Berry bush rework - what's your take?

[Crunchy Chicken]

I hate that berries have to be fertilized at all. I want that out. The other changes are ok.

[SimplyAG]

7 hours ago, Crunchy Chicken said:

I hate that berries have to be fertilized at all. I want that out. The other changes are ok.

We can pray mods will arrive for that. Would be so nice to just 'revert them' back to the older version but keep the updated visuals. Wonder what wildcraft ended up like

Edited April 30 by SimplyAG

[EnbyKaiju]

Y'all demanding berry bushes be reverted have never worked in agriculture and it shows. I think the devs have done an awesome job and I'm loving the rework at mixing a level of realism without making it overly complicated & difficult to handle.

I do hope that a mod comes out that gives you what you want, if just so folks stop complaining about it, because it really drags down the mood of what has been a fantastic update.

Edited April 30 by EnbyKaiju

[LadyWYT]

10 hours ago, SimplyAG said:

Wonder what wildcraft ended up like

Wonder no more! https://mods.vintagestory.at/wildcraftfruit

At a glance the mechanics seem to be unchanged from old Wildcraft, so no bush traits, new visuals, or care requirements other than potentially needing trellis or making sure you plant the cuttings at the right time. Which is a shame, in my opinion, but oh well. Maybe they'll include an option in the config later for the new vanilla mechanics.

9 hours ago, EnbyKaiju said:

I do hope that a mod comes out that gives you what you want, if just so folks stop complaining about it, because it really drags down the mood of what has been a fantastic update.

For as many complaints as there have been, I'm a little surprised that no one's made a mod to revert it yet.

[MKMoose]

10 hours ago, EnbyKaiju said:

Y'all demanding berry bushes be reverted [...]

And this "y'all" is... who? One person under this topic saying that they want one specific part of the rework to be reverted? A reference to older requests to roll back soil degradation and the medium fertility requirement, which have been already granted by the devs?

 

1 hour ago, LadyWYT said:

At a glance the mechanics seem to be unchanged from old Wildcraft, so no bush traits, new visuals, or care requirements other than potentially needing trellis or making sure you plant the cuttings at the right time. Which is a shame, in my opinion, but oh well. Maybe they'll include an option in the config later for the new vanilla mechanics.

Porting over the vanilla changes would require a lot of added work, because the Wildcraft bushes are fairly large rework as well, if not larger. They would basically need to reimplement the new vanilla mechanics in their own code and assets, as well as potentially rework many of their textures as well if they were to match current vanilla mechanics exactly.

 

54 minutes ago, LadyWYT said:

For as many complaints as there have been, I'm a little surprised that no one's made a mod to revert it yet.

It's an ungrateful thing to revert, because plainly reverting it also loses out on a whole number of good changes. Just setting nutrient uptake to 0 is a very easy option, but that's really inelegant. Ignoring the berry bushes is an even easier option.

[LadyWYT]

48 minutes ago, MKMoose said:

Porting over the vanilla changes would require a lot of added work, because the Wildcraft bushes are fairly large rework as well, if not larger. They would basically need to reimplement the new vanilla mechanics in their own code and assets, as well as potentially rework many of their textures as well if they were to match current vanilla mechanics exactly.

Oh I'm aware, and I don't really expect the mod authors to go to that much effort. But if they did want to integrate stuff like the trait system and whatnot, I sure wouldn't mind seeing it happen.

 

49 minutes ago, MKMoose said:

It's an ungrateful thing to revert, because plainly reverting it also loses out on a whole number of good changes. Just setting nutrient uptake to 0 is a very easy option, but that's really inelegant. Ignoring the berry bushes is an even easier option.

Maybe, but that's also partly what mods are for, is it not? To my recollection, there's been other game changes, like the quern crafting recipe and I think fireclay crafting as well, that had mods to revert them almost as soon as the changes launched. Hence my surprise that there's not yet been a mod to revert the berry bush changes entirely, or otherwise modify the parts that some players really don't like.

[Crunchy Chicken]

13 hours ago, SimplyAG said:

We can pray mods will arrive for that. Would be so nice to just 'revert them' back to the older version but keep the updated visuals. Wonder what wildcraft ended up like

I'm pondering making said mod myself and also making it so the bushes give more fruit. I really like juicing and wine making and I'm just not vibing with this update.

