Mizter McGregor's Garden

[nasKo]

Mizter McGregor's Garden

Last time round we checked in with some of the main pillars of Build 42 – those things being the crafting and crafting systems update, the tech upgrade, animals/migration and MP.

 

As such, for today’s blog we’ll be dipping into some of the stuff that wider members of the team have been working on for more general improvement elsewhere in the game.

 

FARMING

First off, let’s darken Blair’s door – and watch him lean over a fence with a piece of straw in his mouth while he outlines what he’ll imminently be merging into our internal branch for our testers to play around with.

Currently I’m working on smoothing out the interface and interactions for the revamped farming. One important part of the interface, and player feedback, are the new plant sprites Mash has produced to represent plant states.

Previously, our far more limited number of plants had sprites for their individual growth stages, as well as some generic sprites to represent trampled plants.

 

Now, for every single growth stage and for every plant, we have 600 additional sprites to represent what’s now grown to 15 crops and 8 herbs. These cover states of:

 

• Unhealthy – due to disease, lack of water, or general low health.
• In the process of dying – due to these aforementioned reasons.
• Completely dead.
• Dead-but-also-trampled/crushed. These are for plants that have been crushed by zombie hordes, vehicles etc, and also for dead plants that are degrading over time.

With the farming rework we are adding growing seasons (which can also be disabled in the sandbox settings).

 

With these most plants will have a planting season, with optimal months that produce additional yields. Plants that are planted out of season will be destined to wither away and die. This means, that aside from some winter crops, winter farming will be no more.

 

Growing seasons are learnable knowledge. A farmer character starts knowing all of them; a character with the gardener trait will know most of them; and they can also be learned from reading seed packets and special farming handbooks.

 

CHEEKY RABBITS

Last time we properly met the Knox Event’s deer population and their migration habits, and now it’s time to introduce some smaller varmints – who are tied to the same system, but will move around according to a different ruleset.

 

WIP vid. Kitten behaviour will probably get more realistic / change. (‘Kitten’ is the correct word for baby rabbit – we don’t know that either.

 

 

 

Also we had a bug this week with the carrots.

 

 

Also also, with animals comes poop:

 

MAPPING

Now ably assisted by our newest friend Dirk the map team carry on a-pace with the huge map expansion that (most likely) will land alongside 42, or be a part of its beta updates.

 

After a brief spot of begging we managed to bag a little taster of one of its more epic locations… as ever big thanks to Amz for the vid.

 

 

AND FINALLY

Elsewhere Fenris has been chewing on a key accessibility issue that we’ve been wanting to get fixed up since forever – namely the ability to remap mouse buttons (including extra buttons on fancy mouses) to different actions, by making mouse buttons and keys work exactly the same within the bind menu.

 

Ooh, and also look! Area-specific vehicle spawns in action…

 

This week’s misty hunt from Felkhan. A changelist of all our pre-release and post-release patches since the 41 beta began can be found here. The Centralized Block of Italicised Text would like to direct your attention to the PZ Wiki should you feel like editing or amending something, and the PZ Mailing List that can send you update notifications once builds get released. We also live on Twitter right here! Our Discord is open for chat and hijinks too. Experienced games industry gameplay coder and want to join Team Awesome? Jobs page here.

[mimo_za]

I feel that rabbits will make up a significant part of my diet in the game.

[Tails]

 Another amazing blog post farming overhaul is looking very nice cant wait to grow more types of crops.

 

I do love the cute bunnies in this blog post could wonder if wildlife could become a threat to crops and having to build some walls.

 

Also those car liveries look very nice.

 

 

[Axezombie]

Quote

Plants that are planted out of season will be destined to wither away and die. This means, that aside from some winter crops, winter farming will be no more.

 

But why? Plants do not die magically when a new season begins, life is not like in Stardew Valley. Basically a plant requires water, sunlight and warmth to grow, if you give them those conditions they'll grow no matter the season. So winter farming should still be a thing.

If  you just want to nerf farming, especially interior farming, you could start by making sunlight become very important, also make beginners in this skill to work hard to even be able to grow something harvestable. So change the way to get xp in farming, like sowing seeds, taking care of plants: watering, get rid of weeds, treating diseases... Checking plants's health once a day (I'm serious, by checking everyday your plants you will see if what you're doing is good or bad therefore you'll learn)

A noob in farming wouldn't know how much water a plant needs (how? by making the "dry, fine, well watered..." labels disappear and by having a random amount of water given by the character to water crops, so as a player even if you know how much water is needed your character could mess up because he's a noob and therefore could water too much or not enough), what a good soil is (for interior planting, managing amount of dirt, quality of dirt and space), a noob won't know how to treat diseases, not even recognize them, they wouldn't even make the difference between a plant needing water and a plant burning because of too much sunlight, currently ingame at lvl 0 in farming you can do EVERYTHING like a pro (if you read a magazine), you just harvest less...

 

My point is: please don't take away a good feature like interior farming, which will be a reward to good farmers who prepared themselves for winter by finding a generator to keep a place warm enough to grow plants and added more windows for sunlight, basically the ones who built a greenhouse. Make it realistic like you do for all other features and it will be nerfed enough for people to search for another way to get food OR to become good enough farmers to deal with winter (and other seasons, summer is really a pain when there is a drought and heatwave if you don't have water and a way to make shade).

 

[GrandPunkRailroad]

Forgive me for what may be a simplistic question, but will the work that Fenris is doing on rebinding and remapping keys also be applicable to controller remaps?

Since forever I’ve wanted to experiment with using the touch plate on my ps4/5 controller as a mouse cursor. 

