MKMoose

FYI, a moose has 21 health and will die in 6 melee hits or 4 ranged hits with an iron spear. Which, oddly enough, is actually the same as most deer, and less than the elk which has 30 health - if we were to take the deer as a reference, then the moose should have its health roughly doubled. But I do think that the point seems to be also about lack of reaction to wounds and blood loss, not just about immediate damage. As of 1.22, the hare had its health reduced to 3, making it possible to one-shot it using a longbow with any arrows or a crude bow with 0+ damage arrows. I would not expect the status effect system to introduce any significant changes, at least not within the same major update in which the system is added. Both because it is more sensible to introduce a large system step-by-step, and because it doesn't seem to me that the devs even have any significant interest in overhauling large parts of the game. That said, killing animals with a single shot, which in isolation would absolutely trivialize parts of the game, can be easily balanced with two main factors: better animal AI - more aware of the player, fleeing easily, requiring skill to approach, tracking after the shot - a one-hit-kill doesn't have to make the animal drop on the spot, and having to track the animal could easily take the same amount of time that chasing it frantically through the bushes takes currently - realistically, larger animals like deer will nearly always run at least a couple dozen meters after getting their lungs pierced (even with modern compound bows), while a suboptimal hit, if it's even fatal, often leaves them running for hundreds of meters before collapsing. This would also mean that animal husbandry would retain its benefits, because you naturally wouldn't need to carefully approach a domesticated animal and then track it after a difficult shot - just walk up to it with a knife and kill nearly on the spot (which shouldn't be done with a cleaver, but that's another matter). In order to make hunting take up a more appropriate amount of time, it would be easy enough to increase animal yields to be more realistic - and doubly so if harvesting and preserving animals is made more time-consuming, instead of a simplistic "pick up, throw in the cellar". If there are any concerns about it being too complex or anything of that sort, then I offer you: trapping. Primarily snare and deadfall traps, for rabbits, squirrels and birds, to provide the player with an accessible source of meat and small hides in the early game. Trapping pits for larger animals are an option and improvised solutions will always be possible, but keeping hunting as the primary method for killing the larger animals is desirable from a design standpoint. To create a natural progression system - as the player acquires better gear, they would become increasingly better suited at hunting large game - and to facilitate a greater level of satisfaction from a successful hunt, which could be easily lost if trapping pits are too efficient.

I'll always say that glue will not be a complete mechanic until it's possible to tap trees for relatively large-scale resin extraction (with an intermediate step if need be; sap could also could be used for some kinds of syrup) or make bone glue as a simpler alternative, or ideally both. But as it stands, as long as almost all clutter items are purely decorative, I do think that the current repair cost is excessive, because there's no shot a small decorative item is reasonably worth 6 resin and 6 charcoal. Some of the larger ones, maybe, but a few candlestubs, a pile of scraps, a small toy, a couple bottles, a stack of books? And it's trivially easy to modify by adjusting reparability in the assets.

I do think that, ideally, both casual and combat-oriented players should be able to have plenty of fun during storms on default settings. Painting a safe hideout as "the least fun option" kind of neglects the fact that one of the biggest reasons why a player might be disinterested in fighting through the storm is just that they don't find intense combat enjoyable, so only allowing the player to remain in safety in a way that is seemingly deliberately ensured to be less fun is exactly what makes people turn the storms off. It can easily end up feeling like combat is the only "correct" way to engage with them. Focusing on "how to make it better without making it easier" seems like an odd way to approach it to me, because making it easier is inherently nearly the only way to make it more fun for the people who find that it's too difficult. Doesn't mean that the peak difficulty has to be lowered (special, extreme challenges could even be added for experienced players), but more interesting low-risk routes should be viable as well. A level of risk should be retained, naturally, but getting chased around by T3+ monsters is not just risky - it's downright oppressive when the player doesn't have late-game equipment and ample supplies. I would argue that the best way to go about this would be to focus on temporal storms being an atmospheric environmental anomaly first, then combat challenge second - not the other way around. I think that the storms should be safe for the most part, and only dangerous within more localized, brief phenomena that the player could seek out and take on for some sort of reward (or sometimes, but rarely, be surprised by), instead of it being a "monsters are now everywhere and you can't do anything about it" event. Simply give the player a couple varied options for what they want to do, and if they want to just chill while admiring the temporal disturbances, then why not let them? I would expect this to backfire very easily. As it stands, the players who stay in hiding tend to already be on the back foot - those who don't have the equipment or skill for it, or just don't feel like fighting at the moment - so I don't think it's a good idea to further push those players to engage with the storms. Granted, something of this manner could potentially be a good way to encourage the player to try fighitng bit-by-bit and see that it's not too bad instead of avoiding combat altogether, but I'd personally anticipate more problems than solutions to come out of this specific idea. It could be much more worthwhile to give the player any reason to venture out into the storm besides combat, so that monsters would be an obstacle and not the goal.

New species do a lot to offset the yield and fruiting cycle changes, because they've been added on top without reducing the frequency of other bushes. Ultimately, food is fairly plentiful, and even if bushes are now a bit less viable, it's still fairly easy to collect a couple dozen to a hundred berries over a fairly short run and subsist on them for much longer than they took to collect. I've personally found that while it can be more difficult to tell whether a bush is ripe, it tends to be very easy to notice bushes from a distance due to some sort of graphical issue that causes them to become oddly bright from farther away - I'm not sure whether that's a common experience or whether the old bushes used to be similar, but it looks kind of wrong and kind of trivializes finding berries. Each of the bright green spots (more yellow near the desert) is a berry bush or a couple of them - there's at least ~50 of them visible here. Do keep in mind that this is caused by their initial state being randomized. They will start ripening at much more similar times after the first winter when they get synchronized by going into the dormant state.

