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Planters


Brex

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To me, it makes no sense how you are somehow able to just pour a bunch of dirt on a concrete roof and suddenly bam, you've got yourself some crops. I think a more logical step would be implementing planter boxes, like raised garden beds so you can grow crops on roofs or on concrete/non-soil surfaces. Plots, planters, boxes...anything like that would be more immersive and make more sense.

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I think placing soil deep enough on a roof is perfectly logical, from someone who's grown crops before. You're not trying to grow a bunch of trees or anything, small crops like the ones in the game are perfectly reasonable. Something that comes to mind is the hanging gardens that are on display at Disney World in Florida. They grow that shit literally sideways on trellises so I don't think making a garden on a roof is unreasonable. Have you seen how big weeds can get only having roots like 5-6 inches into the dirt? Pretty gosh-darn big.

 

Planters or dirt floor, it's all the same really. As long as you have a place to walk. 

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37 minutes ago, EnigmaGrey said:

Much more a fan of the roof collapsing from the weight. They don't tend to like that.

 

Otherwise, Turbo's talked in the past about doing soil fertility as part of erosion. I imagine it'll happen at some point.

Being able to mix animal feces and/or guano with soil and letting it compost would be a great mechanic, because planting stuff straight in the ground often times doesn't work as well as you'd hope. Just a thought though *shrugs*

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18 minutes ago, PapayaKing said:

I think placing soil deep enough on a roof is perfectly logical, from someone who's grown crops before. You're not trying to grow a bunch of trees or anything, small crops like the ones in the game are perfectly reasonable. Something that comes to mind is the hanging gardens that are on display at Disney World in Florida. They grow that shit literally sideways on trellises so I don't think making a garden on a roof is unreasonable. Have you seen how big weeds can get only having roots like 5-6 inches into the dirt? Pretty gosh-darn big.

 

Planters or dirt floor, it's all the same really. As long as you have a place to walk. 

 

Soil's heavy. It weighs around a ton per cubic yard when wet. It's seven or eight times as heavy as snow. Something engineered for that weight (or avoiding the use of soil and using specific plants) is a different matter.

 

I wouldn't say it's unreasonable to be able to put a few pots up on a roof, but enough to get the kind of quantities of food PZ implies? No way.

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7 minutes ago, EnigmaGrey said:

 

Soil's heavy. It weighs around a ton per cubic yard when wet. It's seven or eight times as heavy as snow. Something engineered for that weight (or avoiding the use of soil and using specific plants) is a different matter.

 

I wouldn't say it's unreasonable to be able to put a few pots up on a roof, but enough to get the kind of quantities of food PZ implies? No way.

One cubic yard could do wonders on a roof, considering crops need more depth than they do width or length of the space they're planted it. You use wood and section it off. make it the planks 7 inches tall. That's five increments of height, less than a cubic yard. Make those planks the length of a cubic yard, 36 inches, and make the width with another piece of wood with the same dimensions and space them out 6 inches apart. You now have 6 sections of soil that are 36 inches long, and 5 sections of soil that are 7 inches tall, so you could now look at it like this: one section of soil to grow crops in would be 36 inches long, 7 inches tall, and 6 inches wide. Perfectly reasonable to grow crops in. If my math is correct, you have, now, 30 sections of soil to use, and if you design your roof to hold the soil, so you're right, something engineered for crops on a roof would be fine. But that's kinda the point here, no? All the previous calculations aside, if you designed a roof to bear the multi ton weight of having crops, it would work, and in a situation like in PZ, that is definitely practical, now, whether or not that aspect is accurately depicted in PZ is a different matter, and I would agree that just a flat roof with nothing but soil on it would probably collapse the roofs in this game. 

 

It could be done though, and I'll never not believe in the creative realism you guys use in the game. I'm sure if necessary, the time could be taken to add weight loads for buildings, but does anyone want to get that deep into it? Probably not lol.

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On 4/28/2019 at 8:00 AM, Brex said:

To me, it makes no sense how you are somehow able to just pour a bunch of dirt on a concrete roof and suddenly bam, you've got yourself some crops. I think a more logical step would be implementing planter boxes, like raised garden beds so you can grow crops on roofs or on concrete/non-soil surfaces. Plots, planters, boxes...anything like that would be more immersive and make more sense.

Good idea, will take half a decade for them to put in the game tho.

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21 hours ago, EnigmaGrey said:

I wouldn't say it's unreasonable to be able to put a few pots up on a roof, but enough to get the kind of quantities of food PZ implies? No way.

I've seen more than enough rooftop gardens to know that this both isn't the case for buildings with roof access, and even if urban gardening was an unrealistic concept implemented as-is, this concern is a hardly enough of an issue to use the "realism gets in the way" card here to rationalize throwing on heavy constraints that limit players to something so little. 

 

Yes, you can produce a lot of food from a rooftop garden. It is perfectly reasonable to grow crops up there. On the shingled roof of a home? Or the roof above a porch? No. But any building that has roof access? They can support the weight of planters. @PapayaKing makes a really good point here with what you can do with the space. There is no question about it, especially since we are scrutinizing this for the sake of a video game. Would you dump a ton of soil on a roof and expect verdant meadows to grow? Not at all. But planters are perfectly fine, this is a proven concept beyond a reasonable doubt. To scrutinize this too much would just take away from the game, which wouldn't have really been needed if realism was the sole concern anyways.

 

As for rooftops in the game, the buildings that already have roof access would be ideal locations for rooftop gardens to begin with. These structures aren't exactly your average shanty house, what we have now are small office buildings and warehouses that would be ideal choices for this kind of thing. 

