I like the new berry bushes

[Henchman_Dave]

I dunno if this take is unpopular but I love that they have unique traits, I want this for more plants later. Anything that takes a while to perfect and gets better with time further pushes unique playstyle focuses and interdependency for multiplayer, and searching for that perfect cranberry bush is pretty fun imo.

It also keeps food a challenge in the early-mid game because you aren't stacking 200 berry bushes outside your house.

rewarding time and resource input is the way to go imo, I'd personally like something like butchery in the future that lets you gather more meat from animals if you set up a work station and tools for it.

[Slam]

I like it too, fruit was very easy to get, but now, consistent long term fruits take more effort, and make the other fruit options, such as fruit trees or pineapple, more then just a novelty, just don't grab ones with thin root or the decreased yield, the other ones don't matter as much.

 

Edited Sunday at 05:37 PM by Slam

[Dilan Rona]

Given the care they put into the new bushes, and the mechanics, I'm hoping that they do the same for the meat eventually as well, with the addition of proper butchering systems

[MKMoose]

As the #2 berry bush rework hater, I do actually agree that some of the changes are definitely beneficial in the long term. Taking cuttings instead of full bushes is an obvious good change, though after that it kind of goes downhill for me for the most part. I don't personally think the rework even achieves what you're saying that you like about it, and I'd argue that many of the changes are largely misdirected, they are at odds with the gameplay role of berries for the average player, and are also unrealistic. Even if they were to stay roughly as they are, there's still a couple significant issues to fix, most notably that cuttings with different traits don't stack with each other, which is a sacrilege towards player inventory space and has no simple solution besides nuking the trait system back out of the game.

The dominant community sentiment, as seen for example on this Discord thread requesting to remove the fertilizer requirement, which got 11k messages in 5 days and ~80% reactions in favor, I would summarize as "yes, but not like that". The 1.21 berries clearly needed a rework, but the changes are the most controversial part of the update by far. Some of the changes are good, but most can be easily argued to be arbitrary, pointless, purely detrimental to the player, unrealistic, or a combination of those, while some of the biggest issues with berries remain mostly unaddressed. They're still available almost all the way through the year, spawn in pathetic tiny patches which are unrealistically scattered and annoying to collect (which is the main reason why aggregating them from a large area has been such a common strategy - they're just really inconvenient otherwise), and they remain easy to replant in large quantities even if it requires to wait a couple months longer and fertilize a bit for full yields. I've made a whole list of what I don't like about the changes here, and I really hope that at least the seemingly unintended issues will be addressed.

Now, it's also worth mentioning that a part of the negative reactions could have been prevented with more intentional design or better communication, because when people initially saw that "berry bushes require fertilization or they will stop bearing fruit", many people quite naturally started freaking out, because it was easy to assume that it would actually require regular fertilization and render berry bushes effectively worthless. In reality, the average player will never need to use more than 4 bone meal, or 3 compost or saltpeter, or 2 potash, which gets your bushes into the healthy state for something like 4-5 years in the current balance, which is a pretty moderate upfront cost more than it is maintenance.

Not saying that appreciating those changes is in any way wrong or whatnot - you are free to enjoy the game however you see fit - but I just personally really don't like them for a whole host of reasons, and the community at large is clearly dissatisfied.

 

31 minutes ago, Dilan Rona said:

I'm hoping that they do the same for the meat eventually as well, with the addition of proper butchering systems

Just for a bit of context, the devs have said they won't be implementing detailed butchering and skinning due to gore concerns. A lot of people have been suggesting ways to simplify the system and minimize gore (myself included), though I'm not aware of any dev statements suggesting that anything is planned for anytime soon. There are some plans for animals, apparently, but it's very vague and I don't know when any of it might come and whether it will involve anything related to butchering.

