Regenerative Farming (Game mechanic)

[juicyslew]

Overview

Regenerative farming would add a new core mechanic to the game. It would require that you maintain your fields soil health so that your cash crops have enough nutrients to survive until harvest.

Functionality

What is soil health?

In the mod, "soil health" is represented as 5 integers between 0 and 100. These integers will be referred to as "soil measures". These values have no real life meaning, they are just meant to provide a notion of various aspects of soil health. At the start of the game, the farming area will generate 3-5 smoothed maps of values. The range and nature of each map will be dependent on which soil measure it's being generated for. These maps are then sampled to generate each soil measure, and thus the soil health, at each tile location with the goal of creating peaks and valleys of soil measures over the entire farm.

Crop Diets

All crops will have a particular "diet". Diets are also 3-5 integer numbers but represent the daily effect that the crop has on the soil. At the end of each day, all crops will effect the soil with their diet. If a crop would put the soil health outside of it's allowed range of 0-100, it will die overnight. Note that crops only "eat" when they are watered and the day ends, so if you're crop would wither when watered, you could refrain from doing so.

Examples of Crop Diets

Parsnip

Parsnips are easy and take a long time before they'd deplete the soil

Strawberry

Strawberries on the other hand, are much more intense. It would take some decent preparation to have these planted for an entire season.

Soil Blends

Various objects can be used to craft various levels of soil blend. These can be placed on a field tile similar to fertilizer. They will then stay on the tile, though can be replaced by another blend or removed with time just like fertilizer. You will not get back the blend when replacing with a new one. These blends also have a daily "diet" but most of them are purely regenerative. This allows you to offset some of the depleting effects of growing specific crops. Easier to make blends will have smaller effects or in some cases, negative effects that you may not care about in the short term, but will in the long term. Harder ones will have larger, more positive effects, but never so large that you can ignore soil health entirely.

Cover Crops

"Cover crops" are just regular crops that have regenerative properties for the soil. They tend to sell at little profit or a loss, and in extreme cases may not sell for anything at all! Cover crops accomplish the same thing that soil blends due but with two major differences:

1. They are notably better at regenerating the soil for cheaper when compared to soil blends, but
2. They need to be planted on the field, meaning you can't grow your cash crop while they are there.

Example of Cover Crops

Tulip

Tulips don't generate much of a profit (and perhaps this mod should make them generate even less so), however they do regenerate soil health. Utilizing this in tandem with soil blends to rejuvenate fields even faster

Soil Surveyor

A simple tool provided to you sometime within the first 2 weeks of the game, and purchasable from Pierre or Joja. When in hand, shows extra UI info about the soil health near the cursor and mousing over a farm tile. This UI info won't have the exact numbers.

Balance of profit and conservation

Balance is only loosely considered in these concept images. Generally I'm imagining ~2/3 of farming effort is dedicated toward profit and ~1/3rd towards regenerative practices. There should be a range of intensity in cover crops and soil blends where the trade off is profit vs regeneration ability. For example: tulips could give nearly the same as what they cost, but regenerate the field. But buckwheat could regenerate very effectively [5, 2, 2, 4, 2] but sell for quite little resulting in a large loss in exchange for quick soil health fixes.

Optional Features

Features that could be interesting, but don't seem core to the goal.

Replacement Soil - Optional

You can buy a new replacement soil objects to replace existing soil. Doing this will set the soil health to a specific amount. The higher the quality of the replacement soil, the better. But it is EXPENSIVE, requires there's no crop on the tile, and takes a LOT of energy to do. These could be craftable, but again it should be expensive enough to do so that it usually doesn't make sense to do it.

Soil Health Visuals - Optional

Tiled tiles that are depleted in particular ways could have a certain look about them to indicate that particular sets of nutrients are low without needing a soil surveyor. This would be nice since it would allow the player to see the direct harm of their previous actions. For example, growing some intense cash crop may work fine for a while but one day you'll wake up and see your field looking cracked or off-color. Giving a visual effect to your non-regenerative farming practices. Soil that is high in certain things could have similar effects, and soil high in everything could have a sort of glow to it.

Soil Totems - Optional

(This should be for the future)
These act as a wide range effect that regenerates soil health magically. These are decently expensive to craft, but more importantly they require an item be put inside them to actually function. Let's call that item "Junimo's Blessing" for now. You can place a Junimo's Blessing inside the totem to enable it, and can right click the totem to remove it, allowing you to place it in another type of totem if necessary. There could be many different types of totems, some with wider ranges and weaker effects and others with much smaller ranges but much stronger effects. Their effects could increase with multiple Junimo's blessings on the same totem, or they could simply be overlapped to achieve double the effect I suppose.

