Berry bush rework - what's your take?

[MKMoose]

What actually has changed

A description and mini-guide to the changes. Most of this information you can roughly get from the handbook. Includes a couple potential objective issues, especially those which are unlikely to change in the foreseeable future.

 

1. Reworked visuals. Generally speaking: no longer a cube, more detailed, more realistic and more varied. Ripe fruit can be more difficult to notice, especially on struggling bushes. They can't be pruned anymore, but returning this functionality would likely require a lot of additional texture work on top of what the devs have already taken on with several new fruit types alongside the reworked ones.

2. New species. As of now, strawberry and beautyberry have been added. A whopping 8 more new fruit types are in game files but not obtainable yet, though I don't know whether all of them are going to be added in 1.22 and whether all of them are going to be implemented as fruiting bushes, and three may realistically fit better as fruit trees.

3. Cuttings. Bushes now drop a few pieces of plant debris when broken, only useful for rot. In order to propagate the bushes, cuttings have to be taken from them using a knife and planted in soil, and they take a few months until they grow into a proper bush. They grow in two stages, from cutting to a young bush, then from young to a mature bush. The exact time is currently 8.5 +/- 2.3 months until the first harvest (sum of cutting growth, bush maturation and the first fruiting cycle), though it may still change - either way it's long enough that it will be unlikely if not impossible to get any significant berry harvest in Year 0 before winter hits. A cutting can be taken from a bush only once per year. A cutting has to be planted within 15 days of obtaining it.

4. Adjusted growth cycle. I'll skip an exact description for now, but the most important practical differences include: extended growth time from empty to ripe bush (2 => 2.5 months), shortened growth window (they take longer to start growing again after the winter) and shortened ripe duration (4 => 1 month). Overall, it seems generally impractical in temperate climates to harvest berries more than twice per year. Different species have slightly different parameters. Also, as of rc.6, bushes require sunlight to grow.

5. Bush health and fertilizer usage. Bushes planted from a cutting now require fertilizer to maintain good health. A bush has four possible states, depending on its average nutrient level:
- 80-100% nutrients => “bountiful” - produces 50% more fruit,
- 30-80% nutrients => “healthy” - default state,
- 10-30% nutrients => “struggling” - produces 50% less fruit,
- 0-10% average nutrients => “barren” - doesn't produce any fruit at all.
This does not affect wild bushes - wild ones start off randomly either "struggling" or "healthy" and stay in that state indefninitely (and can't be fertilized). Bushes planted from cuttings start off from an amount of nutrients determined by the soil they are planted on (the same level as for farmland), and then they consume a portion of nutrients every time the fruit ripens (an equal amount of all three nutrients, more is consumed when the bush is more healthy). The nutrient consumption falls off slowly over time, becoming almost negligible after ~15 years and very nearly zero after ~25 years. The amount of fertilizer you need to use and how early you have to use it after planting depends on the soil you use (and it’s practically the only effect that soil ends up having on the bush). For low fertility soil, the bush will start off in the "struggling" state, so you're generally gonna prefer to fertilize it immediately or just plant in better soil. For medium fertility soil, you will generally want to add at least one piece of fertilizer after about two years from planting the bush, and then some more within the next couple years. Most players won’t generally need to use more than ~4 portions per bush in a typical multi-year playthrough, or a bit more up-front if trying to keep them "bountiful". In the extreme, ~10 portions in total (a bit more if only using bone meal) over up to ~10 years are required to bring a bush to the “bountiful” state immediately and maintain it indefinitely. Strawberries are an exception, since they have halved yield and halved nutrient uptake, so they almost don't have to be fertilized at all besides the initial cost of bringing them up to a higher health state. It is currently possible and arguably optimal to sustain the bushes only on one nutrient and not all three, which seems like an exploit but I don’t know when and how it will get patched, if at all.

6. Fertility requirement specifically (the “barren” state). A bush which falls below 10% average nutrient levels will enter the “barren” state, in which it no longer bears fruit and has to be fertilized to produce again. For medium fertility soil, if the bush doesn’t get fertilized initially, it will happen after ~8 years, I think, if I didn't miscalculate something, which is borderline irrelevant for the average player - it's entirely possible to just skip fertilization altogether, and you'll just be collecting half-yield bushes. Fertilizing the bush planted in medium fertility just a tiny bit makes it impossible for the nutrient levels to fall to “barren” - they will stay “struggling” or better forever. I’m separating it from bush health as a separate feature, if only because it was initially very controversial and I want to see separate sentiments for fertilization in general, and specifically the requirement to fertilize lest the bush stop producing fruit.

