PC Changes To Farming

Well if someone doesn´t like farming then simply don´t do it.

You can easily get meat and canned food by just playing the game. Until i have a farm up, i simply kill everything i see on my way, stop for farms or houses with pigs and other animals and buy from every vending machine i happen to see, while doing quests/looting. And ofc you find food when looting. I never starved and i have loads of meat.  

Farming is a guaranteed income of good food with low effort. Ofc you need to invest points if you want it to be profitable, that´s just fair tbh. Reseeding literally isn´t an issue. 2 mins if you are slow (for your food needs, ofc longer if you want sell food and need a bigger farm)

I can live from 25 plots, 10 each for corn and potato, 5 for coffee and 10 mushrooms. I could feed 2 more people than just me with that.

Not sure yet if i will get pumpkins later, but as said, they are rare, so i still have time left to deceide that.
Yeah, I'm not doing it. I get more than enough food from the vending machines and hunting.

The thing is that I liked in A19. I don't particularly need then. But I just liked slowly working from a few seeds into a little farm.

Not getting crops back does still mean that finding seeds is pointless as soon as you have a farm of appropriate size.

My idea is for the harvest is just leaving new seeds in the ground when you get them. This way the reseeding work is effectively halved. But obviously with the current system the half of the seeds you have to craft from produce need to be planted by hand.
Nothing wrong with reching the point where you don't need the seeds anymore.

That happens with all the loot.

Once you have good T6 gear you don't need those loot anymore.

Once you have enough crucibles you can yeet them from tall buildings.

And so.

Of course, to make seeds valuable you just need to tweak the values until you reach that point. Like the amount of veggies needed to make a seed, the amount of crop received, and so.

 
Look at the bigger picture. By day 8 at warrior difficulty, from 1 city I got 4 stacks of meat, 200 corns, 20 potatoes, 30 blueberrys, 1 hop seed and 3 pumpkin seeds, all from farm PoIs and few looted ones. After that I started looking for supercorn. 3rd city gave it to me. You will have no food issue if you spend 2-3 points into LotL

 
I've said this several times on here, so I won't go into detail, but the opportunity for farming to really impact the progression of your game/character is huge and it's a real shame (imo) that it's currently the "ginger stepchild" of the game.

I don't feel a lot of work would be necessary to bring it up to a standard where it competes with the other "game loops" (mining, looting, crafting, etc). How much work and the willingness of the devs to do the work, well.. that's the rub isn't it?

I'll be honest, from being someone who has farmed all through the alphas, in A20 I have not placed a single plot, instead grabbing all the crops I need from the traders - they seem to be plentiful and very cheap! It's just a far more efficient way of achieving the goal, but it's certainly one tinged with melancholy knowing there is a farming system just that it's nerfed in this alpha.

 
By day 25, I am swimming in food from my crops and by day 40ish I go almost a week before even remembering to touch it.

Instead of only maybe 15 farm plots in A19, I now do on average of 60 farm plots.    I plant around 15 potatoes, 25 corn, 10 blue berries, 12 shrooms, and 5 pumpkins.

I rotate on which item I'm running low on and plant more of those.  I average getting 6 out of 10 seeds per crop harvested and then replant back up to what my needs are.

I also supplement food that I find on traders and vending machines, as I'm swimming in dukes.

 
Yeah for those of us who just want to have a somewhat comfy post apocalypse (with good food) this change is a kick in the nuts. Orclover reposted some good advice that he found from a steam thread, to change that 50% into something else.. for me it's 100% because of the extra time to manage it.

C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\7 Days To Die\Data\ConfigUse Notepad or Notepad++ to open Blocks.xmlHit F3 and paste "3harvestplayer" search twice and you'll see<!-- NOT_A_SHAPE --><block name="plantedMushroom3HarvestPlayer">scroll down and change the prob="0.5" to prob="1", in the following line;<drop event="Destroy" name="plantedMushroom1" count="1" prob="0.5"/>search twice again for the next player harvest block for the crop you want and change those prob="0.5" to prob="1" for whatever plants you want.Personally I find 0.75 to be a pretty good sweet spot especially if you don't go for living off the land tier 3 right away. (I always do because I like me some farmin'.Always remember to create backups of your xml's before modding them.

 
Is there a reason why there have been changes to farming? When harvesting crops the crop no longer reverts to a seedling, instead you have 50% chance to get a seed. What is the reason for this change? From what I have seen most people hate this change and I agree. At five plants per seed, farming isn't very viable and I don't see why you wouldn't get a seed from a crop. Luckily there is a mod to revert it back to Alpha 19 style but I still don't know why this was changed.
I am not sure where you're seeing that farming isn't valuable. Farming was broken before and is still very powerful now, do some basic math to see. At perk lv1 you average more than 6 crops per seed, that is minimal investment with no points in fortitude. Any lower and you still find plenty of seeds in the wild to plant around. 

