Crop Growth Multiplier Configuration

[AnkouArt]

I've been playing quite a bit of VS since 1.14 but I'm not really a fan of is how easy food is to get.
Even in a cool starting climate and poor quality soil most crops will still be ready to harvest in 7-10 days (including things I actually grow myself IRL that I know take 2-3+ months.)

For me personally, this makes things like composting or finding Terra Preta completely unnecessary since I'm trying to create a more challenging survival experience and getting enough food is already trivial without them. 3 harvests in one summer after going out of my way to play the game as inefficiently as possible just isn't what I'm looking for in an immersive survival game.

But obviously not everyone is going to want growing food to be slower and I'm sure getting enough food is more of an issue in an always-on multiplayer server where the seasons can change while you are away so I think a multiplier configuration on crop growth, like trees, is the ideal way to handle this.
Let us control how fast/slow we want our farms to be to manage our own challenges.

(Berries are another matter, but I see someone has already made a post about them recently (and personally I'm a fan of making them seasonal, like real life, but a growth multiplier could work for them too.))

Tl;DR - Add a confutation option for a growth time multiplier on food crops, like trees, so we can slow down how long it takes our farms to reach harvest.

[Streetwind]

Rejoice: matching agriculture closer to the season system is already on the roadmap.

[Onsdag]

If they're going to make growing crops more 'realistic' (which I'm fine with them taking longer) then they would need to make every aspect more 'realistic' as well. One cereal crop seed should produce more than just a couple grains of food. One pumpkin seed should not result in only one or two pumpkins... which then have to be sacrificed as food to be turned into a single seed. In its current state one vegetable seed results in only one seed and anywhere from 1-3 vegetable crops to be eaten. If we're talking 'realism' here then a single seed should (depending on food variety) result in scores if not hundreds of times return in food and/or seed value in a single harvest, not the current value of approximately a 1:1 ratio.

Sure, make it so you only get one, maybe two, harvest(s) a year. But then we'll also have to have it so that one harvest provides enough food and seed to last us throughout the entire coming year and beyond.

If you want to "create a more challenging survival experience" for yourself then don't be afraid to set self-imposed restrictions on yourself. Don't grow a garden, or only allow yourself one harvest of each crop type a year, and then try surviving on only what you can hunt or forage in the wild the rest of the time. Try playing with 30 day months and hard winters. See how "fun" and challenging that can become. As it is right now I find the farming aspect of the game something of a chore already... kinda like in real life except in different ways... and I have to spend almost my entire summer growing, cooking, and preserving food to survive the coming winter months. Playing with 30 day months and harsh winters, I've barely survived one winter, and I'm now about to head into my second winter, and I feel like I haven't "progressed" much in the game because I'm spending so much time just trying to simply "survive." But maybe I'm just playing the game wrong. Or maybe I'm just that inept. Your mileage may vary.

[PhotriusPyrelus]

2 hours ago, Onsdag said:

If they're going to make growing crops more 'realistic' (which I'm fine with them taking longer) then they would need to make every aspect more 'realistic' as well. One cereal crop seed should produce more than just a couple grains of food. One pumpkin seed should not result in only one or two pumpkins... which then have to be sacrificed as food to be turned into a single seed. In its current state one vegetable seed results in only one seed and anywhere from 1-3 vegetable crops to be eaten. If we're talking 'realism' here then a single seed should (depending on food variety) result in scores if not hundreds of times return in food and/or seed value in a single harvest, not the current value of approximately a 1:1 ratio.

Sure, make it so you only get one, maybe two, harvest(s) a year. But then we'll also have to have it so that one harvest provides enough food and seed to last us throughout the entire coming year and beyond.

If you want to "create a more challenging survival experience" for yourself then don't be afraid to set self-imposed restrictions on yourself. Don't grow a garden, or only allow yourself one harvest of each crop type a year, and then try surviving on only what you can hunt or forage in the wild the rest of the time. Try playing with 30 day months and hard winters. See how "fun" and challenging that can become. As it is right now I find the farming aspect of the game something of a chore already... kinda like in real life except in different ways... and I have to spend almost my entire summer growing, cooking, and preserving food to survive the coming winter months. Playing with 30 day months and harsh winters, I've barely survived one winter, and I'm now about to head into my second winter, and I feel like I haven't "progressed" much in the game because I'm spending so much time just trying to simply "survive." But maybe I'm just playing the game wrong. Or maybe I'm just that inept. Your mileage may vary.

