Topic

Gardening Changes Feedback Thread (reasonable or not?)

I figured I'd get a thread started for some different points of view. The details of the changes are in beta.glitch.com/forum/gener... , but basically stuff takes longer to grow. Considerably longer. What once took 30 minutes, now takes 5 hours. Potatoes now take a full real-life day.

First, let me state that I'm somewhat relieved that I won't have to be harvesting a crop every couple of hours. I was simply incapable of allowing my plots to be inactive for any period of time, and could usually be found tending to my crops . . . shirtless . . .to avoid the unsightly 'farmer's tan'.

That said, these changes seem to have taken away a nice profit stream and/or energy source. I will admit that gardening seemed to be a bit unbalanced, but does this swing things too far in the other direction? The guano part is nice, but it has been such a scarce resource that I'm not sure how feasible that approach will be. Do I have to return to the mines, or will that become less worthwhile too?

As you can see, I'm a bit conflicted on this. So, I turn to you for your feedback and sound reasoning (as evidenced by countless other threads ;). I haven't crunched any numbers, but feel free to share any that you might have.

Is this a good/fair change? Is guano more plentiful now and thus a feasible way to increase yields? What is the most worthwhile profession now? Does anyone want to buy any suntan lotion or a gently used straw hat?

Posted 17 months ago by Joe Blow Subscriber! | Permalink

Replies

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  • no, i messed that up.

    how much guano did you collect and how long did it take you to collect it?
    Posted 17 months ago by striatic Subscriber! | Permalink
  • Sorry stri... didn't note anything quite that closely...  I know I *did* have enough guano to fertilize all plots 2x with some left over...    And like I said, I filled up two bags with stuff (and probably a little overflow into some other bags...) but I can't tell you how long it took. 
    Posted 17 months ago by Pirate Apples Subscriber! | Permalink
  • So, we thought and we did make some changes on this. Since last night we:

    • Rebalanced all the growing times for crops & herbs so they grow about twice as fast on average (overall, they take 44% less time to grow, but it was uneven: e.g., yellow crumb flower is 4x faster, potatoes a bit more than 2x faster, corn is unchanged, etc.). Still longer than they did before, but not as dramatic.

    • Increased the length of time for which a plot stays wet to 12 hours, from 7 (which was an oversight when we changed the growing times. Since nothing takes as long as 12 hours to grow, you won't need to water in between planting and harvest (as long as you water when you plant)

    • Increased the rate at which Batterflies spontaneously produce guano.

    • Added Batterflies to several locations on the "big island" (mainly in Kajuu, but many in Alakol and Andra as well)

    Phase two of this was going to be a set of garden-enhancing potions to be released with potionmaking ("SOON!"-ish) but we'll see about bumping that up somewhat so additional yield or growing-time tweaks can happen before potionmaking is ready.
    Posted 17 months ago by stoot barfield Subscriber! | Permalink
  • thank you Stoot, that sounds way better :)
    Posted 17 months ago by Teena Subscriber! | Permalink
  • Potionmaking!!!! 
    Posted 17 months ago by Pirate Apples Subscriber! | Permalink
  • @stri...  just did a quick test... 20 minutes

    202 beryl
    209 sparkly
    3 amber
    1 ruby
    1 sapphire
    113 guano

    fwiw
    Posted 17 months ago by Pirate Apples Subscriber! | Permalink
  • Pirate Apples

    i just did it myself at top speed, blowing through a huge combination of spinach and planks to get it done as quickly as possible.

    bought 28 potato seed = 1120
    spent 105 energy to teleport to caves
    used equivalent of 500ish spinach to generate guano
    spent 105 energy teleport home
    spent 56 energy to plant and water

    this took 20 minutes and 1700 worth of e/c, not including the potato seed purchase, which would have added another 1120 worth of e/c to that tally.

    then another five minutes simply to do the clicking necessary to fertilize 28 plots twice.

    that was, beyond the rather high capital cost, a full 25 minutes of nearly *constant clicking*.

    hardly contemplative, peaceful gardening.

    and now i still have to wait another 30 minutes to get the crops.

    if you want 25 minutes of constant clicking, might as well just mine.
    Posted 17 months ago by striatic Subscriber! | Permalink
  • Thanks for the changes stoot! And I'm also looking forward to the bots and the potions!
    Posted 17 months ago by MaryLiLamb Subscriber! | Permalink
  • ah well.... you are far more scientific than I, stri!! 