Non fortitude specs should be able to farm without losing resources.
1 point in living off the land makes 1 seed average more than 6 crops, making it worth it, just slower than previous alphas.

 
The reason they nerfed farming is simple, they made animals spawn all over the place and they somehow thought this was the balanced solution.

 
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The reason they nerfed farming is simple, they made animals spawn all over the place and they somehow thought this was the balanced solution.


If they are lying about that, sure. But why should they lie about such an inconsequential thing?

https://community.7daystodie.com/topic/22366-alpha-20-dev-diary/?do=findComment&comment=451634

Why invent developer reasons when you simply can read what they were thinking. Use the search function of the forum or follow a developer to get notified when they post in the forum

They may be wrong about player motivations, like madmole here saying that players would be motivated to go for the better foods for the bonuses. We will see, that is why they have EarlyAccess. They can find out what players actually do and if everyone is just hunting and mass-making boiled meat then they surely will turn a few dials so that players will appreciate farming more.

Are you playing with feral sense by the way? Without it, i.e. with default setting, it could well be that animal spawing is unchanǵed from A19. With feral sense you get too many tasty wolfes, coyotes and bears in foresty towns, sure,

 
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Orclover reposted some good advice that he found from a steam thread, to change that 50% into something else.. for me it's 100% because of the extra time to manage it.
I would recommend learning how to do this as a proper modlet rather than changing the base xml. There are resources for that here on the forum, and on Guppy's discord. Actually, I think there are already a few modlets that do this or something similar in the mods subforum here and probably on the other mod sites as well. There's been a glut of farming adjustment modlets since the change.

Advising people to change the base xml just leads to chaos the next time the game updates the relevant file.

 
meganoth said:
If they are lying about that, sure. But why should they lie about such an inconsequential thing?


Gee sorry I missed page 185 of the dev notes, but the timing is too conspicuous, OK,, they thought farming was too easy (it wasn't, you had to grind for materials and spend time on it and use levelups to be effective), and x3 the animal spawns, added more seeds in the wild and so just nerf city on farming. Are these things causes or effects? If food was just too easy why add so many more animals and seeds? Because fun pimps doesn't want us to play the game 'that way' but 'this way'. That btw, is a horrible horrible horrible way to game dev a sandbox game.  IMHO.

 
Gee sorry I missed page 185 of the dev notes,


You could just have asked for the reasons and then checked the plausibility of those reasons first before inventing new theories on incomplete information

but the timing is too conspicuous, OK,, they thought farming was too easy (it wasn't, you had to grind for materials and spend time on it and use levelups to be effective), and x3 the animal spawns, added more seeds in the wild and so just nerf city on farming. Are these things causes or effects? If food was just too easy why add so many more animals and seeds? Because fun pimps doesn't want us to play the game 'that way' but 'this way'. That btw, is a horrible horrible horrible way to game dev a sandbox game.  IMHO.


The timing argument, sorry, has a big hole: It is a new alpha, all big changes happen at exactly the same time. So the addition of a drone, the RWG changes, the difficulty to find beakers, feral sense, ... all conspicuously happened on the same day. 😉

 
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I am currently fence sitting on the farming changes. What the person who I play with the most and I DO like a lot is that we have to be craftier (hah!) with what we have on hand. It forces us to branch out to other foods that we either ignored before or made only because we wanted to make something different.  What we don't like is that seems to make Living off the Land 1 and 2 close to irrelevant.  It takes 5 plants to craft 1 seed.  At 1 and 2 you get 2, maybe 3 back from a punch.  But if you lose the seed, you're now at  a net two loss (or 3!) loss.

Finding seeds hasn't been super productive and most of the seeds we have found are yucca, cotton, goldenrod, and the red plant that I don't want to spell out.  All of which are useless for crafting food. We're more than willing to ride it out a bit longer and see if things even out, but right now we both feel that either the chance of getting the seed back needs to be increased to 60-70% OR the cost to craft seeds needs to be reduced.  The other possibility would be to lessen the need for corn either in tweaking recipes or more recipes that don't rely as heavily on corn/farmed foods.

 
What we don't like is that seems to make Living off the Land 1 and 2 close to irrelevant.
I thought so too at first, but I do find it useful if I'm in the "farmburbs" common at the city outskirts. While I've got LotL 1/2 at least I can get some extra from those "wild" farm plants, and still hold some back to make seeds with later if I don't find enough before I get LotL 3. I rarely start planting my own crops before I've got 3, though.

 
I am currently fence sitting on the farming changes. What the person who I play with the most and I DO like a lot is that we have to be craftier (hah!) with what we have on hand. It forces us to branch out to other foods that we either ignored before or made only because we wanted to make something different.  What we don't like is that seems to make Living off the Land 1 and 2 close to irrelevant.  It takes 5 plants to craft 1 seed.  At 1 and 2 you get 2, maybe 3 back from a punch.  But if you lose the seed, you're now at  a net two loss (or 3!) loss.


