Farms

[Gunther_01]

Idea for building farms for specific food purposes.
For examples I will use Potatoes

You can build your farm as you would a normal building. Then within that building you can build plots designed for specific plants. Think of there being a back door to the farmland.
Lets call our building Gunther's Potatoe Farm, and our farming Plot can be called Potatoe Plot #1.
Now, initially you would plant any amount of Potatoes up to how many you can dig in a day (i forget).
After youv'e planted them, you will of course need to tend to them.
You can have a project "Tend Crop". The character will tend to the crop, and it will take a large ammount of time to do so. Say two days.
Tending speed can be increased by additional characters helping, and tools such as the dungfork and the potatoe harvester.
Tending should be done every two days to get maximum yeild, with the potatoes being completed after a game year.
Now the total yeild has to be calculated.
Ideally, a ratio, or percentage, has to be made between the possible and actual tending time. Then multiply that by your actual original amount of potatoes planted and voila: you've got a lot o' food for alot o' people for a year, in which your preparing another harvest.

[creepyguyinblack]

Yes, I have suggested a similar idea in the past. My idea was to have a new set of projects in the manufacturing page called "farms" or somesuch. There'd be a farm project for each type of farmable food, and it'd take a certain amount of the food, lets say 1000g of potatos and also gathering the foods by hand would be reduced by half or a quarter to make farming more required for large supplies of food. The raw food added would represent the seeds and such. Then the project would take five to ten days and yield maybe 5-8k of potatos. Each project would have to have someway of detecting the location terrain type, so you couldn't grow wheat in the desert, but one could transport some wheat grains and grow them in a field that used to only have stone or something. Now that water is about, perhaps it would be a requirement too of some extent. This isn't a precise proposal yet, but more of a concept that needs to be refined but I think it could work great and inspire a new cantr economy with some people being farmers and others having tot rade their goods for food.

[Jos Elkink]

The interesting thing about your suggestion, TJ, is that it doesn't even require programming - RD can implement this. Yet, please don't ... It quite badly interferes with other plans I'm working on to a similar effect ... Could you do something for me? Collect all information on the forum on suggestions related to land usage / farming, and email them to me? *grins*

[Spectrus_Wolfus]

*hops around excitedly* gimme a hit gimme a hint please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please

[Jos Elkink]

See thread on grids

[Siphersh]

Yea, but actually The way Gunther_01 put it, this harvesting-thing doesn't sound that bad at all.

A very important thing about farms is, that they are _outside the city walls. And such military improvements may be to come sometime in the future, because it seems like those untamed pranksters of Cantr-characters just won't turn into hippies.

And so I think that having farms at the same place as buildings, is just too much of lack of realism.

What I have on mind is having a special kind of location right outside the town. From this forelocation you can then enter the towncenter, you can set off on the journey, or you can visit the fields, mines, etc. But you can only build certain things on this forelocation, like a watchtowers. Thus defending the resources becomes a complex and quite realistic issue.

I like your ideas, but I don't really think that terrain type should be considered.

And I think, resource limitation could come from a limit on the max. # of simultaneous harvesting or mining. There can be carrot-fields that can be worked on by more people. I am not sure that we need a growing cycle, and seeds, and stuff. If we had seeds, than all the current distribution of plant resources would be erased. That can be quite a shock at some places.

So, it would be a big change, and make working more complicated. Usually you don't have code for the details of doing a certain job in Cantr, and I am not sure that should change.

If realism is the point, than yes, it's obvious that you need seeds, and that certain plants can grow at certain places, and sowing, plus a growing cycle, plus that you dont have to tend to it each hour, only say one hour a day. And thus you can have a farm, and if someone ask you for food, you can say that you give him food, if he tends to the crops at one of your farms for one hour. That brings personal interaction. A one year-cycle would be appropriate, I think.

It may be intruduced gradually, like this: the resources remain present, but not in the town center, but in the fields, opening from the forelocation just as mines, and the mushroom-fields, and stuff. (Mushroom is different, as is fish. that differentiation is already present: they have different icons. No mushroom farms, OK?) So, you have them there, and you can collect them as you can now. (Fishing place should open from the town center) Or you can decide to build a farm, take a gram (of carrots, for example), and sow it. This way it will yield in one year the amount (or even more) as if you collected it 24 7 for a year. Or shall we have seeds indeed? Like you click "take seeds" or something on a plant-resource? I would find that overcomplicated. The relevant effect can be simulated by sowing 1g of the plant. So, you can't run a hemp farm, if noone has any hemp. But even if terrain would be considered, you could grow anything on a plain? There is no climate in Cantr. That means, you don't have to trade carrots, just sow it. Well, OK. Some poor-man's plants should grow any terrain, however. And back to graduality: the original, collectable resources would go in for good, when the first farm at that location gives its first yield. And the plant should go in if not tended to for two successive days. So, all this means, that the "carrot field", or maybe we can have the peasants coomunicate with each other: the "field" is a location, and the farm behaves like a building, except that you cannot "enter" and "knock", but "sow", "tend to", and "harvest". Do we need all this fuss?

A problem is, that even if gradually introduced, this would increase food production significantly. Food will be less of a problem. Is that good? And do we have cotton and hemp? We don't seem to have some. Those are also plants.

I am not afraid of plant production growing too quickly in case of these kind of farms. The programmer can always adjust some numbers if game balance is gravely threatened. And building farms should be demanding: you need steel for the plow. OK, the plow cannot take that much steel. But the programmer could also cheat a bit for graduality's sake: let's have a very large amount of resources needed for building a farm, and then gradually decrease to a realistic level, as they see how farms work.