    My mining in Janagi didn't feel tedious...  I have ladders to climb, which amuses me for reasons I can't explain.  And when I'm done mining, I settle down and snag the batterflies.  And when the rocks regenerate, I start climbing ladders again.

    Different strokes I guess.
    Posted 17 months ago by Pirate Apples Subscriber! | Permalink
  • Whoa, Stri, 28 potatoes means you'd need 56 guano to fertilize... That's 280 planks fed to the bats 10 at a time, so 28 feedings. When I did that I actually had time to mine until the teleport timer ran out.

    If the bats are now in Alakol, better still... No more teleporting. Incremental improvements, I guess.
    Posted 17 months ago by Blitz Subscriber! | Permalink
  • that's the thing .. you're viewing gardening as a sort of hobby for miners.

    with the current system, that's all it can be, and even then it is still annoying. the time spent planting the hobby crop is probably more profitably spent just doing more mining.

    i think the best available price for guano at auction right now is 200 per individual guano. so that's out as an option.

    the other issue is that you are able to pick the guanos off the ground coz you're the probably one of the only people bothering. if everyone who used to be a gardener did that, the base guano collection times would be higher due to competition thinning the readily available supply.

    in order to successfully garden, you have to be a miner, or at very least a caver.

    before, you could be a miner/gardener if you wanted to, or you could be just a gardener.

    so this is a winnowing of gameplay options.
    Posted 17 months ago by striatic Subscriber! | Permalink
  • Thanks for the adjustments...still have to see how that works when I get in game.  Very happy to hear the watering lasts longer since that will help me a bunch.  Thanks for listening!
    Posted 17 months ago by ~Pink Flamingo~ Subscriber! | Permalink
  • btw, a full alakol crop of potatoes is

    28 plots

    17 potatoes per plot

    7 energy each

    3,528 e / c

    i put in, including seed purchase, 2,800 e / c

    25 minutes of constant clicking

    and 1 hour of game time

    for a profit of a whopping 728 e /c

    at level 32 that isn't even enough to refill my energy tank
    Posted 17 months ago by striatic Subscriber! | Permalink
  • the profit gets a lot better if you get the seeds only from piggy plops, but that is adding a significant amount of clicking and time .. and then you can also just pick up freshly dropped guanos off the ground instead of feeding, but the more people engaged in guano collecting, the lower and slower the return.
    Posted 17 months ago by striatic Subscriber! | Permalink
  • With the new changes -- especially bats in Kajuu, closer to home! -- I think I'm a-okay with gardening again. The extra long times were messing up my strategy (I used to plant by recipe, but felt like I had to plant by time, which threw me entirely off), but I think that this happy medium will let me  go back to my old, comfortable ways.

    Thanks, stoot!
    Posted 17 months ago by Sheepy Subscriber! | Permalink
  • Sheepy, you're welcome!

    striatic … not sure what to say. All the stuff you are going on about is only true if you absolutely need to get the crops as fast as possible. (And, if that was your bag as a gardener —hey, now you can get them about 4x faster than you could yesterday … min-max away!)

    But, that doesn't sound very fun. Should we increase the return in currants in order to give people an incentive to do all that not-fun clicking? Probably not.

    Speeding up the growth is an option (if someone needs crops in a hurry, or has an easy source of fertilizer, or wants to go to bed and speed up this last crop so they can plant something long-growing overnight). But it is certainly not an obligation of all gardeners. And certainly less profitable per unit-of-human-effort then "plant, water and come back when they're ready".

    Instead of assuming the point of gardening is to get the maximum number of crops out of a garden as quickly as possible, imagine that someone might think of gardening as a pleasant occasional task for which one's patience was rewarded with the fruits of the earth: wake up, swing by home, harvest what's grown since you last played, tend, replant, pick up or make some supplies and be off into the world.

    If you imagine that mindset, the time it should take for a plot to grow should be something reasonably and pleasantly paced to the game. (If we had kept, say, spinach at 6 minutes forever then there would have been people sitting by their gardens all day replanting every six minutes. Not very fun, never mind the poo.)