7. Medium soil fertility requirement. A cutting can only be planted on medium fertility soil and above. As of rc.6, this seems to have been removed. Keep in mind they will start off "struggling" in low fertility and require fertilizer more quickly, while on barren soil they won't produce any fruit at all unless fertilized.

8. Traits. Some bushes can have a few small effects applied to them, which can be either negative or positive. Increased/reduced yield, nutrient uptake, harvest speed, ripe duration. Those traits persist when bushes are propagated through cuttings, which means that you can find a really good bush with multiple good traits and propagate it out into a large farm. However, new traits cannot be created by propagating bushes - you have to find good wild bushes and propagate them. Cuttings with different traits don’t stack, which can take up a lot of inventory space quickly.

9. General balance as a food source. Mainly influenced by the adjusted growth cycle, as well as by a 20% drop rate increase relative to 1.21 (4.4 => 5.5 berries per healthy bush). Wild bushes are significantly less reliable than they used to be, especially for people who may struggle to notice them now, but purely numbers-wise as well. Cultivated bushes can be arguably better than they used to be, especially when considering traits, but require more time to properly set up and some fertilizer to keep them healthy. The initial growth time is long enough that it seems impractical if not impossible to get a sizable quantity of bushes fast enough to fruit within Year 0 at default world configuration. Remember that farming has received some nerfs in 1.22 as well, which makes this comparison a bit less straightforward.

I'll try to update this post at least until the stable release if anyone has any corrections or when new changes are released, though the poll itself will probably stay as is.

 

Motivation for this post

When discussing the rework, I’ve frequently seen perfectly fine changes being complained about with completely incorrect assumptions about their effects, and a couple times I've even seen literally nonexistent changes being complained about. I’ve also seen the rework uncritically praised with no apparent attempt to even consider criticism of it as potentially valid.

Of a few relatively popular videos I've looked at to gauge people's sentiment, every single one included only surface-level coverage, used flawed testing methods, neglected many details, and even included baseless conjecture or plainly incorrect information in one or two cases.

On the whole, player familiarity with the rework is low despite many reactions being heated, because many people predominantly react off of vibes, expectations, unverified interpretation of the changelog, and word of mouth. Many people supportive of the rework aren't even familiar with the details of what has been changed, and even fewer still actually know which parts are predominantly being criticized. Similarly, a lot of the people critical of the rework are grossly overreacting to the fertilization requirement and a couple other details without actually analyzing the gameplay impact of all the changes, which easily drives a feedback loop where two sides fuel each other's emotions and entrench themselves in opposing positions. Productive discussion has been quite rare to see, which is kind of both expected and disappointing.

A lot of that reaction could have been prevented by designing the rework differently to avoid hitting obvious triggers like the fertilizer requirement, or by communicating the changes more clearly in the changelog.

Personally, while my initial reactions to the rework were admittedly somewhat rushed, I generally argue knowing the code and full extent of the changes. The most positive broad take I can muster is as follows: the design direction is fine even if not what I would prefer, but the execution has some problems. Certain changes are quite universally welcomed, but there are certain components of the new system, intentional or not, which should still be revised or improved, if not removed. One of them (soil downgrading) has been rolled back in rc.3.

I’d be interested to know what people think of individual aspects of the rework.

Edited Saturday at 09:30 AM by MKMoose

[Blaiyze]

I haven't yet played the new version as I prefer to wait for the stable releases, I do still have thoughts.

The TLDR: overall, I like the changes.

When I first saw the fertilizer requirement, my initial knee jerk was "oh great, we have to fertilize ALL THE TIME?" and then I saw people who actually have tested it, and I think it's written more specifically in the update (my knee jerk just hopped over this part I think), that the fertilizing is literally once per year. Which honestly, that's nothing. Seriously, I don't see the big deal if it's one slap of bonemeal per year. If it were more tedious, with having to fertilize throughout the entire initial growth of the cutting, I could understand that being a frustration.

I've always thought that berries were far too OP early game, but I think they were made that way partially for early game food security. The addition of fishing really bridges the gap. I also prefer the concept of berries ripening and having a single harvest window per year, which is on par with how berries work IRL and simply makes more sense. Especially considering berries became useless pretty quickly once farms were up and running and food stability had been achieved. This makes them more viable long term particularly with the variants. It makes foraging early game perhaps a touch more complex but means actually paying attention to/marking down those berry patches as you explore.

I've been wanting to try playing without the map and go in blind being forced to play slower and more focused, so I'm interested to see how the new berries will impact this.