While I tend to agree, bear in mind, that 1 "seed" isn't really a single actual seed.  It's seeds enough to sow approximately one square meter of farmland.  See, video games - or games in general really - do a *lot* of abstraction.  what you see as a representation isn't necessarily exactly what is represented.

One square meter of, say, rice, is well more than a handful of grains.  The average yield of a hectare is 3-6 tonnes.  A hectare is 10,000 m^2, a tonne is 1,000 kg.  That means in one m^2, you get 0.3 kg of dried rice.

So 0.3 kg is about 1.68 cups of rice, which, when rehydrated would approximately double to 3.36 cups.  So we actually end up getting more or less the right amount, don't we?  Two game-units of rice cook up to one serving, so as long as you're getting an average of about 4 game-units of rice, that's pretty accurate.


I can't be bothered to go through this for every kind of produce, but rice at least seems to be pretty "realistic".  Except for the fact that we don't have to dry it.  Or hull it.  Or cook it with water.  Or sort the seeds.  Or grow the seeds into seedlings.  Or till the ground.  Then plant the seedlings.  Then submerge them in just enough water.  Then drain the water for a time.  Then add the water back.  Why yes, I did enjoy Sakuna: of Rice and Ruin, how could you tell?  @_@

If there's something to look at, perhaps it's the satiation you gain from one game-unit of the different foods.  :shrug:

[Onsdag]

9 hours ago, PhotriusPyrelus said:

While I tend to agree, bear in mind, that 1 "seed" isn't really a single actual seed.  It's seeds enough to sow approximately one square meter of farmland.  See, video games - or games in general really - do a *lot* of abstraction.  what you see as a representation isn't necessarily exactly what is represented.

One square meter of, say, rice, is well more than a handful of grains.  The average yield of a hectare is 3-6 tonnes.  A hectare is 10,000 m^2, a tonne is 1,000 kg.  That means in one m^2, you get 0.3 kg of dried rice.

So 0.3 kg is about 1.68 cups of rice, which, when rehydrated would approximately double to 3.36 cups.  So we actually end up getting more or less the right amount, don't we?  Two game-units of rice cook up to one serving, so as long as you're getting an average of about 4 game-units of rice, that's pretty accurate.


I can't be bothered to go through this for every kind of produce, but rice at least seems to be pretty "realistic".  Except for the fact that we don't have to dry it.  Or hull it.  Or cook it with water.  Or sort the seeds.  Or grow the seeds into seedlings.  Or till the ground.  Then plant the seedlings.  Then submerge them in just enough water.  Then drain the water for a time.  Then add the water back.  Why yes, I did enjoy Sakuna: of Rice and Ruin, how could you tell?  @_@

If there's something to look at, perhaps it's the satiation you gain from one game-unit of the different foods.  :shrug:

I'll take your word for it. I did some calculations for wheat (yes, I realize wheat is not in the game) and it comes to about the same - enough "seed" to plant in one m^2 yields about .4 kg of wheat. I imagine the other grains would be comparable with rice and wheat. I don't know about the vegetables, and, like you, I don't want to bother going through each of them.

Still, I do think there are issues with the pumpkin, which doesn't act like other crops. You don't get both "seed" and "food" from a pumpkin, you only get "food," and if you want "seed" you must turn the "food" into one "seed." In real life one pumpkin plant can easily produce several pumpkins, which yields tons of "food" plus tons of "seed." In the game however I found like 5 seed, and planting those seeds in tera preta resulted in 3 pumpkins. Granted, I had them in a single 7x7 greenhouse and so they didn't have the space they needed to properly grow. I learned from the mistake, turned the 3 pumpkins into 3 seed and planted them outdoors with a ton more space. Still, even with constant care, good soil, fertilizer, etc., each pumpkin plant yields anywhere from 0-3 pumpkins. Maybe it's just bad luck but I've had several plants not produce anything, or maybe only one pumpkin. And so after like 4 growing "seasons" my original 5 "seed" is now up to 7... and I haven't been able to use a single pumpkin for "food" yet because I have to always turn them into "seed" so I can try growing my inventory. This is frustrating and definitely not "realistic."