    In the long run, the rest of the game needs to be fun enough that the psychological appeal (or real game "need") for currant rewards does not compel people to do stuff they won't want to be doing.
    Posted 17 months ago by stoot barfield Subscriber! | Permalink
  • ' wake up, swing by home, harvest what's grown since you last played, tend, replant, pick up or make some supplies and be off into the world.'

    yays!
    This is my kinda gardening. It's not a chore, or a way to make currants, it's a nice thing to do when I'm temporarily between tasks, or bored of a project, or whatever. I pop home for a bit, refill my food bag, look after my trees and garden, empty my meat collectors and I'm off again, on the next adventure.

    I also love getting the little 'one of your crops is ready' reminders throughout the day. It makes me feel happy to know that on my little roof in the heights my cabbages have matured and are waiting for me.
    Hooray!

    Thanks for making some changes so quickly, stoot.

    Signed: Not A Hater
    Posted 17 months ago by Wrendolin Subscriber! | Permalink
  • +1 Wrendolin
    Posted 17 months ago by Charlotte Subscriber! | Permalink
  • Stoot, this is better. Thank you for listening to us and for making changes so quickly.

    I love Glitch and I think it is great that you guys actually listen to all of us and are willing to tweak things when we voice our opinion. :)
    Posted 17 months ago by Rilu Subscriber! | Permalink
  • Thanks, your post covers all the points I was going to make about why I garden in Glitch.

    It is a relaxing pastime for me. 

    I didn't care about the extra growing time.

    What got to me was all the added complexity to get your crops to harvest.  You couldn't just clear, water, plant and then reap.

    I was really irritated that you had to water during the growing cycle.

    My proposal was going to be:

    Puttering:  Water the plot, plant the seed, leave it for a long time, come back and harvest.

    Serious gardening:  Water the plot, plant the seed, leave it for a long time.  If you come back and water a few times it doesn't take as long to harvest

    Truck farming:  Water the plot, plant the seed, add guano.  Water the seedling, add guano.  Water and harvest.  For those of you who want gardening to be a business that competes with mining. 
    Posted 17 months ago by WindBorn Subscriber! | Permalink
  • i'm going to post now/read later, which may be annoying, but my feedback:

    i'm running shorter and shorter on $$ and produce as the game changes.  i'm contributing more to projects, and still, as i've mentioned before, trying to help other players out.  i have always tried to be "self sufficient" as much as possible in terms of making my own food, and helping others with food and money.  the auction sniper means that i can't buy things cheaply at auction, and i'm not going to mark things up on auction to try and make a profit (nor do i think that works, because of the sniper) because it's not how i play the game- i like it as a community-oriented game. i'm not making $$ as i level anymore, either.

    i depend on my garden to keep eating and playing this way. when i just got back to my garden that i had planted (real) hours ago, it was in the same state only dried out. i bought 200 spinach for the first time in my months of playing, from a vendor, for one of the many projects in the nostalgia land that are now asking for just straight produce, not even as part of a recipe. so you've got: less ways to earn money through "just" playing, an auction that makes it very hard to buy cheaply unless you're using a 3rd party sniper script, projects that ask for tons of raw ingredients that are now much harder to come about, and energy that uses the same raw ingredients that are also harder to come about. 

    in the future, when we are all rookies, this will be good, i suppose, we'll all have to walk away from our computers because we're out of basic supplies to cook/work/eat. it will be harder for some of us to earn expensive houses (or only certain kinds of players will be able to earn expensive houses) so it will slow/spread things out.

    but i don't like it- you can mine really fast, you can harvest really fast, but you can't grow your own?

