MKMoose Posted Tuesday at 11:33 PM Report Posted Tuesday at 11:33 PM (edited) On 3/9/2026 at 3:02 AM, LadyWYT said: On 3/9/2026 at 1:33 AM, 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. And I appreciate it. To be honest, I'm getting tired of these discussions myself in some capacity. It feels like no matter what people say, a large portion of the pushback to criticisms of the rework fundamentally misses the entire point of what it's directly responding to, and a lot can easily feel outright rooted in unwillingness or incapability to take words for what they are. That's not directed at you, to be clear, I'm mostly talking about some impressions I got on Discord here. An infuriatingly common sentiment is just a number of variations on "the changes are good", which, to be clear, is completely acceptable as standalone feedback, but seems rather questionable to me when it's a direct response to criticisms. It's also in no way exclusive with the argument that certain parts of the rework are a net negative in spite of the overall direction being solid. I think I'm gonna put this in a more space-efficient spoiler box. Spoiler Because I don't want to quote a dozen individual sentences, I'm gonna start off with clarifying better what gets me to say what I say about which mechanics, and that's hopefully gonna hit most of your points. I should probably explain some things in more detail, but I only have so much time and effort I'm willing to put into a single post. Feel free to point me to anything you I didn't answer in a satisfactory way, and I'm probably gonna be revisiting this either way to make sure I didn't write something stupid. Fertilization requirement. There is simply no such thing in real life as a plant that absolutely requires fertilization to keep bearing fruit, at least unless it's potted (only has so much to use up in the pot) or planted in low-quality soil (in cases where the energy requirement to keep reaching new nutrients is too high for the specific plant to keep growing efficiently). Berries are now the only food source that requires additional care after planting. Minimum fertility requirement. Berries can be very picky in terms of a couple factors like pH levels and water balance, especially shortly after the bush is planted, but tend to have low nutrient requirements, and some species are pioneer plants with can very quickly take over barren or disturbed areas. I can't wait when most other plants can only be planted on medium or high fertility for the sake of consistency with berries' precedent. Soil downgrading. It damages the visuals of the soil, results in annoying lower-fertility intrusions, allows to halve terra preta cost in certain contexts. It has close to zero reason to exist, because a near-identical effect could be achieved by making the bush consume nutrients during initial growth, which it already effectively does via the downgrading. And while some plants affect soil composition in various ways and make it less suitable for other plants, permanently reducing soil fertility with no way to bring it back up feels like a placeholder mechanic at best. Traits. Besides the issue of unstackable cuttings which I suppose I don't need to explain, they introduce arguably completely unnecessary complexity to wild bushes. The fact that a new player isn't familiar with the relevance of these traits isn't the problem - it's that the traits are actually borderline irrelevant for the new player, and even if they were more impactful they would still arguably just constitute excess complexity in the one place where it is most easily harmful, which is the early game. They can introduce early incentives where the player should just be taking the food they can get and not worrying about little details that will generally have little impact until a couple years into a berry farm. Add more complexity to endgame farming, sure. But this trait system adds complexity really quite evenly across the board. It genuinely confuses me in some capacity why they didn't go for a system where wild bushes have few if any traits, but planted bushes have a small chance to gain some traits that the player would have to cultivate over several generations of berries. An aside that has only just occured to me which I didn't mention explicitly before: something of a root issue with a few these changes is that they primarily punish instead of rewarding: the fertilization requirement could have easily been implemented as a temporary boost to yield instead, not unlike it effectively works for crops (for those it's frequency and not yield, but still), the minimum fertility requirement just isn't really necessary for much of anything, since lower-fertility soil takes more fertilizer either way and it's not like medium fertility soild is difficult to find either (at least outside of cold climates); adding a long-term benefit to higher-fertility soil instead of just a would have done it as well, soil downgrading is just explicitly adding an extra cost with little justification; even if that cost is irrelevant to many people, the traits are more frequently negative than positive - their effect on early game food availability ends up being a net negative, and bushes with good traits can only produce any real benefit once propagated at least some two times to get a larger number of them. On 3/9/2026 at 3:02 AM, LadyWYT said: 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. Reducing medium fertility to low fertility can already be easily considered "creating a bunch of soil that's no longer useful for much of anything". Low fertility is generally not practical for farming, and in crafting it can only be used for sod roof over barren soil. Even for