Reclaiming Farmland when Fully Replenished

[marmarmar34]

Currently, farmland placed cannot be recovered. This makes any early placed high fertility soil or terra preta useless if placed in a suboptimal location. I understand the original intention was to prevent people from cheesing the crop rotation mechanic, but it makes little sense that you can't reclaim those valuable soils when they're fully replenished.

 

My suggestion is simple, allow the retrieval of farmland when their nutritional value meets or exceeds their base value. This would prevent people from cheesing the game, while also allowing players to safely relocate their farm to a more desirable location.

 

I would also like to suggest that there would be a little note on if the soil is safe to reclaim or not. This would explain the mechanic in game.

Edited January 2 by marmarmar34

[Thorfinn]

That made a huge amount of sense when TP was the highest productivity soil, and could not be crafted. I'm not sure it still does. Compost is such a slow process that the bottleneck is not the original soil.

But, yeah, that was me, too. I'd finish the game with stacks of TP in chests rather than use them. If the growing season wherever I settled was too short, I didn't want to have to leave it all behind. Now, though, it's rather easy to start your second year with pretty much as many tiles of max fert soil as you like. And your investment in barrels is a one-time thing. You can do the same each subsequent year.

[LadyWYT]

I wouldn't mind it being a mechanic, but I also don't think it's a priority at all for the reasons @Thorfinn mentioned.

[marmarmar34]

5 hours ago, Thorfinn said:

That made a huge amount of sense when TP was the highest productivity soil, and could not be crafted. I'm not sure it still does. Compost is such a slow process that the bottleneck is not the original soil.

But, yeah, that was me, too. I'd finish the game with stacks of TP in chests rather than use them. If the growing season wherever I settled was too short, I didn't want to have to leave it all behind. Now, though, it's rather easy to start your second year with pretty much as many tiles of max fert soil as you like. And your investment in barrels is a one-time thing. You can do the same each subsequent year.

Where are you getting so much bio material to end up with stacks of TP? I have stacks of berry bushes growing right outside my base, but still only have enough compost for roughly 12 TP a year. That's not to mention the stacks of bush meat and hides I let rot due to the sheer volume of wolves that spawn near my base!

[LadyWYT]

39 minutes ago, marmarmar34 said:

Where are you getting so much bio material to end up with stacks of TP? I have stacks of berry bushes growing right outside my base, but still only have enough compost for roughly 12 TP a year. That's not to mention the stacks of bush meat and hides I let rot due to the sheer volume of wolves that spawn near my base!

I don't know how Thorfinn does it, but I do know that some players will make dough from flax/other grain and let that rot. Grain is, after all, easy to grow in large quantities, and dough rots rather quickly.

For me, I get enough compost just by hunting and berry picking, as those are both activities that I greatly enjoy. 

[marmarmar34]

18 minutes ago, LadyWYT said:

I don't know how Thorfinn does it, but I do know that some players will make dough from flax/other grain and let that rot. Grain is, after all, easy to grow in large quantities, and dough rots rather quickly.

For me, I get enough compost just by hunting and berry picking, as those are both activities that I greatly enjoy. 

You know, that makes much more sense. I certainly have more than enough flax grain lying around. I don't necessarily have anything planned for it just yet as I've been putting off animal husbandry for quite a while, so I might as well put those grains into use.

[LadyWYT]

2 minutes ago, marmarmar34 said:

You know, that makes much more sense. I certainly have more than enough flax grain lying around. I don't necessarily have anything planned for it just yet as I've been putting off animal husbandry for quite a while, so I might as well put those grains into use.

Also worth noting that you should be able to turn any grain except flax into alcohol, which you can distill into aqua vitae. The yield isn't as efficient as wine, but still quite useful if you need aqua vitae specifically and/or just love planting huge fields of grain crops.

[marmarmar34]

1 hour ago, LadyWYT said:

Also worth noting that you should be able to turn any grain except flax into alcohol, which you can distill into aqua vitae. The yield isn't as efficient as wine, but still quite useful if you need aqua vitae specifically and/or just love planting huge fields of grain crops.

