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bilbobuddy

More agricultural amendments: Hoes and ploughs

19 posts in this topic

After reading about historic farming, I realized that the hoe that we have in TFC is quite bland and boring, and could be more balanced. 

 

In TFC, the only tilling implement is the hoe, which can instantaneously till any sort of dirt or grass you throw at it. 

 

First of all, tilling should take time, just like mining a block, second, it should only be able to till dirt with a very narrow band of medium amount of hydration. This would limit the places where you can settle, as not everywhere would be tillable, and prolong early game, which would be great. The crops that get planted should also have a chance of dying. When you try to till very wet or dry soils with a sedimentary or metamorphic hoe, it should just break. With an igneous hoe it should take an absurdly long time.

 

Hoes would also not be able to till grass, it would have to be dirt

 

The next tool should be the plough. It would be able to only be made out of metal, and could till successively wetter and drier dirt as they get better, with steel ploughs being able to till grass.

 

Ploughing and tilling should be hard work, an use lots of hunger. If you could hook up a plow to a horse or cow (its like an ox, okay) it could make it easier. This would increase the value of animal husbandry, and diversify the stuff you would want to do in TFC

 

What would be the point of this? Well I was thinking that blacksmithing, on an anvil, (the way to get high end tools) could use exhorbitant amounts of hunger, and and the way to feed yourself would be to increase your food production to suit your new work, by making ploughs to till more farmland. This wold make getting good tools more difficult  (as you have more work to do), and provide a new thing to do. The amount of food you would need might not be able to be met with the small amounts of hoeable dirt that you find, and you would have to invest in higher quality ploughs to convert more of the nearby land into farmable fields to fuel your blacksmithing.

 

This could also take some of the cost of moving up the tech tree away from exploring (which is really the only cost there is in TFC) and move it into a more effort based system.    

Edited by bilbobuddy
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Isnt the scythe considered a farming implement? It's sort of dual-purpose, but I thought it was meant to enable you to harvest large amounts of crops quickly, since it breaks everything in a 3 X 3 area.

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Personally I would rather not make farming more of a pain than it already is. This just sounds tedious. Perhaps if someone would like to make an add-on for this so people have the option to choose how difficult they want farming to be.

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But farming in tfc is super easy, you tile the soil and dump the seed. Single player or multiplayer is easy to have overabundance of food. Where is the pain in that? Is only tedious because is really easy and there are no chalenges. Also discounting the taste thing you can live out of single crops, so you do not really need variety. You can plant only one type of grain, and vegetable and just switch then over. 

I would love to have agriculture to require more work, but even more if variety of foods was a requirement to be healthier. So your health bar would stop at 1000 and to get it higher you need to eat different types of vegetables, maybe even start to lower your health if you only eat one kind of a type of food, exception would be off course dairy. 

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But farming in tfc is super easy, you tile the soil and dump the seed. Single player or multiplayer is easy to have overabundance of food. Where is the pain in that? Is only tedious because is really easy and there are no chalenges. Also discounting the taste thing you can live out of single crops, so you do not really need variety. You can plant only one type of grain, and vegetable and just switch then over. 

I would love to have agriculture to require more work, but even more if variety of foods was a requirement to be healthier. So your health bar would stop at 1000 and to get it higher you need to eat different types of vegetables, maybe even start to lower your health if you only eat one kind of a type of food, exception would be off course dairy. 

 

 

Exactly the problem I was trying to rectify.

 

 

And the part of the reason why I wanted to add this is to make it more historical, where a food surplus was needed to free up time for technological advancement, and more importantly, It would stop the only balance of new stuff in TFC from being exploration, adding another balance for the player to work for.

 

I feel that the only thing I ever do is explore to find new resources, and this gets kinda boring after a while. I would love to do something else, even if it is kinda tedious, which it wouldn't be all that much, cause you would have to select a good spot to grow your plants etc.

Edited by bilbobuddy
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To be honest, I think there should be more to TFC farming, but I don't think making the current process simply harder is the right thing. There is a thin line between the game being difficult and frustrating. 

 

What I think should be done (in some way) is creating a sort of "tier" system, kind of like we have with the metals. (stone age, no pick -> casting age -> all tools and weapons, no armour -> smithing age -> everything posible from bronze -> bloomery -> Blast Furnace)

 

I don't have the exact ideas right now, since its 8:30 AM here where I live and I was awake for the whole night, but I'll try to come up with some system later when I'm fresh.

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Hoes would also not be able to till grass, it would have to be dirt

 

The next tool should be the plough. It would be able to only be made out of metal, and could till successively wetter and drier dirt as they get better, with steel ploughs being able to till grass.

 

So if I can't till grass blocks with a hoe then I have this magical tool called... a shovel. Tada! Instant dirt! I have personally tilled grassy soil with a shovel and a hoe, it is totally possible. The shovel breaks it into chunks and the hoe breaks down the chunks. I would not go to the trouble of making a plow when I can just use a shovel... I propose that almost no one would make plows.

