tree seed droprates are way too low

[Jowi]

ive been seeing this discussion on reddit recently and its been fanning my own frustrations again:

why the hell do trees drop less seed when cut? why do you need to manually punch each leaf? theyre seeds, theyre already hanging on the tree! it falling over wouldnt destroy them! with the sticks i could kind of see it, them breaking off in the process, but seeds? do they just evaporade? those acorns surely stay intact from a little fall, how do you think they plant themselves in nature?

and then, the droprates themselves. why are trees dropping but a handful of seeds, most of the time none? and dont you dare say Balance! you know damn well thats bullshit. in real life trees give hundreds if not thousands of seeds, here its two, maybe three. sure VS trees are a little smaller, and the seeds drop yearround instaed of only at a certain time of year (actually why not ty that into the mechanic?). but not being able to keep a forest above the replacing level is ludicrous. for some trees is objectively impossible. case in point, crimson maple. how many times have i seen a couple of them in a forest finally afetr a long walk, punch EVERY SINGLE LEAVE PER HAND, only to get NOTHING!

and dont come with "we try to encourage exploration", just admit you made a mistake. the only sustainable way of keeping certain trees is buying them from a trader, which is boring nonsense

and walnuts, WALNUTS! why are they even edible? who ever said: "you know, i chopped down a whole tree after punching all the leaves i could reach before hand, building an ugly dirtpillar in the process, and all i got where a handful of seeds, how about i eat some of them"- nobody, nobody ever did that. you know how cool it would be to actually have walnuts as a viable food source? but having to pillar up and destroy them all by hand to get anything (i got literally not a single seed from a giant tree by felling it) is simply too much work for too little food. yeah sure its protein, but the fact that you cant cook with them should cancel it out! Have you ever seen a real walnut tree? have you ever had to pick up all the walnuts in autumn? do you know how much that is? 

or acorns, how cool would it be to use acorns as pig feed, but again, no, too valuable

and to get to the leaves in the first place needs ugly and weird nerdpoling up the tree to get every last leaf, which surely cant be thr intended way of playing? right? RiGHT?

 

you get my frustration, tree seed droprate beeing tied to hand vs felling makes no sense, and the amount of seeds you get is absurdly low, to the popint of beeing unsustainable within one generation

 

so here some of my ideas how to fix it:

1. ONE droprate, regardless of how the eaves are destroyed. shears are still useful for clearing, but handpunching doesnt offer advantage, rather felling gets the same as hand before

2. higher droprate, like COME OOOONE, nobody ever propagated rare trees successfully, and having to travel far and wide, strip the beautiful landscape of its special trees, only to get literally nothing in return most of the time just isnt good gamedesign, doesnt encourage exploration, isnt balanced, and is just plain frustrating and makes no sense (and since you can buy them form traders anyway..., i mean im thankful for that, at least this way its somewhat renewable)

and maybe, but a bit weird:

3.a single special leaf "crown" block in every tree, that is guaranteed to drop one seed, in addition to the other leaves, so there is at least no loss

4. seed droprates beeing tied to the seasons, keeping the old low droprate most of teh year, but having a crazy higher one for their individual month, maybe even so the player has to keep track of when its most advantageous to chop down each type of tree to maximise seedharvest

5. if upping the seed droprate, maybe in exchange introduce a possibility of failure when planting, similar to fruit trees, or the need of watering (if not by rain), or just increase the growtime (wasnt it on default 2x in the past at some point? recently its been default 1x, which i like, and can be changed individuliy of course)

6.(i mean would there be a way to introduce a system of them dropping seeds automatically wihtout cutting the tree?, i mean not like in dynamic item form, but like either pregenerated lying on the gorund, or all at once during a certain season, but again in solid item form, maybe like snow, or idk, hitting it with a hammer lol. but no, probably not easy or performance friendly)

 

 

and yes, i know there are mods that up the drop rate, and yes, ive been using "useful shears", but mods cant always be the bandaid for everything

if anything, anything at all, just unify the droprate, so i dont have to dirtpole up and punch every single leaf, so i can just chop it down, at least that, please

 

 

 

 

 

[Echo Weaver]

Haha. I was going to suggestion "Useful shears." It really did change things for me. I was so sick of whacking all the leaves off of my oak trees just to finally get one seed to replant after I chopped it down.

Walnut in particular should have a higher drop rate.

But I agree that a felled tree should drop several seeds, and usually it doesn't drop any.

Edited September 1, 2025 by Echo Weaver

[LadyWYT]

Shears greatly increase the drop rates of both sticks and tree seeds--you're supposed to use shears on the leaves first before cutting the tree in order to get the most resources. By doing so, you'll be getting tree seeds at a high enough drop rate to both sustain and slowly expand a forest. 

Seed drop rate also depends heavily on the type of tree in question. Common trees like pine and birch tend to drop more seeds than ebony or purpleheart. Ebony and purpleheart are much more rare since you can make the best crates out of them(more storage slots compared to other crate types). Likewise, the rarity is also to prevent players from doing like the other block game and just getting one seed for a tree like this, taking it home, and having an entire forest's worth of ebony/purpleheart with little effort.

