Well Water

Gathering water is slow to the point of being useless for agriculture. Everyone buys buckets of water from the crafting vendors. But it's a more interesting world where wells and fountains are useful. It creates choices when laying out your farm i.e. more beds or a fountain, and it adds the gathering water activity to agriculture.

The cost of water is a gold sink. To keep the gold sink increase the cost of seeds by 4 gold (the cost of 4 buckets of water). Remove water from crafting vendors. Decrease the time to harvest water to something like 100 buckets of water a minute at a small fountain and 200 a minute at a large one. Add a harvest water skill to agriculture or have that rate increased by water attunement.

 

I agree with all you say EXCEPT the "increase the cost of seeds by 4 gold" part.
If gold sinks are necessary, find one elsewhere please.......

 

No thank you, I'd rather not waste another hour in order to keep my vendors stocked.

 

How about a water pump that requires a windmill to power it could automatically water "x" number of plants in the vicinity. The water pump could need regular maintenance that replaces the gold sink that is the water buckets. The "x" in that first sentence would be determined by the state-of-repair on the water pump.

A little bit like Sim City water pumps ...

For those that don't want automatic irrigation, they could continue buying buckets.

 

You lost me, Lained... keep your vendors stocked with what ?

 

Farmed goods, it'd take me an extra hour to harvest the required water even from a large source.

 

Let's just make the rain regional and rotating between regions, and make it water our plants that are OUTDOORS. Greenhouses shouldn't benefit from rain! Spoiler, I have no greenhouses and only farm outside.

 

The whole idea of being able to draw water from a well would be that if you put in the -time-, you saved a bit of money making your overall agricultural output more profitable.
However, like with almost every other example in this game, iinsufficient analysis was done to determine the "value" of a player's time. How many buckets worth 1 gold (2 gold each, when the system was initially added) could you get in an hour, vs. how much money could you get doing anything else.

In order for manual waterbucketing to be viable, it needs to be doable at a rate that is at least on par with (or approaching par with) other revenue generating activities. Otherwise it is a waste of time. You certainly don't do it because its "fun". In fact, water-macroing has been a longstanding problem precisely because it is too slow and too boring.

To address this problem, it either needs to be:
a) an active skill whose profitability is on par with other active activities
b) a passive/time delay skill (like farming/brewing) that 'gathers water over time' after a player initializes it

If it isn't either of those things, it either gets ignored (people buy water instead) or abused (people macro water).

Its been long asked for 'waterdrawing' to use the same methodology as other crafting, i.e. let the player queue it up to 60 and leave it. Honestly though, even in this scenario the rate is too slow to make it a viable 'active' activity, unless you were drawing like 10-20 buckets at a time. At best, it would be a "drawing water while watching netflix" thing (more activities that encourage player to tab out of the game while playing are not good).

What I'd personally prefer to see is a kind of resevoir system - wells, fountains, etc. of different sizes fill up with water over time. Interacting with these gives the player 50-100-500 buckets depending on the size. Then they start filling up again from 0. Option to buy buckets from npc vendor still exists. Sinking resources into crafting/buying water resevoir type buildings would achieve the need for a gold sink but eventually turn into a return on investment thing provided you had ample places to put such things.

 

Or, have it so you have an unlimited supply of water buckets IF a water source is on the same lot! This way, you are actually making having a water well on the same lot a usefull decision. You could have different water sources have a different watering cooldown, such as those tiny bird fountains have a longer cooldown, but the huge fountains or wells have a very short one. This could make things better!

 

Just because its another one of the baffling things....if you're planting outdoors, and it rains 10 times a day (even in the desert) this should deal with the watering steps.
Manual watering should really only be required in greenhouses or if you're planting stuff in a basement. Not only does it just make sense that rain water gets things wet but from a balance perspective adding water cost to benefit from greenhouse acceleration (or basement deceleration) kinda makes sense.

 

Actually, I'm asking that the cost of water be negligible and the time to draw it be negligible entirely because I think drawing water from a well to get water creates a more interesting and life like world than buying it from a vendor. I put in the 100/200 a minute because that fits the current design. I plant about 500 at a time so collecting water twice would be trivial to me. Maybe it should be even higher so that it is trivial for people that plant 5,000 at a time. I'd be happy if they made it open a pop-up where you could type in however many and get that in one go.

I would also like rain / climate to play a role in agriculture but I'm sure that's a bigger change. I was hoping that in keeping this small it might happen.

 

Greetings all you sota sinners,

I am a migrant worker who serves as a water boy for a large sota plantation, so I know what you've all been doing, you know it's a sin and if you continue to do it you are going to be in the same situation I am, trying to make a living on 1000 buckets a day out of a well that was meant to only water a single peasant's size lot.

Let's be very honest about what we are talking about here, which is industrial size farming involving more than a single village lot and most likely even more. But when we get into the industrial size, we are also talking about having at least a few or more real world hours of fun playing a dedicated farmer.

We do have these donkeys, and we do have a playful need to be able to do something with all our sota vegetables, because I suspect that less than 1% of our produce is ever used for cooking.

Water well from actor Lee Van Cleef's entry scene in the movie "The Good, the Bad and the Ugly".



In our game, Avatar feeds the donkey produce from the farm, donkey goes round and round, Avatar collects water? It's just a thought I had.