Its something that I'd really like to see happen. Plants that can be placed in player housing that wither and die of neglect, or prosper and bloom when taken care of.
Like real plants, in-game plants should require maintanence. I think the sources for plants should be varied. Some should be "craftable". Carpenters or provisioners could extract seeds from common harvests. Carpenters could make pots and planters to place in a home. Seeds could be placed in appropriate planters (each seed should be assigned a class of planter it is allowed to work in). Depending on care and maintenance you could have a full grown plant in less than a month.
Other sources of seeds would be corpse loot from animal type mobs, quest rewards, and vendor purchased. The vendor selling seeds should also sell a guide book on the care and maintenance of each kind of seed it sells. This becomes important in pot selection/planting.
Ultimately I would love to see gardens being sold as well as pots for your home. The gardens could be accessable via a placeable door much like guild housing is. There could be several different styles of gardens. Not only could you have small, medium and large gardens but you could also have a Halasian garden (for cold loving plants), a cave garden (for the mushroom fanatics out there), a desert garden (for arid plants) a tropic garden (for jungle plants), and a Lavastorm garden (for the heat loving plants). There should be corrisponding pots available to allow these different plants to exist near each other. A Lava Pot for heat loving plants. An icy pot for cold loving plants. A sandy pot for arid desert plants. Even a water bowl for aquatic plants.
I think the best way to handle the balance between care and maintenance and overworking the players would be for plants to only be active when the owner is on line. Even if other players visit the house the plants are in (or the garden) the plants don't continue to "age". Only when the owner returns home do the plants check to see how long its been since they were last watered, fed, and cared for. Various plants should have different maintenance periods, with hardier breeds only needing water, food and care about once a month. Most plants should need care about once every 12 actual player hours. Maybe new sprouts need more care but would quickly grow beyond that stage.
Mostly gardens would be about appearance. Some small functionality in producing common harvests would be a great bonus. Perhaps after the plants have matured you could "harvest" them. The harvestable plants would accumulate harvests while they are in good or better condition until someone comes to pick up the current crop. Say incriment the amount once an hour.
I can't see this system replacing harvesting, but having a reliable source of one common harvest would be nice. Special dropped seeds might produce some of the more exotic plant items that come from the house plant. Like the escape root, power root, ect.
As far as feeding goes there should be a combination of player made, dropped and store bought plant foods. Plant food could be carpenter produced, provisioner, or even alchemist. Maybe each could make a certain kind of food? Maybe plants perfere a mixture of certain different kinds of food. Some raw harvests could be used (i.e. loam, roots). There may be other sources of foods out there.
Water should be readily available. Speical water should be better for most plants. Having special containers for water being made by crafters would be great. Either jewlers, carpenters, or armor smiths could make special containers that allow you to visit different locations and "harvest" water. Basically, you have to be swimming and then you can use the container. Some containers only keep track that they are carrying water (just a regular watering can, fill it up in the qeynos moat). Other containers retain a special property of the water (Cursed Can: retains the cursed proprties of water from unrest, Sunwashed Can: retains the mineral content of desert water, Air Flask: retains the magical properties of water from the Kingdom of Sky). Certain plants require special water in order to bloom. Other special plants require dropped flasks of water.
Care: most plants need their soil ariated, to be trimmed, and weeded. Special tools could be made to cut down the time or even tinkered up to do the maintanence for you (till it breaks down). I'm think mostly woodworker and possibly tinkered recipes. Also maybe weaponsmith for tree tools or other metal tools.
Gardens shouldn't require pots for plants. Rather they should have areas that are designated as "no plant" (paths) and the rest should be open to place a plant anywhere. Also they should allow normal furniture so an entire garden sceen can be produced. Say maybe 100 furniture items per size catagory and maybe make some pavers so you can make your own garden paths. Oh, and some lawn gnomes.
I've been on an eq2 hiatus for months now. Slowly going to start logging in here & there. Another game I've been playing around with that I played before eq2 has farming in it, I think it is really fun growing virtual crops that can be used for various things (flowers to decorate, trees for same, food to use...). In that game some are useful some are not, among other things to grow, you can grow herbs used for potions, and fruits & veggies for cooking, and hops to make brews with (no one but me brews really though, it's not worth its effort but I find it fun).
Maybe in house or guildhall... Wouldn't it be a server strain rendering all those extra things?
Koho@Butcherblock wrote:
The same can be said for any new furniture. If your looking to make it easier to load into your player-decorated zone consider using the same item as much as possible. While there are lots of different kind of lamps in the game, reducing your choice to 1 different kind of lamp placed creatively instead of 10 different lamp modles means you have to load 9 less object models. That increases your load efficiency greatly.
