MKMoose

Small update as of rc.6: many bugs related to berry bushes have been fixed over rc.5 and rc.6, including the "young" state which was previously getting skipped being now functional, so the bushes are now much closer to functioning fully as intended and you might want to play around with them again if you've experienced bugs with them in earlier versions, as I anticipated, two specific bugfixes have now extended the time from planting a cutting to bush maturation from 2 months to 6 months on average, the medium fertility soil requirement seems to have been removed (berries planted in low fertility will start off "struggling" and require fertilizer much earlier than in medium fertility, while bushes planted in barren soil won't produce fruit at all without fertilizer). FYI, Pizza said in the Discord recently that they can't be made properly seasonal yet due to them being one of the primary foraging foods. While I don't think it would be a major issue due to the growing season generally starting around June or even earlier (especially in warmer climates) for species like strawberry or blueberry, that was the unofficial dev stance, so we might have to see more foraging foods added before berries get a single harvest window.

I feel like somewhere in here there's an absolutely amazing way to turn RPG-like levelling into something much more interesting and immersive. The exact mechanics are a bit up in the air, but the general idea of player progression by slightly tweaking the class identity sounds very enticing. I think it would be fine enough to keep them limited to buffs in most cases, though, especially in the case of the clockmaker's proposed upgrades due to how niche they tend to be. I think Tyron has expressed interest in allowing some traits to be gained during gameplay, so I think something like this is absolutely on the table for the future.

If you mean the fix to the number of growth stages when calculating growth times and nutrient consumption being one higher than it should be, then that seems to have been effectively reverted now by adjusting the base nutrient consumption and growth time defined for individual crops to 1 - 1 / growthStages of the 1.21 values.

It's much slower than that. Roughly two years are from the starting state in medium fertility (50%) to struggling (30%). From bountiful to barren it takes something like 20 years, if you fertilize a bush initially and then forget about it. There's a reason I've been saying the fertilizer requirement is practically irrelevant. Two per year should be the maximum in temperate climates, at least when not using a greenhouse.

As of rc.5, seemingly all changes to crops besides halved grain yield and increased wild grain frequency seem to have been rolled back. The changelog only mentions one fix: However, it seems that the nutrient consumption and growth time of all plants has been multiplied by 1 - 1 / growthStages, returning the effective consumption and growth time to 1.21 values. Unless maybe one other bugfix still changes things relative to 1.21, but either way most changes are no longer a thing right now.