I would say that the lack of meaningful differences between bushes is among the weakest points of the rework, at least out of those that have seen near unanimity. A couple species have halved yield and halved nutrient uptake (can be a bit better or worse, but ultimately changes little). Currants have very slightly adjusted temperature thresholds (close to irrelevant in practice). Select bushes slow down the player when moving through them. The system is already set up to easily handle a massive breadth of differences, so it's kind of disappointing to see many bushes being functionally identical and the global mechanical variety still much lower than fruit trees. I'd imagine that part of the reason for it might be that the devs still have plans for the bushes, but quite frankly I don't care much about plans that we know next to nothing about - not design direction, not details on the planned features, and not any ETA. While I don't know what you might have learned from some videos, keep in mind that content made early into the release tends to be colored by speculation and rushed or flawed testing methods. It's just what tends to happen anytime new content is released and the devs don't describe the changes in detail. Fertilizer is currently required eventually in some scenarios if you want to keep the bush producing fruit at all, and in almost all contexts if you want to keep the bush healthy, but it's mostly irrelevant in a typical short singleplayer game, roughly up to ~2-3 in-game years (in large part due to the long initial growth time). Fertilizer can be used to increase the yield of bushes to 150% as well, which results in somewhat better efficiency in terms of space and harvesting time, but isn't ultimately particularly impactful. It's basically a bit of up-front investment in return for slightly faster harvesting. I personally think that the fertilizer requirement is pretty pointless. I would much rather see the effects of fertilizer be purely optional, but significantly more meaningful and functional instead of just increasing yield.

This is the new procedural dungeon. Currently there's just one, with frankly quite repetitive contents and layout. I'm not aware of significant changes from 1.22.0 to 1.22.2 in regards to the dungeons. They can be very easy to find sometimes, but a lot depends on whether you get a lot of flat areas - veryflat is the only landform where they can generate, and it takes up about 6% of world surface if I recall correctly. To be honest, I have no idea what loot should be considered appropriate and have no clue what the dev stance on it might be, but it does seem like it can allow to skip some parts of early progression while posing little to no threat. And it's not claimed, so you can pick up a few interesting things. I wouldn't mind if it was even maybe slightly more valuable, if it was actually risky to explore, because as it stands it's almost incomparably more worthwhile than regular ruins tend to be.

This is not a concern, at least not until you try regenerating the world using commands. As a general rule, new versions are compatible with older worlds, though the already generated parts of the world might not have some new features (e.g. rapids, new berry bushes, missing animal maps for fish), so you'll have to move to new chunks to find them or backup the world and try using something like /db prune 1 drop confirm to regenerate the world in areas where you haven't modified it (only if it's created on 1.18.0+; also, this one won't fix the fish) or something like /wgen regen <radius> (radius is in chunks, so the radius in blocks is 32x that number) to regenerate a specific area (be mindful to do it at least 32 * (radius + 1) blocks away from anything you don't want deleted to use the latter). Remember to backup the world if you want to be safe, especially if you intend to run any commands to regenerate the world. A fresh start can certainly make for a more cohesive experience and reduce risk of bugs, so it's probably the more attractive option if you've started this world relatively recently and aren't particularly attached to it. Otherwise, the risks are small enough that it's more a matter of preference than necessity, and you should generally be fine to upgrade.

Baby goats and sheep can be caught in both traps, though crate traps have a significantly higher chance of success (70% > 30%). Baby pigs can only be caught in basket traps, interestingly enough. More generally, the basket trap can catch: chicken, hare, fox (baby), hyena (baby), raccoon (baby), wolf (baby), pudu deer (baby), goat (baby), sheep (baby), pig (baby). And the crate trap can catch: fox (adult), pudu deer (adult), water deer (adult), all deer except pudu (baby), gazelle (baby), goat (baby; higher chance than basket trap), sheep (baby; higher chance than basket trap). That's based on the JSON assets, so it's fully accurate assuming no bugs or other odd behavior. Also, keep in mind that many animals (especially adult animals) can eat the bait from the trap but can't be caught.

The thing with cinnabar is that it's not even really a dye, because it's an insoluble mineral. Technically, cinnabar was used for pigments, primarily in art, lacquerware, and cosmetics, but it's generally not useful for dyeing leather, cloth and stuff, because it doesn't bind in the way that dyes do. Red dye was primarily obtained from madder (brick red, usually more common, lower-quality and lower-class) and insects like kermes and cochineal (carmine and crimson red respectively, more luxurious generally, although common in some regions as well). Beetroot could also be used, but it tends to be more violet or pink. Similar issues can be found with a few other in-game dyes as well. Though the current dye sources are arguably a matter of balance as well, so there's a chance that some clothing recipes would have to be changed if we were to preserve their balance.

It's roughly under 60% of bituminous coal and anthracite deposits, though partial coverage is also possible. It's only tied to location in the horizontal plane, so close-by deposits will tend to either all have fireclay or all have no fireclay. No relation to deposit size.

It doesn't work in regions generated prior to 1.22, reported in #9158/#9234. The temporary workaround that I've found is to use the command /wgen regen 0, which regenerates the animal maps for the region (512x512 area) that you're currently in. When using /wgen regen 0, make sure you're not standing near any player-built structures that you don't want deleted (at least 32 blocks away, to keep it simple), as the command actually regenerates the chunk you're in, and regenerating the region is a side effect in a sense. Backup the world to be extra safe. Keep in mind that this only regenerates the region you're in, so you're gonna have to run the command again if you want to fish in different regions generated prior to 1.22.

Both from the perspective of immersion and gameplay, this should probably just depend on a lot on the specific trader and specific goods in question, and many if not all traders should probably be exclusive to either the populated or the less populated areas. As a general rule, I think the main goals here are (1) drive a clear direction of trade and (2) prevent short-distance or next-door trading. Any resource that can be purchased from traders should have a sink in a different part of the world (or no sink at all), and I think it would make sense for those closer to civilization to sell ready-to-use items and buy raw resources to be processed as well as some rare trinkets, but be disinterested in common items that other nearby traders might have already provided them with. Those in the wilderness, on the other hand, would buy many of those processed items (things like tools and clothes especially, essentially the universal needs I've described earlier here), and sell ready-to-process raw materials they've obtained or rare valuables. Something of the sort. Like this, maybe: an agricultural trader out in the wilds should probably have a large variety of regional and gathered foods in smaller quantities, potentially some very valuable ones; near other traders, they will sell large quantities of a limited selection of common foods, as well as trade more exotic plants from other regions of the world for a high price, a survival goods trader living in the wilderness may fit under a label like "hunter" better (I know that this would conflict with the class, but not sure what else to use), selling some immediately useful survival items and stuff like meat and hides in fairly large quantities, whereas closer to other traders they should primarily sell items that a person might reasonably need when preparing for travel like long-lasting food, warm clothes, lanterns and tools, and they could actually buy the meat and hides that the ones in the wilderness sell to turn it into that long-lasting food and warm clothes, a commodities trader, while in the wild, could probably be renamed to a "prospector" or something of the sort, selling many raw materials, whereas the ones in more populated areas would buy raw materials and sell more complex products like nails and strips, fertilizer, blasting powder, parchment, a building materials trader could receive similar treatment and focus on obtaining the wood, stone, clay and other materials that the traders in larger settlements could turn into furniture and actual building blocks, an artisan, furniture or luxury trader should primarily if not only live in highly populated areas, and their in-game purpose (alongside the building materials trader) should be supplying the player and functioning as rusty gear sinks (important for multiplayer economy) more than particularly meaningful interaction with the traders in the wilderness, a treasure hunter only really makes sense in the wilderness for the most part, and should sell a lot of items that luxury traders look for. Those would probably need to be tweaked a lot, still, to make them properly make sense, and you might notice that I've even come to some different solutions from those suggested by @ifoz despite talking about the same topic from a similar perspective.

