1.22.0-pre.1 - Fishing, Mechanisms, Metalworking and More!

[Calmest_of_lakes]

6 minutes ago, MKMoose said:

Most useful fruit take 20x longer to spoil than berries. Some of the Mediterranean and tropical ones take 7.5x as long as berries, and the rest is exactly as long as berries.

That seems like a really good advantage to have, compared to berries. I disliked berry farming because I struggled to make use of my berries before they rotted (which is still useful, of course, but annoying.)

[EnbyKaiju]

  

17 minutes ago, MKMoose said:

The problem with berries for me is that I see no reasonable argument for them to be relatively more complex than fruit trees and farming.

I'm guessing they probably took a look at real life berry plantations and tried to meet the mechanics in the middle. I doubt they will be a super complicated system but having some level of complexity & attention required for it. Honestly if all the end change results in that we need to grab cuttings like fruit trees, and once a year we have to throw a handful of bonemeal onto each plant then I think that's plenty of a change to shake things up. That being said I still have memories of the blueberry farm next to where I lived when I was a teen and the horrid smell of the yearly dump of fertilizer, lol

On the plus side the result of all this will mean that growing huge berry plantations over time through cuttings will be a lot easier. But we won't really know until everything is settled.

Thinking about it though, if they did want to make things needlessly more complex they would make fruit trees take like 2-5 years before fruiting just like the ones IRL. (I do not want this, btw, just theorising needless complexity that VS doesn't need)

Edited March 3 by EnbyKaiju

[LadyWYT]

To me the complexity for berry bushes is just the trade off for them being easier to propagate and harvest in the wild. It's quite easy for a player to visit the local berry patches and harvest quite a lot of berries, while wild fruit trees tend to be quite scattered and only ripen at very specific times of year. Likewise, it takes a couple of in-game years for fruit trees cuttings to really establish themselves, and those cuttings also have a pretty high rate of failure. In contrast, the berry bush cuttings don't seem to have a failure chance(currently) and mature into fruit-bearing bushes in under a year, meaning that it will be much easier and faster for the player to get a field of berry bushes going than it will be to get an orchard of fruit trees. In which case, most players would likely continue the same meta of ignoring fruit trees entirely and relying entirely on berry bushes. By needing to fertilize the cultivated bushes every once in a while though to keep them productive, then the player has a choice of whether they want an easy investment initially that will require more maintenance over time, or a harder initial investment that requires less maintenance for more reward in the long term.

I also wouldn't be surprised if fruit trees were revisited later to give them a bit more complexity though. Perhaps no fertilizer requirement, but maybe the player will just need to prune the branches once in a while to keep the trees at their most productive.

[EnbyKaiju]

1 minute ago, LadyWYT said:

To me the complexity for berry bushes is just the trade off for them being easier to propagate and harvest in the wild. It's quite easy for a player to visit the local berry patches and harvest quite a lot of berries, while wild fruit trees tend to be quite scattered and only ripen at very specific times of year. Likewise, it takes a couple of in-game years for fruit trees cuttings to really establish themselves, and those cuttings also have a pretty high rate of failure.

Yeah, this is a good way to word it. And very much my thinking too. There's nothing stopping folks from going out and grabbing those wild ones, it's just the harvesting them in bulk in a plantation setup that is made more complex by this system (as far as we can tell)

Put more effort in now, come back with a much bigger harvest later. So that makes me think the drop rates might be higher for cultivated plants as a result too.

[DUCATISLO]

tongs for cooking pot? really?

[LadyWYT]

11 minutes ago, DUCATISLO said:

tongs for cooking pot? really?

No. It was a bug that has since been fixed, to my knowledge.

[EnbyKaiju]

That's why it's an experimental/unstable build

A lot of stuff is still being worked out. It happens when you do major reworks of game mechanics...or minor ones even.