Edited Sunday at 06:42 PM by MKMoose

[LadyWYT]

I like the rework as well--the berry bushes feel more like actual plants now instead of just generic leafy blocks that also happen to produce fruit. The traits and bush health I'm finding especially interesting though. A trait like "Heavy Bearer" will increase yield by 15%, which equates to an extra berry or two. Same for bush health--healthier bushes will produce a couple extra berries and more sickly bushes will really only produce a couple berries at most. Now it's easy to look at that and go "oh, what's the big deal? A couple extra berries just for one bush just isn't worth the effort". If bushes were solitary plants then that might be true. However, berry bushes aren't supposed to be solitary plants; they naturally occur in patches, and the player is supposed to plant a large patch of them at base if cultivating them. So a few extra berries per bush adds up quite quickly, especially for classes like Malefactor that have a gathering bonus, or classes like Blackguard and Tailor who have penalties to gathering. I love finding the healthier, heavier-bearing bushes as a Blackguard, because it's just so very satisfying to pick a large handful of berries off a single bush rather than only get a few berries.

As for the fertilizer requirement, I'm not worried about that, especially with Tyron's comment:

Quote

Berry bushes require fertilization or they will stop bearing fruit. Berry bush nutrient use tapers off by 15% per year (resulting in about 5% use after 20 years). Some bone meal each year should be enough to give you a decent harvest

 Bonemeal is something that is just so easy to come by, but doesn't have much of a use otherwise. So it's quite nice to have something to do with all those bones now. From the sounds of it, it's not something that needs to be done often at all either, and if the world is played long enough it also sounds like something the player will eventually be able to ignore entirely.

[Ceridith]

The changes to prevent berry bushes from being completely uprooted and replanted is a good thing, this made gathering food trivial during the first year's summer and fall seasons if the player simply relocated every bush they came across during the spring season. The addition of traits rewards players who want to go out of their way to min/max cultivation is a welcome change as well. I'm in agreement with others however, that the fertilization requirement goes a bit too far.

That's not to say that soil fertility and fertilizer shouldn't have any impact. Planting a clipping on higher fertility soil should allow it to mature faster, as should optionally adding fertilizer. Higher soil fertility and fertilizer should also have a chance to increase berry yield as well, and in my opinion should also somewhat reduce the cooldown for taking subsequent clippings. But most importantly, this should be an optional choice players make to increase berry production beyond baseline, rather than something they're forced to do to maintain a regular amount of berries.

The main issue was the ease of relocating and hoarding berry bushes, making it too quick and easy to make a large berry farm. I'd say the inability to uproot and replant bushes and instead having to be time-gated by the clipping system, along with the incentive to be picky about what bushes to take clippings from, addresses this issue well enough.

[Zane Mordien]

2 hours ago, MKMoose said:

The 1.21 berries clearly needed a rework, but the changes are the most controversial part of the update by far.

Biggest issue I have is they are hard to spot. I had a real issue getting enough to eat for a few days, so I had to resort to eating roots until I was able to spot them better. New players might find it a lot harder to feed themsevles which would suck.

Your posts remind me of how much I hated Bowtorns when they were added. If you read back that far in the posts/discord there used to be about 50 of them hanging around outside your base after a temporal storm or a high activity night. They are still here, although they have been tweaked so you have some hope, but I wouldn't get my hopes up they will be what you want in the end. 

[EnbyKaiju]

Jumping in to agree that I love the new berry bushes too. I've a history in berry picking so I know how well they can blend into the natural environment, they looked too minecrafty before so now you have to actually look out for them and get practice finding them.The gatherer side of the hunter/gatherer was very much easy mode before, now it's a more skilled role to learn.

I think in time folks will get better at locating them, and find it less of a struggle. But so far, 10/10 update for me.

[Vexxvididu]

I've not played 1.22 yet, so my opinion is just based on reading patch notes and comments.

I agree that having to take cuttings instead of easily moving complete bushes is a very positive change.  Almost everyone agrees that 1.21 berries were too easy.

Like many other people I was worried they'd gobble up fertilizer like hotcakes, but just having to give it a bit of bonemeal or whatever as you plant it and gain years later doesn't sound that bad.

One other thought on fertilizer in general is that I think compost shouldn't be such a bottleneck...  needing 64 rot to "age" for 2 months/20 days just to get 16 compost seems expensive for what it is.  Especially compared to bonemeal.

I guess I have no opinion yet on the traits given I've not played it.  It sounds cool, but I see why @MKMoose doesn't like how it prevents cuttings from stacking.  Early game inventory space is precious.

[MKMoose]

3 hours ago, Zane Mordien said:

Biggest issue I have is they are hard to spot. I had a real issue getting enough to eat for a few days, so I had to resort to eating roots until I was able to spot them better. New players might find it a lot harder to feed themsevles which would suck.

