DemiserofD
Sodbuster
Who hasn't heard of feeding a horse a big, healthy apple?
I grew up on a farm. We had many fruit trees there; dozens of apples, a pair of pears, a couple apricots, several cherries, even a few peach trees! It was always wonderful watching them grow, and harvesting them to eat or sell. And whatever was wasted on the ground wasn't wasted at all, because we let the chickens run free beneath the branches, protecting them from the sunlight and giving them a healthy, nutrient-rich diet.
Which is why it makes me so sad that fruit trees are in such a poor state in this game.
Fruit Trees are the longest-term investment in the game. Not only do you need to wait a full month for them to grow, not only do they cost exorbitant amounts of money, but then you need to wait a full three more years until they reach their maximum output!
Unfortunately, because the value of fruit doesn't effect the value of Artisan goods produced from that fruit, and since by year 4 you should almost certainly be able to process all your fruit, this makes the value of this fruit less valuable than it really should be, given the input costs.
There's also the problem of the unbalance between various tree types; since trees all take the same amount of space on the farm, they all have the same opportunity cost, but fruit trees like Apricots and Cherries pay substantially less than other alternatives like Pomegranates and Apples.
The net result of this is that virtually no-one makes orchards of fruit trees. The most commonly seen sight is one of each tree type, planted for style points, plus as many trees as will fit around the borders of the greenhouse.
I'd like to make a few suggestions that could help make them a more desirable thing to have on a farm.
1: Let us feed our animals with fruit!
I know very well that animals love to eat fruit! Vegetables too, but fruit especially, will cause chickens to go into a frenzy, rushing to get there first!
So, in lieu of grass or hay, why not let us feed our animals with any excess tree fruit we might have? In fact, this could give a bonus to their productivity! Giving them a normal piece of tree fruit might give them a 25% chance to produce twice as much that day, all the way up to an iridium-star fruit giving them a 100% chance to produce twice as much that day!
2: Make excess fruit fall off, rather than vanishing!
Right now, once a tree has 3 fruit on it, any more just vanish! This doesn't happen in real life; it falls off the tree! Once on the ground, it's still quite good for a good day or so, just polish it off and it's good as new!
So why not make the fruit, rather than vanishing entirely, just fall off the tree onto the ground? Once there, animals could eat it, and get all the benefits I mentioned above!
This has the side benefit of automatically feeding animals allowed to play beneath them!
3: Increase the productivity of cheaper fruit trees!
Sadly, Cherry and Apricot trees just aren't worth planting right now, and it's easy to see why! They only produce a single cherry or apricot per day! Real life cherry trees produce HUGE bunches of cherries, and apricot trees produce so many they completely cover the ground!
So increase the production rates of these trees! Making two or even three fruit a day would be okay, because their lower prices makes them much harder to process all the produce!(hehe)
Plus, this gives the animals even more to monch on!
4: Let Tree Fruit produce higher-quality wine/preserves!
I don't want to typecast fruit into only one thing. Feeding it to animals is all well and good, but that shouldn't be the only reason to have fruit trees!
So, last of all, what if fruit tree fruit, when processed, made wine or preserves of one quality less than the fruit used to make it?
For example, Gold-Star apples would make silver-star wine, and Iridium-Star Pomegranates would make Gold-Star Preserves.
Nobody is ever going to age tree fruit, because of its much lower value compared to Starfruit or Ancient Fruit, so this allows the higher qualities of fruit to remain beneficial to players, even if they have the capacity to process it all!
Heck, it would even give a reason to have Preserves Jars at the endgame, where they currently are more or less irrelevant! Processing Apricots or Cherries with preserves jars would produce almost as much as wine, but quite a bit faster to boot!
Conclusion
I'd love it if these tweaks, or tweaks like these, could make it into the game.
Hopefully, they could bring Fruit Trees from a curiosity to a valuable aspect of any farm!
I grew up on a farm. We had many fruit trees there; dozens of apples, a pair of pears, a couple apricots, several cherries, even a few peach trees! It was always wonderful watching them grow, and harvesting them to eat or sell. And whatever was wasted on the ground wasn't wasted at all, because we let the chickens run free beneath the branches, protecting them from the sunlight and giving them a healthy, nutrient-rich diet.
Which is why it makes me so sad that fruit trees are in such a poor state in this game.
Fruit Trees are the longest-term investment in the game. Not only do you need to wait a full month for them to grow, not only do they cost exorbitant amounts of money, but then you need to wait a full three more years until they reach their maximum output!
Unfortunately, because the value of fruit doesn't effect the value of Artisan goods produced from that fruit, and since by year 4 you should almost certainly be able to process all your fruit, this makes the value of this fruit less valuable than it really should be, given the input costs.
There's also the problem of the unbalance between various tree types; since trees all take the same amount of space on the farm, they all have the same opportunity cost, but fruit trees like Apricots and Cherries pay substantially less than other alternatives like Pomegranates and Apples.
The net result of this is that virtually no-one makes orchards of fruit trees. The most commonly seen sight is one of each tree type, planted for style points, plus as many trees as will fit around the borders of the greenhouse.
I'd like to make a few suggestions that could help make them a more desirable thing to have on a farm.
1: Let us feed our animals with fruit!
I know very well that animals love to eat fruit! Vegetables too, but fruit especially, will cause chickens to go into a frenzy, rushing to get there first!
So, in lieu of grass or hay, why not let us feed our animals with any excess tree fruit we might have? In fact, this could give a bonus to their productivity! Giving them a normal piece of tree fruit might give them a 25% chance to produce twice as much that day, all the way up to an iridium-star fruit giving them a 100% chance to produce twice as much that day!
2: Make excess fruit fall off, rather than vanishing!
Right now, once a tree has 3 fruit on it, any more just vanish! This doesn't happen in real life; it falls off the tree! Once on the ground, it's still quite good for a good day or so, just polish it off and it's good as new!
So why not make the fruit, rather than vanishing entirely, just fall off the tree onto the ground? Once there, animals could eat it, and get all the benefits I mentioned above!
This has the side benefit of automatically feeding animals allowed to play beneath them!
3: Increase the productivity of cheaper fruit trees!
Sadly, Cherry and Apricot trees just aren't worth planting right now, and it's easy to see why! They only produce a single cherry or apricot per day! Real life cherry trees produce HUGE bunches of cherries, and apricot trees produce so many they completely cover the ground!
So increase the production rates of these trees! Making two or even three fruit a day would be okay, because their lower prices makes them much harder to process all the produce!(hehe)
Plus, this gives the animals even more to monch on!
4: Let Tree Fruit produce higher-quality wine/preserves!
I don't want to typecast fruit into only one thing. Feeding it to animals is all well and good, but that shouldn't be the only reason to have fruit trees!
So, last of all, what if fruit tree fruit, when processed, made wine or preserves of one quality less than the fruit used to make it?
For example, Gold-Star apples would make silver-star wine, and Iridium-Star Pomegranates would make Gold-Star Preserves.
Nobody is ever going to age tree fruit, because of its much lower value compared to Starfruit or Ancient Fruit, so this allows the higher qualities of fruit to remain beneficial to players, even if they have the capacity to process it all!
Heck, it would even give a reason to have Preserves Jars at the endgame, where they currently are more or less irrelevant! Processing Apricots or Cherries with preserves jars would produce almost as much as wine, but quite a bit faster to boot!
Conclusion
I'd love it if these tweaks, or tweaks like these, could make it into the game.
Hopefully, they could bring Fruit Trees from a curiosity to a valuable aspect of any farm!
