Planter Automation while Maintaining Design Challenge.

Cruateor shared this feedback ago

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One thing I noticed and appreciated with the new Apex update is that we are forced to collect our crops either by hand, or by creating a collector contraption. This was interesting to me because for the first time in a while Keen has introduced a mechanic that either we had to invest manual time into, or explicitly design a mechanism that does something for us. This is a prime example of taking a basic mechanic like hunger and transforming it into a design challenge in a game revolving around engineering.

However my biggest gripe is how these new planters require us to go to each individual one and plant seeds ourselves. This system takes that design challenge and dumbs it down to still requiring manual labor for nutritional rewards. I’d like to propose a simple change that still enables that engineering challenge but allows for automated farming.

I would like it if we were able to drop seed items onto planters those would be able to take them in like a collector and plant those seeds automatically. This would maintain the engineering aspect of figuring out a system for detecting when to drop a seed over a specific planter, and allows us to fully automate farming.

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Replies (3)

Rage_Spammer ●

I was wondering about a good way to implement automated planting without adding a new block and that's actually a pretty smart way to do it. They could potentially add the collector functionality to the farm plot (filtering for seeds, of course). It would still need some changes from the collector since the plot doesn't have an inventory.

Might be a little difficult to drop only 1 seed per plot, though. They take very little volume. Would likely end up dropping multiple at once.

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misher ●

Just add "auto seed" option for planters. Upon harvesting they can give only 1-2 units instead of 2-3 and use that one to automatically "reseed" the plot. Why even bother with collecting automation if you still need to open each individual farm and seed it after the the harvesting. We can automate so many things in this game, why we cannot automate farming? I am sure there will still be tins of issues you will have to solve with the automation, but at least it is an engineering challenge rather than just mondain manual planting every time.

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Jay Horr ●

Finally decided to look back into the support page here, because it is something that fundamentally annoyed me.

I don't mind having to plant manually, but I do mind the time it takes to plant a single plot.

The planting process consists of the following steps:

Look at the field (mouse movement)
Press F (Button press)
Click at the seed (Mouse movement + button press)
Click "Plant" (again, mouse movement + button press)

Those are just way too many actions.

I see three ways of resolving this:

Reduce the number of clicks (and especially mouse movements) it takes to plant something. Perhaps let the player keep the seed in their hands, then just plant by pressing F on the plot. This reduces planting to effectively pressing two buttons and one mouse movement. This way, you can still plant manually, but it's not as frustrating to do so.
Keep the current system, but reduce the number of clicks needed. For example, you could pre-select the last used seed when accessing the farm plot, and allow confirmation of planting (i.e. pressing "Plant") by simply pressing Enter, F, or whichever key fits best here.
Add a way to plant automatically.

EDIT: The same is true for harvesting by the way. But it's not nearly as bad, and at least you can automate it. But if you could do planting with seeds in your hands and pressing F, harvesting the same way only makes sense. I understand there is the general issue of harvesting unfinished crops, but that could be resolved by only allowing "quick harvesting" for fully grown crops.

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