Tillage, harvest residue, weeds - more effort and reward in farming, not a waiting game with no progression

[MKMoose]

I've edited this suggestion to account for feedback and some additional ideas while streamlining the whole thing. The changes primarily include moving some parts around, reducing focus on plowing as I didn't initially realize how heavily reliant on animals it is, and adding the idea for incorporating harvest residue into the soil after collecting crops.

 

TDLR

Leave organic remains after harvesting crops and allow tilling farmland for large benefits to nutrient absorption from fertilizers and passive replenishment (and consequently reduce the baseline nutrient replenishment rate), as a way to require more effort to grow food, and reward this effort with higher yields.

This suggestion only attempts to put forward a concise improvement to specific parts of the system and to some extent consolidate a few smaller suggestions. I know that there is also a variety of other ideas primarily related to irrigation, obtaining seeds, plant variety, and whatever I may have missed, and that a lot of them may be adjustable through mods, but those are not my focus here.

 

Primary motivation for this suggestion

As it stands, farming is highly simplified to the point of requiring almost no investment for high returns, and a farming cycle boils down to a very simplistic "plant seeds => wait => collect" loop with very little added complexity or maintenance. In this way it also allows the player to create unreasonably large farms which have impractically large yields, with no real limit and no detriment to overexpanding due to how fast and easy it is to plant and harvest crops.

The main goal is to make farming more engaging and immersive, while incentivizing slighly smaller, but more high-effort gardens instead of large crop fields that require almost no maintenance.

 

Other issues that these changes can address

1. Once a farm is established, hoes become practically useless.

2. Farmland does not drop soil when broken (I know this is very old complaint, but also one that is not the easiest to fix without allowing certain exploits).

3. The player is able to immediately build massive farms almost completely unconstrained instead of starting with a smaller garden patch until better farming implements are unlocked.

4. Historically, farming was made much more efficient with the introduction of better agricultural tools, which constituted a massive improvement to quality of life across the world. There have been some especially important breakthroughs, for example when the introduction of cast iron in Europe made high-quality tools much more available to an unprecedented number of common people. This kind of progression is, as of now, completely absent in the game - a crude stone hoe is absolutely sufficient even after steel is unlocked.

5. Fertilizers make farming even more tivialized by allowing to use plants that consume the same nutrient many times in a row with no problems, but even that doesn't really matter, because it's possible to increase the farming area at practically no cost and keep parts of it inactive to replenish nutrients without added maintenance. Combined with other factors, nutrient levels in my experience have low enough impact that a player could feasibly be unaware of them and still have no issues farming, just get confused sometimes when some crops grow a bit slower.

 

The main proposition

1. As crops grow they consume nutrients from the soil - no major changes to vanilla may be necessary here, but it might be worth to prevent the player from methodically using up all the nutrients one-by-one, for example by reworking nutrient consumption to allow crops to consume multiple of them at the same time, or even produce some nutrients. Base nutrient replenishment rate should be reduced significantly relative to the current rate, and the same goes for the rate of absorption of nutrients from fertilizers. It may also be worth to increase nutrient consumption of crops.

2. Have collected crops leave behind organic remains (kind of like grass does after it is cropped), which the player should generally remove after each harvest. It may or may not be possible to plant crops without removing the remains, but removing them would provide a signifiant boost to nutrients, be it immediate or over-time (it could simply apply the same kind of nutrient bonus as fertilizers do). Removing and incorporating the residue by hand would likely be possible, but it should probably have reduced benefits to properly incentivize better methods.

3. Allow farmland to be tilled using a hoe, potentially in the same way as creating farmland in the first place. This process would increase nutrient replenishment and fertilizer absorbtion rates and absorb nutrients from harvest residue at the same time. Replenishment rate would likely remain significantly reduced while crops are growing on the tile. Tilling could also:

• temporarily increase maximum nutrient levels,
• give a small immediate bonus to nutrients,
• increase yields from crops planted on tilled farmland by the virtue of more seeds surviving,
• increase the total effect of fertilizers, instead of just increasing how fast they get absorbed.

It may be useful to allow to cultivate the soil while crops are already growing, which is not important in this core suggestion but some other features may make it necessary.

This change could require to increase the durability of hoes. Better hoes may work faster and apply higher buffs on top of the most obvious durability advantage.

 

Optional changes

1. When not tilled, have farmland very slowly return to its base state (soil) in a few stages, each requiring slightly more effort to convert to usable farmland again, with the goal of disincentivizing overexpansion and leaving farmland unused for extended periods of time. This could be integrated with the presence of weeds in some way, so that regular weeding would prevent this conversion. Crops that were planted but remained unharvested would still remain there indefinitely and could keep growing slowly, perhaps also preventing the final conversion from farmland to soil to allow easier retilling. It may also mean that:

• farmland wouldn't be immediately usable after winter, and would have to be tilled again before use,
• farmland could be collected for relocation, but the player would have to wait a fairly long time first.

2. Allow weeds to grow together with the player's crops. They could grow as part of the farmland block and not as separate plants to avoid excessive complexity with another thing in the same block as crops. This could be tied into converting farmland back into soil. The weeds should grow very slowly with at least two growth stages, the first of which would have no effects yet, and would have to be removed either as part of tilling or by hand. They should be implemented in a way so that their effects are less significant if weeds grow shortly before the harvest, for example by incrementing a reduction to yields only when the main crop's growth advances to the next stage. This could be associated with some new plants that grow on farmland and can be found throughtout the world where it makes sense, because the current grass (and rare horsetail) is functional but simplistic.

3. Have tilling also reduce moisture or apply other temporary debuffs, to require the player to maintain a proper balance and avoid overtillage and apply more pressure to either use fertilizers or rotate crops. It could also serve as a way to reduce excessive moisture in wet climates, and could be associated with the addition of different moisture requirements for different plants.

4. Increase the initial cost of creating farmland, either through a direct cost increase or through something like reduced base nutrient levels shortly after creating farmland. It would disincentivize replacing soil after each harvest, to counterbalance the changes to replenishing nutrients potentially amplifying some undesirable incentives.

 

Possible related changes (more long-term)

1. Implement planter boxes or pots (be it ceramic, from wooden boards or whatnot) as a method of small-scale vegetable (and herb) farming, potentially simplified in several ways (no farmland turning back into soil, no weeds or at least less of them, better water retention) but requiring regular use of a watering can or reliance on rain due to lack of irrigation. I'm thinking that something like a trowel could be used to aerate the soil in planter boxes, though that might be getting a bit excessive in detail. Similar planter boxes are also a prime candidate for mushroom growing which is on the roadmap, but that's getting a bit outside the scope of the suggestion.

2. Add plows to the game which would perform the same job as a hoe, but would be faster, more convenient, more durable, and potentially would apply higher or more buffs. However, plows would likely require an animal to pull them, which may easily end up time-inefficient, finnicky to control, or have a variety of other issues. It's a high-potential but high-risk feature. There are some examples of human-powered plows from Asia, as well as other implements in-between a hoe and a plow starting from the 18th century, but they're pretty niche. There's a bunch of different designs and levels of technology at which regular plows could be unlocked (most important are early mould-board plows, later improved with iron ploughshares), but regardless of specifics the goal is to increase efficiency of farming and improve the effort to reward ratio along with progression. It may even be worth to require a plow to create proper farmland, while delegating the hoe to creating simple garden patches. The hoe could likely be used to till both, but the plow would be unsuitable for gardens. A garden patch could be slightly more efficient for growing vegetables (and herbs), while farmland in turn could be better for grains.