On the topic of trade more than just traders, one thing that I've been thinking about in relation to Tyron saying at some point that he would like a merchant to be a more viable player job in-game, is that traders shouldn't just sell a semi-random assortment of items with no clear rhyme or reason besides all centering around a mostly cohesive theme. One possible way to implement this is through giving traders more distinctive categories of items that they sell or buy, related to a specific trader job: Bulk exports - the items which a trader could reasonably produce (or otherwise obtain) in large quantites, which would be the primary materials that the player would be interested in for trading - pottery from the artisan, food from the farmer, clothing from the tailor, and so on. These trades wouldn't rotate nearly as often, could be fulfilled over a long time, and could even be seasonal. Also, keep in mind the key word: "bulk". This wouldn't be just half a stack of bread or a single pickaxe - it could potentially go into dozens of stacks at a time, albeit naturally with appropriate delay between each delivery. Ideally, a trader should know roughly where traders who want these bulk exports might be, tying into the "traders know each other" idea. Bulk requests - the mirror or complementary half of bulk exports - the artisan needs clay and rare minerals, the farmer needs fertilizer, the tailor needs cloth, and they are willing to pay handsomely for it. Crucially, once a request is fulfilled, then the trader could have the next bulk export ready much faster or at reduced price. Similarly to bulk exports, traders should have some sort of an idea where these items could be sourced. High-value items - some things like tailor-exclusive clothing, the recurve bow, and other relatively difficult-to-obtain items, should be possible to sell at significantly higher price than most items, simply to reward the player for putting in the effort to put together a more complex product from multiple ingredients. Universal needs - a trader shouldn't really be in a position to just refuse everything except a very narrow selection of specific items. Sure, they probably wouldn't offer particularly high prices for most items, and they shouldn't accept bulk materials or random scraps, but it feels really annoying when careful analysis of what I can sell to nearby traders ends up giving me something like 3 possible items which I can produce in reasonable quantity. And similar to bulk requests, there could be situations where a trader finds themselves in need of some more common items like food, clothing, building materials or tools, at which point the normally low prices could increase for a time - ideally only at a time when it makes sense, e.g. food in the winter, tools in the summer, and only in locations where it makes sense, e.g. fuel only in areas where trees are scarce. And keep in mind that these shouldn't be specific like "flax bread" or "tin bronze axe" - these should be more like "food" or "axe", or sometimes more specific like "food which will take more than a month to spoil" or "bronze or better axe". A special balancing factor for bulk exports/requests could be that they would be sold in enclosed merchandise crates, which would have especially high sell value and could only be carried in limited quantity (possibly in the backpack slots). These would be among the primary goods that the player could move between trader outposts. They could also be opened to get the goods inside, but an intact crate would have much higher sell value than the items themselves, balanced in such a way that it would be generally preferable to sell them (unless maybe when looking for bulk items). And all of that would require some changes to the restocking mechanics and traders' gear supply. The same system, naturally, could be integrated into any larger settlements and story locations, with the caveat that each settlement would have to be treated as a single entity in some way, because it wouldn't make sense to buy things from one trader and sell it to their neighbor. It would be really cool to actually have tiny villages with clear purpose that implies specific needs and exports, e.g. these guys living in a forest produce a lot of lumber, but need tools, meanwhile those guys produce tools but need fuel for metalworking. This hunter sells meat to supply the two other camps, and that trader imports ore to sell to the metalworkers. Granted, I know that there's a line somewhere there that the devs probably don't want to cross with larger villages, but the general idea could be implemented well even with one-trader huts. Can't really reference every other post on this topic, but generally I'm always wary of ideas for any sort of bandits, because nearly every single game that tries to implement them inevitably ends up with a simplistic system that kind of works, easily tweaks out and produces unexpected results, often creates strange ways to maximize return from bandit interactions, and it's overall nothing to write home about. And the reason for that is pretty simple - it's very difficult to create a believable human AI system (both in terms of moment-to-moment behavior and long-term relations) which is neutral, but not exploitable, and threatening, but not hostile. It's incomparably more complex than regular trader or animal systems. Many games, when implementing a human enemy, tend to default to something like cultists or cannibals, in large part just because many behaviors which would be considered erratic, unpredictable or immersion-breaking for bandits, suddenly become natural for these guys. While bandits could be cool, I think that it would be fine to stop at elusive thieves that only steal from traders, some shady traders, tricksters, and the like, while leaving more hostile behavior to appropriately more extreme factions.

