Farming skill improvement

Have a new general feature to suggest, or think one should be tweaked? Share your ideas here.
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nobody
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Re: Farming skill improvement

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TLDR recommendations:
- change water/weed algorithms to prioritize planted plots, dry plots, and weeded plots over empty, well watered, and not weedy plots.
- add a `cultivate` command to farming that allows a farmer to improve their harvest
- add tasks to till fields, till plots, plant, water, weed, and harvest to emulate community gardens that will allow starting players and players with less time to enjoy farming without having all their riln and time necessarily diverted to farming.

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I decided to spend a week farming and I found that (1) it is possible to keep your bucket perpetually full, but doing so is more wasteful than with other activities, (2) if you aren't concerned with continuing to farm with a full bucket, farming doesn't take a long time unless you go really big but it could be made to be less burdensome via some back-end changes, and (3) spending more time farming doesn't increase income, only increasing the number of plots increases income.

The first is an observation that doesn't need to be acted on, it's mostly irrelevant. My observations are that it is possible to deliberately leave at least one empty plot to till, water, and clear repeatedly to gain exp and train the farming skill. It's spending energy and time for experience and no riln, so it's certainly not optimal. With a big enough farm it is probably possible to water and weed inefficiently to keep one's bucket full all day. It isn't possible to have a farm big enough to water and weed efficiently and keep a full bucket all day, even with 700 farming though.

The second is a relative statement - it takes a couple hours every day to manage a large farm and that's more game time than some people have. It would be somewhat less time consuming and more flexible if the watering and weeding systems prioritized (1) planted plots over empty plots and (2) the most dry plots over more well watered plots (and similarly the most weedy plots over the less weedy plots) so that one needn't spend unnecessary effort topping-off well watered plots before moving on to the dry ones and so that players could make a choice about the level of weeds and drought that they can live with instead of feeling the need to keep everything watered and weeded all the time so that the whole farm is well maintained. To clarify that last point with an example, it isn't possible to maintain only a somewhat watered state in all one's plots because attempting to water will result in fully watering the first plot and then moving onto the next. It isn't feasible under this structure to weed/water more frequently for shorter periods because the lowest ranked plots will be well tended but the last plots will be overrun and too dry. However, there are some reasons to not make this change. It would probably be unrealistic, a farmer wouldn't wander around from dry spot to dry spot watering, they'd just water in rows and the current system kind of reflects that. It also would probably be more computational intensive to repeatedly calculate the least watered plots vs just checking if the next plot could use some water.

The third point above is an odd dilemma, the most diligent farmers will earn the same amount as a farmer doing the most minimal amount of work to keep all the plants growing continuously. The current water and weeding system limits how lazy a farmer can be (which is arguably a good thing), but in the end, with the current set up a player who can spend the time will probably farm as a hobby and do other things to fill their time, while a player with less time may have farming be the only thing they do if they even have the time to do it at all. To remedy these, I have two suggestions:
- Add a `cultivate` command that allows farmers to increase their crop yields in exchange for RT and energy. The idea is that a farmer that wants to spend a few extra hours on their farm can focus on cultivating it actively and still be rewarded for that time. Compare the riln a crafter could gain by spending half an hour or an hour and use that and the value of the crop being cultivated to determine how much actively cultivating should increase the yield. Farmers that spend no time cultivating will still get their baseline crop yields, so if someone wanted to farm as a hobby rather than as a main character activity, that's still viable.
- Add farming tasks to till fields, till plots, plant, water, weed, and harvest - one task for each activity. The tasks would send the character to an instanced farm location prepared appropriately (a vacant field for tilling fields, a field of untilled plots for tilling plots, a field of tilled, watered plots for planting, and for watering and weeding tasks a field with seasonally appropriate crops planted with varied levels of water and weeding needed. The character would need to provide their own tools (hoe/trowel/bucket) but not their own seeds (for the planting task). Tilling, planting, watering, and weeding would receive some low exp reward (since those activities already offer some exp) and some riln (calculate as normal for task reward calculations). For the harvesting task, there should be either no riln reward or a riln cost to take the task and the character collecting the harvest can then choose to sell what they harvested to earn their riln (as intended) or keep it to cook/consume/feed livestock. Because the harvest task would allow farm fresh food and there are ideas for that for faction stuff, it should probably be the most time limited task. These tasks would allow players who don't have a couple hours every day to still participate in farming and build up riln toward renting their own farm if they wanted to do that, and would emulate the feel of a community garden. Theoretically, a player-owned and run company could do this instead of the task system, and that would give it a much more real feeling of community, but that also has plenty of pit falls (no work to do because someone recently did all of it, inadequate participation leading to perpetual crop withering, no reliable means of distributing the gains to all the members of the cooperative). The task system would have none of those problems and could also scale much more reliably. A potential down side of the task system is that a character could focus on farming tasks and probably earn more riln than straight farming because as has been previously noted, farming doesn't pay well for the amount of active time required - a character could definitely earn more by instead investing that active time into crafting.
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