Topic

what activity requires more clicks than getting seeds from piggy plops?

I recently bought a house and started gardening.  I might be doing it wrong, but using a piggy to convert vegetables into seeds seems to be the most click-intensive activity in the game.

select piggy
Feed
select vegetable
designate quantity 3
select plop
Examine
select seeds
Pick up

In many cases the selection of the piggy, plops, or seeds has the extra step of picking it out of a list of interactibles.

Is there any other activity in the game that is this involved?  I can type an entire sentence in the time it takes to go through this process.

Posted 14 months ago by Darth Barbie Subscriber! | Permalink

Replies

  • Dunno the answer to your question. But there are definitely too many steps for my (admittedly low) level of patience. And seeds are cheap compared to yield if you have Croppery 3. :)
    Posted 14 months ago by La_La Subscriber! | Permalink
  • Or, if you're me...

    stand next to piggy
    hit enter
    select feed
    select vegetable
    move to quantity picker
    accidentally hit enter before typing "3", thereby feeding the piggy half of your inventory of that vegetable
    weep
    pick up a single plop....
    Posted 14 months ago by Mr. Universe Subscriber! | Permalink
  • I purchase my crop seeds.  I rarely bother with the pig plops.  It's just not efficient.  
    Posted 14 months ago by Poppy of Detwoit Subscriber! | Permalink
  • @ Mr. Universe I feel your pain but that did make me giggle ;0)
    Posted 14 months ago by geekybird Subscriber! | Permalink
  • Mr. Universe... After you select the veggie, you can just hit 3 (rather than move to the quantity picker), and it will automatically change the number in the quantity picker to 3. Then you just have to hit Enter again. I discovered this on accident.

    And yes. I do love that we can pick the number of things now... But I'd still like to be able to feed a pig 15 or 21 of something and get 5 or 7 plops for it (or... 5 or 7 seeds inside one plop).
    Posted 14 months ago by Little Miss Giggles Subscriber! | Permalink
  • I can't believe I only just worked out I should hit enter in order to select the piggy plops from amongst my milling animals. I was getting so utterly frustrated at trying to pick them up by clicking on them that I resorted to buying seeds from vendors... DOH!
    Posted 14 months ago by geekybird Subscriber! | Permalink
  • @Little Miss Giggles - I found that too...  unfortunately, it doesn't keep me from hitting "enter" too soon on occasion.  :)   Especially when I'm "plop mining" 20 or 30 plops at a time.
    Posted 14 months ago by Mr. Universe Subscriber! | Permalink
  • Yes.. I've made that mistake as well! Just wanted to be sure the trick was known. :)

    I only do the plops for seeds on occasion, because it's still a bit tedious, at least if I want a full garden's worth of seeds. Generally I go buy the seeds in packets of 16's as it's much easier.
    Posted 14 months ago by Little Miss Giggles Subscriber! | Permalink
  • I was kind of wondering about this myself. At the very least, combine gathering a seed with examining the plop. It's not like you're going to examine the plop and leave the seed.

    And/or if you feed a piggy, make the default value '3' instead of 'half your inventory.'
    Posted 14 months ago by TK-855 Subscriber! | Permalink
  • @ geekybird  I just figured out the "enter" method last night myself, after many many hours of trying to pick them up with the piggies getting in the way. DOH! indeed.
    Posted 14 months ago by Leites Subscriber! | Permalink
  • I agree with the above comments but there's the other half of the cycle to consider as well: plant seed, water plot (maybe more than once), harvest crop, clear plot - repeat for the other 27 plots.

    This is ok at first, but quickly becomes unacceptable grinding. Once certain skills have been learnt by the magic rock it should be possible to condense the entire crop growing and seed gathering procedures for all of a house's plots into one or two clicks.

    On a similar theme, and again subject to a skill being learnt, it should be possible to completely mine a rock instantly in one click.