And I do definitely agree with you that hunger/satiation should be looked at; that alone would probably fix many of my qualms with farming at the moment. That is it's a constant 'chore' to grow and preserve enough food to provide just for basic survival needs. It should also be noted that I'm playing on a multiplayer server, which makes things even more difficult because time is always progressing when someone is online, so food rots, crops suffer from lack of care, etc., so that by the time you log back in you're often back at square one.

Maybe that's what the OP needs to do - play on a multiplayer server and see just how much more difficult and challenging the food situation becomes. 

[PhotriusPyrelus]

50 minutes ago, Onsdag said:

I'll take your word for it. I did some calculations for wheat (yes, I realize wheat is not in the game) and it comes to about the same - enough "seed" to plant in one m^2 yields about .4 kg of wheat. I imagine the other grains would be comparable with rice and wheat. I don't know about the vegetables, and, like you, I don't want to bother going through each of them.

Still, I do think there are issues with the pumpkin, which doesn't act like other crops. You don't get both "seed" and "food" from a pumpkin, you only get "food," and if you want "seed" you must turn the "food" into one "seed." In real life one pumpkin plant can easily produce several pumpkins, which yields tons of "food" plus tons of "seed." In the game however I found like 5 seed, and planting those seeds in tera preta resulted in 3 pumpkins. Granted, I had them in a single 7x7 greenhouse and so they didn't have the space they needed to properly grow. I learned from the mistake, turned the 3 pumpkins into 3 seed and planted them outdoors with a ton more space. Still, even with constant care, good soil, fertilizer, etc., each pumpkin plant yields anywhere from 0-3 pumpkins. Maybe it's just bad luck but I've had several plants not produce anything, or maybe only one pumpkin. And so after like 4 growing "seasons" my original 5 "seed" is now up to 7... and I haven't been able to use a single pumpkin for "food" yet because I have to always turn them into "seed" so I can try growing my inventory. This is frustrating and definitely not "realistic."

And I do definitely agree with you that hunger/satiation should be looked at; that alone would probably fix many of my qualms with farming at the moment. That is it's a constant 'chore' to grow and preserve enough food to provide just for basic survival needs. It should also be noted that I'm playing on a multiplayer server, which makes things even more difficult because time is always progressing when someone is online, so food rots, crops suffer from lack of care, etc., so that by the time you log back in you're often back at square one.

Maybe that's what the OP needs to do - play on a multiplayer server and see just how much more difficult and challenging the food situation becomes. 

I'm pretty new; I have not messed with Pumpkin's yet.  I do agree that the choice between seeds and food is nonsensical from an IRL perspective, but it is at least understandable from a gameplay perspective; it's offering the player a choice (whether or not it's a meaningful choice is debatable) on how to use his resources.  Like the "choice" of how to use your first 40 copper: do you get a pick and a hammer, so you can get more metal?  Or do you get a pick and a prospecting pick - like my dumb-butt did my first game that got to smelting - so you can find more ore, but you can't crush it into a smeltable form?  Also, as far as seed scarcity goes, do you know how many seeds an actual tree drops?  HUNDREDS!  But it's such a complete pain to get seeds from trees.  And why the crap does punching leaves give more seeds/sticks than just chopping down the tree?  Ugh.  But that's a topic for another thread...

You touch on a very important part of game design, something that totally drove me away from Chore-Simulator 2017 (a.k.a. ARK: Survival Evolved) a few years ago.  Most people want fun from games, not chores.  I realized I was logging in every day, not to enjoy the game, but to do chores just to maintain stuff.  That's not fun, that's a job.  I hope Vintage Story can strike a much better balance; a little bit of maintenance can be fun.  Too much isn't just not-fun, it's anti-fun.  I'm not sure how you do that, though: make food an omni-present concern without making it so tedious or time-consuming that you can't do anything else but subsist.