    ETA: I love gardening in my house. i go home, i tend my plots, i plant things in nicely colored patterns (the crops are gorgeous, by the way), and soemtimes i plant horizontally, sometimes vertically. i like to tend them, i like to pick them, i like to plant them. you don't get to do this now, except once every... day?
    Posted 17 months ago by greenkozi Subscriber! | Permalink
  •   please don't think that all gardening is casual or for profit. i used my personally grown food as the main source of energy replenishment until now. after the changes i chased a few bats but quickly became frustrated. well, i actually hated it. so i patiently waited for crops to grow today. 2 hours later, needing to get my travel glitch on, i did my other least favorite thing - went to auction knowing i would pay penalty prices. but no cabbage there, actually the entire day there were very few garden items useable for my purposes, in the food category. so rather than having the freedom and fun to play the way i want, i had restrictions that forced me to change my game play, which changed my entire strategy for the day.

      still in good spirits, i rose to the occasion and occupied myself while waiting to stock up my bags and get on the road. several hours later, i still did not have the amount of food source i wanted to support my plans. finally, a friendly glitch (u know who u r <3) let me know about the new adjusted time when applying guano. hurray! - well maybe not. after standing in sappatu slinks for 25 mins. feeding my meat to bats (10 pcs. result in 3 guano), i returned home with my 54 guano and applied the magic hard earned stuff. and waited. and waited. i was so not impressed. i am not here to debate or complain but i am also not here to have my time occupied by these grinds. i don't need more returns/currants or bonuses, i need more fun. chasing bats - not fun. being tied to the garden or spending the entire day clicking for food - not fun. it's work. today my life as a glitch was hard, wait - i already did the hard part the last 4 months. check my stats. so i quit fighting the power and went home.

      at home i hung out, played with wardrobe, rearranged contents of 14 bags, sent some mail, named my pigs again, bought another gnome for inside the house to say amusing things to me, read the forums, researched housing to decide where i forecast the most growth and decide if i am in the right location. i then reread my collection of plants/animal stories attempting to reframe a new strategy, and finally harvested my garden. i didn't replant. i am clicked out. so i bought two more meat lockers, two more butterfly feeders, ordered pigs on auction cause now i'm a meat eater and tied to returning home to empty autobots. on the road i will return to the straits and add egg eater back into my profile too.  none the less it is what it is. so i put on my cat hat and decided to run around doing nothing. ahhhhhhhhh. finally some fun. self made fun, not game play fun, but still fun none the less. but it was short lived and i came home sooner than planned to less supplies than anticipated. not fun. but i am determined to have fun. so now i'm gonna take several thousand currants and fill my bags with food so i can escape the grind for at least the rest of today.

      *sigh. every once in a while i feel strongly enough to put in my two cents and these last changes have impacted me greatly. i do realize others might not share my views but don't beat me up here. i am a beta tester, invited to give feedback and voice my opinion, so this is not just about letting off steam cause i don't like something. my style is my style, my fun is my fun. this is so tiny speck can figure out statistically how many others would use my style and maybe even decide that percentage too small to impact the final decisions they make. and that's cool too. i have been lucky to be invited and experience the good intentions that are the heart of glitch. do with this what you will, i'm off to ride the train - i like to cover the station name and not know where i choose to exit, just for fun!  
    Posted 17 months ago by coolbettycakes Subscriber! | Permalink
  • greenkozi & coolbettycakes, when you have a chance, read about the updates that went out earlier today (or just try growing more stuff in the game) and let me know if that helps.

    (For coolbettycakes: you should be able to produce much more energy from crops than you could use during the course of play. And, for greenkozi: without fertilizing you can do that cycle 32 times per day with the fastest crop; maybe a couple of hundred times a times if using fertilizer.)
    Posted 17 months ago by stoot barfield Subscriber! | Permalink
  • Please can you sort out the green growing progress bar showing grey.

    I woke up this morning to find my cabbage had gone over the new time and the green bar was grey. After all morning of watering & watching it I finally gave up and applied guano. My potatoes were good showing a nice healthy green bar...until I watered them and then it was grey so again no idea of when they will be ready? Eventually I gave up and applied guano to the potatoes too and still had to wait almost an hour until they were ready. This isnt how it is meant to be surely?
    Posted 17 months ago by Teena Subscriber! | Permalink
  • "Instead of assuming the point of gardening is to get the maximum number of crops out of a garden as quickly as possible, imagine that someone might think of gardening as a pleasant occasional task for which one's patience was rewarded with the fruits of the earth: wake up, swing by home, harvest what's grown since you last played, tend, replant, pick up or make some supplies and be off into the world."