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So if I can't till grass blocks with a hoe then I have this magical tool called... a shovel. Tada! Instant dirt! I have personally tilled grassy soil with a shovel and a hoe, it is totally possible. The shovel breaks it into chunks and the hoe breaks down the chunks. I would not go to the trouble of making a plow when I can just use a shovel... I propose that almost no one would make plows.

Would people really want to dig out and replace every block they want to plant something on (as well as having to plant more stuff) when they could just use a tool that tills it as well.

 

And I never said it was impossible, I actually wanted to leave it open to a player.

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Would people really want to dig out and replace every block they want to plant something on (as well as having to plant more stuff) when they could just use a tool that tills it as well.

 

And I never said it was impossible, I actually wanted to leave it open to a player.

 

You could, or you could not. Have you thought of how the plow would be implemented?

Is it just another item that you right click with or is it an Entity that must be drawn by some draft animal? I would assume that making it an entity would be significantly more difficult.

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If you take a look at the thread about carts and wagons I think this thread and that one would work really well together. The plow could be implemented as sort of vehicle that gets towed behind a horse, it would till any blocks it is pulled over, they wouldn't need to be dirt and it would make the stones on the ground pop off. They would also have a passive hydration in them so that you do not directly need a water source, but you would need rain or a source if you actually want your crops to grow with any speed.

Edited by Wandering_eye
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If you take a look at the thread about carts and wagons I think this thread and that one would work really well together. The plow could be implemented as sort of vehicle that gets towed behind a horse, it would till any blocks it is pulled over, they wouldn't need to be dirt and it would make the stones on the ground pop off. They would also have a passive hydration in them so that you do not directly need a water source, but you would need rain or a source if you actually want your crops to grow with any space.

 That would be a great idea

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I'd like if more variety was added to farming, at least. At the moment, it's too simple and too reliable. Spend a little time gathering a few seeds at the beginning of a world and you'll never have to think about food if you're in a warm area, regardless of whether you use fertilizer or not.

Edited by Pyr0mrcow
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Im just going to say. Farming is complex enough already. With drainage, nutrients, and PH levels affecting taste. This doesn't sound like it would benefit the game much. It would force people to spend hours searching for something and give up because they couldn't. This isn't Farming Simulator :/.

Sorry if I cause you negative feelings but that's just how I feel.

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The next tool should be the plough. It would be able to only be made out of metal, and could till successively wetter and drier dirt as they get better, with steel ploughs being able to till grass.

 

 

I have an issue with that.

per the wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plough

The plough (UK) or plow (US; both /ˈpl/) is a tool (or machine) used in farming for initial cultivation of soil in preparation for sowingseed or planting to loosen or turn the soil. Ploughs are traditionally drawn by working animals such as horses or cattle, but in modern times may be drawn by tractors. A plough may be made of wood, iron, or steel frame with an attached blade or stick used to cut the earth. 

 

For a tool to be faster and more durable is reason and incentive enough to make it out of metal.I never understood why the necessity to put everything after metal. Humanity developed agriculture long before metallurgy.  Only once we had a sustained food production we were able to dedicate time to mining and working metals.

Metals make better tools, they are faster and last longer, but we survived for hundreds of thousands of years before we started using metals. Man, Stonehenge was built without metal, just think about. We had actual towns and thousands of people living together before they discovered the uses of metal.

 

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If you take a bucket (not a barrel, a bucket.) of fresh or salt water and left click it on any non-water block it creates a very small 1/8 block of water that disappears. I believe you should be able to dump these buckets of water on farmland to replenish a very small amount of nutrients. A good way of doing this would be to create a nutrient replenishment limit, as we have for feeding animals familiarity levels only once every day. That would limit this so that you could not use this and make it overpowered

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This topic is about farm implements not regaining nutrients. There are suggestions on nutrients/fertilisers or irrigation that would be more relevant. Please limit comment to the topic of the thread.

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I have an issue with that.

per the wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plough

The plough (UK) or plow (US; both /ˈplaʊ/) is a tool (or machine) used in farming for initial cultivation of soil in preparation for sowingseed or planting to loosen or turn the soil. Ploughs are traditionally drawn by working animals such as horses or cattle, but in modern times may be drawn by tractors. A plough may be made of wood, iron, or steel frame with an attached blade or stick used to cut the earth. 

 

For a tool to be faster and more durable is reason and incentive enough to make it out of metal.I never understood why the necessity to put everything after metal. Humanity developed agriculture long before metallurgy.  Only once we had a sustained food production we were able to dedicate time to mining and working metals.

Metals make better tools, they are faster and last longer, but we survived for hundreds of thousands of years before we started using metals. Man, Stonehenge was built without metal, just think about. We had actual towns and thousands of people living together before they discovered the uses of metal.

 

That is a damn good point

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Re: Hydration level(check first post), how is that determined?

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