Agriculture Updates

I have a few wish items for Ag:

1) It is very difficult, especially as plants mature, to see where you have and have not watered. It would be great if the water targeting circle could either highlight the plants that have already been watered in something like a blue or highlight the plants that havent been watered in red so we can more easily know where to water.

2) Harvesting and watering should contribute to the crafting XP pool (edit: harvesting XP was implemented).

3) The penalty for missing a single watering cycle is too great. Missing just one watering reduces the harvest by nearly 2/3. I would think reducing possible harvest by 1/4 per missed watering cycle would be appropriate.

4) edit: Make wells useful please. Make selling water to NPCs 0 gp (if it isn't already) and update wells so that there is no harvest delay or water is given in bigger batches (ie batches of 10 or 20).

5) Increase the amount of seeds returned during harvest.

Thank you!

 

100% agree on the water collecting. Please make that batchable like when crafting stuff. I don't mind the length of time it takes, it's just that all that clicking (or pressing "e") is the very definition of tedious.

 

I end up living in a town where the water bucket vendor is nearby my farm. The margin has been reduced, but this is the best I can do for now until this QoL water bucket retrieving issue has been improved.

 

Yah, I often avoid agriculture for this reason. It seeps out of the game and adds stress to my IRL. In fact, the one and only thing I enjoy about agriculture is looking at the plants in their final phase - its a nice aesthetic. Every other aspect of agriculture is stressful and painful.

People who grow mass crops indoors are smart - you dont have to deal with that stress IRL when you have weeks to water the plants.

I try and time waterings with my availability IRL, but its very often that some life plans change, and the short window of time I had to water is now spent doing something more productive IRL than clicking the mouse and watching a progress bar. Then I lose a crapton of money in the game because the harvest suffers so much. Although the mechanics for farming are simple and its not tons of time spent interacting with it, it does not feel like a casual gaming experience at all, given that one must have ample IRL time at precise cycles of time to engage with farming.

I want to play as a cook and farmer in this game, its why I backed Sota. Im astonished at how incomplete and unsatisfying of an experience both of those skills are, 6 years later :-/

 

I'd love if agriculture was sustainable by letting crops 'go to seed' either by letting it alone and not harvesting it for a period of time or by adding a new 'harvest seeds' option, the goal of which would be to create self-sustaining agriculture without the need to constantly revisit and buy seeds from a store. The cost of levelling associated skills to do this, and the cost in TIME (ie, letting something sit without picking it for longer periods reduces crop yield but increases seed yield) would add a whole new dynamic and a player market for seeds as well. I've seen this implemented in other games and it removes the npc dependence and allows secondary markets to develop or, allows a farmer to sustain their crop through their own seed creation by sacrificing their time.

The water from the well issue is just...awful. At the very least, it needs to be automatable (ie, set yourself drawing water and let it draw up 100 before you have to set it again) and it needs to be a lot faster. A single village lot with planters laid flat accommodates 400 plants. That's 1600 water for the full cycle. With water costing only 1 gold, you need a way to get 1600 water in like, 5 minutes or less, otherwise farming gold and buying water becomes a better use of your time.

 

Buried somewhere in the wishlist forum is a post I made a while ago. Here it is again in a nutshell:
An irrigation system on the crown store consisting of a well, a windmill and a "drip system". The irrigation system would require maintenance periodically that would require mechanical parts.

The drip system would alter the appearance of the planting beds such that the have a pipe running down one side. New Tech? Yes, but shouldn't be a ton.

 

since @Chris mentioned updates to farming/crafting (one item of which is on this list) i thought i would bump @Elgarion

 

since @wizardsmoke recently fixed a watering bug (thank you!), bumping this up again with focus on 1) and 4). relatively small changes with a huge QoL impact.

 

I see farming crops as gambling, because it's gambling that I will be able to make those 2 extra watering appointments on time.

2 of the watering cycles are done during planting, so I think a player should make a "bare minimal profit" if they make even one of those 2 extra appointment times, while just planting with no other watering added should break even for the initial effort, "otherwise, it is gambling".

This week I began farming again and took my Crafting Exp-Pool down to only 1398, the lowest it's ever been, planting, watering and watering, then watering again.
After harvesting 158,358 gold worth of coconuts, my Exp-Pool went from 1398 up to 1,072,658.

*Random Utterances of Farming*
The reason I chose coconuts is that they are very easy to see if they have been watered or not.
Most players are planting cotton, which is much more profitable than any other crop, "yet is more difficult to see if it's been watered".
I personally will be planting a full crop of cotton soon, with my only confidence in being able to insure it's "all" been watered, being a reliance on increased skill.
I hadn't grown any crops before this time with the newest changes (new to me, having been away from the game). I was farming before using the old system of long ago, which had no skill and no skill gains.

What all this means is that,

• I had no agriculture skill a few days ago before planting.
• After planting and harvesting a single crop cycle on my properties, my agriculture skills are now all over 100.
• The radius of each of my agriculture skills are now all, "huge" and getting even larger.

After having accomplished that single crop, I'm now determined to redesign my jam-packed planting lots into a more "strait row styled" configuration in order to increase the speed at which the planting can all be accomplished within, and, to insure that when I do replant with a crop like cotton, ( difficult to see if it's been watered ) "through my newly increased skill and a more organized set of fields", I will be able to accomplish the mission without much worries.

*Note*
I have a POT where I organize my properties into a single field configuration comprised of one or two town lots surrounded by other tightly connected village lots.

*Odd Note*
I was only using large, medium and small planting beds, "yet for some odd reason", after having always went off to water the fields with an even number of water, I always... "always" kept coming back having used an odd number of water. I checked and re-checked and all had been watered with no chance that any had not been watered. It should have been an even number, yet it wasn't, yet it was consistently the same. So, it seems that at least "one" possibly 3 of my plants was watered, yet did not take a bucket from my inventory.
(I currently have "many" fog generators and fire fly generators located "within" my field/s, so I suspect that one of those somehow interfered with the watering process. I will not be including the generators in the redesign to see if that fixes the problem. Then if that successfully fixes the water problem, I will begin testing to seek-out a possible exploit.)


*I apologize to the reader for my increasingly bad English skills, as they are and have been deteriorating due to an increasing lack of use. It's just the byproduct of being surrounded by no one but Thai-People, who speak no English, or small "Pigeon English", like the dialects used by the native city dwelling people in the movie "Blade Runner". I've been increasingly going "native" or something in-between.
~Time Lord~