BERRY BUSH NO GROWABLE I WANT BERRY BUSH! Please?

[Sheepdoug]

Berry bush no growable : ( make me very sad : ( cannot grow many many berries and have limited amount of berries : ( please change this and make berry bush reproducible! Make me poop berry seeds when eat berry please!

[Grummsh]

But you can just cut the berry bushes and replant theme elswhere - and you can gather alot and make a berry bush orchard or such no problem.

[YordaEatsMelon]

On 2/15/2025 at 4:43 PM, Grummsh said:

But you can just cut the berry bushes and replant theme elswhere - and you can gather alot and make a berry bush orchard or such no problem.

The only issue is if you enjoy still being able to encounter bushes in their original locations, importing them home eliminates this. It also means that to have lots of bushes you have to go out farther and farther, when you could otherwise just grow more yourself back at home.

[xXx_Ape_xXx]

In a 1mil x 1mil world (vanilla settings), there's basically unlimited berry bushes to be found, so I wouldn't be concerned about "picking every bush" around your base. And as exploration is a huge part of this game, you're bound to go to new areas that have more bushes than you could ever carry. As much as I've wished for the bushes to drop seeds, I've accepted that I'll have to go explore to find the bushes I want in my garden. Hopefully they will add propagation of berry bushes some time in the future, but until then there's always a mod to help with most things not already in the game.. 

[Grummsh]

12 minutes ago, xXx_Ape_xXx said:

In a 1mil x 1mil world (vanilla settings), there's basically unlimited berry bushes to be found, so I wouldn't be concerned about "picking every bush" around your base. And as exploration is a huge part of this game, you're bound to go to new areas that have more bushes than you could ever carry. As much as I've wished for the bushes to drop seeds, I've accepted that I'll have to go explore to find the bushes I want in my garden. Hopefully they will add propagation of berry bushes some time in the future, but until then there's always a mod to help with most things not already in the game.. 

Yeah what Ape just said but if you really really want to be able to get berry bushes other way there is always this mod:

https://mods.vintagestory.at/wildfarmingrevival

"Seeds for flowers, fruits, cacti, and fern can be extracted with a knife in the crafting grid. These seeds do not require farmland or water, but they are sensitive to temperature and will get a heat boost in a greenhouse" - that means you can get seeds out of berrys themselves and plant these to grow into bushes  There are also other cool things in this mod like mushroom substrate so you can grow your own shrooms or cutting pine/accacia to get resin more easily  

[ManaWei]

From my perspective it's more about the realism.. yeah i get a lot of flak for that opinion.. 

[Grummsh]

15 hours ago, ManaWei said:

From my perspective it's more about the realism.. yeah i get a lot of flak for that opinion.. 

Well i do get the realism arguments and i try not to disregard but... You actually can just dig out a bush - like a berry bush and plat it somewhere else in real life - maybe it would be more realistic in the game if you had to use a shovel for that instead of breaking it like it is know but yeah therese that

 

[xXx_Ape_xXx]

Everyone keeps talking about this "realism" when arguing for their views, yet we still have tools breaking and vaporizing into thin air once they "break", we survive with nothing to drink, yet we starve and start to die the very second we get hungry.

We have soo many aspects and mechanics in this game that is nowhere near close to "realism", yet we long for it to be the pillar we stack our arguments on when we wish we had certain functionality in the game.

If we were to add every real step needed to even craft a simple knapped axe head, find and prepare a suitable shaft to mount it on, gather the needed fibres and sinew to secure it to the shaft, and then use it to chop down our first tree.. we would have gameplay that would take hours, if not days, to even get some simple tools we could proudly use.

Let's cherish the great game we already have, and not forget that this is after all, a game! We have enough time consuming and hair pulling things happen IRL, why would we want to bring it all into an already great game?

Edited March 29, 2025 by xXx_Ape_xXx

[-Glue-]

Berries are already super OP, they pretty much let you survive indefinitely without having to cook or hunt throughout all of the warm seasons. They are already everywhere, we really don't need to be able to farm them. Bringing them home for convenience means sacrificing not having that supply out in the wild, but even so, there is still so many to be found, you will never really be hurting to find more elsewhere.
I had a crock of cooked food I took with me when adventuring out to do the story. After several in games weeks, if not months, I never even opened it. I was just eating berries I picked along the way, and never ran out. I was never hurting for food. I eventually returned home, with a still sealed crock.

