Minimum requirements for a lot of stuff

[SekoETC]

It doesn't make much sense that resource refining (or gathering) projects have no minimum requirements, so you can set projects to last one hour or even less than that to match how much resources you have at hand. In real life it would take about the same time to cook one egg than a dozen eggs, as long as you have a big enough pot and enough water. Likewise it would take you a lot of water to cover the first egg, but you really wouldn't have to add any more water with the next eggs until you have the bottom of the pot covered. And it would take the same amount of fuel to heat a smelter regardless of if you're making a few grams of iron or hundreds of grams (kilos might start making a difference) or if you're grilling meat on a fire, it would take a certain amount of wood to get the fire started whether you were going to grill one piece of meat or more.

Minimum requirements would mean that people would have to buy/gather more resources to get started, and they would most likely be also producing more than one person needs, so they would have excess to sell. It would be more profitable to produce large amounts than small amounts.

Also if this was extended to farming, or it was possible to farm vegetables in a garden and wild resources would be foraged rather than farmed, it would take about half a year to get harvest so newspawns would have to rely on established characters rather than just farming potatoes for a day and then moving on.

[Piscator]

So what exactly are you suggesting? Having a minimum project duration or a minimum amount of fuel? (Not necessary proportional to the other resources. You could cook one egg, even if it would take a minimum of 50g of wood to heat the water.)

If we could get the machine system upgrade going, with fuel being consumed much like in engines, at least one hour's worth of fuel would be consumed for every project, which would go a bit in the same direction.

[SekoETC]

A minimum requirements section that could contain both time and resources. Oh and maybe even tools. That way you would only need for example one pot for cooking, but several people could work on the project without needing additional pots. Tools in the regular section could be per worker, as they are now, and tools in the minimum requirements section would be per project, regardless of the number of workers.

[Piscator]

I think this would be useful.

[Marian]

This would make sense for some things but not others. If you were hungry, why couldn't you go outside and pull up just enough carrots for a meal? Obviously that wouldn't take as long as harvesting an entire field, but that's not what you were trying to do in the first place. (I wouldn't mind seeing the whole 'gather enough food for half a year in one day with your bare hands' thing altered, but any kind of farming changes aimed at cooperation would probably require a huge overhaul of the gathering system, or at least need its own thread.)

Same thing goes for cooking, or even smelting a small amount of metal....even a small amount of fuel is enough when you only need heat for a very short time.

I do like the general idea, but I think if it was implemented it should only apply to more advanced machinery. A regular smelting furnace vs. a primitive one, an oven instead of a fire pit etc.

[SekoETC]

It would make sense if there were vegetable gardens or fields as machines, and those would produce larger harvests, using wild potatoes/carrots/etc. as seeds. Then values for gatherable resources could be made smaller. If you can gather 8 days of food in a day, that doesn't encourage cooking or advanced farming much. In real life hunter-gatherers probably spent most of their time looking for food.

[Piscator]

The gathering rates can be decreased anyway. There is no good reason why you should be able to gather more than two days worth of raw food per day, provided that you could feed ten people with the same food after preparation (and that the means of preparation are sufficiently common).

I disagree by the way that farming should automatically be more effective than foraging in the wild. Chars lucky enough to have a resource naturally growing in their hometown should have an advantage by it. Otherwise natural resources would become utterly useless. Farming has an enormous convenience bonus and needs to be balanced in some way.

The real advantage of agriculture is that it is independent from the availability of the limited natural resources. Noone would get the idea to cultivate blueberries if they just had to go in the wood and take as much as they want. Only when they couldn't find enough anymore, they would consider planting a blueberry bush in their garden.
This could work in Cantr too, if we had a more effective system to simulate overtaxation than resource slots.