Noted, although it seems like a pretty useless liquid at the moment. Distilling is on my bucket list, but it's certainly far from a priority. 

[greasecake]

I think letting mined farmland keep its nutritional value and prevent it from autostacking would do the job.

Also manually mixing it with less depleted soil of the same kind would even make real-life sense and jive with already existing mechanic for temperature and spoilage mixing.

[Facethief]

2 hours ago, greasecake said:

nutritional value

… it’s an acquired taste, I suppose.

[Vexxvididu]

4 hours ago, greasecake said:

I think letting mined farmland keep its nutritional value and prevent it from autostacking would do the job.

This would get messy REALLY FAST because with the random floating point values, no 2 pieces of partly repleanished land would be the same so you'd not have the inventory space to move much.

I like the original suggestion of only letting the farmland maintain if it's maxed out.  OR maybe if it's only partly refilled, round the value down to some fixed values or even zero.

Of course.... moving farmland is arguably only worth it for Terra Preta.  It would make sense if they made this a property of only that soil type I think.

[Diff]

16 minutes ago, Vexxvididu said:

This would get messy REALLY FAST because with the random floating point values, no 2 pieces of partly repleanished land would be the same so you'd not have the inventory space to move much.

I like the original suggestion of only letting the farmland maintain if it's maxed out.  OR maybe if it's only partly refilled, round the value down to some fixed values or even zero.

Of course.... moving farmland is arguably only worth it for Terra Preta.  It would make sense if they made this a property of only that soil type I think.

Game already handles this for temperature. If two items with different temperatures are forced to stack, they average out the different values.

[LadyWYT]

53 minutes ago, Vexxvididu said:

OR maybe if it's only partly refilled, round the value down to some fixed values or even zero.

Maybe in this case, it always rounds the value down to the next lowest applicable dirt tier. That is, if you break medium fertility farmland before all nutrients have recovered, then you get low fertility soil. Terra preta would degrade to high fertility, high fertility to medium, etc. Technically, the system could be abused somewhat by the player breaking terra preta and placing the resulting high fertility dirt to get another crop out of it, but I think the key factor to consider here that such a strategy isn't sustainable and costs more resources than it produces.

[Vexxvididu]

12 hours ago, Diff said:

Game already handles this for temperature. If two items with different temperatures are forced to stack, they average out the different values.

yes, but we obviously don't want that for soil in the same way, because that would be easy to abuse.

[Vexxvididu]

12 hours ago, LadyWYT said:

Maybe in this case, it always rounds the value down to the next lowest applicable dirt tier. That is, if you break medium fertility farmland before all nutrients have recovered, then you get low fertility soil. Terra preta would degrade to high fertility, high fertility to medium, etc. Technically, the system could be abused somewhat by the player breaking terra preta and placing the resulting high fertility dirt to get another crop out of it, but I think the key factor to consider here that such a strategy isn't sustainable and costs more resources than it produces.

This system is good for avoiding abuse, but I think would be overly punishing.  Losing Terra Preta is what people would want to avoid....  I think maybe it's enough punishment so that if you move Terra Preta, you just get empty terra Preta.

[Thorfinn]

I think I'd prefer if it always lost one category. And that includes the special from sylvite, particularly with any of the potash mods. No cheesing the system by placing a block, adding sylvite so it improves one class, break it, rinse, repeat until it is all TP.

[LadyWYT]

1 hour ago, Vexxvididu said:

This system is good for avoiding abuse, but I think would be overly punishing.  Losing Terra Preta is what people would want to avoid....  I think maybe it's enough punishment so that if you move Terra Preta, you just get empty terra Preta.

Possibly, but my reasoning is that by the time the player is farming with terra preta, they should be well-established and not intending to move. If for some reason they wanted to move it, they could wait a little while for the nutrients to tick back up to 100% and then retrieve the terra preta without penalty. 

[Zane Mordien]

I would use it for high fertility more than TP. I will admit though it's more for when I challenge myself and do snowball earth or an arid world where soil is less fertile. In those worlds if I move I want the ability to take the soil with me.