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Agriculture and Commodities
Alright I'm not even going to beat around the bush about this. Farming as a means of commodity production is a big failure in its current state, and I have very little hope that Mining and ??? will deviate from this.
There are a few of reasons for this and they're all a bit interrelated:
1) It has taken way too long to get all of these skills out there.
2) Farming is tedious and there is little room for it to be rewarding, and there is no reason to expect the other skills to not be similar.
3) There is a huge bottleneck in the time it takes to produce items in the production facilities.
4) There is a hard cap on the number of people who can actually participate in this system.
There are also peripheral problems, such as market orders and provisioning that only allows a very small number of people to take part (despite the Provisioning skill costing 100 credits to even buy), but I'm not going to focus too much on that here. Instead, I'll go over the four points I made above.
1) It has taken way too long to get all of these skills out there.
With the time it seems to have taken Farming to come out, and then now for Mining, and whatever the ??? third skill will be, commodity stockpiles have been dwindling overall. Beyond the trickle of comms that you can buy from villages, there is just no way to produce all but 4 of the comms right now.
2) Farming is tedious and there is little room for it to be rewarding, and there is no reason to expect the other skills to not be similar.
Growing crops/calves is an incredibly tedious exercise and it can become a daily chore for some people. Given the time investment, you would expect the reward to be fairly high, but that just isn't the case. The problem here is that there are gold sinks (in the form of seeds, maintenance etc.) here with absolutely no "faucets" other than the production of commodities. This is not a bad thing except the burden is on cities to provide the reward for the farmers. Once the gold sinks are taken out of the equation, it is a zero-sum situation. For every gold of profit the farmer receives, the city is paying one gold. Cities can adjust taxes and prices, but all they really do is shift how much gold the farmer receives/city pays. This means cities are limited in how much reward they can offer the farmer, not just because their own gold is a finite resource, but because if they tried to pay too much they'd have to price their own comms for sale even higher, leading to a surge in prices for final products that we all use.
3) There is a huge bottleneck in the time it takes to produce items in the production facilities.
Production facilities take time to produce goods and this becomes one of the biggest reasons why this whole system is currently a failure. Take rope as an example. I won't explain the maths in this post (I can walk through it later if people want me to), but it takes 45k rope (as well as 22.5 mil gold, 60k leather, 35k iron, and 22.5k coal) to buy and fully upgrade a clothier. With a level 3 clothier and 3 apprentices, assuming the production facility is used with 100% uptime to produce rope, every RL year the facility would still only be able to produce around 32k rope. This means that just to produce enough rope to cover the initial rope cost of the facilities would take a city close to 1.5 RL years of full time rope production.
4) There is a hard cap on the number of people who can actually participate in this system.
Very closely related to point 3, the number of people who can actually participate in ridiculously low. Again not going to go into the maths here, but if we continue to use hemp/rope as an example, 2 farmers could potentially produce more hemp each year than a single fully upgraded clothier can handle. This is a hard cap, which means even if you have 50 people who want to get into farming, they cannot actually make use of the raw resources they generate because there will just be an indefinite backlog in the production facilities with just those 2 farmers.
Points 3 and 4 actually lead to another issue, which is that these caps are static. It doesn't matter if we have 10 players or 1000 players playing the game and using up comms. The rate at which we can generate them remains static and we will find ourselves with more and more shortages if the system remains this way.
I really want to be hopeful for Mining and ??? to fix our commodity issues but given how far off we are with Farming, and to a somewhat lesser extent Provisioning, I just don't see why we wouldn't have similar issues there unless there is a fundamental shift in design goals. I know a lot of people are excited about Mining, but I can't help but feel that many of them will just end up being disappointed after they find out all their efforts will be for naught.
There are a few of reasons for this and they're all a bit interrelated:
1) It has taken way too long to get all of these skills out there.
2) Farming is tedious and there is little room for it to be rewarding, and there is no reason to expect the other skills to not be similar.
3) There is a huge bottleneck in the time it takes to produce items in the production facilities.
4) There is a hard cap on the number of people who can actually participate in this system.
There are also peripheral problems, such as market orders and provisioning that only allows a very small number of people to take part (despite the Provisioning skill costing 100 credits to even buy), but I'm not going to focus too much on that here. Instead, I'll go over the four points I made above.