Realistically, some types of fertilizer should be incorporated into the soil through tilling, and some don't really need it. Gameplay-wise, fertilizer already imposes some manner of work to obtain it in the first place, and being quick to apply could contrast it neatly with tilling crop fields presumably at least twice per year, weeding, or whatever might be implemented, so I'm not sure that having the player also work the fields when adding fertilizer adds much of interest. As long as it's optional, I see no significant issue, but also I don't see much purpose besides perhaps the upgrading part. On this part specifically, I think a lot would depend on what happens with soil fertility. If no significant changes are made and soil upgrading is implemented, then incorporating the fertilizer into soil in-place is certainly a much more attractive option than crafting the better soil and replacing the farmland. Terra preta, due to its special status, would have to either still remain craftable-only or receive an ever so slightly more sophisticated process to match the current cost and allow using charcoal. But in the long term, I don't generally think that tilling fertilizer into the farmland should be a way of "upgrading" farmland (though that can also depend on what "upgrading" is supposed to exactly mean). Adding fertilizer raises the nutrient levels, but usually doesn't really change anything fundamental about the soil, unless done repeatedly over a long time or very intensively. It seems like I can't help but think up brand new ways to overhaul the game, but I think it could be valuable to remove the idea of soil fertility tiers (barren, low, etc.), and instead implement continuous fertility (basically just soil nutrients as they are now, but with visual impact on the soil). This would allow implementing distinct soil types like sandy soil or clay-rich soil without an excess of soil sub-variants. The differences between types of soil could be much more interesting than just quality tiers (though some would still be better or worse for agriculture), with properties like water retention, nutrient retention, maybe even pH or soil compactness or other stuff depending on how deep we would want to go. Once soil type is determined by its base material of sorts (sand, clay, loam, gravel for barren soil, potentially charcoal for terra preta, maybe some more specific soil types - there's a lot of freedom here), its quality would be determined by the amount of nutrients, which could be raised fluidly by adding fertilizer, without distinct fertility tiers. We could even basically remove soil as a block (or keep it just as a simple baseline) and implement soil mechanics for sand, gravel, clay and similar blocks, to produce a smooth gradient which could look really good in arid or very cold climates. Some of the soil properties could also be influenced by tilling and by amendments like ash, biochar (charcoal), lime or leaf litter to better match the requirements of some more picky plants. The one big question with that approach is how to preserve some of the properties from higher-quality soil if dug up, because resetting it to some sort of low baseline likely would not work. I think that literally just saving the soil properties when dug up and allowing them to average in a stack the same way that temperature or spoil time can be averaged would make sense, and it would just require that potential cheesy strategies and hyperoptimization are prevented (could be largely done with a penalty to nutrients when dug up or something of the sort, still disincentivizing relocation but not outright resetting the soil). It's always seemed to me like saltpeter is the stand-in for guano, but it's always been pretty underwhelming. Adding birds has always been a frequent suggestion and a little bit of work has actually been done on that, I think, though it seems to be on hold indefinitely as of now - maybe we'll see something in 1.23, but I wouldn't really put my hopes up. It also has a lot of potential due to bird eggs and the birds themselves being a potentially valuable source of food, especially in the early game and in cold climates.

I do agree that not all the changes I've listed out are necessary and simplifying some things more like you've described could be in certain regards better. The main reason why I've mentioned reworking soil nutrition is that I think growth speed being variable and yield being constant is kind of backwards. Variable growth speed leads to issues with planning out crop growth times and can cause different parts of a crop field to desynchronize (especially annoying when planting crops further than directly adjacent to water). I think it would be better if growth times were something more universal and predictable once the bare minimum fertility and moisture requirements are met, especially for the crops with more seasonal growth, like bulk grains (it could have a bit more effect on the frequency of harvesting faster-growing or continuously-producing plants, but there's no need for it either). Optimization can be focused more on just increasing yields and better matching some stricter requirements, less on reducing inconsistencies and frustration. Those two are interesting and quite reasonable, and I'm just not certain that the benefits would outweigh some potential problems: if weed growth is constant irrespective of soil quality, then that's a strong incentive to plant the crops less resistant to weeds (vegetables, herbs) in small gardens with high quality soil, to maximize the ratio of output over maintenance effort - making weed growth increase with soil quality would at least partially remove this benefit, and in the extreme it could inadvertently incentivize making gardens in low fertility soil (even if it was still suboptimal, the perceived benefit of less frequent weeding could nudge players in the wrong direction), if weed growth is constant for all farmland blocks regardless of location and only affected by the crop growing on the block, then maintenance effort is a very predictable part of the system that can be easily balanced with positive and negative effects - tying it to proximity to grass and weeds could encourage some potentially cheesy strategies (isolating gardens from all nearby grass) and interfere with the added reward for removing weeds (preferably a small boost to nutrients for the soil block, alternatively a plant debris item) which is intended to make weeding less a purely detrimental chore and more an integral part of the farming cycle. My thought is that manure really doesn't have to be complicated. Put straw bedding near domesticated animals, pick it up after some time, and spread it in the garden soil. Some added steps could be added for the sake of realism if nothing else, but taking some liberties for the sake of gameplay is perfectly fine as well, and I think this is a good example of a feature where added complexity has little purpose and doesn't solve any problems, and may easily even be detrimental for the purpose of manure being the superior type of fertilizer.

