Farm QOL improvements

Have a new general feature to suggest, or think one should be tweaked? Share your ideas here.
Dennis
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Re: Farm QOL improvements

Post by Dennis »

Irylia and I discussed the topic for clarity since I had a early morning thought on farming (As a nonfarmer). My thought was that someone can avoid clutter by rotating crops while still utilizing fully the space available to them by designating only a # of plots to plant (and resultingly harvest) a day so there's a constant stream of work daily.The takeaaway was that at the current time there is no way to designate a quantity of plots to plant, or harvest, so it would be a manual and unfeasible activity to do. It would be nice if farmers could designate quantities of auto actions to perform (though I don't know how feasible it is to implement!)


Me: this isn't a real solution, but why not cycle your planting so that you harvest and plant 10 plots a day? That way you can keep 40 plots going all the time.

Irylia: I don't see that as a dismissal. The point was to test it out as that was clearly the issue the OP was having. I don't like having fields that big anyway usually because I see it as too much upkeep when I already have a lot going on. Normally I don't plant that much of the same crop anyway, though I also don't feel that players should have to manually stagger their fields even if they do a monoculture. At least not until there's an easier way to designate to plant a certain number of plots at a time. Currently you have to keep count yourself. So if there's a field of 40 plots, I can't just go "plant 10 rimeveil seed." I would have to count it out or keep looking at the field, which at that size scrolls out of the screen and isn't easy to see in full. If you start out doing 10/day without a fully tilled field then that's different. But still requires a lot of manual care because you also can't say "till 10 plots" or whatever the command is. Again you have to count it specifically yourself. There's a lot of little QOL things that could help with managing this. I just wanted to test that one specific scenario. Or maybe you can and I just didn't see it. Again, I don't usually deal with fields that size so it doesn't usually matter.

Me: I see! I don't farm so I know nothing about the system. I'm sighted, so it isn't normally an issue for me to manually parse things like long lists.

Irylia: And I don't like having to sit there and eyeball how many plots I've tilled or seeds I've planted since they're multi-step processes and when every line is the same it's very easy to lose track. Especially when trying to multitask.

Me: oh yes that's right, auto-actions are gagged, aren't they.

Irylia: Not that it's the end of the world if I till one or two too many - just a slight waste of efficiency and a quick correction. BUT STILL.

Agelity: Usually me when foraging for things like bluestem grass. At a certain point you start questioning whether or not the screen's actually updating and you type l just to make sure your game output didn't freeze on you

Irylia: Lol right? I look in my handcart a LOT when doing that to see how many I have.

Irylia: The point is, there's a lot of commands that could benefit from being able to designate a number to them. Which is kinda what I was getting at with the branch foraging that just got updated. Yay easier branch foraging!

Dennis: number designations would be nice!
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nobody
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Re: Farm QOL improvements

Post by nobody »

I haven't done any farming, and I understand the clutter limits are in place because number of items is what slows the game/server down, not size of items. And food items (at least at present) cannot be bundled because reasons. I also wanted to point out that if this is an issue now with farming/animal husbandry capped at 400, it will be a bigger problem when it can go up to 700 and farm sizes can be even larger.

I have thought over a few solutions, but I'm not sure what would be 'best' or even if any of them are practical/viable:
  • Add a 'silo' structure that has a high storage capacity relative to land use, and can only store harvested crops (not branches, animal products, farm tools, etc). That may not necessarily help with the lots of items bogging down the game though. For that, I understand that vault storage is somehow different from stuff just sitting on a farm (though I don't exactly know how or why). Would it help with the item bloat more if the silo structure worked like a vault (one has to use store and retrieve rather than get/put/transfer)? Probably it should not have infinite capacity and should still spoil, but bank vaults also don't have infinite capacity (I think) and items still spoil in them, so it wouldn't be a stretch in that regard.
  • Any crops that don't spoil (I would guess raw rimeveil doesn't but I don't know because never farmed) could be bundled to reduce the number of actual items on the ground the server has to deal with, but that only helps with a small subset of plantable crops.
  • Bundling could be expanded considerably, but that's a big undertaking and probably a post for a different thread.
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Rias
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Re: Farm QOL improvements

Post by Rias »

Irylia wrote: Wed Mar 03, 2021 8:18 pm It might be better to change farm clutter restrictions away from strict quantity and more towards some other criteria such as size, or numbers by size (15 tiny = small, 10 small = medium, 5 medium = large, 2 large = huge or whatever).
This has been suggested before, but the clutter issue is a technical one. When it comes to the potential slowdown issues from the system parsing through so many items, it doesn't matter what size designation they have. This is why it's based purely on quantity and not size.

