Berry Bush World Settings

[FoxxBoxx Studios]

Gotta say first and foremost, have been looking forward to the 1.22 release!  I took a quick look at everything and the berry bush mechanics are quite good with what was done.  However I noticed that when making a world and customizing the settings, there's no ability to adjust berry bush growth times and fertility need cutoff like you can adjust other nature variables, like tree growth times.

Has it been confirmed if the devs will be adding berry bush configuration to world settings?  I like to play with the 30 day month cycle, and while playing on lower cycles, like the default 9 day mitigates a lot of the issues with the bush growth times, with longer cycles it makes berry bushes far less viable as a food source in the long run.  I would love to see config settings for world creation to help mitigate the wait and grind for bushes.

[LadyWYT]

Welcome to the forums!

7 minutes ago, FoxxBoxx Studios said:

However I noticed that when making a world and customizing the settings, there's no ability to adjust berry bush growth times and fertility need cutoff like you can adjust other nature variables, like tree growth times.

I'm guessing it's due to berries qualifying as a crop, in which case the growth is going to scale with month length as the growth times of other crops do. Outside of mods, there's no way to change it that I'm aware of, and most mods that make that kind of adjustment seem to be out of date.

 

8 minutes ago, FoxxBoxx Studios said:

Has it been confirmed if the devs will be adding berry bush configuration to world settings?  I like to play with the 30 day month cycle, and while playing on lower cycles, like the default 9 day mitigates a lot of the issues with the bush growth times, with longer cycles it makes berry bushes far less viable as a food source in the long run.  I would love to see config settings for world creation to help mitigate the wait and grind for bushes.

It's not been confirmed or denied, but it's not a feature I would expect to see given that the game trends toward more realistic behavior and the devs have indicated they'd like plants to be properly seasonal. 

[FoxxBoxx Studios]

On 5/2/2026 at 11:18 AM, LadyWYT said:

Welcome to the forums!

I'm guessing it's due to berries qualifying as a crop, in which case the growth is going to scale with month length as the growth times of other crops do. Outside of mods, there's no way to change it that I'm aware of, and most mods that make that kind of adjustment seem to be out of date.

 

It's not been confirmed or denied, but it's not a feature I would expect to see given that the game trends toward more realistic behavior and the devs have indicated they'd like plants to be properly seasonal. 

Yeah but you can modify the growth cycle of other things like trees, since the berries cant be planted in farm soil I wouldnt really classify them as a crop, mechanically I'd lump them more with the trees, but thats just semantics I guess!

[Dark Thoughts]

They are definitely closer to fruit trees now, except worse in every aspect. The whole fertilizer requirement just doesn't make any sense. It's the same plant, the same soil, yet it suddenly won't work the same way anymore? Why not instead have soil quality in general affect fruit growth, regardless if natural spawn or cutting? Could even apply to fruit trees too. Low fertility soil = less fruit yield compared to medium or high fertility soil (and maybe even less bushes on world spawn), or even terra preta, and of course fertilizing it could boost it further. Would make way more sense and, imo, fit much better into the game too. It could even be used as an indicator for high fertility soil spawns, by having a much more boosted berry bush spawn chance on high fertility soil, making it easier to find on worlds with more smooth / flat terrain generation (it's virtually indistinguishable from regular soil if you do not see the sides, and some mods make it even harder to see the sides too!).

[williams_482]

7 hours ago, Dark Thoughts said:

They are definitely closer to fruit trees now, except worse in every aspect. The whole fertilizer requirement just doesn't make any sense. It's the same plant, the same soil, yet it suddenly won't work the same way anymore? Why not instead have soil quality in general affect fruit growth, regardless if natural spawn or cutting? Could even apply to fruit trees too. Low fertility soil = less fruit yield compared to medium or high fertility soil (and maybe even less bushes on world spawn), or even terra preta, and of course fertilizing it could boost it further. Would make way more sense and, imo, fit much better into the game too. It could even be used as an indicator for high fertility soil spawns, by having a much more boosted berry bush spawn chance on high fertility soil, making it easier to find on worlds with more smooth / flat terrain generation (it's virtually indistinguishable from regular soil if you do not see the sides, and some mods make it even harder to see the sides too!).

That's basically how it works now. Fertilizer isn't "required" assuming you plant on med fert soil, it's just a good idea because it will increase yields and bonemeal is so cheap that a sink for it was desperately needed. 

I am bothered by the effectively year long growth time for berry bushes and would greatly appreciate a configuration setting to reduce it, but the fertilizer "requirement" is a nothingburger.

[LadyWYT]

3 hours ago, williams_482 said:

I am bothered by the effectively year long growth time for berry bushes and would greatly appreciate a configuration setting to reduce it,

Or perhaps growth times could be adjusted based on the species, and not the same for every kind of berry bush. In that case, the player could plant something like strawberries, and have a plant that matures quickly but has a lower yield, so they'll need to plant more to account for that. Larger bushes could take longer to mature, but produce heavier yields, making them a better investment for small spaces.

[Dark Thoughts]

18 hours ago, williams_482 said:

That's basically how it works now. Fertilizer isn't "required" assuming you plant on med fert soil, it's just a good idea because it will increase yields and bonemeal is so cheap that a sink for it was desperately needed. 

While I disagree that my suggestion is what you're describing, I guess I have been misinformed by Dracc's video on the update then.

[MKMoose]

On 5/6/2026 at 5:29 PM, LadyWYT said:

Or perhaps growth times could be adjusted based on the species, and not the same for every kind of berry bush. In that case, the player could plant something like strawberries, and have a plant that matures quickly but has a lower yield, so they'll need to plant more to account for that. Larger bushes could take longer to mature, but produce heavier yields, making them a better investment for small spaces.

I would say that the lack of meaningful differences between bushes is among the weakest points of the rework, at least out of those that have seen near unanimity. A couple species have halved yield and halved nutrient uptake (can be a bit better or worse, but ultimately changes little). Currants have very slightly adjusted temperature thresholds (close to irrelevant in practice). Select bushes slow down the player when moving through them.

The system is already set up to easily handle a massive breadth of differences, so it's kind of disappointing to see many bushes being functionally identical and the global mechanical variety still much lower than fruit trees. I'd imagine that part of the reason for it might be that the devs still have plans for the bushes, but quite frankly I don't care much about plans that we know next to nothing about - not design direction, not details on the planned features, and not any ETA.

 

12 hours ago, Dark Thoughts said:

I guess I have been misinformed by Dracc's video on the update then.

While I don't know what you might have learned from some videos, keep in mind that content made early into the release tends to be colored by speculation and rushed or flawed testing methods. It's just what tends to happen anytime new content is released and the devs don't describe the changes in detail.

Fertilizer is currently required eventually in some scenarios if you want to keep the bush producing fruit at all, and in almost all contexts if you want to keep the bush healthy, but it's mostly irrelevant in a typical short singleplayer game, roughly up to ~2-3 in-game years (in large part due to the long initial growth time).

Fertilizer can be used to increase the yield of bushes to 150% as well, which results in somewhat better efficiency in terms of space and harvesting time, but isn't ultimately particularly impactful. It's basically a bit of up-front investment in return for slightly faster harvesting.

I personally think that the fertilizer requirement is pretty pointless. I would much rather see the effects of fertilizer be purely optional, but significantly more meaningful and functional instead of just increasing yield.

[williams_482]

Fertilizer accelerating initial growth would make sense and give another incentive to use it.