Fruit Trees vs Berry Bushes

[Dalinar]

Just a thought. If you play with 30 day months, it's clear that fruit trees are completely useless, but the game actually has 9 days per month by default, which means I have a maximum of 3 to 4 harvests per year for the bushes, compared to one harvest for the trees. But when it comes to trees, I like to have double or triple the harvest. That's why the question here is what kind of settings you play with. Because if these are standard then trees make perfect sense.

[LadyWYT]

4 hours ago, Echo Weaver said:

I suppose plentiful fish makes early game too easy?

Maybe, considering that fish don't fight back, but it's not really that difficult to hunt other animals for meat, or forage for berries and mushrooms either. I also wouldn't necessarily say that having more options makes early game(or other stages) any easier. It could, in that if one option doesn't exist, then you have an alternate method to achieve the same goal...but the catch is that you have to be aware of your options and take advantage of them in the first place. It's also important that the player pick the correct option from the choices they have, as Vintage Story will very much punish poor choices.

[Echo Weaver]

4 hours ago, Dalinar said:

Just a thought. If you play with 30 day months, it's clear that fruit trees are completely useless, but the game actually has 9 days per month by default, which means I have a maximum of 3 to 4 harvests per year for the bushes, compared to one harvest for the trees. But when it comes to trees, I like to have double or triple the harvest. That's why the question here is what kind of settings you play with. Because if these are standard then trees make perfect sense.

Isn't the time to harvest scaled for the time scale you choose? I haven't messed with the default time scale, but I assumed I'd get the same number of berry harvests regardless. Not true?

[Krougal]

3 hours ago, Echo Weaver said:

Isn't the time to harvest scaled for the time scale you choose? I haven't messed with the default time scale, but I assumed I'd get the same number of berry harvests regardless. Not true?

It does. There really is no point in adjusting the amount of days, it's to satisfy those who make that their "it's not realistic" hill to die on. Every game that has a compressed calendar of some sort has a group of players that is driven nuts by it.

 

 

[Lollard]

On 11/14/2024 at 2:00 PM, Echo Weaver said:

If we're talking about early-game food in general, it makes me crazy how low the fish spawn rate is.

It makes me crazy how they don't drop any meat half the time. Going after fish is a waste of time on vanilla.

[Thorfinn]

42 minutes ago, Lollard said:

Going after fish is a waste of time on vanilla.

Maybe. Fish don't bite back, and you don't even have to cook them. If you are not very good at hunting, they are also a safe way of preparing meat stew, where you can improve its satiety by 70% over cooked fish, 375% over raw fish, something you cannot do with wolf-flesh. But like @LadyWYT says, you have to know its an option.

No, I don't go after fish except in oddball circumstances, but then again, I'm pretty good at hunting, and I definitely do not want the satiety bar to stop any more than absolutely necessary in the early game.

[Krougal]

I feel like fish are for early game, although 1.20 at some point made them give more nutrition cooked, but I also hunt a lot so I just have no need for fish after the first few days. Everyone takes it for granted that you can find tons of berries to live off of but I have tried warm starts where there wasn't much to eat besides bamboo shoots and I had to explore far to find berries.

 

[Echo Weaver]

31 minutes ago, Thorfinn said:

No, I don't go after fish except in oddball circumstances, but then again, I'm pretty good at hunting, and I definitely do not want the satiety bar to stop any more than absolutely necessary in the early game.

Shrug, I just have a different playstyle. I'm a sneaker rather than a fighter. I enjoy contriving ways to avoid head-to-head combat or tilt the conflict wildly in my favor. If I try out Primitive Survival, I'm sure I'll enjoy traps. I'm playing mod-light right now because vanilla is still fresh, but in a future game I'll give it a spin.

(Heh. I also enjoy building unique experiences each time I play a game like this. I'm already pondering a Homo Sapiens save with Primitive Survival and the stack of Fauna of the Stone Age mods.)

[Thorfinn]

3 hours ago, Krougal said:

although 1.20 at some point made them give more nutrition cooked

I wondered if that wasn't the case. In previous versions I was pretty sure cooking them over a campfire was worse, but in a cooking pot much better. But I didn't care enough to bother reloading an older version of the game.  

