Idea: Make crop farming more difficult/interesting

[cosmicdan]

Howdy,

I had the idea of making farming more interesting with a few new mechanics. I wanted to code this in a mod myself, but thought I'd propose the idea to you first (it could go well with Harder Farming):

1. An option for farmland hydration to require a water block as directly-adjacent (instead of 4 block range). Consider this as "Easy difficulty hydration" mechanic.
2. An option (alternative to above) for farmland to require manual watering of farmland (with a watering can and maybe a sprinkler later that can have water piped into it). The farmland can dehydrate either after every growth stage of the plant - this is "Medium difficulty hydration" - or at random with a low chance (but a more common chance than plant growth stage) - this is "Hard difficulty hydration";
3. Plants can die if not hydrated (Medium or hard difficulty);
4. Weeds can overgrow the crop if too hydrated (Hard difficulty only);
5. A custom difficulty for configuring each individually could also be possible.

Motivation for this idea is how I'm slightly unhappy with hardcore hunger mods out there forcing you to make a lot of different food types, make lots of them, and make you eat often - I think it would be more fun if some of that hardcore survival aspect was shifted towards realism in crops.

If you think that this is outside the scope of Harder Farming then I'd totally understand - a separate mod would work fine. I'd also love to see things like growth/risk penalties for not doing crop rotation and a simple seed quality system a la AgriCraft, but I doubt those would belong here....? I'm also not sure of the technical feasibility (the former in particular would probably require attaching a TileEntity to every Farmland).

[Draco18s]

Thanks for the suggestions! They definitely fit into the idea of Harder Farming, but in terms of how easy it would be to actually code is another problem.

A few comments:

• Due to the way vanilla checks for growth (adjacent hydrated farm blocks) I'm not sure reducing the hydration range of water blocks to 1 would be a good idea. Would also require a custom farmland block (replacing the vanilla block in one manner or another; not super compatible with other mods that may wish to also alter the farmland block)
• Personally against this as it causes an excessive need for the player to manage their farms. Sprinkler as an automation is an idea, but how the sprinkler functions (ie. where is it drawing water from?) becomes another problem
• Crop death / conversion to weeds I am against on the idea that destroying crop blocks has the potential to set the player back resources while they're off doing other things (mining resources, exploring, etc). I had concerns about this when I added weeds to begin with.
• Seed quality uses a TE system. The Crop Sticks are that TE (and how AgriCraft, etc. get around not needing to use a custom farmland block for things like nutrient levels).

That said, if you want to create a farmland block override as a mod, it would integrate well with pretty much everything. There's the possibility that another mod also changes the farmland block, though it's unlikely.

[cosmicdan]

Good points, indeed it wouldn’t be to everyone’s taste, the loss of resources would annoy many. The plan for this mod was to be used on a multiplayer server where we'll have a player-made economy, so the production realism of raw crops fits in with it :) Thanks for your input, I’ll just leave it on my “maybe one day” list for now 😊 Regards, Daniel Connolly From: Draco18s Sent: Thursday, 28 September 2017 3:44 To: Draco18s/ReasonableRealism Cc: Daniel Connolly; Author Subject: Re: [Draco18s/ReasonableRealism] Idea: Make crop farming moredifficult/interesting (#16) Thanks for the suggestions! They definitely fit into the idea of Harder Farming, but in terms of how easy it would be to actually code is another problem. A few comments: • Due to the way vanilla checks for growth (adjacent hydrated farm blocks) I'm not sure reducing the hydration range of water blocks to 1 would be a good idea. Would also require a custom farmland block (replacing the vanilla block in one manner or another; not super compatible with other mods that may wish to also alter the farmland block) • Personally against this as it causes an excessive need for the player to manage their farms. Sprinkler as an automation is an idea, but how the sprinkler functions (ie. where is it drawing water from?) becomes another problem • Crop death / conversion to weeds I am against on the idea that destroying crop blocks has the potential to set the player back resources while they're off doing other things (mining resources, exploring, etc). I had concerns about this when I added weeds to begin with. • Seed quality uses a TE system. The Crop Sticks are that TE (and how AgriCraft, etc. get around not needing to use a custom farmland block for things like nutrient levels). That said, if you want to create a farmland block override as a mod, it would integrate well with pretty much everything. There's the possibility that another mod also changes the farmland block, though it's unlikely. — You are receiving this because you authored the thread. Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub, or mute the thread.

[Draco18s]

Hey, try doing it yourself. A custom farmland block would be a pretty simple mod, all things considered. 95% of what you need is already available in vanilla, the rest is just the mod setup, which there are tutorials for.

Give it a shot. :)

[cosmicdan]

Oh I just have a lot of other things I want to do first is all I meant haha 😊 I’m pretty sure I could do it all, it’s just a question of how far I actually want to take it – I’ll take a crack at it once I finish with some more immediate needs for our pack.

[Draco18s]

Enjoy!