Berry bush rework - what's your take?

[Broccoli Clock]

On 3/20/2026 at 5:26 PM, Blaiyze said:

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.

This.. ^

I don't intend on playing the RC, but do like the changes. Most people know what appeals to me as I've hardly been quiet about what floats my boat. So... immersion, realism and cottage core and "subtle complexity" are my bag, and the updates to the berry bushes seem ideal considering how "abused" they are just now.

 

[BlunderingFool]

On 3/30/2026 at 3:30 PM, Demoncyborg said:

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.

Sorry, rather late but just chiming in.

You already wouldn't be eating only berries, you have multiple food groups to juggle, that's the difficulty of the food system on a mechanical level beyond just availability. If you eat a monodiet in the game you're leaving max health on the table. Adding to that system should have been the way of shunting players off of berry reliance. At the least, the biggest nerf has been undone so at present the berry system seems to be in life with a plant buff now for the most part, if you get lucky on traits. It's a more positive direction to go in.

[Demoncyborg]

19 hours ago, BlunderingFool said:

Sorry, rather late but just chiming in.

You already wouldn't be eating only berries, you have multiple food groups to juggle, that's the difficulty of the food system on a mechanical level beyond just availability. If you eat a monodiet in the game you're leaving max health on the table. Adding to that system should have been the way of shunting players off of berry reliance. At the least, the biggest nerf has been undone so at present the berry system seems to be in life with a plant buff now for the most part, if you get lucky on traits. It's a more positive direction to go in.

uh, yes, i didn't imply that wasn't the case at all in my post. at the start of it i said i like this update, a lot!

now in order to actually have or give yourself an over-reliance on berries, you have to do just as many steps as actually farming. it's very nice!

[cjameshuff]

Some further thoughts on variable strength traits and breeding:

• Fruits exist to propagate plants. It's a little silly that you can't ever use them for this.
• Trying to track traits with fruit being mixed together in stacks sounds unworkable. Breeding could instead be done by collecting seeds from a harvestable plant (maybe use a linen sack as a collection tool?), with the seeds having a combination of traits from that plant and a nearby plant, with some additional random variation. This could not only recombine traits, it could produce hybrids. Look at citrus fruits for some possibilities there...
• Cuttings would be a way to reliably propagate a desirable strain obtained by breeding, and the only way to propagate a sterile hybrid, but earlier on seeds might be a better way to fill your fields/orchards.

[Kreeate]

I don't really care about the rework at all.  I'll simply mod out the things I don't like, and keep the things I do like.

[Dilan Rona]

I for one love the cuttings. give everyone a chance to get a berry bush (eventually), i would rather the bushes store per UUID who took a cutting though, as waiting for a year after someone else took their cutting before you get your cutting. and that is assuming someone doesnt get there before you, and you have to wait another year again.

The fact that they didnt do the same for propagating cattail, papyrus, tule, horsetail, or any other plants is mildly irritating.

[MKMoose]

Now that we have the stable 1.22 release, I wanted to kind of summarize this poll, with 85 votes up until this point.

I’ll be defining the score for each part of the rework as the average of the votes on a topic, interpreting the first (positive) option as 100%, the middle (mixed) option as 50%, and the last  (negative) option as 0%. Funnily enough, the middle category could be completely ignored and it would make very little difference. I’ve considered tweaking the scores in a couple ways, but ultimately I think that simpler metrics with the appropriate caveats will work better.

Keep in mind that the absolute value of the score doesn’t say that much about the mechanic, mainly due to a fairly small sample size of largely unknown origin. What I think is most important here are the relations between different scores. If one mechanic gets 60% and another gets 80%, then the meaning of those scores is really pretty nebulous. What we can say quite confidently, though, is that people like the second mechanic more than the first one.

