There is, IMHO, a glaring exploit in the way that composting a field works in this game. It adds a fixed amount of fertility (a flat +8%) which is slightly reduced by the Environmental Fertility Factor (EFF), but affected by nothing else. This means that composting a large field raises the fertility of a much larger area, and so boosts food production more, than composting a small field - despite it using the same amount of poop! So by the time your population is 400 or so, large fields feed enough people that they can be fertilised every year and kept at 95%+ fertility even when growing high intensity, fertility reducing crops (wheat, leeks, etcā¦) on land with mediocre EFF. I think this is a problem because it removes farm / fertility management as a challenge for the player to solve, makes small crop fields highly inefficient, and generally feels gamey and cheesy.
Iām putting this in this forum because Iāve written a mod that I believe could solve this issue, but Iād like feedback on the idea, and especially the numbers involved, before releasing it publicly on steam. What it does is two-fold:
(1) The fertility provided by compost scales directly with the size of the crop field. Double the area means that youāre spreading the compost half as thick everywhere, and so get half the fertility gain. Currently thinking of calibrating this so that a standard 12x12 field gets the same fertility from composting as now.
(2) Penalise composting the same field on consecutive years as a way to represent diminishing returns. Currently Iām thinking of a -50% penalty for composting two years in a row, -25% with a one year gap, and no penalty otherwise.
On top of that thereās a few minor changes: the fertility from composting is clamped to never be less than 1% or more than 40%, the UI shows how recently a field was fertilised, and the compost yard has an auto-compost option to go for the field that hasnāt been fertilised for the longest.
Iām hoping that this will allow more diverse strategies when it comes to farm size, and make managing fertility an issue even in the later game. For example, maybe growing high-intensity crops on small farms that get a big composting boost, while having low-intensity crops (eg hay, flax) on larger fields that donāt need it. All the while this shouldnāt make early / middle game farming any harder.
Hereās the .dll if you want to try it out. Iāve tested it to the best of my ability, but itās by far my most complicated FF mod so I canāt completely rule out side effects yet. Itās compatible with vanilla save files (and vice-versa), but it does modify the save file directly so I highly recommended making a backup and not overwriting unmodded save files. Unzip in Mono\Mods to run.
Dynamic Composting.zip (4.5 KB)
