Propagating plants and the fear of loss

[Jowi]

First of, i have a certain type of brainrot that gives me anxiety if anything in the (game)world truly disappears, which is why i dreading certain actions ingame and their (nonexisting)consequences.

And keep in mind that my reasons may be stupid, but my requests are not (i hope)

First example: berry bushes

i like berry bushes to be in nature, because thats where they are supposed to be and because it allows me to forage while out and about. Thus i always am reserved to actually just take them from there and plonk them in my base, because that sullys my world in a way, robs it of nature (bear with me here). So i always only take one or two bushes form a large group and take all those who for example grow on sand near water or other places they wouldnt normally grow because the funky worldgenereation.

Thus a way to propagate berrybushes, either by planting berries or taking cuttings, would be both appreciated and frankly realistic, i mean yes, if the player would be able to plant hundreds of bushes over their base would be overpowered at first, but it could be nerfed by reducing the sprouting succes rate or lenghening the sprout time like with fruit trees

(plus its not like making a field of berries isnt realistic in... real life, you know, its a thing, i get that industrial sized fields would feel weird in a pseudo medival setting but at least allowing for small scale reproduction would be nice)

Second example: reeds

Cattails and other reeds: Again, being able to replant them is nice, plus there usually are many and close nearby so i never actually have to transplant them to a field for convienece, but still, they are a limited ressource, especially the fact that cou can cook and eat them, a horrifying idea that never came to my mind because it would be permanently removing a thing from my world, is weird considering that fact.

thusly, either by small chance of seed drop or by giving, as the model would suggest, multiple roots that could be sepereatly replanted but needed time to mature, or by splitting a patch with a shovel receiving two smaller plant that needed growing again. just something

Third example: farmland

i get that picking up the dirt would mess with the nutrients, allowing for essentially cheating in a way, so maybe a way that picking it up again turns it into a competly nutrients poor version, just something that doesnt completely removes that block.

i know that some recipees essentially can create more blocks, but thats rather late and in small amounts, so not satisfactory. again, just something so the block isnt just lost, its a source of long decisionmaking on my side as to where to put my farms because of the fact that i have to fill these plots with dirt from elsewhere should i change my mind later.

fourth example: mushrooms

mushrooms grow on predetermined places and can be harvested with knifes and will regrow, technically not a problem, but it would still be nice to be able to grow them yourself, by taking spores or shift right clicking on placed log or something. maybe it could just work on player placed logs and after each harvest the log would get more and more rotten and after th efinal harevst it breaks into rot pieces, thsu limiting the player in needing a steady supply and stopping them from just plastering mushrooms on the walls of their houses. maybe even allow for continued growsth and harvest in the large plant pots simply. (plus a way to create forest ground would be neat, but idk if thats already a thing perhaps, havent seen it regrow though)

fith example: resin

resin on the other hand is one of the most frustrating to get ressources, so either player planted pines could generate it too or allow us to create resin taps, you know those carved grooves on the log flowing into a small pot, like humans have done for millenia

 

Lastly, and i know thats boring, but perhaps let traders sell the bushes and roots and stuff, like you can with other limited ressources already

 

I Know that most of these things are unneccessary in a big world, as one player could realistically never use up any of these resscources, but it just pains me that i have to steal all plants in my vecinity, leaving nature looking bare, if i want them at my base, or have to travel somewhere far else and do the same to it.

Most of these things are possible in real life, if introducing realism in a game about difficult realism harms the supposed balance of said difficulty, perhaps some thing should be rethought

(sorry if thats all weird and personal, but basically:)

 

TLDR: make certain things replenishable/ Propagatable

 

 

[Thorfinn]

Welcome to the forums, @Jowi!

 

All those issues are addressed in mods. Want details?

Wild Farming Revisited

Wildcraft (whatever the current version is called -- look it up on the mod page and you will get pointed in the right direction.)

Farmland Drops Soil

That might get you all of those. If not, add in At Water's Edge. I think that's all of them.