[LadyWYT]

The only nitpick I have is the visuals. I don't think they have any significant flaws so I voted in favor of them on the first question, but I also voted in favor of them on the second question since the visuals for black currants and white currants could use just a little more contrast to make the berries stand out better. It's not really a huge deal since the tooltip gives the information about bush status, and the other bushes don't have that issue, but a little polish is needed.

Everything else I've found to be quite enjoyable.

3 minutes ago, Blaiyze said:

I also prefer the concept of berries ripening and having a single harvest window per year, which is on par with how berries work IRL and simply makes more sense.

I'd prefer this too, but I don't think the game is quite developed enough to go adding that feature yet. 

 

4 minutes ago, Blaiyze said:

It makes foraging early game perhaps a touch more complex but means actually paying attention to/marking down those berry patches as you explore.

What I've been enjoying is getting 4-5 berries per healthy bush, as a Blackguard. Before 1.22 it was 3-4 berries per bush, which wasn't really a problem, but it's just not as satisfying as getting the bigger handfuls. In contrast, the struggling bushes give about 2 berries on average, but I still harvest them anyway and still have more than I can really eat.

As for marking berry patches I don't really bother as I'm good at remembering where they are, but I have found it quite useful(and fun) to mark down the better patches so I know where to go later for taking cuttings.

8 minutes ago, Blaiyze said:

I think it's written more specifically in the update (my knee jerk just hopped over this part I think), that the fertilizing is literally once per year. Which honestly, that's nothing. Seriously, I don't see the big deal if it's one slap of bonemeal per year. If it were more tedious, with having to fertilize throughout the entire initial growth of the cutting, I could understand that being a frustration.

Pretty much this. Having an actual use for that bonemeal is going to be so nice, and annual maintenance isn't a big deal. Likewise, fertilizing berry fields isn't exactly unrealistic, as far as I can tell, so I'd rather have the bonemeal use and save pruning for a later update as another option for getting bushes to a bountiful state faster or training them for the Heavy Bearer trait(+15% yields) over time.

I'm also not convinced that switching the annual fertilizer requirement to an annual pruning requirement would actually solve very many of the complaints either(plus it would make bonemeal a lot less useful). The general impression I've gotten from reading many of them is that it's less about the method itself and more about needing to actually take care of the cultivated bushes once in a while to keep them productive.

[MKMoose]

49 minutes ago, Blaiyze said:

When I first saw the fertilizer requirement, my initial knee jerk was "oh great, we have to fertilize ALL THE TIME?" and then I saw people who actually have tested it, and I think it's written more specifically in the update (my knee jerk just hopped over this part I think), that the fertilizing is literally once per year. Which honestly, that's nothing. Seriously, I don't see the big deal if it's one slap of bonemeal per year. If it were more tedious, with having to fertilize throughout the entire initial growth of the cutting, I could understand that being a frustration.

It's only once per year for bone meal, and about once every ~2 years for other types of fertilizer. That's in the first couple year, and it falls off over time. I actually don't know whether this change (nutrient consumption being reduced over time) was planned from the start, or added in as a quick solution to the initial heated reaction. In the current balance, fertilizing isn't even necessary for short-term worlds, up to ~2 years.

 

49 minutes ago, Blaiyze said:

I've always thought that berries were far too OP early game, but I think they were made that way partially for early game food security. The addition of fishing really bridges the gap. I also prefer the concept of berries ripening and having a single harvest window per year, which is on par with how berries work IRL and simply makes more sense. Especially considering berries became useless pretty quickly once farms were up and running and food stability had been achieved. This makes them more viable long term particularly with the variants. It makes foraging early game perhaps a touch more complex but means actually paying attention to/marking down those berry patches as you explore.

They ripen usually twice per year now, which is a bit more better than up to three times (assuming temperate climate). I've been also arguing for only one seasonal harvest and some changes similar to what you're mentioning, and Pizza (one of the devs) has responded that the hope is to eventually make all plant life seasonal, even flowers. Naturally, that will take some time, but it is a pretty neat goal to aim for.

Berries being somewhat OP in the early game has actually been probably the single biggest argument in support of these changes. My opinion is that this wasn't really a problem in the first place and should have been addressed differently (cuttings and a seasonal growth cycle would have nerfed them plenty - no real need to tack on much beyond that in terms of balance), but it is undeniable that it has been solved one way or another with this rework.

 

32 minutes ago, LadyWYT said:

Having an actual use for that bonemeal is going to be so nice, and annual maintenance isn't a big deal. [...]