landscaping I've generally wanted medium fertility for its color. On 3/9/2026 at 3:02 AM, LadyWYT said: 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. This is unironically an excellent example of that "the changes are good" response. I actually agree with this, except maybe the part that the rework is realistic (the bushes might be overall more realistic than they used to, but adjusting several details could easily make them much more realistic still), and what I don't see is how some of the changes contribute net positive complexity (especially the soil degradation, which I'm glad we can largely agree on). On 3/9/2026 at 4:09 AM, LadyWYT said: Pruning sounds like it'd be more discouraging to long travels, which isn't ideal given what the main story requires. The current nutrient consumption does that as well, though, to an extent. For a bit of context, in real life, pruning is typically done annually as far as I can find, and I see no reason to require it more often in the game. On 3/9/2026 at 11:01 PM, LadyWYT said: [...] 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. I do agree that this part is a perfectly fine change. I've actually said somewhere in these forums that setting up a large berry farm should take more up-front effort and resources, while wild berries should be much more abundant, relegating berry farming mostly to convenience and maybe some benefits from optional maintenance and some late-game benefits for higher investment. As it stands now, farming mostly just takes time and not effort or preparation, especially when propagating for traits, because the fertilizer requirement is rather low. On 3/9/2026 at 4:09 AM, LadyWYT said: 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. The differences between different species is something that does seem like it should be implemented sooner or later, and I think I've seen some JSON work to that end in the game assets. Strawberries are already a bit different from other bushes. Bushes spreading dynamically would be pretty neat, and I would love it if new bushes could spread onto burned land especially, since certain berries are very fast pioneer plants (meaning that which readily colonize disturbed environments) and it has apparently been used historically to promote berry growth as sort of radical way of berry cultivation. I also recall @williams_482 mentioning that bushes could consume nutrients from adjacent tiles as well. I didn't really like it for all bushes, but I think would actually be a very neat and realistic way to distinguish currants and certain other larger fruiting bushes that may prefer more space from the smaller ones that grow into denser thickets and carpets. Applying a similar effect to fruit trees would also make sense. Edited Tuesday at 11:33 PM by MKMoose 2
LadyWYT Posted Wednesday at 12:22 AM Report Posted Wednesday at 12:22 AM 13 minutes ago, MKMoose said: Fertilization requirement. There is simply no such thing in real life as a plant that absolutely requires fertilization to keep bearing fruit, at least unless it's potted (only has so much to use up in the pot) or planted in low-quality soil (in cases where the energy requirement to keep reaching new nutrients is too high for the specific plant to keep growing efficiently). Berries are now the only food source that requires additional care after planting. I would say it's more that berry bushes are the only crop right now that really requires additional care after planting, but even then it's not that much care in terms of gameplay. I've not exhaustively researched IRL berry cultivation, but from what I can tell annual fertilizing and pruning both seem to general requirements for getting the best crop out of a cultivated bushes. That's also where I get a little irked about arguments like "it should have been pruning rather than fertilizer!" as the suggestion isn't really changing the mechanic at all, but just switching one kind of annual maintenance for another. Reading through the handbook a bit more, it seems like the average time it takes for a bush to drop from bountiful to barren is about two years of continual harvest with absolutely no care, which is pretty generous. By "harvest" I'm not sure if that just means the nutrients are used and the health check done when the berries are ripe, or whether the player(or appropriate creature) actually has to harvest the bush themselves in order for it to count. If the latter, that probably gives even more of a grace period. Overall I'm not against pruning, but I would rather keep the fertilizer requirement for basic maintenance(because having something useful to do with all my bonemeal is nice), and have pruning function as a way to give cuttings the "Heavy Bearer" trait. That way, the basic maintenance remains rather easy, while giving the player an option to turn mediocre cuttings into some great plants. 