Redemption Harem - Farming

This is still in development, so some things might change from this post to final implementation, but I think I've got enough set in place to talk about it.

If you've played the demo, farming was set up in a "plant <crop> in row <X>" fashion, which - especially early on, when you only have two characters that actually eat anything, created a massive surplus of food.

It's easy enough to forage/hunt for food in v0.1, but especially when you're still trying to figure everything else out and your crafting skills are a low enough level that you might feel you don't have enough room to both keep everyone fed and try and raise your cooking skill, continuing to capture monsters to redeem and/or recruiting new party members might feel like it'd overwhelm your ability to gather supplies. Even if it wouldn't, it might push the game in a direction where you can't do much except gather supplies, which isn't very fun.

The balancing point I've landed on is that you'll need to find a Fertilizer item to unlock each farm plot, and each plot will grow independently. This will let me get a feel for balance during testing and spread out or make available Fertilizer accordingly, and prevent farming from immediately solving all food needs forever.

As for how farming works mechanically, once you find Fertilizer (the first one will be in the garden shed), you interact with a garden plot to "unlock" it and prepare the soil. Once the soil is prepared, you pick something to grow from your inventory and plant it. Both of these steps will take a small amount of time to do, and can't be done at night.

The bit I'm unsure of right now is the next step - watering it. I want to have watering the plant daily be a thing, but as I've thought about it, I don't think I want watering it to be required, especially since there's a small Waterskin mechanic that limits how much water you can carry on you at a time (don't worry - it's easy to refill and can be upgraded eventually). At the same time, I feel like watering your crops should be a thing, so rather than the plant not growing that day if you don't water it and possibly eventually dying, I think what I'm going to do is have the "growth rate" of each plant take longer than it should, and watering will speed that up. Though that hinges on whether I'm able to implement that at all, because keeping the game event interactive and dynamically updating it based on a dynamic variable is part of the reason this hasn't been fully developed yet, so this may end up being simplified so you don't need to water your crops at all for the sake of my own sanity. Watering crops to speed up growth is the goal right now, though, so that's what to expect. Either way, watering a single plant (at least in my experience) only takes a few seconds, so this step won't take time, just water, but I'll probably still put something in place to stop you from working at night.

The last step is harvesting the crop, which is just as simple as planting it. It'll take a bit of time so you won't be able to do it at night, but interacting with a fully grown crop will let you reap the rewards of your hard work, giving you more food than you'd otherwise find to forage in a hunt area.

I did consider making this a profession skill as well to increase crop yields the more you interact with the system, but I think needing Fertilizer to unlock additional plots is all the progression that's really necessary for it. Plus I can always change my mind and add it in later if I feel like it.

So, what do you think? Potentially tedious? Much-needed easy access to food for your fortress? Welcome cozy farming vibes? Let me know in the comments.