A6.0 Feedback: FARMING

The new Art for the pumpkins and tomatoes and others is very nice!
But... they're a bit too tall; can't hardy see through them to tell if plants on other side are harvestable.
I know in RL I've never had a 6 foot tall tomato trellis, but maybe these are "Superior Super Space Tomatoes!" and need one that tall, heh
All kidding aside, certainly corn grows 5+ feet but corn's fully grown graphic is easier to see through than pumpkins or tomatoes and the nice thing about the corn is it drops to a third it's 'harvest time' height when harvested, allowing you to see the rest of your garden.

A few screen shots to illustrate:

1) First Person View (FPV) the 3x3 has; Note all the Aloe plants are ready to harvest.
row-1 (left to right) Corn ready to harvest, Corn just harvested, Wheat just harvested.
row-2 Aloe, Aloe, Wheat ready to harvest
row-3 Aloe, Aloe, Aloe
--- 2nd pic is toon standing in middle of harvested Corn in Third Person View (TPV)


2) (FPVa) the 3x3 has;
row-1 Tomatoes ready to harvest.
row-2 Pumpkins ready to harvest.
row-3 Space Durians ready to harvest.


2) (FPVb) same 3x3 as above except the the middle column has been picked; harvested middle Tomato and middle Pumpkin and middle Space Durian.


2) (TPVb) same as above except toon standing in middle of picked Tomatoe plant and in Third Person View


Really do like the new art; very realistic, nicely done!

 

I am pretty new to Empyrion, but watched several YT LP's. My main issue on this topic is the grow light. Supposedly it works for a 3x3 area. But straight underneath it is 25 degrees (C), were the 8 other have less. In my opinion all 9 growing plots should get the same stats. Else you might have to fill the entire ceiling with grow lights to encounter any breaches or weather conditions or whatever effects. And the room/area get very pink-ish ... In E6RC4.x I once worked outside my base during a thunderstorm and cold outside on Akua. When returned inside almost all plants were dead, except the ones directly below a growing light. The base were not airtight, forgot the elevators to the roof (after understanding that I just put a small block above to seal it temporary).
Second thing is giving the ability to get more schematics for seeds. I wrote more about that in another thread somewhere recently.

EDIT: Still this weather feature in A6 that can cause death of plants if the hull is breached (O2 leak), even on Akua if cold outside. Do not use too much time if to rebuild something.

 

I don't know where to put this thread, but maybe here, because it impacts also on the farming mentality:

Will there ever be a function, to sell your stuff (eg Food, crops, parts, metals etc.) to Traders? Because in my opinion this would make the trading stations a more compelling stop and would improve the trading system

PS.: Please move this thread to a better spot, I couldn't find one^^

 

The growing light actually produced heat in EXP...
It was only a couple degrees C, and only underneath it, not on the 8 surrounding plots...
Don't know if it's changed yet...

 

Grow Light placed 1 block above, in the common pattern. I have a picture of the base in the thread "What did you do today ...". When I took out parts of the floor to put more GP's in, the temp started to drop due to got unsealed (ground under) except directly below GL. 6x6 area, 4 GL. Is it a bug if the GL produces heat (25C)?

 

My main suggestion with the farming is to make the crop plots require wood and not plastic. Started on Nigunes... no corn plants so no plastic so cant place a grow plot to grow corn to get plastic. Only way to get the grow plots was to take the from a POI that I put a core into or hope I randomly looted plastic from a crate, which with the one poi i completely looted i did not get. I ended up just building a CV without any crop plots and flying to Akua to get some corn.

Also the starting huts for SP have outdoor growing plots even on planets like Nigunes where it is way to cold to grow anything.

My suggestion is to make 2 types of grow plots, ones that use wood or crushed stone with nutrient solution and are listed as basic grow plot, or non air tight. Then make a second grow plot that uses metal and plastic and is air tight that can be used with ships. You could still place the first type in a CV but would need to completely seal the room with other metal blocks before placing the grow plots

Currently grow plots are acting as a their 2 tech, you cant grow plants until you are into the higher tier items and they should be a starter type item one of the first keys to survival.

 

Hehe, yeah. Built that before outdoor temps killed plants It needs an update/variation for non-temperate planets.

 

I agree. I was really surprised I couldn't create grow plots without having grown something first. And that first corn takes forever to grow, and you have to use it to create corn seeds. As you say, planting crops is a "starter" activity, and it took me a surprisingly long time to get my farm up and running. And even then, I couldn't have done it without the survival hut. I'm surprised corn isn't a collectable resource... just replace "corn dog plant" with "corn" and that would make a big difference.

