Better With Wheat, Add-on [Exploratory Discussion]

[abominare]

I've been toying with the idea of going about and adjusting some of the food making mechanics of BTW, while until recently I had been putting off such an addon because of FC's limited talk that he'd like to redo the whole hunger system, I've decided to move forward since its doubtful to see any real change until RTH since BTW is being wrapped up at the moment.

I've done a little legwork in feasibility and been brushing up on my coding, while I know this isn't the place to learn to mod a simple no you can't do this because of redistributing code would be helpful though. (no real explanation needed just say it won't work)

More importantly though, is I'd like some feedback on the ideas, if everyone hates it then my job is much easier because I can continue unabated and not worry about code redistribution since I can do it just for myself.


Proposed Concept 1#

Alter wheat grinding Recipe to use the seeds instead of the chaff. IIRC FC has left a hook for altering grind recipes. Its always been extremely silly to me that I make flour for bread and donuts using the part of wheat you don't actually use to make flour.

What I hope to accomplish is that this puts a larger strain on creating basic food stuffs, since seed production is already averaged to about 1.5 seeds per plant this lowers the output and requires more pre-planning on wheat farm needs. If possible I'd actually like to lower seed output making a much larger strain on having to upkeep larger fields of wheat. (This might be a code issue though).


Concept #2

This ties into the first, since wheat chaff will suddenly be in a larger supply I would ideally like to introduce a hay barrel type item that would replace feeding wheat directly to animals. Having a simple 3x3 crafting recipe would suffice. Sadly I'm thinking I might run into trouble here with how BTW handles feeding changes, but ideally I could place this block and have it trigger the next two animals capable of breeding and then disappearing (as in they "ate" it). The nice thing is, it allows you to essentially queue up breeding and is block dispenser friendly for automation, its also more expensive making large animal farming more of an investment.


Concept #2.5

Making a hay compactor to facilitate hay-breeding automation. Obviously runs on mechanical power, will require anvil level tech to keep the early game stress.

Concept #3

Crop Rot

I'd like to add an additional state to vanilla crops, ideally with a random tick event after the mature stage. Basically the longer you leave crops unharvested the more likely they are to be over ripe/rotted and unfit for consumption. This makes food farms more demanding and not just a leave until hungry sort of thing. It also makes automating a much more desired and required investment for later game play since going out and exploring for a couple days may mean you come back to no food and you beginning to starve.

On the flip side I'd really like to change the pig breeding food of choice to be a slop type of food the recipe requiring cooking in a cauldron rotted food. Rotted food of course will yield no plantable seed or starter for potato/wheat/carrot. This means that running a pig farm suddenly requires devoting a portion of your crop harvest to being neither self sufficient nor able to feed yourself. Thus makign you pay attention to your crops. On the flip side it does allow you to salvage bad harvests by ultimately recycling it to yummy bacon, stressing the importance of having a pig farm pre automation.

[Larmantine]

if you are trying to make wheat even harder, know this - most of us still use meat. It easier to get and restores more. Think about other food. Personally i use bread rarely.

[Kombucha]

I use wheat for breeding and that's about it. Was lucky enough to end up on a world with a Mushroom Biome nearby and once I had enough wood to make a bowl (which was about 10 seconds in) I was set for food.

Mooshrooms aside, yeah, bread doesn't seem to be many people's go-to choice for food these days.

[nmarshall23]

A few suggestions..

I'd reexamine your motivations for this mod.
I'm not sure that anyone would really care for a mod that adds realism to Wheat farming.

Take a look at your world, look for areas that you feel could use another challenge.
For example once an auto hemp farm is made, well, I tend to over produce hemp..
I wish there was a loom or something.

If your just getting back into programming, take your time exploring how to mod minecraft, I have 8 years of writing java code, and I find MC a mess, it's hard to control my instincts to refactor it all. It's not at all straight forward.

I do agree that the food mechanics, and hunger system could use a remake. I have a few idea but I fear that the required code is all over the place. And that's a large project, with very little to show for it initially.

