About Berry bushes

[Tam Hawkins]

I am not sure if this should be in Questions or discussion so I post it here.

I have tried out the new berry bushes and I find them not so much different from the old ones, honestly it might be even easier to get more since you can just duplicate them. But I noticed a few things I was wondering about and wanted to know what others think about them:

1. Maturing: Berry bush cuttings when planted need around 3 months to mature. Once they do they can mature into all states (mature, flowering, rippening and ripe). Is that intended? I thought they would all go to mature and then after a while start flowering and so on.

2. Fertility. They supposedly need to be fertilitzed to keep healthy. I planted mine in medium fertility soil (50% fertility) and after harvesting the fertility is not going down even 1%. Is the reduction on fertility just not shown or does it do so little that one cycle is not showing a difference?

3. Taking Cuttings. Taking cuttings from a bush makes it so that there is a 12-13 months cooldown before taking another cutting. Making it so that you can take another cutting after a year. But that can be circumvented by taking a cutting from the cutting. After planting your cutting and waiting 3 months you can immediatly take a new cutting. Since they are all copies from each other that means you can take 4 cuttings that are the exact copies per year and then next year you can do the same but 4-5 times as much. Meaning that a single bush can turn into 5 in the first year and then 1-5 in the next year from each cutting of last year. That means your bushes can pretty much explode in populance.

If you find just a single good bush that you want to keep in the first year you can have 4 of them (I am excluding the original since that one might be far away), then next year you can have 4+3+2+1 = 10 more bushes so overall 14 bushes already and in your third year you can have 4*5+4*4+3*3+2*2+1=50 new bushes then add your old ones and you are at 64 bushes.

From what I understand the devs wanted to make bushes less avaiable to just put in your base, but that does not seem to happen here.

 

I am not against any of these points (except maybe nr1 as that seems just weird) but I was wondering if that is all intended?

What do you guys think?

Best Regards,

Tam

[Nisaba]

The randomization of growth state so you can never find a crop of berries all ready to pick at the same time is one of the dumbest decisions ever made in game dev. Is neither realism nor fun.

[LadyWYT]

1 hour ago, Tam Hawkins said:

1. Maturing: Berry bush cuttings when planted need around 3 months to mature. Once they do they can mature into all states (mature, flowering, rippening and ripe). Is that intended? I thought they would all go to mature and then after a while start flowering and so on.

I don't think this is intended. It's been reported on the bug tracker and listed as a bug, so it should be resolved by the stable release, if it's not been fixed already.

 

1 hour ago, Tam Hawkins said:

2. Fertility. They supposedly need to be fertilitzed to keep healthy. I planted mine in medium fertility soil (50% fertility) and after harvesting the fertility is not going down even 1%. Is the reduction on fertility just not shown or does it do so little that one cycle is not showing a difference?

As I understand it, the nutrients are only used when the berries ripen, but even then it's only a chance to actually use up nutrients. I think it's supposed to take about two in-game years for a berry bush to deteriorate from bountiful to barren if the player takes zero care of the bush.

 

1 hour ago, Tam Hawkins said:

3. Taking Cuttings. Taking cuttings from a bush makes it so that there is a 12-13 months cooldown before taking another cutting. Making it so that you can take another cutting after a year. But that can be circumvented by taking a cutting from the cutting. After planting your cutting and waiting 3 months you can immediatly take a new cutting. Since they are all copies from each other that means you can take 4 cuttings that are the exact copies per year and then next year you can do the same but 4-5 times as much. Meaning that a single bush can turn into 5 in the first year and then 1-5 in the next year from each cutting of last year. That means your bushes can pretty much explode in populance.

Interesting. Sounds like something that might be adjusted, but it also sounds like it's probably fine. There's only so many berry bushes one needs in singleplayer, and this sort of feature would probably be really nice in multiplayer for players to share/sell cuttings to other players.

 

1 hour ago, Tam Hawkins said:

From what I understand the devs wanted to make bushes less avaiable to just put in your base, but that does not seem to happen here.

This isn't the impression I've gotten. I think the intention is less to make bushes less available to players, and more to make the bushes behave like actual plants, as well as discourage players from just tearing up the local plant life and hauling everything back to base(which can be a real problem on larger servers). With the changes, players will need to put just a little more effort into establishing a berry patch at their base, but they can grow as many bushes as they want, as well as have potentially better yields than before.

 

1 hour ago, Nisaba said:

The randomization of growth state so you can never find a crop of berries all ready to pick at the same time is one of the dumbest decisions ever made in game dev.