Your numbers are not totally correct:

Wild corn plants

LoTL 1:  2 ears of corn

LoTL 2:  2 ears of corn with 50% chance of 1 extra

Once you convert 5 ears into a seed, it now becomes a planted crop and these are the correct numbers:

LoTL 1:  4 ears of corn with 50% chance of a seed return

LoTL 2:  4 ears of corn with 50% chance of 1 extra, plus the seed chance

Personally, I would recommend just planting and harvesting at LoTL 0 and 1, and not start converting plants into seeds until LoTL 2/3.  I tend to hold off on any farming / harvesting until I got LoTL to the first rank at least so I am harvesting 2 for each wild plant and 4 for each planted crop I do.

 
Slaasher said:
Just the people you see complaining about it on these forums.

I would say that most people are happier with this change than the way it was
I love these statements on forums.  Makes the big rock in back yard feel good about it's IQ

 
Your numbers are not totally correct:

Wild corn plants

LoTL 1:  2 ears of corn

LoTL 2:  2 ears of corn with 50% chance of 1 extra

Once you convert 5 ears into a seed, it now becomes a planted crop and these are the correct numbers:

LoTL 1:  4 ears of corn with 50% chance of a seed return

LoTL 2:  4 ears of corn with 50% chance of 1 extra, plus the seed chance

Personally, I would recommend just planting and harvesting at LoTL 0 and 1, and not start converting plants into seeds until LoTL 2/3.  I tend to hold off on any farming / harvesting until I got LoTL to the first rank at least so I am harvesting 2 for each wild plant and 4 for each planted crop I do.
I'll have to recheck, but I'm pretty sure I'm not getting 4 from a planted crop on lotl1 or 2.

 
The new changes didn't make farming fun or challenging, just tedious.  Just build 10 farm plots per crop, and with 3/3 Living off the Land you can always have a net gain per yield.  This is more two steps forward and one step back approach.  And are the people complaining that growing crops are OP, the same people actually like growing the crops ?

I prefer needing to fertilize every few yields, watering stardew valley style and throw in bug infestation or a drought / disease randomness when you do not attend to fields frequently enough.  These suggestions are coming from a player that loves farming in any game. Make farming an important role for a group to respect and rely on the farming player.  When I said I was not farming this new run (When a20 went stable and restarted a new world), they gave up trying and ate boiled meat and quested tier2 farm runs for potatoes and corn instead and killed the ever spawning boars.

 
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I prefer needing to fertilize every few yields, watering stardew valley style and throw in bug infestation or a drought / disease randomness when you do not attend to fields frequently enough.  These suggestions are coming from a player that loves farming in any game. Make farming an important role for a group to respect and rely on the farming player. 
Please no. I would mod that out so fast. LOL I'm happy with the A20 level of farming tedium. It's a bit more than it was before, but not so much that I feel stuck at base more than I'd like.  Sure, if you're in a group and you're the farmer, you have time for that because it's your job, but I don't play MP anymore and I really don't want to add much more to the "at home" task list. 

I love farming. Farming and fishing are my two favorite game activities. (Yet I don't like either in real life.) As someone who played several hundred hours in the now-defunct Life Is Feudal MMO, I consider myself a professional video game field tender. The crops I grew kept everyone else fed and provided millions of yards of linen rope for their various needs. The fertilizer... oh lord. It was endlessly tedious but also rewarding, and it was also pretty much the only thing I had to do on my main, and one of my alts also handled fishing to supplement the food stocks so we could weather the off-season.

In 7DTD, I've got zombies to kill, loot to obtain, cars to wrench and whatever quests Rekt wants me to do that day, then I come home, work on my base, check on my meal planning situation and fix my gear while monitoring my perimeter for annoyances. (I installed the Friendly Rekt mod and now he's my favorite.) I then check my med stocks and my resources to see if I need to stock up on anything the next day. I love farming in this game but anything much more than "plant it, punch it, plant it again"... Please, no. I would even accept an overall volume reduction without complaint but I don't want farming tedium. I'm just one person. Let me have my backyard garden in peace. Farming in this game is not the main gameplay, so it really shouldn't be complicated. 

 
I'm currently on day 11 and have got all the perks for farming, plus i have a farm plot where each item will be 4x4 in blocks/seeds.

With all the perks, im getting 7 [iirc] items per farm block so enough to replant a seed and have a small excess.  Obviously this only becomes a viable food source if you have a large enough plot of land with plenty of farm blocks but it's well worth it imo.

[I'll still prefer the old method of farming with a hoe but this isn't too bad i think]

 
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