Interestingly, if we define participation as the number of votes on a topic as a percentage of total votes, then we will notice that participation ended up being quite closely correlated with the score (r^2 = 0.69 despite certain outliers). Combined with the caveat that it's possible to vote multiple times on the same mechanic, it is nearly useless as a metric in this case, but also it may suggest that people who like the changes are significantly more likely to vote on them. The only really notable exception is the fertilizer requirement, which got quite high participation for reasons which I think are fairly obvious.

 

1. Reworked visuals. Score: 78%. Some complaints here seem to focus on the visibility of berries and the clarity of which stage the bush is in. My personal take is that the lack of visual consistency with other parts of the game should be addressed in some way, and it could also help with the visibility issues. I was personally really surprised that berry clusters are not implemented as 3D models the way the fruit on fruit trees are.

2. New species. Score: 96%. By far the single most unanimously praised change. I don’t think there’s much to comment on here, beyond a note on variety and inventory clutter: as it stands currently, the species barely differ between each other in anything besides visuals, there is great overlap in their temperature ranges, and you can find 8 out of 10 currently available species in temperate climates. It could be nice to reduce the overlap between the temperature ranges a bit (both in terms of spawning and growing) to enhance the distinction between different climates and to avoid cluttering the inventory with too many functionally identical but visually different berries.

3. Cuttings. Score: 83%. I think most of the negative sentiment on cuttings seems to be related to the limitations on taking cuttings (just once per year, although can be largely circumvented by taking cuttings from newly grown young bushes) and to the very long growth time of new bushes (currently 8.5 months on average and paused when it’s too cold, which in some contexts makes them arguably just worse than fruit trees). Alongside reworked visuals and new species, cuttings belong to the trio of most supported changes which are getting very little pushback.

4. Adjusted growth cycle. Score: 57%. The first option here which can be considered quite mixed in terms of community sentiment, though frankly I’m unsure what the cause for it is. There’s a range of issues that I could point to, but those will be my own opinion much more than a summary of community opinion in this case:

• berries start off in a random state in new chunks, and effectively also when planted due to high randomness, which can make them ripen unpredictably,
• however, once the bushes get "reset" by becoming dormant, they follow a strict fruiting cycle which is almost identical for all species - pretty unimmersive and unrealistic by itself, balance notwithstanding,
• as it stands, in warmer temperate regions (closer to ~10 C yearly average), berries can ripen twice per year (around July and October), meaning a bush is available during two out of 12 months, and that’s assuming the ripe state doesn’t get cut short by the bush going dormant; there is some variation and some randomness, so ~3 months will be a pretty good (and fairly optimistic) estimate, but it’s still not nearly enough for a beginner to feed themselves reliably,
• in slightly colder temperate regions (closer to 0 C yearly average) berries will generally only ripen once (around August), at least if not harvested immediately as they ripen, which halves their availability,
• being on this edge between one and two harvests causes a “ripening” bush with just a few days until ripe to suddenly go dormant, which just feels bad (and it’s kind of realistic, but works out poorly in practice),
• the most that you'll usually get over a larger area is around 4-5 months total availability (not considering a greenhouse in the context of early-game foraging),
• a proper seasonal fruiting system would make it easy to stagger different species between each other in a controlled way, to ripen as early as in May, more likely in June (e.g. strawberries, currants), through July, August and September (e.g. blueberries, blackberries), and the last berries ending around October or even extending into November (e.g. cranberries); the ripening times would be much more natural with a good seasonal system, and the player would be encouraged to find and plant multiple species to cover a longer time period (a similar effect can be achieved by adjusting dormancy temperatures, but it could still have several of the other flaws like random initial state).