Yeah, that's been probably the most common complaint regarding new bush models, though in terms of aesthetics alone the feedback has been very positive from what I've seen. I'm definitely not noticing them from as far as I used to, especially because the color of the ripe fruit alone is not an immediate giveaway anymore, though the bushes are now a bit more distinct from the everpresent birch leaves. I don't personally mind this change, as I think the old bushes were pretty ugly, used to really stick out and were kind of difficult not to notice once I knew what to look for. Slight texture tweaks could help, but it's also probably not too difficult to get used to their new appearance.

New player perspective would be very useful to get on this, though I've also argued that berry bushes should be much more plentiful in the wild, which would likely largely alleviate the issue of the currently very sparse bushes being somewhat difficult to spot.

 

3 hours ago, Zane Mordien said:

Your posts remind me of how much I hated Bowtorns when they were added. If you read back that far in the posts/discord there used to be about 50 of them hanging around outside your base after a temporal storm or a high activity night. They are still here, although they have been tweaked so you have some hope, but I wouldn't get my hopes up they will be what you want in the end. 

Well, the bowtorn firing squads were a bug, and that got fixed. At least they were a bug after storms - I don't recall it affecting high-activity nights as well, but I could be wrong. Bowtorn themselves are somewhat divisive to this day, but personally I don't really have significant issues with them besides simplistic AI, which basically applies to all entities in the game. Also, they belong to the more fantasy, eldritch lore-related part of VS, so they get more allowance to be implemented however the devs see fit within reason, they aren't restricted by realism, and they've been used to address clear design flaws that were present when there were only drifters.

But the berries? Apologies if I'm repeating myself too much, but I'm really just baffled and disappointed with several of these changes (same as the heat treatment mechanics, by the way), especially because most of them seem fully intentional:

1. Several of the new bush mechanics are completely unrealistic (the fertilization requirement, minimum fertility requirement and soil degradation).
2. Several of the changes are solving very few if any issues while also creating new ones, which makes them arguably just a net detriment to the game (if there's one good change, it's the cuttings, which solve obvious problems and cause very few if any).
3. Virtually all of the changes are inconsistent with the rest of the game, at least as long as other food sources aren't reworked to match (even the cuttings are in multiple ways different from fruit tree cuttings for no clear reason).
4. The total effect of the changes arguably makes the berry bushes unfittingly complex for the earliest food source that the player is likely to rely on, to which I actually got the response that gathering is unaffected, which is kind of fair enough, but still 1) health states and traits are extra clutter which is almost entirely irrelevant for a beginner and 2) trying to replant berry bushes which are inconvenient to collect regularly is a very intuitive thing for new players to do as far as I can tell.

Like, those aren't just the devs' interpretation of what they want the game to be, as could be argued with the bowtorn. To me, most of those are kind of fundamental mistakes. And you know what I honestly kind of hate? Almost nobody has given any pushback to these complaints - because there's almost no pushback to give. I welcome any attempts, though, or at least corrections.

I'm not really expecting the berry bushes to be exactly what I would want them to be - that would be disregarding other people and making a game just for myself, and that's why I'm pointing out issues more than I'm proposing any larger changes - but I genuinely think that the fertilization requirement, minimum fertility requirement and soil degradation would be better off just rolled back, because I see no reasonable justification for them to be added in the first place. Or at least no justification that trumps these specific changes being unrealistic. There's a lot of functionally similar mechanics that I could easily appreciate, like soil preparation, water balance or pruning, because those could at least be realistic. Traits are better, but the unstackability issue is still very significant.

Edited Monday at 12:35 AM by MKMoose

[LadyWYT]

40 minutes ago, MKMoose said:

Several of the new bush mechanics are completely unrealistic (the fertilization requirement, minimum fertility requirement and soil degradation).

I mean, just going off what @EnbyKaiju said about working in berry fields, and doing a quick Google, fertilizing cultivated fields of berry bushes seems to be a common practice in order to get better harvests. I daresay it's not explicitly necessary in order to get a yield, but in order to get larger yields, especially for commercial production, it's probably advisable. For agriculture in general, as far as I'm aware, fertilizing crops and fields is also a rather common practice, especially at the commercial level. For a backyard garden though, it translates more to tilling some compost into the soil between plantings or maybe sprinkling a bit on the plant itself in order to keep the nutrients/soil acidity the way that's ideal for that plant.