[Meh]

I do argee that at some point the benefit of wild foods has to be reduced. But I think that works hand in hand with limiting the amount of wild harvesting for densley used areas.

A machine has been requested that is time based rather than effort based for seperate reasons. This came along with a request to have machines use a resource out of a container.

This sounds like a machine that is time based AND records the expended effort for a final output AND uses resources over time.

The reason why I mention machines is that

1) They create projects people can partipate in like Gunther_01 sugessted.
2) The intial build of the farm would be on the manufacting page as creepyguyinblack suggests.
3) And as you can see in the game there are certain things that cannot be built "inside" where "inside" means behind a wall.

It's not that I directly disargee with the concept of a "forelocation". I just belive that the game sort of already has this. Outside is a forelocation. Inside is safe/walled. If you want a bunch of people inside working on inside project together so they can talk then design the town that way. Which would mean the ability to take several existing buildings and move them inside of one building.

I still agree about not having a location as a grid or even broken into two parts.

[Gunther_01]

Well, yes. I wasn't suggesting we have seeds as such, as Siphersh says. I would just plant a certain amount of carrots.

Yes I agree a helluvalot with this "forlocation" and towncenter.
*******
KARNON FOREST TOWN CENTER: INFO

Exit gates to KARNON FOREST FARMLAND
*******
KARNON FOREST FARMLAND: INFO
Path to KARNON FIELDS
Path to KARNON
Path to KARNON SEASIDE

WILD FOOD
Potatoes

FARMS
Gunthers Potatoe Farm -Farm-
Guntladens Carrot Farm -Farm-
*******
Wild food should ideally be gatherd at a relativley slow pace. Farming would bring very large yeilds, but only at yearly or half-yearly cycles. You do get more, but it kind of evens out.

[Siphersh]

Or, we could just simply forget farms.

What's the effect of a farm? It yields more? Well, we can always have improvements any time on tools, or you can build a special building that increases yield on the "fields" - that is the locations, where you can do the projects.

And you don't have to be there all the time... Well, this would make it possible, to have one peasant there, and attend to more fields, which in effect has nothing more, than having much more yield with one man's work. Assuming, that the player has computer-access all the day, so that he/she can change farms every hour. I wouldn't like to have this. This is unfair. Internet-access shouldn't have such a great and direct IG relevance.

OK, then there's that you have to wait for the yield for one year. What's the effect of that? That simply means, that more planning is needed. That sounds good, I think.

And with farms, you can enter a location, and harvest the yields of others' fields. Is that realistic? I don't think so. You don't do such things. But in effect: you can steal resources without farms, as well. Or you can burn it? Oh, I wouldn't like to have fields that anyone can burn. That's not realistic either. Maybe this could be coded in a realistic and balanced way, but that would invove way too much programming, I think. Too many problems arise.

And: you can grow any plants, that are allowed by the terrain. That brings realism, more planning,

I like the way it is now.

But if I may suggest an alternative solution, which may be more simple: Just let's have a coded memory of the last resource-gathering on every plant. That is - at this field, you have corn, but it's not been collected for a year by anyone. The chars don't know that, of course. And if much time elapses, the corn disappears. And you can re-farm corns by having a certain amount of of corn, (better not one gram, but much more), and it takes other resources to re-farm as well, and at least a couple of days work. Preferably much more.

Or even better: if the corn is collected, its yield grows. That means the max. # of workers at one time. Especially, if they have improved tools. That is - 2 people can work on it at one time, and if they collect regularly, in a couple of years 4 people can work simultaneously. If they start using a plow, they get more corn per worker per day (as by now), plus in a couple of years it yields for 7 workers. But if they don't collect, or collect with less improved tools, the yield goes back. If not collected at all for a couple of years, it goes in, and you have to re-farm. Thus, collecting a plant also means improving and extending the fields. In this case, one single aspect is left out of a farming-system: the growing cycle itself. The growing cycle may bring realism, but it is not neccessary for the major social effect of farming, I believe. If you don't collect regularly, the yield will go down. That's the point.

But if a growing cycle is needed for better realism, we could just simply have "seasons": in the first 5 days of a year, the yield is nil, but this work increases end-season yield enormously. In the middle seasons yield is (close to) nil, and work increases end-season yield greatly.

All we need for this is a little database for every single plant-source, and a bit of a code to "collecting".

Graduality would not be a problem, I think. Noone will starve to death in one year. And you can have poor-man's food, not farmable plants, but resources that behave like mushroom and fish: no farming effects on those. Just a single constant max. # of collecters at one time. Some kind of berry in the woods, wild plants on a plain, and so on.

And of course, if you don't work on it in the first 5 days of a year for say two years, it goes in completely, and has to be refarmed. And you can initiate corn at a place, even if there was no corn before, of course. It's just a question of terrain. Much work, and improved tools could effect the end-of-year yield, as well as some kind of longer-term cultivatedness of the resource.

This way farming could be simulated without having objects called "farms". And this way you cannot trick the code for best results, because the end-year yield is dependant simply on the working hours spent on it during the year, and the tools. And you can have different tools needed in different seasons, but that is not a must. That would complicate it a bit, because a "sowing" project should not overreach its season. It could change automatically to "tending to", and the tool-requirement could change as well. Hm... That would be a bit complicated, wouldn't it. I wouldn't like in-game Cantr-lore become dominated by explaining how the Cantr code works. It should be restricted to the most obvious. OK, that you need a plow only in the sowing season, _is_ quite obvious. It's just that extra coding is needed: at the end of the season, the computer must check every single collecting project, and adjust them accordingly.[/quote]

[boomhaeur]

I'd kill to see what Siphersh's words per posts average is...