1) It has taken way too long to get all of these skills out there.
With the time it seems to have taken Farming to come out, and then now for Mining, and whatever the ??? third skill will be, commodity stockpiles have been dwindling overall. Beyond the trickle of comms that you can buy from villages, there is just no way to produce all but 4 of the comms right now.
2) Farming is tedious and there is little room for it to be rewarding, and there is no reason to expect the other skills to not be similar.
Growing crops/calves is an incredibly tedious exercise and it can become a daily chore for some people. Given the time investment, you would expect the reward to be fairly high, but that just isn't the case. The problem here is that there are gold sinks (in the form of seeds, maintenance etc.) here with absolutely no "faucets" other than the production of commodities. This is not a bad thing except the burden is on cities to provide the reward for the farmers. Once the gold sinks are taken out of the equation, it is a zero-sum situation. For every gold of profit the farmer receives, the city is paying one gold. Cities can adjust taxes and prices, but all they really do is shift how much gold the farmer receives/city pays. This means cities are limited in how much reward they can offer the farmer, not just because their own gold is a finite resource, but because if they tried to pay too much they'd have to price their own comms for sale even higher, leading to a surge in prices for final products that we all use.
3) There is a huge bottleneck in the time it takes to produce items in the production facilities.
Production facilities take time to produce goods and this becomes one of the biggest reasons why this whole system is currently a failure. Take rope as an example. I won't explain the maths in this post (I can walk through it later if people want me to), but it takes 45k rope (as well as 22.5 mil gold, 60k leather, 35k iron, and 22.5k coal) to buy and fully upgrade a clothier. With a level 3 clothier and 3 apprentices, assuming the production facility is used with 100% uptime to produce rope, every RL year the facility would still only be able to produce around 32k rope. This means that just to produce enough rope to cover the initial rope cost of the facilities would take a city close to 1.5 RL years of full time rope production.
4) There is a hard cap on the number of people who can actually participate in this system.
Very closely related to point 3, the number of people who can actually participate in ridiculously low. Again not going to go into the maths here, but if we continue to use hemp/rope as an example, 2 farmers could potentially produce more hemp each year than a single fully upgraded clothier can handle. This is a hard cap, which means even if you have 50 people who want to get into farming, they cannot actually make use of the raw resources they generate because there will just be an indefinite backlog in the production facilities with just those 2 farmers.
Points 3 and 4 actually lead to another issue, which is that these caps are static. It doesn't matter if we have 10 players or 1000 players playing the game and using up comms. The rate at which we can generate them remains static and we will find ourselves with more and more shortages if the system remains this way.
I really want to be hopeful for Mining and ??? to fix our commodity issues but given how far off we are with Farming, and to a somewhat lesser extent Provisioning, I just don't see why we wouldn't have similar issues there unless there is a fundamental shift in design goals. I know a lot of people are excited about Mining, but I can't help but feel that many of them will just end up being disappointed after they find out all their efforts will be for naught.
8
Comments
Some specific points I'd like to know about:
1) Let's say Mining facilities will take comm X to build. Let's say between now and when Mining comes out, every org uses up their stockpile of X. Without the facilities, we have no way to produce X, so we're stuck without being able to use Mining forever. Imagine if this had happened with one of the original comms needed for the Farming facilities. Do you have a feasible plan to deal with this?
2) In your ideal scenario, should commodity production be able to keep up with demand? For example, if the playerbase was big enough to demand 1000 of comm Y per year, should the playerbase also be able to produce 1000 of Y per year, given enough of the playerbase wishes to dedicate their farms/mines/??? into production of Y? If this demand increased to 2000 Y per year, should we also be able to scale our production to that level?
3) How profitable are these systems supposed to be? Just the lesson cost alone is almost 300 credits per skill. Not saying they need to be the most profitable thing ever, but is the aim to make these actually profitable systems if someone wants to invest the lessons/time into it, or is the point mostly to produce commodities?
4) How long do you aim for the production facilities to make back what it took to purchase/upgrade them?
As for my findings, I have laid out the conclusions in this post. I would be very happy to discuss the numbers or some specifics (such as wood production really, really sucking right now) further with you, but I feel without a clear idea of what the design goals here are, I don't think it's really helpful to make too many suggestions.
