Board Thread:Suggestions/@comment-24108228-20150723225638

So I was messing around with life seeds on the server I last played on, and while I was doing that, I noticed that life seeds take ages to grow. Since each tree gives about 400 hunger points each per harvest, without any crafting required, I figured that it was probably some vague attempt to balance it slightly, where the editor adding it decided "Ah, why not." and put in a longer growth time.

But it got me thinking. Surely, to nerf farming, and therefore make survival more difficult (since farming is by far the best way to make food), you wouldn't need any fancy system. All you'd need to do is extend the growth times on everything, to something more akin to a full day in 303 time. Now this may seem like I've just crushed the hopes and dreams of every single farmer and tribe in the game, but hear me out. Tl;Dr= By making farmland less effective, farms need to grow to keep up with hunger requirements, and some islands will be unable to hold the requisite amount of farmland to host the tribe. This adds a large amount of difficulty to living on difficult islands, and will therefore balance them properly.

Since food is harder to come by, cooks and fishers will have to do more work, and stop freeloading. And as a final note, the suggestion is merely a change to the "Wait" line on the farming script, so it would be remarkably easy to add. Real Post= Currently, the only reason you would settle on an island that has natural food instead of ore is because it contains something else of extreme value - say a huge flat space, important animals, or a central location on the map; either that you're just feeling lazy and don't want to have to worry about anything in this playthrough. Really, if you're going for strength, there's no reason not to make a beeline for magma the moment you get the berries and wheat.

There isn't any risk to living on harsh islands, because farming can provide all the food and water you need, with minimal effort and space. Sure, you could argue that I'm speaking from a veterans perspective, and many people wouldn't find living at desert as easy, but really it's extremely simple. You bring berries, wheat to farm, build wells out of the materials at the island, and all stats are filled to their max. If someone chooses to take the path of a tribe at magma, they should have to put a lot of effort into feeding themself, and setting up should be hard and require preparation. This is where the nerf comes in.

Farming, being easily the best source of food (you can't contest with the amounts that wheat and corn give you), is the main lifeline of tribes and soloists on harsher islands, and given how easily they can survive, it makes sense to nerf farms so they actually have to work for their reward (which is a nice island with lots of ores on it). One of the main issues with making survival harder is that newbies would struggle to cope, and may be turned away from the game by it's high difficultly. However, by nerfing only farms, the new players (who will be living on the forgiving islands that have natural food and water supplies), will not notice a difference, as only farmland is made less effective.

Other than making the inhospitable islands live up to their name, this would also give rise to more cooks and fishers, and more importantly, cooks and fishers who're not freeloading. With crops being scarce, high level cooks would be needed to make the most of the food available, and fishing, although not quite capable of feeding a very large tribe, could certainly help in a pinch. And to top it all off, it's realistic, and would (probably) only require about 5-10 minutes to implement! As of post #7, it was realised that something will need to be done about wheat based foods if we are to directly nerf farming, else they'll be (one of many) loopholes in the system. How to Nerf Bread and Pie? Directly nerf the hunger given. Nerf the amount produced by farms and natural spawns. Nerf the amount produced by farms, and leave the loophole in. I don't like this suggestion to begin with.  