FelixDR

I already posted in the discord, but since I am excited about it, and fleshed it out, i thought could post it here as well! The following ideas are drawn from my experiences working on a farm in real life Currently, farming is kind of an ‘afk’ activity in Vintage Story. You can easily collect and plant a bunch of seeds and get a big harvest year 1. The following ideas are intended to make it a bit more challenging, interactive and add more of a progression curve. - Increased growth times Now you can get 2, or even 3 harvests in a year without having to do anything special. In my opinion, players should only be able to reach this efficiency if they invest time and effort into their land. Of course, there need to be some game mechanics to actually do this: - Weeds. Nature is wild, and will reclaim that fancy patch of farmland in no time, unless you manage it. What if every day, a block of farmland has a chance to grow some weeds. This could go in 3 stages, from some small seedlings, to completely overgrown. This wouldn’t kill your crop, but it would give a debuff to growth speed, until you clear out the weeds – by simply holding right click on the farmland. - Increased time land stays wet. Watering is a tedious task, and most people build ugly farms with water holes next to every block. This is not what farms look like. To encourage people to build proper fields of crops, without holes in them, maybe the watering mechanic should be a bit more forgiving. - Mulching This is when you put dried grass over your land. This keeps moisture in, and weeds out. Game mechanics wise: Invest some grass, and you don’t have to water and weed as much. - Crop death No farmer in the world has a 100% harvest. Pests, bad genes or other factors always cause some of your plants to die. Plants should just randomly die sometimes. The only thing you can do about this, is give your plants the best chance possible. If your plants are properly taken care of, and have enough nutrients, they will be most likely to stay healthy, and the chance of them dying will be lowest – never zero though. If they die, I do think you should get the seed back! - Environmental pressure Maybe you have an exceptionally hot year? Or it rains for a week straight. These are things that stress plants out. Extreme weather conditions should slow growth down, and increase chance of crop death. - Composting Currently, you can only make compost out of food (rot). But real compost is made of other things as well. I would love to build a pile of dried grass, rotting food, wildflowers, weeds I pick from the garden, and any other green material I find. This could turn to compost over time. This could look similar to a pile of charcoal in game (lots of little layers I can shovel up) - Getting more seeds I think to get more than 1 seed from a plant, you need to invest and let the plant go to seed. This means sacrificing the crop, and letting it grow to maturity on your land. Then you can harvest extra seeds instead of food. - Genetic selection Ok. This one is a bit more wild, but could be really cool! Plants have genes. What if seeds can vary in temperature resistance, moisture needs, growing times and crop yield. In general, these qualities should be very similar for a species, especially if the seeds are taken from the wild. But maybe if you let a plant go to seed, it has a chance to ‘mutate’, and give you a seed that has some more favorable qualities. This way, over time you could train a strain to work better in your climate, by selecting the best seeds to plant next year. One example: Soybeans and rice are some of the best foods in the game. But they don’t grow so good in a temperate climate (irl). This way, it could take you a couple seasons to get a big harvest from these end-game crops. I do realize that this system risks a horrible inventory management issue, with lots of different seeds to keep apart. Maybe the properties of seeds should average out if combined in a stack? Add the good seeds to your ‘growing pile’ and discard the bad ones. What do you think?