If food is too easy, like MineCraft, why even have it at all?  If it's as simple to solve as: "punch some trees, make some hoes, break some grass to get seeds, plant seeds to get wheat, live on bread forever" (or "find village, live on potatos/beets/carrots/wheat forever"), why even have it in the game?!  The other end of the spectrum isn't really fun either, though; never having enough food if you don't dedicate so much time to it, you don't get to enjoy other parts of the game.

One approach might be to make the point less about subsistence, and more about thriving.  That is, eating to live would be relatively easy, but *thriving* would be more difficult, probably most easily accomplished with a more developed cooking system where good dishes/meals which are more involved to create gives not just satiation, but desirable buffs.  But something like an advanced nutrition system where it builds over time so you have to maintain it, not just turning food into effectively potions like Stardew Valley does.

 

I have not played on a multiplayer server for this game, but I did play on an ECO server for a while where time marches on even if no one's online.  Though crops required (at least when I played, which was some time ago) little attention and tending.  I can't imagine an outdoor (I have not messed with Greenhouses yet, not sure how they work) farming being successful on a multiplayer server where rabbits come eat your crops, or the crops dry out while you're offline.

I've enjoyed farming in video games since the first Harvest Moon I played.  The question should always be: what's fun about farming?  And I think the Harvest Moon style gets it mostly bang on: once you get everything tilled (and if not for tool durability, I'd confidently say tilling should need to be done more than once) and fenced and planted, you want to wake up, tend your crops, then forget about them, at least until you go to bed, but probably until the next morning.  As I mentioned in my last post, I really enjoyed Sakuna, but my rice farm always felt just a little too oppressive.  It felt like it needed *constant* attention, if I went off to do a level, I'd come back to something needing to have been solved sooner (usually weeds, sometimes water).  But it is very important, I think, to have some kind of crop-tending, otherwise you end up with MineCraft's "Oh, I'm out of food, better go harvest my MEGA FARM, that I ignore until just this situation!".

[Silent Shadow]

Farming should be hard enough that people feel the need to either build a farm or move around as a nomad. Right now farming is in a good place as the amount of food it provides for a given input is proportional to the amount of work put in to the farm (fences, irrigation, roads, glasshouses, etc.) Living as a nomad is fine for exploring early on.

Progression is good too, since you have to play as a hunter gatherer until you get enough seeds to have a farm that can feed you. Once you do start, there are crops (onions mostly, but also rice and pumpkins) that do not need a fence to protect against rabbits so you can live off those while you are getting a fenced field up and running. Later on you can make glass houses and can irrigate your fields so you have a longer growing period and no longer need to water crops anymore.

As for the daily work associated with it you still have watering, fertilizing, and you have to monitor the temperature to see if further planting is possible.

[Silent Shadow]

I have found a work around for now, if somewhat complicated and with some drawbacks.

There is a command in the game that affects how time in the game scales with real life time: /time calanderspeedmul [number] (0.5 is default, bigger numbers speed game time up)

So you use the number (multiple of real life time) of 2 and then double time for a month, and halve various rates (tool speed, hunger rate, food spoilage rate, sapling growth rate, etc.) you can have crops grow at what feels like twice the speed as usual. You could flip this around (use 0.25) and halve/double the rates respectively if you want crops to feel like they are taking longer to grow.

The downsides are that time based processes such as charcoal burning, random animal/plant spawns, and the day/night cycle are also affected and cannot be adjusted.

 

[James Hall]

I actually feel farming is too hard and not rewarding enough. I don't think it should take 7-9 days to grow something if I am going to need it to survive... we are CONSTANTLY starving to death with a dedicated hunting and farmer.

[Streetwind]

Food becomes less of a problem once you start to know the game better. Though admittedly, multiplayer is always going to be harder in that regard than singleplayer due to needing to feed multiple mouths off of the same forage area.

