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WoolyCreeper

Crop growth with increased year length

16 posts in this topic

Hi Guys,

 

Sorry that my first post on the furom is a bug report :(

 

Version: 78.17

 

Both SSP and SMP

 

Description:

 

If the year length is increased to 360 days crop growth is disproportionally scaled.

 

Experienced this on my server so I tested in an SSP creative test world using /time add XXX to repeatedly test the growth of wheat, soy, jute and onion.

 

Tests

 

Year length: 96 (default)

Result: Normal growth with 1 or 2 harvests a year depending on crop type

 

Year Length: 360

Result: Slow crop growth with onion and soy able to mature most years, wheat rarely matured before winter and Jute never matured in time.

 

Year Length: 720

Result: No visible growth throughout the year. Onion survived the winter but had already used it's nutrients up and just sat there forever.

 

If I set the year length back to 96 as works fine again.

 

Other mods: None on the server and only gsgl shaders on my client.

 

I hope there's a fix for this as my server really needs the longer year.

 

Thanks

 

Wooly

 

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Were your plants growing on freshly tilled soil with full nutrients and the use of fertilizer? For the long year lengths, were your crops properly hydrated with the farmland within 4 blocks of water?

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Thanks for the fast response.

 

In my tests I used hydrated farm land and skipping a year between tests to allow nutrient recovery (I checked with a hoe that the nutrients had recovered before each test). I was reusing the same farm land but the results seemed pretty consistent across multiple tests with each year length. My first batch of tests were with the 360 day year (my config was like that for the server). I tested 4-5 times at 360 days before reducing it to the default 96 and tested 4-5 times again before retesting the 360 day year a few more times. I then tested the 720 day year but only once.

 

I did not think to test fertiliser.

 

Cheers,

Wooly

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Hmm.. just tested with fertiliser on a 360 day year and it does seem to bring crop growth roughly back into line the 96 day year proportionally.. 1 harvest from wheat soy and jute and 2 from onion. Unless fertiliser doubles growth normally (I don't know) it seems to override the issue.

 

-Wooly

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i ran into a similar issue with 288 year cycle. Crops would take 2+years to grow. Did not use fertilizer as i never found any but we did cycle the crops.

Jute never had a chance...

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We'll look into this. Thanks for the report.

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Is there any update on this issue?

On our server we run into the same problem.

FTC 0.79.9.357, no additional mods, year length 240.

All crops planted on freshly tilted grass and properly hydrated.

 

As far as I am able to see the crops deplete the available nutrients with a static amount, the same for each day/cycle. By increasing the year length I increase the amount of time my crops have to grow without any available nutrients and are therefor seriously hampered in their development. Adding fertilizer helps as it adds to the available nutrients (tested in creative, still have not found sylvite).

 

I do not know the code or how best to approach this, but perhaps make the nutrient usage of the crops or the amount of nutrients in the dirt tied to the year length, so this goes up as you increase the duration of a year.

 

If you need any more additional information, please do not hesitate to ask!

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Hey guys ... I'm playing build 0.79.15, and crop growth in longer years still sucks all nutrients from the soil which grinds its growth to a halt (planted in early spring, on fully hydrated soil and with the required nutrients at top value).

 

Just wanted to hear if there is anything new to report on this "issue" ?.. Or if the use of Sylvite fertilizer is still the only way to have a hope of a crop yield ?

 

I like the thought of having a longer year (360 days) making the winter a longer challenge to survive.

 

I luckily have a decent supply of Sylvite ... yet it would be fantastic if my Sylvite supply could be used to yield more crop-harvests a year (or to bypass crop rotation), rather than to have to use it to get a harvest.

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Hey guys ... I'm playing build 0.79.15, and crop growth in longer years still sucks all nutrients from the soil which grinds its growth to a halt (planted in early spring, on fully hydrated soil and with the required nutrients at top value).

 

Are you sure that your crops are hydrated with fresh water, and not with salt water? When using a hoe in water mode, does the plot look blue or black?

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Are you sure that your crops are hydrated with fresh water, and not with salt water? When using a hoe in water mode, does the plot look blue or black?

Hey Kitty ... thanks for a speedy response :)

 

Yes, my crops are hydrated with freshwater (hoe water-mode shows blue) ... So that is not the culprit ... But as far as I can gather (from changelogs/wiki/forums) crops should grow (albeit rather slowly) on soil that isn't hydrated at all.