I'm also not convinced that switching the annual fertilizer requirement to an annual pruning requirement would actually solve very many of the complaints either(plus it would make bonemeal a lot less useful).

I've never understood this point. Surely, if the problem is "too many bones", then we could just add a whole range of interesting and historically accurate uses for them? Bone meal apparently hasn't been a recognized thing until the 17th century, whereas bone broth, bone glue and a whole host of products of bone carving have seen significant use since prehistoric times.

Edited March 20 by MKMoose

[LadyWYT]

8 minutes ago, MKMoose said:

I've never understood this point. Surely, if the problem is "too many bones", then we could just add a whole range of interesting and historically accurate uses for them? Bone meal apparently hasn't been a recognized thing until the 17th century, whereas bone broth, bone glue and a whole host of products of bone carving have seen significant use since prehistoric times.

As a fertilizer, there's not really a point to bonemeal since it provides the P nutrient. Yes, there are crops that utilize that nutrient, like pumpkins, onions, and parsnips, but there's not really a need to fertilize crops either outside of flax, since linen is incredibly useful. Compost takes a while to actually make; potash can be difficult to find and so can the traders that sell it; saltpeter can be dangerous since it's found deep in the caves, but the player would probably rather use this for flax or blasting powder.

Bone broth, bone glue, and other things would be good uses for bones as well, and I daresay we'll see them at some point in the future, but at least some of them seem like they would require systems that aren't really in the game yet(like bone carving).

Overall, using bonemeal as an annual fertilizer doesn't seem entirely unrealistic, especially not from a gameplay standpoint. Bones are easy to acquire, and it's something to do with them in the short term. Needing to care a little for the bushes to keep them productive also makes them feel more like plants, and not so much leafy vending machines. And like I said before, I'd like to see pruning as well, but I think it's better suited as additional maintenance mechanic to help bushes become productive more quickly, or train them to acquire better traits over time(potentially even losing bad traits they may have started with). Trying to swap fertilizing for pruning now seems like it would not only remove that kind of potential depth, but would probably delay the 1.22 release since the code and art assets would need reworking to accommodate. Removing the maintenance requirement entirely just makes the bushes less interesting.

[coolAlias]

19 minutes ago, MKMoose said:

Surely, if the problem is "too many bones", then we could just add a whole range of interesting and historically accurate uses for them? Bone meal apparently hasn't been a recognized thing until the 17th century, whereas bone broth, bone glue and a whole host of products of bone carving have seen significant use since prehistoric times.

I want my early bone tools! Specifically a bone + rawhide strip sewing kit I can use to make and mend various leather goods.

Broth would also be great, but would probably mean our bones get an expiration date like other food sources - fresh bones are the best bones!

As for the berry rework, I can't comment on it since I haven't really interacted with it at all even after nearly a full year in game, but I appreciate the detailed writeup.

[Teh Pizza Lady]

I love the berry rework and have zero complaints about it.

[Ceridith]

I like the intention of the changes, but I feel like they still need tweaking. Specifically, the fertilizer and soil requirements. I understand the intention to prevent berry bushes from trivializing earlier game food scarcity, but the inability to transplant bushes and having to rely on the new clipping mechanic to propagate bushes addresses the issue.

I don't think medium fertility soil should be a minimum requirement, but low fertility soil should at least slow clipping growth unless fertilized as a compromise. I feel that the curve for how much fertilizer is needed to maintain berry yield could use some tweaking as well, with high fertility soil able to maintain a normal berry yield without additional fertilizer indefinitely, and balance around that. Additionally, I think that the better nutrients a grown bush has, the cooldown for taking clippings should be reduced.

[williams_482]

My primary objection to the berry bush rework at this point is that knives break berry bushes almost instantly, and playing on a macbook with a trackpad it's inconsistent if the game will register a two finger (equivalent to right) click correctly. Accidentally and irreversibly breaking a bush while trying to remove a cutting is no fun. 

Other than that, the mechanics as they exist now are a little clunky in some areas but mostly make sense and don't seem particularly onerous. I'm content with them. 

[Teh Pizza Lady]

31 minutes ago, williams_482 said:

My primary objection to the berry bush rework at this point is that knives break berry bushes almost instantly, and playing on a macbook with a trackpad it's inconsistent if the game will register a two finger (equivalent to right) click correctly. Accidentally and irreversibly breaking a bush while trying to remove a cutting is no fun. 

Other than that, the mechanics as they exist now are a little clunky in some areas but mostly make sense and don't seem particularly onerous. I'm content with them. 

