Agriculture's economic problems

An area of the game with severe imbalance issues is agriculture. I know that there will be forthcoming work to help address that, but it's unclear what all that may entail beyond adding fertilizer as an option while growing. That is unlikely to address the fundamental issue(s) with agriculture that break down into a few different items. This post makes the (reasonable) assumption that any crop grown should be possible to at least vendor for a minor profit and no crop should be able to be sold to a vendor for a loss. Since this is about large scale agriculture, it will assume water is always purchased. For ease of discussion, it will assume the average crop yield. It will use 1000 planting spots for ease of computation. The costs of greenhouse(s) and garden beds/pots will be ignored since they are one-time costs.

First covered will be Cotton, for two reasons: #1 - It is an oddity in terms of yield and #2 - It is specifically designed as a cash crop no vendor sells it in game to players (to create artificial scarcity).

********COTTON*******
This is a "medium" growing crop
Costs
--------------------------
Water: 8000g
Seed: 16000g
--------------------------
Total: 24000g cost

Yield: 9000 cotton

Vendor sell price: 36000g
Net Profit: 12000g (6000g/day)

*********8g crops***********
These are the "fast" growing crops, consisting of: Carrots, Garlic, Lettuce, Pepper, Potato, and Tomato
Costs
-----------------
water: 8000g
seed: 8000g
---------------
Total: 16000g

Yield: 8000

Vendor sell price: 16000g
Net profit: 0g

*********16g crops***********
These are the "medium" growing crops, consisting of: Banana, Barley, Corn, Grapes, Hops, Lemons, Mandrake, Nightshade, Onion, and Wheat
Costs
-----------------
Water: 8000g
Seed: 16000g
-----------------
Total: 24000g cost

Yield: 16000

Vendor sell price: 32000g
Net profit: 8000g (4000g/day)

*********30g crops***********
These are the "long" growing crops, consisting of: Coconuts, Apples, and Tea. A little oddity here as Apples have a different yield rate, so that'll be noted in the following. Vendor sale price works out equivalently however.

Costs
-----------------
Water: 8000g
Seed: 30000g
-----------------
Total: 38000g

Yield: 18000/27000

Vendor sell price: 54000
Net profit: 16000g (5,333g/day)

*********10g crops***********
These are "short" growing crops, consisting of the Blue, Orange, Pink, Red, and Yellow roses. These are always money losers, even if you harvest all the water rather than buying it.

Costs
-----------------
Water: 8000g
Seed: 10000g
-----------------
Total: 18000g

Yield: 7000

Vendor sell price: 7000
Net profit: -11000g

*********6g crops***********
This is a "short" growing crop, consisting of Pumpkins

Costs
-----------------
Water: 8000g
Seed: 6000g
-----------------
Total: 14000g

Yield: 4000

Vendor sell price: 12000
Net profit: -2000g

*******************************************************************

Due to the odd way in which farming is structured in SOTA (Duration, watering schedule) it's generally difficult to grow more than 1 crop a day, even using a greenhouse (For me, due to the fact it'd require me to be awake at hours I'm normally sleeping). I.e., both "short" and "medium" crops are generally equivalent as far as ability to harvest, even though "medium" crops take twice as long. At least when using a greenhouse to speed things up.

Several important points jump out with the above data.

• Vendor price for 6g, 8g, and 10g crops is too low, as they lead to a zero or negative result. The vendor price for Roses should be a minimum of 3g/per. Similarly, Pumpkins should be a minimum of 4g/per for vendor sale.
  
• Cotton is often king (As designed). It's only worth skipping if you can get 2.3g/per or higher on 16g crops or 3.5g/per or higher on 8g crops. If you can sell Cotton to players for more than 4g/ per, then it's even more difficult for the other crops to be a worthwhile investment.

One of the root problems with agriculture is the fixed cost of water. I.e., you spend the same on water regardless of the maturation time of the crop. This causes a significant imbalance for all of the "short" duration crops because such a significant proportion of the cost is tied to water. The fact that it is possible to obtain water at zero cost makes things even more convoluted, because it encourages botting. If you take away the water cost entirely, everything (except Roses) becomes profitable.

In general, I think agriculture needs a complete overhaul. For example:

• Duration and the amount of water necessary should be linked. Shorter duration crops require less water, longer duration crops require more water. This allows the water cost to be balanced across crops.
• Vendor prices need to be adjusted so that one is never losing money by growing any given crop. The profit margin should probably be minimal to encourage selling crops to other players. But it should never be negative.
  
• The zero cost method of obtaining water for agriculture needs to go away. Sorry well-wishers. It just encourages botting and doesn't really offer anything to serious farmers. Alternatively, remove the water from vendors and increase the amount that you can harvest from wells, etc (like 500 per draw). This would help some of the serious issues with brewing as water cost derails it too.
  
• The growing schedule needs adjustment so casual players can farm w/ full capability (Assuming they work standard jobs and can't access the game from the office). Right now the intervals are either 4 hour, 8 hour, 12 hour, or 24 hour. The 4 hour interval generally means people can only do those crops by starting on a morning during the weekends. The 8 hour interval works well on a weekend if you plant later in the evening (6pm+). The 12 hour one I seldom do, but is still problematic outside of the weekend. The 24 hour one is probably the easiest time period to line up with regardless of work schedule.

I hope @DarkStarr and @Chris will review this thread, as just adding fertilizer to adjust crop yields will not resolve the fundamental problems that currently exist with agriculture.

 

I prefer mandrake, nightshade or garlic over cotton purely due to the larger hit box affecting the area batch skill cursor.

Anyone harvesting water manually deserves the extra profit, anyone using a bot deserves the extra ban.

