Indoor Gardening System


Deathdealers747

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To take a bit off of my previous suggestion (adding of Poop into the game), I think we should be allowed to setup an Indoor Gardening System. Indoors would be much warmer and allow for a higher chance of successful crops due to being protected from the weather and animals. 

  1. It should require Poop or Fertile Soil/Fertilizer Bags to create a Crop Plot of sorts.
  2. It should require at least 1 Seed to start the Growth Cycle.
  3. The area needs to have proper Sunlight and be near a Window.
  4. Have a beginning of a 15% succession rate in properly cultivating a Seed into a Grown Plant.
  5. Require a minimum of 15 Days to get a plant to Full Maturity.
  6. Require Potable Water (or Non-Potable?) each day to grow. I'm thinking 0.07 Gal might be a good number - per Plant that is.

Now, obviously, in order to make this happen several items would need to be added.

  • Seeds
  • Fertilizer/Fertile Soil/Poop
  • Crop Plots/Pots/Pans (could use the ones already implemented in the game, maybe?)
  • Growth Cycle - Seed, Sprout, Blossoming, then Fruition. 
  • Different types of editable fruits/vegetables, such as, Potatoes, Nuts, Radishes, and other items that can be grown without the use of a Seed or other items that need seeds to start, such as, Apples, Tomatoes, and Oranges.

Additionally, I could see this also expanding into the idea of being able to grow your own Cat Tails, Rose Hip Bushes, Old Man's Beard Lichen, Maple Saplings, and Birch Saplings.

The overall idea is to make it easier to "Live Off the Land" and remain in one location, if someone desired.

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Might be fun / challenge to try and grow some of your own food, typically you would do this in a glass house. As plants need lots of light to grow.

Not sure how it would go in such cold and cloudy weather in TLD, plus it would require constant warmth else the soil would just freeze along with any plants.

I think I would first like to see some sort of smoker to preserve fish / meat.

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3 hours ago, Deathdealers747 said:

To take a bit off of my previous suggestion (adding of Poop into the game), I think we should be allowed to setup an Indoor Gardening System. Indoors would be much warmer and allow for a higher chance of successful crops due to being protected from the weather and animals. 

  1. It should require Poop or Fertile Soil/Fertilizer Bags to create a Crop Plot of sorts.
  2. It should require at least 1 Seed to start the Growth Cycle.
  3. The area needs to have proper Sunlight and be near a Window.
  4. Have a beginning of a 15% succession rate in properly cultivating a Seed into a Grown Plant.
  5. Require a minimum of 15 Days to get a plant to Full Maturity.
  6. Require Potable Water (or Non-Potable?) each day to grow. I'm thinking 0.07 Gal might be a good number - per Plant that is.

Now, obviously, in order to make this happen several items would need to be added.

  • Seeds
  • Fertilizer/Fertile Soil/Poop
  • Crop Plots/Pots/Pans (could use the ones already implemented in the game, maybe?)
  • Growth Cycle - Seed, Sprout, Blossoming, then Fruition. 
  • Different types of editable fruits/vegetables, such as, Potatoes, Nuts, Radishes, and other items that can be grown without the use of a Seed or other items that need seeds to start, such as, Apples, Tomatoes, and Oranges.

Additionally, I could see this also expanding into the idea of being able to grow your own Cat Tails, Rose Hip Bushes, Old Man's Beard Lichen, Maple Saplings, and Birch Saplings.

The overall idea is to make it easier to "Live Off the Land" and remain in one location, if someone desired.

Growing crops is an interesting idea, but it should be saved for if/when we get full-blown seasons. Hopefully, if we do get seasons, a lot of this will already be taken care of: wild plants will be able to respawn over a period of time to indicate their regrowth with the new warmer seasons and PV farmstead is clearly an orchard of some sort.

1 & 3) It would have to be bagged soil or already existing planters in a fixed greenhouse. This isn't something you can just slap together on the dining room table at PV farmstead or the floor of ML office. You have to have enough depth of soil, enough light (and what's simply coming through a house window isn't going to cut it in most cases), someplace for excess water to drain, and enough warmth. The warmth is a huge one. Strip down in one of the main shelters and you'll be sitting somewhere in the single digits C/30's F. Not near warm enough for plants to germinate or grow. This is why it would have to be a fixed greenhouse, to get enough light and enough heat via some sort of distribution system.