The minimum fertility soil requirement is likely to prevent players from creating a bunch of barren soil that's no longer useful for much of anything, as well as to keep players from accidentally sabotaging themselves by ending up with cultivated bushes on land that has essentially no nutrients and absolutely will need a lot of fertilizer attention.

The soil degradation stumped me a little too, until I thought about it a little more. One "strategy" I've seen mentioned to attempt to skirt the maintenance requirement for berry bushes is to just dig up old bushes and replace them with new when they start to wear out. Now I wouldn't say it's unrealistic to clear out old bushes that are no longer productive, however, I think it's more ideal design to keep the bushes fully productive indefinitely as long as the player is willing to care for them a little. I daresay it's also less hassle overall to do a little annual maintenance with fertilizer, than it is to try to get players to constantly remove old bushes and plant new. In any case, the simplest explanation is that the devs don't want players doing that for whatever reason, and rather than just outright say "no you can't do that at all" the answer is "you can, but it will cost more time and effort than other methods".

52 minutes ago, MKMoose said:

Several of the changes are solving very few if any issues while also creating new ones, which makes them arguably just a net detriment to the game (if there's one good change, it's the cuttings, which solve obvious problems and cause very few if any).

Berry bushes were too simple and strong before, and have been reworked to be a little more complex in a realistic fashion, as well as having more realistic visuals. With change comes the need for new farming strategies. As an initial change I really don't think it's a bad one. It's a solid system with more room for improvement later on, but for now it seems to me that berry bushes are more interesting to cultivate since, well, they can actually be cultivated like real plants now. They also have traits, which while simple I've found to be quite nice. 

Honestly I don't really see any new problems getting created, aside from multiplayer servers having issues with griefers destroying all the wild berry bushes. However, I would also say that's the same problem as before, just with a different cause, since it's just players destroying bushes out of spite and not players digging up bushes to use back at home.

1 hour ago, MKMoose said:

Virtually all of the changes are inconsistent with the rest of the game, at least as long as other food sources aren't reworked to match (even the cuttings are in multiple ways different from fruit tree cuttings for no clear reason).

I would note that I would expect later crops to be updated to reflect this kind of complexity--fruit trees especially. It's also possible that code to support certain features needed for more complex farming just doesn't exist yet. In any case, I suppose the devs could have just decided to overhaul the entire farming system this update, however, that would almost certainly mean cutting a lot of other features in order to focus exclusively on farming--features like procedural dungeons and watermills and whatnot that players have been asking for, for a long time. An update focused solely on farming is great for players who enjoy that aspect of the game the most, but isn't going to thrill the players who don't care about farming at all or would otherwise have preferred to see some other features get some love.

 

1 hour ago, MKMoose said:

The total effect of the changes arguably makes the berry bushes unfittingly complex for the earliest food source that the player is likely to rely on, to which I actually got the response that gathering is unaffected, which is kind of fair enough, but still 1) health states and traits are extra clutter which is almost entirely irrelevant for a beginner and 2) trying to replant berry bushes which are inconvenient to collect regularly is a very intuitive thing for new players to do as far as I can tell.

The thing I find baffling about this statement, is that...it's not exactly hard to go out and forage the wild bushes while waiting on the cultivated ones to mature. If the player is playing with the map, they can easily mark the locations of wild bushes down to make later foraging very easy(which is what I've been doing). 

1. I would actually disagree here, and say that gathering is affected just a bit. Struggling bushes might have one less unit of berries, while healthy bushes seem to be the standard as before. The bigger factor, I think, is the bush traits. "Shy Bearer" results in -15% yield, while "Heavy Bearer" results in +15%, which is the equivalent of harvesting the bush as a Blackguard/Tailor or Malefactor respectively, if one has no foraging traits. In any case, I don't think that's too much to worry about when it comes to the start of the game. The bigger factor is just the player getting used to what the new bushes look like, which is just a temporary issue.

