Old Berry Bush Behavior option in worldgen/survival settings

[Autocrat]

I decided to play for the first time in a while, saw the berry bush change while exploring my new world, when I asked why the berry bush was depressed a friend told me what happened, and then I entirely lost interest and closed out of the game. My early game historically consisted of mass gathering berrybushes and putting them near where I settle while I get established - this being too annoying in the new system, in a world I created with intentionally relaxed setting to just chill, it killed my desire to play. I really just want a setting or toggle for the old behavior - with all the various settings, options, and toggles and customization/varied preference accommodation, I believe this being an option to be within the ethos of the game.

[Echo Weaver]

I don't think I see exactly what you're looking for, but there are several mods reducing the difficulty of 1.22 berry bushes: https://mods.vintagestory.at/list/mod?sortby=lastReleased&sortdir=d&text=berry&side=&a=&mv=1.22&c=&t=

[Autocrat]

I saw that but really I just want a worldgen option for the old behavior, that doesn't really change the making berries a pain in the stone age thing that irked me, I just want to be able to make worlds with the old behavior without having to change the new behavior for people who want that

[Rainbow Fresh]

I'm afraid such a worldgen option, if ever planned, will not come anytime soon though so mods are your best bet. Currently the old berry bushes with their old behavior are still in the game and as such should be easy enough to patch back into the world generator solely to keep backwards compatibility with older worlds - lest people would get every source of fruit (bar a few, rare trees) nuked in a potentially several thousands of blocks radius; but the intention to replace berry bushes with the new system entirely is clearly present. I can also understand why as the new berry bushes are much, much more detailed the trait system - while having it's own RNG-based  frustrations and probably in need of a system to manually propagate/cultivate such traits through work - is a nice addition to reward exploration and planting new stuff even later in the game, and the changed growth cycles + nutrient consumption (while quite possibly in need of some more balancing) is a good change to combat the problem of having infinite food available from the get-go where you could just collect a stack of berry bushes and not need to worry about food until winter. As such it is expected that people complain about the new system being notably harder simply because they are used to the old, easy one but it doesn't make the new approach innately bad.

So tl;dr if an official difficulty setting would come to the game it would be configurable growth times for fruit trees and fruit bushes (though we don't even have that for normal crops) and maybe the ability to turn off nutrient consumption of fruit bushes; though I don't think that's too likely and it will not be an "use old/new berry bush system" toggle. For anything else and especially for anything now mods will be your only option.

[Autocrat]

the old worldgen setting would not be default - it would be a new setting for new worlds which generates old bushes instead of new bushes. Which, considering old bushes still exist in the game... The old system was not a problem, because I enjoyed it. I don't want it to mess with your world or your preferences, I just want a setting when I make a world which generates the old bushes as they did previously. In fact given the old bushes (and thus behavior) still exist, if anything that would make implementing a toggle at the level when you create a world to generate the old bushes easier if anything. With zero impact on new worlds with new bush settings.

[Rainbow Fresh]

Like I literally just said, if the developers would want the old, simple and "too easy" bush system they wouldn't have made the new one. The new one isn't perfect and will need more tweaking but that is going to happen. There is no point to keep the old system officially in the game and as such any official base game attempt to make things configurable would configure the new mechanics, not toggling between the new and old system. If the developers were to keep the new and old version of every single feature they rework in the game and then make it a toggle the game becomes unnecessarily bloated, harder to maintain and equally harder to support because there is always the question "Are you using the old or new system". I simply do not see this happening from a game development perspective, neither do I see the new system getting scrapped entirely in favor of the old.

Mod are quite literally the thing invented for what you originally stated as your goal "I want it this way without forcing it onto others". Mods exist that do about what you want while being future-proof enough to use the new system, not just retrofit all new bushes with the old ones - which will eventually break when the old ones get fully removed from the game. You install those mods for yourself to get the experience you want without affecting the experience of those around you. No asking for an official toggle and maintenance of two redundant systems in the game for your sake required. Sure, official options are always nicer because then it's the developers' responsibility and fault to make sure it works; but because of that there are things that really shouldn't be the developers' job to fix. Personal preference over the general development of the game and fleshing out of mechanics is one of those. I do thing we are missing settings. Crop growth speed if only to be inline with all the other time-based modifiers like hunger rate and spoil rate. Fruit tree setting if only to be inline with the existing tree growth modifier. But keeping the old berry bushes ingame and making them available as a setting is not one of them.

[Autocrat]

If they intended to remove the old bushes from the game I am of the opinion they would have done that with the new ones, they were explicitly left in for compatibility sake. Considering the scope of the settings is to allow the vanilla game to appeal to varied niches of people with various behaviors far more impactful being settings (eg, turning temporal stability and/or storms off outright) set on world creation, I believe it is perfectly reasonable if not ideal for what amounts to a single setting called "classic berries" off by default which, when on, simply puts an old bush wherever it would gen a new one. None of the mods at present do this. The scope of the suggested setting is small and very much inline with the vanilla worldgen settings which already exist in my opinion. But I do not enjoy the new system, and have friends who can say the same, who would be delighted if we could simply press a button on making a world to have the system that we did enjoy.

