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Potato seeds


Peon

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Just to point out that it's not really a thing.

Sure its possible to get potato seeds but no one does it: It takes ages to get potatoes to seed, you need very specific conditions for the seeds to grow, you're not sure of what you're getting thanks to cross pollination, it takes ages to grow and it is more vulnerable to everything (pests, diseases, temperature, droughts...) so it's an unnecessary gamble. 

It makes no sense that in a survival situation anyone would try and do that. 

You grow potatoes by planting some of your harvest back once they grow tubers. 

 

I'm a farmer by trade and after trying to replant some of my harvest in PZ muh immersion is now broken.

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Speaking of Potato discrepancies:
From the accompanied LUA I've found that there are only supposed to be 3-4 (modified by sandbox abundance setting) Potatoes of yield from a farming plot. Like that breaks muh immersion.
There are reports that show an average yield of 2kg(4.5lb) of potatoes per plant. 
Given 4 plants per growing plot that should be more in the range of 40 Potatoes in yield (one ingame potato being 0.2 weight, guessing 0.2kg)

I remember my parents growing potatoes in the garden when I was a kid and I remember pulling dozens of potatoes out of the soil on harvest.

@Peon do you have some of your farming experience to contribute to that for a little more realistic crop outcome?

Cheers
WASP103

P.S. I'm also working on tuning the farming_vegetableconf.lua in order te better reflect potatoes.
Then there's also the aspect of nutritional value that seems to be skewed towards cabbages a lot.
Potatoes have around 77kcal per 100g IRL. Ingame potatoes weigh like 200g and only have 70 calories (assuming kcal is meant here since the daily amount is also around the number 2000)

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On 5/23/2021 at 12:07 PM, WASP103 said:

Speaking of Potato discrepancies:
From the accompanied LUA I've found that there are only supposed to be 3-4 (modified by sandbox abundance setting) Potatoes of yield from a farming plot. Like that breaks muh immersion.
There are reports that show an average yield of 2kg(4.5lb) of potatoes per plant. 
Given 4 plants per growing plot that should be more in the range of 40 Potatoes in yield (one ingame potato being 0.2 weight, guessing 0.2kg)

I remember my parents growing potatoes in the garden when I was a kid and I remember pulling dozens of potatoes out of the soil on harvest.

@Peon do you have some of your farming experience to contribute to that for a little more realistic crop outcome?

Cheers
WASP103

P.S. I'm also working on tuning the farming_vegetableconf.lua in order te better reflect potatoes.
Then there's also the aspect of nutritional value that seems to be skewed towards cabbages a lot.
Potatoes have around 77kcal per 100g IRL. Ingame potatoes weigh like 200g and only have 70 calories (assuming kcal is meant here since the daily amount is also around the number 2000)

Well I only grow potatoes in my backyard, most of my land being grain for cattle feed so I don't have much experience with industrial potato growing. I recon those numbers are very high for an average and are probably due to GMO and/or heavy fertilizer use with plenty of weed killers. 

Potatoes tend to do better in a very rich soil, I use the area where the pigs were grazing (its perfect because they eat the weed then turn it into fertilizer and also plow the area while doing it) but you have to wait a little bit as potatoes do not like fresh manure (too much Nitrogen). 
With this method I would say I get 1kg, perhaps a little more per plant, they are a lot of potatoes per plant (10 to 20+) but most of them are quite small compared to those you buy in the store. I guess I could let them grow a little bit more and give them more water but we get a lot of mildew in the area so harvesting early-ish works better for me. Also they taste much better when small. 
Potatoes are very sensible to pests (especially to a specie of beetle we call doryphore here in France) and you should never plant it twice at the same spot because of that.

They do not need much water (I seldom water mine, rainfall is enough most of the time, maybe one or twice during the summer as we don't really get summer rain anymore) so this could be reflected in the game: It's a very low maintenance crop and very suited to survival. 

About other crops, on the top of my head I would say the cabbage yield is both too fast and too plenty full, I was amazed by how many cabbages I got from a single patch. Cabbage can take up to 9 month before being ready to harvest and a lot of it will be eaten by slugs and snails.
Tomatoes are way too easy to grow in game. IRL They need a lof of upkeep (Support, pinching side shoots) and very ideal conditions to prosper (lot of sun, good timing with watering, a very rich soil, a late and dry autumn...). Most of tomato growing is done in greenhouses because of that. It is a good survival crop because of yields but it's hard to pull off. 
Strawberry is not something you have to replant every year. A bush will last for a very long time and give you fruit every year but you can keep them for 5+ years easily.
Radish is a very good survival crop, grow incredibly fast, is very sturdy and low maintenance. "He couldn't even grow radishes" is something we say around here of someone that is bad at farming. You would have to plant several hundred every week if you are planing on eating a lot of those but I wouldn't wish a radish based died on my worse enemy. 
Carrots are hard to get started as seeds needs a lot of watering early on but don't need a very fertile soil or much water once they do start to grow. It needs some skill but it's a very good survival crop.


That being said surviving on vegetable is quite hard. Most of them are very low calories. They give you important nutrients so they are essential but most of your calorie intake will be grain based (bread, pasta, rice and so on).
When you're making a vegetable salad or stir fry there is usually as much/more calories in the salad dressing or cooking oil for the stir fry than the vegetable part. You would need to eat several kilograms of vegetable a day if you are not growing wheat or producing oil, especially if you are spending a lot of energy during the day. You really need some animals like pigs and chickens if you're planning on going for the long run. 
If I had to survive on agriculture alone I would be growing mostly buckwheat, beans, lentils, corn and potatoes. 

