PC Idea to fix A20 farming

I have LOTL 3 and I still don't get enough seeds everytime to replant. I harvested 14 corn plots and got back 10 seeds. Now of course that means I had enough corn to make more seeds, but it happens frequently enough that I am always making a few seeds each rotation.  Maybe I just have bad RNG. Replanting doesn't take that much time for me, but I am only feeding three people. I have 42 plots at my main base (after recalling that mushrooms don't need a plot or a space next to each other.)  Yeah, we do have to eat often, but it isn't gamebreaking.

 
Roland said:
We tend to only eat once we are hungry letting the bar dip down close to 50% before eating a dish that takes us back up to the top
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Ya know, if there wasnt a warning message that popped up until much later, like the orange warning took twice as long to even activate, then our group probably wouldnt even notice the loss of hp/stamina.  Its the message that drives them crazy.  Like they HAVE To fix the hunger pains right then and there, they hear a groan after all so they think they have to fix it.  And blinking red message sends them into a panic, hell a few of them were sure they would starve to death (never happened, ever).

Tone those two messages back a bit (and change nothing of the effects, just temper the warning) and a lot of the freaking out some players do over the hunger system might abate.  You probably wouldnt even need to change anything other than the warning.

 
meganoth said:
Your fertilizer scheme is a possible method, no question. And by changing the returns of fertilized ground one could even add the feature that LotL 0 does not allow a self-sufficient farm. Which is something the developers seem to want and you desperately don't want as you consider it broken that way. Unless you can convince them that one of their current design goals with farming is wrong you already have lost no matter what your scheme does

One disadvantage may be that fertilizer needs one bit in world blocks reserved for recording the "fertilized" state, a very scarce and expensive resource. This may have been part of the reason to remove fertilizer and the old way of farming and my guess is that that alone is a hard sell (unless there is an easy alternative available).

Another disadvantage from my point is that fertilizer makes farming even more work (producing fertilizer and fertilizing). A point TFP might actually like and that would probably appeal to Roland as well. At the moment more work would make farming so unappealing that most players would not bother anymore. Naturally that can be corrected by balancing meat resources.
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old fertilizer required poo, my fertilizer has farmable nitrate, bone and rotten meat, which seems fairly abundant and replenishes with zombie dogs, vultures and zombie bears, or rotten piles on the ground, so it shouldnt be too hard to get imo.

With fertilizer your farm size would by necessity be much smaller, currently you are limited almost only by how many plots you can put seeds into (provided LotL3) with my system you would only use as many plots as you could realistically fertilize, so in some ways it would be more work (in general it would, but i think that is fine as a cost for producing food) but in others it would make infinite sized farms less realistic.

I did consider unfertilized farms only providing 1 crop per harvest with 3 harvests per seed which would be inefficient but i decided that the effort of harvesting 3 times for one meager crop is enough of a cost to justify it. A self sustaining farm of only unfertilized crops would be a nightmare for upkeep as it would take 15 harvests to get one more seed, by the time you get a self sustaining farm that is profitable from only farming you will be weeks into the game looting at least t3 PoIs so i think it is justified. 

 
Roland said:
Ill have to check tonight when I get home. I want to say around 30 but they were all corn and potatoes. But we also had bacon and eggs dishes, fish tacos, chili dogs, and sham chowder in addition to all the meat stews we were able to make. We tend to only eat once we are hungry letting the bar dip down close to 50% before eating a dish that takes us back up to the top so we had plenty of food and the crops kept coming in until we had a huge surplus. She finally stopped farming until our storehouse of food was almost empty.

We struggled a bit at first until she got up to LotL 3 but the fully perked skill has been plenty for our group. We don't make baked potatoes or corn bread. We only make the filling meals.
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I just took the LoTL3 skill yesterday after finally getting My FORTITUDE stat up to 5 a day earlier.   So I should harvest the first LoTL3 level crops on Day 36,  when We all go back into play it will be prep for Horde Night.     I think my frustration came in feeling that I had no option other than spend My last 3 skill points toward just getting LoTL3.    its been very strange that when I first took LoTL2,  I had a fair surplus,  enough to replant the same number of crops,  with 4 to 9 food items left in each of the crop types.  Then after the 3rd harvest it seemed I was getting less and less seeds back after each replanting.

 
Orclover said:
Days are set to 90 minutes (I know it screws up everything), most of us play 6-9 hours a night.
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I think plant growth time is tied to real time, not in-game time, and stamina use/food drain would also be tied to IRL time right? So you get a fully-grown plant after 63 minutes and you run around so much and swing your club so many times in 63 minutes. So hopefully your 90-minute days don't screw up the plant mechanics too much.

Another way maybe to adjust the balance for crops (not so much for your group; you seem like you've found a solution that works for you) would be to reduce growing time a bit. More crops per unit time. Benefit is that since it's a relatively large number, it can really be fine-tuned. Maybe 55 minutes is fast enough, or maybe 42.

 
Ianua said:
I have LOTL 3 and I still don't get enough seeds everytime to replant. I harvested 14 corn plots and got back 10 seeds. Now of course that means I had enough corn to make more seeds, but it happens frequently enough that I am always making a few seeds each rotation.  Maybe I just have bad RNG. Replanting doesn't take that much time for me, but I am only feeding three people. I have 42 plots at my main base (after recalling that mushrooms don't need a plot or a space next to each other.)  Yeah, we do have to eat often, but it isn't gamebreaking.
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It is absolutely normal that you have to make seeds every replant if you want to keep the size of your farm. On average you have to craft the seeds for half of your whole farm

 
Roland said:
As the perked player it should be you harvesting and crafting seeds but then you should just stick the seeds in a container and let them do all the planting.
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That is such a bureaucrat solution thou.. :)

"Sir, we have an issue. Farming is a boring one-man job"

"Well, the solution is clear, my dear. Make it a two-man job with a layer of logistic in between, and add some wasted time. Maybe add an overseer and a pre-planner to boot."

