Grains are seeds

[SnapJelly]

Hello friends,

Crops as they are when fully grown drop 2+ items, the food and a seed to be replanted. But in the case of grain this doesn't make a lot of sense because the grain we eat IS the seed of the plant.
It makes sense for vegetables to need seeds because to need a way to store them over winter so you can plant in spring but grains last long enough as it is, and for the sake of inventory management it just makes it inconvinient that the food grain and the seed are seperate items.

I'd argue that at least in the case of grain the food item itse'f should be what you plant to grow more grain, this would not only save an inventory slot when building a farm early game but also make for more interesting resource management when growing your farm by having to decide how much of the harvest you replant and how much you keep for eating.

what do you guys think?

[Demoncyborg]

if we're going realistic with grain, it doesn't make sense for the vegetables to have random seeds you get upon harvest then, too. Seeds from onions and carrots are far into their lifespan where harvesting the vegetable isn't viable anymore, they get woody and gross by the time they flower. Valheim shows this by letting you plant seed onions or regular onions, but VS doesn't have a planting system like that, so it might become a timing thing, which already makes multiplayer farming sound a bit more... painful >_< 

i don't think i'd enjoy this as a lone change, maybe a huge mod or total overhaul to farming, but unless all the crops get a realistic flavor (i want brown rice! i want bran!) i feel like it'd be out of place compared to the rest.

[SnapJelly]

4 minutes ago, Demoncyborg said:

Seeds from onions and carrots are far into their lifespan where harvesting the vegetable isn't viable anymore

I think that would make for more interesting farming personally, having to choose between harvesting the crop for food or letting it sit for longer so you can get seeds for the next harvest.
As it is you can kinda just ignore most of your farm untill you happen to glance over and see the crops are grown

[Kulze]

Overall for it as I'm a big farming nerd anyway, but it's a complex topic with how to gather different types of seeds, handle the harvesting times and more.

Specifically... if you let crops too long in a field they become bad obviously. Which isn't something currently happening. But for - as was mentioned - carrots as example you need to do that to actually get the seeds.

A alternative would be to split those types of plants into 'normal' ones and 'seed plants'. After harvesting a carrot you cut the greens and replant them to then cause them to flower and produce seeds. 

Would be a fun addition for those types of crops, which are most plants where we eat the roots, like carrots, beets and the likes.

[MKMoose]

16 minutes ago, SnapJelly said:

[...] this would [...] make for more interesting resource management when growing your farm by having to decide how much of the harvest you replant and how much you keep for eating.

This would be a very cool tradeoff, though given that most grains currently drop ~6 items, it would have a pretty minimal effect on what is left for the player to eat. I think it could be interesting to change each grain crop to drop ~3 grains, or even closer to 2. This may naturally need to be counterbalanced with some other changes.

 

21 minutes ago, SnapJelly said:

what do you guys think?

It's one of the most common suggestions in regards to farming, probably, next to closely related changes for other crops (e.g. giving crops an additional seeding phase). Overall a fine change, and certainly immersive, and there is one potential issue to account for: grain spoils, so in the event that someone is absent on a server for a long time or for some other reason loses all of their grains, they would need to get it back from elsewhere. I would solve it with at least one of two changes:

• add renewable, forageable sources of wild grains (this would likely need to be part of a broader plant growth rework and could be integrated with a hay meadow mechanic),
• adjust grains to spoil at an unfavorable ratio into a non-edible variant which can still be planted and lasts forever (this would benefit from a proper composting mechanic as well).

 

2 minutes ago, Kulze said:

A alternative would be to split those types of plants into 'normal' ones and 'seed plants'. After harvesting a carrot you cut the greens and replant them to then cause them to flower and produce seeds. 

Seems like an excellent solution to the problem of losing edible crops and getting an excess of seeds after a period of absence on a server. For simplicity, it's not even necessary to cut the greens or create two types of plants - just put the regular vegetable or whatnot in the soil, acting like a seed for a different crop which then produces seeds for the main crop. Some way of converting the plant in-place could be good as well.

[Demoncyborg]

8 minutes ago, Kulze said:

if you let crops too long in a field they become bad obviously. Which isn't something currently happening.

it technically does, but they don't 'spoil', the plant dies if it goes too extreme a temp which tends to happen at least once a year for most plants in most zones.

the main reason i don't want this to change is because it's hard enough to time growing seasons in multiplayer already, i don't wanna log on and find my crops all rotted in the field, or all turned to seeds when winter is coming. i could just as easily suck it up and deal with it, but i wouldn't like it >.>

aaand maybe this is just a bug, or i'm just insanely lucky somehow, but I find crops that fully mature before they get stunted drop the full amount still. as long as it matures right before it gets cold or heat damaged, it still drops the full amount, which is an insane lifesaver when months drop by in multiplayer and a whole field gets frosted.

[Kulze]

Yes exactly, the issue with MP and also with expeditions and simply the time passing for harvest is the major reason why I'm saying 'rather keep it simple'.