[Doctorgeo7]

Thank you so much for putting in the time and effort to make this post. I was optimistic when I first read about the berry bush rework. But I found it annoying that several people called the changes bad, despite the lack of details in the original dev-blog reveal and likely having not even tested the changes. The berry bush overhaul sounds like it will address my friends' and my issues with berry bushes being too easy to horde and overly simple to farm. All without adding too much complexity for the sake of "realism." 

[Bruno Willis]

I've started a bunch of new worlds recently and run about them in survival, and as I got used to what the new berry bushes look like, I found it just as easy as before to get a good berry feed in the very early game, just with a bit more variation. I also feel like wild berry bushes in the same group have more variety in when they're going to ripen, which means it's now a lot easier to keep relying on wild berries and harvesting a handful here and there, even in places you've already harvested before. 

[MKMoose]

5 hours ago, Bruno Willis said:

I've started a bunch of new worlds recently and run about them in survival, and as I got used to what the new berry bushes look like, I found it just as easy as before to get a good berry feed in the very early game, just with a bit more variation.

New species do a lot to offset the yield and fruiting cycle changes, because they've been added on top without reducing the frequency of other bushes. Ultimately, food is fairly plentiful, and even if bushes are now a bit less viable, it's still fairly easy to collect a couple dozen to a hundred berries over a fairly short run and subsist on them for much longer than they took to collect.

I've personally found that while it can be more difficult to tell whether a bush is ripe, it tends to be very easy to notice bushes from a distance due to some sort of graphical issue that causes them to become oddly bright from farther away - I'm not sure whether that's a common experience or whether the old bushes used to be similar, but it looks kind of wrong and kind of trivializes finding berries.

Each of the bright green spots (more yellow near the desert) is a berry bush or a couple of them - there's at least ~50 of them visible here.

 

5 hours ago, Bruno Willis said:

I also feel like wild berry bushes in the same group have more variety in when they're going to ripen, which means it's now a lot easier to keep relying on wild berries and harvesting a handful here and there, even in places you've already harvested before. 

Do keep in mind that this is caused by their initial state being randomized. They will start ripening at much more similar times after the first winter when they get synchronized by going into the dormant state.

Edited May 8 by MKMoose

[williams_482]

8 hours ago, MKMoose said:

I've personally found that while it can be more difficult to tell whether a bush is ripe, it tends to be very easy to notice bushes from a distance due to some sort of graphical issue that causes them to become oddly bright from farther away - I'm not sure whether that's a common experience or whether the old bushes used to be similar, but it looks kind of wrong and kind of trivializes finding berries.

I've had a similar experience, although it's inconsistent. I think this comes from berry bushes having subtly different seasonal coloration changes than the surrounding terrain. In early summer when colors are at their most vibrant, berry bushes have very similar coloration to birch leaves. As the weather gets colder the berry bushes do change color, but they stay lighter for longer. 

Fruit trees do a similar thing, but they are uncommon enough that the distinctive look doesn't seem as strange. 

[pyraxis]

So far I mostly like it, but I'd like to see more done with the established fruit mechanics. If this is the start of a general fruit rework, I sincerely hope that (at least) berry breeding and fruit tree grafting become implemented as vanilla features. Grafting is as simple as allowing cuttings from a different plant to be added to established fruit trees. Hypothetically, the knife tool would be used to create a notch in the established tree and a wedge in the cutting. Then a hammer could be used to place the cutting on the established tree, with each tree able to receive 1 cutting per year with a limit. This would both increase future yield for each tree and make exploration more rewarding.

Currently, berry plants generate with a 15% chance for a trait. As each berry plant can have up to 4 traits, a simple statistics-based genetics system isn't too far fetched. Right now, for each trait generated in a plant, there is a 60% debuff chance and a 40% buff chance. A Mendelian genetics-based generational breeding system could be fun to work with.

Right now, cultivated berry plants are resource-intense with relatively little reward. Exploring for resources is already a very big part of the early game, and bushes are relatively common. Establishing a large, diverse berry patch in the early game would be far more rewarding if you could breed and then clone the ultimate berry bush for wine (and therefore aqua vitae) production in the late game. For someone using the inbuilt world edit system to keep the same base through game versions as early access progresses, this would be very rewarding.

 

Edited May 9 by pyraxis