[LadyWYT]

3 hours ago, Echo Weaver said:

stack of Fauna of the Stone Age mods.

One feature that I really like about these mods is that they actually make the game scarier. Not that Vintage Story's monsters aren't freaky, but they make noises that do not sound like animals at all. With the Fauna mods, all of the animals make noises, and it'll be fairly obvious that you're hearing an animal and not a monster, even if you're not that familiar with the animal making the sound. What makes it scary, in my opinion, is not knowing whether it was a passive animal that made the noise, or an animal that's highly aggressive. Once you learn which animals make which noises, it gets a little less scary, but some of the predators move very fast and hit rather hard, so I wouldn't say that the fear ever really disappears entirely.

3 hours ago, Thorfinn said:

No, I don't go after fish except in oddball circumstances, but then again, I'm pretty good at hunting, and I definitely do not want the satiety bar to stop any more than absolutely necessary in the early game.

I'm somewhat the opposite--I like fish for variety, and will deliberately go after them if there's a good fishing spot nearby. If I'm out on a short trip too I'll usually take advantage of the fish I find(as well as other forage) for food, since it doesn't require cooking. Otherwise, I'm pretty much hunting about everything that moves; composting the bushmeat and using redmeat/poultry in stews.

[Dalinar]

On 11/15/2024 at 1:55 AM, Echo Weaver said:

Isn't the time to harvest scaled for the time scale you choose? I haven't messed with the default time scale, but I assumed I'd get the same number of berry harvests regardless. Not true?

Its not. 
its always 16 days for berry bushes.

[ArgentLuna]

Ive found its best to just pick from the local trees 

[Echo Weaver]

On 11/15/2024 at 7:13 PM, LadyWYT said:

One feature that I really like about these mods is that they actually make the game scarier. Not that Vintage Story's monsters aren't freaky, but they make noises that do not sound like animals at all. With the Fauna mods, all of the animals make noises, and it'll be fairly obvious that you're hearing an animal and not a monster, even if you're not that familiar with the animal making the sound. What makes it scary, in my opinion, is not knowing whether it was a passive animal that made the noise, or an animal that's highly aggressive. Once you learn which animals make which noises, it gets a little less scary, but some of the predators move very fast and hit rather hard, so I wouldn't say that the fear ever really disappears entirely.

When I read the descriptions of these mods, I can just picture a Stone Age vibrantly alive, where early human is just an afterthought. It's very different from the quiet-cataclysm setting of default Vintage Story.

[Khornet]

On 11/11/2024 at 6:04 PM, LuisEdGm said:

What is the point (other than aesthetic) of working so hard for fruit trees when berries have the same satisfaction rating (other than cranberry) and are SO MUCH easier to gather in a nice garden?

 

 

[Sqweak]

I like how hard it is to get a tree growing, it makes the game even more immersive. Fruit trees are hard to grow and take time to start producing--I cant imagine getting cuttings to take is an easy task. I'm trying to get some cuttings to take before winter.

[LadyWYT]

8 minutes ago, Yinminni said:

I like how hard it is to get a tree growing, it makes the game even more immersive. Fruit trees are hard to grow and take time to start producing--I cant imagine getting cuttings to take is an easy task. I'm trying to get some cuttings to take before winter.

To me, the difficulty of getting a fruit tree going is part of what makes it satisfying to harvest one when you do get them established. Not only do they produce a lot of fruit in one harvest, that often keeps for quite a while, but having a proper orchard means that you sank quite a bit of time into that part of your farm. Even moreso if you managed to graft two or three different fruit types onto one tree.

[Sqweak]

1 minute ago, LadyWYT said:

To me, the difficulty of getting a fruit tree going is part of what makes it satisfying to harvest one when you do get them established. Not only do they produce a lot of fruit in one harvest, that often keeps for quite a while, but having a proper orchard means that you sank quite a bit of time into that part of your farm. Even moreso if you managed to graft two or three different fruit types onto one tree.

Agreed! Can't wait to have excess to store, feed pigs, and make pies! Thats far off for now.