It's the same with making the farming itself more complex. Optimally I (and I personally I mean, it's not what should be listened to at all  ) would love to have every detail of farming related work included because I'm just that type of person. Give me soil composition, airation, water retention, lightwave-based growth-time, proper microbiomes, plant cloning, 'chitting' (what you to pre-sprouting with potatoes) and so on and so forth.

90% of that would be absolutely awful overall for the game though  

So the simple re-plant option for the greens to create a pure flowering and hence seeding result is what I would recommend if the system is expanded.
It allows to keep the mature crop inside the ground for as long as you want, which when we introduce a extra stage after maturity would mean we gotta make the actually harvested carrots worse there since they're overripe.
And re-planting the crop itself makes no sense at all since that thing doesn't cause plant growth, it's solely a nutrient storage and anchor, specifically to be biennial rather then a annual crop then. It does just regrow green and flower, but that doesn't happen with a harvested and then re-planted carrot as the root network is destroyed and it uses up the nutrients stored to recover those, making overwintering usually not easily possible.

Gameplay-wise one alternative to cutting off greens is to allow 'rooting' crops like carrots or beets to live out their biennial nature though. Meaning instead of dieing off when it gets frosty they transform into their secondary form, which is the flowering option producing seeds the next year and no edible crops.
This is also a good option since it doesn't inflate the storable item count (splitting greens and roots of a carrot would mean 4 items instead of 2.Uncut plant, greens, root and seeds) but instead just causes the method for farming them to change. You then don't need to keep track of them and plants forgotten to be harvested sprout the next year with immunity against cold for the first stages after re-sprouting, simply to be harvested along the way for seeds fully.

I'll provide a simple flowchart for the current and the 2 options I thought up which I think make sense gameplay-wise:

Normal:
Plant crop --> wait for crop to grow --> harvest crop

'Cutting' option:
Plant crop --> wait for crop to grow --> harvest crop --> cut off greens --> replant greens immediately --> 1-2 stages for greens to flower and seed --> harvest seeds

'Biennual' option:
Plant crop --> wait for crop to grow --> Harvest only necessary amount, leave others --> winter arrives and plants 'transform', becoming inert until next spring --> at temp reaching a minimum threshold plants start growing with strong cold resistance or immunity to not simply die off by sudden changes --> normal growth time for a second time --> harvest only seeds at end.


That's what I think would be the most likely options.
Knowledge-wise the cutting option is easier but needs a very mild amount of extra work. It also creates new items to manage.
The biennual option is less work intensive minimally but you gotta know beforehand that it's an option. It doesn't create new items to manage though.

[MKMoose]

20 hours ago, Kulze said:

And re-planting the crop itself makes no sense at all since that thing doesn't cause plant growth, it's solely a nutrient storage and anchor, specifically to be biennial rather then a annual crop then. It does just regrow green and flower, but that doesn't happen with a harvested and then re-planted carrot as the root network is destroyed and it uses up the nutrients stored to recover those, making overwintering usually not easily possible.

Granted, it wouldn't be exactly realistic, but "no sense at all" is a bit excessive in that the current mechanics can easily be argued to make no sense at all either, if not less. The point of the idea of replanting whole vegetables is to add more interesting farming complexity with minimal busywork, no item clutter, and fewer potential design issues, not to make the process as accurate as possible. But it's easy enough to also implement the option to harvest some of the crop and leave part of it in place, which could correspond both to partially harvesting biennial crops and to implied replanting of cut-off greens.

 

21 hours ago, Demoncyborg said:

the main reason i don't want this to change is because it's hard enough to time growing seasons in multiplayer already, i don't wanna log on and find my crops all rotted in the field, or all turned to seeds when winter is coming. i could just as easily suck it up and deal with it, but i wouldn't like it >.>

I wonder if it would be better to create a more realistic yet lenient growth system where, instead of basing everything on arbitrary growth times and growth speed, each crop could have a few growth phases determined primarily just by time of year and have its yield depend on how much time it spends in each phase and in what conditions.

There's several ways to do this, but a basic example could use four growth phases, for simplicity let's say each of them lasts roughly three months, possibly adjusted depending on climate:

• Planting season. Newly planted seeds do little to nothing yet. During all phases, if the conditions are unfavorable, plants will gradually lose health, but seeds that haven't started growing yet should have increased resistance to cold weather and some other effects.
• Growth phase. The plant accumulates resources, at a greater rate if the environmental conditions are right and more resources are available. It may lose health depending on the weather, but can also use some of the accumulated resources to regain lost health if necessary.
• Harvest season. The plant becomes ready for harvest, with yield depending on the amount of resources it managed to accumulate during the growth phase, and stays ripe until the end of the harvest season.
• Dormant phase. When an unharvested plant reaches the dormant phase, it will decay into seeds that will grow next year, and might even retain some of the accumulated resources.