Is it the end of the world having to spend a few minutes per farm doing this? No. Should it be at least somewhat rewarding given the time and heavy credit investment? Well, that's what I am trying to ask here.
Failing that, we've still been letting city leaders trade in some of their excess comms to us in exchange for another comm as needed.
2) Yes, and yes. Worth noting farming comm generation is currently outpacing comm usage healthily.
3) It should be profitable, though hard to say how much. I've been getting very conflicting feedback on this with some people saying it's good profits and others saying it's not at all. It's worth noting that using fertilizer is going to tank your profits in exchange for more commodities.
I'm going to crunch some numbers here using one of the city's rates as an example:
- A farm can grow roughly 870 cotton across spring/summer.
- I'm being a real scrooge here, so I'm only buying one seed bag (50 gold) and refill it 3 times at 100 gold each for 90 cotton seeds total.
- That's 350 gold for 90 cotton seeds, or roughly 4 gold per cotton.
- Farm is 91 tiles, minus 2 for shed, minus 1 for well, minus 1 for scarecrow. 87 tiles.
- Watersprite is 100 gold every 5 weeks. We want to cover all of Spring/Summer for cotton. 12.5 weeks a season, 25 weeks (aka real days) total. So 500 gold total to cover 87 tiles of cotton. An extra 6 gold per cotton, roughly.
- So at this point we're at 10 gold per cotton.
- The city I'm looking at it is taxing at 5 gold per cotton, now we're at 15 gold per cotton total.
- Level 1 clothier takes 5 cotton to make 1 cloth, so 75 gold per cloth.
- The city is buying the cloth at a rate of 230 gold per, so my net profit is 155 gold.
- At 870 cotton across all of spring/summer, I can make 174 cloth and earn 26970 gold from selling it to the city.
- This is all just from a single farm.
That's pretty profitable for the individual. City is obviously taking a big hit but in return their farmers are making some decent coin and they're getting a steady supply of cloth.
This is hard because I took the city that has the lowest tax rate and highest buy rate. Other cities are taxing a lot more and buying for a lot less, so profit is going to be a lot lower as a result.
4) For the gold cost? Probably a long, long time. For the comms, this is on our list of changes as they're way too high for now (before someone asks, if we lower the costs yes we'll refund the difference). But we won't roll out the upgrade costs until Mining is out to line the two up properly.
---
On another note, one problem is that the level 1/2 facilities are way worse than the level 3 one and one of the changes we have planned along with the cost decrease is bumping the efficiency of those up. We're also adding in the option to turn on a round-robin queue (so it processes 1 item from queue pos 1, then 1 item from queue pos 2, etc until it reaches bottom of queue) so that people will see a steady trickle of their comms coming in if there's a big order in the queue.
2) Ok. If that is the intended goal then the hard caps we have do need to change significantly. As far as I am aware, the farming comms we have are some of the least used comms, though I may be wrong on this. I just know that we have a much greater demand for things like silver, gold, ash, and ice.
3) Your example has a couple of errors and missing costs but they don't really amount to much. That's still only a profit of around 1000 gold per week, which is honestly not bad, except for the fact that it costs this city 205 gold per cloth (230 - 25 from the taxes). This is a ridiculously high amount for cloth and is probably not sustainable since I don't think there is actually that much demand for it. Also this example perfectly highlights my point about TPI. This clothier will take 928 seconds to get through one cotton. For 870 cotton that is over 9 RL days and 8 hours to get through that one batch. If they had 5 farms it would require 46 days and 17 hours. That's almost the entire year's of production used up by a single person.
Cloth is also one of the better commodities as it gives more room to balance the profitability/cost for the city.
Let's take wood as another example:
100 gold per 30 seeds. 3.33 gold per seed.
Can plant 17 trees at a time. Takes 12 weeks (roughly 1 season) to grow, so let's say over spring-summer-autumn we can get 51 trees planted.
8 water sprites, or 800 gold needed. Roughly 15.7 gold per tree.
6 maintenance, or 600 gold needed. Roughly 11.8 gold per tree.
Total of 30.83 gold per tree
Let's imagine a city that severely undertaxes at 5 gold per tree and overpays at 150 gold per wood (therefore costing them a very high 147.5 gold per wood).
