[A17] Vegetable Garden [8/22/17]

[stigma]

After using vegetable garden for a little bit now I have a few quick points of feedback:

CRAFTING CONFUSION
- Some of the crafting stuff added is very unintuitive when it comes to skills. After having to experiment a lot I've figured out that mining salt is a mining priority - yet it seemingly uses crafting skill (improved crafting mod helped me here by telling me what skill is relevant). Unless you just happen to have a pawn that is both set up to craft and mine you can easily not be able to get anyone who is actually good at this job do it because they are technically not miners - and this can be VERY confusing an is never explained anywhere as far as I can see. I think that either a single skill should be used for everything if possible - or if it is technically difficult to make this work then a clear description in the worktask is desperately needed.

-Crafting tribal medicine kits is a little similar. A crafting priority, but seems to use medicine as the relevant skill-check. I think a better description in the worktask would make this clearer.

TRIBAL MEDICINE KITS (ingredients)
- The recipe for tribal medicine kits seems a bit weird. Currently 2 hops, 2 smokeleaf and some leather. It does not use any healroot. Why? It would be much more intuitive if this upgraded your herbal medicine (and maybe stretched it out a bit to provide a better amount of medicine pr healroot) rather than being totally separate. As it is, healroot becomes pointless once you start producing tribal medicine kits. Maybe it should be 3hop/3smokeleaf/1leather/2healroot => 2-3 tribal medicine or something along those lines so that healroot and herbal stays relevant but you can improve quality and effective use by upgrading it with work.

INFORMATION OVERLOAD / FLUFF
- Consider having a "light" version of the mod. While a lot of the basics in this mod are great and offer completely new functionality and possibilities the sheer amount of new crops and recipes can be daunting. I almost passed on it because I felt it looked "too bloated" (I'm glad I didn't now, but it took me hours to figure out what crops and recipes to focus on and which ones are there mostly for extra flavor and options). I think that a "light" version that trims down many of the plants and recipes that do pretty similar things would be a great way for new people to see if they like it before they go balls-to-the-wall and get like 30 crops they have to decide between when they start planting - not to mention even more recipies.

While I appreciate that advanced players can have a lot of flavor variety to play with I think that a LOT of both the crops and the recipes (especially the high-level baking and treats) could probably be cut down by as much as 60-70% and still retain most of the essentials - just with less variety.

There can be such a thing as "too many options" and I think a sign of a quality mod is to trim the fat where it can. Stuff like squash and tomato being virtual carbon-copies of eachother is just an especially poignant example.

SOIL BALANCE
- First of all the info on this page is out of date it seems. Description says the enhanced soils are 150%/200% but in my game now (using latest version build 10) it is 120%/160%. I like that it doesn't seem overpowered now. If anything it's maybe a little weak for all the work and resources you need to make fertilizer. Maybe a +10% to both would be in order, but it is hard to say without numbercrunching.

My main complaint is that garden soil (120%) for 10 fertilizer seems to be totally outclassed by plowed soil (160%) for 15 fertilizer. Except that you need one extra research - why would you ever want to spend valuable fertilizer on garden soil? I am always going to saving it for plowed soil as far as I see it. It doesn't seem like it would ever be worth it to use garden soil as a stepping stone - and NEVER useful once you can make plowed soil (much less extra fertility added pr. fertilizer so it is very inefficient use even not considering that you eventually want to upgrade).

My opinion is that garden soil should use much less fertilizer than plowed soil so that even if you have both they can both be viable. Garden soil if you have a lot of space but little fertilizer, plowed if you need maximum yield in a small package. That way they are both useful and relevant options and not just a straight upgrade.

Maybe something along these lines:
- Keep plowed soil at 15 fertilizer (no change)
- Change garden soil to 3 fertilizer. It seems a drastic change, but I think it needs this to remain a viable option.

With these values:
- Plowed soil is 3x more dense in terms of added fertility (+60% vs +20% pr tile), so great for space/travel efficiency or if you just have loads of fertilizer.
- Garden soil +67% more efficient use of fertilizer (for 15 fert. you can get a total of +100% fertility added instead of +60%). Very effective use of limited resources if you have much space and manpower.

Before you think "+67% seems like a lot" - keep in mind that it is much more optimal to give super-sensitive crops very high fertility than to let most of your crops have +20% because many plants can't benefit as much from it - so there is inherently a lot of weakness in spreading out the fertility instead of being able to focus it - and not just in terms of needing extra space.

MOATS
Very cool - but very powerful.

I think maybe they should need some resources to build other than work. Anything that you can build with nothing but work is very powerful (and efficient due to not needing any hauling at all).

Maybe should require some "pile of dirt" ? 2 or 3 units perhaps?

CROP BALANCE
- After having made a huge spreadsheet (actually updating one for vanilla made by another user to include vegetable garden) I think that crop balance seems pretty good so far. overall At least not much jumps out at me as being obviously overpowered. I still feel that meat-substitutes (while a good idea) are a little OP mostly because red lentils (0.12 nut.) have a nutrition/day yield that is about the same - or even slightly better - than many vegetable crops like potatoes/tomatoes/corn ect. While it is cool to have a growable meat as an option I don't think it should be nearly this convenient. Meat ought to be significantly harder to come by than vegetables since you need it to make fine and lavish meals for mood bonuses. If you can make "meat" as easy as vegetables then you never have a reason to want to make simple meals. I think the nutrition of red lentils (and mushrooms to a lesser extent) need to go down by maybe as much as half for this to be better balanced, to keep meat as a relative luxury in cooking, and to not trivialize hunting, animal farming and other sources for meat.