 

Some potential problems to discuss

1. Added complexity doesn't necessarily equal more fun and enjoyment. I do not have a good answer to this other than that plenty of other mechanics aren't necessarily fun or enjoyable in the moment, but we expect them in a realistic, uncompromising survival and would probably say the game is better off for having them. For the game that Vintage Story aims to be, farming gives surprisingly high returns for very little effort and has an extremely flat progression curve.

2. These changes may impose tedious, routine maintenance on the player. Do note, however, that in the simplest possible implementation it would only ever require to use a hoe once after every harvest if not less, without the need for regular maintenance, which wouldn't be excessively time-consuming or distracting from other tasks. 

3. Some of these changes may make farming less accessible to new players by introducing additional complexity. This is largely why I suggest that tilling should be balanced in a way that it is only really required after the first winter, as similarly that weeds should grow slowly.

4. Requiring regular use of farming tools may create a fast resource sink, in extreme cases forcing the player to return to stone tools if they don't stock up on enough metal, which can be especially risky for new players. A simple solution would just be to give hoes and plows very high durability, but I don't know how good an idea that is. It may also be largely solved with a decent tool maintenance or recasting system, but that's a much bigger topic than I'm willing to dive into for the purpose of these features.

5. The need for maintenance can disrupt the player's long trips and exploration, by requiring them to return and care for crops. This only really applies to weeds, though, and other mechanics can be easily implemented in a way that makes them primarily matter before planting and after a harvest, without requiring excessive maintenance.

6. Anything that can progress independently of crop growth can introduce issues on servers where an individual player is only active for a small part of the server's uptime, by making the farm overgrown during the player's inactivity. This should be easy to fix by modifying a few parameters in server settings, and on the designer's side by avoiding mechanics that require excessive continuous maintenance from the player.

7. As with all changes of this caliber, the resulting balance would have to be monitored closely and additional adjustments may have to be made.

Edited November 18, 2025 by MKMoose
Rearranged some points. More focus on weeds, less focus on plows which would most likely require animals. Added a new point about harvest residue.

[LadyWYT]

8 hours ago, MKMoose said:

1. Added complexity doesn't necessarily equal more fun and enjoyment. I do not have a good answer to this other than that plenty of other mechanics aren't necessarily fun or enjoyable in the moment, but we expect them in a realistic, uncompromising survival and would probably say the game is better off for having them. For the game that Vintage Story aims to be, farming gives surprisingly high returns for very little effort and has an extremely flat progression curve.

This is the main reason I'm not in favor of intense overhauls like this. While Vintage Story farming is highly simplified compared to what real farming is, it's still more complex than what a lot of other games offer(stick seeds in ground, come back later to harvest, rinse and repeat). The more time the player has to spend farming, the less time they're spending doing other things the game has to offer, that they may enjoy more. As it stands, the current system is complex enough that the player does have to think a bit in order to get the most from their farms, but it's not so complex that they have to spend a lot of time micromanaging it, or pick between farming and other gameplay.

 

8 hours ago, MKMoose said:

2. These changes may impose tedious, routine maintenance on the player. Do note, however, that in the simplest possible implementation it would only ever require to use a hoe once after every harvest if not less, which wouldn't be excessively time-consuming and arguably farming would be much better off for it. Using better plows would also reduce the necessary effort further. There is a balance to be struck here.

I do think they would be great as mods, and a few mods that implement some of the concepts do exist. However, I will also note that those mods aren't very popular. Depending on which one you look at, in some cases the farming complexity mods are less popular than the mod that...uh...makes bathroom functions a thing.

 

8 hours ago, MKMoose said:

3. Some of these changes may make farming less accessible to new players and push efficient farming methods further in progression, reducing the availability of simple and consistent early to mid-game food sources. This is largely why I suggest that tilling should be balanced in a way that it is only really required after the first winter. A decent enough plow may also be unlocked as soon as the Early Copper Age, though, while better ones would only offer incremental improvements.

Honestly, I don't think it's necessarily bad to have more challenge up front for new players, given that Vintage Story is already a very challenging game and that's part of the appeal. It's a tough mountain to conquer, but very satisfying when one manages to do so. However, you do have a point, in that you don't want to make the early so difficult that new players get too discouraged by the default difficulty and quit.

 

8 hours ago, MKMoose said:

4. Requiring regular use of farming tools may create a fast resource sink, in extreme cases forcing the player to return to stone tools if they don't stock up on enough metal, which can be especially risky for new players. A simple solution would just be to give hoes and plows very high durability, but I don't know how good an idea that is. It may also be largely solved with a decent tool maintenance or recasting system, but that's a much bigger topic than I'm willing to dive into in this post. It seems that we're getting sharpening relatively soon, though, which may play a role here.

I do agree that there ought to be more use for the hoe, but I think the better way to go about it, without upsetting the current balance, is to simply require the hoe if one wishes to remove the weeds from fallow farmland. Likewise, if farmland sits fallow for too long, it should revert back to dirt, at which point it can either be dug up safely, or tilled again in order to keep farming.

The plow would be great for large scale farming, but should probably be a tool that's available later in the game, once the player has access to bronze and a creature strong enough to pull it. That way, it's something for the player to work their way up to, but also something that could be safely skipped if the player really doesn't enjoy farming or livestock that much.

As for the current farming balance, here are the main advantages I see:

1. There are two different options when it comes to planting crops. The player can either put in the effort to rotate their crops carefully and avoid the need for fertilizer, or they can use fertilizer to focus on specific crops and thus avoid needing to bother with crop rotation or massive farms.

2. If the player designed their farms with good irrigation and were careful about what crops they planted and when, they can safely plant their fields and leave on an extended expedition(exploration, story content, etc), and have fields ready to harvest(or nearly ready) upon their return. They don't have to choose between having flax/a full cellar for the winter, and doing the story or exploring.

3. The player can build farms however big or small they wish. However, adding a mechanic like needing to weed crops to ensure a good harvest is going to limit farm scale severely since larger farms are going to require a lot more time and effort to maintain. If month length is set to longer than default, larger farms will be required in order to produce enough  food to sustain the player through the winter, and some players just really enjoy building massive farms. However, it's not really going to be fun for the player if they have to end up spending all day doing nothing but take care of weeds. Likewise, it's also not really going to be fun for the player if they have to choose between progressing the story or exploring, or taking care of a farm to make sure they can actually stay fed over the winter or have flax for windmills and bandages.

[Bruno Willis]

I really like how the investment in terra pretta pays off in this game. You really only need a little bit, say 18 blocks or so, to produce way more food than you need in 1 year. It feels like you can do a year of intensive farming to fill up your cellar, and then the next year you can put in a crop and just go off adventuring. 

11 hours ago, MKMoose said:

Primary motivation for this suggestion

As it stands, farming is highly simplified to the point of requiring almost no investment for high returns, and a farming cycle boils down to a very simplistic "plant seeds => wait => collect" loop with no added complexity or maintenance. In this way it also allows the player to create unreasonably large farms which have impractically large yields, with no real limit and no detriment to overexpanding.