This is 35.83 gold per tree and at 1 tree per 2 wood that's about 17.9 gold per wood for a profit of 132.1 gold per wood.
Total profit of 132.1 * 2 * 51 = 13474.2 gold
Split over the 36 weeks to grow it, that's roughly just 374 gold of profit per week, even with very favourable taxes and prices.
In this example we can see what happens in a scenario where we can't grow that much at a time. With a TPI of 1166 seconds, the yearly yield of 51 trees per farm is only enough to keep this lumber mill occupied for roughly 16.5 RL hour. This puts production saturation at roughly 72 farms dedicated to growing trees.
4) Ok, this is fair. I'm not exactly sure why it should cost cities lot of gold just to take part in the system, but if the comm reduction is significant then this is more reasonable.
1) A lack of understanding of supply and demand and how it SHOULD be influencing farming and production.
So. This bugs the everloving hell out of me. If you're a city leader, council member, or a minister or aide to the Trade ministry, you can see all the comms the city has. You should be keeping in mind total comm levels, what comms people are actually using or need, what's needed to upgrade and maintain facilities, and what you have an abundance or overabunance of. Why is this important? Because if you're doing the whole farming and producing comms thing to help keep your city stocked as opposed to doing it for profit, you SHOULD NOT be producing a ton of a comm your city doesn't actually need. Until recently, Enorian had been producing hemp out the wazoo and turning it into rope, and then the city was buying it at a high price. Despite, y'know, not actually needing any of it. I guess people saw the very fast growth and regrowth times and thought it'd be an awesome money maker.
Yeah, no. It doesn't work that way.
If you look at what rope is actually used in, it doesn't amount to a lot. So why produce so much of it?
Meanwhile, wood and leather are used in a lot more important things (like upgrading and maintaining facilities), but take a much longer time to actually farm. Unless a person is farming stuff to produce things to keep for themselves, cities have a lot of influence to nudge people into producing what it needs. Need wood? Increase the city buying price on wood while dropping the price on others to encourage the production of those comms.
2) Farming for self/profit vs Farming for city
While it's great when getting a nice profit and helping your city align, more than likely it's not, especially if the city you're in can't really afford to pay out as much for in-demand comms to remain competitive. So you really have to decide right away if you're farming and producing to make money or to produce comms for yourself to keep, you're going to be sending your stuff to where the taxes are lowest, facilities are upgraded for better efficiency, fastest or smallest queues, and then sell it to wherever has the highest buy price to make the most out of your efforts. For for-profit farmers, you're going to have to realize that you're going to be moving things around a lot, and not getting stuff produced all in the same place.
If you're farming and producing to help out your city or you're a super patriot and insist on producing everything in one city...I'm sorry, but you're going to have to accept that you might not be getting the most profit for your efforts if you receive any at all. If you're sincerely trying to help your city, you should be willing and able to take the losses. If a city can't afford gold compensation for the amount of work or comms, they really should be providing compensation some other way. If they can't find a solution that's satisfactory for you, well...might have to bite the damn bullet and sell to someplace that CAN.
3) Going 'all-in' vs Diversifying
So. Making all of your fields full of cows or cotton seems like a super amazing money-maker... Yeah, if you don't mind waiting ages for overloaded production facilities to finish with your stuff. You also run into the issue of potentially having so much of one thing that you'll drain a city's coffers. Diversifying allows you to 'spread your investments' around and also help alleviate production queues a little. Also, if you do Provisioning (which is another can of worms) it helps alleviate that burden further.
4) Making the most out of farming/Production requires research, attention, observation, and planning
I love Farming. I also love being able to get comms I need for my crafting in bulk. Yes, I have farming artifacts (hoe, axe, scythe, and fertilizer), which makes it so much faster and boosts yield by a decent bit, but I happily loan them out to people who ask. But I spend maybe an hour at most tending to farms. And when I was managing around 10 different farms, it still didn't eat a ton of time as I'd just check on them whenever I wasn't doing anything else. Keep in mind, I also do a LOT of Provisioning stuff too, which is even more work. Want to know how I manage? One farm is all cows or split half between cows and a crop with regrowth. One field is all cotton, which I rotate to a Provisioning crop when autumn rolls around. Two or three fields dedicated exclusively to Provisioning crops. And one or two fields of just trees. This ensures I can fill whatever market orders I take with time to spare, and still have crops to turn into commodities to either keep for myself or sell.