I've got a rough mockup of what a handbook entry for this could look like. To start off, a couple notes: I've tried to keep the style similar to the in-game handbook, without the kind of formatting that I would typically use in larger text blocks like that (which, to be honest, the handbook could greatly benefit from in a few places), the total length of this mockup is roughly double that of the current handbook entry for quenching and tempering, caused in large part by there just being more individual mechanics to cover, I'm not exactly certain on the exact level of complexity the system should have - I decided to include a couple mechanics I've initially noted to be optional, mainly to lean into making temperature management more in-depth, but this is ultimately just a mockup; I've also slightly relaxed some constraints which I felt weren't doing much, there's a few underlined words which would likely link to an appropriate handbook page or search, and more information could be found in those separate pages, having appropriate tooltips at many stages of the process would help a lot to inform the player what they've just done, what they're about to do, and what they can do, without having to go back to the handbook too many times. You'll also notice that I've elected to use "annealing" for normalization, with no functional changes, and I've also switched it out in the main post. It seems to be a more historically appropriate term, even if it might be slightly misleading nowadays. As a side note, the roadmap actually says "quenching, tempering, annealing", so including annealing as well seems pretty neat. Heat treatment of ferrous metals After forging a tool or weapon from a ferrous metal (iron, meteoric iron or steel), heat treatments can be performed to improve its qualities by controlled heating and cooling. All heat treatment processes start with bringing the metal up to a certain temperature range, which is shown in the tooltip of the worked item for each process. Once the item is heated past the minimum temperature, it should be kept in the desired range for several in-game minutes, which ensures that the metal temperature is uniform and the treatment is more effective. Finally, the workpiece has to be cooled down, depending on the type of treatment either slowly by allowing the item to cool in air, or rapidly by submerging it in a barrel of a quenchant liquid, for example water. In many cases, annealing alone is sufficient to obtain a high-quality tool. A more advanced process requires performing annealing, quenching and tempering in that order. Annealing Annealing is used to improve the durability of tools and weapons. It is also useful later as a way of reducing the risks of quenching. The temperature that the item has to reach for annealing is indicated by the metal turning to a red color. After soaking in that temperature, the item has to be cooled slowly in air. Annealing can be performed repeatedly, but the relative durability increase provided by subsequent iterations will diminish quickly. In order for repeated annealing to have the appropriate effect, the workpiece has to be kept close to the minimum required temperature, as heating it up excessively will remove the effects of prior heat treatments. Quenching Quenching can be used to greatly improve the power of tools and weapons, at the cost of making them brittle, which severely reduces their durability, and at the risk of breaking them. In order to amend the durability penalty, the next process of tempering will be necessary afterwards, while the risk of shattering the item can be controlled with several factors during quenching. This process can be especially valuable for weapons, but for some tools power value may provide little to no benefit. Quenching is a risky process which creates great internal stresses in the metal, which can sometimes cause the workpiece to shatter. An item which has been annealed will have its risk of breaking reduced, and repeated annealing will reduce that risk further. Similar to annealing, the workpiece needs to be red-hot for quenching, though the temperature should be slightly higher. Quenching from the optimal temperature range will produce slightly improved effects, but excessively high temperatures will increase the risk of shattering as well. The last step for quenching requires the metal to be cooled quickly by using Shift + RMB on a barrel of quenchant liquid like water, while holding the workpiece using tongs. The effects and risks of quenching can optionally be affected by certain other factors as well, including choice of different quenching medium like oil or brine instead of water, or covering the workpiece in fire clay. After an item has been quenched, you need to make sure not to heat it up too high above the tempering temperature, as doing so will reverse the effects of prior heat treatments. This means that a quenched item can only be tempered, unless you wish retry annealing and quenching if the first attempt was unsatisfactory. Tempering For a tool which has been quenched, tempering can be used to restore the durability back up and achieve a more satisfactory balance between durability and power. It will have no effect on unquenched tools, or on tools which have been heated back up too high after quenching. This process requires much lower temperatures than annealing and tempering, and similar to annealing it requires the workpiece to be cooled slowly in air. After tempering, the durability of the item will be increased back up, but the power will decrease slightly. More durability will be recovered when tempering at higher temperatures, while tempering at lower temperatures may be more useful when trying to preserve as much power as possible. Tempering can be repeated, albeit with diminishing returns, and durability can even be brought up to on par with an annealed item this way.

A simpler explanation of the detailed process, or a more simplified process, just to be clear? It's a seemingly pretty common suggestion, but I'm not sure what it's supposed to solve except reduce frustration when the workpiece shatters on a very low chance. Iron is extremely plentiful as it is if you know how to find it, and the added cost from shattered tool heads isn't very significant until you start going into extremes. Obtaining an ~37% power buff by quenching 5 times will get you to shatter on average ~1.3 tool heads, and that is roughly the maximum I would consider reasonable for the average player. By removing or heavily reducing the resource cost, you'd be essentially removing a balance lever from quenching with nothing to replace it and leaving time and tedium as almost the only factors keeping the player from outright absurd creations. I could also see it as a way of being more forgiving for a new player who only has a tiny quantity of iron, though a small problem then appears: resmelting the iron nuggets is done more optimally using a full bloomery with 120 nuggets, so smelting just 20 can be seen as a waste, and if the workpiece returns less than 20, then you wouldn't even be able to resmelt it into a new ingot. Granted, this could be addressed by allowing the bloomery to take multiple inputs, with some caveats. Okay, this I can work with much better. I'm impressed with how well you put this, honestly. I don't really have much to say at the moment other than that the basic process is really quite simple on the surface (as described in the "main suggestion" section) and several of the more complex effects are only required under the hood to force this specific order of operations in a controlled way and to achieve a specific balance between all the different parameters. I'll see if I can write something more clear and concise at some point. Normalization also offers an easy way out with a neat durability buff for anyone not finding themselves ready to take on the more complex process yet. If I had a nickel for every time someone told me that this was already possible, I would have two nickels. Keep in mind that as long as the temperature readout is perfectly accurate, then the color is mostly just for immersion. You might recall a similar argument from when I was saying that the temporal stability gear in the middle of the screen is too accurate and too reliable and ends up making the player pay too much attention to the UI and not the world, so any diegetic signs of unstable areas wouldn't really be useful anyways unless the gear is changed or removed. I haven't exactly checked how realistic the current colors are and how practical they would be in gameplay, but I think they would likely require some adjustments to allow actually telling the temperature with good accuracy in the range where it matters most without an excess of guesswork. That this would likely have to be an optional setting I did say myself, but nonetheless I think it would be a really cool one, especially suitable for Homo Sapiens. Even if not remove the temperature readout, I would like to see it rounded, at the very least to an integer. Optionally to larger steps like 10 C, and maybe even with some random error if we're feeling more adventurous, as a way to require a bit more deliberate temperature evaluation and not a single robotic comparison.

