While planting wood trees I noticed that it only takes a few people and the wood trees are gone. If we want these to be a sustainable source we need to make them much hardier.
1. If two people harvest a wood tree, it's gone. You get 40-80 lumber out of it, which is just terrible returns considering the amount of materials you put into the bean. If people pet, water and harvest as folks normally do with trees, that tree is almost certainly a goner.
2. When you're done harvesting the tree, it's gone. Then, someone tends the patch and plants a bubble tree in the patch. Eventually, there are no more wood trees in the whole world and we're back to poisoning trees again for planks.
Wood trees are a clever idea, but they definitely need some tweaking.
Personally, I think it's important that people learn by their mistakes. Mistakes like over-planting a single species and having to remove a tree to get some bio-diversity.
If wood trees are tweaked, I would seriously hope that it's not in the direction of making them immortal. To get wood, you need to remove a tree. To get more wood, you need to plant more wood trees. If you turn the forest into an orchard, you won't have a way to get wood without cutting down the orchard and replanting with forest trees.
I don't think they need to be immortal, but they definitely need to be more hearty.
From what I could see, wood trees only have two harvests in them when they start out. Maybe if the usual restrictions on watering and petting frequency were reduced/eliminated they might stand a chance?
40 wood is alot for one chop. I think people just need to learn not to cut down the last bit of a tree, but let it sit so it can grow (just like real life--wow!)
I never saw a wood tree larger than two whacks big.
But I really like the notion, that people have to take care of them for them to keep producing. And if people selfishly harvest that last bit, the trees are gone.
@Cupcake
I haven't tried planting the wood tree beans yet, but when I saw "Groddle Forest" I assumed it's because the wood tree bean description says they can only be planted in Ix or Groddle Forest. (Home patches being mostly exempt from planting limitations.) I too have a wood tree in my yard, but I'm not sure how long it will stay there since I don't consider wood to be all that scarce a commodity compared to earth and loam.
Perhaps the Powers That Be could tweak the wood trees so that the base is covered in metal! That should stop people from chopping them! However, the metal shielding would gradually rust away over time. Once the tree's gotten off to a good start, it's up to the players to decide what to do with it. Since the base would be metal, logically, you'd have to add some metal ingots to the bean seasoning recipe. The higher the quality of the metal you add, the longer the base shielding lasts! There might even be a way to make the base last forever! (Unless you forget to take care of the tree or break out the tree poison of course.)
Here's my chart of how long each base shield lasts:
No ingots: No shield
2 plain ingots: Shield lasts half a day
2 tin ingots: Shield lasts 1 day
2 copper ingots: Shield lasts 3 days
2 molybdenum ingots: Shield lasts 5 days
1 of each kind of ingot: Shield lasts forever
What uses can 40+ planks serve? I'd say nerf the harvest down to 12 or so...
Also, do Wood Trees blossom in their lifetime? I only saw 2 last test and they looked basically dead.
Oh, and finally, if anyone has a picture of a dead wood tree (killed by poison), please add it to the Wood Tree wiki page for consistency among the other tree pages.
Hburger: planks are needed for projects. Hopefully someday they'll be necessary for other things as well, besides splanking (I can only imagine what...) I haven't seen a wood tree past level 2, but I assume it always looks the same but taller--it provides wood, and nothing else...
Planks are also used in some recipes, perhaps only one (something about cedar smoked salmon).
Also, I'm currently growing a wood tree in my backyard to see it at its oldest. So far, it has not looked like anything more than a trunk with plank-like branches :\