Three Skills I Would Like To See For Farming

I am really excited about the Farming profession in SotA. I realize you can’t get everything into SotA for skill professions. This is a storyline that is probably mostly about fighting for something that is good and fighting against evil. But I would like to see 3 skills for Farming in the game.

• Agronomy – The ability to produce fertile ground, get healthy seeds, and increase the effectiveness of the plant as an ingredient for cooks.
  • I could see this tying into the ability to gather more complex fertile dirt for use on your farm. Maybe even tougher to grow plants require you recognizing and using specific dirt types. The higher your skill the more chance your plants have of growing in less fertile dirt. Your resulting harvest is also of higher quality giving more energy to food products made by cooks.
• Breeding – The ability to breed animals and create a stronger breed then sell on the market.
  • Maybe at low level you can only breed rabbits, but at higher level you can breed cows Horses, elephants, or whatever more difficult animal.
• Horticulture – Your ability to plant then harvest the plant.
  • When planting a higher skilled player may be able to plant the seed better assuring it will take to the ground. Then when gathering, they are able to retrieve more of their plant, where a lower skilled player my destroy a part of it.

These would be some neat dynamics to the Farming profession. I hope you do many more “passive” professions like cooking, tailoring, smithing, surgeon, driver(though I don’t know how that would work with a duel map), brewer, and more. Thanks.

 

Breeding, I doubt we will see till an expansions comes around.
But with that, here is some more skills I'd like to see:
Herding - The ability to round up some cows or horses and bring them into your barn.
Breaking horses so you can ride them.
Branding them so you know where to shop next time and for ownership.
And maybe horseshoeing and making saddles.

Yea these may be more for ranching then farming.

As for farming I'd be looking at games like Farmville 2, Rune Factory Frontier, and Harvest Moon for ideas.

 

I like the idea.
Its nice to break up farming into sub-categories, this allows farmers to differentiat from each other by specialising into different types of farming

 

I saw some photos on an email thing i got yesterday, in which there where entire farming communites on house rooftops and things of that nature. Done to look very nice and in fact pertty and appealing.

I hope that for houses that take up almost every little bit of land ou have, that theres a way ro farm on roofs (and in the basement for stuff that should not have daylight.. and in your attached river or ocaen for water front property).

I know Farming at this stage is planned more as a hobby then a skill tree.. but i hope it still gets some decent attention. How else are we going to convince farmville players to check it out?

 

I'd rather they make farming a skill than to make it something that everyone can do.

 

As with all things, the simpler the better.

My assumption is that a deed of level of say <village> will have <20> squares which can be used for either plants or animals, either of which can be harvested on a regular basis. So if you want to be a tailor, you might grow sheep and cotton. Or you might grow food or have a butcher shop.

 

I would like to see as many skills utilized as possible , especially if they don't require constant balancing from the Team ,,id say do it to it and have fun with it . Perhaps that could be a natural generation of rares ? and what Tim came up with would be a good start .
Lor

 

im a bit fuzzy on the farmin gtopic as its been a while, but i believe the plan is that initally it will be open to everyone and wont really be sonidered a skill. However for a later expansion or content release it may be developed into a full blown skill.

 

Sir Stile, I heard/read the same thing that farming would be more of a hobby instead of a skill. Basically, like how plant growing was handled in UO. I haven't heard if they would turn it into a skill in future episodes. The problem with farming is that it usually requires a lot of land, so I am not sure how that would be doable in SotA at least with the dual scale maps. Maybe they can make fields available on the outskirts of towns.

 

I'd like to see public farm fields that can be tended by players, but we shall see.

 

God I didnt hear that. When they said there was farming I was all excited about a passive profession that I can get into. If everyone can do it... its just a hobby and I cant be involved in the economy while doing it.

I must make a post asking.... doing so now.

 

OMG you guys all have left out the most important skill there needs to be for farming.....


BUTCHERING!!!