In several ways, the recent changes have already significantly nerfed berries as an early-game food source, while arguably making them better than they used to be in the late game. The expected yield from a ripe wild bush is reduced by ~6%. It used to be that (if I recall correctly) 1/3 (33%) of wild bushes would be ripe in newly generated chunks and 2/3 (~67%) of wild bushes would be ripe under natural conditions (except those eaten by animals), while now it's only 1/4 (25%) in newly generated chunks or 2/7 (~29%) in the longer term (ending up with a ~25-60% reduction in the total number of ripe wild bushes). Granted, there are now new species which increase that quantity back up somewhat, though as of now the effect is at best some 20%. If my math is right, then that's something like a 40% total reduction in the expected wild berry yield, while the time of year is right [as of 1.22.0-rc.7, with even more new species, the yields are again up a bit, though the difference isn't massive]. And that's combined with ripe bushes being potentially more difficult to notice, grown bushes taking more time to wake up after winter, cuttings taking their time to grow, traits making it much less practical to take every single bush home, and two harvests per year down from three being usually the maximum in temperate climates. Contrast that with cultivated bushes, which have 20% higher yield in the "healthy" state or 80% higher in the "bountiful" state and can be boosted further with the "heavy bearer" trait to respectively 38% or 107% higher than 1.21 bushes. Even considering two harvests and not three, that's still -20% or +20% (without the trait) and -8% or +38% (with the trait) total yearly yield for "healthy" and "bountiful" bushes respectively, relative to 1.21 bushes. Keep in mind that it consequently also takes significantly less total time to harvest a given amount from the bushes, especially if you happen to get the "densely clustered berries" trait. I would absolutely support adding new food sources, potentially tubers, roots, herbs, bird eggs, and other stuff of this kind, to bolster the early-game hunter-gatherer experience while berries aren't in season, and I've even suggested that somewhere before. That said, I don't think new food sources are necessary to achieve a satisfactory balance with berry bushes even if they are made strictly seasonal. Early berries fruit around June, which I think could even make for a very neat early-game experience. The player would at first have to struggle somewhat to feed themselves for a couple days, and once they are sufficiently familiarized with food scarcity and likely have learned about some wild plants and perhaps tried hunting, they would be granted a bit more breathing room for at most around five months to prepare for the real challenge that is winter. If taking food away from newer players is a concern with reduced satiety, then that's where the second part of my suggestion from a while back may fit right in: dense thickets of larger bushes like blueberry, raspberry or blackberry, and carpet-like large patches of small bushes like cranberry or cloudberry, numbering from a couple dozen to hundreds of bushes, or even many thousands in certain cases where they may cover the ground almost like grass (e.g. in the arctic tundra). Currants, strawberries and some other bushes can remain in smaller and more spread-out patches for the most part, and may be designed to be more optimal for cultivation in one way or another. What I take issue with in the way that berries and the overall food system are currently balanced is that they seem to neglect certain arguably obvious balance levers which could greatly increase the depth and variety of various food sources in the game. The moment we've finally got some sort of maintenance requirement as a new lever, it's smacked right onto the food source which needs it arguably the least, and made borderline irrelevant to compensate. If berries were made very bountiful but limited to a short avaliability window, then being labor-intensive to collect (clarification below) and quick to spoil would work perfectly to push the player to invest into other food sources, as well as into preservation methods, instead of making all balance revolve about food scarcity. They would be an amazing food source at the beginning of the game, especially during Year 0, but suboptimal long-term due to their inherent properties. Fruit trees would gain value in a very natural way, since they produce a lot of fruit that can be collected more quickly and doesn't spoil as fast. Berry bushes and fruit trees used to be very similar in most aspects except that trees would take longer to set up but their fruit would last longer. Instead of leaning into this distinction and introducing new differences, they've been made more similar in several ways, which to me is a wasted opportunity at best. Wouldn't it be more fitting to make berries explicitly into the early-game, accessible but inefficient food source, while making fruit trees require a bit more attention to maintain in good health but reward the player with even greater yields? By "labor-intensive to collect" I mean just the time it takes to collect berries off the bush once you're next to it. Could also be neatly increased by giving the larger bushes four hitboxes on the corners (more would probably be overkill, less would be difficult to arrange neatly), requiring the player to collect smaller portions of fruit bit-by-bit. Alternatively, multiple harvesting stages could work, though that would be comparatively pretty boring. I don't think the same would work well for fruit trees, to be clear, unless maybe just for the ones with smaller fruit, especially cherries and lychee. The issue with subsisting off wild bushes to me is that they're tedious to collect intentionally, but extremely easy to collect while traveling, which means that they're annoying most of the time but can completely trivialize long-distance travel. Just recently I've run ~2.5k blocks, consuming a full 1.5k satiety hunger bar along the way, and in that trip I collected ~8k satiety worth of berries that I stumbled upon, not even bothering with crops and mushrooms - one sample isn't indicative of much, of course, but +~400% satiety off a random trip filled almost entirely with running seems pretty crazy, especially since it's after nerfs. That's largely how I made a two-way trip to the tropics, by the way, ~100k blocks total yet without taking any food with me. Making berry patches larger but much more time-consuming to collect would mean that harvesting them midway through travel would require stopping for an extended period of time, whereas harvesting a patch near home may be roughly unaffected in terms reward per unit of time on average, but more convenient and intentional than having to run between many patches a few bushes each.