My recommendation is to get an actual mouse if you're going to be doing any kind of gaming, especially on a laptop

 

[DUCATISLO]

mid bushes

[ArgentLuna]

I will adapt to it just as ive adapted to the other changes the game has had

[Hafthohlladung]

I was starting to get worried about MKMoose, he was being far too quiet this week about Berry Bushes.  Now I know why! 

[MKMoose]

12 hours ago, LadyWYT said:

Overall, using bonemeal as an annual fertilizer doesn't seem entirely unrealistic, especially not from a gameplay standpoint.

I don't like this, and I think I'm gonna gloss over it for my own good. 

 

13 hours ago, LadyWYT said:

Needing to care a little for the bushes to keep them productive also makes them feel more like plants, and not so much leafy vending machines.

As much as I agree with this, I feel like berry bushes are quite literally the only food source currently in the game where this is unnecessary if not harmful from the perspective of game balance and pacing. I'd argue that berry bushes should be limited by low satiety (I personally see no significant issue with just nuking it down to 40), seasonal availability window (different for different species), and being very labor-intensive to collect (in part because of the low satiety).

They could actually take much more optional maintenance than they do now to make very good bushes, but then that would explicitly be a small high-effort garden that the player voluntarily chooses to maintain instead of a massive plantation. And that optional effort should go into alleviating some of the drawbacks of wild bushes like short availability window and labor-intensive harvesting, instead of just being a boost to yield which the player can nearly just as well get by simply planting more bushes.

 

12 hours ago, LadyWYT said:

I'd like to see pruning as well, but I think it's better suited as additional maintenance mechanic to help bushes become productive more quickly, or train them to acquire better traits over time(potentially even losing bad traits they may have started with). Trying to swap fertilizing for pruning now seems like it would not only remove that kind of potential depth, but would probably delay the 1.22 release since the code and art assets would need reworking to accommodate. Removing the maintenance requirement entirely just makes the bushes less interesting.

The new bushes require seemingly some of the most complex texture work that the game has seen so far with dozens of individual textures per bush, so I'm wondering whether they even manage to fit all the new fruit types into the update, let alone a second set of new textures that pruning would almost certainly require (unless they use some clever masking, but the results of that most likely wouldn't look as good, and would still have to be tailored for every bush individually).

I'm not quite sure where the idea of swapping fertilizer to pruning even comes from, though I can agree that just swapping it would be a pretty ill-advised idea. That said, removing the fertilizer requirement (just the requirement via the "barren" state, not the rest of the bush health system) would change almost nothing in the current balance. Well, at least as long as the arbitrary medium fertility soil requirement remains in place and bushes aren't adjusted to consume nutrients during initial growth.

Pruning as a way of getting new traits onto bushes does seem like an interesting idea from a gameplay perspective, though at which point would new traits be applied? It seems to me like a better way to implement creating new traits may be to just make cuttings occasionally gain or lose traits when planted. Granted, it may end up a bit annoying to have some outliers with additional or missing traits in the middle of a berry plantation.

[Bumber]

I forgot about the growth cycle changes. Considering berries spoil extremely fast, doesn't that seem like a serious issue? Especially since wild fruit trees were fixed to generate full sized?

It feels like the nutrients should be returned to the soil if the berries aren't harvested. Granted it's only for planted cuttings, so it's not like they're ever going unharvested unless they're decorative. (Which mine have been, though I do harvest just so the raccoons don't damage the bushes. Maybe I'll just turn the berries into compost.)

Edited March 21 by Bumber

[williams_482]

13 hours ago, Teh Pizza Lady said:

My recommendation is to get an actual mouse if you're going to be doing any kind of gaming, especially on a laptop

90% of my Vintage Story game time is on a pretty beefy linux desktop with a mouse, keyboard, etc. Sometimes, though, you just want to be able to play from the couch. 

[LadyWYT]

1 hour ago, Bumber said:

Especially since wild fruit trees were fixed to generate full sized?

They were supposed to be fixed to bear fruit in the first game year; I don't know about generating at full size. That being said, they're still bugged at the moment and not bearing fruit in the first year like they're supposed to.

 

6 hours ago, MKMoose said:

As much as I agree with this, I feel like berry bushes are quite literally the only food source currently in the game where this is unnecessary if not harmful from the perspective of game balance and pacing. I'd argue that berry bushes should be limited by low satiety (I personally see no significant issue with just nuking it down to 40), seasonal availability window (different for different species), and being very labor-intensive to collect (in part because of the low satiety).

