More threats to harvests / stores

[Cedric the Silent]

1 hour ago, Sunny_Sometimes said:

Crops having individual moisture tolerances instead of just heat tolerances. This would be especially important in the early growth stages and disrupt irrigation min/maxing. Crops like amaranth and cassava would become drought-resistant in their later growth stages whereas rice would need very high hydration to be maintained.

Pretty sure there is a mod called Farming Revamped which has that feature to some degree. Certain crops in it get damaged and die if they get over or under watered and you can no longer safely certain plants directly near a water source block for most plants because the soil is counted as watered logged.

[Zaph42nd]

On 6/19/2026 at 1:41 PM, Crimeo said:

The main reasons why real life medieval peasants didn't all just advance to steam power in a decade or something while swimming in tons of excess food, is that unlike in this game, every single harvest didn't go 100% perfectly like clockwork, and stores were not 100% sacrosanct once laid in.

• Extreme non-scheduled weather events, storms strong enough to kill crops, unscheduled early or late frosts, heat waves, etc. (Being more conservative with your planting schedules or holding seeds in reserve; more benefit to greenhouses by mitigating damage)
• Locusts (kill crops but you can catch and eat the locusts themselves to an extent or slow them down as crawling nymphs with trenches and burning/drowning)
• Blights for certain crops that make them non viable for awhile (probably need an exception for flax prior to wool being in the game as a viable alternative)
• Flying raiders like crows that go over fences (scarecrows/guard animals can deter, scarecrows need to be frequently moved or they realize it's not alive)
• Rats get into storage if you don't have cats or dogs prowling your property

Year 1 could be chill with weather and plagues to give you a reliable chance, but opens up after that. Overall, the main defense against all of these in addition to individual defenses listed, is just having bigger farms than now, more excess, and storage methods that last 2+ years to absorb a bad harvest

On a gameplay perspective I'm a little mixed on this, crops being just weather and nutrient sensitive is gameplay friendly but not fully immersive. Things like blights, pests, and other threats would add a lot of difficulty, immersion, and challenge with little reward so might not mesh well with the gamey aspects of the game. A compromise maybe, perhaps high temporal activity could cause your crops to suffer such that rifts would blight/rot crops if planted too close or extend growth duration? Either way, more integration with other mechanics could make crop-management more interesting and engaging

[LadyWYT]

35 minutes ago, Zaph42nd said:

A compromise maybe, perhaps high temporal activity could cause your crops to suffer such that rifts would blight/rot crops if planted too close or extend growth duration?

The problem I see here is that several players already don't like temporal mechanics. While temporal mechanics could certainly use a little work, I don't think it's a good idea to add more features to them that are most likely going to be annoying and prompt yet more players to turn said mechanics off. 

[Zaph42nd]

13 hours ago, LadyWYT said:

The problem I see here is that several players already don't like temporal mechanics. While temporal mechanics could certainly use a little work, I don't think it's a good idea to add more features to them that are most likely going to be annoying and prompt yet more players to turn said mechanics off. 

Fair, I think it'd also need to come with revamps to temporal mechanics on the whole, but that's a separate topic. Still integrating it with crops would make some lore sense, but gameplay wise it'd be a mixed bag