It is partially random, on average 3 months, 2 days and 4 hours, though the variance is low. Just to note, keep in mind that nutrient recovery (just like crop growth speed) is slowed down by 10% for every 1 C below 10 C, so nutrient recovery over winter is much slower, or entirely paused during the coldest months.

Hm, I neglected that part somehow. Yeah, it is a bit odd that crop rotation without a fallow period is non-functional, except the little bit that will recover between ripening and next planting. I don't feel like it's too bad if you time it neatly. Four fields, one nutrient each for three of them, the fourth one left fallow, and switch them around after each harvest. Some aspects could be tweaked depending on whether you even need any P crops, or some other factors. Kind of heavy-handed, but actually incentivizes a more proper crop rotation cycle now with three nutrients and a fallow period. It's not ideal, but in the previous balance you often didn't even need to use all three nutrients, and just alternating two of them was often entirely viable, so I feel like some sort of in-between option would be great.

The realistic process is roughly: Normalize (once or more, may be skipped), to reduce risks of quenching and improve toughness. Quench (only once; if unsatisfactory then go back to 1. and retry), to maximize hardness at the cost of making the metal brittle. Temper (once or more), to balance out a desired proportion between hardness and other properties. I can understand simplifications and minor discrepancies, but the order of operations in the current system isn't similar to the realistic process at all. Tempering is actually in this weird spot where the in-game implementation is somehow more similar to real-life normalization in certain regards, because it's done before quenching to reduce risks. Repetition may be greatly reduced by just tweaking the numbers, that much I can agree with. But making tempering less effective would make it almost completely useless. It's a matter of hyperoptimization in the best case scenario (quenching for low power or for durability), while for high-power tools tempering is strictly harmful in the current balance. The problem with quenching for durability is that it doesn't even offer a proper tradeoff like power does (because power exists on a completely separate balance axis). Shatter chance and durability increase are effectively the same effect but going different ways, and once the risk outweighs the benefits, it's just fundamentally not worth it. The first iteration gives you a 14% expected effective durability increase (controlled for resource loss). The second iteration falls down to a 2.5% expected effective durability increase, or ~4.8% if you temper in-between. Starting from the third iteration, it becomes an expected loss, and that's only considering material savings, while time, fuel and clay costs actually make it even less worthwhile. Even if you abuse the ability to temper indefinitely, which is currently possible though contradicts the handbook guide, it will quickly start costing you more time than it's worth in durability. Why even allow the player to waste time and resources on something like this? I argue that it doesn't, because it doesn't have any standard risk-reward mechanics. A proper risk-reward mechanic should generally always have at least one of the following: scarce opportunity - if the player is allowed to risk wasting a limited opportunity for a greater reward, then the risk feels more impactful; in the current system, the risk is taken very frequently, failure doesn't present any meaningful setback besides wasted time, and retrying is allowed instantly, tightened error margin - if the player is allowed to play in a way that leaves less room for error in mechanical execution in exchange for some benefits, then the inherent risk naturally creates tension and engagement, and it also serves as a method of self-regulating difficulty; in the current system, the "risk" is purely an uniteresting random chance. There's also a lot of other things that could be mentioned here, but scarce opportunity and tightened error margin are, in my experience, the most common and most essential parts of a good risk-reward mechanic.

