bug? 1.22 Medium fertility farmland(?)/flax(?) nerfed/bugged?

[Calmest_of_lakes]

Is it my imagination (probably the case,) or was medium fertility farmland OR flax nerfed? I used to be able to get 1, maybe 2 flax crop harvests per year back in 1.21, but now, my flax stops maturing after reaching stage 8/9. It's been a solid week of being stuck on stage 8/9, and it's too late to harvest, being in the negative temperture range in october where I set up my home. Is this a bug, a deliberate change, or me being silly? Do I need potash in order to grow flax, now?

It's very discouraging that so much patience has gone to waste, and I'm left empty handed and with less flax seeds. I might have to make a gigantic greenhouse, and mine as much potash as possible. Blegh.

Do wild crops spawn after world generation, by any chance?

[LadyWYT]

9 minutes ago, Calmest_of_lakes said:

Is this a bug, a deliberate change, or me being silly?

It's both, kind of. As I understand it, farmland was bugged before and causing crops to mature faster than intended, and has been fixed in 1.22. So now crops are growing as they should, but it feels like a nerf due to the prior behavior.

As far as deliberate changes, all grains now have half their previous yields, but spawn in larger patches in the wild. All this really means is that players will want to plant larger fields of grain.

12 minutes ago, Calmest_of_lakes said:

Do wild crops spawn after world generation, by any chance?

To my knowledge, no. The crops will be generated as new chunks are generated, but new crops won't spawn in old chunks. If you need seeds though, agriculture traders are a good option, as are ruins and cracked vessels.

[Calmest_of_lakes]

2 hours ago, LadyWYT said:

It's both, kind of. As I understand it, farmland was bugged before and causing crops to mature faster than intended, and has been fixed in 1.22. So now crops are growing as they should, but it feels like a nerf due to the prior behavior.

But now, crops dont seem to mature in time before winter.

Edited 19 hours ago by Calmest_of_lakes

[LadyWYT]

18 minutes ago, Calmest_of_lakes said:

But now, crops dont seem to mature in time before winter.

When did you plant? I think when I last messed with it I planted late June/early July and had one harvest before winter. Planting in late July/early August might be a little dicey.

[Calmest_of_lakes]

Planted in June or may, I think

[Silfrenbirce]

I just hopped onto the forums meaning to ask if crops had been nerfed in the update.  I'm not sure precisely how long it's been, but definitely at least four or five in-game days have passed.  I've got a bunch of crops planted on medium fertility soil, and I've kept it watered (in addition to several days of rain).  And not a single planted block has progressed past stage 1.

Prior to this update, even if I was pretty neglectful of crops, they would progress - albeit at uneven rates - and by now would at least be two or three stages ahead.  Since it hasn't been *that* long since I planted them, I'm not sure whether this is an actual bug or whether the update just really did drastically reduce growth time.  It's the 5th of June on my save file.  I forgot to make note of the day I planted them, but I'm fairly certain it was no later than the 1st.  Shouldn't I have seen SOME growth by now at least?

Edited 6 hours ago by Silfrenbirce

[Calmest_of_lakes]

17 minutes ago, Silfrenbirce said:

Shouldn't I have seen SOME growth by now at least?

It really feels inconsistent, or it doesn't give you enough information, at least. Reason #398598 why the game would really benefit from showing the player more information, like QoL mods do. 

[williams_482]

The update should not have affected stage 1 growth times.

The bug which was fixed was a "fencepost problem" with nutrient consumption as crops grew. Flax, for example, has nine growth stages and is supposed to consume 50 K nutrient. Previously it was consuming 50 / 9 = ~5.5 K per growth stage. This is wrong because although there are nine stages, there are only eight transitions between stages because crops start at stage one, so flax should have been consuming 50 / 8 = ~6.3 K per growth stage.

This results in significantly slower growth, but concentrated in the later stages. Under the old system flax in 75% moisture med fert soil at stage 6 would still have ~23% K fertility left to work with, and would grow to the next stage at 58% of baseline growth speed. Now under the same circumstances it will have ~18.5% K fertility left at the same stage, dropping it to 29% of baseline growth speed. 

All in all, this should increase total growth times relative to the old system by about four days on med fert soil, two days on high fert soil, and zero days on terra preta. That's meaningful (much harder to get two harvests in year one, and functionally impossible to get three in years 2+) Based on my first year crop in my 1.22 test world it seems like things have slowed by more than that, which could be me losing track of days, or could be one of the other factors (light level, temperature) interacting with the already slowed growth times in an unexpected way. 

[samogitia]

15 hours ago, Calmest_of_lakes said:

... being in the negative temperture range in october where I set up my home. Is this a bug, a deliberate change, or me being silly? ...

 

I'm pretty sure crops stop growing at 0 C. and if its 2 C outside they only grow at 20% speed. So that may be the reason they take forever.

[john_p]

More wild seeds, less farm yield. Big farms encouraged. Before, I'd have 4 storage vessels full of each grain before year 1 is over, as well as 8 barrels of various wine. 1 grain = 1 bread, which lasts over a year, or 4 grain + 8 crops = pies, which lasts over a month and gives mucho grande saturation.

Crops also lure animals from 80,000 meters away (trust me bro, from experience), so they contribute towards protein.

[Thorfinn]

As @williams_482 alluded, I suspect it is an intentional design choice.

Before, there was absolutely no reason to bother with anything above medium fertility soil. Especially when composting itself took 2.5 months, and was gated behind full copper. Now improvement of your farmland has been put more on par time-wise with other mechanics like animal husbandry, fruit trees, and, now, berry patches.

