Hi everyone,
And welcome to the second part of the materials and farming explanation for 0.9.
Yesterday I mentioned that I will be changing the way players will get access to seeds, and that there will be more “natural” plants to be found in the wild. These plants will of course include the current “cash crops”, i.e. coffee, spices, tea, and tobacco, in addition to some new ones that will be created for 0.9. In yesterday’s post, I hinted that flax will be one of them. So far, the linen maker simply creates linen “out of nothing”, but that will be changed during 0.9. Flax will become a “naturally occurring” plant in the world, and can later be turned into seeds to be planted in farms. The linen maker will then take the harvested flax and turn that into linen.
With all of these plants, the player will need to continuously decide whether to use up the naturally harvested plants by turning them into a more valuable end product, or whether to save up a larger quantity of them in order to get a seed that will provide them with a more stable income. Of course, what you find may influence that decision. If you start with lots of banana groves, turning their fruit into a seed to increase your food production may be an easy decision - while it may be more useful to use up your bananas if you have started with relatively few of them, to prioritise expanding to somewhere with better resources.
In addition to this new system, one small change may also be relatively impactful: fields will only be placeable in certain locations. This will likely mean that certain plants will only be plantable in certain biomes (e.g. in the jungle where it is sufficiently wet), or will be more productive in certain biomes (e.g. flax fields in the plateau area). I have not fully decided on how to implement this yet, but certain things are already clear (e.g. no fields in the desert area).
The underlying mechanic for this was created a little while ago, but I had not yet implemented it. However, you may be able to look forward to a limited version of it with the next update, where fields will no longer be placeable in the desert. The full version of it will then come in with new plants and better balancing for 0.9.
Until next week!