All nutrients - recovery is completely paused while a crop is growing. I'm frankly unsure whether it's an intentional change, but that's what it is right now, and it's arguably better from a design perspective, even if not ideal. Once the crop ripens, recovery resumes again, though at a much slower rate for the nutrient preferred by the crop.

The changelog mentions two changes separately: I don't really know what is what here, but there seems to have been another change as well: farmland no longer recovers nutrients while crops are growing on it. It used to be that farmland would stop recovering nutrients when it had a ripe crop on it, apparently. Now this was changed to where farmland seems to only recover nutrients when empty or when it has a ripe crop on it. Both before and after the update nutrient recovery is significantly slower for the nutrient preferred by the currently planted crop. Based on a quick test, flax planted in medium fertility soil used to take ~2.5 months and leave the farmland at ~15 K (~35 K net uptake) at the time it finishes growing, whereas now it seems to take ~3.5 months and leave the soil at 0 K (50 uptake). I do generally like the change for the most part, or at least the general direction, because it used to be quite easy to outright ignore the nutrient levels and still have almost zero issues with farming, whereas now fertilizing, crop rotation and better soils are much more useful. That said, especially combined with the yield reduction for grains, this is a very significant nerf that will in all likelihood just cause people to build even larger farms than they used to make. If they want to address farming being nearly free food, then the current plant-and-forget cycle should also be changed in some way, instead of just making everything slower and less efficient. Few methods would achieve this nearly as effectively as requiring more care and maintenance for optimal growth.

I don't like this, and I think I'm gonna gloss over it for my own good. As much as I agree with this, I feel like berry bushes are quite literally the only food source currently in the game where this is unnecessary if not harmful from the perspective of game balance and pacing. I'd argue that berry bushes should be limited by low satiety (I personally see no significant issue with just nuking it down to 40), seasonal availability window (different for different species), and being very labor-intensive to collect (in part because of the low satiety). They could actually take much more optional maintenance than they do now to make very good bushes, but then that would explicitly be a small high-effort garden that the player voluntarily chooses to maintain instead of a massive plantation. And that optional effort should go into alleviating some of the drawbacks of wild bushes like short availability window and labor-intensive harvesting, instead of just being a boost to yield which the player can nearly just as well get by simply planting more bushes. The new bushes require seemingly some of the most complex texture work that the game has seen so far with dozens of individual textures per bush, so I'm wondering whether they even manage to fit all the new fruit types into the update, let alone a second set of new textures that pruning would almost certainly require (unless they use some clever masking, but the results of that most likely wouldn't look as good, and would still have to be tailored for every bush individually). I'm not quite sure where the idea of swapping fertilizer to pruning even comes from, though I can agree that just swapping it would be a pretty ill-advised idea. That said, removing the fertilizer requirement (just the requirement via the "barren" state, not the rest of the bush health system) would change almost nothing in the current balance. Well, at least as long as the arbitrary medium fertility soil requirement remains in place and bushes aren't adjusted to consume nutrients during initial growth. Pruning as a way of getting new traits onto bushes does seem like an interesting idea from a gameplay perspective, though at which point would new traits be applied? It seems to me like a better way to implement creating new traits may be to just make cuttings occasionally gain or lose traits when planted. Granted, it may end up a bit annoying to have some outliers with additional or missing traits in the middle of a berry plantation.

