Why do seeds cost so much? I see strawberry seeds for sale for like $75. That strikes me as really bizarre- to start up even a small farm that's like $750, am I missing something?
First thing I changed after I downloaded was reducing all of the costs by a factor of five. =)
I get that one lone seed can produce $(crop_value*yield) worth of product (ignoring for a moment that sale prices are only 55% at "normal" Rough difficulty, so it should actually be $(crop_value*yield*0.55) to represent the final sale cost)... but since seeds are dropped automatically in excess of the crop size, it is essentially free for abstracted offworld farmers and growers to produce viable seeds: any excess of seeds that they don't require is of no value to them, so any price they charge is mostly related to what they expect the market will bear and to recoup distribution costs from the sale.
Since space travel in the Rimworld universe appears to be relatively low-cost -- why else would we have dozens of spaceships visiting a planet on the extreme fringes of transstellar space every year, let alone every planet on the rim sporting a half-dozen or more population entities -- even the transport costs would be comfortably low.
So, if the price would be what the market will bear, $75 for a square metre of strawberry plants is not particularly bearable for me. ;-) $15, while a bit pricey, does reflect the fact that you're buying a whole square metre's worth and it was carted halfway across the galaxy to get there. Typical Earth seed packets actually involve even more processing (entire crops are grown entirely to go to seed) but far less distribution, and are only ~$1.50 for common cultivars per square metre.
Frankly, they could even be entirely *free* and it would still be balanced, since the extra step required in acquiring them from traders or salvaged pods is more than enough to serve to justify the raison d'être of the mod in the first place -- it nerfs the ability to plant all crops from the very beginning of the game, and instead requires you to "unlock" them all.