[Rainbow Fresh]

Compatibility is not intention. Granted, I do not understand why they did, in fact, not just use their existing block remapper to automatically update all existing pre-1.22 bushes to their 1.22 counterpart and rather kept things as they are; maybe because that would completely throw off any growth cycles. But leaving legacy code in a program for a couple versions to give people using that enough time to safely and comfortably migrate to the replacement is a common practice. Leaving this "deprecated" code in is done solely to not break what exists by the time of the change, not because it is intended to still be used. The old berry bushes are deprecated and no longer intended to be used. No mod that automatically replaces 1.22 berry bushes with their legacy pre-1.22 counterpart exist because people know it's wasted effort as one day, be it 1.23 or 1.25, these legacy remnants will be fully removed to clean up the game's code considering everyone had ample time to migrate to using the new system. And when that day comes, all the mods and all the worlds still relying on this content will break. Therefor only mods were made that use the new system but tweak it to be as close to the old system as possible. New berry bushes with a nutrition consumption of 0 (first mod under the results posted above) and sped up growth times (second mod on the results posted above) make the new berry bushes essentially function like the old ones, except you still have to use a knife to get a single cutting of a bush per year instead of slapping and stealing the entire original "block" of bush, and the random traits existing.

[Demoncyborg]

what rainbow said is true, this kind of thing is what mods are for.

if every time the devs updated the game with something new, only to add an option to change it back, it's just adding layers of complexity to an already intensely complex game. like rainbow said, every bug and question would need to be met with "are you using x, or x option?" and that eventuality would only grow so much more huge and complex with how much the game is already growing.

seasons, weather, food spoilage, geology and worldgen changes are all updates that majorly changed the way survival worked, and there are not options to remove those either.

 

 

[Autocrat]

13 minutes ago, Rainbow Fresh said:

Compatibility is not intention. Granted, I do not understand why they did, in fact, not just use their existing block remapper to automatically update all existing pre-1.22 bushes to their 1.22 counterpart and rather kept things as they are; maybe because that would completely throw off any growth cycles. But leaving legacy code in a program for a couple versions to give people using that enough time to safely and comfortably migrate to the replacement is a common practice. Leaving this "deprecated" code in is done solely to not break what exists by the time of the change, not because it is intended to still be used. The old berry bushes are deprecated and no longer intended to be used. No mod that automatically replaces 1.22 berry bushes with their legacy pre-1.22 counterpart exist because people know it's wasted effort as one day, be it 1.23 or 1.25, these legacy remnants will be fully removed to clean up the game's code considering everyone had ample time to migrate to using the new system. And when that day comes, all the mods and all the worlds still relying on this content will break. Therefor only mods were made that use the new system but tweak it to be as close to the old system as possible. New berry bushes with a nutrition consumption of 0 (first mod under the results posted above) and sped up growth times (second mod on the results posted above) make the new berry bushes essentially function like the old ones, except you still have to use a knife to get a single cutting of a bush per year instead of slapping and stealing the entire original "block" of bush, and the random traits existing.

If compatibility was not their intention they would have remapped and replaced the old blocks but the edge cases that would cause would be a pain so they decided not to because of the completely different behavior. In fact I suspect they first tried full swapping/remapping it in old worlds and saw things break. They tend to avoid trying to break blocks in existent worlds, thus I do not ever see them purging the old bush types from the game on the basis of them being tiny blocks with a tiny footprint in terms of size to keep compatibility with old worlds. 

10 minutes ago, Demoncyborg said:

what rainbow said is true, this kind of thing is what mods are for.

if every time the devs updated the game with something new, only to add an option to change it back, it's just adding layers of complexity to an already intensely complex game. like rainbow said, every bug and question would need to be met with "are you using x, or x option?" and that eventuality would only grow so much more huge and complex with how much the game is already growing.

seasons, weather, food spoilage, geology and worldgen changes are all updates that majorly changed the way survival worked, and there are not options to remove those either.

 

 

It's literally at the top of survival challenges for your first example

then slightly below that...

Spoiler

Loads of geology options as expected from the world generation tab

Edited Monday at 02:13 PM by Autocrat
attempted error cleanup

[Demoncyborg]

oh wow complete misread on my part there, feel free to ignore what i said

[LadyWYT]

1 hour ago, Autocrat said:

If they intended to remove the old bushes from the game I am of the opinion they would have done that with the new ones, they were explicitly left in for compatibility sake.

Welcome to the forums! If I'm not mistaken, the reason that old bushes were left untouched is to ensure that worlds generated prior to 1.22 wouldn't break, especially since some of the old bush behavior, like stacking, no longer exists. I'm sure the devs could have forced a block update, but it's probably easier to just let old bushes remain as legacy blocks and prevent the player from obtaining any more. That also allows players to keep playing their older worlds without massive issues.

As for adding the old bush behavior to the game as a world config option? No, that's something that should be handled by mods. The game is still very much in development, things will change before the final release, and trying to keep old gameplay systems as "legacy" options leads to bloating the file size as well as creates some pretty big problems on making sure all the settings generally play nicely together. There's also the aspect of the devs are trying to fulfill their own vision for the game, and while they do make some concessions as needed to give players plenty of options to season the game to taste(like removing lore content or setting all creatures to be entirely passive), there are also some aspects they're not going to change, because there still needs to be something there to challenge the player and retain the game's general intended vision.