You'll find that lot of the game uses this tactic. Mobs are generally variations of the same basic models in a zone. Lots of the objects in a zone are often repeats with some twisting invovled. Especially in "cluttered" areas. I'm perty sure there is only one generic "boulder" in the game which designers twist, turn and resize to get the desired effect. All of that object reuse means they have less objects to load when you zone.
Mandating that you only use 1 kind of couch, 1 kind of rug, and one kind of tapestry in a guild hall can make a huge difference. While you might have 30 couches, 50 rugs and 100 tapestries hanging in various parts of the hall your only loading information for 3 objects. Also it gives you a more uniform look.
Zehl_Ice-Fire wrote:
I'd love to see farming as a follow up to gardning. I see this as the end-user personal kinda thing that everybody can get into. I'd like to see large-scale farming as a subclass like transmuting and tinkering. Farmers would be able to purchase access to "farm plot" instances where they can manage the planting and care of a farm. They have to balance costs vs produce. They can sell the end products, maybe even for a profit.
They would have different problems to contend with. Bad weather, insects, drought, ghophers, gnolls, all sorts of things. The more farming skill you have the larger the plot you could manage OR the more difficult crops you could plant. It would be a tradeoff of more exotic means smaller more intensive farming vs more common and easier to manage large scale farming.
But honestly, I think gardning is more practical at this stage than actual farms. Lots of people could and would get involved in growing a few plants as long as it wasn't rediculously hard. They wouldn't even have to do anything really, other than look nice and either bloom or die depending on how much you take care of them.
EQ2 is a fantasy game. In my fantasies I might spend time in gardens, but I don't spend time gardening, YMMV.
On the other hand I suggested a while back having herb garden items (made by carpenters, which having been fed compost and watered wouls produce herbs for use in special provisioner recipes.
I love the idea of plants that can be tended to produce special effects. It wouldn't have to be too complicated. For instance, maybe you can just leave the plant alone and you have a nice house item, but if you tend the plant it grows lovely flowers. If you're really good to the plant, it has a chance of growing flowers that can be picked as used as a rare food ingredient. It would be fun to discover what the plant could do!
We had this to a degree. Those carpenter made planters used to sprout hay at different times of the year. It wasn't too noticible and I didn't know it was happening until the planter glitch. About six months ago, all the planters in my attic disappeared from the dirt patch. All I could see was hay waving around, hay I had never seen before. That is when it came to light that the planters actually had seasonal activity.
See this thread for a discussion. http://forums.station.sony.com/eq2/...topic_id=443290 Scroll down a few notes and see the comments and picture posted by LadyGalasya.
Hmm...so at least some form of the mechanic needed to vary the item with time is already in game. That's good to know.
I could swear that my little Tunare sapling looked withered and dry after being horribly neglected (something about paying no rent for months, but I digress) and I equally swear it looked better after I watered it and sang to it. Maybe it was all in my head, maybe not, but it could mean this idea is maybe possible. I can see my dry, withered garden now, better give it to the necro ......
The idea is cute, but if I had to take care of my plants they would all look like the evil Frostfell tree
Lateana@The Bazaar wrote:
You'd finally have a reason to go home once in a while. Maybe even use that bed you bought.
Meirril wrote:
Lateana@The Bazaar wrote:The idea is cute, but if I had to take care of my plants they would all look like the evil Frostfell tree You'd finally have a reason to go home once in a while. Maybe even use that bed you bought.
LOL with 19 alts on The Bazaar and a dozen more or so scattered about elsewhere I would never get to sleep anyway
Didnt they do that in the Sims Online? You watered and tended your trees and such to grow magical fruit or something over XX amount of days?
Do you envision using the water, bones and fertilizer found as corpse loot as the items to tend your garden?
If you let your plants die because they havent been watered or fed in XX hours or days will you lose them forever or they go into shock?
Will other people be able to tend to them if they have access to your guild hall or house? Could they harvest from them as well?
Why not just have special plants that only grow in certain parts of the norrathian world that you can harvest for special herbs and such. Emerald Halls drops components only found there....on the other hand I would love to see a bush that could be harvested for seeds of the tender
I had a goldfish screensaver once... but I turned it off and one day I turned it back on and my fish was floating at the top of the screen . I kinda see that happening with plants too, but I do like the idea of players being able to propagate their own trees/shrubs for harvesting. Too bad miners can't really do much for ore hehe.