How are you going to get all the meat out of them little piggies? There were butcher shops and cleavers and all that in UO, but no butchering went on. You might see a hanging animal carcass as a prop sometimes. The higher your butchering skill the bigger the animals you can butcher, the more meat comes out with each butcher. >=-P Be almost like lumberjacking except your looking for meat. Some of the equipment/items butchers would need could come from a tinker like: Chain, rope, hooks(to hang em), cleaver, pot(to dump all the icky parts no one wants to eat keep the liver though!). Now I hope none of you all are vegetarians =O that could be bad.

Another thing that might be good would be sheering sheep for their wool, or specializing in wool or milk gathering, but yea what would be the point of getting milk in a game like this? It was pretty useless in UO to have a pitcher of milk. Or a bread loaf, muffin, cookie or anything like that. All food did the same thing, made you feel more satiated, healed stamina and thats it. Not like we want to worry about nutrition or anything and make sure our characters get enough fiber, or calcium or anything. If you wanted food in UO you just got fish steaks cuz you can buy em in bulk.

 

Bring back the flax fields!

 

Props for putting thought into this. Personally, it's not something I would ever do. Of all the skills in LOTRO, farming was the most boring/useless. Maybe they can make it more relevant and interesting in this game. Or, as we've discussed in other threads, make it so only those who really have the interest & dedication get the biggest benefits from quality farming. I'm a fan of that - if it's your passion, it should be a deep & rich experience.

But personally, I'd rather have the developers focus their efforts on aspects of the game that everyone will use.

 

There will be butchering as they have already made a butcher's table crafting station.

In the first episode farming will have a very minor role, but the later episodes they will hopefully improve the role of farmers.

 

the natural farming and gathering of cotton and other vegetables in UO was something I really enjoyed. it was nice as a new player to be able to go grab some food from a public farm in town and be able to "satiate your hunger" for free. It was nice when I learned how to turn cotton into thread into yarn into cloth.
Perhaps one of the skills will allow you to better harvest the public resources, and at a certain level allow you to plant your own?
It will probably not be a huge focus until later on. We could see a huge demand for it as well.

Personally there are days where I enjoy mindlessly/stresslessly coming home from a long day and just doing a few "chores" in game like gathering or some crafting. The fact that a game can offer a balance between action and adventure as well as social and relaxing gameplay helps make it successful (in my eyes).

 

It would be nice if they could remove the tedium of farming. Rather than force the farmer to pick up all the (regular) apples from their orchard and walk over to the local vendor to sell them, they should make the regular stuff just go straight to the local vendors, and influence the economy. If you have a lot of apple farmers, apples will be cheap & plentiful at the local vendors automatically. If you have only one or two apple farmers, they'll be more expensive and less plentiful. And if there are no apple farmers, apples will be very expensive and very rarely available.

Then there's the rare & epic stuff - "special" apples suitable for use as a reagent in magic spells, for instance. Perhaps the apple farmer can choose for those, too, to automatically go to the local vendors - or he can keep them in his own inventory to dispense later.

But having the automatic option removes the tedium and helps drive the local economy.

One thing that bugged me about LOTRO is that prices never varied, no matter how common items were. The vendors near the farms always bought & sold stuff for the same price. There should be some effect on prices and availability based on the local economy. If you're the only person who's such a great apple farmer that you can readily produce the epic apples needed for high level spells, that should be reflected in the economy - people should know they have to travel to your town to buy them.

 

I always loved farming but having 1 million items to make everything sucks... Not sure how I would fix that maybe buy more and make a few thing harder to grow?

 

Turguin going with your apple example I actually like the idea.
My thought was what if each town/village/city have its own "apple" economy.
- there are apple trees or farms around the town that players can go contribute to, click to harvest the trees that are "ready" with a chance to proc and get one of the "special apples"
- perhaps a gathering skill increases this chance?
- when a player goes to a vendor to buy some apples, prices will depend on how many "apples" the town has in store (or some way of tracking how many people are contributing to picking apples)

downsides
- people are lazy, not everyone likes picking apples. what if you get stuck in a town with high apple prices?

this could apply for "insert generic resource name here" any resources that could be found around town or city, or in the countryside nearby

 

Well if it's a true player-driven economy, eventually someone will decide to invest in apple farming, because it will be profitable.

Of course, as a mage, am I happy because I can't cast my cool spell because nobody wants to farm apples? Not sure...