Salem

I spend most of my time farming. Feeding compost bins, cleaning out worms, harvesting cotton, cleaning cotton, weaving sheets, selling sheets. I love the grind, what can I say? But a few things started to bug me as I thought about them:

Why can I harvest a field at 1000% plenty for the same phlegm cost as a field at 100% plenty? If I am picking 10 times as many lettuce heads, shouldn't it cost me a little extra phlegm? Perhaps there could be farming tools to ease this burden, like a hoe for cabbage or a scythe for cereal and corn. If the alchemy of the tool matches the alchemy of the crop, then the crops wouldn't suffer a loss of purity upon harvesting.

Shouldn't there be a limit to the number of fertilizers we can apply to a field? If you were to actually pile 200 humus (which is 40 times MORE humus than is required to make the field fertile enough for planting at 100% upkeep, mind you) on to a field, wouldn't you cut off the light to the planted crop and inhibit its growth? If you were to do this over 4 successive generations wouldn't the landscape eventually rise? Another example would be 100 clumps of hay (50 times more than required for lean-to bedding).

I've found occasions where I want to LOWER the influence bars of a field. Should there be a fertilizer that increases the influence loss (perhaps a new use for Salt?)

Zapt13 wrote:I spend most of my time farming. Feeding compost bins, cleaning out worms, harvesting cotton, cleaning cotton, weaving sheets, selling sheets. I love the grind, what can I say?

YAY!
+1

(sorry for not actually responding)

I was thinking about this the other day, I had two different trains of thought that both fit.

Firstly:
Filling compost bins is a pain in the... index finger. And it slightly annoys me that you can simply fill it with one thing, cereal, meat, wood chips, and get out beautiful compost that is as pure as the tree that made the bin (and the worms that live in it). So I started toying with the idea of tierd compost. The compost bin would have 3 bars, similar to a field, the first bar would fill up when you add something of little value, ie the things we compost at the minute, the second bar would rise with things that are a bit more effort, like cooked food and picked plants (chestnuts etc), the third bar would be the harder to come by stuff, seaweed, hay (as it is valuable already), perhaps the unused inspirationals that were mentioned in the annoyance thread. When a piece of compost is made it will take from the bars that are available and become graded based on those bars. (Obviously there is potential for 7 outcomes but we probably only want 3 or 4 different grades.) The different tiers could simply give a greater effect when used on fields, this works especially well when the number of fertilisers is limited.

Secondly:
There are two ways to fertilise a field, like we do now we prepare the soil, and then once the crop is planted we can feed it, IRL things like wood chips and hay are used as mulches that help the ground retain moisture, where as lime and droppings are for nutrients. What I would suggest is we split our current fertilisers into two groups, we will call them fertilisers and mulches. BEFORE planting we can fertilise the ground with Humus, lime, clay and droppings, and after planting we can mulch with wood chips, hay, coal and dross. With limits set on how many of each can be used. How upkeep effects things I am not sure, perhaps we could get rid of it completely.
This has some side effects, namely the purity of the crop, I believe it should be harder than it currently is to produce large amounts of a pure crop, obviously it is already hard to produce pure humus, but once you have you only need two pieces and a ton of lime and you have a lot of your crop and you can produce repeatedly. If we were limited to 5 fertilisers, and if you use less than 5 a default 25/25/25/25 pure fertiliser is assumed for the others, and the crop takes the purity of (3*seed purity+the purities of the 5fertilisers)/8 AND we make some changes to reflect how easy it is to get pure fertilisers. For instance clay from pure water is easy so we make clay reduce plenty so that 5 clays will produce a tiny amount of the crop, pure lime is a pain so it is still the main fertiliser for increasing plenty.

I feel I have shared enough of my idea for you to get the idea and to point out its flaws, so I will stop now.

Anyone else usually thinks:
Why water has no use in all the farming process? We have 10% water maybe it can take place in the farming or preparation of field process.

RobertoKarlos wrote:Anyone else usually thinks:
Why water has no use in all the farming process? We have 10% water maybe it can take place in the farming or preparation of field process.

I too often think this.

The question is is this really realistic? Does anyone know if plants actually use water to grow or is that just from that movie with Luke Wilson? And how can they grow without a sun? Don't farmers need tractors too?

Maybe we could have bonuses for food that is grown organically because everyone knows organic foods are better for you and this will help deter players from using pesticides. I know a lot of players who have quit this game because the fascist developers are racists and make turkeys be grown in coops instead of being raised free-range.

Cleayt wrote:The question is is this really realistic? Does anyone know if plants actually use water to grow or is that just from that movie with Luke Wilson? And how can they grow without a sun? Don't farmers need tractors too?

Maybe we could have bonuses for food that is grown organically because everyone knows organic foods are better for you and this will help deter players from using pesticides. I know a lot of players who have quit this game because the fascist developers are racists and make turkeys be grown in coops instead of being raised free-range.

I love fake Claeyt.

Brilliant .

as a dutch person, i want to be able to dig gullies around my farms and let it fill with water from rain, lakes or rivers or even through a well with a windmill pump!

irrigation is the prime example of mass farming!

Adding more depth to farming could be interesting, it is a crafting MMO afterall.