I'm happy to consider solutions. For the time being with rimeveil and threshing/winnowing, it might be a good idea to harvest and process it in batches rather than harvesting it all at once and reaching your clutter cap and preventing yourself from being able to do anything with it. I'll also point out that containers count as a single item on the ground, so plopping some backpacks or barrels or whatnot down on your farm to transfer lots of small items into can really help.
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Irylia
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Re: Farm QOL improvements

Post by Irylia »

Yeah I think the issue with rimeveil and something like pumpkins is they seem to take up a lot more space. With pumpkins it's understandable. But with rimeveil it doesn't make a lot of sense. They start out at like 6lb small items and end up at the being under 1 lb small items. When you first start out with a boll you can only fit a very small number (like 4-6) in your bag, much like a large piece of wool. But once they're winnowed down you can fit far more (I fit all 249 winnowed rimeveil in my already quite full backpack and only gained 1 encumbrance from it). So that might be part of the problem with containers. If the full harvest can fit in the handcart, then it's a lot easier to just transfer out small amounts to process at a time.
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Irylia
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Re: Farm QOL improvements

Post by Irylia »

Oh, also, love the silo idea even though I already have way too many farm structures on my land. I also feel like toolsheds aren't big enough to actually hold all the tools one uses on a farm or with working other farm-related jobs. But that's another matter.
Dennis
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Re: Farm QOL improvements

Post by Dennis »

Building off Agelity's silo idea, since if I'm understanding you right in terms of possible slowdown, I think one of the mentioned issues is that large quantities of items cause issues.

Since all farming products come out as virtually identical, would it be possible to create a silo construct that sucks up 1 kind of nonperishable farming product (up to a certain maximum quantity) which would delete the item off the game, and tick an internal counter in the silo? And you can then withdraw items from the silo counter which would spawn in that item, and subtract from that counter (down to a minimum of 0).

So for example, let's say you construct a rimeveil cotton silo and harvest 200 rimeveil cotton. Rather than having 1 container with 200 rimeveil cotton inside of it, you have 1 silo that exists, but has an internal counter of 200. You can then retrieve, recover, withdraw, dispense, or whatever verb have you cotton, spawning in that many number of cotton (and subtracting that from the internal counter of the silo.)

Since it only stores nonperishables, you won't need to be afraid of people just storing up thousands of, like, tomatoes. you can also have the silos only take from harvesting so people don't put items in just to store them thereby avoiding potential abuse of the silo constructs.

Running off into the sunset with the same concept, you could do the same with any number of repeated, identical nonperishable items.
For example, containers specifically designed only to store grass up to a certain quantity, a container designed to store branches of small, medium, or large up to a certain quantity. Item-specific containers that delete items off the world and tick an internal counter that a player can then later withdraw from! If any of these constructs or containers are mobile in design, you can use a weight calculating formula equalling quantity of input times number in counter. I wouldn't go so far as to make these containers for directly processing or crafting as I can only imagine what a headache that would be.
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Rias
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Re: Farm QOL improvements

Post by Rias »

Since we've got attention back over to farms and clutter and all that, I'll outline what I'm planning. I do want to improve QOL for a lot of the various farming and animal husbandry procedures, but at the same time I want to discourage hoarding and the common use of farms as all-purpose storage warehouses and workyards. I'm sure there will be mixed feelings on this. The fact remains that vaults are the intended means of long-term storage and have special mechanics and limitations to this point; farms are not.

## Silos
- Stone and wood varieties.
- Only hold crop/harvest items.
- Allow harvesting to go straight into the silo.
- Maybe slow spoilage a small amount?
- Rats and other pests will occasionally get into silo contents and spoil (delete) some of the items, to discourage long-term "just in case" hoarding. Use it, sell it, vault it, or dump it.
- Allow gettings animals like cats to lessen the above pest issues (and also just to have fun pets on the farm), but NOT prevent the pests outright.