[DUCATISLO]

8 hours ago, LadyWYT said:

No. It was a bug that has since been fixed, to my knowledge.

yay also why are you EVERYWHERE!?

[TeaJay]

I don't really like this level of complexity over berry bushes, I hope they tone it down a bit.

It's alright to have in-depth systems but this feels a bit unnecessary especially since they nerfed fishing as well (you need pretty big water areas to even find fish now) and if they make animals more skittish on top of that, early game food sources are gonna be a bit slim.

[williams_482]

Are the fertilizer and traits actually relevant to the very early game?

It sounds like the early game is going to be pretty much the same as far as berry bushes are concerned: eat the wild ones that are ripe, and take a cutting while you're at it if you have inventory space. It means you won't get the extra convenient big late summer/early fall berry harvest you got under the old system, but you can go pick all the wild berries which are still out there because you didn't dig up the bushes, and by that time you should have enough veggies and grains to keep you stocked for a long time anyway. 

EDIT: I will say I hope berries are primarily N crops. Fertilizing with ground bonemeal every once in a while is no problem, but P fertilizer is more annoying and K would just be cruel. 

Edited March 3 by williams_482

[Stralgaez]

14 hours ago, EnbyKaiju said:

I hope in time the devs find more ways to encourage folks to actually engage with the crop rotation/fertility system. The game is built on a lot of mechanics that are supposed to engage folks and have them learning & adapting in the way civilizations past have. And to be honest I find just destroying fields and replacing the soil to just be a waste of the devs' effort to give folks systems to involve themselves with. It's also a real industrialised mindset. The four field system was created to help agricultural workers not deplete the soil and ensure the health of the dirt ecosystem, it was a way for farmers who weren't in floodplain style farms (like farmers along the Nile) to replenish the nutrients & keep working.

It can help colorcoding the nutrient categories for convenience, making them easier to pick them apart so you don't run into accidental misplants like grain, which comes both in K or N requirements.

 

As for the learning and adapting - The basic gameplay speed of which has the seasons cycle through the year doesn't allow for such depth when it comes to agriculture.

That's where, I believe, mods can actually be useful if you decide to go for the slow experience and where such systems actually can work.

 

For the berries - Just feels a bit overcomplicated for something that provides low satiation and has a short spoil time just because they are 'easy' to get early in game.

Edited March 3 by Stralgaez

[MKMoose]

14 hours ago, LadyWYT said:

To me the complexity for berry bushes is just the trade off for them being easier to propagate and harvest in the wild. It's quite easy for a player to visit the local berry patches and harvest quite a lot of berries, while wild fruit trees tend to be quite scattered and only ripen at very specific times of year. Likewise, it takes a couple of in-game years for fruit trees cuttings to really establish themselves, and those cuttings also have a pretty high rate of failure. In contrast, the berry bush cuttings don't seem to have a failure chance(currently) and mature into fruit-bearing bushes in under a year, meaning that it will be much easier and faster for the player to get a field of berry bushes going than it will be to get an orchard of fruit trees. In which case, most players would likely continue the same meta of ignoring fruit trees entirely and relying entirely on berry bushes. By needing to fertilize the cultivated bushes every once in a while though to keep them productive, then the player has a choice of whether they want an easy investment initially that will require more maintenance over time, or a harder initial investment that requires less maintenance for more reward in the long term.

Honestly, I don't see this almost at all. Some points on contrasting berries and fruit trees are quite valuable, but I cannot stress enough that investment, maintenance and reward should all be low for berries. Balancing berries as a high-maintenance source of food just seems antithetical to their actual role both in real life and in the game.

The main reason why trees are often seen as not worthwhile is that berries have almost no practical downsides - even the short spoil time is largely circumvented by the ability to harvest a single bush multiple times in a year. This can be most simply adjusted just with a seasonal growth cycle, and at no point does it call for regular maintenance.