5. Bush health and fertilizer usage. Score: 45%. As expected, this part of the rework does not get much appreciation. Many people will actually be largely unaffected by this change, but I think the low score really speaks for itself either way.
Seemingly the most common argument from the start has been that it would be fine if fertilizer was just a purely optional boost to yield, and in certain regards that’s very close to what we effectively got after they very quickly implemented slow decay in nutrient uptake over time. I don’t know if I can recommend any concrete changes here, but the least that I can recommend is to be more intentional in design and communication:

• if continuous maintenance was not the intent, then I genuinely don’t know why the initial implementation and description of the changes made it seem like that was the case, only back off quickly (though it's still not difficult to make that assumption based on the changelog) - the majority of the initial reaction after the rework was first revealed was caused by the initial state being seen by many people as practically abandoning the existing design philosophy of Vintage Story, and that kind of irreversibly tainted many people’s impression of the rework,
• merely phrasing the change as “requiring fertilizer” is an easy trigger for backlash, and anyone with a decent idea of how game communities work could have predicted the reaction just based on a few words of the changelog,
• the current state is more like up-front cost, but it’s spread-out over a few years, so instead of actually being an effective up-front cost, it can instead incentivize breaking and replanting bushes repeatedly,
• there is also the whole fiasco with people thinking that wild bushes require fertilizer, which was not an unreasonable inference from the prerelease changelog and yet it wasn’t made clearer since then besides some unofficial clarifications,
• lastly, as it stands, bush health is so far removed from fertilizing crops that sharing the nutrient system with it can genuinely be more confusing than helpful for understanding it, especially if the player is going by with what realistic bush health actually requires.

6. Fertilizer requirement specifically (the “barren” state). Score: 32%. While I’m not sure how much of this is a knee-jerk reaction more than anything, this is the lowest-scoring part of the rework, justifiably and unsurprisingly. The simplest argument against it is just that it’s unrealistic. A lot of people have said that it would be fine if the bushes stayed as they are, just with the “barren” state removed so that a bush will always keep producing some berries. I think that removing the “barren” state and changing nothing else would make for a rather inelegant system, and I think it would need a few more concurrent adjustments if it were to have the “barren” state removed, though frankly it arguably needs rebalancing even if the “barren” state is to stay. High fertility soil and terra preta are virtually useless for berry bushes, since the difference between medium fertility and terra preta is equivalent to roughly two portions of fertilizer, which is massively less than terra preta costs to make.

7. Medium soil fertility requirement. Score: 43%. Since it was removed, I don’t think there’s much to be discussed here. The score was low, and I'd argue it’s a good thing that it was removed, though I wonder how people would now vote on something like “fertilizer requirement in low-quality soils”.

8. Traits. Score: 75%. Traits are roughly in the middle in terms of score, with the dominant feedback about them being seemingly that there should be a way to crossbreed bushes or in some other way produce new traits instead of just having to find wild bushes with them. It’s also been quite common to see the idea that fruit trees should get traits as well, which kind of just comes back to the issue of berry bushes being inconsistent with the rest of the game. I also stand by my arguments that cuttings with different traits being unstackable is a sacrilege against the player’s inventory space and that the traits introduce unnecessary clutter for what is arguably the most basic and accessible food source, but other than that I think there is not much to say - a pretty good system with a lot of potential which is currently rather shallow.

9. General balance as a food source. Score: 57%. A mixed score again. To this day I don’t think we have seen any official stance on what the intended balance of the bushes is, but as it stands they have been kind of butchered in the early game, with fewer ripe wild bushes that have slightly reduced yield, inconvenient transport, extremely long growth time, short availability window, and the fertilizer requirement. Cultivated bushes can be in certain regards more efficient than the old bushes, especially when considering traits, but it takes much more time and effort to get them up to that state in the long term. Seemingly the most common argument in favor of the rework is that changes were necessary due to berries being OP, but that is actually quite debatable and clearly isn’t the only reason for the changes. They were easy to replant, but many people didn’t bother after the first or second year anyways due to other options being plainly better, both as a food source and also for rot production. Cuttings have now made them more time-consuming to replant and too slow to benefit from in Year 0, but they’ve also made it possible to propagate the bushes at an exponential rate without decimating wild bushes. I’ve personally argued that berries should be much more common in the wild, but take more time to harvest, to lean into them being a reliable food source for the early game and for emergencies, but not viable late-game due to inefficiency more than scarcity - cultivated bushes, then, could be made several times more efficient than wild ones with a bit of maintenance.