From what I can find, huge eurasian pigs can interbreed with the regular ones (though not with the other species that spawn in warm climates). The baby will always grow into a regular variant - the huge ones can only be found in the wild.

It's only once per year for bone meal, and about once every ~2 years for other types of fertilizer. That's in the first couple year, and it falls off over time. I actually don't know whether this change (nutrient consumption being reduced over time) was planned from the start, or added in as a quick solution to the initial heated reaction. In the current balance, fertilizing isn't even necessary for short-term worlds, up to ~2 years. They ripen usually twice per year now, which is a bit more better than up to three times (assuming temperate climate). I've been also arguing for only one seasonal harvest and some changes similar to what you're mentioning, and Pizza (one of the devs) has responded that the hope is to eventually make all plant life seasonal, even flowers. Naturally, that will take some time, but it is a pretty neat goal to aim for. Berries being somewhat OP in the early game has actually been probably the single biggest argument in support of these changes. My opinion is that this wasn't really a problem in the first place and should have been addressed differently (cuttings and a seasonal growth cycle would have nerfed them plenty - no real need to tack on much beyond that in terms of balance), but it is undeniable that it has been solved one way or another with this rework. I've never understood this point. Surely, if the problem is "too many bones", then we could just add a whole range of interesting and historically accurate uses for them? Bone meal apparently hasn't been a recognized thing until the 17th century, whereas bone broth, bone glue and a whole host of products of bone carving have seen significant use since prehistoric times.