 

I think that in a survival game farming should not be easy so I like that it takes a bit to get it going. Although care should be made to make sure its possible to do without a high degree of luck on all starter planets. I like the effect of weather on farming. But I also think farming gives way to much experience.

Getting 1800 exp from a 9x9 plot is a lot. Once you get some farms going (which does take some doing initially) it really is very easy to do this 12+ times for half a level of exp or more. Take some of that farming experience away and give a bit more for building activities like upgrading blocks or device creation or collection of goods from water/h20/oxygen generators, or auto miners, or , my favorite, more exp for exploring. I guess there will always be ways to farm exp but its a little bit ridiculous at the moment.

It would be cool if you got a high one time exp bonus for the first time you picked a particular crop from a farming plot. Or maybe some other reward as a solo mission.

 

Lack of fiber and corn (and seaweed) on Masperon basically means starving to death repeatedly unless/until you get lucky with a POI (and manage not to be immediately flattened by the PV in the meantime). I like a hard start on a hard world, but without any non-RNG way to bootstrap into a farm, it's not any fun. Honestly, farming is much more fun (and reasonable to get started with) in Minecraft.

A few suggestions, in no particular order:

• Produce fiber from most organic material. It's fine if it takes a while to do and/or requires multiple inputs (ideally you could mix and match the multiple inputs, but that may not be possible at present given how recipes are currently handled).
• Produce only one seed from each seed recipe, so that farm expansion proceeds linearly rather than geometrically (even better, require double the current input to make it sublinear).
• Reduce the XP from harvesting (maybe 10 XP max).
• Have an improvised terrain placeable grow plot made from wood and rock dust; it would take twice as long to grow plants and would only grow during the day as it wouldn't have an integrated light.

 

So we've been trying to get plants to grow in our base for days now without success. As there is little to no feedback from the plant system to figure out what's going wrong, I post an image of our setup here:


Whenever we leave the planet shortly (no other player in that playfield) all our plants are dead the moment we return. The base has power, the lamps are on, ventilation is on, oxygen is sufficient, temperature seems ok and so does radiation, yet the plants are _always_ dead as soon as we check on them.

 

This is a bug might want to re post in the correct forum.

 

I don't understand the changes to crop yields. I make tinned food, and the yield on planted tomatoes went to 4, but the recipe now requires 4. What was the point of that, exactly? Meanwhile visibility has been reduced significantly in my greenhouses. Overall, my opinion of the changes ranges from "meh" to "i don't like it".

 

@Menos Check if the temperature is 25 when you stand directly under a Grow light. In several SP (E6 to A6 versions of the game) I have experienced that if the room is not airtight and cold weather outside, plants can die in seconds. The ones straight below a Grow Light survived. On Akua, so no O2 issue for me.
One issue can be if the MP server is set up with an older patch and got updated, or your install is newer. Still Alpha game, so maybe no "bug" if a new patch makes older saves/servers buggy. When coming back from a trip, then it will take some minutes where the playfield with the base is refreshed and time is active, before reach the base and go inside.
Else a bug probably.

 

Even worse, if you look at the overall food points, it's not worth cooking anything now (aside from canned vegetables for very long away missions); 1 space durian plant gives you 4 space durians (40 food points each) for a total of 160, while cooking them into space fries only gets you 75. 3 space durian plants is probably enough to keep you fed indefinitely. It seems like the devs forgot to lower the food points of harvested foods when they increased the harvest sizes.

Personally, I'd like to see food points cut in half and harvests cut in half while retaining the same more expensive recipes. Also, while we're at it, we should get only one seed per seed recipe. Then farming would have some challenge to it, and there'd be a reason to have more expansive grow operations.

 

Why? Because the graphics for the certain plants changed and players complained that they look so big that they must yield more vegetables to make sense... *sigh* It was just a quick 'fix' (for a non-existing problem) - food related stuff will have proper balancing act at some point im sure, not just right now as it works 'good enough'.

Speaking of which - we've been finding it funny that you need FOUR whole pumpkins in order to make ONE cookie! And it's probably not even worth it as @geostar1024 noted - raw food can offer more food value than cooked. Just that you can get a tummy ache...

 

Attn: Developers
My girlfriend noticed my aloe plants swaying with the wind. She noted, based on experience with real-life aloe plants, that mine moved entirely too much. The plant is much more sturdy and would not move that way unless subjected to extreme winds. After watching some of my other plants; it seems strange that only the aloe would move, when it is much stronger than say, the fiber plant.

Thanks for your hard work and consideration!