Gather beeswax from beehive.

[wadko]

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.

Okay... so you need 60g of roses to make honey and start another growing project. It's 1,25 Cantr hours. You need also 60 grams of water (for growing roses in a windowbox). It's 0,25 Cantr hours if you are using a pump. Then you put flowers into a beehive for a day and get 180g of honey. Totally it took 2,5 day to obtain 180g of honey. The automatic projects don't need human to advance, but they do consume time. Plus you need to have build the machines and tool you need.

Where in location with a healing food you just go and gather it. It could be onions, it could be sugar or grass, but you don't need to take preparation to obtain healing food, just go and take it.

[Piscator]

Sorry, but you can't count automatic projects, neither the automatic growing of the flowers nor the automatic transformation into honey. It takes some time, yes, but it's not your time. You can spend that time on something completely different, gathering more healing food for example.

Building cost for machinery and tools also account to next to nothing in the long run.

An example: If you build a beehive today and use it for a hundred years (and currently there's no reason why you shouldn't use it even longer), every day of use costs you 0.5g wood, 0.15g of beeswax and 0.1g of iron. If machines never wear out, you might as well ignore their costs.

[wadko]

The beehive can be stolen.

[Miri]

Sorry, but you can't count automatic projects, neither the automatic growing of the flowers nor the automatic transformation into honey. It takes some time, yes, but it's not your time. You can spend that time on something completely different, gathering more healing food for example.

Then how should time of automatic projects be counted? It is a certain cost - you can work on something else then, sure, but you don't get the output instantly either. You're more-or-less bound to the location till it finishes, or at least you've got to be there when it does.

Also, I think the cost/effort of building a beehive, window box and getting the initial bunch of flower material has to be taken in consideration as well. Neither of those require only common resources, and needs no preparations and tradings to be done prior.

Maybe if the machines (beehive included) would decay over time/over use, and were inrepairable/needing resources to repair...?

[Doug R.]

Allow me to clarify the numbers in this discussion:

With a shovel, you can heal 19.4% damage per manned day of work gathering onions.
With a knife, you can heal 3.33% damage per manned day of work gathering grapes.

Using wild roses gathered with scissors, you can heal 43.6% damage per manned days of work with honey

However,

Using gardened roses, grown with grass fertilizer, you can only heal 4.62% per manned day of work.

Gardened flowers reduce the efficiency by nearly a factor of ten. This seems more than acceptable to me, so, instead of making the healing powers of fermented beverages suck even more by making honey even less efficient, maybe the discrepancy between wild and gardened flowers should be narrowed by some means.

[Piscator]

I wonder where your numbers come from. Gardening should only be slightly less effective than gathering hild herbs without tools. (150g/dow in automatic mode and ~100g/dow with assistance). That's only the factor three, not ten.

[Doug R.]

I'll post the detailed breakdown here when I have time.