You know, when the auto resprout function was first announced all the farmers were upset that farming had taken another hit. The manual action of planting the seed was seen as one of the essences of "farming" just as manually hoeing the ground to make it garden sod used to be. What if they removed planter boxes and went back to hoeing the ground with a hoe? Would that suddenly be more tedious gameplay having to physically hit the ground instead of being able to have plots crafting in the background while doing other actions and then placing them quickly and tedium-free?
Hit the ground, plant a seed, chop a tree, mine an ore, hit a zombie, accept a quest...It's all the same button press. People who really enjoy farming want to hoe the ground by hand, plant the seeds by hand, provide water, add fertilizer-- I mean those are the pimp dreams requests for farming we've been getting for years and the the complaints we got when it no longer mattered if you planted near a water source or needed fertilizer or hoed the ground or planted seeds after the initial planting were from people who legitimately liked the farming aspect of the game.
Now you guys against this are calling it tedious-- but you'll spend all night banging a pickaxe against the subterranean walls or upgrade 150 frames to better blocks pressing the exact same button the same number of times if not more. Its only tedious if you aren't really into it. People who don't care about building much find it tedious. People who don't care about mining find it tedious. People who aren't into farming find planting seeds tedious.
You'll have to see-- but for every one of you who finds it tedious there will be others who love being able to plant each time and reconfigure their crops by grouping how they plant their seeds differently and they will be glad of the change because they don't find it tedious. There are some that would love for a blueprint feature to replace brick by brick building because they find it tedious. Gather the resources and feed it into the blueprint and voila automatic base without any of the tedious block crafting, placing, and upgrading. Do you think our builders would like to get rid of the "tedium"?
I think some of the suggestions I've read are great and I wouldn't be against the devs adopting them if they decide to step away a bit from this change and compromise somewhat. But if they don't change it then what I really suspect is that teams will be sharing the farming load more. There won't just be that one guy designated as the farmer dude. He'll be like--I'm not planting this entire field myself. Everyone come help and then we'll go do a quest. That would be less tedious for sure.
Exactly right. Farming is something that I enjoy, and while I acknowledge that planting seeds isn't really a nice task, I understand the choice for balance and for making farming "more personal" (and actually how it should actually work).
Seeds had very little importance in a19. The "just plant them and forget" mechanic was nice, but you are throwing down the window ~17 items too soon. And I'm not talking in a similar way to how primitive weapons stop being useful after 30 hours. I'm talking COMPLETELY useless. Once you plant your farm, which is usually either huge or small (but limited nonetheless) then it's over for those items. I can't think of a recipe that has seeds in its list of ingredients, so that makes it even more tough to value them.
In my opinion and from what I've seen the statistical yield of a farm is still profitable as long as you have enough starting produce, and -for a survival game-, it fits. Right now you oughta put 1 point in farming if you want to have guaranteed increased yields. In a21 you won't even need the point to make a profit, as the farmer outfit will take care of that for you.
There are other ways to do the change, like Gazz suggested:
-Instead of touching the seeds, you can instead reduce the statistical yield of the overall crop plants, and the result would be mostly the same BUT, the seeds being a useless item would remain.
So this change IS the better change. It looks well designed in the streams, and I believe it has been done by someone who knows what he is doing from personal experience, which happens to be my personal experience too.
Remember that 1 point in Animal Tracker is enough to keep us fed from day 1 with a bit of active hunting. A guaranteed amount xp from planting would be nice, but there's no such a thing programmed in the game so it cannot be used from existing code and it would potentially have dupe problems in multiplayer, so that's a new feature request.