## Toolsheds
- Restrict the types of items they can hold to tools and other specifically work-related items. (Not including random item components)

## Construction
- Allow beginning a construction project without the required materials. This creates a "construction site" item which components can be added to as they are acquired. Once all the components are there, the actual building can start. This means just planning the project will provide the storage required for the often-considerable amount of materials, rather than needing to store them all in a vault, crates, handcarts, etc. beforehand.
- Have construction sites despawn after a certain amount of time. We don't want a bunch of abandoned construction sites piling up.
- Similar to the above, probably limit the number of constructions sites any one person can have at the same time.

## Woodsheds
- Have the wood eventually be affected by rot/mildew to prevent eternal storage. Probably a good long time, but still ultimately encouraging people to use it, sell it, vault it, or dump it.

## De-Janitorproofing
- Make farms no longer janitorproof.
- Probably (for now, at least) make an exception for furniture items, which have the tradeoff of taking up farmland space. I remain wary on this point, as this allows farms to continue being used as all-purpose long-term storage facilities and workyards.
- When the farmland owner or the last person in the room goes to leave, send a notice if there are items that are susceptible to the janitor and require a confirmation before leaving the room.
Dennis wrote: Thu Mar 04, 2021 8:22 amRather than having 1 container with 200 rimeveil cotton inside of it, you have 1 silo that exists, but has an internal counter of 200.
I've worked on this for animal shelters/feeding troughs, but in the end things get fiddly when it comes to items that have different spoilage dates and stuff like that. Not impossible by any means, just requires some additional time and consideration I haven't gotten around to yet.
Irylia wrote: Thu Mar 04, 2021 8:16 am I also feel like toolsheds aren't big enough to actually hold all the tools one uses on a farm or with working other farm-related jobs. But that's another matter.
Really?

look in toolshed
In the pine toolshed you see ...
a butter churn (empty)
a copper chisel (x3)
a copper knife (x3)
a copper saw (x3)
a copper trowel (x3)
a glass-paned copper oil lantern
a pine bucket (empty) (x8)
a pine mallet (x3)
a pine threshing flail (x3)
a pine-hafted copper handaxe (x3)
a pine-hafted copper hatchet (x3)
a pine-hafted copper hoe (x3)
a pine-hafted copper logging axe (x3)
a pine-hafted copper pickaxe (x3)
a pine-hafted copper scythe (x3)
a pine-hafted copper shovel (x3)
a pine-hafted copper sledgehammer (x3)
a pine-hafted copper work hammer (x3)
a pine-handled copper awl (x3)
a wicker winnowing basket (x3)
some copper knitting needles (x3)
some copper scissors (x3)
some copper shears (x3)
some leather boots (x3)
some leather work gloves (x3)
some rope (x3)
The pine toolshed barely has any room left in it.
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Rias
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Re: Farm QOL improvements

Post by Rias »

P.S. De-janitorproofing would likely mean I could remove, or at least ease up on, the item count clutter limitation. Presumably it won't be so common when people can no longer leave piles of random items on the ground without a care.
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Irylia
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Re: Farm QOL improvements

Post by Irylia »

Liking the construction site thing a lot. I frequently run into issues where I have to make people dig up tilled farm plots just to have enough room to build something on their land because the components take up too much space. This should definitely help with that.

In addition to silos - if you're going to restrict items that go in toolsheds, might want to add some other type of storage shed that's bigger than a typical furniture item for storing large components like wagon wheels, hoops, and hubs that take up a lot of space. Speaking of... I definitely had some components hiding in there which was why my toolshed wasn't holding as much as it should. So yeah, nevermind on my size worry there.

I would like to suggest that wood rot only take place if the wood is not properly stored (timbers that don't janitor left out or whatever). If it's just lying out in the weather, sure, but if it's in the woodshed, please don't. I keep stuff in there for long-term storage in case an order comes up and I don't have time to get more wood. They already have space restrictions in the shed so I don't see why rot would need to be a thing there.

I guess now that stumps can be cleared I'll feel a lot less horrible getting rid of things though. I definitely hold onto wood like it's gold just because of the time/effort it takes to fell and process a tree, but also because trees were getting further and further away from town. I think that addition alone will really improve clutter issues. I can keep components for a few things handy, but get rid of everything else and forage or fell as needed. (The branch change helps with this too).

I still have issues with de-janitoring, but I'm sure I'll get over it. My main concern is if you logout on your farm you won't see that warning message. But I also played a templar in the other game and their cells weren't janitorproof. So I'm sure I can adjust as long as there are sufficient storage options available either in town or on the farm.
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