The main goal is to make farming more engaging and immersive, while incentivizing smaller, relatively high-effort gardens instead of large crop fields that require almost no maintenance.

I think weeds might be a good way to do this without adding too much complexity, and I've found weeding can be really satisfying in other games (don't starve). I don't think you would want it to be so disruptive that it makes big farms pointless, rather it would just make them increasing inefficient, and make maintaining a high quality little garden a little more interesting. 

I also think a way to subtly improve your crops could help, but that one's been gone over many times already. 

[Thorfinn]

If we are going to add to the complexity, I'd like to see grazing and implied animal poop improving fallow land. I'd have crops take from multiple nutrient pools, like the do IRL. Maybe you could cycle two crops with the right mix of necessary nutrients, then have to go fallow, for a shorter time if you put herbivores on it.

But I think that also requires a rework of the whole thing.  Default starts are really only capable of one crop per year without a fast crop and intense fertilization. By the time you get to redwoods, you can reasonably expect two crops per year. Which also changes foraging, hunting and animal spawns, etc.

[MKMoose]

14 hours ago, LadyWYT said:

This is the main reason I'm not in favor of intense overhauls like this. While Vintage Story farming is highly simplified compared to what real farming is, it's still more complex than what a lot of other games offer(stick seeds in ground, come back later to harvest, rinse and repeat). The more time the player has to spend farming, the less time they're spending doing other things the game has to offer, that they may enjoy more. As it stands, the current system is complex enough that the player does have to think a bit in order to get the most from their farms, but it's not so complex that they have to spend a lot of time micromanaging it, or pick between farming and other gameplay.

It's really not an intense overhaul, though, at least unless you count all the secondary changes as well (and arguably the plow, I'll touch on it in a moment). In the simplest form it's literally just "reduce base nutrient replenishment rate, but allow to bring it back to current levels by tilling once in a while". It could even be just once in about three harvests if the player uses all three nutrients bit by bit.

Either way, the background for my suggestion is that I've really never found farming to be in a meaningful way complex or engaging, and I never had any issues farming despite starting out on low-fertility soil. It might as well have been the same "plant, harvest, repeat" loop as it is in much simpler games and almost nothing about my experience would have changed. Sure, it is a bit more complex than many games, but that never stopped me from practically not caring about that complexity and seemingly not being worse off for it. I still had like three to four times the crops that I needed to survive during my first winter, and three storage vessels full of grain (and that's not counting vegetables) before the second winter rolled around.

Maybe I just did everything more quickly than expected, but I really found it to be almost trivial. Food is extremely bountiful compared to all other survival games I've played, especially after the first winter. Or at least more so than in games where survival is actually a significant focus, with something like Don't Starve or Project Zomboid being prime examples. Not that this is a bad thing, but it really surprised me initially and I was genuinely baffled how quickly I was able to collect literally thousands of grains and vegetables.

 

14 hours ago, LadyWYT said:

The plow would be great for large scale farming, but should probably be a tool that's available later in the game, once the player has access to bronze and a creature strong enough to pull it. That way, it's something for the player to work their way up to, but also something that could be safely skipped if the player really doesn't enjoy farming or livestock that much.

I do agree with this, and I have to admit I kind of overlooked how rare human-powered plows are, as I kind of assumed that a scaled-down version would be fine. There have been some examples of them and similar tools, though, primarily in Asia, and other alternatives between a hoe and a plow have apparently started appearing in meaningful numbers in the 18th century once cast iron and steel became more widely available. I should probably revise this suggestion once I think through the implications. Do keep in mind that this is an even stronger argument from the perspective of realism and historical accuracy than I initially put forth against allowing the player to make almost arbitrarily large crop fields.

 

14 hours ago, LadyWYT said:

I do agree that there ought to be more use for the hoe, but I think the better way to go about it, without upsetting the current balance, is to simply require the hoe if one wishes to remove the weeds from fallow farmland.

This would still require more proper weeds to be added, and potentially to have them overtake all fallow farmland over time and not just some of it. It may also be somewhat jarring since the player can just remove grass with their bare hands easily, so why not weeds? I'll also mention on the topic of weeds, I think the game could really use a much greater variety of mosses, grasses, sedges, shrubbery and stuff like that, not just as weeds but also for general plant variety, especially on the gravelly tundra or whatever that is (I don't know of any real biome which only has gravel, very sparse but tall grass, and trees for some reason).

 

14 hours ago, LadyWYT said:

1. There are two different options when it comes to planting crops. The player can either put in the effort to rotate their crops carefully and avoid the need for fertilizer, or they can use fertilizer to focus on specific crops and thus avoid needing to bother with crop rotation or massive farms.

In my experience, planting without fertilizers boils down to never planting crops which consume the same nutrient twice in a row, and that's it. Or if that somehow doesn't work, increasing the size of the farm is almost free and there are no consequences for overexpansion, so why not just do that? You can easily sustain yourself from a couple dozen blocks anyways, so even doubling that for convenience takes very little effort. The game even kind of incentivizes the player to expand the farm more than necessary (which in some capacity may be a good thing), since all nutrients replenish (according to the wiki) thrice as fast on fallow farmland. And you also get some free horsetail on the side (not that it's rare in the wild, but from farmland it's infinite).

 

14 hours ago, LadyWYT said:

2. If the player designed their farms with good irrigation and were careful about what crops they planted and when, they can safely plant their fields and leave on an extended expedition(exploration, story content, etc), and have fields ready to harvest(or nearly ready) upon their return. They don't have to choose between having flax/a full cellar for the winter, and doing the story or exploring.

14 hours ago, LadyWYT said:

3. The player can build farms however big or small they wish. However, adding a mechanic like needing to weed crops to ensure a good harvest is going to limit farm scale severely since larger farms are going to require a lot more time and effort to maintain. If month length is set to longer than default, larger farms will be required in order to produce enough  food to sustain the player through the winter, and some players just really enjoy building massive farms. However, it's not really going to be fun for the player if they have to end up spending all day doing nothing but take care of weeds. Likewise, it's also not really going to be fun for the player if they have to choose between progressing the story or exploring, or taking care of a farm to make sure they can actually stay fed over the winter or have flax for windmills and bandages.

Crops don't have to be something that the player has to babysit all the time. Just check in midway through their growth, get rid of a few weeds. Or if you don't, you're gonna have just slightly increased growth times or a bit lower yields (the latter of which would probably be more realistic). Heavier consequences would only really start appearing after an extended period of time without tilling and weeding, like a whole year or something. Making it slow would also make it so that a neat garden doesn't suddenly become overgrown.

It's more about giving the player something to do if they care about having a neat and tidy crop field or a small but highly efficient garden, not something that they would absolutely have to do regularly in order to survive. Kind of like fertilizers are more like an additional option to allow accelerating growth speed or bypassing nutrient replenishment rates, not something that the player has to regularly use on farmland to make it usable.

Also, disproportionately affecting worlds with different month length should be trivial to fix, unless I'm missing some nuance. Just keep the rate at which weeds grow or farmland degrades at a constant level per month.

 

8 hours ago, Thorfinn said:

Default starts are really only capable of one crop per year without a fast crop and intense fertilization.

Are you sure about this? Or maybe I was lucky? But I'm quite sure I've just ended a year with three harvests from medium-fertility soil with no fertilization and some time to spare. I think it was two times flax and one time onion.