 

I think that a player structure that is built from a threshold of a certain carpentry skill wouldn't be able to make use of planters, but anything else with roof access (not your neighborhood home) has been designed with bearing weight in mind to begin with. Still, while weight is a valid concern, it is not enough to seriously deter sizeable rooftop gardens from existing. 

 

So there is give-and-take here. This is something people already do often without consulting an architect and rarely face any real consequences for it. To shut down the rooftop garden or constrain it to a few pots would be a pointless limitation, as nobody who had a horse in rooftop gardens would ever question it outside of building something obviously inappropriate. For a video game, PZ is probably fine and safe for supporting this.

 

In the realm of base-building for a video game, most that claim to have some stake in realism (State of Decay, for example) offer opportunities for sizeable, profitable rooftop gardens where the opportunity is available.

 

Anyways, that's my take on it! Gameplay and realism both allow for leeway and creativity here. :)

Edited by Kim Jong Un
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2 hours ago, Kim Jong Un said:
 
 
 
 
 
 
5
2 hours ago, Kim Jong Un said:

I've seen more than enough rooftop gardens to know that this both isn't the case for buildings with roof access, and even if urban gardening was an unrealistic concept implemented as-is, this concern is a hardly enough of an issue to use the "realism gets in the way" card here to rationalize throwing on heavy constraints that limit players to something so little. 

 

Yes, you can produce a lot of food from a rooftop garden. It is perfectly reasonable to grow crops up there. On the shingled roof of a home? Or the roof above a porch? No. But any building that has roof access? They can support the weight of planters. @PapayaKing makes a really good point here with what you can do with the space. There is no question about it, especially since we are scrutinizing this for the sake of a video game. Would you dump a ton of soil on a roof and expect verdant meadows to grow? Not at all. But planters are perfectly fine, this is a proven concept beyond a reasonable doubt. To scrutinize this too much would just take away from the game, which wouldn't have really been needed if realism was the sole concern anyways.

 

As for rooftops in the game, the buildings that already have roof access would be ideal locations for rooftop gardens to begin with. These structures aren't exactly your average shanty house, what we have now are small office buildings and warehouses that would be ideal choices for this kind of thing. 

 

I think that a player structure that is built from a threshold of a certain carpentry skill wouldn't be able to make use of planters, but anything else with roof access (not your neighborhood home) has been designed with bearing weight in mind to begin with. Still, while weight is a valid concern, it is not enough to seriously deter sizeable rooftop gardens from existing. 

 

So there is give-and-take here. This is something people already do often without consulting an architect and rarely face any real consequences for it. To shut down the rooftop garden or constrain it to a few pots would be a pointless limitation, as nobody who had a horse in rooftop gardens would ever question it outside of building something obviously inappropriate. For a video game, PZ is probably fine and safe for supporting this.

 

In the realm of base-building for a video game, most that claim to have some stake in realism (State of Decay, for example) offer opportunities for sizeable, profitable rooftop gardens where the opportunity is available.

 

Anyways, that's my take on it! Gameplay and realism both allow for leeway and creativity here. :)

 

It's not a zero-sum game, is it?

 

We can both have roofs that collapse when overloaded (realistic, a way to balance roof-top camping and add an additional dimension to carpentry, erosion, and weather) and still have some rooftop plants without it being an exercise in wish-fulfillment (mass crop yields, safe from zombies or hand-waving away buildings designed to handle a foot or two of snow) or trying to imitate 7 Days to Die. It's the sort of detail that makes PZ unique.


Hydroponics at least makes more sense, as per your article, but that's a tad different than what's depicted in the game, mentioned in the OP, or what most people picture when  they hear the word "planters." I'd not mind having it in the game at all.

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2 hours ago, EnigmaGrey said:

 

It's not a zero-sum game, is it?

 

We can both have roofs that collapse when overloaded (realistic, a way to balance roof-top camping and add an additional dimension to carpentry, erosion, and weather) and still have some rooftop plants without it being an exercise in wish-fulfillment (mass crop yields, safe from zombies or hand-waving away buildings designed to handle a foot or two of snow) or trying to imitate 7 Days to Die. It's the sort of detail that makes PZ unique.


Hydroponics at least makes more sense, as per your article, but that's a tad different than what's depicted in the game, mentioned in the OP, or what most people picture when  they hear the word "planters." I'd not mind having it in the game at all.

I meant to hyperlink the picture of planters used in the article, but yeah, I can agree with that. Not so much on your roof collapsing on you, but that's where I was going with being unable to have soil/planters on low level carpentry structures or house roofs.

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I really want collapsing roofs under certain conditions (e.g. too much stuff and a lot of rain, or maybe having a ton of zombies on the roof, etc.). Oops, now you have a broken leg and the noise has attracted a nearby horde.

 

Actually, it should be necessary to maintain buildings occasionally, including the roof. The more erosion, the more vulnerable they are to collapsing.

 

Heck, it should be possible to damage property in a way that makes them less stable.

 

This totally needs to happen. 

Edited by grammarsalad
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  • 1 month later...
On 5/9/2019 at 11:56 PM, grammarsalad said:

I really want collapsing roofs under certain conditions (e.g. too much stuff and a lot of rain, or maybe having a ton of zombies on the roof, etc.). Oops, now you have a broken leg and the noise has attracted a nearby horde.

 

Actually, it should be necessary to maintain buildings occasionally, including the roof. The more erosion, the more vulnerable they are to collapsing.

 

Heck, it should be possible to damage property in a way that makes them less stable.

 

This totally needs to happen. 

True that. but it should start with "obey gravity" mod added to game - or equivalent

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