Edited Wednesday at 09:02 PM by MKMoose

[cjc813]

i think the bushes are downright ugly, and the cuttings take *way* too long to grow.

i like some of the ideas involved, but the above two things kinda ruin the berry experience for me.

[LadyWYT]

2 hours ago, MKMoose said:

I don’t know if I can recommend any concrete changes here, but the least that I can recommend is to be more intentional in design and communication:

I don't want to wade back into the argument too much, since I mean...we've both gone in circles about it and most issues have been covered. But there are a couple points I'll touch on, and this is one of them. Sometimes things get lost in translation, and 1.22 brought a lot of changes, a couple of which were rather significant and a bit confusing at first. Which to be fair, once you get used to things operating a certain way, and those things see big changes, it makes sense that the changes will feel a little confusing.

In any case though, I think for the future, clarity in the patch notes should probably receive a little more focus in order to help prevent players from getting too confused. Knee jerk reactions will still happen, sure, and there's always gonna be a few complaints, but overall I think if the bigger changes have a bit more in-depth explanation, it'll help.

2 hours ago, MKMoose said:

5. Bush health and fertilizer usage.

Honestly, my overall take here regarding complaints is that some players prefer the easy-mode bushes of previous versions, where the player can do nothing and get free food. I'm sure those players would rejoice if fertilizer, bush health, and traits were removed, and bushes became just basic blocks again, but the flipside of that argument is that players who were hoping for more in-depth agriculture are going to wind up disappointed since the bushes at that point literally do nothing special other than allow propagation, especially since a bush rework was touted as a major part of the update.

Arguments over what kind of maintenance is realistic aside, I like that cultivated bushes take just a little bit more work and planning upfront in return for better yields over time than what wild bushes offer. It's also pretty fun hunting around for different traits and slowly improving the berry farms over time as well, but the traits are also easy enough to ignore if the player doesn't really want to bother with it. The change has me actually using fertilizer for agriculture for once, rather than just ignoring that feature entirely, but again...it's not something that's going to demand so much of my time that I'm not going to be able to do all the other stuff I wanna do in the game.

3 hours ago, MKMoose said:

I’ve personally argued that berries should be much more common in the wild, but take more time to harvest, to lean into them being a reliable food source for the early game and for emergencies, but not viable late-game due to inefficiency more than scarcity - cultivated bushes, then, could be made several times more efficient than wild ones with a bit of maintenance.

It's a neat idea, but already a feature, in my opinion. Wild bushes are scattered, can have bad traits, and are easily raided by critters before the player can get to them. Likewise, the player can easily spend several days checking and harvesting wild bushes. In contrast, cultivated bushes are easily checked and harvested in just part of a day, and will most likely have more beneficial traits due to the player being picky about what they cultivate. I don't really see how you widen that gap further without making the system feel frustrating in the early game, or frustrating to players who'd rather rely on hunting and gathering for their needs rather than homesteading.

 

3 hours ago, MKMoose said:

though I wonder how people would now vote on something like “fertilizer requirement in low-quality soils”.

I mean I figure that if the player plants something in soil that doesn't have a lot of nutrients, using fertilizer would be much more of a concern. High fertility soil/terra preta has more value for agriculture not only because plants will grow faster on it, but the high nutrients means that the player won't need to use fertilizer very much, if at all.

 

3 hours ago, MKMoose said:

Adjusted growth cycle.

I do expect to see the growth cycle adjusted in the future to be more seasonal. However, doing so now would probably make the early game a little too harsh for most players. To take a stab at guessing: implementing an herbalism loop would be a prime opportunity for making plants more seasonal, especially since it's likely to introduce a status effect system that will likely include illness(which can also be affected by the season). Brewing teas and other concoctions alone is solid enough gameplay, but I think it would be much more interesting if it had extra depth by making many ingredients seasonal.