Edited November 16, 2025 by MKMoose

[Thorfinn]

Yes, currently you get multiple crops per year in a default start.

I'm just saying if you are adding complexity for the sake of verisimilitude, it doesn't make sense to do half measures.

[EDIT]

And like @LadyWYT says, making it more complex just to have something to do strikes me as more of a mod than base gameplay. Particularly when it's not something you solve creatively, but merely increase the number of clicks.

Edited November 15, 2025 by Thorfinn

[MKMoose]

3 minutes ago, Thorfinn said:

Yes, currently you get multiple crops per year in a default start.

I'm just saying if you are adding complexity for the sake of verisimilitude, it doesn't make sense to do half measures.

Ah, sorry, I misread and thought you meant the current state of the game. This could be an interesting change as well, though it would probably carry huge downstream consequences. Most notably, it would make it extremely difficult to gather up sufficient food before the first winter in the current game balance, and even once new year rolls around it would take a really long time to get the first harvests. And once you go far enough north, it would make it practically impossible to grow anything.

While a small reduction to growth time may be beneficial for the game in some capacity, I don't think going quite as far as one crop per year is a good idea without large concurrent changes.

[Thorfinn]

Agreed. It's a lot of stuff to change around for, so far as I can see, not much gain. Unless one really likes clicker games. I already have to shut down after an hour or two because there's enough clicking to aggravate incipient carpal tunnel.

[LadyWYT]

26 minutes ago, MKMoose said:

Either way, the background for my suggestion is that I've really never found farming to be in a meaningful way complex or engaging, and I never had any issues farming despite starting out on low-fertility soil. It might as well have been the same "plant, harvest, repeat" loop as it is in much simpler games and almost nothing about my experience would have changed. Sure, it is a bit more complex than many games, but that never stopped me from practically not caring about that complexity and seemingly not being worse off for it. I still had like three to four times the crops that I needed to survive during my first winter, and three storage vessels full of grain (and that's not counting vegetables) before the second winter rolled around.

Maybe I just did everything more quickly than expected, but I really found it to be almost trivial.

Eh, I have a similar outlook on farming, but I chalk the sentiment up to just having what's probably several hundred hours worth of gameplay under my belt at this point. Not everyone enjoys ultra hardcore, and given my time lurking the forums, it seems several players(usually newer players, but not always) tend to struggle with managing their food supply, which suggests to me that the standard difficulty is working as intended. 

 

29 minutes ago, MKMoose said:

I do agree with this, and I have to admit I kind of overlooked how rare human-powered plows are, as I kind of assumed that a scaled-down version would be fine. There have been some examples of them and similar tools, though, primarily in Asia, and other alternatives between a hoe and a plow have apparently started appearing in meaningful numbers in the 18th century once cast iron and steel became more widely available. I should probably revise this suggestion once I think through the implications. Do keep in mind that this is an even stronger argument from the perspective of realism and historical accuracy than I initially put forth against allowing the player to make almost arbitrarily large crop fields.

The main reasoning I had for opting for an animal-powered plow, is that ties into the husbandry gameplay loop, as well as likely being more fun to use than trying to pull the plow yourself. It's also a little easier to steer it if you're behind the device rather than in front of it.

 

33 minutes ago, MKMoose said:

This would still require more proper weeds to be added, and potentially to have them overtake all fallow farmland over time and not just some of it. It may also be somewhat jarring since the player can just remove grass with their bare hands easily, so why not weeds?

Yeah, that's the main way I see a weed mechanic working, without it getting incredibly annoying. Weeds have to be removed before you can use the farmland again, but otherwise can be left alone to turn farmland back into standard grassy dirt. As for the hoe requirement...maybe the hoe can instead remove weeds in a 3x3 area, giving the player incentive to use a hoe over doing the work by hand.

 

36 minutes ago, MKMoose said:

In my experience, planting without fertilizers boils down to never planting crops which consume the same nutrient twice in a row, and that's it.

That is pretty much it, however, you do need to be careful about what crops you plant where, and when you plant them. Otherwise, you can screw up a harvest by planting too early/too late, or end up having no consistency between what nutrients are where(which makes management a pain). 

 

37 minutes ago, MKMoose said:

Or if that somehow doesn't work, increasing the size of the farm is almost free and there are no consequences for overexpansion, so why not just do that?

Mostly just because not every player wants that much farmland. Of course, the other problem is that the player doesn't need to expand their farms to get around crop rotation and fertilizer; they can simply go dig up dirt elsewhere in the world and replace the farmland dirt to restore nutrients entirely.

41 minutes ago, MKMoose said:

Crops don't have to be something that the player has to babysit all the time. Just check in midway through their growth, get rid of a few weeds. Or if you don't, you're gonna have just slightly increased growth times or a bit lower yields (the latter of which would probably be more realistic). Heavier consequences would only really start appearing after an extended period of time without tilling and weeding, like a whole year or something. Making it slow would also make it so that a neat garden doesn't suddenly become

It's more about giving the player something to do if they care about having a neat and tidy crop field or a small but highly efficient garden, not something that they would absolutely have to do regularly in order to survive. Kind of like fertilizers are more like an additional option to allow accelerating growth speed or bypassing nutrient replenishment rates, not something that the player has to regularly use on farmland to make it usable.

Right, but the thing is, it's not uncommon for players to lean into the most efficient routes of doing things, or strive to get the best possible yields from things like farming. If the player isn't at the base to pull the weeds(or check to make sure there's no weeds to pull), that's something likely to pester at the back of their mind while they're away. 

I will note though, that this doesn't really dissuade players from just...ignoring the mechanic entirely, putting up with the weeds, and just making absolutely massive farms to counteract the crop loss from neglect. What the mechanic does do though, is make it more frustrating to maintain farms at a large scale, which isn't really ideal given that it cuts down on player choice(now they're going to feel forced into small gardens). 

44 minutes ago, Thorfinn said:

And like @LadyWYT says, making it more complex just to have something to do strikes me as more of a mod than base gameplay. Particularly when it's not something you solve creatively, but merely increase the number of clicks.

Yeah pretty much. I still recall you telling the tale of your adventures with modded weeds.  I do enjoy farming in this game, and while I do think it could be complex, I don't know that most other players would enjoy the same level of challenge that I do.

[MKMoose]

7 hours ago, LadyWYT said:

Eh, I have a similar outlook on farming, but I chalk the sentiment up to just having what's probably several hundred hours worth of gameplay under my belt at this point. Not everyone enjoys ultra hardcore, and given my time lurking the forums, it seems several players(usually newer players, but not always) tend to struggle with managing their food supply, which suggests to me that the standard difficulty is working as intended. 

That's fair, and that is also why I was considering to add tillage and weeding as something that the player only has to really worry about if they want to continue using the same soil for an extended period of time.

To be more specific about weeds and give more proper context to the rest of this, I mean something like an average of some 20-30 days for weeds to appear on each tile (though it may also depend on proximity to grass in some way). For each of them have a few days with no effects and then something like a slowly increasing yield reduction, up to about -25% after three to four months. Perhaps make the yield reduction lower for existing crops, but significantly higher if the player cares so little as to plant new crops without removing weeds (could be implemented by incrementing the yield reduction only once for each growth stage of the main crop). It may be worth to block planting new crops if the weeds completely overgrow the tile. The scythe could reduce the growth level of weeds to the first stage, potentially also making them faster to remove by hand or while tilling. Removing weeds could also give a small bonus to nutrients to add a positive incentive as well, on the account of plant remains getting absorbed back into the soil. The nutrient bonus could be higher for more grown weeds to slightly offset the consequences of long trips and the like.