25 minutes ago, MKMoose said: the minimum fertility requirement just isn't really necessary for much of anything, since lower-fertility soil takes more fertilizer either way and it's not like medium fertility soild is difficult to find either (at least outside of cold climates); adding a long-term benefit to higher-fertility soil instead of just a would have done it as well, soil downgrading is just explicitly adding an extra cost with little justification; even if that cost is irrelevant to many people, Yeah after further thought I agree on these points. I still don't hate the mechanic as it is, but those things could probably be cut without issue. For long-term benefits, making higher fertility soil grow the bushes faster, like it does for other crops, would be a better change, I think, since then the player has a clear incentive to use the best dirt, but is still going to be okay if they just work with whatever they have. 28 minutes ago, MKMoose said: the traits are more frequently negative than positive - their effect on early game food availability ends up being a net negative, and bushes with good traits can only produce any real benefit once propagated at least some two times to get a larger number of them. I still disagree here. In my experience, wild bushes seem to be about 50/50 on whether they will have traits or remain plain. Of the bushes that have traits, it seems to be about a 50/50 split on whether those traits will be good or bad. The traits that affect harvest speed are neutral, in my opinion, since while it's useful to harvest faster it doesn't really hurt the player to harvest slightly slower either. Same goes for the trait that affects the ripeness duration--I don't quite understand if that one means the fruit rots on the bush more/less quickly, or if it means that it ripens faster/slower. But in either case, it's an effect that is probably minor given that most players will probably be harvesting the fruit as soon as it's ripe. The traits that affect nutrient use and yield are the main ones to be concerned with, in my opinion. Taking a cutting from a bush that uses up more nutrients probably isn't the worst thing ever, but it's probably not ideal for the long term. Likewise, having several bushes with the trait for better yields is going to allow the player to get a bigger harvest in a smaller space--the key here being that the player will need to cultivate several bushes with that trait for it to be useful. The bushes with lower yields are best left alone. My current strategy regarding the traits is looking for bushes that have the "Heavy Bearer" trait and taking cuttings from those when possible, and otherwise just getting cuttings from plain bushes or bushes with neutral traits to serve as a basic starter patch while I get the really good bushes going. It's a nice little long-term goal to have. 40 minutes ago, MKMoose said: I would love it if new bushes could spread onto burned land especially, since certain berries are very fast pioneer plants (meaning that which readily colonize disturbed environments) and it has apparently been used historically to promote berry growth as sort of radical way of berry cultivation I mean if berry bushes did that, I'd be more inclined to play with lightning fires turned on. One other factor I didn't consider is that some of the pushback to the changes might be coming from the angle of the maintenance requirement in relation to large servers, since time is constantly passing and whatnot. To be fair, that is a valid concern, but I don't think it should be addressed by simplifying the game experience for singleplayer/small servers just to address a problem that's specific to large servers. I think it's better handled by including more options for servers in general, or perhaps just making the nutrient/bush health check happen only when the player harvests the bush, rather than when the fruit itself ripens. In the case of the latter, the player would then only need to perform maintenance when they've benefited from the bush, rather than needing to maintain the bush regardless of whether they actually harvested the berries or let them rot on plant. 48 minutes ago, MKMoose said: I also recall @williams_482 mentioning that bushes could consume nutrients from adjacent tiles as well. I didn't really like it for all bushes, but I think would actually be a very neat and realistic way to distinguish currants and certain other larger fruiting bushes that may prefer more space from the smaller ones that grow into denser thickets and carpets. Applying a similar effect to fruit trees would also make sense. I don't know that I'm a fan of the idea, but I'm not against more nuance getting added to the cultivation of specific species. It is, however, the kind of change that I think is better done later, rather than something attempted all at once. 1
Makeshift Posted Wednesday at 03:14 AM Report Posted Wednesday at 03:14 AM New player: Hearing about berry bush rework coming, reading along, eating popcorn. Perspective: Current berry bushes are baffle me. I get this entry tutorial and impression that there's a LOT of complexity in this game, even need to pay attention to soil nutrient levels in crops that take a very long time to grow. Hail exists and hurts. I'm instructed to make a special pit for charcoal, cellars to preserve food, surely, if I punch a berry bush, I'll just destroy it. It can't be that easy? A week or three in (in-game time), I choose a bush and punch it, just to see... and I get the bush. Don't even need a shovel to dig it up. Just a whole, functioning, plantable bush. That feels so out of place. Yeah, I'll welcome a change to that. --- That part said, I see the fertilizer thing and I laugh because it even further makes me think "Don't Starve: Minecraft Edition" due to fertilizer being needed for replanted bushes in Don't Starve as well. I think I like the idea of the trimming-based maintenance better. Maybe both? Drag some real bush experts into a chat, discuss with them, and make a second rework in the future. I just got to Copper age for the first time, and feel like I learned quite a bit in the process. This feels nice, and I know it's not the only thing in VS that does this, and would love to see bush farming join into the random educational moments.
Hafthohlladung Posted Wednesday at 08:49 PM Report Posted Wednesday at 08:49 PM 21 hours ago, MKMoose said: To be honest, I'm getting tired of these discussions myself in some capacity. For a brief moment there was hope. Then I discovered the spoiler box...