1 hour ago, Jowi said:

and walnuts, WALNUTS! why are they even edible? who ever said: "you know, i chopped down a whole tree after punching all the leaves i could reach before hand, building an ugly dirtpillar in the process, and all i got where a handful of seeds, how about i eat some of them"- nobody, nobody ever did that. you know how cool it would be to actually have walnuts as a viable food source? but having to pillar up and destroy them all by hand to get anything (i got literally not a single seed from a giant tree by felling it) is simply too much work for too little food. yeah sure its protein, but the fact that you cant cook with them should cancel it out! Have you ever seen a real walnut tree? have you ever had to pick up all the walnuts in autumn? do you know how much that is? 

Walnuts are probably the only tree I'd agree needs a bit of tweaking. I think in this case, there ought to be a walnut seed and edible walnut items, so you can have a seed or two to plant new trees while having edible walnuts at the same time. And rather than needing to chop the trees to get your nuts, you could just look around underneath walnut trees come autumn and pick up all the ripe nuts that have fallen. Keep them in the shell for long term storage, and shell them when you're ready to cook/eat them. And of course, this idea could apply to any edible nut-bearing tree, not just walnuts.

[Bruno Willis]

1 hour ago, LadyWYT said:

Common trees like pine and birch tend to drop more seeds than ebony or purpleheart.

Birch is so hard to propagate! I use shears and I have no trouble at all getting way more acorns, walnuts and maple seeds, but I am so very careful to shear every leaf-block for each birch tree I cut and I am not quite at replacement levels. I think because they have so few leaves per tree, even if the drop-rate is high, it feels like they're a precious tree.

I would love to see a way for forests to regenerate perhaps, as if there are seeds buried in the ground and when space opens up they have a chance to go. Basically, forest floor would have a slim chance to generate a planted sapling if it was exposed to direct sunlight during spring. That might mitigate the need for a guarantied seed drop?

I do think the drop-rate is too low, although manageable for ordinary trees when using shears. 

[Echo Weaver]

6 hours ago, LadyWYT said:

Shears greatly increase the drop rates of both sticks and tree seeds--you're supposed to use shears on the leaves first before cutting the tree in order to get the most resources. By doing so, you'll be getting tree seeds at a high enough drop rate to both sustain and slowly expand a forest. 

I don't think this is vanilla? If shears increase the seed drop rate on their own, it's not very much. I didn't notice any difference until I installed Useful Shears.

I'm pretty sure the tooltip for shears just says that it makes breaking leaves faster, which it does do.

ETA: I don't know about the drop rate on sticks. I got so many sticks trying to get seeds I can't guess whether the drop rate increased with shears or not.

Edited September 2, 2025 by Echo Weaver

[LadyWYT]

47 minutes ago, Echo Weaver said:

I don't think this is vanilla? If shears increase the seed drop rate on their own, it's not very much. I didn't notice any difference until I installed Useful Shears.

https://wiki.vintagestory.at/Shears

It is vanilla. You don't get a ridiculous amount of seeds, but it's a bit more than what you'd get breaking all the leaves by hand.

[Echo Weaver]

2 minutes ago, LadyWYT said:

https://wiki.vintagestory.at/Shears

It is vanilla. You don't get a ridiculous amount of seeds, but it's a bit more than what you'd get breaking all the leaves by hand.

I don't think that says it increases the seed drops? "Using shears allows players to gather sticks and tree seeds from trees. Shears break leaf blocks in a 3 block wide cube, centered on a targeted block."

This implies you need shears to gather sticks and seeds from trees. I don't know if that was ever true, but it's not true now. Otherwise, it talks about increased efficiency in block breaking. That WILL get you more seeds faster in the sense that you destroy leaves faster, but when you have a limited number of leaf blocks on a tree, it won't stop you from removing all the leaves without getting a seed block.

Maybe it does increase seed drops. I just didn't notice when I used them, so it doesn't seem like it could be that big an increase.

[williams_482]

Tying tree growth to specific climate parameters and increasing the growth times of rarer trees seems like a better way to prevent players from surrounding their base with a forest of purpleheart after one trip down south. It just feels wrong that these trees are not only difficult to find, but inherently unsustainable to harvest. 

[LadyWYT]

3 hours ago, williams_482 said:

Tying tree growth to specific climate parameters and increasing the growth times of rarer trees seems like a better way to prevent players from surrounding their base with a forest of purpleheart after one trip down south. It just feels wrong that these trees are not only difficult to find, but inherently unsustainable to harvest. 

It's also fairly realistic, as not every plant will grow in every climate. The game is fairly lenient in that regard; it tends to be more of a problem for propagating fruit trees since the normal trees seem to survive just fine even when planted outside their ideal climates. Fruit trees and other crops you can still grow outside their ideal climates, but it takes some extra effort(greenhouses), and some might only have stunted harvests if they're able to survive at all.

The general idea in Vintage Story is that you work with the resources available near where you choose to settle; if you want the more exotic stuff then it takes extra effort.

[Michael Gates]

Walnuts drop plenty enough seeds to be sustainable... IF YOU CLIP THE LEAVES ON TOP. Nerdpole up the side, get on the tree, then shear everything from up there. If you just do it from ground level you're not even going to be close to enough, if you nerdpole up a little and do only the sides it's kind of marginal.

Yes, it's a pain in the neck, and I almost wish I didn't love walnut wood so much