In some ways that's more realistic, however, I think this kind of change would overall be a detriment to gameplay balance. The seasonal harvest part is fine, and something I would eventually expect the game to implement. The lower satiety is the biggest problem, since berries are an important early game food source. Enough newer players seem to struggle to keep themselves fed that I'm not sure it's a good idea to make it an even harder task, at least in that manner. When paired with seasonal harvests, it's going to be especially brutal, given that the game starts in May and berries haven't necessarily brought forth yields yet.

Basically, a change like this is likely to cut early game food supply by over half, and will probably be a little too punishing on newer players. There would need to be a few more food options, I think, to help give them a fighting chance and keep things balanced.

As for the labor-intensive part...this is why it's ultimately better for the player to create their own berry patch at home, rather than rely on wild foraging to avoid dealing with the annual maintenance. Even with all the wild patches marked, harvesting them can easily take a handful of days since the player has to cover a wide territory(which exposes them to hostile wildlife and other threats) and wild bushes don't necessarily ripen at the same time. Having cultivated bushes at base saves a lot of time, since they all tend to ripen at once and all the player has to do is take a couple seconds to step outside and check them, and spend a few minutes harvesting if the berries are ripe. Adding a little bonemeal/other fertilizer once per year also only costs a minute or two, depending on the size of the berry patch, and is a cost that diminishes with time. 

[john_p]

Berry rework is a pretty good change of balance.

For singleplayer.

[Daskarion]

I want to leave my experience with wildcraft mod here. as the berrybush update takes from it:

 

I spent a lot of time messing around with wildcraft mod while building my winery on a server. The gameplay was very similar to the berrybush update.

Here’s what happened with the wildcraft mod:

I started out in a temperate area, nothing fancy, just exploring, and stumbled across berry bushes in the wild. Used a knife to take cuttings (one per berrybush). The wildcraft mod made cuttings spoil in a single day, so if you wanted them to survive, you had to rush straight home and plant them. There was an option to put cuttings in water buckets (one cutting per bucket), but I never bothered with that.

So, back home, I began planting. Planted cuttings turned out to be super sensitive to temperature. All I planted in too late just died during winter.

Wildcraft’s huckleberries and dogrose were tropical berries, so I got them pretty late in the game. Snowberries and knyazberries produced venomous wine, which I still planted anyway. The mod also has kind of bushes that looked different, it felt like I was growing small “plants” instead of proper bushes: cloudberries, strawberries, all these looked like small plants but produced berries. These small plants don't have cuttings but needed the knife + fruit combo in the crafting grid to get their seeds, and once you planted the seeds, they acted just like cuttings (except you could get way more seeds than cuttings).

There wasn’t any fertilizer required in the mod.

Result: Most of the berry bushes gave their first harvest around the spring of the new year. I made neat rows: 2 by 8 for each berry type. Just from that, I got so many berries every harvest that I could barely keep up. Processing took entire in-game days in front of fruitpresses. And by the time I finished, the first bushes I’d harvested were already ripe again.

Five in-game years later, I had 336 bottles of wine, 336 bottles of brandy (from every berry type), 18 barrels filled with wine, 10 barrels of brandy, 2 of aqua vitae, and a bunch of fruit juice barrels, too. That doesn’t include wines I made from fruit trees. If I had gone for the quantity over quality route, I could have easily tripled that.

Honestly, the requirement for berrybushes seems intimidating at first, but in practice, you’ll be drowning in berries. That’s was my experience with wildcraft mod.

[Hafthohlladung]

3 hours ago, Daskarion said:

Five in-game years later, I had 336 bottles of wine, 336 bottles of brandy (from every berry type), 18 barrels filled with wine, 10 barrels of brandy, 2 of aqua vitae, and a bunch of fruit juice barrels, too. That doesn’t include wines I made from fruit trees. If I had gone for the quantity over quality route, I could have easily tripled that.

Honestly, the requirement for berrybushes seems intimidating at first, but in practice, you’ll be drowning in berries. That’s was my experience with wildcraft mod.

I think the problem we have is that a lot of the current criticisms are coming from players who get nowhere near 5 in-game years on a single map.

It's almost like if they can't max out a game mechanic by the 2nd year they're not interested.

Edited March 21 by Hafthohlladung

[MKMoose]

6 hours ago, LadyWYT said:

Basically, a change like this is likely to cut early game food supply by over half, and will probably be a little too punishing on newer players. There would need to be a few more food options, I think, to help give them a fighting chance and keep things balanced.