 

7 hours ago, LadyWYT said:

Yeah, that's the main way I see a weed mechanic working, without it getting incredibly annoying. Weeds have to be removed before you can use the farmland again, but otherwise can be left alone to turn farmland back into standard grassy dirt. As for the hoe requirement...maybe the hoe can instead remove weeds in a 3x3 area, giving the player incentive to use a hoe over doing the work by hand.

The hoe could have the advantage of tilling and weeding quickly at the same time, which would matter a lot if regular tilling was added as well or if farmland were to slowly convert back to soil.

 

7 hours ago, LadyWYT said:

Of course, the other problem is that the player doesn't need to expand their farms to get around crop rotation and fertilizer; they can simply go dig up dirt elsewhere in the world and replace the farmland dirt to restore nutrients entirely.

This is part of the reason for the idea to increase the initial cost of farmland in some way.

 

7 hours ago, LadyWYT said:

7 hours ago, MKMoose said:

Crops don't have to be something that the player has to babysit all the time. Just check in midway through their growth, get rid of a few weeds. Or if you don't, you're gonna have just slightly increased growth times or a bit lower yields (the latter of which would probably be more realistic). Heavier consequences would only really start appearing after an extended period of time without tilling and weeding, like a whole year or something. Making it slow would also make it so that a neat garden doesn't suddenly become [overgrown.]

It's more about giving the player something to do if they care about having a neat and tidy crop field or a small but highly efficient garden, not something that they would absolutely have to do regularly in order to survive. Kind of like fertilizers are more like an additional option to allow accelerating growth speed or bypassing nutrient replenishment rates, not something that the player has to regularly use on farmland to make it usable.

Right, but the thing is, it's not uncommon for players to lean into the most efficient routes of doing things, or strive to get the best possible yields from things like farming. If the player isn't at the base to pull the weeds(or check to make sure there's no weeds to pull), that's something likely to pester at the back of their mind while they're away. 

I will note though, that this doesn't really dissuade players from just...ignoring the mechanic entirely, putting up with the weeds, and just making absolutely massive farms to counteract the crop loss from neglect. What the mechanic does do though, is make it more frustrating to maintain farms at a large scale, which isn't really ideal given that it cuts down on player choice(now they're going to feel forced into small gardens). 

We could even bring out the "given the opportunity, players will optimize the fun out of the game" quote, and I do agree that it's a risk with this kind of mechanic, though I think the same already exists for a lot of food sources in the game, if to a slightly lesser extent. You need to collect fruit trees in a specific time window, you need to collect berries, crops and I think also beehives to get new ones to start progressing and ideally you need to do it before winter, you have a specific time window for regular milking, not to mention that everything spoils if you don't use it. Tilling and weeds only significantly differ in that they would more explicitly punish excessively long neglect or serve as additional maintenance before seeding, instead of doing it mostly just through opportunity cost.

I kind of feel like you're talking about a significantly more restrictive implementation than I have in mind. Maybe my wording is to blame. The purpose is to give the player something to care about, so that they will feel incentivized to put in a bit of extra effort and get rewarded for it, instead of treating farms like something that just churns out food almost for free. I think it should be more of a conversion of effort to reward, rather than free reward with practically no cost. We already have fruit trees and berries, which can more realistically serve as maintenance-free food sources, while animal husbandry is essentially on the opposite end of the scale in that the player gets nothing out if they put nothing in (though it still doesn't really punish the player for neglect in any big way, instead serving more as nutrition type conversion).

As for farm size, it would remain absolutely possible to create larger farms without an excessive amount of maintenance, but players would just be more incentivized to plan better for what they actually need. If they decide to maintain an acre of land regardless, then they will be met with an acre of land to care about, instead of being able to leave it fallow with no consequences other than having a bit of grass to remove when they need to plant something once in ten years.

The possibility of creating excessively large farms while ignoring weeds is something to be addressed, but to a small extent it's also a good thing - make a larger farm with less regular weeding, or have a smaller one but maintain it with more care. As it stands right now, there is no incentive aside from aesthetics not to make them larger. I think it should be sufficient to just make sure that removing weeds is not excessively tedious, while increasing the debuffs incrementally to the point of disabling the ability to plant new seeds without removing weeds. The nutritent bonus for removing weeds might also be of great benefit here, to better incentivize weeding at least once in a while.

[Thorfinn]

11 hours ago, LadyWYT said:

maybe the hoe can instead remove weeds in a 3x3 area

Oh, I love that idea! Unless the codeblock for scythes is hardcoded. Then I think I'd be happy with 2x3.

11 hours ago, LadyWYT said:

Weeds have to be removed before you can use the farmland again, but otherwise can be left alone to turn farmland back into standard grassy dirt.

Two great ideas in the same paragraph. That's got to be some kind of a record here. I particularly like that changing back to regular dirt is on the game's timetable, not the players.

11 hours ago, LadyWYT said:

I do enjoy farming in this game, and while I do think it could be complex, I don't know that most other players would enjoy the same level of challenge that I do.

Me, too. Though I would appreciate the extra planning and "strategery" that would be involved in crops drawing from two or more nutrient pools, or, for example, like in real life, legumes actually improving one nutrient while depleting others.

2 hours ago, MKMoose said:

As it stands right now, there is no incentive aside from aesthetics not to make them larger.

Not quite true. Opportunity cost. The time you spend making them larger you cannot also spend doing other parts of the game. Depends strongly on what you think the game is. I'm not the personality type that enjoys puttering. I vastly prefer hitting it hard, making a homestead appropriate to the needs of the game, finishing, then starting again, applying the lessons I learned from mistakes in the last playthrough.

This, of course, implies that as new chapters are added, that homestead will have to evolve. Things like groves and animal husbandry might become more desirable or even necessary, which they obviously are not at the moment. You cannot get Gen 10 or even fruit trees before the story content is done unless you are intentionally dragging your feet. Puttering.

Great mod idea for those who like puttering, though.

[Tabbot95]

On 11/15/2025 at 6:18 PM, Thorfinn said:

If we are going to add to the complexity, I'd like to see grazing and implied animal poop improving fallow land. I'd have crops take from multiple nutrient pools, like the do IRL. Maybe you could cycle two crops with the right mix of necessary nutrients, then have to go fallow, for a shorter time if you put herbivores on it.

But I think that also requires a rework of the whole thing.  Default starts are really only capable of one crop per year without a fast crop and intense fertilization. By the time you get to redwoods, you can reasonably expect two crops per year. Which also changes foraging, hunting and animal spawns, etc.

Having the ability to lay down straw/hay as a texture/overlay such that animals to are able to "soil" the hay (that it can be harvested and a saltpeter works can be constructed for either fertilizer or blasting powder) would be interesting.

Edited November 18, 2025 by Tabbot95
legibility

[Facethief]

40 minutes ago, Tabbot95 said:

idk having the ability to lay down straw/hay as a texture/overlay, and for animals to "soil" the hay; (such that it can be harvested and a saltpeter works can be constructed for either fertilizer or blasting powder) would be interesting.