2. Just because a brand new player doesn't understand the relevance of something doesn't mean that thing is bad. I'd prefer cuttings stack as well, in some ways, but outside of something like Minecraft's bundle I don't see a way to feasibly do that. I certainly don't want RNG traits, nor do I want to see plain bushes everywhere like before as that is less interesting. What I would like to see is the traits listed on the cutting item, since right now I think it just displays a plain cutting and doesn't list the cutting traits(I should probably report that on Github, if it's not been reported yet).

3. I don't think this is a problem because new players are, well, new. They're inexperienced, so of course they're going to make mistakes and try out logic that works in other games but doesn't in Vintage Story(like punching trees). And that is perfectly OK. The worst that will happen in this case is the new player will break a berry bush expecting to pick it up(or just to see what happens) and figure out what happens. In which case, they'll be heading to the handbook, wiki, or forums to figure out how to cultivate berry bushes.

1 hour ago, MKMoose said:

Almost nobody has given any pushback to these complaints - because there's almost no pushback to give. I welcome any attempts, though, or at least corrections.

There, I tried.  

Overall I see it as an example of how new mechanics might look in the game, or how old mechanics(like fruit trees, which the devs seem to want to make more similar to berry bushes regarding cultivation) might be polished from their original states. I also think it's a change that's similar to the fireclay changes that happened there a while back, in that it's a change that's controversial at first and may not make the most sense, but once the player has played around with it then the reasoning "why" starts to click. That's not to say that everyone's going to like the changes either, just that I think it's a change that will generate a lot of kneejerk reactions before the playerbase really figures it out.

The more baffling part to me is that more farming complexity and options are a fairly common type of suggestion, so I don't quite understand why the bush rework is getting so much heat. Yes, it's different than what existed before and will take some getting used to, but from what I've seen of it it's not at all been turned into this horribly tedious task that requires players to babysit their crops(which is a criticism I've leveled against many farming ideas in Suggestions), nor has it really changed the early game to the point that players are going to struggle too much to find food and starve.

[Ceridith]

18 minutes ago, LadyWYT said:

The more baffling part to me is that more farming complexity and options are a fairly common type of suggestion, so I don't quite understand why the bush rework is getting so much heat. Yes, it's different than what existed before and will take some getting used to, but from what I've seen of it it's not at all been turned into this horribly tedious task that requires players to babysit their crops(which is a criticism I've leveled against many farming ideas in Suggestions), nor has it really changed the early game to the point that players are going to struggle too much to find food and starve.

It's that it feels like an over correction. Preventing digging up and relocating mature bushes and time gating trimmings to propagate bushes does enough to balance out the issues berry bushes had. Requiring fertilizer and reducing the fertility of soil blocks trimmings mature on feels punitive. It pushes into into the territory where many players are feeling like cultivating berry bushes isn't worth the trouble.

And then there's also that it's just kind of backwards from a realism stand point. Many berry bushes grow like weeds in real life and have no problem thriving even in what would effectively be low fertility soil. I have a black currant bush in my backyard IRL that I have to aggressively prune back every summer, I have never once fertilized it yet am always swamped with berries.

[LadyWYT]

3 minutes ago, Ceridith said:

It's that it feels like an over correction. Preventing digging up and relocating mature bushes and time gating trimmings to propagate bushes does enough to balance out the issues berry bushes had. Requiring fertilizer and reducing the fertility of soil blocks trimmings mature on feels punitive. It pushes into into the territory where many players are feeling like cultivating berry bushes isn't worth the trouble.

I mean some of that I can understand, but at the same time that's also what's very confusing. On one hand, players will happily ask for/suggest ways that all kinds of things could be made more complex/interesting, or otherwise comment that particular things feel too basic. Then when changes arrive and things start becoming more complex, players start looking for the proverbial pitchforks about it.

Nixing the fertilizer requirement and letting the soil remain as-is wouldn't be the worst thing, but at that point it's just playing Wildcraft without actually needing the mod. Which I have nothing against Wildcraft and enjoy how it handled things, however, I would also say that it was still very simplistic and not particularly engaging beyond a superficial level when it came to crops in that regard.

9 minutes ago, Ceridith said:

And then there's also that it's just kind of backwards from a realism stand point. Many berry bushes grow like weeds in real life and have no problem thriving even in what would effectively be low fertility soil. I have a black currant bush in my backyard IRL that I have to aggressively prune back every summer, I have never once fertilized it yet am always swamped with berries.