In several ways, the recent changes have already significantly nerfed berries as an early-game food source, while arguably making them better than they used to be in the late game. The expected yield from a ripe wild bush is reduced by 10%. It used to be that (if I recall correctly) 1/3 (33%) of wild bushes would be ripe in newly generated chunks and 2/3 (~67%) of wild bushes would be ripe under natural conditions (except those eaten by animals), while now it's only 1/4 (25%) in newly generated chunks or 2/7 (~29%) in the longer term (ending up with a ~25-60% reduction in the total number of ripe wild bushes). Granted, there are now new species which increase that quantity back up somewhat, though as of now the effect is at best some 20%. If my math is right, then that's something like a 40% total reduction in the expected wild berry yield, while the time of year is right. And that's combined with ripe bushes being potentially more difficult to notice, grown bushes taking more time to wake up after winter, cuttings taking their time to grow, traits making it much less practical to take every single bush home, and two harvests per year down from three being usually the maximum in temperate climates.

Contrast that with cultivated bushes, which have 20% higher yield in the "healthy" state or 80% higher in the "bountiful" state and can be boosted further with the "heavy bearer" trait to respectively 38% or 107% higher than 1.21 bushes. Even considering two harvests and not three, that's still -20% or +20% (without the trait) and -8% or +38% (with the trait) total yearly yield for "healthy" and "bountiful" bushes respectively, relative to 1.21 bushes. Keep in mind that it consequently also takes significantly less total time to harvest a given amount from the bushes, especially if you happen to get the "densely clustered berries" trait.

I would absolutely support adding new food sources, potentially tubers, roots, herbs, bird eggs, and other stuff of this kind, to bolster the early-game hunter-gatherer experience while berries aren't in season, and I've even suggested that somewhere before. That said, I don't think new food sources are necessary to achieve a satisfactory balance with berry bushes even if they are made strictly seasonal.

 

6 hours ago, LadyWYT said:

In some ways that's more realistic, however, I think this kind of change would overall be a detriment to gameplay balance. The seasonal harvest part is fine, and something I would eventually expect the game to implement. The lower satiety is the biggest problem, since berries are an important early game food source. Enough newer players seem to struggle to keep themselves fed that I'm not sure it's a good idea to make it an even harder task, at least in that manner. When paired with seasonal harvests, it's going to be especially brutal, given that the game starts in May and berries haven't necessarily brought forth yields yet.

Early berries fruit around June, which I think could even make for a very neat early-game experience. The player would at first have to struggle somewhat to feed themselves for a couple days, and once they are sufficiently familiarized with food scarcity and likely have learned about some wild plants and perhaps tried hunting, they would be granted a bit more breathing room for at most around five months to prepare for the real challenge that is winter.

If taking food away from newer players is a concern with reduced satiety, then that's where the second part of my suggestion from a while back may fit right in: dense thickets of larger bushes like blueberry, raspberry or blackberry, and carpet-like large patches of small bushes like cranberry or cloudberry, numbering from a couple dozen to hundreds of bushes, or even many thousands in certain cases where they may cover the ground almost like grass (e.g. in the arctic tundra). Currants, strawberries and some other bushes can remain in smaller and more spread-out patches for the most part, and may be designed to be more optimal for cultivation in one way or another.

What I take issue with in the way that berries and the overall food system are currently balanced is that they seem to neglect certain arguably obvious balance levers which could greatly increase the depth and variety of various food sources in the game. The moment we've finally got some sort of maintenance requirement as a new lever, it's smacked right onto the food source which needs it arguably the least, and made borderline irrelevant to compensate. If berries were made very bountiful but limited to a short avaliability window, then being labor-intensive to collect (clarification below) and quick to spoil would work perfectly to push the player to invest into other food sources, as well as into preservation methods, instead of making all balance revolve about food scarcity. They would be an amazing food source at the beginning of the game, especially during Year 0, but suboptimal long-term due to their inherent properties. Fruit trees would gain value in a very natural way, since they produce a lot of fruit that can be collected more quickly and doesn't spoil as fast.

Berry bushes and fruit trees used to be very similar in most aspects except that trees would take longer to set up but their fruit would last longer. Instead of leaning into this distinction and introducing new differences, they've been made more similar in several ways, which to me is a wasted opportunity at best. Wouldn't it be more fitting to make berries explicitly into the early-game, accessible but inefficient food source, while making fruit trees require a bit more attention to maintain in good health but reward the player with even greater yields?