This kind of system (if balanced well, of course) could greatly reduce the pressure to plant at the right time, because you'd have clear and predictable planting and harvesting seasons (varied for different plants, naturally) without having to calculate growth times and predict tight planting or harvest windows. Even being too early or too late in spite of having this large margin of error would still usually allow you to get a harvest, just probably a smaller one.

A big advantage of this system is that it is also flexible. Changes to individual parts of the system like the duration of a growth phase could be done directly, instead of having to adjust low-level parameters like temperature margins which could have unpredictable second-order effects. Well-designed seasonal growth like this would be straightforward to adapt to biennial crops, overwintering, continuously-producing vegetables, fruiting bushes and trees, wild forageables, or essentially any and all crops or plant growth including very nonstandard stuff. And as far as I know, the devs have expressed that they would like to implement some sort of seasonal growth system eventually, though at this point there is basically no telling when that might happen, if ever.

 

Side note, there is currently a bug with incorrect calculation of drops from plants affected by temperature that primarily affects cabbage (#9841) - might be the reason why you're getting full harvests sometimes. 

Edited Saturday at 10:38 AM by MKMoose
Spelling.

[Kulze]

Ah, I meant 'realistic sense' there. So yeah, seems to hard if taken as a universal argument, that's true.
I generally try to either gamify something when realism makes no sense at all or can't be properly combined with realism and still cause the enjoyment. But usually I try to lean towards realism where possible as it makes immersion better. With the caveat that any mechanic has to feel fair since life itself is not fair and the task of games is to provide us with a method to feel success with guarantee if the effort is given.

I also like the simplifcation. Though I would say that the total growth-time should have a bit of a modifier. Nutrients alone are not sufficient there, you're right. A fixed timeframe where things can be planted - depending on the seasonal situation of the area - would be nice. This is the part of 'lightwave-growth phases' in nature. The sun provides a specific wavelength depending on distance and angle to the atmosphere which shifts during the year naturally, and plants have adjusted to those wavelengths. This is why in reality growth-lights come in different light spectrums for budding, for the growth stage and for the fruiting stage of plants.

A tool to identify it easier would be something interesting there, found in ruins to enable easier farming... but entirely doable if a bit of intuition and testing is done personally.

So basically each plant having as you stated @MKMoose:
- A seed time, but based on day/month where it provides the best outcome
- A growth time, individual for each plant.
- A harvest time, with individual timeframes where they stay viable
- Dormant or 'withered' depending on plant-type, when the timeframe to harvest is over. This can lead to expansion to nearby plowed fields (if unharvested) or simply staying in the ground (if harvested) over winter.

This would allow different kinds of plant behaviour, like a carrot becoming biennual or annual depending on actions. Or things like chives being perennial which form clumps which raise the amount of produce over the years and can expand to other squares when left alone and allowed to flower.

Would definitely make the farming situation more immersive overall, and not demand constant player interaction or the world becomes 'barren' without our intervention.
And mechanically it can be confined within player interacted blocks, hence plowing areas and letting plants naturally expand over time, as well as allowing this system to interact with flowers and mushrooms accordingly as well.

I would be especially happy for the lack of issue for planting at the exact right time, instead just reducing yield a bit unless excessively handled wrong. And the nutrients can be a multiplier for growth-time and for yield simply then. Too extreme off and no yield or barely any... perfectly handled means a week+ less growth and also substantially more yield then baseline, making actual management of the soil more realistic while also not needing to constantly keeping an eye out for it.

So yeah, I like it as it can confine all plant-life into one smooth system, including trees, bushes, flowers, shrooms... whatever basically. Just plant at the right time with the right soil conditions and be happy. And either yearly (for multi-year crops of any kind) fix the soil composition or simply handle it before planting.
Also it allows secondary effects, like beans acting as a natural nitrogen fixer, hence proper crop rotations being a thing... but not a forced necessity.

[Demoncyborg]

12 hours ago, MKMoose said:

Side note, there is currently a bug with incorrect calculation of drops from plants affected by temperature that primarily affects cabbage (#9841) - might be the reason why you're getting full harvests sometimes. 

it's not sometimes, this is all crops, as long as they mature properly before being stunted, they should drop the full amount. I did a small test on flax and this happened even with dead plants too, so it really must be an oversight / bug?

[MKMoose]

23 hours ago, Demoncyborg said:

it's not sometimes, this is all crops, as long as they mature properly before being stunted, they should drop the full amount. I did a small test on flax and this happened even with dead plants too, so it really must be an oversight / bug?

I've been completely unable to reproduce it over multiple attempts (besides cabbage, which has the other bug), so I'm not sure if there's anything specific I would need to do to trigger it.

It especially shouldn't happen for dead plants, because that's a different block which should have its own drops. If it's not a mod issue, then I could probably make a few guesses like a client-server desync (maybe related to randomized update intervals, or maybe incorrectly saved damage accumulation, or something else), but ultimately I've been unable to find anything. If you can reproduce it in vanilla then it seems like it's worth reporting on the issue tracker.