Farming Discusion Thread -- (Dev) Replied

This thread is to Discuss the possibilities, ideas, likes, dislikes of the in game farming system.
------------------------------
Posted from Kickstarter Update #20
Farming

"Players who were reading carefully will notice that there was no mention of farming in the above resource or crafting skills. Currently we are planning on making farming a bit of a different type skill from the other resource production categories. The other resource skills involve going out and hunting for elements in the wild and the time to collect elements in seconds to minutes. Farming on the other hand is generally done in the safety of cities and villages and generally involves a lot of patience.

For our first pass at the resources, we are planning on leaving farming out of the main skill system and instead making it something that any player can enjoy without a huge investment of time. It will also give the player a reason to come check in on the game daily to harvest and collect goods which they can use in other crafting skills or use for adventuring.

The general process is that players would find, buy, or earn a seed of some sort. They would plant the seed, in their garden or the community garden(for those without a house) and possibly add other elements with the seed to help it grow better or differently. The other elements could be things from gathering skills(fish, granite, straight stick, manure, etc) or from adventuring. Some additions make the resulting plant create more seeds, some make it grow faster, some make the output more effective, some seeds simply won?t grow without additional elements, and some have other more mysterious effects! While many of these garden recipes can be learned from talking to local villagers, many will only be found through experimentation!"
--------------------------------------

Alright so farming is not what I expected. I like that it is set outside crafting and I like that everyone can do it.

I don't like the fact that it will need daily maintenance. I can see someone with a large farm spending a lot of time everyday just maintaining it. Being the son of a depression era subsistence farmer, the idea behind a farm for me, isn't a set of daily time-syncing rituals. Farming is set aside a square of land, till the soil, plant the seed, water, wait, harvest, repeat. That's what I call "Farming."

The SotA Farming system sounds a little bit like gardening. Now "Gardening" is something totally different. You can spend hours everyday pruning, fertilizing, watering, crossbreeding, planting and caring for your garden of flowers and houseplants. The gardening system in Final Fantasy 11 was like this and it was really cool, but it wasn't "Farming" by any stretch of the imagination. Farming implies, a large initial workload followed by time and finally a large ending workload, followed by the harvest.

My family has operated a Nursery since 1942, I'm not a farmer, I'm not a gardener, but I was around it my whole life. The Farming system proposed so far feels like neither.

 

I realize I'm bumping an older thread here, but I was going to post something similar so it seemed silly to not.

I have to agree. till > seed > irrigate > wait > harvest > repeat. There may be a few things in between where a profitable crop doesn't normally grow in your region with out some fertilizer, pest control(scare crow on SotA?) or maybe extra water, but still, I agree.

I was going to also comment on decay. As you slightly eluded to, normally if you dont harvest in time the crops decay and die. In cases of North America the winter kills them, South America the fruit falls off and decays. But I dont think you can do that here because its a game. The crops growth cycle should depend on the players ability to get on check his crops. You cant have a hard working office stiff(thinking of myself here) growing crops only to come back at the end of the week to dead crops. So in my opinion, once ready to harvest, it should remain ready till harvested. A good example is in Minecraft, your crops remain till harvested.

LAND
I also wanted to talk about land. I think farm land should be larger and only have farmers rights to it. Be tax free and be an active farmer. I say be an active farmer because I can see where there could be a problem of someone getting farm land and then never using it. So maybe it is earned through the rumored "public farms" parcels.

In all of this I still haven't crafted an opinion on if its better for the progress of the farm to happen only when the farmer is online, or if it should 'grow' while he is offline. Not sure how I feel about that.

Just my thoughts, as someone that is looking forward to this role, I hope they are heard.

 

I think plants growth rate should be high when character is online and low but not zero when character is offline. That way, hard work will be appriciated and casual gamers will have what they want.

In Ottoman Empire if a land doesn't get seeded more than 2 years, manager of the land would take that farmers right to use the farm back and give it to someone who deserves it even if the farmer paid the taxes.

 

Great points about the differences in farming and gardening. I had not thought of it in that light.

All the details about maintenance and decay are not set in stone. Our goal is to have a realistic system that is both fun and rewarding.

 

I have zero real world knowledge about farming, and I likely have black thumbs when it comes to gardening.

However, here's just a list of things off the top of my head that I'd like to see considered:

<strong>Farming</strong>:
- Planted crops taking time to grow, say a fortnight (two weeks).
- The quantity of crops harvested to offset the time it takes to produce them.
- Animals could take longer to produce materials, or shorter, depending on the item.

<strong>Gardening</strong>:
- The option of being able to have planter boxes, or just use the ground.
- Being able to grow some of the minor reagents
- Create synergies between growing types of plants together, so planting onions next to carrots benefits both plants, but planting them near petunias will cause them to yield a sub standard crop.
- Have plants that require different environment types, like mushrooms, instead of growing everything out in the open and in full sunlight.

<strong>Both</strong>:
- Hirelings to some of the "busy work" associated with farming/gardening.
- Having different types of farming/gardening compliment each other, eg: having cattle improves some garden growth due to use of fertiliser, etc.
- Create ties to other crafts, for the creation of tools, soil fertility, etc.
- Be able to protect your farmland/garden from the elements, greenhouses, etc.

 

I do not know if I will farm in game but would enjoy the ability to bring back seeds for farmers from far away lands. I plan to do a lot of exploration and would enjoy becoming a scholar of sorts (of all things).

Harvesting for seeds might be a skill (or plants could behave like a loot able object) - Unfortunately, I can't add creative ideas to farming - but I think that the weather patterns affecting crops etc fits with the lore that has been mention up to this point.

If I would ever set up a shop - my shop would be full of oddities/random assortment of items - seeds for farmers would add diversity, and that's a good thing in my book.

I could imagine being contracted to go and gather rare forms of fauna - that would be pretty cool.