    Then we could spend time doing something new and interesting in Glitch.
    Posted 14 months ago by John259 Subscriber! | Permalink
  • I feel like you have to compartmentalize it into three distinct steps, or it'll make you go mad... Here's my seed gathering process (optimized for "maximum" efficiency):

    Drag veg from pack to piggy
    designate quantity 3
    hit enter/"OK"
    repeat 1 dozen times
    ......
    hit up
    select plop
    "examine"
    repeat 1 dozen times
    ......
    pickup one pile of 12 seeds

    (assumes all of one type of veg)
    Posted 14 months ago by Grem Sketch Subscriber! | Permalink
  • I'd agree that it should not take so many clicks to gather seeds.  If you feed a pig 9 or 12 or 15 items, you should get 3, 4 or 5 seed packets in the plop.  If there needs to be a maximum for one go or a bit of randomness in the result, so be it.

    Btw, comparing it to mining isn't even close.  You click mine, you wait, then get results.  You don't need to pick up a sharpening stone, sharpen the pick, shine the pick with a cloth, pick your nose with it, then mine and then repeat all of it again to mine a second time.  
    Posted 14 months ago by Edgar Druin Subscriber! | Permalink
  • replanting a full grown, dried up herb garden plot is
    select herb garden
    select which plot
    harvest
    hoe
    water
    (likely if you dont have herbalism, you've had to repeat at least one of these steps)
    select shuck
    (if you've harvested other plots of the same plant, or had the herb in your inventory before harvesting, select how many to shuck)
    click herb garden again
    click herb plot again
    click the seed you're planting

    so yeah.
    Posted 14 months ago by Priestess Mint Subscriber! | Permalink
  • I am with Mr. Universe- I somehow inadvertantly hit all or half and wonder where all my veggies went. I would love it if I could even select all plops and and examine all plops and have them sort in my bag into piles of seeds.
    Posted 14 months ago by Xyrem Subscriber! | Permalink
  • I HATE tending to my garden and generating seeds.. it's so boring.   Once I get my harvesting badges I am selling up for a firebog house.. and then will have to go through it all again to get my herb badges :'-(
    Posted 14 months ago by icatchm0nkeys Subscriber! | Permalink
  • Just an FYI I did the math and for 5,009 herbs from a 12 plot garden it will take you 400-some times. Sigh. I just got the 503 achievement. I feel so hopeless! :D
    ...
    D:
    Posted 14 months ago by Jhennauchan Subscriber! | Permalink
  • I hate when I accidentally feed, say, 500 cabbages to a pig. I don't mind being punished for carelessness, but it seems like a pig should not be able to eat that much!
    Posted 14 months ago by magic panda Subscriber! | Permalink
  • All this being said, Gardening and farming are NOT for everyone, which is why there are SO many other options out there.  If you are bored with gardening or find it tedious, go and mine for a while, or try come cooking or alchemy.  You can get all of the ingredients for cooking without lifting a watering can, so it's not necessary.  And there will ALWAYS be people who do these things because they enjoy it.

    As much as I think that the process for getting seeds is long and complex, it is, for me, WAY more interesting than when I tried mining/smelting for a while.  That's just how I play the game.  And cooking is way more complex!!

    For comparison, here are the steps for making a Hearty Groddle Sammich from scratch:

    Find a chicken
    Squeeze the chicken to get some grain
    Find some Spice Trees
    Harvest at least 5 allspice
    Find a piggy
    Pet the piggy
    Nibble the piggy to get meat
    Find a Bubble Tree
    Harvest enough to get 3 bubbles
    Convert 1 grain into Flour
    Convert 1 spice into a Pinch of Salt
    Convert 1 spice into Hot Pepper
    Convert 2 spice into Cumin
    Convert 1 spice into Mustard
    Convert 3 bubbles into 1 Tiny Bubble
    Make one bun (using flour and salt
    Make one Hot 'n' Fizzy Sauce (using hot pepper, cumin, mustard and tiny bubble)
    Make Hearty Groddle Sammich (using bun, hot 'n' fizzy and meat)

    So, 18 steps, at least 6 different skill sets, all for one Sammich.  And, if I may be totally honest, it is way fun. :D
    Posted 14 months ago by Grem Sketch Subscriber! | Permalink
  • I buy my seeds. I don't have the patience to feed them 16x for each harvest. If you could do it all at once, that would be awesome. 
    Posted 14 months ago by Wynella Subscriber! | Permalink
  • For efficiency and consistency, I think it's a good idea for "Examining" the plop to result in the seed packet automatically going into inventory. After all, nibbling a piggy results in the meat going straight into inventory, not on the ground. 

