Reduction of food yields

[new.vogue.nightmare]

What we need is not lower food yields... but more preparation. It does not take one day to start a farm and grow and harvest foods. Getting a ninefold surplus from carrots is perfect but you have to take into account that there should be a minimum amount of time for farm projects. Gathering things (like berries and the like) of course, you can choose a small yield and get it done quickly. However, it doesn't matter how few carrots or potatoes you want, IRL if you want one potato it takes just as long to grow as a whole field. The difference of time is in the planting and harvest. There should be multiple projects for farmable resources. You can plant so many in an hour, more planting takes more time, maybe tools like plows or hoes or the like could make this go more quickly. Then there is the time it takes to grow. This would be a constant for each kind of food. Maybe making potatoes grow faster to offset their inefficient suckiness or something XD. The "growing" stage of the project could also be hindered by the number of people working on it. For example, a single man cannot tend to acres upon acres of fields without some kind of equipment or help.
Then would come the harvesting phase. Perhaps there would be a decay rate to simulate food rotting in the fields if it isn't harvested quickly enough.

The only problem with this is that this would require some major programming changes.

However, it would put enough effort into making food that food would actually become something you can sell at market. It would mean that someone cannot simply farm for carrots for a day, then work for nine more days on something else. However it would make new industries possible and open jobs in farming and agrcultural industries rather than every man and woman farming for thmselves.

Just imagine, small family subsistence farms for themselves, being a full time thing as it should for those who don't wish to live with society or in undeveloped areas, and huge agribusinesses in other places. Then the small developing areas can rely on the foraging things (like blueberries) and the populated areas would have the manpower to support a heavy farming industry.

In order to supply tools and machinery for this, other industries would be needed, because it would be too difficult to run a farm and build machinery unless you had a special department devoted entirely to that. Nonetheless it would open jobs for workers in manufacturing.

I apologize for my rambling but I think this is a good idea.

[Sho]

Yeah, that's sort of like my idea, except it would indeed be much more realistic. But for the sake of keeping the newspawn learning curve reasonable, I think the way to go is my idea. It wouldn't be too hard to implement, would it? As for the problem with starving newspawns, we could have newspawns start with enough food to keep them fed for the length of their first farming project. Of course, we could just force the newspawns to beg for food. It might make societies stronger. Everyone would have some friendships or loyalties from the beginning.
I like the idea of food-centric and animal-centric spawning. It wouldn't be so obvious a change, for one thing. Newspawns would actually have better chances of doing well.

[new.vogue.nightmare]

Well, the thing is, for one when children are implemented they'd have families to feed them until they went out and got a job. Of course if they did not get a job then they'd be screwed. In addition, there are forageable foods. For ecxample you may have noticed that the icon for potatoes is different from the icon for blueberries. There should be a difference between farmed foods and foraged foods. New continents for example should have people foraging for food until they are able to farm, simulating the realistic development in society. That way, you would have people continuing to forage for food, but not having enough time to progress, and then groups that chose to specialize, where the excess of food would make it possible for other industries to develop. the ease of food is the reason why the cantr economy is so slow...anyone can simply farm for a few days, go get resources, come back, farm a few more days, make stuff out of resources...of course it is quicker to specialize but the benefits are not great enough for actual societies to form in Cantr. Instead you have small groups of people who as players have decided to make their chars be "social animals."

[kroner]

i really like the minimum harvesting length idea. that would simulate having to put a lot of time into actual farming. i think i would even support a 1 year minimum time limit on farming projects. this would force career farmers and make eveyone else have to trade for food. gathering projects could stay as is, but they only usually yield healing foods anyway. also, before the first harvest on a new island, lots of people would then have to gather food while the farmers farmed simulating this period beofre farming technology. it should also require a few tools to farm efficiently.

but the main point is that the minimum project time idea would solve a lot of problems.

[Spectrus_Wolfus]

i like this minimum time length idea and the tool's needed idea but i think the tool's needed should only increase the end result. say with out any tool's you get 80% of the maximum yeild and with all the tool's that would help you get 220% yeild with it being a random of 20% either way from that number. maybe even increase the maximum amount you get from having all ool's so that an area with a harvester could plant more food and gather it faster. ok i got mixed up a bit so in simple term's what i have in mind is

Farmer Bob chooses to make a farm of 8000 potatoe's. he spend's the time needed to plant them which would be at say 1000 a day so 10 day's. they take 5 day's to mature so that when he's half way done the first are alrady for harvest. but them put a limit on it so that if they don't et harvested in a certain time they "go to seed" and are no longer edible. so in say 4 day's. but have an optoin so that people can help him harvest with a harvester or even by hand so that he can continue to plant the rest of his potatoe's but he isn't losing any of them to over growing. if people are trying to encourage society this may in order for large amount's of food to be made you'd need people to help each other out or nobody would get anywhere. if he was forced to do it all himself make it so he'd only end up with say 2 day's of extra food.not much chance of travelling off anywhere which he could do if he wantd but he'd be out of food by the time he got his next farming project done and with no garentee's of being even able to farm at the other end it would mean traveller's either have to trad for there food or be sponsored by a society in ordr to get anywhere safely

well just my 20 cent's worth anyway

ok more like a buck 50's worth hehe

[The Industriallist]

Believe it or not, I was trying to minimize the suffering of newspawns. I love the idea of requiring realistic farming like that, but I thought that would destroy any chance of the Cantr player group expanding.