This is true, and also where I think the system could be improved on later. However it does also depend somewhat on the berry species in question. Wildcraft had a mechanic that did allow certain kinds of bushes to spread like that over time, as well as a feature that appropriately thorny bushes would hurt if the player tried to walk through them without sneaking. I daresay similar could be added to vanilla bushes, though it's likely best done later when more time can be devoted to making sure the bush varieties are split off into appropriate sub-categories. Possibly even after a status effect system as well, if the devs would rather apply "briar scratches" as a temporary debuff rather than just add a flat damage modifier.

As far as pruning vs. fertilizer, I wouldn't mind seeing a pruning option alongside the fertilizer, so then players can choose which they'd prefer. Personally, I think I'd much rather apply a bit of fertilizer every once in a great while rather than end up needing to prune frequently to keep the bushes productive. Pruning sounds like it'd be more discouraging to long travels, which isn't ideal given what the main story requires.

As a side note on wild bushes spreading naturally--I do think that there would have to be some limit in place on how many wild bushes can be in a single area. Otherwise long-term worlds are going to have a serious problem with berry bushes overrunning everything, which just isn't ideal for a number of reasons. 

[Hafthohlladung]

3 hours ago, MKMoose said:

And you know what I honestly kind of hate? Almost nobody has given any pushback to these complaints - because there's almost no pushback to give. I welcome any attempts, though, or at least corrections.

There is plenty of pushback, it's just that most of us don't feel the need to occupy a full screen of text to express it.  Also quoting a negatively themed Discord thread, where a bunch of Min-Maxers swarm in to cry about the changes is not really a representative sample of the Vintage Story 'Community'.

3 hours ago, MKMoose said:

I'm not really expecting the berry bushes to be exactly what I would want them to be - that would be disregarding other people and making a game just for myself, and that's why I'm pointing out issues more than I'm proposing any larger changes.

After about 5000+ words across multiple posts on the topic of how bad the 1.22 Berry bushes are, that's the conclusion we're expected to believe? 

Edited Monday at 04:32 AM by Hafthohlladung

[SoraChiiy]

11 hours ago, Dilan Rona said:

Given the care they put into the new bushes, and the mechanics, I'm hoping that they do the same for the meat eventually as well, with the addition of proper butchering systems

yea for sure butchering would be so nice to be added in

[EnbyKaiju]

4 hours ago, LadyWYT said:

I mean, just going off what @EnbyKaiju said about working in berry fields, and doing a quick Google, fertilizing cultivated fields of berry bushes seems to be a common practice in order to get better harvests. I daresay it's not explicitly necessary in order to get a yield, but in order to get larger yields, especially for commercial production, it's probably advisable. For agriculture in general, as far as I'm aware, fertilizing crops and fields is also a rather common practice, especially at the commercial level. For a backyard garden though, it translates more to tilling some compost into the soil between plantings or maybe sprinkling a bit on the plant itself in order to keep the nutrients/soil acidity the way that's ideal for that plant.

You wouldn't believe the stink when a blueberry plantation gets its yearly fertilizer dump, haha. Be glad we only need to use bonemeal in game for this, because in real life they use chicken manure.

The way the VS devs have done this? It makes sense to a level of realism that's not onerous on the player. Yes it's another thing to do, but it's not something you have to check on every day. And honestly I'm getting a little frustrated on people crapping on the system when the whole premise of the game is to add as much realistic immersion on the player as they can without it being a painful grind.

This is fine. It's more than fine, it's accessible yet challenging.

Will it probably get balanced out over time, sure. But the constant crapping on the new mechanics is making this place toxic and I am enjoying hanging out here less and less. It's getting to be as bad as the discord.

So I'm just gonna enjoy the game, get used to the new way of doing things, and trust in the people who have proven more than capable of making this game as amazing at it is. Anyone unhappy with the new system can go find or make a mod, because you're an emotional drain.

[dakko]

6 hours ago, EnbyKaiju said:

And honestly I'm getting a little frustrated on people crapping on the system when the whole premise of the game is to add as much realistic immersion on the player as they can without it being a painful grind.