[Blake81]

OK, this is 100% a pet peeve of mine, but I feel it bears mention. Could you please remove the hood stripe and insignia from the State Trooper cars? I love the fact you guys looked up the actual liveries for them and got them almost perfectly. So the fact the hood is the only wrong part bothers me even more than it would if the whole thing was wrong

 

Source:

 

Btw, if you added this, does this also mean you remade the regular Police liveries? With so many cool ones you've added since the cars' first introduction, the Police ones have looked kinda lackluster

Edited May 26, 2023 by Blake81

[Tchernobill]

Growing seasons awesome.

 

P**p test guesses:

Rabbit, Cow, Cat, Human, Dog, Bird.

[Nebula]

On the video with rabbits - great music! Thank you!

[Chrona Trigger]

Looks good!  Just wanted to say, and agree with Axezombie that, plants might not thrive outside of their usual season, but they generally do survive, and can produce regardless.  My suggestion would be to add a season compatibility multiplier that can be applied to both growth and health depending on plant type (perennial or annual).

 

So, let's take... carrots, and strawberries for examples.  Carrots are a perennial: the part we eat, the root, doesn't die.  It keeps its growth, and continues to live year after year.  Strawberries are perennial as well, perfectly capable of surviving winter, as they do in the wild, the part we eat IS annual, and dies off in winter.  I would suggest a growth multiplier be given to each season, according to the best time for that plant.  Strawberries are typically a late spring crop, and they would grow best then; however, they could still be planted, grow, and produce during the summer, or fall, but it might take longer, or they may produce less.  So, 1.5x spring, 1.0x summer, 0.5x fall, 0x winter, or perhaps negative for winter to "reset" the growth.  Carrots are a spring and fall crop, so 1.0x spring, 0.5x summer, 1.0x fall, 0x winter.

 

For health, Let's go with carrots and tomatoes.  Carrots, just a neutral 0x multiplier for freezing weather: They can survive just fine.  But tomatoes are an annual plant (outside of the tropics), so, let the cold weather kill them off.

 

For the indoor winter farming... why not?  It's a normal, real thing.  So long as the conditions are right, plants can grow and survive just fine inside.  Reasonable temperatures and light levels.  Using the same seasonal growth system, you could do a check if they're indoors and needs are met (also could introduce sunlamps as an added barrier), and instead of a season, the indoors gets a 0.75x growth rate, as a penalty for the convience.  They'll grow, but slower than they would outside.  Safety and convenience in exchange for resources and speed. 

[Axiomatic]

Build 42 is going to be such a massive, improvement update to the game. Really looking forward to it. Actually curious if the devs would rank this as the most substantial / most work put into any update in the games decade + history. In any case, the wait is becoming interminable since the last update, hoping its ready sooner rather than later!

Edited June 7, 2023 by Axiomatic

[Magondivel]

I wonder if there will be bees? Hives, wax, honey and other things associated with them.

[moosensical]

On 6/3/2023 at 4:22 PM, Chrona Trigger said:

Looks good!  Just wanted to say, and agree with Axezombie that, plants might not thrive outside of their usual season, but they generally do survive, and can produce regardless.  My suggestion would be to add a season compatibility multiplier that can be applied to both growth and health depending on plant type (perennial or annual).

 

So, let's take... carrots, and strawberries for examples.  Carrots are a perennial: the part we eat, the root, doesn't die.  It keeps its growth, and continues to live year after year.  Strawberries are perennial as well, perfectly capable of surviving winter, as they do in the wild, the part we eat IS annual, and dies off in winter.  I would suggest a growth multiplier be given to each season, according to the best time for that plant.  Strawberries are typically a late spring crop, and they would grow best then; however, they could still be planted, grow, and produce during the summer, or fall, but it might take longer, or they may produce less.  So, 1.5x spring, 1.0x summer, 0.5x fall, 0x winter, or perhaps negative for winter to "reset" the growth.  Carrots are a spring and fall crop, so 1.0x spring, 0.5x summer, 1.0x fall, 0x winter.

 

For health, Let's go with carrots and tomatoes.  Carrots, just a neutral 0x multiplier for freezing weather: They can survive just fine.  But tomatoes are an annual plant (outside of the tropics), so, let the cold weather kill them off.

 

For the indoor winter farming... why not?  It's a normal, real thing.  So long as the conditions are right, plants can grow and survive just fine inside.  Reasonable temperatures and light levels.  Using the same seasonal growth system, you could do a check if they're indoors and needs are met (also could introduce sunlamps as an added barrier), and instead of a season, the indoors gets a 0.75x growth rate, as a penalty for the convience.  They'll grow, but slower than they would outside.  Safety and convenience in exchange for resources and speed. 

 

It's likely the team will eventually implement interior farming as a mechanic (I believe in a prior thursoid they specifically talk about greenhouses being a future goal). The steps they're taking now, expanding the list of crops we have access to and implementing more considerations for planting season and plant care is definitely an iteration towards that--but it's an iteration. This has to come first, and the rest will come later, in another build.

 

As for your proposals for crops...some crops being perennial would be nice, yes. Berry bushes especially. However, carrots are not as long-lived as you think--they'll overwinter well if it's dry, and honestly keeping them in the ground when it gets cold is a great way to store them fresh for longer and save on fridge space. But if it's wet, the root will rot, and if it's too cold, the greens will die and then the root will rot. If it gets too hot--if you plant carrots too late in the spring/start of summer--they'll bolt and go to seed, which ceases root production. You're left with a sad, bitter little twig of a carrot.

 

All this to say, farming is very complex! The team has to build up the system iteratively, as all (good) game design is done. I'm positive they'll get to this kind of stuff eventually, and when they do, it will be as deliciously brutal and rewarding as the rest of the game.