Personally, I think berries should feed you less, and/or make you sick if you eat too many. That way they are not something to live off of forever, but rather hold off starvation when desperate. Cooking them into meals would avoid you getting sick.

We need to think of how to make them compliment the gameplay, not hyperfocus on unbalanced realism.

[PineReseen]

I feel like adding berry bush reproduction would probably be a good idea, but probably not in the berry bushes' current state. It would probably be more appropriate to add it in a berry bush overhaul, or maybe a wider crop rework. Berries can already sustain you for quite a while if you keep finding them, so maybe reducing their saturation or making dietary choices matter would be more realistic and balanced, like @-Glue- mentioned.

Expanding berry bushes from them being just an infinite food dispenser that breaks below/above a certain temperature would also go well with balancing the bushes.

What if there was different types of blueberry, or cranberry variety like it is with the currant, and they would pollinate each other? If you have a largely homogeneous blueberry garden, it would give around 40 satiety per berry (More or less, I'm not sure how reduced the satiety would have to be balanced), but if you had a heterogeneous blueberry garden, it would receive a buff of 10 satiety per different variant. Maybe the different variants of blueberry would be generated in gradients, so you have to go a fair bit away to be able to pollinate your garden adequately.

And of course, replanting the bushes would probably include harvesting a branch off the bush (Maybe limiting it how many times you can do it in a month without beginning to kill the plant would also balance it out fairly.), and planting it in the soil.

I feel like a solution similar to this would satisfy the exploration, difficulty, and balance aspect of the game equally. Now, do note that I am not a biologist and I just read most of the information from some gardening websites and tried to make it "balanced".
I hope I didn't just throw out the original idea and make it my own, but oh well...

[Thorfinn]

19 minutes ago, PineReseen said:

And of course, replanting the bushes would probably include harvesting a branch off the bush (Maybe limiting it how many times you can do it in a month without beginning to kill the plant would also balance it out fairly.), and planting it in the soil.

The Wildcraft mod does this. Used to be you could get max 2 cuttings per fruiting cycle or something like that. Plus, cuttings had a very short freshness timer. And it is still way overpowered. Nerfing the satiety would help in that respect but would then require you to eat EVEN MOWR berries to keep your nutrition bar filled, kind of the opposite of what @-Glue- is suggesting, that we come up with a way to reduce berry consumption.

[PineReseen]

19 minutes ago, Thorfinn said:

The Wildcraft mod does this. Used to be you could get max 2 cuttings per fruiting cycle or something like that. Plus, cuttings had a very short freshness timer. And it is still way overpowered. Nerfing the satiety would help in that respect but would then require you to eat EVEN MOWR berries to keep your nutrition bar filled, kind of the opposite of what @-Glue- is suggesting, that we come up with a way to reduce berry consumption.

The idea I have with reducing the satiety is that the players would lose more energy looking for berries than they would gain, and that berries would not suffice as the sole food source, thus requiring packing food on long expeditions. If that does not work, then perhaps making eating too much of a single food type would result in debuffs, and you'd have to eat turnips or hunt alongside eating berries. Maybe cross-pollinated berries you'd have at home would be fine and dandy for your satiety needs, but wild ones, not so much. Or tweak the additional satiety of additional variants to be 20 so there would not have to be more than 3 variants of currants? Or just increase satiety to be 50 and additional per variant to 15.

As for the cutting, I was thinking you can do it only 1 time per 1 or 2 months. You could still run around and cut off branches of other bushes in the wild, but as there are a lot of them in the wild, that probably wouldn't differ too much from just replanting them.

Edited April 5, 2025 by PineReseen
Fixed typo

[Thorfinn]

1 hour ago, PineReseen said:

The idea I have with reducing the satiety is that the players would lose more energy looking for berries than they would gain

Sure. Then how do you keep the fruit bar from dropping? Does the fruit nutrition bar work differently than the others?

How it currently works is that the bar moves up with the satiety of the food consumed, and decreases with time. So reducing satiety by 50% would mean you need to consume 100% more berries to stay where you are. Seems weird to solve the problem of berries being too nutritious by making you eat two crocks of jam at a sitting to keep your nutrition levels up.