Dude, is something wrong with the “.” key on your keyboard? Why do you use so many semicolons?

[Thorfinn]

31 minutes ago, Facethief said:

Why do you use so many semicolons?

1=so many?

[LadyWYT]

10 hours ago, MKMoose said:

I kind of feel like you're talking about a significantly more restrictive implementation than I have in mind. Maybe my wording is to blame. The purpose is to give the player something to care about, so that they will feel incentivized to put in a bit of extra effort and get rewarded for it, instead of treating farms like something that just churns out food almost for free. I think it should be more of a conversion of effort to reward, rather than free reward with practically no cost. We already have fruit trees and berries, which can more realistically serve as maintenance-free food sources, while animal husbandry is essentially on the opposite end of the scale in that the player gets nothing out if they put nothing in (though it still doesn't really punish the player for neglect in any big way, instead serving more as nutrition type conversion).

Maybe, but I think it's more along the lines of, most every time someone brings this topic up, the suggested method they lay out is essentially equating realism to fun, which ends up requiring the player to spend the majority of their time just caring for their farmland if they want a good harvest. While that is realistic, it's not really fun, unless that's all the gameplay the player is interested in.

For me personally, I do think farming could use a bit more depth, but while I do enjoy farming in the game I would quickly grow to absolutely hate it if I felt like I had to be constantly checking my farms or following very specific maintenance constraints to keep it going. With the current system, I can make my farms as big or as small as I like, without care requirements changing too drastically. Likewise, I don't have to be constantly battling weeds to ensure I get a harvest; I just need to deal with the weeds before I can plant new crops. I don't like dealing with fertilizer either, especially since I like to use compost and saltpeter for other things, so I sink more time into carefully rotating crop types. And though farming can sometimes be a bit of a time sink, it's not so much that I can't easily take breaks and go mess around with other gameplay when I wish to.

7 hours ago, Thorfinn said:

Not quite true. Opportunity cost. The time you spend making them larger you cannot also spend doing other parts of the game. Depends strongly on what you think the game is. I'm not the personality type that enjoys puttering. I vastly prefer hitting it hard, making a homestead appropriate to the needs of the game, finishing, then starting again, applying the lessons I learned from mistakes in the last playthrough.

Yeah pretty much. As noted above, I do like to putter, but I want to be the one choosing to putter, and what I putter around with and when. There are certain requirements for progression, and time limits to certain activities(like you can't grow crops in the cold), but as a general rule the game is still fairly lenient about giving the player plenty of freedom to pick a method that works for their playstyle.

 

7 hours ago, Thorfinn said:

This, of course, implies that as new chapters are added, that homestead will have to evolve. Things like groves and animal husbandry might become more desirable or even necessary, which they obviously are not at the moment.

I think this is also a good chunk of the reason that some gameplay aspects, like fruit trees and animal husbandry, feel "worthless" at the moment: there's only two of a planned eight story chapters implemented. If the player is completing roughly one chapter per in-game year, that means the player will take about eight years to complete the story, which is a few hundred hours worth of gameplay and easily enough time to make things like animal husbandry worthwhile.

 

10 hours ago, MKMoose said:

The purpose is to give the player something to care about, so that they will feel incentivized to put in a bit of extra effort and get rewarded for it, instead of treating farms like something that just churns out food almost for free.

Going back to this bit, I think a better way to smooth out farming progression, is instead of adding weeds or more "busywork" for the player to manage, perhaps just tweak how the player acquires seeds. Make wild crops a lot more scarce, so that the player can't just gather a couple stacks of the main seed types within a day's travel spawn. Instead, the player needs to either scavenge vessels for seeds, purchase seeds from the agriculture traders, or otherwise manage their crops carefully to acquire more seeds if they don't wish to spend days scouring the landscape.

As for how to get seeds from crops, now the player needs to choose between harvesting their crops for edible food, or letting them go to seed in order to have seeds to plant for next harvest. The main exception to this rule is grain, since...well...grains are both the edible food part and the seed part.

In any case, a change like that would slow down early farming a bit, and make it more of a process the player needs to actively build up, much like metalworking or livestock.

[Bruno Willis]

58 minutes ago, LadyWYT said:

Going back to this bit, I think a better way to smooth out farming progression, is instead of adding weeds or more "busywork" for the player to manage, perhaps just tweak how the player acquires seeds. Make wild crops a lot more scarce, so that the player can't just gather a couple stacks of the main seed types within a day's travel spawn. Instead, the player needs to either scavenge vessels for seeds, purchase seeds from the agriculture traders, or otherwise manage their crops carefully to acquire more seeds if they don't wish to spend days scouring the landscape.

As for how to get seeds from crops, now the player needs to choose between harvesting their crops for edible food, or letting them go to seed in order to have seeds to plant for next harvest. The main exception to this rule is grain, since...well...grains are both the edible food part and the seed part.

In any case, a change like that would slow down early farming a bit, and make it more of a process the player needs to actively build up, much like metalworking or livestock.

It would be really nice if there was still a reason to collect mushrooms in your second year. 

There is a good mod to make crops go to seed you might be aware of: https://mods.vintagestory.at/zippyscroptweaks . I found it rewarding. Choosing to re-plant all your grain to get a proper grain harvest instead of eating any is a really fun cost-benefit choice, as is letting things go to seed rather than harvesting them for crops. 

[LadyWYT]

Just now, Bruno Willis said:

It would be really nice if there was still a reason to collect mushrooms in your second year. 

Oh there is--how else are you going to make delicious redmeat-mushroom stew? Or "stew surprise" to feed to your friends? You can also stick shrooms into flowerpots and use them as decoration. They're also handy to have around when you're out on an expedition; bring a cookpot and just forage some ingredients to cook with instead of bringing your larder with you.

 

2 minutes ago, Bruno Willis said:

There is a good mod to make crops go to seed you might be aware of: https://mods.vintagestory.at/zippyscroptweaks . I found it rewarding. Choosing to re-plant all your grain to get a proper grain harvest instead of eating any is a really fun cost-benefit choice, as is letting things go to seed rather than harvesting them for crops. 

Yep, that's the one I was thinking of.  Ironically, I don't play with it myself, but the way it implements the mechanic seems like it would be a good way to add more depth in a way that isn't frustrating.

[Bruno Willis]

I like croptweaks a lot, but it comes with increased crop spoilage speed, and seeds can spoil too, which I found stress inducing and made me unwilling to leave my base. I've just realized that the mod is configurable though, so I'll be going back to it, but giving crops and seeds a far lower spoilage rate.

Apart from he spoilage rate issue, it feels like base game, fully fits into the difficulty and complexity level of the game. It's not too much or too little, and I think it would be a good adition to the base game, alongside a restrained addition of weeds, a good way for garden beds to revert to grassy dirt, and a subtle way to improve your seed stock. 

[Entaris]

Only a brainchild between Sakuna: Of Rice and Ruin and Farming Simulator 2025, but in VS will satisfy me.

 

And the Threshing mod should be vanilla. 

[Bumber]

On 11/16/2025 at 1:33 PM, LadyWYT said:

You can also stick shrooms into flowerpots and use them as decoration.

Do they still rot if you do that?

[LadyWYT]

43 minutes ago, Bumber said:

Do they still rot if you do that?

