Topic

Time/Effort and Payoff comparison between gardening and other activities?

Hi all! 

I was wondering if anyone has done any sort of math on gardening versus other activities.  There are always requests for making gardening easier/quicker, but I wonder if the tediousness of gardening is because we tend to do more of it at once, "having" to stand there until we finish the plots, whereas tree or animal actions are a bit more freeform.  I feel as though the payoff per time and effort spent is approximately the same whether gardening or doing other actions, but it's just a hunch, and I'm wondering if anyone has any sort of math on the topic.

Posted 4 months ago by diaveborn ♥ Subscriber! | Permalink

Replies

  • humbabella is your best friend for this stuff:  http://mathemaglitch.blogspot.ca/
    Posted 4 months ago by Snowpuff Subscriber! | Permalink
  • Definitely an awesome blog :D  Not sure there is anything there about my question specifically.  Perhaps I shall work on my "summon Humbabella to this post" vibes :D
    Posted 4 months ago by diaveborn ♥ Subscriber! | Permalink
  • The only thing that bothers me, and find a huge time sink, is having to feed piggies to get back a seed or so. If only we'd have a verb similar to "shuck" but for veggies, it would help a lot in the popularity department.
    Posted 4 months ago by Heatseeker Subscriber! | Permalink
  • It's not just time/effort and payoff you have to take into account.

    I just do the stuff I like and don't do the stuff I find a grind. If I get currents or iMG in the process that's all tot eh good but not essential
    Posted 4 months ago by IrenicRhonda Subscriber! | Permalink
  • @Heatseeker: You do know you can feed a stack to a piggie now, not three at a time for one seed? One stack gives 27 seeds in about 4 plops

    I did always buy my seed but have produced my own since that change. 
    Posted 4 months ago by IrenicRhonda Subscriber! | Permalink
  • @IrenicRhonda: Oh I had no idea! What a huge improvement. Many many hugs for the share :)
    Posted 4 months ago by Heatseeker Subscriber! | Permalink
  • The reason I'm asking about time/effort and payoff is because if those are comparable to other things like harvesting from trees or whatever, then asking for, say, the ability to water all plots at once would be unreasonable, and I'm curious since it comes up so much.
    Posted 4 months ago by diaveborn ♥ Subscriber! | Permalink
  • I guess it depends on what you're gardening?  And also what 'worth' means to you.  Are you looking to maximize your iMG intake when it comes to harvesting gardens vs trees, or are you after currants?  Or both?

    I look at my backyard herb plots as an easy currant investment more than anything else.  I only plant yellow crumb; it takes maybe ten minutes to harvest and replant everything and then I can let it sit while I'm at work or asleep.  It's tedious because it turns into a button-mashing party pretty fast and I don't get to really play what I enjoy most about the game (i.e. travel and explore) while I do it... but each yellow crumb harvest nets me a really great currant return for my ten minutes of actual gardening time.  Each session also probably nets me ~2k in iMG.  But since it takes eight hours for the crumb to grow before I can repeat the harvest/replant session again, I can't exactly rely on my gardens as a reliable source of iMG.  I'm not sure if I've ever heard anyone saying as such.  I can probably make the same amount of iMG in that time by running around on a resource route or just exploring Ur.  I think I made around 16k the last time I spent an hour in Ur just harvesting and nibbling.  Even if you're growing stuff with a shorter growing period... there's easier ways to make iMG happen.

    But since it's related to the topic: my opinion on a mass water/tend function is that it would probably make the legwork a bit easier, sure... but unless they also do a 'guano all plots' function with that, too, it'll only cut out ten minutes in an eight-hour-long process for me.  (Which, hey, to be able to spread guano that fast would be amazing, but surely also extremely game-break-y.)  But I don't think those functions would really add anything negative or positive to the game, or even for the players besides some instant gratification.
    Posted 4 months ago by Classical Subscriber! | Permalink
  • Thanks, Classical, neat to hear your opinions on it!  Good distinction between img and currants - I hadn't been thinking of it that way because I don't tend to accumulate img very fast.