 

Yes, I hate planting/harvesting cotton. The threshold to make a profit via player vendors is definitely much easier with nightshade and mandrake as well, so I generally prefer to go that route. Regardless of those things, the underlying design of agriculture seems broken and the entire water issue contributes to brewing being a mess, as well.

If someone can manually harvest 4,000 water at a rate of one bucket at a time, more power to them, but I don't see that as a realistic method of doing agriculture in SOTA.

 

As far as i know from watching the streams the only thing fertilisers will do is allow players to grow bigger stuff like bigger pumpkins so on ...so i dont know where you got the yield increase idea.

As one who has done alot of large scale agriculture i think the way to go is not by allowing people to make tons of gold off it but to have agriculture products which players need constantly . If you allow just 1g profit /plant in some areas that can scale fast to hundred of thousands of gold/daily. Planting nightshade before it got fixed would yield 3g/plant when crafted into potion and sold to NPC which led to a huge gold inflation (prolly 20 mil gold + entering the economy weekly ) ... today nightshade is 2 gold instead of 3 g....so 1g profit can lead to terrible side effects for the economy.

There are ways to improve agriculture

1. First Chris needs to fix the water as he promised .... less water consumed on plants ( i thought he done that already)..
2 . Why is mandrake the only plant used in enchanting ? I would leave mandrake just for general enchants and when an item is socketed add a plant that is need it ..different plants for different gems .
3. The water cycle need to be either automated or the plants need to stop growing until you water them ...
4. Time to let us harvest beetles from cotton ..10 beetles every 1000 cotton would be a good start .
5.Lets plant some trees ...we need forests plantation..wood has been scarce in like forever ...

Property needs to have value ingame ... the only way that is achievable is if we can plant stuff that people need ... Large scale agriculture is the only thing that made worth having 10-20 or more deeds available for agriculture . None is gonna use 20 town or 20 city deeds just to have nice homes .

Agriculture was killed just like brewery without a viable alternative being offered . When agriculture was demolished the property value also tanked and its now dropping every week .Thats sad.

 

#1- Your a looney toon for planting 1000 seeds, I'm sorry but I have 40 plots to plant and I find that tedious... outside plots, no greenhouse...
#2- lets see why the devs don't finish agriculture, starting with sew multiple seeds, I for one can't figure out if it's broken, not finished or just how to do it...
#3- drawing water from a water source, this is broken and should be finished so that at the very least we can draw 20 buckets automatically... oh sure 1 at a time...
#4- adding the ability of harvesting seeds by ticking a box or even random rng with at least a 50% rate...
#5- water by rainfall, what ever happened to that idea?

Fertilizers are nice, but how about finishing what's there too... Just my priorities...

 

Are you not using batch planting, that'd take two clicks?

 

I'm old, could you explain what you mean? Thanks... my clicker ain't that fast, so I use "E" key... Ya know, highlite press E... are you saying I can press it twice?

 

No Lained means going to the k key/skills and dragging 'harvest plants' to your non combat bar and you can do that with water plants as well to water/harvest more than one at a time.

 

There's nothin' like turning a game into a second job....

 

Yes, I'm doing those 2 now, but sow batch doesn't work, can't drag the icon off or dbl click, so my alternative is to click the plot (highlite, press E)... to sow seeds... I can't do 40 let alone do 1000 unless using a BOT, which I won't do...

 

the skill description specifically says it's an innate. drag the actual seed onto your noncombat bar.

 

No it doesn't work. I think we need that too but perhaps with other skills built up to get to it for a temporary reason to plant. I just plant as I need to save gold. I'm usually poor

 

Oh now that I did not know. Thanks @Alley Oop

 

I would have never thought of that, thanks...

 

Now I can see a real need for a 2nd non-combat bar just for crafting and another for agriculture, and as many other specific things we are doing..., just an idea...

 

Oh yes please or at least a longer one that goes across the bottom of the screen. I understand the need to limit the combat bar but our non combat bars are ridiculously small for all we want to add to them.

 

<Smacks side of face>

 

lol well remember these days. That pretty much is much more organized than my screen looked. Still if we want a messy screen we should be able to have it or of course as organized as we want to but at least have the freedom and choice of placing things as we like. So agriculture things, emotes, songs, fishing icons, pet icons and on and on

 

I was thinking more along the lines of just additional 10 slots, using that arrow thing in the center to rotate through them, they could do an additional 5 x 10 or so, I think that would be enough... We could set them up like 1 for agriculture/crafting... 1 for potions/fishing or fishing/taming

 

Well, what it will do has changed over time. At one point Chris had said it would have effects like increasing yield, IIRC.

I think you mean the potion exploit that got patched out last release? Nightshade has always sold for 2g to the vendor since I started my spreadsheet on agriculture to find out the best price points, and that was well over a year ago.

The potion exploit worked like this. You made Deadly Poison potions and then sell them to a full price vendor (Like the alchemist in Ardoris). Breakdown was:

Flask (3) * 10g: 30g
Black pearl (5) * 6g: 30g
Nightshade (10) * 3g: 30g
-----------------------------
Total: 90g for 3 potions (or 30g per potion prior to the current release)

Thus you had a net loss of zero gold on top of gaining crafting XP. So a lot of people did this to make XP and not lose money. If a non-farming could get the nightshade for a little less than 3g each, they could even make a few gold (The farmer always makes gold if it sells for > 1.5g per). This caused a massive gold influx in the game and so Chris reduced the amount of gold you could get from selling the potion by 50% (to 15g/potion), so it is always a money loser and no more free crafting XP. Since nightshade only costs 1.5g to produce, the people who grew & sold the nightshade were causing a massive amount of gold to enter the game. It was in fact more profitable to grow the nightshade and craft the potion IF you were offered less than 3g/ per.