Persist ALL THE THINGS

[WildWeazel]

Trees: World.generateTree(Location, TreeType) Sugarcane: reuse soil check to find height of plant, then check if block above is air Cactus: same as sugarcane, also check for solid blocks surrounding air block Pumpkins/melons: search for attached fruit, if none search for adjacent air block above dirt/farmland, remove stem from DB, add again when fruit is broken?? Cocoa: ???? Mushrooms: ????

[benjajaja]

@ProgrammerDan yea there is a veri big issue of people still AFKing because it either 1. already works fine for them or 2. to setup a bot that connects for 1-5min every N hours is more complicated than most AFK mechanism.

Can we think of some way to penalize AFKers (vs disconnecting and using persistence), without penalizing farms that are near populated areas too much?

[ProgrammerDan]

We're working on it :P (Max and I). So keep your eyes on the AFKPGC mod, it's coming. We've got some good ideas to get people moving.

[benjajaja]

@ProgrammerDan yea I've been watching the development, looks good!

[ttk2]

I think ideally we would rebalance RB such that harvests are only needed once or twice a day. Such that bots are not needed to harvest to maximum efficiency. Thoughts on this proposal?

[WildWeazel]

Now that compactors are in it's more practical to work in high volume, so I think that makes sense. Would that mean multiple drops per harvest? How does that affect people who are actually growing food?

[hlprimm]

Maybe something to "simulate" fertilizer. Make the maturity time 24 hours for wheat. You can get more wheat only if you punch it with a certain block, which is consumed from the player's inventory.

@WildWeazel I think people would just end up harvesting wheat as food less? I don't know how else you would prevent people from piggybacking on this change, though.

[ttk2]

Why not just have a 24 hour grow period?

[benjajaja]

@ttk2 that would probably make people AFK less, since they just have to log in once a day.

[ttk2]

that's the goal, lets just balance for that, work out how to keep it from being too big of a pay cut and call it a day.

[benjajaja]

@ttk2 the problem would be that food for newfriends without clay soil would take several days to grow, as WildWeazel pointed out.

[ttk2]

this is true, its not like they will find any mobs to eat either.

[benjajaja]

@ttk2 if tried with something boring like cactus for starters, to set it to 24hrs, what would be the problem? Farmers will say "the output is way lower" and they'll be right, it will be 48 times lower.

I don't think adding some modifier that doubles the output of a single plant is a good idea. Ideally we would have a contraption that "sucks up" as much as we configure, but contraptions aren't there yet.

Cactus seems to have a huge number in XP recipes, namely 4 times as many as the cocoa requirement for example, simply becuase there is a huge output from farms. If we set the cactus requirements to roughly 1/50 of what it was before (or something higher for starters), I think everyone would be happy and we could reduce botting significantly.

[ttk2]

I don't have an issue with that for cactus, but what about food crops? should we add a bread factory to allow the creation of the same amount of food from 1/48th the wheat while we reduce the xp what requirements by a factor of 48?

[benjajaja]

Let's start with cactus. I don't think it makes much sense to AFK wheat anyway. Harvesting bots aren't that common, and if you can make a harvest bot, you can just connect it every N hours, instead of having it idle between the "harvesting" program.

[benjajaja]

Correction regarding wheat AFK: it seems noone AFKs wheat, but wheat bots usually work on fields so large, that when the bot has finished harvesting, it has already grown back at the beginning. So increasing wheat time would probably just increase farm sizes, annoy players and not really reduce AFK for now.

[benjajaja]

closing this issue, if we need persistent mushrooms we should open a new issue.

[ttk2]

ok lets start with cactus then, it should be an easy change to make.

[benjajaja]

@ttk2 I'm going to make a PR setting the time to 12h and explaining that it requires the XP recipes to be adjusted.