It seems unbalanced/unfair, imo, that my thoughts on realistic immersion differ from yours (I own a blueberry orchard, btw) and yet my expressing my thoughts on the subject is being called an "emotional drain."

I can understand how you've probably already been saturated on the subject since you participate both here and in discord, so I do sympathize to some extent. However not all of us have already discussed it, and we should be able to express our opinions too.

[williams_482]

I don't interact with the Discord on any regular basis, but I have to imagine it turns toxic cesspool very quickly around unpopular changes. That's the way of huge communities where the only barrier to having your voice heard is if you can type quickly enough. My sympathy to all who wade into those dark waters. 

Everyone on these boards (with very few, highly visible exceptions, none of whom I've seen lately) is here because they really like this game and what the developers have done with it overall. Criticism of choices planned for the coming update comes from a place of love, and a desire to make sure the game continues to add fun and interesting mechanics while maintaining a very high standard of quality. I think most posters issuing substantive criticisms make this care and appreciation clear, but not in every single post, and in conjunction with high volume overt negativity from other places it's easy to understand why even thoughtful criticism can start to grate. 

I'm curious to see what mechanical changes the devs make from here. I imagine this being a rc release means they intended for it to be feature complete, but there are a lot of directions they could tweak things in. Personally I'm not an expert on berry bush cultivation, and although I don't love the idea of needing to fertilize bushes, I'm not hugely bothered by it either. I am confused by the more convoluted seeming aspects of this (minimum soil quality and downgrading quality on growth), but they won't be game breaking in any case. Med fert soil is easy to find. 

[Chrondeath]

12 hours ago, LadyWYT said:

The soil degradation stumped me a little too, until I thought about it a little more. One "strategy" I've seen mentioned to attempt to skirt the maintenance requirement for berry bushes is to just dig up old bushes and replace them with new when they start to wear out.

Surely the maturation time for the replacement cuttings would be a large enough obstacle to doing this?  Or did the maturation time get cut short enough that you could dig up and replant all your bushes at the start of winter and have them matured by spring? 

It would also be using up the once-per-year cutting to do that, preventing you from duplicating bushes with good traits....

I'm still unclear whether the soil quality has an effect on bushes other than the initial nutrients.  Does bush soil try to revert to its base capacities like farmland does, or is the soul quality forgotten once the bush matures and it's just "add to it with fertilizer, consume some on harvest"?

[williams_482]

12 hours ago, LadyWYT said:

The soil degradation stumped me a little too, until I thought about it a little more. One "strategy" I've seen mentioned to attempt to skirt the maintenance requirement for berry bushes is to just dig up old bushes and replace them with new when they start to wear out. Now I wouldn't say it's unrealistic to clear out old bushes that are no longer productive, however, I think it's more ideal design to keep the bushes fully productive indefinitely as long as the player is willing to care for them a little. I daresay it's also less hassle overall to do a little annual maintenance with fertilizer, than it is to try to get players to constantly remove old bushes and plant new. In any case, the simplest explanation is that the devs don't want players doing that for whatever reason, and rather than just outright say "no you can't do that at all" the answer is "you can, but it will cost more time and effort than other methods".

The problem with this explanation is that it's a totally ineffective way to stop an anticipated "strategy" which itself is obviously silly?

We already know people are more than willing to dig up and replace med fert soil for their crops, even though simply rotating crops and adding more fields seems a clearly superior approach. The idea that someone would be so uninterested in using all the bones they surely have lying around to fertlize bushes every once in a while that they would rather destroy the bushes and replace them with cuttings that take half a year to grow to maturity is believable, if only because people already do silly things. The idea that they would be discouraged from that by the need to bring in fresh med fert soil is obviously ridiculous. 

[LadyWYT]

51 minutes ago, Chrondeath said:

Surely the maturation time for the replacement cuttings would be a large enough obstacle to doing this?  Or did the maturation time get cut short enough that you could dig up and replant all your bushes at the start of winter and have them matured by spring?

I think the berry bushes go dormant over the winter now, so while it might be possible to take and plant cuttings I don't think the cuttings would actually start to grow until spring. So the player could take and plant new cuttings from the old bushes before clearing them out, but in that case they're probably going to miss out on at least one berry crop, if not more.

 

53 minutes ago, williams_482 said:

The problem with this explanation is that it's a totally ineffective way to stop an anticipated "strategy" which itself is obviously silly?