    stoot. there is a group of gardeners who finds it relaxing "just to garden". what's wrong with that? the new time scales make this very difficult to do.

    gardening *has to be* a hobby, as you describe it.

    you could do everything you describe before, with the old times.

    if you wanted to be relaxed about gardening, you could plant a crop with a long cook time, wander off, come back just as you say. lots of people did that.

    the changes haven't created a new behaviour. people were already doing everything you describe.

    for people who just like to garden and see the fruits of their labour and experiment with different crops or whatever they want to do, that is no longer an option. well, unless they like clicking batterflies or gathering guano.
    Posted 17 months ago by striatic Subscriber! | Permalink
  • Here's a question: would gardening have been better if it had been fast?
    How about almost instant?
    Posted 17 months ago by Lord Bacon-o Subscriber! | Permalink
  • indeed, before this happened i was going to suggest in ideas plants with longer cook times for bigger yields. something for people to plant while they're asleep or for players who want to play glitch by appointment.

    that's all good.

    yeesh, stoot you really do have a very skewed perspective of what i think of the game. of course gardening as a hobby, without min maxing, casual, that's great. that's obviously one way to play the game and i never said otherwise.

    but you don't need to cut out .. let's call them farmers .. you don't need to cut out the farmers in order to do that. or take farming and making it a click and teleport intensive task.
    Posted 17 months ago by striatic Subscriber! | Permalink
  • "Here's a question: would gardening have been better if it had been fast?
    How about almost instant?"


    with certain crops it was.

    i know when i planted spinach by the time i was done planting 28 in the alakol large garden, the spinach would already be springing up and ready to harvest on the other side.

    at that speed in some ways the gardening actually became *less* efficient, because gardeners can use the gap times to gather seeds from piggies and with spinach the timing was all wrong.

    but the cool thing about gardening was that you could play it fast with fast crops or slow with slow crops. one way wasn't any better than the other but it was easy to pick a crop that was "your speed" and kinda throttle the experience to your comfort level while still staying in the same basic groove.

    Signed: Not a Hater.
    Posted 17 months ago by striatic Subscriber! | Permalink
  • Good question Lord Bacon-o: if 1h20m was *just right* and 3 hours for the same crop is way too long, would 40m have been funner? 2m? 15 seconds?

    Striatic, I'm just going by what you wrote: all that math above was presumably about min/maxing crop production times, no? And, farmers have not been cut out, nor has farming been "taken and made a click and teleport intensive task".
    Posted 17 months ago by stoot barfield Subscriber! | Permalink
  • I think that the current crop times are a good compromise between before this test and yesterday, especially now that the watering issue seems to be solved.  

    And this is speaking as someone who gardens regularly and is probably too lazy to actively collect guano except when I am already planning to mine.

    I checked the times on all the seeds, and I think they seem reasonable.  I don't mind doing longer crops overnight or when I am at work, and shorter crops during the time I am actually playing or around during the day.

    Thanks!  
    Posted 17 months ago by RainCat Subscriber! | Permalink
  • Some issues will never please everyone, I wonder if this should be looked at in a slightly different light?...maybe, in the future of the game, we may find ourselves having to choose certain specialities (I think this has already been mentioned)...and whereas some may want to mine at super-fast speed, others may wish to be top gardeners...and hence each player will have a different skill to add to the game, making projects more interesting and giving auctions  and trading a bit of a twist as not everyone will be identical and have identical skills.

    If this is the case, then maybe the old gardening times can be brought back and given to players who reach a top level in gardening skills, giving those who love gardening their passion back, and those who aren't bothered a chance to choose a different path that suits them.