To my knowledge, they don't rot unless you take them out of the flowerpot. 

[Bumber]

That might be useful to exploit if farm crops didn't just stay fresh forever until you harvest them. Still, emergency rations you can store basically anywhere is potentially valuable.

[MKMoose]

9 hours ago, Bumber said:

Do they still rot if you do that?

They lose freshness and spoil, but don't actually turn to rot as long as they're in the pot. They can stay there indefinitely, but once spoiled they effectively can't be used elsewhere or even replanted, as they will rot immediately once removed from the pot.

 

On 11/16/2025 at 1:56 PM, Thorfinn said:

On 11/16/2025 at 10:51 AM, MKMoose said:

As it stands right now, there is no incentive aside from aesthetics not to make them larger.

Not quite true. Opportunity cost. The time you spend making them larger you cannot also spend doing other parts of the game. Depends strongly on what you think the game is. I'm not the personality type that enjoys puttering. I vastly prefer hitting it hard, making a homestead appropriate to the needs of the game, finishing, then starting again, applying the lessons I learned from mistakes in the last playthrough.

How much do you need to make a farm larger? An extra flint hoe or two, a dozen or two dozen fences, and at most ten to twenty minutes? I have nothing against your kind of playstyle, but I don't feel like making a bigger farm would have any significant opportunity cost unless you're straight up speedrunning the game. And it could potentially also save you some time later on and allow to collect sufficient food and fiber earlier thanks to being able to harvest more crops less frequently.

 

On 11/16/2025 at 9:18 PM, LadyWYT said:

Maybe, but I think it's more along the lines of, most every time someone brings this topic up, the suggested method they lay out is essentially equating realism to fun, which ends up requiring the player to spend the majority of their time just caring for their farmland if they want a good harvest. While that is realistic, it's not really fun, unless that's all the gameplay the player is interested in.

For me personally, I do think farming could use a bit more depth, but while I do enjoy farming in the game I would quickly grow to absolutely hate it if I felt like I had to be constantly checking my farms or following very specific maintenance constraints to keep it going. With the current system, I can make my farms as big or as small as I like, without care requirements changing too drastically. Likewise, I don't have to be constantly battling weeds to ensure I get a harvest; I just need to deal with the weeds before I can plant new crops. I don't like dealing with fertilizer either, especially since I like to use compost and saltpeter for other things, so I sink more time into carefully rotating crop types. And though farming can sometimes be a bit of a time sink, it's not so much that I can't easily take breaks and go mess around with other gameplay when I wish to.

It has been said here and in other threads that realism doesn't necessarily have to make the game explicitly more fun in order to make it arguably better.

Either way, while I probably could have phrased it better, the intention for tilling specifically is that it should matter most before planting seeds or right after a harvest, without excessive maintenance in-between. That's also why weeds initially landed in the optional category, though having them only block planting new crops and not affect crop yields would allow them to only ever be removed before seeding as well, at which point there would be basically no maintenance, just slightly more work when planting. I've revised the original suggestion to account for this, but I'll mention it again at the end.

 

On 11/16/2025 at 9:18 PM, LadyWYT said:

Going back to this bit, I think a better way to smooth out farming progression, is instead of adding weeds or more "busywork" for the player to manage, perhaps just tweak how the player acquires seeds. Make wild crops a lot more scarce, so that the player can't just gather a couple stacks of the main seed types within a day's travel spawn. Instead, the player needs to either scavenge vessels for seeds, purchase seeds from the agriculture traders, or otherwise manage their crops carefully to acquire more seeds if they don't wish to spend days scouring the landscape.

As for how to get seeds from crops, now the player needs to choose between harvesting their crops for edible food, or letting them go to seed in order to have seeds to plant for next harvest. The main exception to this rule is grain, since...well...grains are both the edible food part and the seed part.

In any case, a change like that would slow down early farming a bit, and make it more of a process the player needs to actively build up, much like metalworking or livestock.

There's two potential problems I can immediately point out with this.

One is multiplayer servers and long trips - depending on implementation, people may end up getting restricted to only or primarily use grains, since vegetables may go into the seeding phase too quickly to reliably collect them. Weeds and the need for tilling could have the same issue in that they advance while the player isn't active but the server is running, but they have an advantage in that they are primarily an issue when the player has to harvest crops and plant new ones. Tilling and weeds are also arguably much easier to tweak to be less impactful by simply adjusting a few numbers, whereas adjusting the phase that drops more seeds to would likely have to focus on dropping more crops but less seeds, which kind of defeats the purpose of it.

The second is related primarily to new players - if some people are already having difficulties managing their food supply, then I don't think reducing the availability of seeds while making it easier for an experienced player to expand the farm quickly would be in any significant way beneficial to the accessibility of the game. I've also seen several beginners walk next to a patch of wild crops completely oblivious, thinking it's just another type of grass or something, which is a fun problem in itself. The reason why I suggest tilling and weeding is that thwy willl kick in only after the player finds seeds and plants them, and can be made much more immediately apparent once they do.

Side note, Tyron also spoke of restricting wild crops and plants in general to areas where they would appear naturally, like splitting them between continents with Eurpean crops in certain areas, Asian and American plants in their own regions, or something of the sort. This would create additional incentives for exploration and perhaps seed vessels while allowing to increase seed yields from crops.

 

I've revised the original suggestion quite significantly, if you're interested. I've taken some of the feedback into consideration and added a point on incorporating plant residue after each harvest into the soil through tilling, which I've realized would be a much better, more immediately rewarding incentive. The player would be actually managing the crops through tilling, instead of performing a semi-arbitrary extra step to increase nutrients.

[LadyWYT]

On 11/15/2025 at 2:25 AM, MKMoose said:

2. Allow weeds to grow together with the player's crops. They could grow as part of the farmland block and not as separate plants to avoid excessive complexity with another thing in the same block as crops. This could be tied into converting farmland back into soil. The weeds should grow very slowly with at least two growth stages, the first of which would have no effects yet, and would have to be removed either as part of tilling or by hand. They should be implemented in a way so that their effects are less significant if weeds grow shortly before the harvest, for example by incrementing a reduction to yields only when the main crop's growth advances to the next stage. This could be associated with some new plants that grow on farmland and can be found throughtout the world where it makes sense, because the current grass (and rare horsetail) is functional but simplistic.

I'm still going to be stubbornly skeptical about any kind of weed mechanic requiring maintenance for a good harvest, as that just does not strike me at all as being fun long-term. Granted, if the devs fit such a thing into their vision, I trust them to do it well, but until then the mod database has the best data to work with. A few have tried to implement weeds in one fashion or another, and such a mechanic has been suggested before, but most of the time it boils down to the player needing to babysit their farm in order to ensure weeds don't damage crops. And that's not very fun.

You do seem to have opted for a less intense route here, in that the weeds are a slow-growing detriment and thus the farms only need checking occasionally. However, I will note that the weeds still appear to actively interfere with crops, so ultimately I see the player getting pushed to babysit their farm and getting frustrated as a result. On the flipside, if weed growth is so slow that it practically never interferes with growing crops...then that kind of begs the question, why have it in the first place?

Just my opinion, but I think the current vanilla system is just fine. There are weeds, yes, but they don't require the player to babysit the farm to ensure a harvest. The player just has to clear out the weeds before they can use the farmland for more crops.

