Gather beeswax from beehive.

[Doug R.]

It would be nice to gather beeswax from a beehive. It's not as if beeswax is common.

[CrashBlizz]

With the beehive being as usefull as it is, automatically producing healing food, I think its quite good that not every town can instantly have one - because they don't have beeswax.

[SekoETC]

Well, currently since you can't make several beehives in one town, beeswax is pretty useless after you get one hive, unless you're making candles or sealing wax. It seems like an artificial restriction that you can't have several beehives, but since you only need to add flowers that can be grown practically for free, there's very little work involved in beekeeping and I suppose allowing several hives would upset the balance. I wish it was different, though...

[Arenti]

Well with the candles implemented now I could use a lot of beeswax actually.

[Piscator]

Generally speaking I'm not a huge friend of introducing more ubiquitous resources, but I guess beeswax wouldn't hurt as it has so little uses.

About the other thing, making honey will likely not stay this easy forever. The initial amount of flower will have to be raised to a sensible level and then the restriction to one hive per location would be unnecessary.

[Miri]

I don't see why not

It would be a manual project added to the hive's project list, giving around day-worth of normal gathering of beeswax... or maybe a bit more, since handling a hive should be a little bit easier than wild bees, nesting in some old tree or something. Hives are built the way that alows easy removal of wax and honey.

To hinder the honey production, why don't make it manual, or at least half-manual, like drying meat? Right now, on PL island there's a place where a set group of people makes tours around abandoned towns, just setting up honey gathering projects and collecting outputs...

[Piscator]

And that's where I disagree. You might be right from a realistic point of view (and even then a location with the resource "beeswax" could translate to a place with hundreds of bee colonies where the wax can just be picked up), but in terms of game balance it makes no sense to offer a certain resource more conveniently and in higher quantities than the natural resource. People lucky enough to have found a place with beeswax should keep the locational advantage. Otherwise they would build a beehive even if they have the resource present and all places truely would become the same.

In short, beeswax from beehives, yes, but maximally at half the natural gathering rate.

[wadko]

About the other thing, making honey will likely not stay this easy forever. The initial amount of flower will have to be raised to a sensible level and then the restriction to one hive per location would be unnecessary.

So you are saying that you will increase the amount of flower used for the honey production, but you will also increase number of beehives you can build in one location? No, thank you. I feel better with one beehive.

[Piscator]

I guess so, but that doesn't change the fact that beehives are giving honey away practically for free.

[wadko]

Not exactly for free.

There are two ways of gathering flowers for the beehive:
1st - gather flowers or herbs in the place where you are.

2nd - grow flowers in a flower pot, windowbox or herb garden.

I can see that in one town where they used windowboxes very often now they aren't using them. They have (luckly for them) flowers so they gather them, it's not automatic like grownig in flower pots but it's cheaper.
Herb gardens can't be build everywhere, but they are cheaper in use than flowerpots and windowboxes. Still it's not automatic and you need fertilizer (composted grass or dung).

So it's not exactly for free, you need more people to work to keep up with the honey production before the "flower pot and windowbox change".

[Piscator]

Indeed, but a beehive operates with 50g of flowers, an amount you need to work about a quarter of a day for (assuming you have to grow them), and gives you 180g of honey. That means that you can get 5.4 health points worth of a very compact healing liquid practically everywhere. For comparison, harvesting onions for two hours with a shovel would only give you enough food to heal 4.9%, which would also nearly weigh twice as much by the way.

[wadko]

50g of flowers, an amount you need to work about a quarter of a day for (assuming you have to grow them)

Where you got that?

[Piscator]

In one day you can grow 40g of roses with a windowbox (actually 50g, but you have to use 10g as seeds), which requires 60g of water. In one day you can collect 300g water with a pump (even more with a well). This means you can grow (at least) 200g of roses with the water you can pump in a day, or 50g roses with the water you pump in two Cantr hours.

If you don't have a pump, it takes considerably more effort of course, but even then you can produce more healing food in six hours than by e.g. gathering raspberries for eight.

[CrashBlizz]

If you don't have a pump, it takes considerably more effort of course, but even then you can produce more healing food in six hours than by e.g. gathering raspberries for eight.

See, now that you say that I see it as ok. I mean in order to do that you have to have gone through the effort, and got the resources, to build a pump and garden and beehive or whatever. Raspberries you just walk into town and pick straight up. Of course there should be some big pay off at the end, even if it needs tweaking.

[Piscator]

Well, "just walking into town" can take several years if you happen to live in a place that doesn't have raspberries. It's a huge advantage to have a source of healing food right in your town, so I guess that should be compensation enough for the effort put into it.

Producing cheap resources until infinity is definitely not the kind of pay-off we should desire, as that kind of thing is what's causing the current inflation.