farming feedback

First off I'd like to say - It's been awhile since I've tried agriculture. Being able to tell which saplings I've watered is a huge improvement. Makes the watering experience more enjoyable. Still quite a bit of mouse clicking involved but at least it's not as frustrating.

A few observations/suggestions that have probably been regurgitated a million times by other users.

buying water buckets from npc crafting vendor takes a long time for all of the water buckets to arrive into my inventory - if this isn't a bug, perhaps an onscreen message that says 'please wait while I prepare your goods' or whatever.

I encountered a situation where the 'follow party leader' message showed up in the same orientation as watering notification. Instead of watering the plant I was sent to kingsport and I was very put off.

Perhaps there could be an initial agriculture tutorial/hints and the 'toggle deco' key could be set to F12 by default. In this tutorial it would explain 'Farming is more enjoyable if you toggle deco mode off by pressing F12' ... F12 could be whatever is appropriate.

Being able to retrieve these types of onscreen hints somewhere recorded in your journal would be helpful. Perhaps a 'recent hints' section of the journal. "Press F12 to toggle deco mode" for example. There's a lot of text that doesn't get read by humans in the chat window.

Also, I'm pretty sure Guinness Blonde was 6% when it was first released and now it's 5%

 

Another thing that would be nice is being able to double click the planter itself .. and choose quantity of 20 seeds then hit craft and it fills each sector one seed at a time using similar crafting interface behavior. So it would still take time to do it, but not as much clicking.

 

If the above 20 at a time seed planting isn't an option I would still like to see the ability to equip seeds as a weapon, then use a deck icon to activate the farming/planting cursor .. or something to that effect. That way I don't have to see a gigantic crafting window in my face 72 times per green house. I would simply click a planting icon, it would give me a cursor and use the seeds that I have in my hand...I would click the unoccupied sector of the planter with the cursor, it would create a sapling in that sector and I would move onto the next unoccupied sector. It would be nice if there was some type of indicator that tells me what type of seed I'm using, a small image of the plant itself for example (?) and maybe something that says (152x) and subtracts as you plant the seeds

This would eliminate 80 clicks in a large planter - instead of double clicking on the unoccupied planting sector (crafting window comes up), double click on the recipe, then click craft - technically 5 clicks per sapling. The cursor method would be 21 clicks - activate planting cursor using non-combat deck, then click on each unoccupied sector (20). Fertilizer could be used in the other hand, and if multiple fertilizers would be required you could create a 'bag of fertilizer'... where the player could put different types of fertilizers in the bag and it would withdraw 1x of each fertilizer type per sapling. It could be used as an alternate method in addition to the existing planting behavior?

 

The "E" key can help cut down on a lot of double clicking. It saves a lot of time when planting or watering. I actually had it bound to one of my extra mouse buttons so it's even faster.

 

It would be even better, if I click on a planter, and can plant it in one click. For example, I should put in a window seeds (of different kinds) up to a number of available plant beds, and a corresponding number of buckets of water, and plant them all in one go. The same should go for harvesting. It will reduce the boredom, improve the UX, and make the whole process enjoyable.