What actually has changed A description and mini-guide to the changes. Most of this information you can roughly get from the handbook. Includes a couple potential objective issues, especially those which are unlikely to change in the foreseeable future. 1. Reworked visuals. Generally speaking: no longer a cube, more detailed, more realistic and more varied. Ripe fruit can be more difficult to notice, especially on struggling bushes. They can't be pruned anymore, but returning this functionality would likely require a lot of additional texture work on top of what the devs have already taken on with several new fruit types alongside the reworked ones. 2. New species. As of initially writing this, strawberry and beautyberry had been added. As of 1.22.0-rc.7, cloudberry, raspberry and blackberry have been added. Five more new fruit types are in game files but not obtainable yet, though I don't know whether all of them are going to be added in 1.22 and whether all of them are going to be implemented as fruiting bushes, as three may realistically fit better as fruit trees. 3. Cuttings. Bushes now drop a few pieces of plant debris when broken, only useful for rot. In order to propagate the bushes, cuttings have to be taken from them using a knife and planted in soil, and they take a few months until they grow into a proper bush. They grow in two stages, from cutting to a young bush, then from young to a mature bush. The exact time is currently 8.5 +/- 2.3 months until the first harvest (sum of cutting growth, bush maturation and the first fruiting cycle), and it's lengthened further as it is slowed down by cold temperatures. It's long enough that it will be impossible to get any significant berry harvest in Year 0 before winter hits, and even Year 1 berries may be pretty tough. A cutting can be taken from a bush only once per year, though it's currently possible to take a cutting from a young bush, which greatly accelerates propagation. A cutting has to be planted within 15 days of obtaining it. 4. Adjusted growth cycle. I'll skip an exact description for now, but the most important practical differences include: extended growth time from empty to ripe bush (2 => 2.5 months), shortened growth window (they take longer to start growing again after the winter) and shortened ripe duration (4 => 1 month). Overall, it seems generally impractical in temperate climates to harvest berries more than twice per year, and in slightly colder climates you will be limited to just one harvest per year. A greenhouse can be used to slightly extend the growing window and hopefully get one extra harvest, but the effect may not be reliable enough to bother. Different species have very slightly different parameters. Also, as of rc.6, bushes require sunlight to grow. 5. Bush health and fertilizer usage. Bushes planted from a cutting now require fertilizer to maintain good health. A bush has four possible states, depending on its average nutrient level: - 80-100% nutrients => “bountiful” - produces 50% more fruit, - 30-80% nutrients => “healthy” - default state, - 10-30% nutrients => “struggling” - produces 50% less fruit, - 0-10% average nutrients => “barren” - doesn't produce any fruit at all. This does not affect wild bushes - wild ones start off randomly either "struggling" or "healthy" and stay in that state indefnitely (and can't be fertilized). Bushes planted from cuttings start off from an amount of nutrients determined by the soil they are planted on (the same level as for farmland), and then they consume a portion of nutrients every time the fruit ripens (an equal amount of all three nutrients, more is consumed when the bush is more healthy). The nutrient consumption falls off slowly over time, becoming almost negligible after ~15 years and very nearly zero after ~25 years. The amount of fertilizer you need to use and how early you have to use it after planting depends on the soil you use (and it’s practically the only effect that soil ends up having on the bush). Assuming the bush ripens twice per year (in climates on the warmer side of temperate): For low fertility soil, the bush will start off in the "struggling" state, so you're generally gonna prefer to fertilize it immediately or just plant in better soil. For medium fertility soil, you will generally want to add at least one piece of fertilizer after about two years from planting the bush, and then some more within the next couple years. Most players won’t generally need to use more than ~4 portions per bush in a typical multi-year playthrough, or a bit more up-front if trying to keep them "bountiful". In the extreme, ~10 portions in total over up to ~10 years are required to bring a bush to the “bountiful” state immediately and maintain it indefinitely. Strawberries are an exception, since they have halved yield and halved nutrient uptake, so they almost don't have to be fertilized at all besides the initial cost of bringing them up to a higher health state. It is currently possible and in certain cases optimal to sustain the bushes only on one nutrient and not all three, which seems like an exploit but I don’t know when and how it will get patched, if at all. If it ripens only once, you will need much less fertilizer. 6. Fertilizer requirement specifically (the “barren” state). A bush which falls below 10% average nutrient levels will enter the “barren” state, in which it no longer bears fruit and has to be fertilized to produce again. For medium fertility soil, if the bush doesn’t get fertilized initially, assuming the bush ripens twice per year, it will happen after ~8 years, I think, if I didn't miscalculate something, which is borderline irrelevant for the average player - it's often entirely possible to just skip fertilization altogether, and you might just be collecting half-yield bushes. Fertilizing the bush planted in medium fertility just a tiny bit makes it impossible for the nutrient levels to fall to “barren” - they will stay “struggling” or better forever. I've separated this from bush health as a distinct feature, if only because it was initially very controversial and I wanted to see separate sentiments for fertilization in general, and specifically the requirement to fertilize lest the bush stop producing fruit. 7. Medium soil fertility requirement. A cutting can only be planted on medium fertility soil and above. As of rc.6, this has been removed. Keep in mind they will start off "struggling" in low fertility and require fertilizer more quickly, while on barren soil they won't produce any fruit at all unless fertilized. 8. Traits. Some bushes can have a few small effects applied to them, which can be either negative or positive. Increased/reduced yield, nutrient uptake, harvest speed, ripe duration. Those traits persist when bushes are propagated through cuttings, which means that you can find a really good bush with multiple good traits and propagate it out into a large farm. However, new traits cannot be created by propagating bushes - you have to find good wild bushes and propagate them. Cuttings with different traits don’t stack, which can take up a lot of inventory space quickly. 9. General balance as a food source. Mainly influenced by the adjusted growth cycle, as well as by a 20% drop rate increase relative to 1.21 (4.4 => 5.5 berries per healthy bush). Wild bushes are significantly less reliable than they used to be, especially for people who may struggle to notice them now, but purely numbers-wise as well. Cultivated bushes can be arguably better than they used to be, especially when considering traits, but require more time to properly set up and some fertilizer to keep them healthy. The initial growth time is long enough that it seems impractical if not impossible to get a sizable quantity of bushes fast enough to fruit within Year 0 at default world configuration. Remember that farming has received some nerfs in 1.22 as well, which makes this comparison a bit less straightforward. Now that 1.22 stable has been released, I may no longer update this post, though feel free to tell me if you have any corrections. The poll itself will probably stay open. A summary of sorts for the poll, alongside some of my opinions and feedback, can be found in this comment: Motivation for this post When discussing the rework, I’ve frequently seen perfectly fine changes being complained about with completely incorrect assumptions about their effects, and a couple times I've even seen literally nonexistent changes being complained about. I’ve also seen the rework uncritically praised with no apparent attempt to even consider criticism of it as potentially valid. Of a few relatively popular videos I've looked at to gauge people's sentiment shortly after the rework was revealed, every single one included only surface-level coverage, used flawed testing methods, neglected many details, and even included baseless conjecture or plainly incorrect information in one or two cases. On the whole, player familiarity with the rework is low despite many reactions being heated, because many people predominantly react off of vibes, expectations, unverified interpretation of the changelog, and word of mouth. Many people supportive of the rework aren't even familiar with the details of what has been changed, and even fewer still actually know which parts are predominantly being criticized. Similarly, a lot of the people critical of the rework are grossly overreacting to the fertilization requirement and a couple other details without actually analyzing the gameplay impact of all the changes, which easily drives a feedback loop where two sides fuel each other's emotions and entrench themselves in opposing positions. Productive discussion has been quite rare to see, which is kind of both expected and disappointing. A lot of that reaction could have been prevented by designing the rework differently to avoid hitting obvious triggers like the fertilizer requirement, or by communicating the changes more clearly in the changelog. Personally, while my initial reactions to the rework were admittedly somewhat rushed, I generally argue knowing the code and full extent of the changes. The most positive broad take I can muster is as follows: the design direction is fine even if not what I would prefer, but the execution has some problems. Certain changes are quite universally welcomed, but there are certain components of the new system, intentional or not, which should still be revised or improved, if not removed. Two of them (soil downgrading and medium fertility requirement) have been rolled back.