I daresay this might also be an opportune time to possibly explore pruning options, since "pruning" could include snipping the flowers off a plant(which could be used in herbalism) and sacrificing an earlier harvest in return for a bigger harvest later. 

[Bruno Willis]

I've just started playing with the new bushes, and I couldn't be happier. They are so fun to find, they look so good, and it's just added so much interest to the world, wondering if that bush is a special one? what about that one? I bother checking bushes without fruit, just incase I want to come back and propagate it later. 

[Gaelyn]

It took me almost two hours to finally figure out how to take a cutting from a berry bush. I thought I was trying it at the wrong time of year or the wrong stage of the bush's development or something. I could not figure it out for the longest time. I was holding down left-click with the knife (while also holding shift, my sprint button) instead of holding down right-click with the knife while also holding shift. My impulse was to use left-click since that is how you get fruit tree cuttings as well as harvest plants like cattails. There really needs to be some kind of tooltip or handbook explanation for how to take a cutting from a berry bush.

I even checked the patch notes and other places online, but wasn't able to find anything about how to take the cuttings other than that a knife was needed. I'm just glad I finally figured it out to be honest. It was getting pretty frustrating not knowing what I was doing wrong.

Edited Wednesday at 03:39 AM by Gaelyn

[InternetDragon]

Welp, time to go though the starve-respawn-starve cycle until crops start growing. Berries went from A to F tier as terms of farmable food, same tier as fruit trees, but somehow worse. Not gonna even bother with this system.

[cjc813]

4 hours ago, InternetDragon said:

Welp, time to go though the starve-respawn-starve cycle until crops start growing. Berries went from A to F tier as terms of farmable food, same tier as fruit trees, but somehow worse. Not gonna even bother with this system.

Yeah, I find myself relying on mushrooms and cattail roots a lot more now in early game.

Mid to late game, berries seem more reliable than trees, tho. So they may be worth planting.

Granted, I play exclusively MP servers that run 24/7, so your milage may vary.

[Broccoli Clock]

Now I've experienced 1.22 (didn't bother with the RCs or any youtube spoilers) and I'm pretty ambivalent about the berry changes. I do think that something needed to be done, it seemed just too easy to go around the world collect every berry bush going and within a week or two you'll have a hectare of ripe berries.

What I have found, though, is that I've not tried to propagate any of them. Just harvesting them if they have fruit, whereas the sat I was getting from the berries has, for the most part, been replaced by fishing. I do wish that fishing was a little more involved, mods will probably do that, as I do sort of feel I've swapped easy berry collection with easy fish collection, but we'll see as I move forwards and how the winter will treat me.

[Megakruemel]

Cuttings

I don't really like the cutting system for trees and am also a bit miffed that it was added for bushes. At the same time, I do think it's a good idea for balancing and it feels less weird for bushes, as they aren't as rare as fruit trees. Plus we now have a Vanilla game method to actually make more bushes, instead of having a fixed amount of bushes available in the currently existing chuncks.

I do think we should be able to produce seeds from fruit though, be it tree or berries, maybe even adding them to trader inventories. I understand that this would break balancing quite a bit. But I think we can't go "It needs to be realistic" route when we can't allow simple seeds or at least seedlings we have to nourish first.

I am biased though, as I'm coming from Project Zomboid, where "realism" only seems to apply when hurting the player. As in, a steel axe disintegrating after cutting a few trees and a crowbar demeterializing after hitting a few zomboids over the head being sold as realism because of the "realistic" durability system. And I somehow get that same feeling from cuttings. Basically a lot of work (waiting time) for little gain, or with tree cuttings, sometimes no gain at all as cuttings can fail. All that when tree cuttings are already really hard to find.

