REVISION 41D NOW IN THE EXPERIMENTAL BUILD

a granary so you can store raw crops that don't overflow over your food stockpile?

 

Farming has always been a challenge in CE, because the time limits and potential for rot and crop loss is something other jobs don't have to deal with.

Three things come to mind that would help specifically with farming.

1. Encourage larger work crews to farm by adding utility to the farming job based on the number of workers in that crew; 10 to 25 utility per crew member should be good.
2. Add 100 or so utility to farming jobs when the sun comes up (when the isDawn boolean is true).
3. A while back I suggested tweaking crop.go so that normal crops only grow during the day (and that corrupt crops only grow at night, after David pointed out that omission). If I'm reading the current crop.go file correctly, the counter for crops still runs during the night as well. Crops that hit their time limit at night and start rotting can get well along in the process before any colonists are willing to do anything about it.

If #3 is implemented at some point, the stageTimeSeconds entries in crops.edb should be reduced by 25% (or 75% for corrupt crops) to compensate.

 

I think that unlocking certain crop types once the overseer reaches a specific skill level in farming would make a skilled team valuable, and also add some attachment to the character, you lose that character and the crops die off, or at least prevent you from planting them again.

 

You mean to say you are not all lashed permanently to the oars!!! I'll be sending a missive by flightless bird to the Queen describing such slovenly behaviour! This is not how we built an empire!!

 

A long, long session, you may find something useful in the files. Up to around 60 colonists - some persistent bugs, the farms have stopped working a couple of times (fixed by stopping farming and picking a new crop), the mines are stuck in some kind of limbo. Otherwise, things are working generally as intended. Some more observations / bugs:

• as noted elsewhere, soldier created via barracks can not be assigned rally points
• soldiers do not appear to hunt at night
• together, the previous two are particularly unfortunate when the colony experiences a beetle stampede at night
• the material requirements for modules that need 3 or more things are illegible, because the text is all squished together

 

The UI stuttering does not happen when game is paused so maybe just have the game auto-pause when the work menu is opened. It will help a lot of those who don't know the pause work around.

 

Here's a save with the mysterious farm stoppage, and the ghost gabion line problem.

 

The Kitchen and farm, aside from the soldiers are the ONLY critical jobs so far. Yeah if cant make beds then moods may sour but starving is irreversible.

Right now with 4 person work crews 4 ovens cant keep churning out that much food when colony gets big, with better stockpiles they might get more efficient but this so far is my biggest hurdle.

Farms are the same way due to the work crew size and only 1 crew per plot.

As for food making, I don't know if the goal is to add a bigger chain eventually like farmer for wheat windmill for flour and then bakery for bread or brewer for beer and other breakdowns for food processing instead of generic kitchen, but as it stands , with limited work crews 1 kitchen cant keep up, and I can designate more kitchens if need be but this would be the only office besides barracks that would need this duplication.

For farms, maybe a farm shack for office and once an overseer is assigned, he has commoners work any crops that need it, this keeps them working instead of having idle farmers because a new overseer happened to goto an untended crop and tie it up.

Every other office/workshop I have can get by with 0 to 1 helper as my demand never gets that great as long as I have a healthy stock built. Any laborers I get winds up maxing my farming , kitchen, militia overseers, the rest I never care about it. and having 5 overseers dedicated to farming gets to be a pain especially when they wont touch another field if already has a crew on it.

As for regard to plot sizes, with a higher population a 5x4 plot doesn't cut it, but making them much bigger and they spend several days just seeding the durn thing. What good is the ability to make a large farm plot if they cant farm it decently. I am better off with a ton of smaller ones, the only problem is, these take up workcrews and causes a lot more micro managing to make sure I am not wasting staff.

Started a new play on the jungle island while waiting for next patch, big difference when first came out, but hope to see a lot more stuff down the road.

 

I suspect the reason I'm not seeing problems with kitchens keeping up might have something to do with always building a ten-oven kitchen first up.

Earlier builds required colonists work at cooking, but for a while now each worker has been able to keep multiple stoves active concurrently. It there is an idle worker, an idle oven, no meal is waiting to be collected, the order quota hasn't been met and there are available ingredients, they'll cook in parallel. Especially if the distance to pick up and set down is kept short, with the food stockpile, megakitchen and farms close together.

(Related: on temperate at least, wheat is a wonder crop. Bread seems as good-tasting as anything else and wheat also allows both beer and whiskey. Apart from that, only flax and opium provide value for me, with bamboo a useful supplement once the forests are covered with Progress... So no doubt all of this will change when the cooking economy is next revised to Promote the Wonder that is Cabbage. )

 

Last game I had some trouble getting people to flatten terrain, also I had a gamecrash. plus still laggy whit workcrew windwow open, and it resetting allowed jobs. Strangly no dump file.

 

Is anyone else getting no re-growth on berries? Not a single plant has been re-populated in 30 days.

 

Hmm got a spam of madness stuff in my game. Anything could cause this ? (like the cooking of long pork ? I think i made some but here it looks like half the colony went mad)

 

What about assigning a crew to a farm 'office' to get a dedicated farming crew ?

 

that just means you are playing the game the right way.

 

That would be great. I tried out some of my suggestions, and they worked like a charm.

Spoiler: crop.go

receive Update()
<<

if not SELF.tags["spoiled"] then

local isNight = query("gameSession", "getSessionBool", "isNight")[1]
if not SELF.tags["corrupted"] then

if not isNight then
state.timer = state.timer + 1
if state.timer%10 == 0 then
--state.timer = state.timer - 10

cropOneSecondUpdate()​

end​

end
else

if isNight then

state.timer = state.timer + 1
if state.timer%10 == 0 then

--state.timer = state.timer - 10
cropOneSecondUpdate()​

end​

end​

end​

end​

I also:

1. Reduced the growth times in crops.edb by 25% (75% for clawbulbs).
2. added <session_bool value="1" name="isDawn" weight="200" /> to the utility section for the Till Soil, Tend Crops, and Harvest Crops jobs.
3. Bumped up Till Soil's base utility to 1200, while getting rid of the 200 utility bonus for carrying a hoe. Now that tools just magically appear when needed, adding a tool bonus doesn't make as much sense.

It worked great. I had three full sized fields chugging along.



Most of the time those weren't full crews either - just two workers and the overseer, usually. Obviously, bigger crews would allow them to keep the entire field going at once.

No spoiled crops either, except for one or two around day 16.

 

I didn't follow what they plan to do with tools, but maybe they'll come back in some form when other features are closer to completion ?