 

The kind of fantasy that I would personally love to see for berries is to have them be very plentiful in nature, even covering certain areas almost like grass, but be less efficient and only available in a narrow time window dictated by a seasonal growth cycle (the realistic window is often about 2-4 weeks, though individual bushes can be staggered between each other, and they ripen gradually instead of all berries on a bush at once). This could create a neat dynamic where the player would be able to mark rare but rich berrying spots where berries can be easily and reliably gathered in quantity, and visit those spots with a couple baskets at an appropriate time of year depending on species.

The main advantage of this approach is that this would:

• incentivize food diversity - it would be naturally beneficial to find patches of different species that produce fruit at different times of year,
• incentivize food preservation - if the time window for ripe fruit is very limited, then preserving it becomes crucial (and fruit trees which last longer would naturally gain value),
• promote a gathering gameplay style that doesn't necessarily favor replanting - a berrying spot or two within walking distance in the area would be a valuable resource worth marking on the map and returning to, arguably creating an incomparably better gameplay dynamic than having to collect scattered bushes from a large area and replant them close to home so that harvesting large numbers of them next time is remotely convenient.

Edited March 3 by MKMoose

[MKMoose]

22 minutes ago, williams_482 said:

I will say I hope berries are primarily N crops. Fertilizing with ground bonemeal every once in a while is no problem, but P fertilizer is more annoying and K would just be cruel. 

As far as I can tell, they currently use all nutrients simultaneously in the same quantity, and their health seems to be based on the average between the nutrient levels.

[williams_482]

15 hours ago, EnbyKaiju said:

hope in time the devs find more ways to encourage folks to actually engage with the crop rotation/fertility system. The game is built on a lot of mechanics that are supposed to engage folks and have them learning & adapting in the way civilizations past have. And to be honest I find just destroying fields and replacing the soil to just be a waste of the devs' effort to give folks systems to involve themselves with. It's also a real industrialised mindset. The four field system was created to help agricultural workers not deplete the soil and ensure the health of the dirt ecosystem, it was a way for farmers who weren't in floodplain style farms (like farmers along the Nile) to replenish the nutrients & keep working.

I don't understand why people think replacing the dirt is a good idea even now. 

Instead of digging up your field, just leave the existing field as it is (or plant a different nutrient on it) and start a new field with the dirt you were going to use to replace the existing field? Unless you insist on farming in a ravine or something you should have plenty of space, and you obviously aren't short on med fert soil because you keep replacing it. Is this a water problem, done by people who have water source movement off and also grow very little that isn't flax? 

On default settings dirt replacement just seems like a silly waste of time compared to the way the devs obviously intend players to manage their farms. 

[LadyWYT]

1 hour ago, williams_482 said:

EDIT: I will say I hope berries are primarily N crops. Fertilizing with ground bonemeal every once in a while is no problem, but P fertilizer is more annoying and K would just be cruel. 

I'm pretty sure bonemeal is the P nutrient and compost is the N nutrient. 

 

51 minutes ago, MKMoose said:

Honestly, I don't see this almost at all. Some points on contrasting berries and fruit trees are quite valuable, but I cannot stress enough that investment, maintenance and reward should all be low for berries. Balancing berries as a high-maintenance source of food just seems antithetical to their actual role both in real life and in the game.

The main reason why trees are often seen as not worthwhile is that berries have almost no practical downsides - even the short spoil time is largely circumvented by the ability to harvest a single bush multiple times in a year. This can be most simply adjusted just with a seasonal growth cycle, and at no point does it call for regular maintenance.

 

The kind of fantasy that I would personally love to see for berries is to have them be very plentiful in nature, even covering certain areas almost like grass, but be less efficient and only available in a narrow time window dictated by a seasonal growth cycle (the realistic window is often about 2-4 weeks, though individual bushes can be staggered between each other, and they ripen gradually instead of all berries on a bush at once). This could create a neat dynamic where the player would be able to mark rare but rich berrying spots where berries can be easily and reliably gathered in quantity, and visit those spots with a couple baskets at an appropriate time of year depending on species.