Please don't go too far. There are a million realistic, interesting ways of making the game hopeless for newcomers. Showing off new ones isn't helpful.

Meh: depletion is scary. Maybe a good idea, but needs to be looked at carefully. It could do a lot more damage than the animals did back when they were acting like army ants.

Ilithar: So now, instead of getting a job because you like talking to people, your character will get a job because they want to get stuff faster than they can make it themselves. I never wanted farming with tools to be less productive (at least not necessarily ).

[new.vogue.nightmare]

Again.

This will not make it more difficult for newspawns.

Only different.

Instead of farming for a day of food and being able to slack off, they'll either have to farm constantly for themselves until they store up enough food to do something else (which should at least take a few days) Or, get a job. This will cause a slightly more realistic development curve, as subsistence farming without tools should be a part of everyday life, not something you do every week or so. As it currently stands, 'farming' is more like going to the supermarket--you do a little bit of work and you get enough food so you don't have to do it again until next week...

[Surly]

I think I can sum up my position on this issue easily.
New-spawns starting with a years food: good idea
Reduced food yields: Bad Idea
Minimum length for farming of one year: good idea
Requiring everyone to have bellows for steel: stupid idea

[new.vogue.nightmare]

Rather than starting with a year's food, how about having more wild foods available for forage? Possibly a wild variation of everything even. Then you could either forage for wild foods (similar to the farming and gathering currently in effect, and you get no more than 2 or 3 days of food for a day of foraging) Or farm the same thing (which would take the time of sowing, raising, and harvesting)

there could be two options for these then: the gather food button, and the farm food button. Some foods of course would be noncultivatible perhaps (like seaweed)

Also, the harvesting, rather than being just a project, could be something where at the end of each hour an amount of the harvest goes into the inventory of those working on it...then you could have dishonest farmhands, or people sneaking into Farmer Jones' field and stealing grain..

And like I said, if children are as close to implementation as I've heard, there won't be as much need for quick food sources, since parents will usually support the child at least until they're able to support themselves...unless they're lousy parents. Thus originates laws against negligence in some of the more caring communities

[The Industriallist]

I think that we actually agree about the point of this. I started this post, so it should be clear that I am for reduced subsistence farming yields. What I am worried by is the minimum farming period idea. Its good, reallistic, and would be an immense pain for someone starting out.

And I definitely think this will make it more difficult for newspawns. Just not unreasonably so.

Instead of farming for a day of food and being able to slack off, they'll either have to farm constantly for themselves until they store up enough food to do something else (which should at least take a few days) Or, get a job.

Exactly. But they can't farm constantly very well from a starving start.

[new.vogue.nightmare]

Thus the use of collectable wild foods which yield quite low (maybe no more than 2 meals per day) thus allowing people to subsist alone, although with a reduced production of other things, to simulate the difficulty of subsistence. Also, not everyone should be farmers. As it is, pretty much every single char in Cantr farms their own food whenever they run low. Now, if food were a bit harder to get, there would be such a benefit to having certain people specialize in the raising of food crops that any societies that didn't specialize would develop more slowly than those who did. Specialization means increased yield and paves the way for economies of scale.

And again, there won't really be a problem with a starving start if the whole children idea gets implemented, which shouldn't be too long. Until then people can rely on charity or public food service, which is quite plentiful in most areas. In fact, it's illegal to farm your own food in some areas unless you're a designated farmer, so it really doesn't matter in those cases.

[watermelonnose]

If we could have a project to build a farm. So much stone or wood for the fence around it with a lockable gate. Harvesting machines would only be built on the farms. There could be an option for different sized farms. Each size would only allow a fixed number of people to work it keeping the yields proportional to the size. Everywhere else outside the farms subsistence food gathering would be the norm.

[new.vogue.nightmare]

I was sorta thinking about that the other day, special buildings "enclosures", locks would only serve to make entrance an hour project (you can after all jump even a good fence with enough effort), and that would make it so you wouldn't have to share your harvester with everyone.

*farmer comes out of house, sees intruder trying to climg fence and fires his crossbow* YOU DERNED KIDS STAY OFF'N MY PROPERTY!

That would rule so much it makes me cry.

It would then be possible to farm outside of these enclosures, but it would be so eay to steal from the harvest of those fields.

[Spectrus_Wolfus]

then we'd need guard dog's

or just trapped wolves that won't attack if fed or trtained to not attack farm worker's

[Sho]

We could solve the "starving start" problem by having characters start with some food. It's not a very elegant solution, but I think it could be explained realistically. After all, characters are (at the moment) supposed to have been living for 20 years before they spawn. Wouldn't they have had some food with them?