Higher level farming should allow more advanced farming techinques.

[Zombiologist]

The simple method of tilling the land up and planting veggies in rows works and is ideal for large scale farming with big machines, but compared to many other methods of hand growing food seems a bit primitive. I think if one has a high enough farming level they should be able to utilize more techniques.

For one I think mushroom farming would be interesting. Growing various edible fungi can get really complicated really fast and has a steep unforgiving learning curve depending on what you're growing. In fact many mushroom species to this day nobody has figured out how to farm them, but some of the simpler mushrooms are definitely obtainable by the average person without needing a degree in mycology. In fact it can be as simple as collecting logs, stacking them in the right patterns, and inoculating them with the desired spores from the desired mushroom or filling a big bag or bucket with woodchips, cutting some holes in it, and inoculating it. The easiest mushrooms to grow are no more difficult than a vegetable garden.

Hugelkultur is another one that somebody that doesn't know the first thing about gardening probably wouldn't know how to do, but somebody more experienced could easily do. There is a lot of debate on what the best verson of hugelkulture is and I won't get into that here, but my personal favorite method is to dig about a foot deep, put large logs into the hole, stack branches and brush on top of that, then stack organic matter like leaf litter and compost on that, then put the foot of dirt back on top of that, and line the edges of the bed with logs to make a nice raised bed garden and apply mulch on top to reduce the need for watering. Hugelkultur mounds fertalize themsleves with all the decaying matter, and till themselves because they sink as they decay. They also require much less watering than a traditional garden bed and can handle much more over watering if there is a lot of rain because they drain well. You can also reduce the need to water by making swales which are similarly simple mounds of dirt placed strategical to herd rain water flow, though these are typically used in much drier environments that many would otherwise consider unfarmable without modern tech I've seen some people try to make them in other evnironments as well.

There are also many ways to amend soil such as using pine needles or calcium (from bones, fire ashes, or eggshels) to raise and lower soil PH, mulches to reduce weeding and watering as well as fertalize, biochars to reduce the need to fertalize and support soil bacteria (vermiculite aka perlite can also do this but can't be made at home, though often can be bought at gardening centers and seed shops), and various pesticides and pest repellents that can be made from plants or are themselves living plants and methods of attracting beneficial insects and animals. I think an expert farmer could know a lot more about these than a novice.

Then there are various farming structures one can build. Cold frames and hoop houses both can relatively easily be made by hand and allowing for year round vegetable gardening for some types of veggies. Fruit walls and fruit trenches were the go to before greenhouses where invented and allow for plants to survive in colder climates and extendes the growing season when built correctly. Then of course there are the green houses themselves, which can be heated with thermal wells (which though a lot of work could be theoretically built by hand) or with heat batteries, which could be as simple as water barrels painted black to absorb heat during the day and release it at night. There are also various methods of making greenhouses to do better in the cold with less heat needed, such as wallapini aka hobbit green houses that are partially buried in hillsides. Besudes this in some places horse manure used to be buried in large quantities so that as it decayed it heated the soil enough to grow crops through the winter.
And of course there are also hydroponics though this might be above what we can consider an average person in a zombie apocalypse obtainable.

Another method that an advanced farmer might know is growing more food in less space, sometimes called square foot gardening, which can maximize how much food you get in minimal space by careful crop planning. There's also the possibility of growing microgreens, and a lot of parts of fruits and veggies we already farm are edible but are traditionally simply thrown away or composted. For example squash flowers (which once the female flowers are pollinated are perfectly fine to eat the males without reducing yields), many other flowers also have edible petals such as roses. Perhaps a more advanced farmer may get more frequent yields because they have more knowledge of these various edible parts.

Edited December 12, 2022 by Zombiologist

[stuck1a]

This are some nice idea's, but honestly my opinion is: keep things simple.

It's feels a bit like overtaxing the farming feature as it is a zombie survival game.

Farming already yields so much food pretty quickly that you have to compost most of it or it will rot. Keeping 2-3 squares will provide you with more than enough food already. With such improvements, you could probably supply yourself completely with a single farming square, so this would be very hard to balance.

This mushroom thing sounds interesting, too, but the game doesn't differentiate between mushrooms. There are a handful of "mushrooms" with different sprites and when a world is created, a couple of them will be randomly chosen as poisonous. So that seems difficult to reconcile with the existing game logic. Since livestock farming was introduced, maybe the greenhouse thing could be a nice thing to be able to maintain the food supply for the animals in winter. Maybe as an farmer profession special recipe or something like that.

 

but:

Even if I personally reject the idea for a vanilla implementation, this might be some nice features for an "advanced farming" mod. I'm sure, there are suitable servers which would use it.

Maybe you could develop a mod that implements these ideas. In case of doubt, this would also act a proof of concept regarding the balancing.

Edited December 12, 2022 by stuck1a

[getstoopid]

I also think that farming should be not too complicated but some more that it is now would be quite interesting I guess, like greenhouses or mushrooms but let us wait what b42 has in store for us as they do actually work on improving it in multiple aspects afaik?

[Zombiologist]

2 hours ago, stuck1a said:

This are some nice idea's, but honestly my opinion is: keep things simple.

It's feels a bit like overtaxing the farming feature as it is a zombie survival game.

Farming already yields so much food pretty quickly that you have to compost most of it or it will rot. Keeping 2-3 squares will provide you with more than enough food already. With such improvements, you could probably supply yourself completely with a single farming square, so this would be very hard to balance.

This mushroom thing sounds interesting, too, but the game doesn't differentiate between mushrooms. There are a handful of "mushrooms" with different sprites and when a world is created, a couple of them will be randomly chosen as poisonous. So that seems difficult to reconcile with the existing game logic. Since livestock farming was introduced, maybe the greenhouse thing could be a nice thing to be able to maintain the food supply for the animals in winter. Maybe as an farmer profession special recipe or something like that.

 

but:

Even if I personally reject the idea for a vanilla implementation, this might be some nice features for an "advanced farming" mod. I'm sure, there are suitable servers which would use it.

Maybe you could develop a mod that implements these ideas. In case of doubt, this would also act a proof of concept regarding the balancing.

In the current farming system the crops are unrealistically productive and grow really fast compared to the real thing. To change it to more realistic farming methods requiring a bit more know how before getting anything highly productive like above would likely be more balancing than it would be breaking, IMO.

As far as mushrooms go they could likely easily essentially just add a new type of farm plot with new mushrooms that work very similarly to the existing ones, except requiring different materials to set up and grow. Tomatoes are essentially berries and there was no issue reconciling that with the berry foraging system in game.

[Pandorea]

Farming (and crafting in general) will be upgraded and reworked in the next major build. 

[Axezombie]

My opinion on the subject is that farming should be nerfed, at lvl 0 in farming you already have all the knowledge you need to take care of crops which obviously IRL is not like that at all, but your ideas are great

[getstoopid]

2 hours ago, Axezombie said:

My opinion on the subject is that farming should be nerfed, at lvl 0 in farming you already have all the knowledge you need to take care of crops which obviously IRL is not like that at all, but your ideas are great

Agree with that too