 

I hope there is a fix for this as the long year is really attractive to me ... with the long winters becoming a force to be reckoned with, and it goes without saying that food gathering and harvesting crops is a matter of life and death ... and the mechanics that make the crops grow "normally" in a 96-day long year would be more at home in the 360-day long year, since winter goes by in the blink of an eye on 96 and surviving wasn't even a stuggle in my old world.

 

And since my "home" is a remake of an old Icelandic farm called "Glaumbær" which is an old building style known as "torfbær" or "bustabær" (copy these words into google and take a look at the images, it's a great building style for this mods atmos) ... anyhow, I wan't to have a potato patch up by the house (where there isn't a watersource) and I don't want to wait until i have red steel to make that a feasible option ... and even though I have a Sylvite supply not to far from home, I would like to be able to use that more strategically by helping me achieve more yields or even if remotely possible (haven't tested) making me capable of "speed growing" sugarcane at the "latitude" of ca. 10.000 during the short window of plantable friendly temperature.

 

Do you know what mechanics are behind the crop growth in the mod ?.. Is there a config change I can make that minimizes the nutrients the crops draw from the soil per day or is there code that needs to be worked on for the longer years to work identical to the 96-day long one ?

 

Thanks again.

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This is actually something I've been noticing for almost as long as its been possible to set the year length... I always play with 120 days instead of 96. The result is that certain crops, especially the slow grains, run out of nutrient before completing the last stage of their growth cycle. As long as crops have nutrient, however, they grow fine.

 

I'm fairly sure this is because nutrients are still consumed on a per day/per growth tick/etc. basis, but it takes more days/growth ticks/etc. to advance one stage when the year length is increased.

 

To fix this, total nutrient amounts available would have to increase by the same factor as the increase in growth time when the year length is changed... or, the consumption of nutrients would need to go down accordingly.

 

Of course, now in b79, there's the new crop growth multiplier from the config file also playing into that...

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So I've ran a few tests, and as far as I can tell everything is working properly. Even on a default 96 year length, the slower crops such as wheat run out of nutrients before the last stage of growth.

 

Starting with a brand new world, I grew two patches of wheat, one on fertilized tilled soil, and one on unfertilized tilled soil. Both patches were tilled from grass, so they started with the non-fertilizer section on nutrients at 100%. A completely barren tilled dirt block was also put next to the field, so I could keep track of how quickly nutrients restored on a fallow plot.

 

With the default, 96 year length, the wheat with no fertilizer grew at a rate of about 4.4% per day, the wheat with fertilizer grew at a rate of about 6.6% per day (1.5 times faster). Both crops drained nutrient A and any fertilizer at 6.6% per day. The fallowing plot regained nutrients at about 2.1% per day. The fertilized wheat reached maturity on day 15 (2 in-game months), while the unfertilized wheat only made it to 71% growth before the plot ran out of nutrient A.

 

I then changed the config to set the year length to 120. I reset the clock of the world to 0 so that the temperature and weather conditions would be the same as before. The dirt and grass blocks were replaced so that everything started at the exact same conditions.

 

The wheat with no fertilizer grew at a rate of about 2.6% per day. The wheat with fertilizer grew at a rate of about 5.3% per day (2 times faster). Both crops drained nutrient A and any fertilizer at 3.8% per day. The fallowing plot regained nutrients at about 3.1% per day. The fertilized wheat reached maturity on day 19 (2 in-game months), while the unfertilized wheat only made it to 69% growth before the plot ran out of nutrient A.

 

In both situations, the nutrient drain is faster than the unfertilized wheat could grow. For the longer year length, the gap between the two is also smaller, and the nutrient regen was actually faster than the unfertilized growth, instead of slower in the default year.

 

I could run this same experiment again and compare it to a 360 year length, but I'm fairly positive the results are going to end up the same.

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Well, LancelotBrown said he observed his issue at 360 days year length. There's also a big difference between +275% length and the +25% length you already tested. Maybe his issue doesn't crop up until you pass a certain threshold?

 

As for the wheat running out of nutrient regardless of time scale: is that something that organically grew out of circumstances, or is that intentional? Feels kinda odd to me. If it is not intentional and just too low priority to bother fixing, would you be open to a suggestion post with a proposal for a rework?

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So that took forever, and it doesn't 100% match because we do have a couple behind-the-scenes things going on for years greater than or equal to 360 days, such as hydration playing more into the role, as well as scaling the growth over more months.

