Meadows - natural and artificial, for hay, fodder, herbalism and aesthetics

[MKMoose]

Motivation

In the current state of the game, it's very difficult to create good-looking pastures, farms, and similar builds, and using crops on farmland requires constant maintenance.

This is a group of tightly related ideas aimed at increasing environment variety and adding farming-adjacent methods for land use. It would also provide a distinct method of acquiring certain plants, especially hay and other fodder for animals as well as some herbs or flowers. Additionally, this would allow to quickly and easily create highly immersive and maintenance-free large-scale landscapes that would add visual flavor for farms, orchards and similar builds.

 

New plants

Before anything like meadows gets added, it would be ideal to consider the plants that would have to be added to grow in them:

1. Grasses. The current grass is functional, but rather uninteresting, and it would be great to introduce more variety in this area in different climates and ecological biomes - not just in terms of height, but actually inspired by different species. This can also include different density and models rather than just textures, since the current grass only uses a cross shape, and something denser in a triangle, square or other shape would be ideal for thick grasses in steppes or savannas especially.
2. Clovers. In some contexts, it's the meadow and pasture plant, frequently used as fodder for animals. For game purposes, it's fine if it remains very similar to grass in function, just with different aesthetics. That said, it could also have an important use in farming, since crop rotation utilizing clover is very effective due to its nitrogen-fixing capacity as a legume.
3. Wildflowers, herbs and other. The purpose of those can be very varied in herbalism, decoration, beekeeping and various miscellaneous uses. Example plants in this category include dandelion, milkweed, poppy, knapweed, but some of the existing flowers could also be used.

Left - grass (Poa pratensis, common meadow-grass); middle - clovers; right - wild poppies.

 

Natural (perpetual) meadows

Perpetual meadows are pretty simple - it's largely just a matter of improving world generation and adding new plants into it - so I don't think there's much to discuss. They should mostly appear in wetlands (low elevation, near water), near deserts, near oceans, and at very high elevations (and the different types should of course have differences between each other). They could be more localized and in some way distinguished from grasslands, but it's not really necessary. It would also be cool to sometimes generate openings in forests with meadow-like vegetation and elevated quantity of certain mushroom species. It would be quite reasonable to significantly increase the spawn frequency of various plants like mushrooms and crops in meadows, though it's not necessary.

From left to right: riverside meadow, desert meadow, coastal meadow, wildflower meadow.

 

Artificial (agricultural) meadows

Since agricultural meadows are obviously man-made, there would have to be a way to create them in some simple and intuitive way. Here's what I would propose:

1. Make generic grass convert into different plants when cut using a scythe. If it's just cropped, it would grow into special tall/dense grass, which would drop 2x or even 3-4x dry grass. If it's cut to remove it entirely, clovers and/or shorter grasses would replace it.
2. If the climate conditions are right, allow certain other plants to grow in place of grass after it's cut with a scythe. When only cropped for grass/hay, this effect would be rather limited (though it could allow to grow 3-4x grass in favorable conditions instead of 1-2x grass in less favorable conditions), but when grass is removed entirely to grow clover and shorter species, then a variety of flowers, herbs, and other plants could spawn with it, as well as potentially certain mushroom species.

Now, having a couple different types of grass and a dozen flowers is cool, but inventory management is bound to be an issue. I think that the best way to solve this is to allow the plants to have different drops when collected in different ways. If collected with a scythe, all plants would only drop grass, or a simple new item like hay or fodder (where by fodder I mean a generic item only used for feeding animals as well as making compost and maybe as cheap fuel). If collected with a knife, they would have more varied drops where relevant. I'm not entirely sure about collecting flowers and similar plants by hand, because removing plants by hand is often done e.g. when building, when inventory clutter is extremely undesirable.

The natural question which comes up is "how do you cultivate a specific plant?", to which I don't have a concrete answer, as a lot depends on the exact mechanics regarding what different plants can regrow into when cut. That said, I would strongly oppose most of the plants dropping seeds that could be planted on farmland - farming shouldn't be the ultimate answer for everything, so as to not relegate artificial meadows to one-time seed collection. They're intended as a unique way of land use land and acquiring certain resources, and they should ideally remain relevant all the way through the game's progression. A lot can be done with additional tool modes for the scythe, but I would be careful with it to avoid excess complexity.

Similarly, "how do you revert back to regular grass?" is a question worth considering, and again it largely depends on the exact scythe and regrowth mechanics. I don't think making it passively revert over time is a good idea, simply because these mechanics are in large part intended as a way of easy landscaping and decorating, especially for large-scale farm-like hay meadows that wouldn't require any maintenance, so it shouldn't be necessary to redo it every so often. If nothing else, reverting might be done by destroying the plants by hand, or more quickly with some other tool like axe, machete, shovel or hoe.

Left - uncut hay meadow; middle - hay meadow up-close; right - orchard meadow.

 

Related possibilities

1. Introduce more involved, interesting and realistic composting, potentially using mechanics similar in certain regards to charcoal pits. While I'm not certain about the details yet as it's not the main topic of this suggestion, this would ideally allow using a variety of plant matter and other organic material besides rot in an intuitive way in the composting process.
2. Allow grazing animals to create pastures using the same mechanic of converting cut grass to different plants (requires them to actually graze on grass), which could be similar or identical to the clover meadows I described. This should probably only apply to domesticated animals, or otherwise wild animals would be affecting the landscape in likely undesirable ways.
3. Courtesy of this suggestion, it may be a cool idea to add stone and metal sickles. They would work largely the same as the scythe, but allow for more precision by only acting on a single block (and the stone sickle would also allow to less efficiently create artificial meadow creation in the Stone Age, without having to collect copper for something so basic). They may or may not have full plant-specific drops instead of just generic grass/hay/fodder, to serve as the dedicated plant harvesting tool over the knife.

Edited Sunday at 02:50 PM by MKMoose

[LadyWYT]

Yes please! There are meadow-type areas already in the game, but I do think they could stand to have some bigger variants. I know the states of the Great Plains tend to get laughed at a lot for being so flat, however, to me that's also part of what makes them so interesting. There's nothing but grass or corn or other crops for miles and miles and miles.

[Blaiyze]

Agreed 100% - which is why I used to play with the Plains and Valleys mod (sadly not compatible with Terra Pretty which I'm giving a tryout atm).

Larger relatively flat sections between upheavals would be really lovely and tuck in very nicely with rivers when they get that sorted - I really hope they reach out to the creator of the mod watersheds, which in my opinion, is the best damn rivers type mod that I've seen - I do wish they were longer for river traversal but even with the shortened versions it REALLY makes the environment much more visually appealing.

Plains are a must. Clover would be wonderful too. Great suggestion.

[Heegrim]

They are looking into adding rivers so I really hope we get a terrain generation overhaul to add more realistic valleys

[Bruno Willis]

I love that these meadows would form naturally via normal interactions. It'd feel so good to gradually see grassland change into a meadow as you mow it for hay each year. It might be good for artificial meadows to have a way to regress back into a wild state too though.