5) 15 days? It typically takes months for most annual plants to grow and develop harvestable fruits/vegetables. The game may not be completely realistic, to provide fun and balance, but I really can't see them just going complete easy-mode.

6) Potable water. You do not want to be watering your plants with non-potable water... not unless you want to get sick.

Apples, oranges, and most common nuts grow on trees... full blown trees, ya know, like 10+ feet tall at minimum... that take literal years (minimum 3) before they produce harvestable produce. Cat tails are a water plant and they need even more space to grow, as they spread via runners and not every part of the plant produces the edible stalks, which is why you find them scattered among the rest of the unharvestable rushes.

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3 hours ago, Deathdealers747 said:

Well, Russia managed to figure out how to farm... So, I'd probably start there. Other than being a heating issue, I really don't see your point.

Plants needs light. Did you see, for example, greenhouse without lamps? 

And i didn't get your reference about Russia. They have summer, you know that right?

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The main problem is the warmth and the light. You might be able to grow potatoes if you found some bags of compost (and some potatoes to start you off, obviously). I think you'd probably need to keep a fire burning in the same room in order to maintain enough ambient warmth though.

The thing about enabling players to live off the land in one location is this: it's really boring. You can do this already with current game mechanics if you want to, and you don't need vegetables. If you live close to rabbits (and preferably fish as well) you can get a sustainable food supply; then all you need to worry about is having enough matches/ignition sources. But it gets really tedious and repetitive. I know it's all subjective as to how one gets enjoyment from the game, but the exploration of the world is what makes the game interesting and challenging, not the sedentary farming bits (or a mixture of the two, at least). Exploration and movement around the map brings all the game systems into play - dangerous animals, weather, different types of food available and equipment required. If you stay in the same spot, you're deleting a lot of this variation from your experience.

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2 hours ago, Pillock said:

The thing about enabling players to live off the land in one location is this: it's really boring. You can do this already with current game mechanics if you want to, and you don't need vegetables. If you live close to rabbits (and preferably fish as well) you can get a sustainable food supply; then all you need to worry about is having enough matches/ignition sources. But it gets really tedious and repetitive. I know it's all subjective as to how one gets enjoyment from the game, but the exploration of the world is what makes the game interesting and challenging, not the sedentary farming bits (or a mixture of the two, at least). Exploration and movement around the map brings all the game systems into play - dangerous animals, weather, different types of food available and equipment required. If you stay in the same spot, you're deleting a lot of this variation from your experience.

Well, I'd agree to disagree with that comment there. I have a Save File that's on Voyageur Difficulty with 45 Days in. I haven't moved from Mystery Lake Main Office - it's my main base and I always go back to it. I think different people have different manners in which they choose to survive, but I'm a Home-Base kind of guy. 

It hasn't been boring, but it has been difficult, because this is the first time that I've ever gotten this far. Add in the fact that I'm doing my best to explore the world without spoilers from the Wiki - the only time I looked up a Map was to find the bunker on Mystery Lake - I had found it on another Save File, but when I went back there I couldn't find it after 2 hours (real-time) straight of searching. Now, 5/8 locations checked and I still haven't found it!

I think it'd be wise to try to remember that everyone has a different play-style and everyone finds different "difficulties" to be difficult in different manners. Otherwise, there would just be one setting: Hard, on all games. In this circumstance, there's 4 difficulty settings, but each one has its own merit and challenges within itself. 

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1 hour ago, Deathdealers747 said:

Well, I'd agree to disagree with that comment there. I have a Save File that's on Voyageur Difficulty with 45 Days in. I haven't moved from Mystery Lake Main Office - it's my main base and I always go back to it. I think different people have different manners in which they choose to survive, but I'm a Home-Base kind of guy. 

It hasn't been boring, but it has been difficult, because this is the first time that I've ever gotten this far. Add in the fact that I'm doing my best to explore the world without spoilers from the Wiki - the only time I looked up a Map was to find the bunker on Mystery Lake - I had found it on another Save File, but when I went back there I couldn't find it after 2 hours (real-time) straight of searching. Now, 5/8 locations checked and I still haven't found it!

I think it'd be wise to try to remember that everyone has a different play-style and everyone finds different "difficulties" to be difficult in different manners. Otherwise, there would just be one setting: Hard, on all games. In this circumstance, there's 4 difficulty settings, but each one has its own merit and challenges within itself. 

I can't disagree with anything you say here (except shame on you for caving in and using the wiki!), but I think my point still stands.

