I have always disliked the huge fields of Gooseberry bushes that seem to form after a while in every settlement. It is counter intuitive that 50 bushes actually are worse than say 20. They only take up more space, and make it slower to care for the bushes. They don’t actually yield more food per time unit, but act more like a store of food.
So I am thinking of a change:
Gooseberry bushes would yield one harvest every seasonal cycle, without requiring more soil all the time.
Like with Raspberry, you could get one extra harvest out of them per cycle, by harvesting quickly and then tending to them. This is optional though.
You can’t grow bushes from seeds, but you can dig up and replant bushes.
These changes should make for less tedious work with bushes, and smaller but more efficient plantations. It would increase the need to plan a bit in advance with the seasonal changes, so you take care of the harvest when the berries show, and store them for the “winter time”, and then you can do other work while the bushes “take care of themselves”.
Hopefully, this would increase the use of other crops as well (like carrots )
Maybe we should add seasons to other plants too. We allready have a lot of plants having this behavior, like Milkweed, Raspberry, Blueberry and now Goosberry. Maybe bees only come in warm seasons, and trees could lose leaves or some plants only grow (back) at specific seasons.
I always found raspberries to be super strong (almost OP) due to their re-plantability and no need for further resource investment after the initial replanting. One domesticated raspberry bush can take you from starving to full as a grown adult with one berry left, with 3-4 needed to last you from initial fruiting to the next cycle. That means a single naked adult in a grass biome needs 4 raspberry bushes and never needs to worry about food.
I see the extensive berry farms as an artifact of the early game meta. Unfortunately by altering this early game meta by removing the resource requirements to maintain these farms (soil and water), you remove the need to advance. Barring the rare, lucky spot where soil and water and overly abundant, in order to stop from running out of soil, you need to start building either an efficient way to transport soil (ie cart which requires steel tools) or a pen to hold sheep to produce manure for compost (which requires steel tools). In order to stop from running out of water, you need steel tools for a shovel to make a well. These are the natural mechanisms in the game that push and require advancement to survive. By removing the need for these resources, you remove that natural survival drive. It risks stagnation at early development.
Also, this is the same reason you see most settlements congregate around the swamp/grass biome split. It’s the only place that has access to both resources, soil and water. So maybe with the removal for both resource requirements, you might see settlement pop up in more diverse biomes.
So there are some pros and cons to this mechanism change. Maybe there is a way to implement the resource requirement change and still maintain a drive to go from berry picking to animal husbandry, possibly using diminishing returns for each consecutive season, requiring fertilizer to “recharge” the berry bushes.
That’s a huge change if we make berry bushes seasonal plant. Our main food comes from berries when we’re foraging. And we will have problems if we cannot find food cuz the berries are not in season.
I know that huge field of berry farm is really annoying and newbie often plant more and more of them.
I feel skeptical about this idea. I agree with the idea of we can’t plant berry from seed. I just disagree making it seasonal.
I guess the natural predators will still have an influence on where the location will be for a starting point: grassland and prairies dont have predators. Also kids cant use bow and arrow. So its saver to be there.
The carrot farms still have two downsides over berrie farms.
without crock containers carrot farms need lots of space.
there will be lots of discussion about how many carrots to leave for seeds.
I’m not sure if its a good idea to make goose berries seasonal.
I think a better option would be to make all goose berry bushes behave like wild bushes. Where one berry respawns every so often. And you cant get more seeds from the berries without a specialised tool. That way it wont be as easy for players to over populate the bushes but it also wont be devastating for a griefer to steal or block off berry bushes in some way. And so that players could also grow they’re own berry bushes in order to have them for sheep, compost etc.
If you do make them seasonal id suggest setting it so berries are the opposite of the raspberrys so that there’s no time where there’s no food at all for eves and early camps.
Ive got mixed feelings about this one…
Lets say im gonna make a building made out of pine walls, that means a massive milkweed farm.
If i have to wait a certain time for berries, to make compost, i would plant more berriebushes so i have a big harvest at once.
So it kinda means we are back at the start… or even worse because now i only need a litlle 3×3 farm because i can tend it, otherwise everyone would make a bigger berrie farm.
It sounds like the general feeling is that limiting the number by not letting you grow the bushes from seed is a good thing, but making them seasonal might not be.
We can start there and only do this for now?
You can’t grow bushes from seeds, but you can dig up and replant bushes.
I worry about griefers tho… since they could simply dig up those or let them die. I personally think the way they are is fine, not perfect but still fine.
I don’t think you need to limit the number of berries.
How to make a village (planting berries) is left to the freedom of the villagers.
Even if you can’t plant from seeds, I think some people will make big berry fields.
If you can’t grow it, I’m wondering if the method of extracting wild berries will change.
I think I will use stakes and shovels now.It may be a little burden for small villages.
It’s the opposite to make it seasonal.
It has a wide range of uses such as soil, sheep’s food, and pies.
its kinda weird how players depend on berries, altho there is so much other tech around. maybe it’s good to change it, but it’s hard to predict how big the influence of berries are. maybe there should be an other way to make compost like @Mandrake suggested here: Compost Boxes.
I feel sceptical about changing berry bushes as well. Though I also feel annoyed by the huge amounts of berry bushes and a lot of ppl eating just berries though there’s a lot different food to eat.
So maybe work on the food system and not on the berry bushes? How about making a „negative yum chain“ - a „meh chain“ for food that you can just pick and eat (berries, raspberries, bananas, cactus fruits, carrots…). So when you eat that food more often, you get less and less food pips from it, until at some point you get none at all (cause if you still get one pip, berry bush farms might just be even more huge). Maybe that encourages ppl to cook (more diverse) and even get an awareness of the yum chain.
Also I think that Eves until maybe generation 3 (?) should be an exception. There should not be a meh chain.
Cause like @scaryWidow I also think there should be a „need“ to upgrade food. Until now ppl just make diverse food cause they want to try new recipes or because (very few player) actually go for a yum chain. And even for this they have to make every food by their own, because (at least what I saw) ppl don’t prepare huge variety in advance. But that should be as natural as building a forge (in my opinion).
So, can you also say why you are skeptical to a change, if you agree with the problem statement (too many bushes)? I’m interested in your reasoning.
If you are interested in changes to Yum, look at this post: Improving Yum for early settlements
There wasn’t very positive feedback, so I put that project on the shelf. (personally, I think it would have improved things though)
i’m not sure, if it would have a positive effect on the game, if berries give less and less food pips. i had a griefer in town, which tried to eat all the berries and bananas. i was glad he wasn’t faster in eating them and he had to wait till he could eat more again. the griefer started to feeding people because he wasn’t fast enough. i think it would be much easier for griefer to destroy the simple food resources, when they give less food pips.
Does that mean the gooseberries bushes will never go away? Like if a town was left for a long time and so? I think raspberries don’t go away, I have been rebirthed in some towns and backbags were ragged but the bushes aka raspberries were fine.
I think it’s gonna be a bit unpractical if it behaved like raspberries with the idea of not being able to plant from seeds, animals feed on them too and animals are somehow essential. Can’t it just be nerfed? Less pips and faster decay in hunger?
The goal is not to make people not use the Gooseberrys at all, but to limit the number of bushes. Nerfing them a little will cause players to plant even more bushes and nerfing a lot will cause them to be useless and disappear entirely.
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