The main advantage of this approach is that this would:

• incentivize food diversity - it would be naturally beneficial to find patches of different species that produce fruit at different times of year,
• incentivize food preservation - if the time window for ripe fruit is very limited, then preserving it becomes crucial (and fruit trees which last longer would naturally gain value),
• promote a gathering gameplay style that doesn't necessarily favor replanting - a berrying spot or two within walking distance in the area would be a valuable resource worth marking on the map and returning to, arguably creating an incomparably better gameplay dynamic than having to collect scattered bushes from a large area to make collecting large numbers of them remotely convenient.

I'm inclined to agree, however, the main hiccup I see with reducing yields is that it might make early game survival more difficult than what's maybe intended for the average player. Granted, I don't necessarily think it's bad for the early game to be a bit more difficult in terms of food, but no berries at all due to everything not quite being in season yet seems a bit harsh.

That being said, even with only one harvest per year in the seasonal scenario, I'm guessing that many players might still continue to ignore fruit trees in favor of just cultivating more berry bushes or relying on bees, since fruit trees still take some effort to get properly going. 

1 hour ago, TeaJay said:

It's alright to have in-depth systems but this feels a bit unnecessary especially since they nerfed fishing as well (you need pretty big water areas to even find fish now) and if they make animals more skittish on top of that, early game food sources are gonna be a bit slim.

Animals are a bit more skittish, but not to the point they all just run away as soon as the player comes within view. The player still needs to get a little close to them before they start to move away, and even then the player can still outrun some creatures such as boar. I think they probably could have gone a little further with it, honestly, since it's still pretty easy to walk up and pick melee fights, but it's a start.

The fishing feels much stronger to me than it was before. Yes, it is a bit more involved, however, a baited hook in a decent pond will catch plenty of fish to eat. Many fish now yield more than 1-2 fillets, and some can yield as much as 5+ per fish. That's quite a lot for relatively little effort and risk on the player's part.

[williams_482]

5 minutes ago, LadyWYT said:

I'm pretty sure bonemeal is the P nutrient and compost is the N nutrient. 

Oops. You are correct. 

 

6 minutes ago, LadyWYT said:

Animals are a bit more skittish, but not to the point they all just run away as soon as the player comes within view. The player still needs to get a little close to them before they start to move away, and even then the player can still outrun some creatures such as boar. I think they probably could have gone a little further with it, honestly, since it's still pretty easy to walk up and pick melee fights, but it's a start.

What I want to know is if trying to milk sheep is now as infuriating as milking goats is, or if a fenced in ewe will let you get close enough for that without fleeing in terror. 

As an aside, it's pretty ridiculous that a gen 3 goat is terrified of you for existing near her, but if you manage to grab her teats while she's actively fleeing she'll let you milk her no problem. 

[LadyWYT]

12 minutes ago, williams_482 said:

What I want to know is if trying to milk sheep is now as infuriating as milking goats is, or if a fenced in ewe will let you get close enough for that without fleeing in terror. 

As an aside, it's pretty ridiculous that a gen 3 goat is terrified of you for existing near her, but if you manage to grab her teats while she's actively fleeing she'll let you milk her no problem. 

Not sure. It does get a little goofy with the dairy stock, but given how long it takes to tame said stock enough to be somewhat milkable, I think it's acceptable compromise. 

[williams_482]

49 minutes ago, LadyWYT said:

Not sure. It does get a little goofy with the dairy stock, but given how long it takes to tame said stock enough to be somewhat milkable, I think it's acceptable compromise. 

Milking becoming fully reliable at gen 3 is not the problem. Large animals continuing to flee as late as gen 3 is both unrealistic and unfun, that's the problem. 

[MKMoose]

2 hours ago, williams_482 said:

What I want to know is if trying to milk sheep is now as infuriating as milking goats is, or if a fenced in ewe will let you get close enough for that without fleeing in terror. 