[williams_482]

My only objection at this stage is how long it takes for cuttings to mature. In my RC test world I planted my initial batch of cuttings at a point when they took a couple months to grow to maturity, and that seemed about right to make them useful without being super easy. Now they typically take an entire year? A year into a typical playthrough food is pretty well solved as a problem from pursuing things with much shorter turnaround times, such as every plantable crop, bees, and arguably fruit trees. 

I do actually quite like the current nutrient/fertilizer setup. It's a bit of an awkward graft of the three nutrient system farmland uses, but I think it works and does a good job "tiering" rewards for effort: you'll get some but weak yields from just planing in med fert soil, better yields from just adding bonemeal (which everyone should be swimming in anyway), and pretty good yields from both bone meal and saltpeter. That all seems fair. 

[Korynith]

As a new player, I am really not liking the change and regret updating my game lol. I do agree berries were too strong early game, but they've been nerfed way too hard. I started a new world and 90% of the berry bushes I find are struggling and have no berries. I'm not yet finding fish reliably enough for it to be a stable food source and have found zero mushrooms so I'm having trouble doing anything but forage for food now, which takes a lot of the fun out for me. A degree of struggle is fine, but now there's heavier reliance on good spawn RNG and I hate having to reroll worlds.

I also think, again, while the old berry bushes needed a visual update, I don't like the update as is. It's very hard to tell when there are berries on the bush and they're just kind of ugly? But that's a very minor complaint. 

Edited Thursday at 08:20 PM by Korynith
brevity

[Broccoli Clock]

14 hours ago, Korynith said:

I'm not yet finding fish reliably enough for it to be a stable food source and have found zero mushrooms so I'm having trouble doing anything but forage for food now, which takes a lot of the fun out for me. A degree of struggle is fine, but now there's heavier reliance on good spawn RNG and I hate having to reroll worlds.

So this is odd, as it's the opposite for me, so much so I started a new thread asking if the fishing needs nerfed. I am able to fish 4 or 5 from one spot if I have a baited rod, then move a  chunks or so down the coast and repeat.

I have found mushrooms; lobster, puffball and a ton of death cap. Oh, I also found one Wavy Cap, which was fun and a nice effect but not at all like being on mushrooms and for some reason the effect hit my FPS.

[Bumber]

On 4/21/2026 at 2:13 PM, LadyWYT said:

Honestly, my overall take here regarding complaints is that some players prefer the easy-mode bushes of previous versions, where the player can do nothing and get free food.

Well, considering they aren't good food. Incredibly short spoil times, but you're still only getting ~2 harvests a year. If they were good, they'd be crops.

Edited Saturday at 06:30 PM by Bumber

[Korynith]

On 4/24/2026 at 7:03 AM, Broccoli Clock said:

So this is odd, as it's the opposite for me, so much so I started a new thread asking if the fishing needs nerfed. I am able to fish 4 or 5 from one spot if I have a baited rod, then move a  chunks or so down the coast and repeat.

I have found mushrooms; lobster, puffball and a ton of death cap. Oh, I also found one Wavy Cap, which was fun and a nice effect but not at all like being on mushrooms and for some reason the effect hit my FPS.

LMAO! Thank you for responding - I assumed if I didn't see any fish in the water, there were no fish. Woops.

 

I rerolled again and finally landed on a decent spawn. I do think if I'd realized I was over-complicating the new fishing mechanic, I would have had a better time in those previous spawns.

Ultimately, I still think RNGesus is going to determine how the new berry mechanic feels overall. I am totally down for the cutting mechanic because I always felt bad relocating the full bushes - I'm the weirdo that won't chop a tree if it looks too pretty (chopping those big gorgeous oaks for tannin kills me). Just the healthy/struggling I think is what needs to go. I'm sure eventually a mod will come out for that eventually. The beauty of this game

Edited 22 hours ago by Korynith
typo