Can we, possibly, instead, get the option with enough Soil Appreciation/Green Thumb to uproot a tree into a root sack so it and I can go on a magical adventure for a new home for him/her, instead of arboricide?
You could just chose not to kill the trees...you don't have to complete every quest or earn every achievement. There is also tree antidote for reviving trees that have been poisoned.
I do like the option of uprooting and moving trees though...sort of like capturing and moving piggies.
I think living with trees you don't want is much less fun than either killing them or transplanting them. Of the three options, finding them a wonderful new home appeals to me far more than the current ones.
Uprooting and moving trees sounds great - but we'd need more patches to move them to. As it stands, there is already a lot of agita over lack of patches.
Perhaps they could also be donated in shrines, if you can't find a patch to move them to. Kind of like capturing over-crowded piggies and tossing them into a shrine...
I do like the idea of being able to dig up the trees.
However, if they were real trees, and we had an arborist's point of view, we'd be cutting some of them down in order for some of them to be better able to grow.
I don't mind if they die - the are imaginations.
If you don't like to kill trees, don't kill em, others will do that for you ;).
I'm with Wren Bramble on this one: trees get harvested IRL too for various reasons. Also, IRL there would be fires, earthquakes, bugs, and other natural occurances which kill trees. Dying is part of the circle of life. (For animals, so is kiling, see the Lion King).
I felt more uneasy when squeezing chickens for grain. Squeezing their food out of em...
I wouldn't want this game to become something you can only play one way. Taking the options of killing trees out of the game would take away a choice, and I like choices ingame. Also, I like some "drama" or difficult choices ingame. I wouldn't want a Looney Tooney happy happy joy joy utopia world, all that goodness would get on my nerves, there would be no "evil" to make undone.
For example, great evil creates possibilties for Great Good. If there is no evil, the reward ( feeling) for doing something good is very very small. Or high mountains create deep valleys. If there would be no mountains, there would only be flatness.
I think you'd feel better administering antidote, feeling you have rescued a tree, then when someone simply moves them and you do nothing.
Personally I'm not saying that killing trees shouldn't be an option - I agree that if the game could only be played in one direction that wouldn't be nearly as interesting. But conversely, wouldn't having the option to move trees, as well as kill them if you like, make it twice as interesting?
Folderol has the gist of my suggestion. I mean, moving a tree is also laborious because you have to find a rare empty patch, assuming they're not donatable, instead of just killing them, which rewards a substantial amount of planks. It feels like a real choice between transplant and poisoning, both have pluses and minuses.
Transplanting is an interesting idea.
The only difficulty I see now is with the current dynamic with patches and, well, the excessive demand for loam. It would depend on how the tree transplanting gameplay worked.
In its simplest form, you'd uproot a tree and put in in your inventory, leaving a patch. If it left a FULL patch, folks who need loam and/or dirt, might get in the policy of up rooting trees and then ditching the tree.
Now if after you uprooted the tree, it left an EMPTY patch, there would be less of benefit to doing this (many folks wouldn't want to wait around for the patch to refill).
Still, it could be used to easily de-tree tons of streets. Unless there was a long cool down. Or a large energy cost... but energy costs are hard to use as balancers unless it is a percentage of max energy. (If it is a flat rate, it is either to little to impact high level players or too high to allow low level players to do it at all.)
And would you be able to drop uprooted trees w/o a patch? What would that mean? Would you need a pot to carry them in? Would that allow folks to put trees in pots ANYWHERE? Maybe... but they have a maximum time they survive in pots.
Could trees be donated? Should that cause guilt? (Probably not. You can donate pigs and baby animals now.)
Lord Bacon-o, you're right - the potential to wipe out whole streets of trees would be there (although having never used poison, I thought that would be possible currently without the option of transplantation). But I wander through Jethimadh a lot, and find trees that have died from a lot of neglect (because of the relatively low foot-traffic through there), leaving whole streets worth of patches. Maybe with transplantation people would be able to more easily complete the quests that require you to plant and tend a lot of seedlings, I don't know. There has to be some kind of a balance (a moral balance?) to it. I think the cooldown and a percentage of max energy (great suggestion!) may be the answer.
Haha that is a level of delightfulness worthy of Glitch, Glum. Except in my mind, for some reason, I see it being an actual race against a tree. That would make me chuckle heartily.
I like the idea of moving trees like animals; then they could be dropped, too, and there would be a market for mature trees. I think they should still moan and complain while you're trying to uproot them, though.