Often the most difficult part is not to actually create a system, but to make sure that the system makes sense in a broader context of the game, not just in isolation. Can't say I get that down consistently, and I do agree that some components of this suggestion could be a bit much. That's a very valid concern, and the problem I've run into is that any attempt to make the maintenance required for different crops much more varied will practically inevitably end up increasing the average level of reqiured maintenance as well, simply because everything that we have in the game is currently clustered quite tightly on the set-and-forget side and can't really be made less maintenance-heavy when there's no maintenance in the first place. I do agree that having to babysit crops wouldn't feel great, and I think that it would just have to be appropriately balanced. The basic rule is that any issues should progress at most about as often as you'd be expected to check up on the plants if you were unaware of the potential problem. Grains and similar crops wouldn't significantly change according to what I've suggested, with just one sowing and tilling, then one harvesting and tilling per year (and possibly one extra tilling to get rid of weeds at the end of the fallow period), and little to no work besides that - more effort per harvest than in the current balance, but a single harvest could also be larger to counterbalance it. Pruning bushes and trees, if added, should probably be done just once per year. For vegetables and herbs, I would expect likely about one weed growth stage per month (stacking up to ~4 stages) at most - but keep in mind that this is for continuously harvested plants, which you might want to visit every other day either way to put fresh vegetables on the plate. For plants which don't outcompete weeds but are harvested less frequently, weed growth could be even several times slower. And for crop fields where weeds don't grow at all unless the field is fallow, you'd just till the field to incorporate those weeds into the soil which would give an extra boost to nutrients. The more nebulous factors are nutrient levels and moisture, primarily for vegetables and bushes (and optionally pH for specific plants), which are a bit more difficult to estimate but I think it wouldn't impose too much maintenance, if any at all. Moisture should probably mostly focus on initial preparation to have a irrigation or drainage setup that matches the climate, and have little impact unless in dry or extremely wet areas. Even then, it would reduce yield rather than kill, so obfuscating the theoretical maximum possible value and current debuff to allow players to shift their mindset away from pure optimization could help a lot. Nutrient levels should be mostly a matter of maximizing yields (and maybe resistance to disease, only relevant in the low ranges like ~0-30%), and they generally wouldn't be something that you have to keep an eye on more often than one or two times per year, maybe three times for specific, extremely demanding crops (and no fertilizer at all would be necessary for a large portion of crops, naturally, as long as fields are left fallow regularly). Animal husbandry would be a bit more effort-intensive with increased fodder consumption and the added effort in collecting manure, though if I recall correctly you've also said in the past as well that something like this would be a pretty good change. I got that part of the idea from you initially, so it's the one thing I was certain you would like. The reason for the addition of specific crops much more vulnerable to disease or pests is separate from that variety driver. The primary purposes of it are (1) to make crop disease actually relevant in regular gameplay, not just when playing "incorrectly", and (2) to give players an optional risk that they could engage in. Plant a better crop, say with 50% higher yield per successful harvest or perhaps some other benefits, but at a 20% risk that it all goes to waste - it's still 20% higher yield on average, providing an avenue for optimization as well as added depth and variety in crop selection, but it's not something that you'd want to try in the early game when food security is a winter away. And ideally, if that is introduced, then there should be some method of reducing those risks. It's ultimately not a necessary feature, though, and punishing repeated planting of the same crops is indeed the more important part. Manure certainly shouldn't be special enough to outright replace other fertilizers, and the reason for placing manure on the pedestal is that it would tie multiple systems together quite naturally. Vegetables and fruits need manure for good yields, which drives the player to invest in livestock. Animals consume food, which drives the player to create meadows. If external sources of fertilizer play the primary role, you lose the first link in that chain, so animals and meadows would be largely disconnected from the rest of the system. Granted, just the fact that animal husbandry provides a lot of other products can make manure useful just as a byproduct of something more valuable. There's quite a number of arguments that I could make in favor of making manure either more or less important, and I'm not entirely sure which way to go, which is a case where I tend to lean towards realism and historical accuracy, which in this case both strongly support manure being a highly valuable resource central to any farm where it is available.