On 11/15/2025 at 2:25 AM, MKMoose said:

4. Increase the initial cost of creating farmland, either through a direct cost increase or through something like reduced base nutrient levels shortly after creating farmland. It would disincentivize replacing soil after each harvest, to counterbalance the changes to replenishing nutrients potentially amplifying some undesirable incentives.

Farmland is already incredibly expensive to craft, given that 16 compost only makes a single piece of terra preta, or two if using high fertility soil in the crafting. It's easy enough to have a small farm full of terra preta at the end of a couple of years, if one puts a decent amount of effort into composting, but larger farms will take a lot more effort. If farmland is made more expensive though, that does discourage the player from opting for large farms...but it also doesn't discourage them from just making a large farm anyway and replacing all the dirt every harvest. Dirt is, well, dirt cheap, especially in singleplayer, and if maintaining farmland itself is more effort, throwing away old dirt and replacing with new is definitely going to be an even more attractive option for those who just don't want the hassle.

As for reducing nutrient levels immediately after tilling, no. It doesn't make logical sense, and it punishes the player for doing something we want them to do, which is establish farms. 

On 11/15/2025 at 2:25 AM, MKMoose said:

1. Implement planter boxes or pots (be it ceramic, from wooden boards or whatnot) as a method of small-scale vegetable (and herb) farming, potentially simplified in several ways (no farmland turning back into soil, no weeds or at least less of them, better water retention) but requiring regular use of a watering can or reliance on rain due to lack of irrigation. I'm thinking that something like a trowel could be used to aerate the soil in planter boxes, though that might be getting a bit excessive in detail. Similar planter boxes are also a prime candidate for mushroom growing which is on the roadmap, but that's getting a bit outside the scope of the suggestion.

I think these are a great idea, but as a cosmetic and not something functional. Greenhouses are much better suited to this kind of cultivation, since they extend the growing season. The limited size of a greenhouse though makes it more optimal to use a watering can, if the player really wants to maximize the use of the space.

 

4 hours ago, MKMoose said:

I've revised the original suggestion quite significantly, if you're interested. I've taken some of the feedback into consideration and added a point on incorporating plant residue after each harvest into the soil through tilling, which I've realized would be a much better, more immediately rewarding incentive. The player would be actually managing the crops through tilling, instead of performing a semi-arbitrary extra step to increase nutrients.

Overall, I like most of the ideas, and think they would potentially fit in the game nicely, in one form or another. But just for me personally, anything like a more intensive weed mechanic is going to be a very tough sell. As I've mentioned before(or tried to), I don't necessarily mind putting a little more work into farms, but I want to be doing it according to my own time, and not so much feel like I'm being forced to do it to get a decent result.

The other thing that I will also note: while I'm not a "speedrunner" type myself, I do like that Vintage Story supports that style of gameplay for those who do enjoy it. So that's also why I'm not really keen on adding more mechanics to force players into specific styles of gameplay. 

4 hours ago, MKMoose said:

One is multiplayer servers and long trips - depending on implementation, people may end up getting restricted to only or primarily use grains, since vegetables may go into the seeding phase too quickly to reliably collect them. Weeds and the need for tilling could have the same issue in that they advance while the player isn't active but the server is running, but they have an advantage in that they are primarily an issue when the player has to harvest crops and plant new ones. Tilling and weeds are also arguably much easier to tweak to be less impactful by simply adjusting a few numbers, whereas adjusting the phase that drops more seeds to would likely have to focus on dropping more crops but less seeds, which kind of defeats the purpose of it.

Long trips aren't really an issue here, but multiplayer is, depending on the server. Agriculture traders would be very strong in this scenario, since they reliably sell seeds. The server type that will have the most issues here is large multiplayer servers where players do their own thing, instead of cooperative gameplay. On a cooperative server, players can help each other get set up, but in the "every man for himself" scenario it's likely the landscape is just picked clean for miles and new players will struggle significantly(which, to my knowledge, this issue is already present in multiplayer). Likewise, bigger servers are harder to manage due to the player count, and often require specialized setups to handle so many players.

On smaller server, especially cooperative ones, it shouldn't really be an issue.

4 hours ago, MKMoose said:

The second is related primarily to new players - if some people are already having difficulties managing their food supply, then I don't think reducing the availability of seeds while making it easier for an experienced player to expand the farm quickly would be in any significant way beneficial to the accessibility of the game. I've also seen several beginners walk next to a patch of wild crops completely oblivious, thinking it's just another type of grass or something, which is a fun problem in itself. The reason why I suggest tilling and weeding is that thwy willl kick in only after the player finds seeds and plants them, and can be made much more immediately apparent once they do.

I don't really see an issue here, to be honest. An experienced player will always be able to accomplish things more easily than a new player. I think if anything, reducing wild crops might make the first winter a bit more satisfying, since newer players will probably need to rely on their hunting and foraging skills to store enough food the first year or two. To be fair, it might be frustrating for a few new players, but I will also note that one observation I've seen some new players make, is that the first winter was...underwhelming. Granted, they didn't seem too disappointed by the experience either, but I did get the impression that they expected to need to do a bit more hunting, foraging, and preparation than they actually did. 

As for more experienced players, yes, they could just achieve roughly the same results as the current system simply by scouring the landscape and getting enough seeds to plant a large farm to supply them through the very first winter. However...with wild crops being made a lot more rare, they'll have to devote more time to that task, and that's time they aren't spending doing other things, like mining, or hunting, or charcoal-making, etc. There is some multi-tasking that can be done, yes, but do keep in mind that inventory space is limited. Most players I would expect to start with a small farm and rely on hunting/foraging to round out their food stores for at least their first winter, and work their way up to bigger farms that can easily satisfy all their food needs.

[MKMoose]

3 minutes ago, LadyWYT said:

Farmland is already incredibly expensive to craft, given that 16 compost only makes a single piece of terra preta, or two if using high fertility soil in the crafting. It's easy enough to have a small farm full of terra preta at the end of a couple of years, if one puts a decent amount of effort into composting, but larger farms will take a lot more effort. If farmland is made more expensive though, that does discourage the player from opting for large farms...but it also doesn't discourage them from just making a large farm anyway and replacing all the dirt every harvest. Dirt is, well, dirt cheap, especially in singleplayer, and if maintaining farmland itself is more effort, throwing away old dirt and replacing with new is definitely going to be an even more attractive option for those who just don't want the hassle.

I'll try to give you a more proper reply to other points as well sooner or later, but I want to quickly say that I didn't mean increasing the cost of terra preta or something of the sort, I meant increasing the cost of converting dirt to farmland (i.e. creating farmland, from dirt), with the express purpose of making it less appealing to just keep replacing old dirt with new dirt, or repeatedly moving the farm to new places.

 

10 minutes ago, LadyWYT said:

As for reducing nutrient levels immediately after tilling, no. It doesn't make logical sense, and it punishes the player for doing something we want them to do, which is establish farms. 

Same point of making it less appealing to just keep replacing dirt. Also, only after initially converting dirt to farmland, not after every tilling, just so we're clear.

Thinking about it from a different perspective, it would reward dedication to a piece of land and the effort put in to make it suitable for farming. Makes quite a bit of logical sense for soil that isn't naturally fertile (especially barren and low-fertility soil), while high-fertility soil and terra preta might not be affected by it.