 

Well this was fun. I'm off to bed now.
 

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  • 1 month later...

Actually, planting potato for seeds is very much a farming practice, it's usually practiced only on very rich soils, and its extremely profitable, of course it wouldn't be necessary at all in the game given the low scale of the crops you plant. I think potatoes are kind of weak compared to their real life counterparts because it would be too good gameplay wise.

Potatoes take months to rot if they are stored in proper conditions, they are plentiful, and they have a considerable amount of carbs, what else could you need? A good piece of information to realize how dependable they are is the Irish Potato Famine. The Irish depended so heavily on potato crops that when they happened to catch a pest and most harvests were lost, the entire country suffered from a severe famine, and that children, is one of the many reasons why we don't do monoculture, cause its a surefire way of screwing ourselves. The Dutch learned that one with tulips lol.

Wheat would be an interesting crop to add because it's a staple of civilization, we make flour, we make malted cereals for spirits and ferments, the thing is freaking magical. You can make dough with nothing but water and flour (the game has a yeast dough recipe but no simple water+flour pie dough recipe). It would provide those very needed renewable carbs we are in dire need of nowadays in game. You exchange laborious crafting, for flavor, immersion and good food.

I think making making crops realistic would be too elaborate, planting season, harvesting season, specific soil, which one is a climber (however its said in English, the ones like tomatoes that need sticks to grow properly), which one needs more shade, etc. So to make up for the lack of difficulty we instead get weaker agriculture, a fair and reasonable trade. Getting corn and wheat however, even if weakened, would add the possibility of so many recipes that it's definitely worth considering. Make corn flour in your mortar and pestle, make tortillas, do some Mexican cooking, make bourbon, alien crop circles, enact a Pocahontas movie scene, the sky is the limit.

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Which country are you from? I don't know anyone that does potato seeds around me, i was tempted to order some online after posting this to see how growing a potato from a seed would be but I have so much on my plate with the summer season that I haven't got around to it. 

Potatoes are indeed OP in real life, it's definitely a top tier crop :D

 

I don't think realistic(-ish) crops would be a bad thing for the game nor too hard to implement.

We already have a season system in place: weather, months, snow, temperature and it's randomized. For example I just had a 2 month drought during summer in my game and it was a very challenging event and I got so excited when the rain finally came, it was a relief to finally see all the containers i put on the ground slowly get filled after months of scavenging for water from the neighbourhood to keep my crops alive.

Too much rain/fog/cold? You get mildew. 2 hot summer weeks without rain? Hope you've been hoarding water.

We already have twine and sturdy sticks in the game. Let's use those as a component for climbers such as beans and tomatoes.

Also agriculture is too much space efficient right now. I can sustain myself for a year with a 9x9 vegetable garden. When you see the grind that is building a log fence around your base I am very surprised the devs chose to make agriculture so easy.

I can get away with only watering a patch of cabbage once per season. Watering is a daily chore if you don't get rain but there could easily be an irrigation system to make it easier on players, we already have water barrels plumbing, let's just hook it to a few metal pipes welded together. 
More level in farming would grant you access to better crops/infrastructure so it's not a mostly useless skill to level. 

You mentioned wheat, maybe carpentry would enable you to build a mill to grind your own flour. Use mechanics to power it with a car (pretty easy to do IRL) or build it near the river if you're going low tech. Maybe you would need to settle in a farmhouse since wheat is not very space efficient to grow and could lead to cool scenarios with hidden zombies in tall wheat. 

 

There could be very interesting things to do with the agriculture system in this game and it wouldn't be forced on the player either because there is many other ways to get food.

 

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Hello! I'm from Uruguay in South America. Down here extensions of arable land are usually far larger than in most other places so planting for seeds, and from seeds can be more convenient at times. Beyond a matter of scale and convenience I'm not aware of the difference in productivity comparing both methods, I could ask around if you want. In the game I'd guess going for the seeds approach is a simpler way to have a universal criteria to all crops.

 

Yeah, the surface of crops needed is incredibly small. I planted a whole bunch at first thinking the yield would be lower and then ended up freezing a whole bunch of food (gotta love gas station pop fridges)

I think that for now even if they don't want to get into more complex mechanics around farming (I'd sure like that though) reducing the yield and fixing their nutrition and shelf life to more realistic values could probably make farming more interesting. According to the new update notes, watering crops won't be as painful in the future lol.

I think they have more planned for the nutrition system (proteins don't do anything for example), and if it's fleshed out more, having a variety of crops and food sources might be more necessary in the future. Imagine getting scurvy if you lack some vitamin intake lol, rosehip tea would be an excellent source of vitamin C and we already have the plant as forage, it's all coming together I tell you. 

 

Another wild idea, having you steal a whole bunch of windows to make a greenhouse for winter, I'd love this. We made a small greenhouse at home and it's pretty awesome, it's like having  tropical weather for plants that don't like the temperate climate around these parts.

 

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8 hours ago, NoPizzaSad said:

Another wild idea, having you steal a whole bunch of windows to make a greenhouse for winter, I'd love this. We made a small greenhouse at home and it's pretty awesome, it's like having  tropical weather for plants that don't like the temperate climate around these parts.

 

Yeah! We built ourselves one a few years back! It's still standing despite a few rough summer hail episodes, we had so much fun building it and it was very cheap to put together because we used windows we scavenged from a few renovation jobs. Here is a couple pictures! 

 

55575689_10218849979538764_4759496038018973696_n.jpg

55458284_10218849968378485_2002306335986679808_n.jpg

Edited by Peon
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