Maintenance of bushes/fruit trees

[Genesis]

Hello everyone,

I haven't been able to find out if this topic has already been discussed, but I think it's an interesting idea to make the shears more useful by adding a system for maintaining berry bushes and fruit trees. 
Pruning is currently (unless I'm mistaken) only cosmetic, but regular maintenance could increase the yield of berries/fruit, either in terms of quantity or growth rate.
In practice, pruning allows the tree to focus its energy on a reasonable number of fruits, which will grow larger and develop more flavor. It also improves aeration and sunlight exposure within the crown: each fruit receives more light, ripens better, and develops its aromas.

In short, it adds yield levels that can be increased by pruning regularly.

 

[Yakkob]

I'd also like to see this. 

[LadyWYT]

Welcome to the forums! To my knowledge a berry bush rework is still on the menu for 1.22.

[Genesis]

Thanks, that's good news. We'll see how it goes.

[Dark Thoughts]

Yeah it's a bit weird how pruning is purely a temporary decorative thing. I don't like the looks so I don't even do it, because I think pruned bushes just look too much like vanilla MC leaf blocks. Would be nice if a pruned block would still be somewhat bushy, and maybe a wildly growing one becomes more bushy than the current standard model. Just for the sake of graphical variety. Because I'm pretty sure real life pruned berry bushes do not look like some snobby hedge.

On that note, trellises in all sorts of types and shapes would be awesome to have.

[LadyWYT]

2 hours ago, Dark Thoughts said:

Because I'm pretty sure real life pruned berry bushes do not look like some snobby hedge.

Would be nice to have some snobby hedge options to decorate with though! Then pruning wouldn't be something strictly for farming.

[Єгорія]

If regular trees get more fruit tree like mechanics, then the kind of trimming could also be used to raised stifled bush-like trees, that would grow from chopped down stumps back into tall trees, as i mentiond in a topic on forest regeneration!

8 minutes ago, Єгорія said:

My vision of the way forests could regenerate is, if regular trees would grow much slower - taking multiple years, sometimes decades, they could get more complex mechanics similar to fruit trees. If that is done different grades of log thickness could exist(so quarter logs would finally make some god damn sense!), but that's besides the point. The way forests could regrow would be simplistic root systems, that could also serve to prevent landslide from happening under trees and leaving floating stumps, by holding the ground down.

The center of the root system could leave a stump and regrow the tree once chopped down - this could also vary by tree type. Many trees are stifled once their main stem is down, and grow into bushes - which we already see in generated landscapes, and could serve as a means to do this manually. These bushes could regrow into proper trees again with trimming, like they often do in real life. This could allow for more propogation methods, other than seeds - saplings could be grown from root segments the player could dig up near a tree, while seeds would have to be gathered seasonally, similar to fruit(maybe allow to plant and grow fruits into saplings too, and if root systems are added fruit trees should also definitely have them)

To limit the performance impact, in addition to it being a much slower process, the growth of worldgen trees could be paused, until their vicinity is tempered with by the player. And actively growing trees could switch to the paused state once they reach a limit set by competition from surrounding trees. Big trees need big root systems - a tree would stop growing once it reached a maximum size allowed by it's current root system, while the root system continuosly failed to expand. But once a player tempers with a tree, it would start to grow again, and so would the trees immediatly next to it, as a root system without a large tree would start receding from its edges, allowing neighboring trees to fill in.

Adding these more complex behaviors could also allow for fun and interesting tidbits, like pines shedding lower branches to create loose stick blocks, and rare events of trees being felled by strong winds.