I still haven't played long enough to get to many of the advanced crops (trees mostly) and the fancy cooking - I will provide feedback on that when I feel I have a stronger grasp on it.

If people want to look at "my" spreadsheet breakdown of yields and work effectiveness let me know if there is a demand. I am happy to share - but I will need to clean it up a bit and add a few missing crops here and there to make it complete before I feel it is good enough to publish.

Sorry for the wall of text - but hopefully this provides good feedback.
If you think I am wrong about something here - let me know and tell me why. It is perfectly possible I have just misunderstood something. I am still new to vegetable garden

-Stigma

[stigma]

The way I heard it,
It's only cheating if it's good for you.
If it's bad for you then it's a challenge.

I guess it depends a lot on what climate you play.
In a jungle it's basically just outdoor hydroponics - so no big deal.
On an ice-sheet it's amazingly powerful in terms of saving power (and yea, probably removes a lot of the food difficulty there).

I think I will contact the author of that mod and see if maybe it could be a good idea to make skylights make less light - so they work more like a energy-free lamp and less like an energy-free sunlamp (or maybe something half-way between with an increased buildcost).

-Stigma

[carpediembr]

Not sure where I should be asking, but I'm runing Vegetable garden + Seeds Please and I'm having trouble trying to find "useless coffee beans"




Anyone got an idea?

[dismar]

Why do you need a useless coffee bean? It's not useful or used in anything

[carpediembr]

Why do you need a useless coffee bean? It's not useful or used in anything

In order to craft Coffee seeds.

[lorebot]

Not sure where I should be asking, but I'm runing Vegetable garden + Seeds Please and I'm having trouble trying to find "useless coffee beans"

Anyone got an idea?

I believe that's a conflict between the 2 mods. Vegetable Garden has 2 coffee beans in the mod atm, one of them is old and the other is new. The old one is being phased out and has been changed to a 'useless' variety that you can't obtain without using Dev Mode or buying it from certain traders that still have it listed in their available items stock lists. It looks like Seeds Please is trying to use the old beans to extract seeds from instead of the new beans. That's something that'll need to be addressed by the mod authors.

[scyther]

I don't know if I'm missing something, but I can't seem to get the compost starter actually IN the compost box. I've got a whole bunch (>250) of compost starter, but none of my pawns are putting it in the boxes. Help?

[Cayprol]

Hi, I recently came across your mod and made a few short runs out of it.
Thank you very much for the effort.

Just want to report sort of a bug I found.
The item Bread has two spoil time.
I think that's because in Items_meals.xml, Bread is inheriting VG_MealRottable which already uses class CompProperties_Rottable for allowing rotten , but adding another will simply add one more line of spoil time.

[attachment deleted by admin due to age]

[dismar]

Hi, I recently came across your mod and made a few short runs out of it.
Thank you very much for the effort.

Just want to report sort of a bug I found.
The item Bread has two spoil time.
I think that's because in Items_meals.xml, Bread is inheriting VG_MealRottable which already uses class CompProperties_Rottable for allowing rotten , but adding another will simply add one more line of spoil time.

thanks

[Sefiriot]

The way I heard it,
It's only cheating if it's good for you.
If it's bad for you then it's a challenge.

I guess it depends a lot on what climate you play.
In a jungle it's basically just outdoor hydroponics - so no big deal.
On an ice-sheet it's amazingly powerful in terms of saving power (and yea, probably removes a lot of the food difficulty there).

I think I will contact the author of that mod and see if maybe it could be a good idea to make skylights make less light - so they work more like a energy-free lamp and less like an energy-free sunlamp (or maybe something half-way between with an increased buildcost).

-Stigma

IIRC he can't do that due to some coding issues from the base game; seems to be all or nothing.

[Lelanti]

Hey, I need a little help with this mod

I just started using this mod, and before Winter I need to make parkas. I was going to use cotton but with this mod cotton plants don't give you actual cotton, I received cotton bolls. I made a loom, but it says I don't have the materials to make cotton, it requires cotton fibre but all I harvested from the cotton plant was cotton bolls and it doesn't seem to work when I want to use the cotton bolls.

Can you guys help?

[dismar]

Hey, I need a little help with this mod

I just started using this mod, and before Winter I need to make parkas. I was going to use cotton but with this mod cotton plants don't give you actual cotton, I received cotton bolls. I made a loom, but it says I don't have the materials to make cotton, it requires cotton fibre but all I harvested from the cotton plant was cotton bolls and it doesn't seem to work when I want to use the cotton bolls.

Can you guys help?

Some other mod is overwriting what my cotton plants produce. You'll have to post the list here or figure out on your own which mod is doing it. So we can figure out how they make cloth.

[Lelanti]

https://i.gyazo.com/d03fea53c3508eacb7db35bf71e9910d.png

There is all my mods

[dismar]

https://i.gyazo.com/d03fea53c3508eacb7db35bf71e9910d.png

There is all my mods

Oh you have extended fabrics running.  I think you just make cloth at the tailoring station in that one.

It will conflict with my mod making some of the loom recipes unusable. But you can make cloth still!

[Lelanti]

I think that was it! Thanks for your help