We already know people are more than willing to dig up and replace med fert soil for their crops, even though simply rotating crops and adding more fields seems a clearly superior approach. The idea that someone would be so uninterested in using all the bones they surely have lying around to fertlize bushes every once in a while that they would rather destroy the bushes and replace them with cuttings that take half a year to grow to maturity is believable, if only because people already do silly things. The idea that they would be discouraged from that by the need to bring in fresh med fert soil is obviously ridiculous. 

I don't know that it's entirely ineffective. There's probably still a few players that will try it, same way there's always a few players that go to the effort of digging up and replacing farmland after each crop rather than just rotating fields. But like I said(or tried to say) before, I think it's there to try to serve as a bit of extra deterrent rather than just outright banning players from trying that strategy.

That being said, I'm inclined to agree that the soil degradation could be removed and the mechanic still serve just fine to stop the behavior.

[MKMoose]

5 hours ago, Chrondeath said:

I'm still unclear whether the soil quality has an effect on bushes other than the initial nutrients.  Does bush soil try to revert to its base capacities like farmland does, or is the soul quality forgotten once the bush matures and it's just "add to it with fertilizer, consume some on harvest"?

In the current system, soil quality is only relevant for the initial nutrients. Passive nutrient regeneration is paused while the block has a bush on top of it.

Also, it consumes nutrients when the fruit ripen, not when they are harvested, so it will consume them even if you don't collect the berries.

 

4 hours ago, LadyWYT said:

I think the berry bushes go dormant over the winter now, so while it might be possible to take and plant cuttings I don't think the cuttings would actually start to grow until spring.

Based on a quick glance at the code, low temperatures seem to only affect mature bushes, if I'm reading it correctly. I'm still gonna answer your longer reply, just so you know.

[Shoom]

I haven't tried out 1.22 in depth yet, but doesn't the buff to fishing sort of balance out the nerf to berries?

I assume what devs are trying to achieve is to incentivize players to vary their diets more and in turn interact with more food related mechanics which I think is good. And now natural berry bush spots matters more and is something worth marking on the map and maybe even considering when settling, probably needs some tweaking but that's part and parcel with any major overhaul or newly introduced mechanic I feel. Might take a little while to get used to for seasoned players, but in the long run I think this overhaul will be good.

[LadyWYT]

10 minutes ago, Shoom said:

I haven't tried out 1.22 in depth yet, but doesn't the buff to fishing sort of balance out the nerf to berries?

As far as the early game goes, berries are, for the most part, the same. The bushes aren't so obvious so players might need to look a little more carefully, however, it's easy enough to learn what the new bushes look like. Fishing, I would say, is probably a better balance to the hunting changes, since animals will now try to move away from players that get too close.

 

13 minutes ago, Shoom said:

I assume what devs are trying to achieve is to incentivize players to vary their diets more and in turn interact with more food related mechanics which I think is good. And now natural berry bush spots matters more and is something worth marking on the map and maybe even considering when settling, probably needs some tweaking but that's part and parcel with any major overhaul or newly introduced mechanic I feel. Might take a little while to get used to for seasoned players, but in the long run I think this overhaul will be good.

I think it's less about diet variety and more about just fleshing out agriculture and food-related mechanics a bit more. The natural berry patches feel more valuable now since the player can't just uproot everything and take it with them, and it otherwise takes a little upfront investment to get a berry patch going at home. So far I've found it to be a rather straightforward process and relatively easy to acclimate to, but then again I also played with Wildcraft quite a lot, which had some similar mechanics.

 

1 hour ago, MKMoose said:

I'm still gonna answer your longer reply, just so you know.

Oh I figured.  One other thought I forgot to mention: I daresay at least some of the reactions might be due to the fact that the mechanic was way too easy before, so having something that's definitely more complex is going to feel even more like a stark contrast. For a game that likely intends the average world to last a few in-game years before the player manages to complete the main story though, I don't think it's entirely unreasonable to have the balance shift to support a reliance on hunting/foraging for the first year while the player gets their agriculture and livestock established.

[KahvozeinsFang]

For berries it's a good change. It might even be good for fruit trees later on as well.

As long as they leave player planted crops alone I'll be happy