Questions about Fruit Trees

[SavageZahar]

When I start a new world, I always see berry bushes that are already flowering, ripening, or ripe.  Yet, I have never seen a fruit tree that generated as flowering, ripening, or ripe, just young or mature.  I have had trees flower and begin ripening in the tropics, but I haven't seen apple trees, for example, that generated mid-ripening as I have with berry bushes.  Are other people experiencing this, or have I been incredibly unlucky?  I would think this isn't intended, as I saw mentions of fruit trees in update changelogs, but I could have misinterpreted what I had read.  Moreover, are there mods that address this specific behavior?

Edited Thursday at 07:41 PM by SavageZahar
Added tags

[Streetwind]

In older versions, fruit trees never flowered or produced fruit in their first year.

1.22 was supposed to fix this, though. "Fixed: Wild fruit trees not fruiting in the first year", says the changelog. That unfortunately doesn't give us much to work with. We don't know what was 'broken', and we don't know what the fix was.

One thing to keep in mind, however, is that berry bushes aren't seasonal. They cycle through flowering and fruiting on a timer that keeps running as long as the ambient temperature is high enough. That means their state can be effortlessly randomized at world start.

Fruit trees, on the other hand, are very much seasonal. They flower exactly once a year, during a specific window of time. For the vernalizing trees, that is after they come out of winter dormancy, so usually sometime in April. For the southern evergreens, it's a range from February to April, except for oranges.

The game starts on May 1st. And time before that date is not simulated.

Because you need a fruiting stage to produce a harvest, and you need a flowering stage to enter a fruiting stage, it's possible that a tree that didn't get a chance to flower because April didn't exist, will skip its entire cycle for the first year.

Meanwhile, orange trees start flowering in June. So those should be absolutely fine, and that sort of lines up with your observation of southern trees that bloom in year 1. They are the only ones to bloom that late, though.

 

All of this is based on my speculation, mind you. I'm trying to think up a best guess as to why it isn't working. That doesn't mean that what I thought up is actually correct.

Edited Thursday at 09:05 PM by Streetwind

[MKMoose]

1 hour ago, SavageZahar said:

When I start a new world, I always see berry bushes that are already flowering, ripening, or ripe.  Yet, I have never seen a fruit tree that generated as flowering, ripening, or ripe, just young or mature.  I have had trees flower and begin ripening in the tropics, but I haven't seen apple trees, for example, that generated mid-ripening as I have with berry bushes.  Are other people experiencing this, or have I been incredibly unlucky?  I would think this isn't intended, as I saw mentions of fruit trees in update changelogs, but I could have misinterpreted what I had read.

It is probably the strangest detail to come out of the 1.22 update. There's been a number of conversations about it, at least one of the devs said that it would be fixed, some relevant changes were made in the code, a supposed fix was mentioned in the patch notes, and yet... nothing.

I have found why the supposed fix isn't working - no tree can ever vernalize as long as it's young, and all newly-generated trees start off in the young state - but I genuinely have no idea how a seemingly completely ineffective change got through any sort of testing and into the patch notes. And I've identified a fix (may need some testing to make sure there's no unintended side effects), though I have no idea if I can get it into the game anytime soon given the extremely slow handling of Issues and PRs. Maybe I could make a mod out of it.

 

1 hour ago, SavageZahar said:

Moreover, are there mods that address this specific behavior?

I'm not aware of any current mods that do this, though I haven't checked exactly. A lot of mods make fruit trees ripen faster, which could be a suitable stand-in and potentially be removed from the world after the first year, but making them start off vernalized is evidently a less straightforward task than to change a couple numbers. If you want to start off with vernalized fruit trees, you could also try advancing the time by one year at the start of the world with /time add 1 year, though keep in mind that this can also have other unintended consequences.

 

28 minutes ago, Streetwind said:

One thing to keep in mind, however, is that berry bushes aren't seasonal. They cycle through flowering and fruiting on a timer that keeps running as long as the ambient temperature is high enough. That means their state can be effortlessly randomized at world start.

Fruiting bushes are effectively seasonal after the first winter, since all timers get reset and not paused during dormancy, provided that wintertime temperatures go low enough to make them dormant. In a rough test this first stopped occuring at roughly 13 °C yearly average temperature for currants (a bit lower for berries), which may be be ~6-12k blocks south from spawn most of the time if I did the math right (very roughly, as there's a huge amount of randomness involved).

Edited Thursday at 09:29 PM by MKMoose

[Streetwind]

11 hours ago, MKMoose said:

Fruiting bushes are effectively seasonal after the first winter

What I meant was that nothing prevents a berry bush from flowering at any time of the year, and even multiple times in the same year, as long as temperatures allow it. Whereas the trees either outright target specific date ranges or effectively do so due to how they react to spring, and they're strictly once-per-year deals. Maybe "seasonal" was just the wrong word for it.

You seem to know more about this than me, though. If I understood you right, the game does try to give trees a chance to vernalize and/or flower at their preferred times even before world start, but because they're spawned young, vernalization gets skipped? I suppose that lines up even better with OPs observation that sourthern trees flower and fruit fine, since they cannot be too young for something they don't do in the first place...

 

Edited Friday at 09:13 AM by Streetwind

[MKMoose]

41 minutes ago, Streetwind said:

What I meant was that nothing prevents a berry bush from flowering at any time of the year, and even multiple times in the same year, as long as temperatures allow it. Whereas the trees either outright target specific date ranges or effectively do so due to how they react to spring, and they're strictly once-per-year deals. Maybe "seasonal" was just the wrong word for it.

That's what bushes do as well, for the most part at least - fruiting bushes and deciduous fruit trees are implemented in a very similar way.

As long as temperatures during winter go low enough to make the bush go dormant, it will always leave dormancy at roughly the same time each year and follow a mostly fixed fruiting cycle. If I remember correctly, the cycle length for bushes is:

• 3.5 ± 0.4 months for the four main growth stages,
• 1 ± 0.1 month ripe time, which may be affected by one of the traits as well as cut short when the bush is harvested (including eaten by animals).

And if the next winter also makes the bush go dormant, the bushes will be synchronized again, just like deciduous fruit trees are synchronized by dormancy.

Or when temperatures during winter are not low enough to synchronize them, then they become effectively random - this is in contrast to deciduous fruit trees which need to be vernalized in the dormant state to bear any fruit.

 

41 minutes ago, Streetwind said:

If I understood you right, the game does try to give trees a chance to vernalize and/or flower at their preferred times even before world start, but because they're spawned young, vernalization gets skipped? I suppose that lines up even better with OPs observation that sourthern trees flower and fruit fine, since they cannot be too young for something they don't do in the first place...

What the game technically does is set the vernalization time to above the required threshold for some trees, which as far as I can tell just causes them to always vernalize regardless of temperature the next time it gets the chance. But the tree starts off young, and it only checks for vernalization once it enters dormancy, which only happens when the temperature gets low enough.

The evergreen fruit trees in hot climates aren't related to the 1.22 change. They also spawn young, but their cycle is not restricted in the same way that deciduous trees are restricted and instead they just fruit at approximately the same time every year - as long as their flowering season is late enough in the year and their "non-flowering young time" is short enough, young evergreen trees will fruit just fine in the first year.

Edited Friday at 09:54 AM by MKMoose