    Personally I have no interest in reading that a x b = c...seeing a post that verges on something representing a school maths lesson is an instant turnoff for me and I usually skip it...but there are some that thrive on figures and statistics, so maybe it al comes down to letting people choose for themselves, that way everyone will have the ability to shape the game to their personal wishes, something which is beginning to feel like a serious requirement for the future.
    Posted 17 months ago by Morticia Addams Subscriber! | Permalink
  • I am not a gardner! Now I don't want to be a gardner!  I was enjoying gardening during last test and my garden was producing sufficient produce to somewhat sustain my energy level along with other foods, as well as it being economical, thus it was enjoyable to garden. I would plant a new garden in the morning and again in the afternoon, it worked for me.
    Now with the change, produce production is insufficient for my needs, it takes too much time! First I need to water several times each plot and it appears that different produce requires more or less watering? Maybe I am wrong but thats how it appears to me. Which ever 5 to 6 hours growing time is too long, because this is a game that uses much energy and food is the main source to replenish that energy. 
     I find myself purchasing the produce instead!- It sort of defeats the purpose of a garden. 
    Posted 17 months ago by Joy Subscriber! | Permalink
  • Joy, did you read this update from Stoot? No more multiple watering needed!
    Posted 17 months ago by Victoria Subscriber! | Permalink
  • Thanks for the changes!  I think this is a great balance to what it originally was and the change when this test started!  I love that watering now lasts 12 hours.  Good job, I'm happy with gardening again!!!
    Posted 17 months ago by Cabinwood Subscriber! | Permalink
  • stoot: I went around in Alakol. I'm pretty sure there are no batterflies in the entire region. I think they may have gotten removed.
    Posted 17 months ago by ss Subscriber! | Permalink
  • @stoot- thanks. did that happen after i posted? and/or does it only apply to herbs? because the chnages i noticed were just dramatically different from the previous time i had gardened. also, my plots, when i came back from work, were dried out. and wilted, which was sad to see, and not nearly as beauitful. this was something i thought about after i posted- i'm actually enjoying this game a LOT more (like i did when i first started) since i'm playing in spurts of an hour at a time, rather than 5 at a time. but hwne i'm penalized for going to work- my crops die because they don't get watered- it kinda sucks! i want my tomatoes!!

    i also agree with the poster who mentioned this takes the fun out of community gardening. i had a great time last test in the community herb gardens, as i don't need/want a house with an herb garden. this test, i came back and spent a couple hours there, and saw 3 purple flowers pop, which is... kinda dull.  i had multiple people come by saying they just wanted to plant some seeds, but there were no plots as i had tenderly planted and watered the empty ones, and none of the old ones had sprouted.  i didn't know about guano- maybe this would have changed the funness?

    i haven't played today, and will only have a few minutes this morning, and none after work, so i dont' know if the changes since your post will affect me, but thanks for listening- i really appreciate you listening to our comments, and i'm not at all against the idea of being able to speed up the process with fertilizer- that's cute- adorable really.
    Posted 17 months ago by greenkozi Subscriber! | Permalink
  • Generally speaking, I like the longer grow times (some grow times seem a little excessive, but it's going to take 11 days to learn Better Learning V, so whatever).  It makes the watering mechanic (and some other stuff) make more sense.  I do have a good reason to move now: my 8-plot garden is no longer useful for more than filling my own slots.  Happily, I just discovered that an 8,000c model is also furnished with fruit and veggies!
    Posted 17 months ago by Ida Keen Subscriber! | Permalink
  • Let me preface this by saying, I am not a miner. I took it up very casually this test (I only have Mining 1!) since I'd read how easy it is to make currents with it and wanted to upgrade to a house with an animal pen, but in general, I do not mine. My skills are very heavily weighted toward cooking and gathering/gardening, in order to be as self-sufficient as possible for a playstyle I've enjoyed very much.

    All I can really say to the changes is... I have adjusted. While I like the concept of the new method, I'm not too fond of it in practice. Taking game time to chase down batterflies (far more annoying to click/use enter on than butterflies, imo) and to feed them incrementally without misclicking is, well, a grindy annoyance. (Granted, part of that would be solved for me with a modification to the pop-up UI, as a couple of others have mentioned, but not all of it.) I've ended up having to compromise, rationing guano based on grow time to minimize my frustration with a) acquiring guano, and b) super long grow times without guano. It's not great, but it's better for me than the alternatives.

    I prefer the old system/times. I enjoyed gardening more in previous tests; it felt far more leisurely. I would let ready-to-pick crops sit for an hour or more if I was out and about, gathering/exploring/helping with projects, because I knew it didn't matter that much: I could plant more with low effort and harvest in a reasonable amount of time. I never felt I had to rush back home after a "one of your crops is ready to be harvested" message to avoid non-productive plots, the way I do now. I also find myself checking my garden every half hour or so to see if plots need watering or seedlings need a second douse of guano (against my better judgement) because their bars don't seem to be moving. (Yes, I did read the changes, but stuff still seems to be drying out quickly and at odd times, and I honestly haven't noticed the time rebalancing.)