For wild bushes this is most likely so that players, especially newer players, will have more food options at the beginning of a game, where they're going to be struggling to survive. Once the game has been fleshed out a little more I would expect the berry bushes(and other plant life) to become entirely seasonal.

[Nisaba]

52 minutes ago, LadyWYT said:

For wild bushes this is most likely so that players, especially newer players, will have more food options at the beginning of a game, where they're going to be struggling to survive. Once the game has been fleshed out a little more I would expect the berry bushes(and other plant life) to become entirely seasonal.

Yeah, if the wild bushes stay like its whatever, but if I'm gonna go through what it much higher effort now to make a vineyard, I'd expect winter to do it's thing for domestic bushes, that it does in real life. It is the great synchronizer. After winter, all bushes in a domestic berry farm should be in sync, or at least mostly.

[Chrondeath]

1 hour ago, LadyWYT said:

As I understand it, the nutrients are only used when the berries ripen, but even then it's only a chance to actually use up nutrients. I think it's supposed to take about two in-game years for a berry bush to deteriorate from bountiful to barren if the player takes zero care of the bush.

How many harvests are there within two years....?  If it doesn't hit the nutrients every time, is it chunking them pretty good when it does hit?

[LadyWYT]

2 minutes ago, Chrondeath said:

How many harvests are there within two years....?

Over two years? I'm not sure, as I've never bothered to count. My rough guess would be around 2-3 harvests per year on default settings.

 

3 minutes ago, Chrondeath said:

If it doesn't hit the nutrients every time, is it chunking them pretty good when it does hit?

This I am also not sure, but I'm guessing that a single harvest isn't going to drain so many nutrients that the bush's health starts to suffer. I think it's more a case of the player just needs to sprinkle some bonemeal on their berry patch once a year to keep them in good health(and thus productive).

[EnbyKaiju]

I'm curious to see how the berry rework is going to play out in long-month play-throughs. I love a solid 30-day month in game, it gives each season a real sense of purpose and makes preparations a lot more necessary. The rework on crops, especially berries, is going to make the need for preserving fruit for long-term satiation bonuses a lot more necessary.

Can't wait to see how it all works out, but 2-3 solid harvests a year feels both realistic and a fun challenge. It'll be like being back working on the blueberry farm again! (never go into strawberry picking, folks, it ruins your back. Blueberries are so much better)

[LadyWYT]

3 minutes ago, EnbyKaiju said:

never go into strawberry picking, folks, it ruins your back.

Someday I want to take a crack at making a strawberry bed in real life. Except I think I'm going to try to put them in a stack of terra cotta pots as a stylized raised bed. Dunno how well it will work, but it will be a fun project to try. Might even help keep some of the critters out of the plants too.

[EnbyKaiju]

1 minute ago, LadyWYT said:

Someday I want to take a crack at making a strawberry bed in real life. Except I think I'm going to try to put them in a stack of terra cotta pots as a stylized raised bed. Dunno how well it will work, but it will be a fun project to try. Might even help keep some of the critters out of the plants too.

They should be fine in pots, they won't be competing for ground space like they do when they are bunched up in the ground and you can give each plant more attention if it needs it. 

Strawberry plants are surprisingly resilient, it's why they survive in nature so well. Wild strawberries are an utter delight, and I'm so glad they got added to VS. I found a few spreading patches in one of my test worlds and they are just so hecking pretty.

Can finally make a strawberry pie as a tribute to Celeste (I love that game) 

[LadyWYT]

2 minutes ago, EnbyKaiju said:

Wild strawberries are an utter delight, and I'm so glad they got added to VS.

Same. Happiness in VS is a Blackguard in a strawberry patch. 

My grandma had a patch of strawberries in her garden. It never seemed to produce many strawberries though. She didn't figure out why until she caught the dog eating the ripe strawberries one day.

[MKMoose]

6 hours ago, LadyWYT said:

I think it's supposed to take about two in-game years for a berry bush to deteriorate from bountiful to barren if the player takes zero care of the bush.

It's much slower than that. Roughly two years are from the starting state in medium fertility (50%) to struggling (30%). From bountiful to barren it takes something like 20 years, if you fertilize a bush initially and then forget about it. There's a reason I've been saying the fertilizer requirement is practically irrelevant.

 

5 hours ago, Chrondeath said:

How many harvests are there within two years....? 

Two per year should be the maximum in temperate climates, at least when not using a greenhouse.