As an aside, it's pretty ridiculous that a gen 3 goat is terrified of you for existing near her, but if you manage to grab her teats while she's actively fleeing she'll let you milk her no problem. 

It might end up even more infuriating, because when I was checking out pre.4 animal behavior changes I found that rams will now chase you the same way that something like wolves or agitated boars would (at least that's what happened in that specific case, not sure whether that will be consistent or if it's even intentional), which may mean that it will be necessary to fence off rams and ewes separately. Animal behavior is honestly one of the rare aspects of the game that feels worse and worse every single time I interact with it. Even stuff like combat I can get used to, but having just chased three goats individually from almost a kilometer away into a pen (would be four if not for a sinkhole in the middle of shubbery), the animal behavior really gets on my nerves sometimes.

 

2 hours ago, LadyWYT said:

I'm inclined to agree, however, the main hiccup I see with reducing yields is that it might make early game survival more difficult than what's maybe intended for the average player. Granted, I don't necessarily think it's bad for the early game to be a bit more difficult in terms of food, but no berries at all due to everything not quite being in season yet seems a bit harsh.

That being said, even with only one harvest per year in the seasonal scenario, I'm guessing that many players might still continue to ignore fruit trees in favor of just cultivating more berry bushes or relying on bees, since fruit trees still take some effort to get properly going. 

Where are you getting reduced yields, though? I didn't mention that at all. Or maybe as part of "less efficient", but that's more about the general impression of the mechanic relative to other food sources, and doesn't have to translate to specific gameplay changes. The main point is that making the ripe time window much narrower (but different for different types of berries) would allow to significantly change up the balance in several ways. Even massive shrublands filled with thousands of berry bushes could stay balanced if the availability window is not too long, food preservation is not too easy, and a couple other miscellaneous conditions are met.

As for fruit trees, I don't feel like there is a good way to truly prevent people from ignoring them as long as their benefits aren't in any fundamental way different from berries. Some differences like spoil time are already in the game, some differences like more varied satiety or different ratios of nutrition to satiety could be added at more or less dev effort, but ultimately one fruit isn't generally gonna be that much different from another fruit. Animal husbandry provides quite notable benefits in the form of convenient access to protein at home as well as a whole exclusive nutrition type, and yet many people don't bother largely because the upfront investment is much higher than farming soybeans, hunting or fishing.

Edited March 3 by MKMoose

[LadyWYT]

20 minutes ago, MKMoose said:

Where are you getting reduced yields, though? I didn't mention that at all. Or maybe as part of "less efficient", but that's more about the general impression of the mechanic relative to other food sources, and doesn't have to translate to specific gameplay changes. The main point is that making the ripe time window much narrower (but different for different types of berries) would allow to significantly change up the balance in several ways. Even massive shrublands filled with thousands of berry bushes could stay balanced if the availability window is not too long, food preservation is not too easy, and a couple other miscellaneous conditions are met.

The "less efficient" part, primarily. The harvest window could be narrowed easily enough, but it also seems the kind of thing that could easily be overdone. I might be generalizing a bit here, but one common thread of many player complaints seems to be having to do X task at Y time, instead of a time the player would prefer. I don't necessarily think that's bad design, as there are, realistically, some things that must be done at certain times, that the player will need to comply with. However, too many scenarios like that stacked together at once can easily narrow the range of options that the player actually has to work with.