    But other than that, I agree with Grem Sketch's sentiments. Not every activity is going to appeal to everyone, and every person is going to have a different definition of what's fun and what's boring.
    Posted 14 months ago by Becky Subscriber! | Permalink
  • Grem Sketch, the difference is that in each conversion step and each make step you get more than one, and there is no wasted materials. If you make extra you can just sell it or use it or drop it on the ground if you don't want it, but you have choices

    If you over feed a piggy you still only get one packet of seeds. The fact that i've accidently fed a pig 400+ onions after a harvest is a bummer. Still only one seed packet here, 397 onions down the piggy drain.
    Posted 14 months ago by Lady SnuggleWumps Subscriber! | Permalink
  • It also hurts because the only reason to feed piggies / examine plops is to *slightly* reduce the cost to raise that crop. If you have a 1% change of accidentally feeding 400+ onions to a pig, you pretty much wipe out that benefit.
    Posted 14 months ago by magic panda Subscriber! | Permalink
  • @Lady SnuggleWumps and magic panda, I totally get that.  I've done it too, and it is really annoying and obnoxious.  However, I've also ground out all the cumin I'd need for 20 sammiches and then realized that I didn't have enough allspice left to do the mustard.  And, I fed a bunch of turmeric to a Batterfly (which, if I remember correctly, got me a whole lotta nothin').

    My question to you guys is this:  why are you carrying around 400+ onions when you are trying to get seeds out of a piggy?  Forgive my incredulity, but that's 5 pack spaces full of onions, over 100 Onion Sauces worth of produce.  At that point do you really need seeds to plant more onions? 

    Just like when donating to a shrine, making offerings to a piggy requires math, some planning, and a little bit of common sense...
    Posted 14 months ago by Grem Sketch Subscriber! | Permalink
  • And if you want to use guano to fertilize, that's a whole extra set of steps you need, one in which you can also feed several hundred items to a batterfly because of the new item quantity selection. I wish we had some options on both feeding pigs and batterflies that were single-click quantity selection like the old style. I can't imagine it would be difficult to implement it for just those actions.  For pigs, allow us to do a "feed 3", with batterflies, have "feed 1, feed 5, feed 10" and then the enter-a-number selector. I usually feed an item where 10 of them will get me 3 guano.
    Posted 14 months ago by MG Botia Subscriber! | Permalink
  • "I hate when I accidentally feed, say, 500 cabbages to a pig. I don't mind being punished for carelessness, but it seems like a pig should not be able to eat that much!"

    I think that if you feed more than about 25 of something to a pig, the pig should explode, scattering meat everywhere.  

    Making your own seeds is handy if you have a few spots to fill and want the seeds NOW.   I can't see making seeds for a whole 16 or 28 plot garden.   Your time is worth money too. 
    Posted 14 months ago by WalruZ Subscriber! | Permalink
  • Well, here's what happened.

    Before the reset, I liked to cook. Mostly awesome stew, for obvious reasons.

    Anyway, after the reset, I decided that I was going to learn the skills with the longer times first, for efficiency's sake. Meanwhile, I'd just bought a 50k house with 28 plots on it.

    So I started growing awesome stew ingredients in preparation for the day that I finally was able to cook it again. I was like a factory for making parsnips, onions, potatoes, and cabbage.

    What I would do is harvest my crop, jump down and feed some to my pigs to get seeds, and then go back up to the garden and plant them.

    Some crops yield as much as 18 per plot, which = 28x18 = 504 items.

    I learned that it's not a good idea to carry that much stuff around.

    So now, I harvest => drop on floor => pick up two stacks (160) => feed to pigs

    Actually, I've stopped feeding to pigs and now buy my seeds, but you get the drift.
    Posted 14 months ago by magic panda Subscriber! | Permalink
  • Oh, I agree that not every activity is going to appeal to everyone. I don't think this thread is a case of people that don't like something saying it should be changed so they like it equally as much as other things, though, so much as people who do like certain aspects wishing it to be a little better.