    So probably in an overall "worth" sense gardening compares to other stuff, just with different img/currant ratios.
    Posted 4 months ago by diaveborn ♥ Subscriber! | Permalink
  • I've been gathering data on gardening drops because they are a non-trivial part the profits of gardening.  Once I have a good set on that I think I'll put something together.  Gardening has always interested me because for a long time I felt that it was not worth doing - basically you'd get better returns gathering other things during that time.  Of course upgrades made herb gardening nearly three times as good as it was, and I feel that made gardening a good use of time.
    Posted 4 months ago by Humbabella Subscriber! | Permalink
  • Oooh awesome! I look forward to any possible results :)
    Posted 4 months ago by diaveborn ♥ Subscriber! | Permalink
  • Humbabella I think I know the drops off by heart if it helps. After gardening for so long what the drops are as far as I know is: one fuel cell, 3 lumps of loam, mega healthy veggie juice, gameshow ticket, modestly sized ruby, Musicblocks DR-1, DR2, XS-5, DB-3, DG-4 and BB-3. If I find more MB's i'll post again :)
    Posted 4 months ago by iDylan Subscriber! | Permalink
  • Humbabella probably already has that list -- she's much more interested in the numbers behind the drops and likely has been tracking every interaction with plots that she's made while working out those numbers.  

    Anyway, the value of gardening builds over time.  Meaning it's not the time it takes to plant and water my garden, it's the time the crop takes to come in.  Guano can speed it, sure, but that's time consuming to both gather and apply.  

    Actually thinking about the drops, gardening would lose value if you reduced the number of interactions required to set a garden.  

    Anyway, I personally don't want an upgrade that lets me manage gardens in one shot.  I've been asking since last fall for a helper or a new set of skills. The first idea I threw out, maybe in October or November, was a set of skills known as Farming, for "super-serious" gardeners, with its own set of tools designed to do entire gardens rather than individual plots (sprinkler, combine harvester, plow perhaps?).  

    My more recent idea is either a machine, an animal, or some kind of little buddy that does gardening in your absence or when directed but takes some other resource as "fuel" -- my specific idea was a drunken kangaroo gardener that works for beer and stashes your crops and herbs in her pouch.  
    Posted 4 months ago by Red Sauce Subscriber! | Permalink
  • Okay, I did the analysis.  Summary is that, to no one's surprise, herb gardening is a very good use of your time.  Probably to many people's surprise, Purple Flowers are often going to be the highest reward herb to plant.

    http://mathemaglitch.blogspot.ca/2012/08/diaveborn-asked-about-efficiency-of.html
    Posted 4 months ago by Humbabella Subscriber! | Permalink
  • once again humbabella produces an excellent write-up! way to go!

    PS - purple? really? wow
    Posted 4 months ago by Snowpuff Subscriber! | Permalink
  • Gardening is (imo) particularly useful to players who only get to pop into the world for an hour or two here or there.  
    Posted 4 months ago by WalruZ Subscriber! | Permalink
  • Reward vs. time investment.. if I only have to farm once for a 15k haul of yellow at my house, thats worth more to me than making 15k quicker on purple, but having to go back and farm over and over all day. In addition, when I have hours to spend. I can farm and replant other yellows, so in the same time it takes to grow purple I am actually spending that time harvesting more yellows.

    Great write up of course! Just giving my opinion based on the non-mathematical aspects of it.

    P.S Just a minute ago... You collected 422500 currants from a Storage Display Box.

    <3 Herbs.
    Posted 4 months ago by Ramus Subscriber! | Permalink
  • My point regarding purple is more about community gardens and herb garden housing routes.  There seemed to be some acrimony in the community regarding the planting of purple, so much so that it drove well meaning glitches to poetry.  But if you consider that a plot gives you around 65.1 currants worth of value just from the imagination and random goodies, and you total up the value of all the seeds, it's 736.9 from a yellow crumb plot or 189.5 from a purple plot.  If that's on a public route whether glitchen tend to come by every two hours, you'll get about five purple plots worth of harvest vs. one yellow crumb plot, which means quite a bit more profit, and divided amongst more glitchen.

    This does also take five times the work, but part of my theory is that the opportunity cost is low since your alternative activity is wandering around housing routes, not aggressively working on your ninja-gamer skills to harvest meat faster.  Of course, as I show, if you are being aggressive, purple can beat yellow crumb even when the opportunity cost of gardening is quite high.

    I agree, though, that if you are just doing your own hard garden, though, and you want to maximize profits, yellow crumb will use up most or all of your growing time.  I think in order to plant purple you probably have to actually like gardening, since a full backyard of purple could end up taking up over 10% of your play time.  Personally I mostly only plant yellow crumb at the moment, but I usually only harvest and replant once a day, so its clearly the best.
    Posted 4 months ago by Humbabella Subscriber! | Permalink