Before every season, I plan how I'm going to make use of all the fields I have available, and I keep track of growth times. I also make sure that my fields are tilled and fertilized before every season so I don't have to spend a lot of time at once at the beginning of the season prepping and planting fields.
On the production side of things, I do a lot of 'shopping' too. I check the facility levels of every city, what their production queues look like and how long stuff takes, what the efficiency is, their tax rate per item, and also comm buy prices. And I check this BEFORE I even ship out stuff anywhere for processing. You want the best bang for your buck? You really have to pay attention, both on the city comm buying and taxing end and on the farmer/producer level.
5) You really have to get your head out of your butt and actually watch what other people are doing.
If the game is moving towards a player-run economy, people really need to understand just how economy is supposed to work. Its based on supply, demand, and competition. Everyone needs comms, and they want to essentially buy your business. If Spinesreach is offering a MUCH better rate on buying certain comms, I'm more likely to take my business there.
But the thing is you don't want to undercut the competition too much. Which is what tends to happen more noticeably with crafting stuff and ESPECIALLY curatives (another problematic can of worms I can rant about at length). Everyone starts with the same base cost with crops. Seed costs don't change. Growing seasons don't change. What's different is what each city charges in taxes, facility level (but even that will even out eventually), and what they'll buy certain comms for. The base price for every comm before production is roughly the same, so any buy price above that will yield profit - how much profit is dictated by the prices cities set, and each city will priorize different things, and essentially competing against each other for your comms. And you as a farmer/producer have to be aware of all of these factors. If you can't or are unwilling to do that, farming probably isn't for you.
I honestly really like the farming and production system, and I feel like you CAN make decent profit with it for relatively minimal effort. But if you want to get the most out of it, you HAVE to shop around. You have to decide right away if you're doing it to help out your city or if you're out to make money. If it's the latter, you really have to pay attention to things so you can k ow what to send where, and where to sell it after. But if it's the former... You're going to have to kind of kwityerbitchin and be willing to accept some loss or significantly less profits for the sake of furthering your city. Or you can go halfway and get stuff produced someplace with more efficient facilities and then sell em to your city for significantly less profit.
A player-run economy only works if stuff is moving around and people are wheeling and dealing. If you can't or won't, that's kind of on you, not the system.
From just a person playing a game's point of view, all I can say is it definitely feels like I cannot even begin to keep up with demand at this rate. Not only do I buy wood from the villages -every morning-, but I also do a ridiculous amount of farming. Even having a considerable amount of Duiran's farms turned towards pine, we just can't keep wood in stock for citizens, let alone to begin a stockpile.
Wood supply getting dangerously low? Consider what it's being used for. Are people buying a ton of vials? How about instead of stocking vial designs in shops, have them produced via the carving knife in bulk on demand instead since it doubles output, and saves you a lot of wood comms in the long run. This is kind of what a player-run economy ends up being. Knowing who has what resources, and how to most effectively make use of what resources you have for the least cost and least waste.
I kinda see people with crafting and farming artifacts having more value as they can offer services to borrow or loan out their artifacts, or just let people borrow them for free. People already lend others their artifacts to make hunting easier. It's the same for crafting, and now farming.
my revenue sheet from last IG year I ran 9 farms, 6 cotton, 3 tree farms. I only grew 1 set of trees per farm (18*3) no replanting. I fertilized every cotton tile, water sprited because I am WAY too lazy to water each tile individually, bought 4 sacks and refilled them, I accounted for sacks, shovels, hoes, scythes, scarecrow purchases, axes, and field maintenance costs through the winter.
I could have made more gold by using different production facilities, but I wanted the quantity of commodities for personal projects and to make sure my shops had cloth and wood for designs.
I did the rounds this morning...
Enorian
Level: 2 TPI: 21m 4s
Apprentices: 1/1
Hide Tax: 550 gp per item.
The tannery will convert 1 hide to 4 leather.