Edited September 19 by Thorfinn

[LadyWYT]

Welcome! All good points(and things that bug me in similar fashion), though as I understand it, Vintage Story is only around 10% of the full game it's supposed to be right now. It's also got a very small dev team. So while I'm pretty sure that all these will be added at some point in the future, they're also already covered by mods until then, as @Thorfinn has listed.

6 hours ago, Jowi said:

(plus its not like making a field of berries isnt realistic in... real life, you know, its a thing, i get that industrial sized fields would feel weird in a pseudo medival setting but at least allowing for small scale reproduction would be nice)

I dunno, seems pretty realistic to me, even for a medieval setting. If it's food, and you can figure out how to grow it efficiently at-scale, why not plant huge fields of it!

[CrazyGrape]

I'd also really like a way to propagate flowers in the base game

You can use them for dyes, but only horsetails are renewable.

[RedVanGhoul]

On 9/19/2024 at 7:40 PM, LadyWYT said:

If it's food, and you can figure out how to grow it efficiently at-scale, why not plant huge fields of it!

Greek plantations full of grapes and whatever else they wanted to make into wine. That may not have had combine harvesters, but they had huge fields of crop

Edited September 27 by RedVanGhoul

[Thorfinn]

19 hours ago, CrazyGrape said:

I'd also really like a way to propagate flowers in the base game

I know you specified base game, and that may be implemented someday once they get the more important bits done. Maybe it's in the vision. Dunno. But the vision is to have a game easily moddable to your tastes. And since https://mods.vintagestory.at/wildfarmingrevival does that and a whole lot more, and is configurable to taste, I think that's probably more in line with the design vision.

Edited September 27 by Thorfinn

[CrazyGrape]

On 9/27/2024 at 1:09 PM, Thorfinn said:

I know you specified base game, and that may be implemented someday once they get the more important bits done. Maybe it's in the vision. Dunno. But the vision is to have a game easily moddable to your tastes. And since https://mods.vintagestory.at/wildfarmingrevival does that and a whole lot more, and is configurable to taste, I think that's probably more in line with the design vision.

I generally pick my words with care, and indeed I am aware that there are plenty of mods out there that address my wishes. Making a game modder-friendly doesn't make the base experience immune from suggestions, wanted features, and constructive criticism. After all, most users of a product don't end up changing or tweaking it, so what comes out of the box is important. (I wouldn't be surprised if fewer than 10% of people change any settings whatsoever when creating their first world at least). I know it's not easy to program everything, and I'm very happy with what I'm seeing in the upcoming 1.20 update for instance .

I will likely get to mods in due time; I certainly had more than my fill with modded Minecraft, what with Tekkit, Feed the Beast, SkyFactory. I found great enjoyment from VS due to its resemblance to one of my favorite Minecraft mods, TerraFirmaCraft! That said, I generally delineate a game with vs without mods as two distinctly different experiences. One is by necessity a carefully curated set of features by the developers, and the other is (often/functionally) an all-you-can-eat buffet of love letters written by people who enjoy a game enough to write their own content for it! This is not to say that modders are less careful in the content they make, but they don't generally put the reputation of the entire game on the line if they break something .

Edited September 28 by CrazyGrape
reworded to remove implication that I've had enough of all mods in general

[Thorfinn]

Understood. I, too, generally choose my words with care.

My mention of the mod was 2-fold -- you don't have to wait to get that feature, and, more importantly, the devs can spend time doing things like multi-block entities and story areas like the RA, instead of spending time writing functionality that will most likely need to be rewritten as the game code progresses. Otherwise the core team is trying to decide if some new core functionality is going to break too many ancillary functions, so not worth messing with.

Think about something simple like wind direction. While it would have been pretty easy to generate a random number, even a weighted one so you have prevailing winds, it would have made implementation of sailing that much more difficult. The choice would have been to back out the wind direction code, ignore it, or put a lot more effort into this new multi-block entity when at this point, it's more of a proof of concept.