Example of Soil Totems

Wood Totem
Cheap to make
All soil in radius 7 regenerates [1 0 0 0 0]
Useful for a single field multipurpose

Wilderness Totem
Medium cost
All soil in radius 4 regenerates [1 0 1 0 0]
Useful for plants that require the 3rd soil measure

Grovetender Totem
Expensive
All soil in radius 12 regenerates [2 0 0 0 0]
Useful for multiple fields or a larger field

Prismatic Totem
Expensive
All soil in radius 4 regenerates [2 1 1 1 0]
Useful for growing a small set of expensive crops

Mother Nature's Boon
Expensive
All soil in radius 2 regenerates [3 2 2 1 1]
Useful for growing legendary crops that have extreme soil depletion rates.

Rationale for this mod

Many mods have tried to make farming more interesting and varied by balancing sell prices or changing it over time (like in ferngill simple economy). This idea aims to accomplish the same but in a more forceful way, with the hopes of adding more pressure for the player to diversify their crops in new and interesting ways, and make being profitable notably more interesting.
More importantly, with some tweaks to prices and some higher value crops that are harder to grow, this will add level of natural progression to the game. Not only must you be able to afford to buy some seeds that are more profitable, you must also be able to successfully grow them.

Effect on gameplay

Interesting Decisions to make

Vaguely ordered by when they would be asked during a playthrough.

• What crops can I reasonably plant and make money off of?
• Where should I till a new field?
• What sorts of soil blends should I use?
• Should I till up a new field so I can work with healthier soil? Or try to better manage the health of my current one?
• Knowing that the crop diet can vary wildly, where should I grow these mixed seeds I've been collecting?
• Is it actually worth it to grow the crop that just came out of those mixed seeds? Or should I just remove it?
• Should I plant a cover crop to ensure I can plant a cash crop later?
• What cover crop should I plant based on my future growing needs?
• When is it time to remove my cover crop to plant my cash crops?
• Can I use the cover crops for anything better than selling them? (perhaps gifting or crafting?)
• Should I build up a field available that has good soil health so that I may plant more intense (but also more profitable) crops there over the whole season?
• Should I keep a small field of extremely healthy soil for growing specialty plants that need way more than most other plants do?
• What soil blends should I work towards based on my future growing needs?
• A new opportunity has arisen (found some new seeds, or thought of a more profitable plan), Can I reasonably pivot given the current soil health of my fields?
• Sure these strawberries are making me a lot of money, but should I remove some of them early to make sure this field isn't depleted next season?

[Optional section questions]

• My field is running out of nutrients. Do I give up? Or stop watering the field to give the soil a chance to recover with soil blends
• Should I stockpile replacement soil? If so, what quality?
• Should I bite the bullet and replace my field's soil?
• Should I move my soil totems?
• What soil totems make most sense for my plans and playstyle?
• Should I have multiple soil totems and rotate which ones are enabled every so often, so that all my fields get some support? Or just focus on one.

Example game plan

Spring:
I plan to make 3 fields ultimately, two will rotate cauliflower and tulips which mostly balance each other out. And the last will have strawberries all season or until nutrition runs out. I'll use a soil blend to try to keep the blue soil measure up, as it looks like that's whats going to run out first.

Summer:
Since my strawberries will have depleted one of the field, I'll plant a hard core cover crop to fix that field back up at a notable loss of profit. But I can still profit from the other two fields that I kept in good health. I'll use some extreme cash crop on one of those to have liquidity, and be more prudent with the other.

Fall:
Once again I have 1 depleted field and 2 healthy ones. I can do the same strategy again and continue to repeat this rotation of fields. However, I've obtained a Junimo's Blessing and can build a wood totem, which is aiding in the rejuvenation process. With this and some better soil blends, I can get my depleted field back to a healthy state in a week and get to planting on it again.

Winter:
There are fewer crops I'm trying to grow, So I could just cover my fields with soil blends and/or cover crops to ensure spring will be extra profitable.

[juicyslew]

Notes on Balancing
Will likely need a wide spread of soil diets and profit margins to make it feel like each crop has an important role to play. Will also probably need more crops than the vanilla ones to accomplish that while also having a sense of progression in what one can successfully grow from year to year.
Forageables will be hard to deal with as they don't have seed objects on which to show their depletion rates. Either they should all have the same or similar soil diets, or should have a perfectly neutral soil diet, in which case their sell prices should probably be nerfed.

[juicyslew]

Hi friends,
I wish I could make this myself but, with no modding experience I'm not even sure where to start.
If anyone has advice or would be willing to give me pointers how to start accomplishing something like this please let me know.

Moreover, if this seems genuinely impossible to accomplish with the current modding tools. Please please let me know so I can move on or think of a different way to accomplish the same vibe.