Fruit

[Njn0225]

Ok, so here's my idea, fruit trees, basically it could work one of three ways, the cool way, the dumb way, and the alright way, first the cool way, my idea is when you plant the fruit tree, apple, orange, pear, etc... you can harvest it several times throughout it's lifetime for food, but at the end of it's lifetime when you harvest it for the last time you chop it down and get food and wood, then you replant, the alright way would be you plant it, harvest it, get wood and fruit, then replant. The dumb way would be you plant it and just get fruit then you replant. What do you fellas think? Maybe you could also include some fruit related diseases or events, like fruit flies infesting your trees making you have to get rid of them, it would ruin your harvest but save the tree for the next harvest, or even scurvy.

[FosterPatch]

I think this suggestion would be a good addition to the game. However, I think acquiring food is already too easy. Adding another method to acquire food (and wood on top of it)... I'd say another addition would be needed for diseases/blight for food growth.

[BetaSpectre]

Blights and etc are already in the game, and IMO they work fine. IMO there should be sectional blights that only affect certain crops.

[O Negative]

Orchards for fruit would make a great addition! It's trivial to make a tree which would produce fruit on harvest, and not be destroyed in the process. Problem is, the game isn't really coded to be friendly with the idea of any tree producing fruit on harvest but not also producing wood. So, you're stuck with a tree which produces wood and fruit on harvest and chopping of said tree. I don't know about you guys, but that just seems really hard to balance to me...

As far as "acquiring door is already too easy" goes, I completely agree. I'm currently working on a huge spreadsheet of data to help me balance a sort of "Ecology" mod I'm working on. So far, I've learned:

- Poplar trees are ridiculously unbalanced as far as wood/year is concerned
- Cacti and Agave produce way too many resources/time for being desert plants
- Plants don't live very long after they've fully grown, which  actually makes their growth rate significantly smaller than it should be

[PieTau]

As far as "acquiring door is already too easy" goes, I completely agree. I'm currently working on a huge spreadsheet of data to help me balance a sort of "Ecology" mod I'm working on. So far, I've learned:

- Poplar trees are ridiculously unbalanced as far as wood/year is concerned
- Cacti and Agave produce way too many resources/time for being desert plants
- Plants don't live very long after they've fully grown, which  actually makes their growth rate significantly smaller than it should be

The plants page of the RimworldWiki has been updated, maybe it helps you with your mod.

[O Negative]

Ah, yes, the wiki. I love the wiki, but sometimes numbers get looked over. For example, with plants... lol

According to the wiki, a poplar tree only takes 15.05 days to grow. But, this just doesn't happen under normal circumstances (without a sunlamp). With a little more precise measurements, I found that a Poplar tree actually takes about 32.58 days to grow fully in naturally optimal conditions. A less dramatic example would be grass. growDays for grass is supposed to be 2.5 days, but it actually takes 5.4-ish days to grow fully. Lifespans are accurate though.

The light % of the day follows a sort of Cosine curve, which is transformed depending on your latitude and day of year (impressive, actually). Using a bit of calculus, you can figure out the average light level/day. I decided to base my calculation off of a fairly optimal latitude and am balancing plants with this in mind. I got around 92% average light for the growth period. This gets calculated in, and multiplies the growth rate each day by about 0.84 for all plants. This then sets the growth/tick off for each individual plant. As you can imagine, this makes things a bit more complicated

I've already tested this with controlled in-game experiments just to make sure my calculations were correct (and to make sure I'm not being an idiot by wasting time); using the scenario editor to disable all incidents, the debugger and god-mode. Because of the different light levels based on latitude I expected a decent amount of error, but I was never more than 0.1 days off for fast-growing plants, and my error for slow-growing plants was a pretty decent 5%.

After I tweak a few things with the plant growth/lifespans, I'm going to be working on some logistic growth models to figure out what each plant's seed-shooting-radius should be, to fill a disturbed area with life again. Wish me luck lol

[Arctic_fox]

how about take the rasberry bush approach, you can harvest it when fully grown and it grows back or it can be cut down entirely for wood, make it take say a year or 2 to grow and provide a ton of food the year AFTER its fully grown all at once but only gives a yield once per year, twice in an all year growing biome, Then each type can have a blight on a single field that will mean you either burn or destory that field if it spreads too fast or lose all of them, maybe it can even start to spread to other kinds of trees once all the origional ones are gone I.E an apple virus or infestation that moves to peach trees if its left alone long enough to infect all apple trees, make it so infected wood has a low chance of infecting other trees as well even if cut down so its a harder choice then just slice down a few trees and use the wood, Hell you can even make diffrent woods have diffrent levels of beauty, for example cherry wood will look nicer then oak but not be as strong, so you can choose to grow fields for wood, food, or both.

this way you have to make choices like you would in real life, do irl, do you chop your food trees down for wood for winter or to sell or turn into art? how about one tree got a beetle infestiation, do you burn half the field and for sure kill the infestation or cut or burn the infected trees down and hope its enough to stop it and that its fast enough to prevent the spread to the rest of your fields? do you keep the cut wood even though there is a chance the infestation can still spread?

[O Negative]

Communicable plant pathogens in a game without communicable human pathogens is a bit of a stretch, in my opinion. It's awesome, but it's a stretch. The coding required for that kind of thing wouldn't be a small project.

[Wex]

IMO all the farm thing is a bit weird.
You don't need to destroy berry bushes, when you pick them. Strawberry plants doesn't need to be destroyed, as corn. I agree about potatoes, rice or haygrass.
But we can't have a tomato plant, because it would be destroyed on picking the tomatoes.

[Arctic_fox]

Communicable plant pathogens in a game without communicable human pathogens is a bit of a stretch, in my opinion. It's awesome, but it's a stretch. The coding required for that kind of thing wouldn't be a small project.

depends on how its done, i was thinking of a poison ship type thing but faster and only effecting one kind of tree with a 5% chance to spread to a new kind if left alone, one tree gets it and if you wait it "replaces" for lack of a better term a healthy tree with an infected one in a spreading ring, as for the wood when chopped has say....a 0.50% chance of spawning infected wood of the same type as what you cut (apple maple oak poplar ect) with no major telltails save a small visual effect or tiny hint in the text to make you need to pay attention.

i would also make it so only player grown trees can be affected, there are a couple ways to code it i think but damn it jim im a trucker not a game programmer so dont ask me.

[Serenity]

how about take the rasberry bush approach, you can harvest it when fully grown and it grows back or it can be cut down entirely for wood, make it take say a year or 2 to grow and provide a ton of food the year AFTER its fully grown all at once but only gives a yield once per year, twice in an all year growing biome,

[...]

Then each type can have a blight on a single field that will mean you either burn or destory that field if it spreads too fast or lose all of them, maybe it can even start to spread to other kinds of trees once all the origional ones

That's exactly what Banished does with orchards for the growing and diseases for all kinds of crops. Works pretty well. Diseases can be checked a bit by not having mono cultures and alternating fields.