"Most excellent, sir, I shall draft the appropriate proposal immediately!"

 
theFlu said:
That is such a bureaucrat solution thou.. :)

"Sir, we have an issue. Farming is a boring one-man job"

"Well, the solution is clear, my dear. Make it a two-man job with a layer of logistic in between, and add some wasted time. Maybe add an overseer and a pre-planner to boot."

"Most excellent, sir, I shall draft the appropriate proposal immediately!"
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Well when you say it like that.

But, I suspect the reality to be much more simple like...  "Plant your own damn seeds people!"

Done.

 
Roland said:
Well when you say it like that.

But, I suspect the reality to be much more simple like...  "Plant your own damn seeds people!"

Done.
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*grin*  Reality is that I call out over voice chat  "Time for Harvest"  then I start off reciting how much yield I get for each food type and how many (or most cases how few seeds returned),  do quick math in My head of how many I have to use use crafting new seeds,  then run inside to the farming box to check for any drop off looted seeds,  then go back outside quickly and replant,  then as I stop at the Foodstuff box, I call out what the final yield was as I deposit the food;  then listen to the groans in response from the rest of our group.  usually a 2-3 minute process overall,  but the frustration,  now ....Thats priceless.   *smirk*

 
Farming was the very first thing that got xml edited.

As much as the rest of the game has progressed by leaps and bounds, farming took a step backwards and turned into a tedious unfun chore.

 
Roland said:
Well when you say it like that.

But, I suspect the reality to be much more simple like...  "Plant your own damn seeds people!"

Done.
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Furthermore, when there was a bad harvest where you had to convert most of the produce to seeds and food might get scarce it should be possible in a group that allegedly cooperates(!) to tell the others to buy food from the trader machines again and do some more hunting for 3 days.

This is a new concept called "adapting to the circumstances". 😉

I have the exact same problem in my current MP co-op game and the same protests of my co-players that they don't want to be bothered 😎

 
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pahbi said:
Farming was the very first thing that got xml edited.

As much as the rest of the game has progressed by leaps and bounds, farming took a step backwards and turned into a tedious unfun chore.
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It is quite easy, this game is a hybrid of quite a handful of genres. There are players who like the mix and there are a lot of players who are after just a some parts and those usually protest if other parts are expanded. Having played a pure survival game like "Don't starve" for 5 hours I can assure you that survival can be a lot more "backwards unfun" than this.😉

 
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meganoth said:
It is quite easy, this game is a hybrid of quite a handful of genres. There are players who like the mix and there are a lot of players who are after just a some parts and those usually protest if other parts are expanded. Having played a pure survival game like "Don't starve" for 5 hours I can assure you that survival can be a lot more "backwards unfun" than this.😉
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Oh man that game turned eating into a full time job.

I think we are all just very thankful that you made the game in a way that is incredibly easy for us to edit it to our taste. Fine tuning is always important.

 
Orclover said:
Oh man that game turned eating into a full time job.

I think we are all just very thankful that you made the game in a way that is incredibly easy for us to edit it to our taste. Fine tuning is always important.
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I'm just a random player, I did not make the game at all.

Now I grant you that you selected the most stamina-burning playstyle of all and that could be a large reason why the food balance is out of whack.

People who just shoot the whole horde night or while running through a POI in light armor use a pitiful amount of food while someone (I assume in heavy armor) using a club or sledgehammer for ALL the fighting is really uncommon, I'm not sure the testers inside TFP really did test that. You are not the common case!

You might even record your daily usage of food and explain your play style in a bug report. But I think they might just say working as intended and that such a playstyle needs special focus on food procurement.

 
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I still wish for a way to keep the seeds, like in A19.

Maybe an extra 4th point in LotL that makes the seed stay planted and revert to the seed stage?

 
PoppaSmirk said:
I just took the LoTL3 skill yesterday after finally getting My FORTITUDE stat up to 5 a day earlier.   So I should harvest the first LoTL3 level crops on Day 36,  when We all go back into play it will be prep for Horde Night.     I think my frustration came in feeling that I had no option other than spend My last 3 skill points toward just getting LoTL3.    its been very strange that when I first took LoTL2,  I had a fair surplus,  enough to replant the same number of crops,  with 4 to 9 food items left in each of the crop types.  Then after the 3rd harvest it seemed I was getting less and less seeds back after each replanting.
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FYI - Unless I am playing a Fortitude heavy character, I usually just do Fort 4 and get the last increase via the Tough Guy Glasses.  Saves me a perk point at the beginning for something I use more often - though note you have to remember to swap out to the glasses before you harvest to unlock LoTL Level 3 and get its benefits.   Eventually when I got my other stuff maxed out, I will put a point into Fort to get to Level 5 so I don't have to swap out glasses.

 
meganoth said:
Now I grant you that you selected the most stamina-burning playstyle of all and that could be a large reason why the food balance is out of whack.

People who just shoot the whole horde night or while running through a POI in light armor use a pitiful amount of food while someone (I assume in heavy armor) using a club or sledgehammer for ALL the fighting is really uncommon, I'm not sure the testers inside TFP really did test that. You are not the common case!

You might even record your daily usage of food and explain your play style in a bug report. But I think they might just say working as intended and that such a playstyle needs special focus on food procurement.
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Yea fortitude build with max punching and heavy armor sprinting at full speed (perked out for stamina regen!), doing horde night in the street at times with fist only.  I may be burning a few calories. 

 
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