Motivation Farming in Vintage Story is currently a rather old and simple system, certainly functional, but arguably underdeveloped. There is a number of things which can be considered to be problems from a design perspective: almost all land use is nearly set-and-forget - this is expected for some plants, but it can get samey when that's all there is, there is little meaningful difference between many food sources - grains and vegetables are both produced in the exact same way through farming, berry bushes and fruit trees provide the same nutrition, and are cultivated in a very similar way, animal fodder and Seraph food are almost all the same items, many components of the system like moisture, fertilizer and crop rotation don't tend to play a meaningful role in practical gameplay, at least for most playstyles (including arguably the most optimal ones which many people will naturally gravitate towards), different plants are very inconsistent between each other - nutrients work completely differently for crops and bushes and are irrelevant for trees, fertilizer serves a completely different purpose for crops and bushes, water is only relevant for crops but nothing else, soil preparation is necessary for farming but irrelevant for everything else, growth systems are implemented differently for all plants that can be cultivated, replanting methods are distinct between everything, the bush trait system is completely distinct from everything else (frankly, I really hope that when herbs are implemented, it's not gonna just be new mechanics again). As I've been reading through some historical works like De Re Rustica and Liber Ruralium Commodorum, I've been noticing just how much interesting and realistic depth could be added to agriculture. These historical texts as well as some other sources are what I'm taking most of my inspiration for this suggestion from (for a quick reference, relatively high-level summary on some of these topics can be found in something like Wikipedia's Agriculture in the Middle Ages article, as well as the History section from the Kitchen garden article). I'm focusing primarily on European agriculture, but similar patterns can be found in almost all regions of the world. Goal Introduce meaningful differences to the variety of cultivated plants, in the method, scale and intensity of cultivation - though risks and maintenance have to be added carefully and only where it really matters, while most food sources should still remain mostly maintenance-free and multiplayer-safe. Add more depth and complexity to the overall farming system without making it unintuitive or tedious. Focus on historically accurate methods of land use. Context The medieval agricultural system has naturally evolved to produce a number of key land types, where various plants were cultivated at different scale and intensity: Gardens - small-scale plots located near houses, used primarily for growing vegetables, as well as herbs and fruiting shrubs (primarily the smaller ones, like strawberries or raspberries). They have very varied plant species, and they were themselves also zoned into segments with different plants. They were characterized by relatively high input (added organic matter, including fertilizer), continuous maintenance (tilling, weeding, pruning, watering, replanting, propagating). Their purpose was maintaining a steady supply of high-value food and medicinal plants, but they naturally provided little to no bulk foods. The plants which were grown in these gardens were selected as a natural consequence of their higher sensitivity to environmental conditions, soil quality, nutrient levels and moisture, as well as often relatively poor resistance to weeds and diseases, all making them unreliable for large-scale cultivation. Small scale and stronger reaction to fertilizer made gardens them a more valuable avenue of utilizing the limited manure, since it provided much better return when concentrated in a small, high-value plot than when spread out over large fields. As an extra note: in richer households, the decorative purpose of gardens was very important, even overtaking the practical uses in some cases, and it would be cool to have a good selection of ornamental plants (though with little to no maintenance, if their purpose is purely decorative). Orchards - larger-scale areas characterized, naturally, by fruit trees, as well as nuts, certain shrubs (primarily the larger ones, like currants or gooseberries), and grapes (with some caveats). Established orchards are very stable and can produce reliable yields over many years. They can receive maintenance and organic matter input concentrated on the trees, but it's less than gardens, and making this difference a bit more extreme could be valuable for gameplay. It can be viable to plant them on lower fertility soil due to trees' root systems being much deeper than smaller plants. Fields - large plots of farmland, used primarily for bulk grains (wheat, spelt, rye, oat, barley, etc.), as well as legumes and certain vegetables (peas, beans, potato, turnip) and in certain regions industrial crops like flax and hemp. The main requirement for a crop to be grown at this large scale is that it has to be low-maintenance and low-risk, which makes this the most set-and-forget area with concentrated seasonal labor (plowing, sowing, harvesting). Using fertilizer on massive fields wasn't generally practical, so crop rotation and fallowing were the primary means that allowed the land to recover. Pastures - mostly covered in grasses with interspersed legumes and forbs, used for grazing to feed animals during the warmer months. Meadows - similar to pastures in that they are primarily used to grow grasses, legumes (especially clover) and forbs to an extent, but different in that they're not grazed continuously - their primary purpose is producing hay to feed animals during the winter. Naturally, the boundaries between those types of plots are somewhat fluid: orchards, with all their space under the trees, were often also used as pastures, meadows, or for growing vegetables, some plants like potatoes, legumes (e.g. clovers, peas, beans) and root crops (e.g. turnips and beets) share certain traits of both vegetables and bulk grains, making them viable to cultivate both at higher intensity in small gardens and at lower intensity in large fields, and they also reduce some aspects of reliance on meadows for fodder, there are some fairly distinct, nonstandard systems, like grape vineyards which are similar to orchards but need more intensive pruning and training, or rice paddies where water is an especially important constraint and larger fields may require more maintenance, different climates will naturally influence the dominant crops and the farming methods, although the general pattern tends to remain similar. What allows this to take proper shape is manure - the single most important fertilizer. It was highly valuable for improving crop yields, but constrained by limited supply. Where manure was limited, secondary sources of fertilizer and other methods of renewing weary soil gained value, primarily natural nutrient cycling with plant debris, compost and nitrogen-fixing legumes, but manure was always in high demand. Since animals need to eat to produce manure, this creates a natural chain of connected systems - pasture and meadows sustain animals throughout the year to achieve a steady supply of manure, which is used to maintain gardens (frequently for medicinal and culinary purposes) and to a lesser extent orchards (for larger quantities of fruit and nuts). With fields being the primary source of satiating foods, this requires careful balance between all types of plots and offers quite a lot of potential for gameplay depth in the overarching system and options for meaningful distinctions between various plants. Gameplay changes Historical reality is one thing, and in-game implementation another. While there's a million changes that could be made, here's a loose selection that I would propose: Greater dependence on environment and soil => overhaul the soil nutrition system, in a way that would encompass all cultivated plants in an intuitive way, and vary between plants more significantly: different plants should be planted in different areas due to varied requirements beyond just temperature, and factors like the amount of rain or the type of soil may make certain plants suboptimal or impossible to grow in some areas, both as a result of deficiency and excess of various parameters including moisture (soil could then be less about fertility which can be amended with fertilizer, and more about soil types which are more or less suitable for different plants), soil types may primarily involve sandy and clay-rich soils, reacting differently to moisture and fertilizer, and potentially even with different pH levels assigned to them, maybe modified in some ways, relying entirely on rain should be more viable (in the appropriate conditions), and it should also be relatively safe without risk of waterlogging, unless it's quite extreme rainfall in warm climates, irrigation, as well as potentially drainage and raised garden beds, could be implemented to allow more precise control over moisture levels, especially near water bodies and rivers which would normally easily cause waterlogging, as a general rule, fertilizer should primarily serve to greatly boost yields from crops (with bulk crops generally having much lower return per portion of fertilizer, and vegetables having the highest return) and allow to improve the soil nutrient levels to make it more suitable for demanding plants, partially circumventing the climate and soil restrictions instead of just accelerating growth. Require regular maintenance for certain plants => implement weeds and potentially pests, which would compete with garden crops and herbs (but pose little to no threat to bulk crops and larger plants). They would grow in the same block as the crop or as part of the farmland block and reduce yield of the main crop over a long time, until eventually overtaking it entirely unless removed. This could also allow collecting farmland blocks once they are overgrown with weeds, though there are some other easy solutions to this. Implement a seasonal labor cycle for bulk crops => revise growth to be properly seasonal and add tillage of harvest residue, so that maintaining a field would primarily involve two stages: sowing and tilling (autumn for winter crops, spring for spring crops) - tilling serves to remove weeds, improve soil quality and increase the survival chance of planted crops (and also gives a real purpose to the hoe), harvesting and tilling (summer for winter crops, late summer for spring crops) - harvesting the crop, incorporating the harvest residue back into the soil, and leaving the field fallow to recover nutrients, additionally, fallow fields could be tilled up to several times during the season, as well as weeded, grazed and manured, but this isn't really necessary to implement in-game and could in certain cases be excessive. Add a risk factor to some crops => implement crop diseases or pests, which would normally pose little risk except when planting the same crops in the same area multiple times consecutively, and pose much greater risks to certain higher-yield crop varieties, where low reliability due to vulnerability to disease would be an important balancing factor. Wild animals should also have more interest in some of the garden crops, and generally less interest in grains, encouraging the player to fence off their garden but not necessarily entire fields. Implement meadows => see the dedicated post for meadows. Constrain the system with fertilizer availability => reduce access to fertilizer (potentially remove bone meal), implement manure, increase livestock maintenance cost but increase continuous products. I believe that the best way to implement manure is through something akin to straw bedding, which would get dirty over time near domesticated animals, to keep the system more intentional, controllable and tidy. Note: maintenance requirement is borderline necessary for fertilizer to be relevant, because if there is no driver for space efficiency, then fertilizer requirement can be circumvented entirely by just planting more. Practical plant categories Looking at it from the angle of "and what am I gonna actually do with this in the game?" (purely from a gameplay perspective and taking a few small liberties relative to what would be most realistic), this is roughly what would be most relevant to the player: Bulk grains and industrial crops - simple staple: low yield per unit of area, but good yield per time investment, safe and reliable with practically no need for maintenance, can be planted in low or high fertility soils without much difference, with low benefit from fertilizer, no need for watering in areas with half-decent rainfall or near water bodies with some irrigation channels, good tolerance to temperature and moisture variations. Clover, peas, beans, potatoes, turnips, beets - fodder and special crops: also lower yield per unit of area and good yield per time investment, harvest times are less constrained by time of year and may in some cases be more frequent than once per year, can be planted instead of leaving fields fallow in certain cases to maximize yields, more risky, may require some maintenance, more benefit from higher fertility soils and from fertilizer, additional complications over simple bulk grains, but also additional benefits - legumes improve soil by fixing nitrogen, root crops make very good fodder. Vegetables - high yield, high effort: very high yield per unit of area (as much as 3-5x the yield of bulk grains, per unit of area per year), characterized by more continuous harvests, not periodic or fully seasonal like other plants, high maintenance requirement to prevent fast decline, mainly due to weeds and potentially pests, the greatest benefits among all plants received from fertilizer and planting in fertile soil (easily 100-200% higher yields when fertilized sufficiently), more sensitive to temperature, moisture, and nutrient level changes (temperature sensitivity would encourage using greenhouses, which should ideally actually stabilize the temperature and not just increase it). Herbs and spices - medicinal and special uses: cultivation similar to vegetables, although maintenance and fertilizer requirement can be lower (they're generally needed in low quantity, so there's an argument for making them especially expensive and valuable, but it could also be easily overblown - it may be better for the most part to just have relatively easy benefits over challenges which nobody will bother to repeat after the first world). Fruiting shrubs - higher-maintenance, versatile fruit: high yield per unit of area when maintained well, and high benefits from fertilizer, requires more attention in the form of pruning and moisture control which tends to be less important if present at all for other plants, and may include some of the only plants (especially blueberries) which get damaged by an excess of fertilizer, not overtaken by weeds like vegetables and herbs, the primary early-game challenge lies in soil preparation, as they require very specific conditions to reliably take root (may require forest soil and/or mulch in some ways), but other than that they can be set up much faster than fruit trees, they can be planted in larger quantities, but, when maintained less intensively, their yields will be no better than wild bushes, and then may potentially die off due to diseases or pests if planted in less suitable soil, many berries are more nutrient-dense than other fruit, and they may also have medicinal uses or other niche properties (e.g. poison). Fruit and nut trees - long-term stability: low yield per unit of area (but naturally can be mixed with meadows or gardens), soil preparation and maintenance requirement to establish a cutting and during initial growth, little to no maintenance and risk once the tree grows up enough, good return from fertilizer, though lower than berries, compared to berries, they require much less long-term maintenance, but take a long time to initially set up and have little to no use outside of food supply - even late into the game when trees can provide plenty of fruit nutrition, maintaining a few berry bushes would remain valuable due to their special uses. Meadows (grass, legumes, forbs) - fodder and aesthetics: absolutely zero maintenance requirement, so they can be easily created at massive scale for aesthetic purposes, provides hay and/or fodder, depending on how it's implemented, which is practically the single best source of animal feed (could be second after certain root crops like turnips, but those require nonzero maintenance and are less reliable). Note on the area taken up by each type of land: most medieval households with some 5 people and one or two cows would need some 10 ha or more of combined land area on top of a shared pasture (the practical reality was still less in many areas), of which the majority would be fields, a smaller part would be meadows, and a very small part (less than 1% in many cases) would be a garden and orchard, so the majority of nutrition would still typically come from grains. Naturally, there were exceptions or nonstandard systems (e.g. olive groves or vineyards may shift the balance a lot), and there were people who didn't own any fields and maybe only owned a small garden (especially those who had other jobs). This is obviously way too much to require in-game from 5 players (10 ha is equivalent to 100 000 blocks, or a 100x1000 area), but the ratio between different categories of land is what's more important here. As a general rule: very small garden, similar or slightly larger orchard, an order of magnitude larger meadows, and even larger fields. Adjusting them a bit for the game would be absolutely acceptable. Closing thought Of course, implementing something like this would be a massive undertaking, likely spanning over multiple updates, and even a small part of what I've described here could make for a much more complex and involved system than what we currently have. There's also no way that I could describe all the changes in detail and account for every possible complication in an amount of text that remains remotely digestible. Any given suggestion could have a variety of details added, adjusted or removed depending on the preference of the next person, so I prefer to avoid an excess of detail and focus more on the general direction. I would be quite interested to discuss it further either way. At least one question will inevitably focus on crop maintenance, on which I have two notes: the required maintenance and effects of proper maintenance or lack thereof can be adjusted a lot in many directions, and different plants can have completely different maintenance requirements, some requiring almost none and some requiring regular attention - that's what meaningful variety implies. It's not like all farming would suddenly require much more maintenance, because implementing realistic features does not necessitate scaling and balancing them in a perfectly realistic way.