    I'd just gotten to a point in the game where I felt I had enough of a foundation to really start "playing".... (I have yet to make it to one of the nostalgia areas, and most of the righthand side of my skill tree is completely grayed out!) However, I feel like I've been set back with unnecessary busywork.

    I appreciate that we will eventually be getting potions to speed grow time and bots to tend our gardens for us. However, neither of these things is liable to impact me much. One is a set of skills that will prolly be low priority for me as I assume they'll involve herbs and/or alchemy, and the other... I'm not sure why I would want it, as a player that enjoys planting and harvesting herself, apart from maybe watering away from home. Instead, or in addition, I would love Morticia's idea of higher level gardening/croppery/whatever decreasing growing times to be implemented.

    tl;dr: Not a miner, love gardening, hate getting guano from batterflies. Old > new imo. Sadness.
    Posted 17 months ago by MX Ghostie Subscriber! | Permalink
  • Just adding my more than .02 currants here...

    At first, when GOD said "don't freak out" and explained the system, I freaked out a bit. Partially because it was a little buggy, I couldn't get fertilizer to work, even after hours crops didn't finish growing, and they were constantly out of water, so after the announcement it seemed like a really bad change.

    Then things were fixed. Now I like it. A lot.

    It's an interesting way to start introducing a skills-based economy, where people would be able to pick the path they like most (with the minor levels of all the skills), and really work that, while also reliant on people with other skills (in an informal, non "clan" way). For instance, if someone likes mining best, they can mine and gather guano, and put some of the fruits of their mining (elements, chunks of rocks or mixed powders) and guano collection on auction. To maintain energy (or jumping ability, or other buffs) they would need to rely, in some way, on gardeners and people with a cooking/blending/shaking preferences. Gardeners would rely on miners or cave dwellers for guano auctions. (I haven't mentioned barnacle gatherers, or other earth-related skills, crystal making, block making and bog-area harvesting only because it's not my thing... for now at least).

    The problem for now is that the price of guano on the auction is so high (which I expect to lower as the novelty lowers) AND there's a meal vendor in the caves, mining/crushing related drinks can be purchased from vendors in the caverns, with others purchased from Helga near(ish)by, all at relatively reasonable prices. Thus, here's no real incentive for miners (or guano hunters) to rely on the produce, meals and drinks auctioned by farmers/chefs/drink blenders the way farmers (and the like) rely on miners (or guano hunters) for guano.

    I'm not suggesting getting rid of the meal vendor (but I'm biased because, darn it, I just love that NPC and his/her subtly pushy ways, following you around with that cart. It's genius!) or Helga (though I could be up for arguing the case to remove the flying humbaba and earthshaker for sale anywhere but via Helga), but it seems like it would create a more economically interesting game if the meals and drink prices from these vendors were set at a level that would make it beneficial to check and primarily rely on the auctions for food and drinks, using the meal and drink vendors out of emergency or laziness. This would even out the economic reliance scale between growers/food and drink makers  and miners. All of which would make the guano-for-growth issue less contentious for those who are up in arms about it.

    Stoot - I'm sure these ideas are not unique or ones you and your team have not already thought of.
    Posted 17 months ago by Eureka Subscriber! | Permalink
  • Thanks for starting this thread.  I have never liked squeezing chickens but now that there are no grain seeds, I find I have no choice but to squeeze and use fecundity powder.  Fortunately grain accumulates quickly, but i also use it quickly so now i buy buns for sammiches to supplement my grain shortage.  I like having the growing time slowed down cause the crops always seemed to mature when I was at a project and unable to return to harvest.  Then they would just wither away.  And I like that we can use guano to speed up the process when we're in a hurry.  I will probably plant more crops now
    Posted 17 months ago by Cat A. Tonic Subscriber! | Permalink
  • I'm ok with the grow times. I still think that cooks are underpaid and overworked, because I'm a cook. 
    Posted 17 months ago by KitkatCat Subscriber! | Permalink
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