    I love gardening. I don't mind the process involved in gardening at all now that I have figured out that I can navigate the plots with the arrow keys (though I wouldn't be opposed to a "hoe all" and "water all" option with the proper, high-powered, and costly tool).

    I also like feeding the piggies; it just needs to be streamlined a teensy bit more, which could easily be done in being able to give them 3, 6, 9, 12, 15 veggies and get the appropriate number of seeds in one plop (I wouldn't expect it to work past 15 at the most). Having to go through the "Feed" process a few times (3-5 or so) to get enough seeds for a garden is fine by me. But having to go through it 16 or 28 times is a bit excessive (if you truly want to feed the piggies and do all your produce yourself- which I'd love to do).

    I think the suggestion of having the default for the quantity picker being 3 is also a good thing (when feeding pigs only). There's a reason I go to the gardening vendor to get my seeds rather than click a million times to get 16 seeds.

    On the question of why someone might have 400 onions in their pack... perhaps they just harvested and while they had the produce they wanted seeds of in their inventory, they started feeding piggies? Makes more sense to me than juggling my inventory around, especially when I am only logging in long enough to harvest and replant (granted I usually try to have seeds on hand already, but that's just me). I've probably got a thousand rice in my bags at the moment, because I haven't had time to put it away properly like I usually do.
    Posted 14 months ago by Little Miss Giggles Subscriber! | Permalink
  • WalruZ: Yes, I agree that mass feeding for piggy plops is not worth it. It's just that I never had a 50k house before, and I was experimenting with different strategies for gardening.

    In my old (10k) house, I had long ago given up gardening for different reasons -- after they slowed down crop growth, I couldn't produce enough produce to satisfy my cooking so I ended up buying produce from vendors anyway. And growing a bit of it to save some $$ seemed pointless.
    Posted 14 months ago by magic panda Subscriber! | Permalink
  • It would be nice if the piggies eating from feeders plopped appropriately.  Because of the click rate I've almost given up gardening entirely.  I don't enjoy mining, cooking is a mild distraction and there hasn't been a rook attack whilst I was online since I learned Martial Imagination over a week ago (I have since learned Piety and other things).  I am struggling to find things that engage me in game at the moment :-/
    Posted 14 months ago by Storm Subscriber! | Permalink
  • The herb garden probably is a little easier if you use the mouse to select the plot.  Just mouse-click on it a few times in a row.  You probably don't even have to move the mouse that much.
    Posted 14 months ago by Darth Barbie Subscriber! | Permalink
  • We should lobby the Giants to add roto-tillers and sprinkler hoses to the game. 
    Posted 14 months ago by WalruZ Subscriber! | Permalink
  • Yes, I feel like we should at leat have a machine to water these plants! How can I melt metal in the comfort of my own home but still have to use a watering can?
    Posted 14 months ago by Asha Greyjoy Subscriber! | Permalink
  • Well, feeding piglets is limited to 1 item when you select feed. Can't feed them more. If piggies were the same way with a feed 1 (if they're hungry) or feed 3 (for seeds) options, it would save all the farmers and pig nibblers from flushing their work down the pooper.

    Optionally, I would love to see a single plop with multiple seeds in it. It would make gardening less dependent on the Vendors. And if seeds are removed from the Vendors to create a player driven economy like Stoot talks about, this will really be a much needed option.

    On the other hand, I do appreciate the humor of a piggie with machine-gun like plops if you over feed them. "I feed 500 onions to my pig by accident and had to take cover as stinkin plops went everywhere!"
    Posted 14 months ago by Ayrock Subscriber! | Permalink
  • gosh, for real.  I always set aside some of my harvest in a pile of food designated to be piggy plop fodder, but to be honest, the thought of all that clicking and the very real possibility that I have a brain fart and feed a pig 33 instead of 3 just makes me go buy seeds instead most of the time.

    lame-o.  LAME-O.
    Posted 14 months ago by Wintera Woodswitch Subscriber! | Permalink