And this "y'all" is... who? One person under this topic saying that they want one specific part of the rework to be reverted? A reference to older requests to roll back soil degradation and the medium fertility requirement, which have been already granted by the devs? Porting over the vanilla changes would require a lot of added work, because the Wildcraft bushes are fairly large rework as well, if not larger. They would basically need to reimplement the new vanilla mechanics in their own code and assets, as well as potentially rework many of their textures as well if they were to match current vanilla mechanics exactly. It's an ungrateful thing to revert, because plainly reverting it also loses out on a whole number of good changes. Just setting nutrient uptake to 0 is a very easy option, but that's really inelegant. Ignoring the berry bushes is an even easier option.

Given that mushroom farming has been chilling on the roadmap for a while, I'd imagine that some more attention may be given to mushrooms once obtaining them can be less about "find them randomly in the wild" and more about "target a specific species of mushroom and grow it deliberately". I'm quite interested in what they might do for mushroom farming, since it can in some cases be the epitome of "tricky to set up, but easy to maintain". Very good idea, and I would just note that it would be best not to go too overboard with satiety variation, because having a predictable baseline "mushrooms give 80" is very convenient and simplifies a lot. The properties of a single mushroom can also be balanced by their availability, both in the wild and in farming. I'd personally rather see just a few protein-only species, not mixed nutrition, because if mix here, then why not mix everywhere? Unless maybe as part of a larger nutrition rework, which could separate nutrition categories into something like energy type (e.g. protein, fat, sugar) and culinary category or micronutrient group (the current categories except protein). Not that it's necessarily a bad idea to mix things, but I think keeping the groups separate is an important component which contributes to VS nutrition being quite uniquely effective at encouraging varied diets while remaining simple and intuitive. That said, I do think that it could be beneficial in the long term to have some way of differentiating foods within a single category to make mushrooms more distinct from vegetables, for example: adjusting the satiety to nutrition ratio for some items (or just removing it entirely, like for bamboo shoots) - bulk foods like grains could have relatively low nutrition but high satiety, whereas nutrient-rich items like most fruit and vegetables could have higher nutrition but lower satiety, some manner of micronutrients, as a single extra nutrition bar, obtained from some specific foods from various primary categories, could allow to directly add a special use to some foods which otherwise can be overshadowed by different options - meat could have more micronutrients than other sources of protein, mushrooms could have little to no regular nutrients, but more micronutrients than other foods (not perfectly realistic, but serves as a fine gameplay incentive), alternatively, a larger rework with something like fat and sugar (nutrition-like bars, applying appropriate minor buffs, consumed at variable rate depending on some factors, forming a distinct trio with protein) could help with adding much more meaningful distinctions to foods, as well as help introduce differences between food requirements in different climates. As much as I can agree with this and like the suggestion, I can't help but feel like there's a lot of other changes which would help this even more (if at more dev time), including: partially or fully hiding the information on how much health poisonous mushrooms reduce, allowing to cook the poison out where realistic, concentrating some mushroom foraging spots to smaller but denser areas to encourage the player to return to them, and implementing more proper seasonal growth. Then, some or most mushrooms would be less a free early-game food source whenever moving through a forest, and more a reward for a diligent gatherer who learns about which mushrooms are edible, seeks out viable growing locations, records valuable mushroom spots, and returns to them when they are in season - a pretty unique design direction compared to sources of food like farming or animal husbandry, which could be more focused on regular upkeep and don't have much space to add knowledge-based progression.

