Agriculture - let plants go to seed

The way farming works now, you have a random chance of harvesting a seed from your crop harvest.

If you forgot to water, or can't make it in time due to real life, you wind up with a low yield crop. While this OK, I propose adding another stage to the crop cycle that mirrors real life and gives farmers another option for when this happens.

Let the plants go to seed.

In real life, if you don't harvest your crop, they will often "go to seed". For example, you may hear of lettuce "bolting" and this happens when the plants stops putting energy into the crop and into making seeds. Once it bolts and makes seeds, the crop isn't harvestable, but you get your seeds back.

Here's an example of lettuce in multiple stages. Note the large thin tendrily bits above the lettuce, that's where the seeds are.




Stage 1 - sprout (needs water)
Stage 2 - immature plant (needs water)
Stage 3 - crop (persists forever currently until harvested) <-- proposed to adjust this so it times out eventually, perhaps after double the regular planting cycle time, so for a 2 day plant, would go to seed after 4 additional days in crop form)
Stage 4 - seeds (occurs if nothing further happens to plant) - proposed

You could do this with or without graphical changes to the crops, with graphics would be ideal, but could be implemented even without graphical changes.

 

that would suck for those of us using plants as deco. we would need the ability to lock a plant at our chosen stage. i do not want my roses to fall to rosehips.

 

I guess you could exclude roses which are mostly used for decorative purposes.
But rosehips are also pretty awesome, especially to make tea from IRL. Great Vitamin C source.

Maybe a right click to "set decorative" option that would lock the plant as a decoration at a certain stage in it's growth, and prevent further growth from happening.

 

Well…in that case I would suggest to create an additional decoration for some plants. E.g.
1 wood board + 5 roses + 10 corpse wax = 1 decorative rose bush that looks like the “living” one but never withers.