Board Thread:Suggestions/@comment-25178962-20150615142220/@comment-24108228-20150626211930

I'm bored. NoNoBanana wrote: Ok, so you're saying that you're not conserving compost, but the labour you spent making the farm. I respond with this: What labour?

Farmers are merely a glorified freeloader. Let's look at the numbers. The largest amount of effort expended by far in farming is the section where you set up the farm. This, all in all, isn't really much effort, tiny patches are more than enough to feed huge quantities of people. Following on from the patch statistics, say we're a solo farmer, like I was referring to in my other post. Say we wanted enough bread to last an entire day of solid playing, and all that wheat was to come from a single harvest of some behemoth farm? Take a guess, how big would that farm be? Enough to take up all of Bento Island? Plateau? Mainland? Did you guess a 7x7 patch of large compost? If so, congratulations, you win a week's worth of bread! Even that didn't need more than an 18x18 patch. For over 10,000 minutes worth of food.
 * You need no cooking skill to make high end food (bread).
 * You need only three farming to produce any high end food renewably.
 * You need only bring two items to your settlement, berries and wheat.
 * Only using bread, with a 2x2 plot you can produce enough food to support a tribe of 5 for almost half an hour, in a single harvest.
 * Or, if you prefer, an entire server with a 3x3 patch for well over 15 minutes.
 * With sickles, you need only one click to harvest crops.

I would hope I made my point about farms only having to be tiny and therefore not really requiring much effort to rebuild. And speaking of rebuilding, you seem to have decided to be sneaky and even make that easier. So if our lazy farmer couldn't be bothered to fireproof and make their farm completely invulnerable, they can still construct their farm over 4x faster, thanks to your addition of compost being placed in pre-built grids. Since the cost of compost is as negligible as the amount of effort farmers need to support themselves, this process of constructing a farm now consists of a single click, or four clicks if you want to make a pointlessly big farm.

And as a final point on the matter, you seem to have ignored the fact that these make farms completely invulnerable . Bombs and other explosives are well established as useless for raiding, and since you can quite easily fireproof your 4 composts, there is literally nothing that can destroy your farmland. Soloist farmer on desert? The most they can do to you is make you lose your iron sickle. All it takes to recover from even a super-raid against a tribe consisting of full mithril-bluesteel hybrids with dozens of bombs and some aimbot yewbeam-snipers giving assistance in the background, will be a small amount of water, to re-fireproof the compost that the raiders wasted bombs on. This should not be the case. These dedicated raiders should be able to completely obliterate your farmland, and if they have to individually forage each one of them, so be it. They killed you, your land is their spoils.

Bearing all this in mind, I loop back round to my original point. Do farmers actually need all this additional help? I mean, farmers can support a tribe of five for a whole 50 minutes, purely off the wheat you get by visiting paradise once. Not exactly a "farmer" when you don't even have to do anything for the first 50 minutes, and certainly not a worker who needs new items to help protect the labour they put into their farms. You say you're protecting labour, but I'm not seeing any labour to protect in the first place.