That's a good one, classified as a pretty unique ridge-and-swale system, but it's the exact same problem again - too high vertical variation and too steep slopes. The Great Lakes region has a lot of ridges that can occasionally go up to some 10 m in height, but the spacing between them tends to be in the hundreds of meters, producing slopes which don't generally tend to exceed ~10% (1 m rise over 10 m run), except maybe right at the edge of water. In other regions like string fens, while the spacing between ridges is smaller, their height is also very low, again producing < 10% slopes, and these shallow slopes are necessary for slow water runoff. I don't know if maybe I'm just not explaining what I'm saying sufficiently again, but I feel like I've said almost the same thing in my first post in this thread that you just said here. I completely agree with this. My point about small-scale vertical variation focuses mainly on two factors: realism - slopes steeper than ~30-35%, equivalent to 1 m rise over ~3 m run, are the practical limit in most contexts where soil is the surface material, and many areas tend to fall under certain characteristic slopes, mainly due to angle of repose and erosion processes (exceptions include features like riverbanks or cliffs, and some regions like arid badlands), traversability - I think it's annoying and unsatisfying to constantly go up and down steep bumps and ridges, and, if I recall correctly, that has been one of the most common complaints about terrain - sure, endless flatlands would be pretty boring, but equally it's entirely possible to go overboard in the other direction, and I think many landforms including almost all mountains do go too far. I could maybe try to whip up some examples with World Edit or in a terrain generator when I have the time.

Near 100% peat coverage is a matter of observation more than definition, and applies to raised, valley and blanket bogs roughly equally. The layer just on the surface is acrotelm, a transitional peat layer which could be considered somewhat separate from peat, but it is certainly not regular soil. A typical bog is a mosaic of drier hummocks usually at most ~1 m above water level, and wetter hollows. Peat is found both under the water, and above water in the hummocks, because the peat is the bog. This is just a natural consequence of how the bog forms, because once the system is ombrotrophic (receives water nutrients from precipitation only, or as close to it as possible, which is the primary factor that tends to differentiate bogs from fens), it means that the system is hydrologically disconnected from the soil, so practically the entire surface has to be peat or peat-forming material. As far as I can tell, the only cases where the peat coverage is more patchy will occur near the edges of bogs (especially blanket bogs), where it generally transitions through the lagg, into fens and regular upland soil. Regardless, I think that the least that we should be able to agree on is that any significant peat in the first place would be ideal for that in-game landscape to actually be reasonably considered a bog. The current way that peat generates in completely random deposits is functional enough for gameplay, but has practically nothing realistic about it. That said, it's classified as a "bumpy marsh" in-game, as far as I can tell, which just oozes with realism, though at least in terms of soil and vegetation is a bit more agreeable than a bog. But the matter of peat aside, my primary issue with world generation itself has always been excessive small-scale vertical terrain variation, which in the case of that landform doesn't match neither a bog nor a marsh.

You can also skip straight to copper or bronze from nothing by buying tools from traders or finding them in ruins, and you can produce steel while completely ignoring pickaxe tier requirements if you get sulfur for bombs (or even without ever using a pickaxe if you buy sulfur from traders), but none of these are game-breaking, because theoretical possibility isn't relevant to natural and practical progression. Not everything has to revolve around the core technological succession chain, and knives are still required for harvesting animals, collecting cattails, scraping leather, and some crafting recipes. It doesn't really matter that the player can break a preconceived mandatory progression chain while handicapping themselves by refusing to craft what is arguably the most basic tool in the game.

The classic "rub two sticks together" bit is exactly what we already have in the game in the form of the firestarter. Gating the firepit behind tools is only a consequence of the Seraph being incapable of setting up the firepit without using firewood. What's better, they're perfectly capable of removing that firewood without actually burning any of it right after building the firepit. And to top it off, whether tools came before or after fire is only relevant to Homo Sapiens. Matter of playstyle. I tend to predominantly use sticks for fuel with zero issues, because most of my firewood goes straight into the charcoal pit and the clay oven. Adding more ways to obtain sticks in bulk besides breaking branches off of trees also seems like a perfectly fine method to alleviate any early association issues that allowing to use sticks for the firepit might cause.

While I don't know about that specific place, bogs typically have very close to 100% peat coverage. Both under and above the water.

And for reference: The water distribution is actually kind of close, but I don't see how a supposed bog can be reasonably considered a bog if it doesn't have peat and moss, arguably the single most important defining characteristic of bogs, despite peat being already in the game. Even disregarding moss, vegetation doesn't match a bog at all. The local vertical terrain variation is way too high for a bog as well. I've seen places in the game that were at least flat, which made them resemble swamps or marches pretty well, but this ain't a bog. Even if we disregard soil and vegetation, then the point about overblown vertical variation remains. I've looked into it a bit more. Feel free to have a look at Mima mounds and patterned ground. Both are kind of right, but not really, for similar reasons - incorrect small-scale vertical terrain variation and mismatched vegetation, among others.