In the case of berry bushes versus fruit trees, the scenario that ends up playing out in my mind in this case is that the berry bushes might be balanced by offering seasonal harvest, and being limited to a window of a couple days to harvest, with the fruit trees being harvestable for several days in contrast. It does seem likely to generate at least some complaints though, for players who don't like the time investment and relative difficulty of getting a fruit tree orchard going. Harvesting berry bushes in the wild is an option, yes, but the player ought to be able to cultivate bushes at home if they choose, for less upfront investment than fruit trees. That's also why I think needing to fertilize the cultivated bushes every now and then isn't a terrible design decision(pardon if I'm repeating myself a bit here), since it's an option that requires less work up front but a little more management effort over time to keep good yields. In contrast, the fruit trees require quite a bit of work and patience up front, since cuttings have a high failure rate and it takes a lot of time for them to mature enough to really produce good yields, but the main benefits of investing in them is that most of their yields store rather well and they don't require much long-term maintenance currently(that could easily change given how berry bushes are changing!) in order to keep producing good yields.

32 minutes ago, MKMoose said:

As for fruit trees, I don't feel like there is a good way to truly prevent people from ignoring them as long as their benefits aren't in any fundamental way different from berries. Some differences like spoil time are already in the game, some differences like more varied satiety or different ratios of nutrition to satiety could be added at more or less dev effort, but ultimately one fruit isn't generally gonna be that much different from another fruit. Animal husbandry provides quite notable benefits in the form of convenient access to protein at home as well as a whole exclusive nutrition type, and yet many people don't bother largely because the upfront investment is much higher than farming soybeans, hunting or fishing.

I'm also inclined to agree here, for the most part, same as there's not really a good way to stop players from farming nothing but turnips for vegetable nutrition. Or at least, it's not really possible to stop that kind of min-maxing without outright cutting down on player options and forcing them into specific styles of play. I do think it's something that will change as more story chapters are added, since it does take a little while to complete the story and more content means that players will, on average, be playing their worlds longer thus long-term investments like dairy stock and fruit trees will feel more worth it. As it stands now though, it's relatively easy to reach steel and beat the main story within an in-game year or two, so unless the player prefers a slower pace or otherwise wants to hang on to the world for a while, long-term investments don't really feel as satisfying.

[CastIronFabric]

when it comes to berry bushes I am not going to form a full opinion until I get a full experience of the overall food balance. I normally resort to berries in my first few months and perhaps fishing will balance it now? I would have to play the full update to get a 'feel' for the overall balance.

Just like in the medical science world, sometimes reductionism is a fault instead of a benefit to full understanding.

 

 

[Ravensblade]

In farming fertilizers can be replaced with crop rotation as same fertilizers are harder to come by then others. That's why i wondered if instead you can just plant them for few years and then cut them. Or simply the berries would always produce fruits, but smaller quantity. 

If fertilization of berries would become problem only year later it complexity wouldn't be much of a problem, as a new player don't need to engage with it right away. 

Similar from my experience the berries should be pruned before winter, i see we can get plant matter to use in composting but i wonder if it would effect their produce.

[Hafthohlladung]

Really liking the look of the new berry bush mechanics.  Should help to stop the ridiculous early game Berry bush Apocalypse on multiplayer servers, where every bush for 1000+ blocks around spawn is ripped up and then hoarded behind protected Land Claims.  Because of this tactic, it can make getting started very difficult for players who join later than the initial group.

Given the extra applications of Berries (current & possible future) besides simple nutrition, it was long overdue that they should require a bit more maintenance if they're going to be grown en masse vineyard style rather than left in the wild. 

[LadyWYT]

8 hours ago, williams_482 said:

Milking becoming fully reliable at gen 3 is not the problem. Large animals continuing to flee as late as gen 3 is both unrealistic and unfun, that's the problem. 

Given that the player actually needs to feed the animals in order for them to breed, perhaps the animals could be fed again in order to make them temporarily more passive. From a real life standpoint it's not unusual at all to feed livestock while they're being milked, as it's a nice treat for the friendly ones as well as a way to make the more temperamental ones behave themselves.

[TeaJay]

I'm guessing from Tyron's quote earlier that the worldgen setting for berry bushes is bugged right now? I went to test it out, and could not find a single berry bush with actual ripe berries. 

e: A lot of them also have moisture levels at 0% so they likely won't be growing at all?

Edited March 4 by TeaJay