Here's some tips that might help:

• Spread out initially. For the first week or so, live mostly singleplayer as you establish your basic necessities without getting in each other's way. The person living in your future base spot should start a farm, the rest of you will share their own seeds and berry bushes and waypoints once it's time to group up again.
• Increase the area. If you have a dedicated food person, they can range out in all directions as far as they can walk in a day, every day. You can find much more forage that way than if you were trying to balance foraging with all other activities. It also leaves food sources closer to home for opportunistic picking by the others.
• The dedicated food person should be a malefactor (gets more drops from wild crops and berry bushes) or a hunter (gets more drops from animals). Under no circumstance should it be a blackguard or a tailor (they get penalties instead).
• Don't sprint everywhere. That rapidly drains your food bar. I know you want to go fast, but save that for when you have the food supply to back it up.
• Don't be injured. That rapidly drains your food bar (and you heal more slowly the lower your food bar is, dragging out the problem unless you keep eating well).
• Don't eat raw ingredients if you can help it. Always cook in a clay pot where possible. Meals produce far more nutrition points for the same ingredients than eating them raw. Eating a claypot meal also stops your food bar from draining for a while, so you can sprint and/or heal without expending tons of satiation.
• Don't aggressively decimate wild forage. Don't pick up berry bushes unless you just harvested berries off of them. Don't break wild crops that aren't fully grown. Your dedicated food person should waypoint every non-mature source of food and, every three to four days, check them all for ones that finished growing. Berry bushes even tell you when they'll be done. Mushrooms can be harvested anytime you find them with impunity, but bookmark those sites too - they may regrow in time (if slowly).

 

Edited July 10, 2023 by Streetwind

[Thorfinn]

I can't speak for whether or not it's the intention, but the game can be pretty brutal to those who set down roots right away at or near spawn, for the reasons @Streetwind explains. On the other hand, living at least your first few days as a nomadic forager is almost trivial at default settings. Unless you started in a massive gravel pit or sand box, it's pretty easy to have a couple full stacks of berries by sunset of the first day. And that's including sprinting everywhere, scarfing down the small stacks of berries (white currants and blueberries, I'm looking at you), turnips and flax grain and making sure you are always slightly damaged so the healing gives you a higher burn rate of food.

And now that crops take significantly longer to grow, the effect, if not the intent, is to further discourage an early shift to sedentary neolithic farming. To encourage you to enjoy the paleolithic for a bit. Yes, you should probably get the seeds you find planted ASAP, but there's no reason you have to live there. The flax isn't going to be ready until the end of June. Just come back later to harvest, and take the seeds back to wherever you did decide to call home.

Basically, it's a whole lot easier if you each play the early game (at least the first day or two) as if you were in singleplayer so you are not foraging the same ground. You may all be ready to start building a common settlement by the end of the month, but that's not a given.

[Maelstrom]

9 hours ago, Streetwind said:

Don't break wild crops that aren't fully grown. Your dedicated food person should waypoint every non-mature source of food and, every three to four days, check them all for ones that finished growing. 

Unless this has changed recently (or mods installed), wild crops mature at a geologically slow pace.  It will be much more productive farming the seeds you can get from harvesting immature crops.

[Streetwind]

The complaint of the person I was responding to was that they keep starving before the first crops have a chance to grow. Ergo it makes no sense for them to optimize the amount of crops they plant at all costs - which is pointless either way, you get so many seeds from exploring and ultimately need only a fraction of them. As soon as you can plant like ten crops per person and keep rotating them between the three nutrient groups, you're golden.

So to maximize short-term food output instead, don't break anything that doesn't actually yield food. It might grow soon, if you're lucky.

And sure, you can start doing caveats like "if this specific crop is this specific stage it definitely won't bear fruit before hand-planted crops do" and so on and so forth, but I didn't want to write a novel - I wanted to write a simple actionable option for them.

[Maelstrom]

I see your point.  Might be a bit of fuzzy line.  I was looking at the possibility of planting crops on day 2 or 3 to shorten the time spent foraging and maximize that first harvest.