I do wish you best of luck, writing mods is very fun.

[whitechaos35]

I would actually like this addition.

if you are trying to make wheat even harder, know this - most of us still use meat.

You can't have sustainable beef without sustainable wheat, so making wheat harder directly affects the production of meat.

[abominare]

Thanks, sorry was away from xmas. From an earlier post my main goal to accomplish here is introduce a time management level to pre automation in BTW. Its often far too easy just to line up wheat near water and harvest as needed. Then either invest that into meat or just have a stack of food while you mine without care for several days until the next batch is ready for harvest.

The big goal of crops rotting is that the crutch of renewable food means having to pay attention, while not desired to be a total realism addition, I like the idea that a bad harvest could slow down technological advancement in the tree by harming leather production, much like in real life, early civilizations halted developing when theres was a food shortage. Even better, if suddenly steve had to wonder where is next meal was going to come from.

I just like the idea of giving the player a situation where they might have to sit and think, whelp I'm hungry to I cull the herd or desperately go out into the dangerous wilds and try to hunt/forage apples to save my livestock herd.

Automation becomes a much more desired thing because it simply gives Steve freedom. He won't be worrying about food failing because he spent too much time building or exploring or even mining. Hes able to move on then to his next big project.

I would love to create a situation where a player has to make a meaningful decision between cows and pigs. Right now cows are such an easier choice over pigs because of the importance of leather. In this case pigs would have a notable use as acting as a famine stop gap if your initial harvest rotted (the big kicker is losing the ability to replant though, which emphasizes keeping a reserve store or suffer punishment of having to grass beat for new seeds). Additionally, by having slop from rotted food become the pig foodstuff of choice, finding a village for a carrot won't be a requirement to actually have a pig farm, eliminating an often silly requirement to even begin a pig farm, without diluting a demand effect from using that food source.


The other idea I had that I already knew to be impossible was introducing a hunger system to animals so making the distinction between pigs and cows from the what they could eat in terms or rotted or not became my next best idea.

[Warr1024]

We had entertained some discussion of doing something similar in BWR, though it has been put on hold because it's out of scope. The implementation would be much simpler, considering the design constraints of BWR.

Basically, certain agricultural goods whose rate production/output has a random factor would vary based on a pseudorandom function of the world seed and global world time. This would create an incentive for players not to depend on monoculture for their food supplies, and add value to less desired foods like melons.

[dawnraider]

While I agree that the food system is in desperate need of help, I don't think this is the way to do it,as while this is definitely an interesting concept, it would basically become "well, I could do foo, or foo, or foo, but I can't really, because I need to watch the food to make sure I don't starve." "Let's move up the tech tree! Dangit, the food needs tending." Also, your point of incentivizing pigs is pretty moot, seeing that a) you can use kibble, so carrots are not actually required, and b) pigs produce 4x as much tallow as cows, so they already have their own advantages.

[TheGatesofLogic]

Oh god... Wheat is an automation NIGHTMARE already and you want to make it more complicated? This would make automated modules utterly untileable due to the requirement of a reliable stream splitter BEFORE it hits an elevator... I'm usually good at minimizing automated devices but this is. Just... Impossible... My opinion? Bad idea because it discourages automation and encourages massive manual farms

[FlowerChild]

Please don't necro man. This one was pretty severe.

[Yhetti]

Here is my opinion: I don't think that either wheat or hemp should give seeds when you pluck them, it's one of the better ways to implement reproduction of seeds, but it doesn't make much sense. Setting that aside, wheat (as previously stated) does not produce very much bang for it's buck. I think that wildgrass, since it can probably contain wheat, should drop an occasional wheat instead of seeds, you can then get the seeds from the wheat(That process is up to you....Ginding?) . Then when planted, the wheat can spread across farmland slowly, and maybe even drops more than one wheat, but never seeds.

This does not only sound more reasonable, and more realistic, but more fair to us auto-farmers. Because honestly, when have you ever plucked a plant out of the ground and had seeds go flying out?