The problem is not the berry satiety, but rather with the availability of berries. The simplest solution appears to me to be either to reduce the yield per bush in *berrybush.json

			harvestedStack: { type: "item", code: "fruit-{type}", quantity: { avg: 4.4 }  },

and 

			{ type: "item", code: "fruit-{type}", quantity: { avg: 4.4 }  },

or reduce the number of bushes in worldgen for the common berries from, e.g.

		chance: 0.12,

to somewhere closer to that of white currants value of 

		chance: 0.03,

or even just change the number of bushes spawned in a location, e.g.,

		quantity: { dist: "invexp", avg: 2, var: 4 },

 

Of course, most people have memories of their first game or six starving to death. I had several such deaths not too long ago trying to find settings that gave the kind of water distribution I wanted.

[EDIT]

Keep in mind that changing this might require other changes. For example, cranberries and black currants and blueberries are all dye components. At the moment, you have them to spare, so dying cloth is not a massive investment of time and resources. But change the abundance of berries and dying cloth becomes more of a luxury. Which, it is, but if the Tailor player is going through all the available berries making clothes, it's going to cause issues with the cook.

Edited April 5, 2025 by Thorfinn

[PineReseen]

23 minutes ago, Thorfinn said:

Sure. Then how do you keep the fruit bar from dropping? Does the fruit nutrition bar work differently than the others?

How it currently works is that the bar moves up with the satiety of the food consumed, and decreases with time. So reducing satiety by 50% would mean you need to consume 100% more berries to stay where you are. Seems weird to solve the problem of berries being too nutritious by making you eat two crocks of jam at a sitting to keep your nutrition levels up. [...]

Hm. I haven't really considered that. The idea I had with the energy spent-to-gained ratio was that when you were traveling, you would mostly move in the direction that you wanted, and only take the berries closest to you, so they wouldn't keep your satiety infinitely full, otherwise you'd lose energy.

With berries for normal activities, you would just scavenge nearby bushes, or those you planted in your garden. As you expand your garden to include different bush varieties, (Or just more of the same fruit variety) the berries would gain satiety and nutrition so you would not have to look for wild berries as much.

Decreasing drops per bush or their availability seems like a good idea, but that just seems like the same thing as decreasing satiety of the fruit, except now you get it at different intervals (At least when traveling). Maybe a mix of these solutions would work best, but if decreasing the satiety of berries found per hour (bf/h) does not work, then balancing berries might be way more divisive in the community.

[Thorfinn]

4 minutes ago, PineReseen said:

Maybe a mix of these solutions would work best, but if decreasing the satiety of berries found per hour (bf/h) does not work, then balancing berries might be way more divisive in the community.

Sure. The easiest solution to the dye problem seems to me to be to drastically reduce the number of berries needed per unit dye. The reason no one cares at the moment about the tailor is that the 1 cranberry to 1 dye ratio means you are using up the cranberries that were just going to rot anyway. (Though the farmer in the group might have preferred them for compost, or the brewer for wine.) But make 1 unit of cranberries produce 5 or 8 or 10 or 16 units of dye, and you can make that less of an issue. Same is true for compost and wine, of course. Reduce their inputs required and the problem largely goes away.

It's really just a bunch of fine-tuning tweaks.

[Thorfinn]

2 hours ago, PineReseen said:

As for the cutting, I was thinking you can do it only 1 time per 1 or 2 months.

WC's limit was once every time it went "bushy", which was twice per fruiting cycle. One could always have it so you could only get clippings when ripe, or when flowering.

But the ability to propagate via clippings means it's possible (and a good idea) to do so as you explore, establishing small berry patches everywhere. Then you are back to the same issue, where you can travel anywhere in your AO, subsisting off berries. If you set your mind to it, by July of year 0, you could travel anywhere in about a 5k radius and have fresh berries wherever you go.

 

[PineReseen]

1 hour ago, Thorfinn said:

Sure. The easiest solution to the dye problem seems to me to be to drastically reduce the number of berries needed per unit dye. [...]

[...] It's really just a bunch of fine-tuning tweaks.

Seems fair.

48 minutes ago, Thorfinn said:

WC's limit was once every time it went "bushy", which was twice per fruiting cycle. One could always have it so you could only get clippings when ripe, or when flowering.