 

6 hours ago, LadyWYT said:

As for the labor-intensive part...this is why it's ultimately better for the player to create their own berry patch at home, rather than rely on wild foraging to avoid dealing with the annual maintenance. Even with all the wild patches marked, harvesting them can easily take a handful of days since the player has to cover a wide territory(which exposes them to hostile wildlife and other threats) and wild bushes don't necessarily ripen at the same time. Having cultivated bushes at base saves a lot of time, since they all tend to ripen at once and all the player has to do is take a couple seconds to step outside and check them, and spend a few minutes harvesting if the berries are ripe. Adding a little bonemeal/other fertilizer once per year also only costs a minute or two, depending on the size of the berry patch, and is a cost that diminishes with time. 

By "labor-intensive to collect" I mean just the time it takes to collect berries off the bush once you're next to it. Could also be neatly increased by giving the larger bushes four hitboxes on the corners (more would probably be overkill, less would be difficult to arrange neatly), requiring the player to collect smaller portions of fruit bit-by-bit. Alternatively, multiple harvesting stages could work, though that would be comparatively pretty boring. I don't think the same would work well for fruit trees, to be clear, unless maybe just for the ones with smaller fruit, especially cherries and lychee.

The issue with subsisting off wild bushes to me is that they're tedious to collect intentionally, but extremely easy to collect while traveling, which means that they're annoying most of the time but can completely trivialize long-distance travel. Just recently I've run ~2.5k blocks, consuming a full 1.5k satiety hunger bar along the way, and in that trip I collected ~8k satiety worth of berries that I stumbled upon, not even bothering with crops and mushrooms - one sample isn't indicative of much, of course, but +~400% satiety off a random trip filled almost entirely with running seems pretty crazy, especially since it's after nerfs. That's largely how I made a two-way trip to the tropics, by the way, ~100k blocks total yet without taking any food with me. Making berry patches larger but much more time-consuming to collect would mean that harvesting them midway through travel would require stopping for an extended period of time, whereas harvesting a patch near home may be roughly unaffected in terms reward per unit of time on average, but more convenient and intentional than having to run between many patches a few bushes each.

Edited March 21 by MKMoose

[MKMoose]

Small update as of rc.6:

• many bugs related to berry bushes have been fixed over rc.5 and rc.6, including the "young" state which was previously getting skipped being now functional, so the bushes are now much closer to functioning fully as intended and you might want to play around with them again if you've experienced bugs with them in earlier versions,
• as I anticipated, two specific bugfixes have now extended the time from planting a cutting to bush maturation from 2 months to 6 months on average,
• the medium fertility soil requirement seems to have been removed (berries planted in low fertility will start off "struggling" and require fertilizer much earlier than in medium fertility, while bushes planted in barren soil won't produce fruit at all without fertilizer).

 

On 3/20/2026 at 6:42 PM, LadyWYT said:

I'd prefer [a single harvest window per year] too, but I don't think the game is quite developed enough to go adding that feature yet. 

FYI, Pizza said in the Discord recently that they can't be made properly seasonal yet due to them being one of the primary foraging foods. While I don't think it would be a major issue due to the growing season generally starting around June or even earlier (especially in warmer climates) for species like strawberry or blueberry, that was the unofficial dev stance, so we might have to see more foraging foods added before berries get a single harvest window.

Edited Saturday at 08:31 AM by MKMoose

[Thorfinn]

I don't know what I'd change exactly, but before we got the first release, I was expecting something that would put berries approximately equivalent to farming or livestock. Maybe even fruit trees. They are still vastly easier than that.

After doing some cuttings, though, I'm likely to go back to my pre-1.22 practice of just gathering the wild ones, same as mushrooms.

Re: seasonality, until they nerf mushrooms, food isn't an issue on default starts. Like someone else said, berries definitely needed to be dialed back a notch or two. MP? Yeah, that's going to be an issue unless wild crops and flint and maybe even bushes and trees start respawning. That's just a problem with MP, though.

[Demoncyborg]

i haven't had a chance to play with the new berries yet but i ADORE the sounds of them. by the time you actually get rolling in a settlement, the berry harvest got old fast, and there wasn't much point in harvesting when you have plenty of dyes and a massive crate of apples already. you'd pick them for rot or the raccoons and moose would come and do it for you.

compared to the other types of gameplay with the crops in this game, it was really lacking, with 3 real steps.

1. Secure space for berries that you collected with your fists. 2. wait for them to grow/flower. 3. Infinite food while it is warm with no effort.

I adore this new system and really hope to see something similar with fruit trees, as past the propagation of your cuttings, i feel largely the same about having an apple orchard. once it's set just forget until you see those blooms. Nursing your plants in the beginning, only for their needs to fall off the longer you take care of them.. aaah it just makes me excited thinking about it, not even gonna lie.