[ADDED] *Growing crops

Some of you may be aware there is a discussion topic over in Game Discussion collecting suggestions for new features for the game, and I feel a few of these could merit some expanded debate on their own, so I'm copying a few of my favourites to the Suggestion board to get a bit of discussion going and see how other people feel about them, and maybe tweak or expand upon them. These are largely an amalgamation of ideas of multiple people so I'm not claiming credit for any idea in its entirety.

My suggestion is for each player to get a field where we could grow our own feed/treats. Deluxe players could maybe get more than one? Or ability to purchase more? You could buy seeds from the store, plant them in your field and have to tend them each day for a week for them to grow to maturity, then harvest them to get the items. If you miss a day your yield is reduced by, say, 10%, or conversely have a baseline of yield, and every day that you tend the field increases the yield, either by a certain amount, or a random amount within a certain range, e.g. 5-15%. Maybe make it possible to find rare magic seeds not available in the store that allow you to grow things like peppermints.

Growing things would be cheaper than buying them, thus reducing your horse care costs, and you could sell extras on the player market. However I can see this quickly flooding the player market unless there was a clear benefit to players buying things here instead of the store, such as store produce being limited in supply, or player grown crops being very slightly better than anything that can be bought in the store. For example, store has Turnips, which offer a 50:50 chance of 1 or 2 stats, while players can grow Quality Turnips, which offer a 30:70 chance of 1 or 2 stats, respectively. My preference is for the latter.

I can see something like this being an extra source of income for players, as well as reducing horse care costs. It would stimulate the economy because players with lots of horses would be buying up the extra treats/feed produced by those with fewer horses, as they generally wouldn't be able to produce enough for their large herds just with their own fields, plus rare or special seeds would sell for a lot. It would also be an extra daily activity added to the game, without involving some endless clicking.

Possible types of crops:
- Basic crops: turnips, carrots, red/yellow/green apples, and wheat or oats (produces feed mix, or maybe premium feed mix?). Their seeds would all be available in the store, and the crop output relatively high.
- Semi-special crops: sugar cane (produces sugar cubes) and alfalfa (produces hay cubes). Either their seeds could be available in the store but the crop output relatively low so as to avoid heavily devaluing the product, or their seeds would only be able to be acquired by special means, such as found on rides, wished from the fountain, etc.
- Rare/magic crops: peppermints and perhaps also flowers (one entire field produces a single Easter Bouquet). Their seeds would only be able to be found in things like riding, fountain, etc, and would be very rare, and the crop output quite low. And if we have magic crops that grow things like peppermints we could also consider something like magic beans, which could grow a credit or two.

Last edited on 2017-08-29 at 15:50:02 by River

Something along the lines of this was brought up between the mods while I was still one. Don't know what happened, but I generally agree with the idea. I like the idea of limiting the store so you'd have to buy from other players, and having quality of treats is nice.

It's definately a good idea, as it involves the players more and gives them more things to care for or do...

I want to be a potato farmer.

OMG SAME!!!!!!!! Potatoes rule ;) yeah, this would be fun!

if I may add, I think this would be a great idea, if the farming was another deluxe feature possibly, or at least offer more options for deluxe players farms. I would also like to say that the premium feed mix should stay out of stores.

100% agree with production and limiting amounts purchasable via the store. Perhaps we could buy seeds and that might make players buy their needed treats from others? Creating more for the economy. Im kind of not feeling good, so I may be incoherent, aand I'll likely add more thoughts on this soon.

I do very much like the idea of farming though. And crafting :)

I strongly feel that the basics of this feature should be available to all players, rather than it be a deluxe-only feature, but deluxe could definitely have some perks attached to it.

I very much like the idea of crafting as well. I won't expand on it here as it's a very different suggestion to this one, and I think it deserves its own suggestion topic, but it definitely has merit. It could be possible to integrate the two, such as crops growing crafting materials and such.

Allow all players to be able to farm crops on their own...but deluxes have an option to buy more acreage and yeild better quality treats?

You'll be glad to know that this is actually one of the things I will be planning down the line.

I want to add orchards for apple trees, possibly other types of fruit too, farmland for growing the current treats, etc etc.

So yes, I will add this, however it will take a long time to implement as I need artwork for it and I have other things that I'd like to do first :).

Awesome news!

Added! ♥