But the ability to propagate via clippings means it's possible (and a good idea) to do so as you explore, establishing small berry patches everywhere. Then you are back to the same issue, where you can travel anywhere in your AO, subsisting off berries. If you set your mind to it, by July of year 0, you could travel anywhere in about a 5k radius and have fresh berries wherever you go.

 

I'm kind of mixed about this. On one hand, this would just be bad for balance, but on the other hand, this would require a fair bit of effort, with late returns. You could just start turnip mini-farms everywhere if bushes are out of the question if you're determined enough. Plus they wouldn't just destroy themselves after a month (As far as I know).

People would probably just take the path of least resistance, so we could try:

Making shears consume a lot of durability to discourage mass harvesting, make branches need to be grown in a moist environment,
Make cuttings have only a small chance to take root like fruit trees (Probably the best one),
Or get rid of cutting bush branches entirely and replace it with a more complicated process like processing lots of mashed fruit into seeds through barrels or something.

We could just ditch the whole berry seed thing, but there's got to be a way, right?

[D3K01]

On 4/5/2025 at 10:02 AM, PineReseen said:

Making shears consume a lot of durability to discourage mass harvesting, make branches need to be grown in a moist environment,
Make cuttings have only a small chance to take root like fruit trees (Probably the best one),
Or get rid of cutting bush branches entirely and replace it with a more complicated process like processing lots of mashed fruit into seeds through barrels or something.

We could just ditch the whole berry seed thing, but there's got to be a way, right?

we could make it require a pot with Terra Preta, or high fertilizer, to grow into a small bush. after that it would be a matter of taking the bush from the pot or even just burying the pot for the bush to grow further. also if we make it so that cultivated plants also become tamed like animals do, it could allow us to grow higher yield crops or gain bushes that grow more berries.

[Thorfinn]

1 hour ago, D3K01 said:

we could make it require a pot with Terra Preta, or high fertilizer, to grow into a small bush.

What the game needs for this is potting soil. Several M Fert, a couple sand, a peat, maybe a dry grass. I for one would never bother with bushes if I had to use terra preta or fertilizer. Not when they are still available in the wild.

[D3K01]

15 minutes ago, Thorfinn said:

I for one would never bother with bushes if I had to use terra preta or fertilizer. Not when they are still available in the wild.

true on the Terra Preta, however if you're making a cutting it would need extra care to get it to sprout roots, which can be supplemented by fertilizer. however i think if planting from a tended cutting made a larger bush kind of like a hedge bush i think it would balance out. especially if it increased the amount of berries gathered.

[Thorfinn]

6 minutes ago, D3K01 said:

however if you're making a cutting it would need extra care to get it to sprout roots

IRL, I do that by putting the cutting in moist paper towels for a week or so, or, if I have a lot of cuttings, like elderberry, loosely bundled standing up in a shallow dish of water.

There was a mod that allowed you to do that with cattail roots -- put them in a bucket and after a while, you have two roots. Way too tedious when you could just go somewhere new and harvest roots in much less time.

[D3K01]

12 hours ago, Thorfinn said:

IRL, I do that by putting the cutting in moist paper towels for a week or so, or, if I have a lot of cuttings, like elderberry, loosely bundled standing up in a shallow dish of water.

... i don't know if we are talking about the same thing... to me a cutting is a small branch of the plant cut just beneath a flower or bud to give it a place to grow roots, that is then placed in soil to grow their roots. the only thing from a plant i have wrapped in paper towel and left in water were seed when i was attempting to germinate them. if we are somehow speaking of the same thing then I'm going to have to try your description, but, again, i don't believe we are.

[Thorfinn]

Yeah, that's what it is. If you can get them to grow rootlets, you can toss all the cuttings that were going to die anyway, and plant just the ones that will live.

I carefully rooted an even gross of the several varieties of wild raspberries growing on our land to plant in our woodlot before I knew the things grow like weeds here and I would have to go around slashing and burning to keep them from crowding out everything.

If you are rooting in water (and probably on paper towels), there's a fertilizer that really helps. The one I used is "TakeRoot", also have a couple that are specifically for hydroponics and one for especially hard to start cuttings like hardwoods. Check on the 'zon. Search for "rooting" and there are pages of listings.