Now that the arborist can plant in 2x2 or 3x3 groupings, this often leads to some trees being placed outside their production circle. What I am dealing with now is a need to put down a deep mine where I must first cull a tree but that tree is outside the arborist production range. Laborers won’t cut it down and the arborists ignore it.
What needs to happen is that when placing trees in any grid size, trees that would otherwise fall outside of an arborist zone of control should not be planted nor given a construction icon. This simple change will allow us to use just the 3x3 selection and plop down trees all around the arborist hut without the need to try and stay within the lines. Also, this 3x3 tool should allow you to place it over the building itself and only affect the spaces not blocked by the building, much like when you set the grazing area for livestock.
The only workaround I can figure at the moment for removing those out of bounds trees would be to either build another arborist building close enough to it overlapping the others range circles, or move an existing arborist building to include that tree. In either case, the placement would only be temporary and of course since I want to build something else there, I’d need to turn off auto replanting for the time being.
I did turn off the auto plant, but even with the tree scheduled for culling, the arborist won’t touch it due to being built slightly outside the circle. Going forward, I will use single unit placement but that shouldn’t be necessary if the placement feature for 2x2 or 3x3 only placed trees within the circle, and ignored any that would be outside of it. You can’t select them for Harvest or Clear either. Only culling, which is only performed by the arborist it seems.
I guess what I’m getting at is, when a tree is partially inside and partially outside the circle, one cannot tell if the tree will be reachable or not until after it is planted. So if there was either an auto feature to prevent planting outside an arborist circle, or a different color for trees being targeted outside the circle when you choose where to plant them, we would know better if we should back out and select a smaller cluster. Even with a 1x1, someone might think that if it’s partially in the circle, it should be reachable.
What I do is put 3x3 apples top and bottom, a 2x2 peach right and a 2x2 pear left and then fill in the space spaces around the peaches and pears 1x1 - 6 of each 3 top and 3 bottom.
I’ve adopted a 4x use of the 3x3 grid (2 above and 2 below) then 10x use of 1x1 squares (5 left and 5 right) giving me 46 trees. When I have an arborist above or below, I use 2 more 1x1 in the point where their circles meet. These two don’t highlight when I select the arborist building (either the one above or the one below) but their stats seem to indicate they have produced fruit. I don’t know if those numbers reflect what has been picked or if they climb the same when not picked from.
Oof! I just learned that pears can carry 40% of their unpicked fruit over into the next year (or is it season) and that with so many non-arborist characters picking from fruit trees, its a good idea to put these trees all over the place, not just within the arborist circle. This way, the arborists can focus on apple and maybe peach but much of the villagers snacking can be achieved without long walks or complex storage management. Maybe my thoughts on limiting where an arborist could plant would ruin the game for some players.
That’s good to know! Another use for planting trees out of the arborists work-zone is that they seem to improve honey production, if they are placed within the zone of a bee-hive.