Edited September 30 by Thorfinn

[Bumber]

On 9/26/2024 at 2:23 PM, CrazyGrape said:

I'd also really like a way to propagate flowers in the base game

You can use them for dyes, but only horsetails are renewable.

I'm pretty sure flowers respawn over time on naturally-generated soil. The area outside my base filled up with them after years of gameplay and I had to start clearing them out.

[NastyFlytrap]

Why is there a bear with you?

 

On a more serious note, i have this problem too, but i found that in a world as big as vintage story, (so not dont starve where my thing applies to the whole map), i can just keep a nice, 1-2 km circle around my base natural, since thats where im going to be spending most of my time, and just pillage the rest for all its worth.

 

That being said, i am not a fan of vintage story's world gen, with its damn ugly ""bushes"" and tiny trees that have one or two blocks for their trunks, and grass thats too tall everywhere, and flowers, it just gets so cluttered, and not pretty real fast, so i kinda turn into a dad and have to mow the lawn, and organize the berry bushes because if i dont, then i go nuts from just how ugly this random sporadic spread of stuff is.

[Deaderpan]

On 10/6/2024 at 1:08 PM, NastyFlytrap said:

That being said, i am not a fan of vintage story's world gen, with its damn ugly ""bushes"" and tiny trees that have one or two blocks for their trunks, and grass thats too tall everywhere, and flowers, it just gets so cluttered, and not pretty real fast, so i kinda turn into a dad and have to mow the lawn, and organize the berry bushes because if i dont, then i go nuts from just how ugly this random sporadic spread of stuff is.

you'd be surprised how much "natural beauty" isnt natural. every meadow has its trees cleared, every lake has its algae removed, most forests have its deadfall removed. most highlands used to be dense forests that where turned into pastures for farm animals.

you're just doing like the 5th oldest job in human history, the "F*ck off nature im trying to survive here" job.

tho i do agree, those patches of bushes with tiny trees are a pain to navigate through and remove

[NastyFlytrap]

7 hours ago, Deaderpan said:

you'd be surprised how much "natural beauty" isnt natural. every meadow has its trees cleared, every lake has its algae removed, most forests have its deadfall removed. most highlands used to be dense forests that where turned into pastures for farm animals.

you're just doing like the 5th oldest job in human history, the "F*ck off nature im trying to survive here" job.

tho i do agree, those patches of bushes with tiny trees are a pain to navigate through and remove

While i agree with you that in the real world a lot of these are modified to look "idealistically pretty", in the game, these are just ugly. I've been to forests that havent been preened clean for tourists and i still liked it. It *was* a natural nature, you know?

 

In the game it just looks plain ugly. Not sure why exactly. I guess real life has nuance in its non uniformity and clutter, meanwhile the game just vomits ""bushes"" and ugly two block trunk trees everywhere. I want to enjoy my exploration in this game, and that requires it to be pretty. The shading, lighting, foliage animations, rain, those are all great, its just the world gen that produces mediocrity.

[Thorfinn]

I suspect your experiences in forests are not as natural as you think, or possibly just at a very particular point in the development of the forest . Without canopy trees, ground bushes and small trees overwhelmingly dominate, to the point of thickets even more dense than the densest in the game. In nature, forest fires usually clear that out from time to time, and the handful of remaining might grow to become canopy trees.

[NastyFlytrap]

19 minutes ago, Thorfinn said:

I suspect your experiences in forests are not as natural as you think, or possibly just at a very particular point in the development of the forest . Without canopy trees, ground bushes and small trees overwhelmingly dominate, to the point of thickets even more dense than the densest in the game. In nature, forest fires usually clear that out from time to time, and the handful of remaining might grow to become canopy trees.

Okay.

 

Not an excuse for them so be so fucking ugly. Also, unfair. Cuz the animals have wallhacks and can literally see me through walls, or in this case, bushes. To me, as the player, those bushes are not see through because im playing the game. Meanwhile, the animals can see through the leaves just like they'd in real life.

