moved (slightly) away from with the recent version.

 

[jams]

This makes sense. Sounds like they set "self sustainability" to the highest tier and balanced the lower perks around that. And they removed the infinitely respawning crops which was a good quality of life change but bad for balance as it was pretty easy to get a farm going.

Things might be tough now, but I assume in A21 we'll have the farmer's outfit giving a buff to yields, possibly a new book series on plants, and of course a temporary buff candy/food/drink that does the same because that's how the meta in this game works for everything else lol.

Except that it is incorrect.  LOTL 1 is perfectly self sustainable.

Example: 10 seed start, LOTL 1.

- Scenario 1, replant only the seeds you get, you will get an average surplus of 77 produce after 5 harvests, with 0 seeds left.

- Scenario 2, craft seeds to keep planting 10 and you will get an average surplus of 75 produce after 5 harvests,  with 10 seeds left.

So after only 5 harvests, if re-crafting seeds you will have produced the same amount of produce to be used for food or crafting, while maintaining the seed amount.  It's pretty much a no-brainer for me which way I'll go.

 

[warmer]

I believe there are companies that are producing crops that grow without seeds so you can't replant and have to buy more seeds. Perhaps those are the only seeds available. 

those are cloned from cuttings which is something we should be able to do once you get a beaker and a chem station

 

[Rince]

I wish that could be a way to keep the A19 way, in which the crops revert to already planted seeds instead of dissapear.

Maybe a ultimate LotL skill that cost most points when you finished the 3 original ones? One book that you can find?