MKMoose Posted yesterday at 12:26 AM Report Posted yesterday at 12:26 AM As a small preface, the current implementation seems to still be very much a work-in-progress despite it being already a release candidate, though I'm not seeing any reason to expect significant gameplay changes (only visual improvements and new species are really likely), and I wouldn't expect pruning to be added anytime soon unless they find a quick way to create visually satisfactory models for the pruned bushes without the need to nearly double the required texture work. 22 hours ago, LadyWYT said: I would say it's more that berry bushes are the only crop right now that really requires additional care after planting, but even then it's not that much care in terms of gameplay. I've not exhaustively researched IRL berry cultivation, but from what I can tell annual fertilizing and pruning both seem to general requirements for getting the best crop out of a cultivated bushes. That's also where I get a little irked about arguments like "it should have been pruning rather than fertilizer!" as the suggestion isn't really changing the mechanic at all, but just switching one kind of annual maintenance for another. Fair enough, I can mostly see this, though I feel like pruning would probably be quite different from the current fertilizing (I'd expect it to be a regular, annual thing, and it probably shouldn't get less impactful over time). And while I can't disagree that fertilizer can boost yields often quite significantly, the point about outright requiring it being unrealistic still generally stands. 21 hours ago, LadyWYT said: Reading through the handbook a bit more, it seems like the average time it takes for a bush to drop from bountiful to barren is about two years of continual harvest with absolutely no care, which is pretty generous. It's much more generous than this, and the upfront cost is disproportionately high since nutrients only start at 25% if planted on medium fertility. And it's especially generous due to the current (possibly to-be-patched) ability to maintain a bush on one or two nutrients while the rest is at zero. After ~5-10+ years the nutrient consumption is extremely low already, and after ~15-20 years the it is effectively paused. And it's also halved for strawberries. 21 hours ago, LadyWYT said: In my experience, wild bushes seem to be about 50/50 on whether they will have traits or remain plain. Of the bushes that have traits, it seems to be about a 50/50 split on whether those traits will be good or bad. Each trait has an independent 15% chance to be applied (which gives an ~52% chance for a bush to have at least one trait). If a trait does get applied, then it has a 40% chance to be positive. 21 hours ago, LadyWYT said: Same goes for the trait that affects the ripeness duration--I don't quite understand if that one means the fruit rots on the bush more/less quickly, or if it means that it ripens faster/slower. It's just that berries stay on the bush in the "ripe" stage for a longer or shorter time. I'd say it's a borderline pointless trait - even clustered berries can be neat by speeding up the time it takes to harvest a large farm, but extended ripe time has absolutely no effect unless the berries are left on the bush to decay on their own. 22 hours ago, LadyWYT said: I still disagree here. [...] The traits that affect nutrient use and yield are the main ones to be concerned with, in my opinion. Taking a cutting from a bush that uses up more nutrients probably isn't the worst thing ever, but it's probably not ideal for the long term. Likewise, having several bushes with the trait for better yields is going to allow the player to get a bigger harvest in a smaller space--the key here being that the player will need to cultivate several bushes with that trait for it to be useful. The bushes with lower yields are best left alone. My current strategy regarding the traits is looking for bushes that have the "Heavy Bearer" trait and taking cuttings from those when possible, and otherwise just getting cuttings from plain bushes or bushes with neutral traits to serve as a basic starter patch while I get the really good bushes going. It's a nice little long-term goal to have. This is largely consistent with what I said, so I'm honestly not sure what you're disagreeing with. The impact of traits on wild bushes in early-game gathering is paractically negligible, because the expected effect is very close to net zero. People probably don't want to collect bushes with negative traits, which will result in fewer total bushes, even if the average quality of collected cuttings is higher. The effects of traits on cultivated bushes can be fairly neat, but it's gonna take time to propagate them, making them mostly a late-game benefit. My main argument regarding traits, besides unstackable cuttings, was something along the lines of "it introduces unnecessary complexity in the early game where complexity can easily be undesirable, while simultaneously offering very little benefit for the player until the late game". 22 hours ago, LadyWYT said: One other factor I didn't consider is that some of the pushback to the changes might be coming from the angle of the maintenance requirement in relation to large servers, since time is constantly passing and whatnot. To be fair, that is a valid concern, but I don't think it should be addressed by simplifying the game experience for singleplayer/small servers just to address a problem that's specific to large servers. I haven't noticed almost any complaints about this, though it might be because I don't play on large servers myself so I may not be paying as much attention to them. That said, I don't think it's a significant issue in the current balance - the fertilization requirement is so low that past some initial setup cost there will be basically no maintenance on long-running servers. 23 hours ago, LadyWYT said: Yeah after further thought I agree on these points. I still don't hate the mechanic as it is, but those things could probably be cut without issue. For long-term benefits, making higher fertility soil grow the bushes faster, like it does for other crops, would be a better change, I think, since then the player has a clear incentive to use the best dirt, but is still going to be okay if they just work with whatever they have. Aye, I'm glad we can at least agree on this stuff, because I would argue that these two changes are easily the worst (or at least most unnecessary) parts of the rework, while traits and the fertilization requirement at least have a slightly clearer purpose. Tying growth speed to higher fertility soil could end up more inconsistent in some capacity, because crop growth speed is tied to nutrient and water levels and not to soil type. I feel like the simpler solution would be to just make nutrients slowly replenish back up to the default level like they do for crops, with some constraints or other adjustments to keep everything neat and purposeful, so that different tiers of soil would allow a bush to stay at different health levels with no long-term maintenance.
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