Nut trees

[Porkbrick]

I would love to see the fruit tree mechanic expanded to include nut trees. In particular large forest nut trees. Walnuts, chestnuts, pecans, even oaks can grow to be giants and produce amazing quantities of food for both wildlife and ancient humans. They were so important in times past that whole societies revolved around them and the food they provided. Most of the northern temperate species are deciduous and only drop nuts in fall. Seems to line up with the fruit trees in n the game. Size is of course something that would need to be addressed, as well as possibly high numbers of trees having to be tracked by the game all the time. 
I have played quite a bit with the acorns mod and I like it a lot. It does a good job of balancing the quantities of acorns you can gather (a lot), with the effort required to prepare them for eating. The mod just adds the acorns to the existing oak leaf blocks, that means they are available all year long and you have to defoliate the tree to get them. Also, when you don’t need them they drop regardless. Ideally they would only be available in fall and they would be harvestable or fall to the ground without chopping the tree.

walnuts do make nuts now, but I feel lucky if I get more than a few per tree cut down. 
 

IF having nut trees work like giant fruit trees could work in the game engine then that opens some cool possibilities. Careful consideration would need to go into balancing. While it would be nice to have a bunch of easily stored food suddenly available just before winter, you wouldn’t want it to be so easy that you don’t need to prep at all.
 

In the wild, you would have animals eating the nuts, the weather spoiling them, and harvest times being short or inconsistent. Additionally, a lot of these big forest tree produce on alternate years or every few years. So you need to really look around to find a good harvest.

Lots of technical stuff to work out. I think it could be pretty neat. 

 

[Thorfinn]

In part, I suspect the reason is that in a reasonably realistic growth rate, a handful of walnut or chestnut or pecan trees would supply all your food needs, unless a nut were so low in nutrition that it wasn't worth bothering with. The point is not so much realism as exploring other game options.

[Porkbrick]

I did consider that. I like that the acorns mod requires a bunch of steps to prepare the acorns. Makes it less of a free lunch as it were. You have to dry them, shell them, crush them, and finally grind them to get the most out of them. 
oaks are inedible without preparation in the real world, so that works in game. Other nuts that are edible with no/little processing could still need a proper drying process to make them storable. Raw nuts don’t have a great shelf life. Could also be fun if you had to compete with deer and pigs for the nuts when they drop. 
instead of the cutting propagation system you could have a less than 100% success rate on planted seeds 

[Echo Weaver]

Roasting nuts rather than drying them would give them a long shelf life, yes?

I think the game balance could be achieved just with controlling the density of nuts on a tree.

So walnut trees drop nuts, but only if you cut them down?

[Maelstrom]

Technically, walnut and oak trees do drop the corresponding nuts BUT the game considers them seeds and not a food.  I would think it wouldn't be too much work (but speaking from ignorance here) to tweak the game code to have oak and walnut trees produce a "fruit" similar to the fruit trees while keeping the current leaf harvesting to produce seeds.

[Porkbrick]

I might be wrong, but I think the walnuts are currently edible. They just drop in such low numbers that you’d never be able to get enough and still have any to replant 

[Krougal]

When seeds are food. It's one of those areas where realism has to give way to simplicity for games sake.

The same with the grain, and the potato and...turnips are root crops too, I guess they are their own seed too.

Considering you can eat the roots of cattails and thule, like Porkbrick said, you can probably eat the nuts too. I haven't felt the need to try.

I make steel and I eat real food and vino...lots and lots of vino.

[Echo Weaver]

Carrots too. I have noticed that there are several crops where the harvestable IS the seed. It seems a bit silly to get a bag of seeds when I harvest those. Handling all varieties of plantables correctly would be a big hassle. I've played other games that go the opposite direction -- the harvestable is always the seed. That gets just as absurd.

My base is near a forest filled with walnut trees. I will go test whether I can eat the seeds sometime soon.

[Thorfinn]

IRL, brassicas (cabbage, turnip) and closely related mustards (parsnip, carrot) all propagate by seeds. If you want the crop, you harvest it the first year, if you want the seeds, you harvest the second year. 

[Echo Weaver]

2 hours ago, Thorfinn said:

IRL, brassicas (cabbage, turnip) and closely related mustards (parsnip, carrot) all propagate by seeds. If you want the crop, you harvest it the first year, if you want the seeds, you harvest the second year. 

Huh. I stand corrected. I thought carrots propagated like potatoes. It's a good thing I am not a farmer IRL.

[Krosis]

I think they should try and merge both regular trees and fruit trees.

Making regular trees drop seeds like fruits would be more realistic and add new food sources. Rare wood trees could be balanced with longer grow rates rather than low seed drops. After all a sheep needs a year to grow, meat needs 2 months to get salted and a fruit tree needs several years, but redwood grows in a week or so.

Growing fruit trees from seeds would make them less anoying and make room for a domestication process like with animals. Also this would incentivate exploring as some fruit trees are so domesticated they would not survive in the wild on their own, and wild fruit trees are not very productive.

Chestnuts and acorns, for example, could be a different source of grain, with higher yields but longer times to produce, just like fruit trees and berry bushes now.

[Zero_]

On 10/28/2024 at 5:20 PM, Thorfinn said:

In part, I suspect the reason is that in a reasonably realistic growth rate, a handful of walnut or chestnut or pecan trees would supply all your food needs, unless a nut were so low in nutrition that it wasn't worth bothering with. The point is not so much realism as exploring other game options. 

So what? It's already super easy to obtain way more than enough food in Vintage Story. We as humans like variety and so I think the whole "it'd become too easy and people wouldn't explore anymore, or wouldn't enjoy the full game" is a non-issue. We explore because we like to, we challenge ourselves because we enjoy challenges. That is why you continue to venture further and further from home to hunt as the game goes on, you continue to collect mushrooms, even though you have the ability to just grow what you need in your own backyard.

[Thorfinn]

13 minutes ago, Zero_ said:

So what? It's already super easy to obtain way more than enough food in Vintage Story.

Right. But there are also a solid group of people who want more of a survival experience, and, reading the code, Tyron can accommodate that in a jiffy, by changing the global rates in mapgen. FWIW, I'm pretty sure the long range plan is to add more of everything, once the core functions are coded. Look at how often mods have to be updated to work with the current code. Now imagine that all those things that are currently mods were base game. The devs would have to do the updating, and we'd be lucky to get one update a year. And I'm pretty sure the idea is to switch to the fruit tree model, rather than the model that comes from that other game. 

Those who want greater quantities of nuts can easily add mods like Acorns, like the OP mentions,  or Wildcraft:Fruits and Nuts. Or even use those mods as templates for adding their own trees. Better yet, use the fruit tree model, but grow them from seeds.