--- PRODUCTION QUEUE ---------------------------------------
Pos. Item ETA Owner
------------------------------------------------------------
1. 156/360 Hides 71h 22m 11s
2. 0/60 Hides 21h 4m
3. 0/330 Hides 115h 52m
4. 0/420 Hides 147h 28m
------------------------------------------------------------
Total time remaining: 355h 46m 11s
------------------------------------------------------------
--- THE LUMBER MILL OF ENORIAN -----------------------------
Level: 1 TPI: 21m 50s
Apprentices: 0/0
Trunk Tax: 175 gp per item.
The lumber mill will convert 1 trunk to 2 wood.
--- PRODUCTION QUEUE ---------------------------------------
Pos. Item ETA Owner
------------------------------------------------------------
------------------------------------------------------------
Total time remaining:
------------------------------------------------------------
--- THE CLOTHIER OF ENORIAN --------------------------------
Level: 1 TPI: 15m 28s
Apprentices: 0/0
Hemp Tax: 25 gp per item.
Cotton Tax: 30 gp per item.
The clothier will convert 4 hemp to 1 rope.
The clothier will convert 5 cotton to 1 cloth.
--- PRODUCTION QUEUE ---------------------------------------
Pos. Item ETA Owner
------------------------------------------------------------
1. 209/630 Cottons 108h 26m 29s
2. 0/420 Cottons 108h 16m >>> You
3. 0/570 Cottons 146h 56m
4. 0/90 Cottons 23h 12m
5. 0/152 Hemps 39h 10m 56s
6. 0/390 Hemps 100h 32m
7. 0/450 Cottons 116h
------------------------------------------------------------
Total time remaining: 642h 33m 25s
------------------------------------------------------------
Duiran
Level: 1 TPI: 19m 26s
Apprentices: 0/0
Trunk Tax: 120 gp per item.
The lumber mill will convert 1 trunk to 2 wood.
--- PRODUCTION QUEUE ---------------------------------------
Pos. Item ETA Owner
------------------------------------------------------------
------------------------------------------------------------
Total time remaining:
------------------------------------------------------------
--- THE TANNERY OF DUIRAN ----------------------------------
Level: 1 TPI: 21m 4s
Apprentices: 0/0
Hide Tax: 120 gp per item.
The tannery will convert 1 hide to 3 leather.
--- PRODUCTION QUEUE ---------------------------------------
Pos. Item ETA Owner
------------------------------------------------------------
1. 133/450 Hides 111h 12m 18s
2. 0/420 Hides 147h 28m
------------------------------------------------------------
Total time remaining: 258h 40m 18s
------------------------------------------------------------
--- THE CLOTHIER OF DUIRAN ---------------------------------
Level: 2 TPI: 12m 4s
Apprentices: 1/1
Hemp Tax: 50 gp per item.
Cotton Tax: 50 gp per item.
The clothier will convert 4 hemp to 2 rope.
The clothier will convert 3 cotton to 1 cloth.
--- PRODUCTION QUEUE ---------------------------------------
Pos. Item ETA Owner
------------------------------------------------------------
1. 272/1470 Cottons 240h 54m 48s
2. 0/362 Hemps 72h 48m 8s
3. 0/300 Cottons 60h 20m
4. 0/568 Hemps 114h 13m 52s
5. 0/240 Cottons 48h 16m
6. 0/810 Hemps 162h 54m
------------------------------------------------------------
Total time remaining: 699h 26m 48s
------------------------------------------------------------
Spinesreach
Level: 1 TPI: 22m 5s
Apprentices: 0/0
Trunk Tax: 200 gp per item.
The lumber mill will convert 1 trunk to 2 wood.
--- PRODUCTION QUEUE ---------------------------------------
Pos. Item ETA Owner
------------------------------------------------------------
------------------------------------------------------------
Total time remaining:
------------------------------------------------------------
--- THE TANNERY OF SPINESREACH -----------------------------
Level: 2 TPI: 23m 55s
Apprentices: 0/1
Hide Tax: 400 gp per item.
The tannery will convert 1 hide to 4 leather.
--- PRODUCTION QUEUE ---------------------------------------
Pos. Item ETA Owner
------------------------------------------------------------
------------------------------------------------------------
Total time remaining:
------------------------------------------------------------
--- THE CLOTHIER OF SPINESREACH ----------------------------
Level: 3 TPI: 10m 32s
Apprentices: 3/3
Hemp Tax: 70 gp per item.