Forty seven days at the Camp Office has not got boring for you, because you have still found it challenging - to get all the resources you need to keep going, I presume? You're doing pretty well, and you will continue to get better and more efficient at surviving as you carry on. And as you do so, I am willing to bet that there will come a point in your game when you have established a reliable system of renewable food and fuel gathering, and you will have explored everywhere on Mystery Lake. And then you might start to think to yourself: "Ok, what now?"

I'm not saying that growing vegetables would break the game, necessarily, but it would have to be carefully balanced so that it didn't make the sedentary playstyle more easy than it is now - this is not a balance direction that the game needs. If anything, I think it needs to go the other way slightly. But if fishing and snaring became less reliable, and hunting became much harder, then I think in conjunction with some simple gardening mechanic, it could work. But the list of fruit and veg that would tolerate the climate is pretty small.

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No, @Pillock is right, living out of a single location does get boring, but at only 45 days in, you're not anywhere near that point yet because you've yet to explore but a small portion of the world. That's where the late-game sandbox is now, you have to make a conscious effort to move between multiple bases (being nomadic) or decide to occasionally take random trips out to other regions from a main base, just to find something to do with your time.The more things you come up with to lock you into, or encourage you, staying solely at one location, the more it discourages exploring and makes it get boring more quickly. That's part of why we have cabin fever, to make you get outside and do something in the long-term.

That's why seasons with naturally reproducing flora is a good idea, because it encourages you to continue traveling to other map regions, even if you gather and return to a main base. In that same way, a greenhouse in a fixed location would also encourage travel/on-going maintenance even after you've explored everywhere.

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It is best to have a base on a few maps. Resources like mushrooms and lichen re-spawn, and also you might have to go re-forge a knife or something. 

There is plenty of farmland in PV, but since we are only in winter I don't think farming should be in-scope. It isn't a farming simulation game.

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4 hours ago, stapeliad said:

Resources like mushrooms and lichen re-spawn

They shouldn't unless you're playing a save from a few updates ago. Spawns are occasionally reset when the game updates. As it is, these items should not be growing in winter.

Growing things inside is also not a bad idea... it's just not really feasible without re-working the ambient heating mechanic. For instance, I'd love to make sourdough (recipe: flour + water + time = dough + heat = bread) but unless you had a constant fire (since buildings lose heat instantly) your flour would just freeze solid.

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One idea (sure a distant future maybe) is you have to travel to specific maps to find all growing tools needed to start a small green house! One map might find a packet of seeds in a safe perhaps, another might find Fertilizer used to feed your plants, and a map where a green house is located to grow them. Sure other factors may come into play such as the right temperature to grow them etc. but eh. from little seeds big trees grow.

Might be good for a long haul game style play. where you need to think in future day 60, day 90, day 400 do I have some cool vegetables/fruit/herbs I can eat or use.

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On 1/19/2017 at 0:51 AM, SteelFire said:

Growing crops is an interesting idea...

I won't quote the whole post, but it's full of really good points about light, temperature and growing time.

For perspective, I grow herbs, greens, and something a bit more substantial (peas, cucumbers, or tomatos) indoors every winter here in Colorado.  I use earthboxes with extensively fertilized soil and good control for moisture.  I don't have a greenhouse, but I have a very large (2m / 8ft) south facing sliding door -- pretty much the best case for all day sunshine in my locale.  I'm 1000km south of Canada, so my winter daylight hours are much longer.  Comfortable indoor temps all the time (thank you central heating), and the door is exceptionally well insulated so it's not drafty.  I use growlights at night to supplement the meager winter sunlight.

So pretty good indoor winter growing conditions -- likely far better than the random TLD survivor could manage.  And it still takes 2-3 times longer to grow crops and yields are far lower than my summer outdoor crops.

Overall it's a cool idea, but indoor gardening in a climate like the current sandbox is a very specialized pursuit.  Spring/summer sandbox is a whole different ballgame, particularly if we could plant our crops outside and let them fend for themselves.   I'd be looking for places without deer, myself. :P

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Just now, Pillock said:

Do scarecrows work with deer? Scaredeers, whatever.

Would be fun to build one out of reclaimed wood, maybe, plus odd surplus bits of clothes!

I haven't had much luck with scarecrows and deer.  Barriers work best, preferably one they can't see through.  The buggers can jump high, but they won't jump into somewhere when they can't see the landing spot.

When I made this comment I was thinking about a ledge on a cliff face.  Maybe one that can only be reached by a climbing rope. :P

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