Crops will overgrow/die if not harvested in time

[RenechCDDA]

Summary

Balance "Unattended crops that are ready to harvest will die if not harvested before their next growth period"

Purpose of change

My runs often go multiple years. One of the things that has always bothered me is that farms have bountiful fields full of food which never, ever goes bad. Similarly, I've left crops behind before when moving base, only to come back years later to a mysterious perfectly square patch of crops in pristine condition. It sticks around forever just waiting to be harvested by the player. This trivializes the entire food portion of the game and means players never engage with it in any meaningful way.

Describe the solution

Well now they just don't wait for you. Those plants just keep on growing and growing and growing... Or in the case of planters, they just die.

Describe alternatives you've considered

if I'm feeling really spicy I might add winter killing crops (though that means having to JSONize which crops survive winter! Effort!)

Testing

Here's what the giant mutable farms look like by Autumn 61, 180 days after game start and with months of neglect:

None of these are harvestable anymore.

And here's me clearing (and replanting) an overgrown field using the zone manager:

2024-04-17.13-52-27.mp4

Additional context

Crop tending eventually, along with the automation to support it. But not today.

[github-actions]

Spell checker encountered unrecognized words in the in-game text added in this pull request. See below for details.

Click to expand

• This patch of green used to be a cultivated field or some sort of monocrop agriculture. Neglected for too long, it has been overtaken by nature.

This alert is automatically generated. You can simply disregard if this is inaccurate, or (optionally) you can also add the new words to tools/spell_checker/dictionary.txt so they will not trigger an alert next time.

Hints for adding a new word to the dictionary

• If the word is normally in all lowercase, such as the noun word or the verb does, add it in its lower-case form; if the word is a proper noun, such as the surname George, add it in its initial-caps form; if the word is an acronym or has special letter case, such as the acronym CDDA or the unit mW, add it by preserving the case of all the letters. A word in the dictionary will also match its initial-caps form (if the word is in all lowercase) and all-uppercase form, so a word should be added to the dictionary in its normal letter case even if used in a different letter case in a sentence.
• For a word to be added to the dictionary, it should either be a real, properly-spelled modern American English word, a foreign loan word (including romanized foreign names), or a foreign or made-up word that is used consistently and commonly enough in the game. Intentional misspelling (including eye dialect) of a word should not be added unless it has become a common terminology in the game, because while someone may have a legitimate use for it, another person may spell it that way accidentally.

[PatrikLundell]

Winter killing plants, self seeding of some plants, plants replaced by weeds as time goes by (many domesticated plants aren't particularly competitive, and Americans seem to favor poison as the means to deal with any threats to yields, and there's nobody left to do the spraying). Also, more animals eating the crops.

If you want to be mean, you could introduce GMO soy beans and corn (at least) whose seeds are intentionally rendered non viable (and if you're really nasty the player can't tell if they're GMO or not).

[Nebnis]

Perfect, now we just need to eliminate the insane amount of fruiting trees in the wilds and maybe late game characters will have to work a lil harder for food.

[Vane79]

What if the player wasn't able to find certain seeds/planted crops before the first winter? Is he screwed then?

Also, keep in mind mods changing the way the game's played. I.E. innawood, sky island.

[RenechCDDA]

What if the player wasn't able to find certain seeds/planted crops before the first winter? Is he screwed then?

Seeds generated as items will still remain viable indefinitely. Even if all agricultural crop seeds were made unavailable to the player they would still be able to grow wild plants gained from forage, or trade for existing seed stocks from the few communities still around.

[RenechCDDA]

Also, keep in mind mods changing the way the game's played. I.E. innawood, sky island.

None of them are particularly relevant here, this is just how crops work. If sky islands wants crops to be magic for some reason it's a simple json override, the same way I did it.

[adamkad1]

What if the player wasn't able to find certain seeds/planted crops before the first winter? Is he screwed then?

Also, keep in mind mods changing the way the game's played. I.E. innawood, sky island.

Just harvest and preserve properly I guess?