Cotton Tax: 50 gp per item.
The clothier will convert 3 hemp to 2 rope.
The clothier will convert 2 cotton to 1 cloth.
--- PRODUCTION QUEUE ---------------------------------------
Pos. Item ETA Owner
------------------------------------------------------------
1. 48/100 Cottons 8h 57m 42s
2. 0/100 Cottons 17h 33m 20s
3. 0/100 Cottons 17h 33m 20s
4. 0/100 Cottons 17h 33m 20s
5. 0/100 Cottons 17h 33m 20s
6. 0/60 Hemps 10h 32m
7. 0/180 Hemps 31h 36m
8. 0/90 Cottons 15h 48m
9. 0/330 Cottons 57h 56m >>> You
10. 0/930 Cottons 163h 16m
------------------------------------------------------------
Total time remaining: 358h 19m 2s
------------------------------------------------------------
Bloodloch
Level: 2 TPI: 21m 50s
Apprentices: 0/1
Trunk Tax: 90 gp per item.
The lumber mill will convert 1 trunk to 3 wood.
--- PRODUCTION QUEUE ---------------------------------------
Pos. Item ETA Owner
------------------------------------------------------------
------------------------------------------------------------
Total time remaining:
------------------------------------------------------------
--- THE TANNERY OF BLOODLOCH -------------------------------
Level: 1 TPI: 23m 40s
Apprentices: 0/0
Hide Tax: 5 gp per item.
The tannery will convert 1 hide to 3 leather.
--- PRODUCTION QUEUE ---------------------------------------
Pos. Item ETA Owner
------------------------------------------------------------
------------------------------------------------------------
Total time remaining:
------------------------------------------------------------
--- THE CLOTHIER OF BLOODLOCH ------------------------------
Level: 1 TPI: 15m 28s
Apprentices: 0/0
Hemp Tax: 8 gp per item.
Cotton Tax: 8 gp per item.
The clothier will convert 4 hemp to 1 rope.
The clothier will convert 5 cotton to 1 cloth.
--- PRODUCTION QUEUE ---------------------------------------
Pos. Item ETA Owner
------------------------------------------------------------
1. 128/210 Cottons 21h 1m 7s
2. 0/120 Cottons 30h 56m
3. 0/5 Cottons 1h 17m 20s
------------------------------------------------------------
Total time remaining: 53h 14m 27s
------------------------------------------------------------
If profit is what you're after, yes, you'll be taking a hit in terms of quantity, but your margins will be MUCH wider. As a merchant, I've had Phoe pretty much looking for the best deal, both for profit and for keeping my caches stocked for crafting, and it's worked out pretty well.
* Leviathan Fertilizer/Artifact sycthe
I have both of these. Fertilizer is amazing because I never have to worry about running out and replacing it, and kind of removes the small amount it cuts into your overall profits. The scythe is amazing because of the ability to increase your harvest. Proc rates are about the same at roughly 12%, but together? Every field of 87 tiles I've harvested with the arti scythe that's also been fertilized, the bonus has procced about 29-31 times for an overall harvest increase of about 25/26%. Only downsides of both is that the fertilizer has the same 2s balance as normal fertilizer, and the scythe is only .5s faster, but for the amount they increase yield, I'm not going to complain. For people producing or doing Provisioning, the boom is pretty noticeable.
* Artifact hoe
For a convenience artifact, it's super convenient. Balance from tilling only takes .5s. I can finish tilling a single field in like a minute. Seriously. I could till an entire city's farms and be done in less than half an hour. The directional input, while neat, is a bit slower than just tilling every single tile individually.
* Trees
Growing trees via Farming is... A little bit of a problem for a few reasons. The major beef I have with growing trees is that they take 12 RL days to produce, and a growing season is 12 days. So even though they grow in 3 seasons, even if you plant them RIGHT at the beginning of spring, you're not likely to get 3 harvests out of it unless you're really on top of resummoning your watersprite. I'm very meticulous with farm scheduling and crop rotations, and even I've never managed to get trees fully grown within the bounds of a single season; there's zero wiggle room.