It has become harder to play the entire content in a single game year, and that's not a bad thing.

 

 

 

[williams_482]

I was grumpy about this at first, but I'm coming around. The indirect buff to Terra Preta is a good thing for the game. The delay on windmills and gambeson armor is a little annoying, but there is always stuff to do in the mean time. 

[Silfrenbirce]

1 hour ago, john_p said:

Crops also lure animals from 80,000 meters away (trust me bro, from experience), so they contribute towards protein.

Now that's just a damn dirty lie.  I have thrown down so many pit traps baited with tasty tasty turnips to lure in rabbits and you know what I've got to show for it?  Bupkis!  BUPKIS!

[williams_482]

1 minute ago, Silfrenbirce said:

Now that's just a damn dirty lie.  I have thrown down so many pit traps baited with tasty tasty turnips to lure in rabbits and you know what I've got to show for it?  Bupkis!  BUPKIS!

In 1.22, planted crops surrounded by a 2 deep pit will catch quite a few animals, even if the crops are fenced off enough to be inaccessible. Eventually you'll kill enough that they won't come back for a while. This won't work in 1.21 though.

[Zane Mordien]

34 minutes ago, williams_482 said:

I was grumpy about this at first, but I'm coming around. The indirect buff to Terra Preta is a good thing for the game. The delay on windmills and gambeson armor is a little annoying, but there is always stuff to do in the mean time. 

Also it's a delay on animal husbandry to an extent because you can't really feed them if you don't have the grain to make it efficient. 

 

I hope they dial it back a notch in the full release. This reminds me of the time they adjusted mining speed to match the player animation.  It was overdone and they quickly adjusted it back some.

[Zane Mordien]

23 minutes ago, williams_482 said:

In 1.22, planted crops surrounded by a 2 deep pit will catch quite a few animals, even if the crops are fenced off enough to be inaccessible. Eventually you'll kill enough that they won't come back for a while. This won't work in 1.21 though.

Yeah this will just get removed again. I thought they got rid of this before because people would just farm animals this way for easy red meat. I have had deer, goats and rabbits all trying to get into my farm.

[Silfrenbirce]

54 minutes ago, williams_482 said:

In 1.22, planted crops surrounded by a 2 deep pit will catch quite a few animals, even if the crops are fenced off enough to be inaccessible. Eventually you'll kill enough that they won't come back for a while. This won't work in 1.21 though.

Lies, lies, and damned lies.  The only animals I've so far caught in my pit traps are two fawns. And I swear the boars are smarter than they used to be.

On that note, I'm not sure how I feel about the reduced aggression of boars in 1.22.  I haven't come across a whole family of them yet.  I came close to a couple of piglets at one point but I hightailed it out of there before I had the opportunity to run into their parents.  Since then, I've only run into the odd lone boar and they haven't attacked me once. On the other hand, I'm really not down with boars choosing to flee now rather than stay and fight to the death after you've stabbed them with a spear.  It used to be either that provoking a boar with a spear thrust would get it to chase me toward a pit, or that it would stay aggro'd on me long enough for me to kill it.  Now, after a few stabs they just run. And I cannot catch a fleeing animal for love or money. And maybe that is a skill issue to some extent, but yes, I'm a bit on the shy side when it comes to chasing an animal down when that's quite likely to mean I get ambushed by a wolf or a bear.  Ask me how I know...

While it makes perfect sense with healthy, uninjured animals, it just doesn't make any sense for a boar - or even a deer - to be able to run away at full speed after they've been stabbed a few times.  I'm aware of the mod Flee Exhaustion that seeks to fix this, although I've not found that mod to actually work so well.  

It's my hope that the devs will consider adjusting this.  

[Vratislav]

5 hours ago, williams_482 said:

Under the old system flax in 75% moisture med fert soil at stage 6 would still have ~23% K fertility left to work with, and would grow to the next stage at 58% of baseline growth speed. Now under the same circumstances it will have ~18.5% K fertility left at the same stage, dropping it to 29% of baseline growth speed. 

And this is the core of the problem.

The grow speed should be at least some kind of continuous function to reflect the worsening nutrients conditions, not containting these jumps that simply double the growth time for last two stages. Then the growth speed would decrease step by step and the lasting of the next stages would be more predicable. 

I have made some wild assumptions and did not bother to find exact numbers, so do not take following table as valid. It is possible example of crop stages on medium 75% moisture, in current model and if we do not decrease growth speed from 58% to 29% when the fertility decreases from 20,1% to 19,9%. If the speed was distributed more evently the long growing crops were less exposed to the risk of prolonged last 1-2 phases.

Edited 2 hours ago by Vratislav

[williams_482]

26 minutes ago, Silfrenbirce said:

Lies, lies, and damned lies.  The only animals I've so far caught in my pit traps are two fawns. And I swear the boars are smarter than they used to be.

I caught half a dozen rabbits, two foxes, two fawns, and a boar, although nearly all was frontloaded into the first month or so. I also did virtually no hunting in the area prior to planting crops and digging my 1 wide, 2 deep dry moat immediately outside my fenced in fields. 

[Zane Mordien]

2 hours ago, Silfrenbirce said:

On that note, I'm not sure how I feel about the reduced aggression of boars in 1.22.  I

Makes it easier to me, the red meat just comes to me to die. Once you have a trash shield and a falx you can pretty much slaughter them.