I've edited the suggestion somewhat after a chat with Tyron over on Discord, and I've mentioned your concern as well in a new section of the post. Feel free to tell me if this is a satisfactory response, and whether you think that some specific mechanics go over the line especially far: I think Tyron has said that adding a config for something like this could be a suitable short-term solution. I don't think resorting to a config is a good idea, but sure, it could be nice for those who don't want excess complexity.

Bismuth/tin/black bronze should be workable at 425/475/510 C, which is lower than copper's 542 C. All of them are workable quite fine even with brown coal and no bellows. The fuel type is only really a matter of convenience for working iron and steel as well as requirement to melt nickel, but keep in mind that converting coal to coke also greatly reduces its effective burn duration in all contexts.

Something like one piece every 2 years at first, a bit more if using bone meal. It falls off over time, eventually becoming completely negligible in long-term worlds. It reaches 600 C normally (700 base value - 100 brown coal modifier = 600), and with bellows it's more than you will need (985.7 C, if I recall correctly), though you will need to use the bellows much more than with other fuel types.

Oh, it feels like young bushes should be functional now, if I'm reading the code correctly. It would be amazing, though if that is theb case, then I can't wait for people to notice that the growth time is three months longer, unless that was changed as well. So many things to check out and be excited about. And I am so glad. Though I don't know how to feel about fertilization seemingly becoming almost irrelevant again.

Great question. There is no answer, only guessing and conjecture. Fertilize it. Any fertilizer works. About one piece per year for the first four years will generally work well enough. Nutrient consumption falls off over time, so you won't have to keep fertilizing in long-term worlds. It's currently strictly optimal to only use one fertilizer type per bush, or two if you want to keep it in the "bountiful" state. Update: with rc.3 now released, soil doesn't get downgraded, and it seems that medium fertility soil will get bushes to start off in the "healthy" state at 50% nutrients, greatly reducing the need to fertilize the bushes.

Does the issue appear at all times while below Y = 128, or does it flicker in and out in some way? While you're standing in or behind certain blocks like crops or fences, perhaps? Either way, the most likely cause is probably the Immersive Mouse Mode. If disabling IMM doesn't fix it (or if you don't have it enabled in the first place), then you can see if the issue still persists after disabling occlusion culling altogether (possibly at some cost to performance). Might be a prime candidate for a bug report.

While holding the item in hand, use: /debug heldtemp <temperature> The temperature value has to be an integer in degrees Celcius, e.g. /debug heldtemp 820 if you want to set it just above the minimum quenching temperature.

It would seem that there is a 5% shatter chance on first quenching. I've found that there should be based on the code and by modifying item attributes, but wasn't able to fully confirm it myself by getting it to happen in spite of having made a couple dozen quenched items.