 

Also, yes, i know that in real life animals are good at hiding and they can see me from bushes while i cant see them, but we both know the AI's of the animals in this game is as crude as a bag of rocks. I understand your argument is 'realism' every single time i open my damn mouth, but its getting tiring. Especially because i've been into countless games in the past where i provided feedback *to make the game more fun*, and every single time a person like you came along who opposed whatever i said, every time i said anything, and everything, for seemingly no other reason than to be a contrarian.

 

I apologize for my rudeness, but after years of having to deal with people like you, im tired of it. Very much so. Its not even personal, its based purely on how you reply, not that you're the one doing the replying specifically.

 

Also also, there are countless things in this game that are unrealistic and yet you'd never apply your mindset against those and argue they should be realistic, so why the double standard? Why are you defending the game every opportunity i suggest something?

 

I never understood this mindset of jumping to the defense of the thing you love, even when its not under attacking. I love vintage story. I just think it could be better. I dont like white knights who shoot down anything and everything for nonsensical reasons.

Edited Wednesday at 07:51 PM by NastyFlytrap

[Thorfinn]

11 minutes ago, NastyFlytrap said:

Especially because i've been into countless games in the past where i provided feedback *to make the game more fun*, and every single time a person like you came along who opposed whatever i said, every time i said everything, and anything, for seemingly no other reason than to be a contrarian.

Don't be a jerk. I was replying specifically to: 

On 10/8/2024 at 1:54 PM, NastyFlytrap said:

I've been to forests that havent been preened clean for tourists and i still liked it. It *was* a natural nature, you know?

You act like someone who has never been to a wilderness area like the Boundary Waters Canoe Area between Minnesota and Canada. Or even regrowth areas of the upper Midwest or SE US.

[EDIT]

I'm not objecting to the suggestion, or whether it could be prettier. Fine, agreed. It's not that I'm shooting it down, just that it's not a priority for me. Not when it's trivial to adopt a gameplay which renders your concern moot. It's your insistence that the game cater to your playstyle which is the problem.

Edited Wednesday at 07:59 PM by Thorfinn

[NastyFlytrap]

20 minutes ago, Thorfinn said:

Don't be a jerk. I was replying specifically to: 

You act like someone who has never been to a wilderness area like the Boundary Waters Canoe Area between Minnesota and Canada. Or even regrowth areas of the upper Midwest.

1: Not everyone lives in america even if they speak english fluently

2: I dont even know what you oppose in my sentence. Like pure honesty here, i have no clue what you see in it that you dont like

Edited Wednesday at 08:16 PM by NastyFlytrap
I felt bad

[Maelstrom]

@Thorfinn isn't opposing you.  He's just adding information to the conversation.  It seems that you want to turn the conversation into an adversarial one.

[Thorfinn]

Thanks. @Maelstrom

@NastyFlytrap, I've been thinking about the easiest way to address your concerns. There used to be a mod called Shorter Tall Grass (or something like that) that simply replaced the tall grass model with medium, the medium with short, and the short with eaten. I didn't like it because then I needed to look at the hover text to see if this was a region I could collect grass from. But you could use that straight up to deal with the problems you are having with tall grass, or tweak it a bit to put all variants of grass at short or eaten.

As for leaf blocks, I'd think though it would be fugly, you could replace the "branchy leaves" with the stem from fruit trees, and the "leaves" with whatever most closely matches what you would like. You could use the mod Wildcraft Trees and Shrubs or it's current equivalent to see how to create your own leafy blocks, or, heck, just replace the "leaf" block with an air block. After all, apart from aesthetics, the only purpose a leaf block serves is as a combustible block if you want to burn off areas. (Which is another way of dealing with all those thick brush areas.

Though you do need to be a little careful with that. Thick brush is one of the few ways that you can give brown bears the slip. You need to be a lot more attentive if you clear out the underbrush.