 

However, the wheat with no fertilizer grew at a rate of about 0.49% per day, the wheat with fertilizer grew at a rate of about 0.76% per day (1.5 times faster). Both crops drained nutrient A and any fertilizer at 0.45% per day. The fallowing plot regained nutrients at about 0.56% per day. The fertilized wheat reached maturity on day 131 (4 in-game months**), while the unfertilized wheat only made it to 85% growth before the plot ran out of nutrient A.

 

Comparing the no fertilizer growth rate to the nutrient drain rate, and the fact that the % growth jumps by stages, instead of steadily incrementing, I would not be surprised if some of the RNG was involved, and that the exact same test could have resulted in the unfertilized wheat reaching maturing just before the nutrients completely drain, instead of vice versa.

 

Either way, the fertilized versus unfertilized growth rate was the same ratio, the gap between nutrient drain and growth got even smaller as time scaled more, and nutrient regeneration for the fallow plot was faster than both the drain and the growth rates in this case. **The only thing that changed here was that it took 4 in-game months for the fertilized crop to hit completion, instead of the 2 in-game months that it took for the shorter year lengths. I'm not completely sure what caused this to happen, and it may have just been a fluke. I plan on running the experiment again at a later date to see if it still happens. Edit 3: I found the explanation for this difference. Each time that the nutrient drain and crop growth occurs, the timer for when the next time drain/growth happens is randomly set to either 24 or 48 hours later. It is entirely possible that the first two runs of the experiment, the RNG chose 24 hours more often, and in the 3rd run with the 360 year length, the RNG chose 48 hours more often, resulting in the crop taking nearly twice as long to grow. It is important to note that both the nutrient drain and the crop growth are both tied to this timer, so it choosing 48 hours does not mean that the nutrients are draining any faster in relation to the speed that the crop is growing.

 

As far as I can tell, nothing is broken here in regards to year length and crop growth. Both the growth rates and the drain rates are properly scaling with different year lengths.

 

@Omicron - I'm under the assumption that it grew organically out of the growth rates and nutrient drain rates that we chose for those specific crops, but I am not certain and it may very well have been intentional, as a way to make the later stages of growth for those slower crops take more time than their earlier stages. I'll have to talk to Bioxx and see if he remembers his intentions when he chose those numbers oh so long ago.

 

Edit: The only issue that I could find in the entire system, that has been fixed for .16 is that tilling grass on a custom year length does not set all the nutrients to 100%. However, I was under the assumption that was not relevant to this thread, as players should be checking nutrient values with their hoes to make sure they are full anyways.

 

Edit2: After throwing some numbers in a spreadsheet, a few of the crops have had their nutrient usage decreased slightly so that the average situation starting on a 100% nutrient, hydrated plot will hit maturity before nutrients hit 0 for 79.16. It should also be noted that even when nutrients hit 0, crops do continue to grow, just very very slowly. While my calculations in the spreadsheet were based off of a default year length of 96 days, there was nothing in them that I could find that would alter the general relationship of the results when the year length value is changed.

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Okay, interesting results, and many thanks for the bugfix and reducing nutrient usage a bit... I've actually been wondering: what exactly happens when crops try to grow without nutrients? I'm currently observing a patch of 4 blocks of wheat in my current world, which I planted 4 ingame months ago. One of them is stuck at the last stage before ripening, the other three are stuck at the second-to-last stage before ripening. They have not shown any activity whatsoever in the last 2 ingame months and will likely die in the coming winter without ever finishing.

 

Also, a little nitpick:

"players should be checking nutrient values with their hoes to make sure they are full anyways."  <--- not happening until lategame anymore, due to skill changes in b79. I already have a metal hoe and had it for two ingame months, but my agriculture skill doesn't look like it'll even complete Novice before the first ingame year ends. As such, I probably won't be checking nutrient levels for a long, long while yet.

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The difference between two identical plots where the only difference is full versus no nutrients is a 0.8 vs a 0.3 modifier. That's the only difference. It should be noted that such a multiplier can make as large of a change as a crop taking 11 days to grow, versus 28 days to grow.

 

In regards to the nitpick, there are claims in this thread that the nutrients of the plot are hitting empty before the crop reaches maturity. How exactly are these players knowing that the plot has hit empty nutrients if they aren't using a hoe? And how did they know it started at 100%? There are a great many different variables involved with crop growth. The specific crop, the temperature throughout the entire time that the crop is growing, whether or not the plot is hydrated or not, as well as nutrient and fertilizer. When conducting experiments like in the OP, to try and determine if the correct behavior is happening or not, it is necessary to remove as many variables as possible, and to double check the values of the variables that are changing.

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