Ratios for producing wood are also kind of abysmal for the length of time investment to grow them, and also processing them. You can only have 12 trees (I don't remember, I'd have to check again) on a single farmplot, and each tree when harvested yields ONE trunk. And when you go to process it, a level 1 lumber mill only produces 2 wood per trunk. Using the artifact axe also doesn't help a ton as the times I've used it, I've been lucky if I can get it to proc twice, maybe three times.
Compare this to cows which take 20 RL days to raise to the point where you can harvest them, but you can have like 14 of them, can raise them during the winter so long as you had enough grass beforehand, and each cow yields 6 hide, and each hide produces 3 leather in a level 1 facility.
Just looking at this, wood is a pain in the butt to produce even in comparison to leather, which takes much longer before ready to harvest. And to put things in even more perspective, vials use 2 wood to make. So you're telling me an entire trunk, which takes 12 RL days to grow can only produce enough wood for a single vial? Uhhhh...
The trees issue can be fixed a few different ways.
- Reduce the growing time on trees to allow for more wiggle room. Godstongue has a grow time of 9 days. Still allows you to get a single harvest out of it, but enough wiggle room in case you mess up or plant a little late.
- Increase the base yield per trunk. Cows take much longer to raise than trees, but yield SO MUCH MORE per than trees do, and the artifact axe doesn't really help much in increasing it.
- Slightly increase the yield from the lumber mill. I mean, come on. 2 wood per trunk at base? It's easier to get that much by just going to a village comm shop for the amount of time you'd spend growing the stuff.
* Watersprite
Not being able to check when exactly your watersprite is going to poof so you can resummon it is a little inconvenient. And really messes up keeping crop growth within a single field consistent. Any chance there could be a line added when you PROBE it that'll tell you how much longer it'll remain summoned for?
My biggest criticism on mechanics is how disproportionate the time sink is for the clothier versus the other facilities. It's because cotton regrows to full maturity every 2 days. If cotton grew at the same rate as hemp, the clothier wouldn't be nearly as congested.
TPI on a single hide is 24 minutes. Cows take two seasons to mature. You can have a maximum of 14 cows on a farm plot. Each cow yields 6 hides. Processing 60 of those hides (bundle limits) will take 1440 minutes (24 hours). This is per TWO SEASONS. 24 hours per two seasons.
A full plot of cotton will typically yield 90 cotton (bundle limits). A TPI of 10.5 minutes with three apprentices is a time of 945 minutes (15.75 hours). This is maximum speed. The Tannery numbers I gave earlier are WITHOUT apprentices. 15.75 hours per plot every TWO DAYS.
Not two in game seasons. Two in game weeks. The proportions here make no sense at all. Please fix the clothier by dramatically reducing the TPI to something appropriately proportional, or increase the TPI of the tannery and lumber mill to do the same.
So even looking at spines and their upgrades, producing 4 commodities in each:
4 cloth- 84m 16s
4 wood- 44m 10s
4 leather- 23m 55s
4 rope- 63m 12s
If the TPI was a mark of how long the finished product takes, instead of how long each raw material takes, that alone would lengthen the amount of time wood and leather is in the que, which would make upgrading based on production times actually useful in those two cases (especially in lumberyard), and destress the clothiers into something far more reasonable, while still staying true to the concept of needing to plan carefully, to coordinate, to shop around, etc.
As @Razmael mentioned a few posts back; the TPI is included in the next push with Production, alongside some other numbers we caught ourselves and some adjustments @Keroc is being such a godsend about. It has been a fun project so far to implement and adjust.
Provisioning was released at the same as farming was, but not nearly as many people are engaging in it. I tend to dedicate two or three farmplots towards it myself, while only focusing one or two fields towards production. Smaller batches, less strain on production facilities. But the large reason why people haven't been doing Provisioning is because of the massive bottleneck with orders. There have been very few general or small market orders, and for the past three seasons, none at all.
I know market orders are still kind of borked, but I think once they're up and running more smoothly, it might help with the Farming burden a little.
Provisioning does not provide comms. It does not require any Production facility. It's another angle to provide a background or RP for people who want to be more Stardew Valley farmer, instead of Aetolia farmer.
Being either type of farmer is not bad. It does, however, make the player decide how they want to spend their time farming. In most cases, I see people choosing Aetolia farmer over Stardew farmer.