I believed there was no way to affect it, but I was recently surprised to discover a time when that wasn’t true! These chickens seem to be improving tree fertility, although I suspect it converges on something lower than really high:
This is also prime grazing land, so I’m not sure I’m going to do anything with that information, in this case. Interestingly, it also looks like they might be reducing the groundwater amount there, although I’m not sure; that could just be because they’re on a hillside. Regardless, this was a case where I wouldn’t want to plant crops anyway except maybe because this is arid highlands. (I’m going for the “no farms” achievement, here, anyway.)
Ok, it seems I’ve been mistaken. Having reached tier 4 with a new town in 0.9.7p3, now, the forager garden still has about the same yield as before. What I didn’t get, is that the “max yield” means actually yield per bush and there are 6 bushes in the garden. Thus, the forager garden yields 6x43=258 berries or 6x22=132 medicinal roots, which is continuously far to overpowerd, IMHO. See, getting those amounts of berries, medicinal roots or willow by just foraging the land, used to be insanely difficult. Now, I can just build a few of these forager gardens and have as many willow, medicinal roots etc. as I want. No need to scout the map, create small satellite villages, organise transport by carts and storages etc. any more… For me, the game really looses an interesting aspect by this. Don’t get me wrong, I think the forager garden is a nice idea! But, it really needs to be nerfed significantly, I think.
Best: Only allow Forager garden level 2 to grow willow, herbs, ginseng. And the yield should also be reduced = 75% compared to the present.
I think that might be the simplest way to go honestly. But even that feels… boring? It basically just removes a reason to venture outside the safety of your town. Just stick one garden next to every basket maker and it effectively eliminates willow from the game completely. IMO, it’s more fun when building upgrades require more complex supply chains and give you new problems to solve; simply removing earlier problems is anti-climatic.
Maybe forager gardens should instead double the resources you get from gathering? This could be implemented by growing a random (biased by frequency) collection of what was gathered the previous year. Or just a boost to gather efficiency if that’s too hard to implement.
Alright, seems like with the new build 0.9.7.p6 the forager garden has been heavily nerfed for real, now. Just excellent, thanks!
It still feels like a very much useful building, since it provides some basic amount of willow, medicinal roots and such, which otherwise might be quite hard to find. Still, if you wanna produce more, you will have to scout the map, build infrastructure and so on, cause otherwise manpower demand will be to high. And, planting fruit trees is encouraged, again.
In summary, it’s an excellent mixture of a nice new convenient game element, coming with a beautifully looking and useful new building, but also guaranteeing a decent amount of gameplay richness. Love it!
350 is an absolutely insane amount considering it uses only 1 worker, 6 tiles of land, takes in no resources, and doesn’t depend on fertility. Like, that’s the whole purpose of this thread…
A bunch of resources are invested in each upgrade.
And then it only harvests one crop.
Sending out a forager can easily match the volume produced, but it is spread out across various items.
This invests labor to match that volume but only produces one item.
It takes the year to do it, and removes the option to gather from remote location.
There are tradeoffs.
Once you start converting, and variation is lost in gathering you pretty much need to do the conversion of all of them, ending up spending lots in lumber.
You only need to spend a small amount of resources to upgrade it to be able to use it forever with unreasonable efficiency, completely superior to other production methods with much higher construction and labor costs. This is no different than spending a few hundred dollars to buy a sewing saw to replace a hand saw and can cut down an entire forest for hundreds of years.
Before the Forager garden level 2 was born, herbs, medicinal roots, and willows could only be obtained by natural gathering or buying from trading posts. And natural gathering means that the quantity is definitely limited, villagers have to travel far and there is potential danger from wild animals. A settlement with a small population is not a problem, but a settlement with a large population is a different story.
With Forager garden level 2, you can have as many herbs, medicinal roots, and willows as you want, as long as you build enough. This is clearly a huge advantage and worth upgrading, especially on maps with harsh conditions like the arid highlands, this is no different from a giant gold mine.
Bottom line:
If you want food, produce it on fields and orchards
Forager garden level 2 should only be used to produce herbs, medicinal roots, willow with lower yields than now.
As one of the people who has done it, though, I will say that I find arid highlands to be a lot less fun than the other map types. Something about having to import 100% of your clay makes it an exercise in frustration.
And having done another arid map just to get the achievement, it turns out that the yields are reduced there, in particular! As it turns out, fruit orchards are actually one of the best ways to use land feed a town on arid highlands, because they still have pretty good tree fertility, but the gardening berry yield on those maps is reduced enough that the balance is in a better place. You’re getting less than a third of an orchard per berry gardener instead of a third to half of one. Also, it means that you don’t need to have an amazing foraging zone to have foragers outperform the gardeners. (With that said, I happened to roll some nuts on my map, and so the town ate a lot of gardened nuts, too!)
Not using v0.9.7 of any kind but the problem at the v0.9.6 level is that the Forager’s Garden is LAZY. It becomes unfun when compared to the dynamic resources and moving forage area of the Forager’s Hut. Given that Medicine Roots, Willows, and Herbs are the only three unique items for Forager’s, you can find a decent spot for each and zone out.
That’s the part I don’t like. The Garden forgoes the reason for the Hut and turns it into a small farm for niche items.
You and I have different definitions of prosper and success.
And you know for a fact, that this ‘success’ would be overrun by the first sizable raid that comes along, because the raid numbers continue to increase.
If I wanted to pass a couple of hours on something I’d never revisit, maybe.
