Farming for Vintage Story

The meta for farming right now is basically big field best. It doesn't really matter if you can't find good soil or use any fertilizer. The only thing it affects is speed, and therefore there's no real incentive to fertilize or try to find better than medium fertility soil. Nerfing yield is the right way to go, but if you're going to do it, it needs to be for *everything*, and then there needs to be higher yield with higher quality soil. That's how it works in real life, and that's how it should work in game.

So I propose a few things that may or may not be appropriate for vanilla, but may also be interesting to modders.

- Soil fertility shouldn't affect speed of growth at all. Plants grow at the same speed regardless of soil they're on. They just produce poorly.

-  Things should take longer to grow. Grains need a full temperate season. Turnips and carrots should get two plantings in most temperate areas. Parsnips and onions also need a full season. Tweaking month counts to get to this would be pretty simple and make a lot more sense than the current soil speed mechanics. To help newbies not die, all crop types should have a chance to spawn in worldgen as their mature type.

- Rework temperature mechanics to require more time in the temperature to be a problem. As it stands, the instant half to 3/4 yield sucks, and makes responsible planting of the stuff that *should* be able to be planted in late summer to be picked in fall not actually work sometimes. I suggest two things here: make the temperature requirement not matter (above freezing) until the end of stage 2, and give us a way to counteract. In cooler weather we have the greenhouse, but it would be nice to have a good counter to apply for heat. Extra water, shading crops temporarily, etc.

-  Soil fertility should have a much bigger effect on yield. Low fertility soil should provide a quarter of current (1.21) vanilla yield, medium half, high full, and terra preta slightly more. This is without fertilizer.

-  Soil higher than low should be craftable with appropriate fertilizers. This would mean that people who can't find medium or high could make it and make certain island survival scenarios a lot less annoying.

-  Replenishment should take a LOT longer, making fertilizer as soil amendment more important.

-  Leaving a field fallow should improve ecosystem. Small animals should start spawning more often in the area, leading to being able to use it as a hunting preserve for small game like rabbits and chickens.

-  Give us *some* way to do under block irrigation. I do not understand why both Minecraft and this game both insist on water needing to be directly beside the block to function as moisture. We've done underground irrigation for millennia at this point. It's not even a good balance point. It just makes weird, ugly blocky farms.

A lot of this is carrot and not stick, but I'm tired of seeing nerfs in games like this that don't actually reward the player for engaging in the *other* interesting systems provided. The nerfs here mostly make early game harder, and I've tried to counter some of that difficulty where I could. But it would make the early game a lot more about hunting and fishing in addition to foraging, and that wouldn't be so bad anyway and quite frankly would complement a rethink of hunting and game management (my fallows increasing small game spawn going along with this). These systems should have more synergy with each other and figuring out ways to continue making foraging and hunting worthwhile even after you have a farm and animal setup is another step.