Please add potatoes as a crop.
Basic food source- starch in the diet before or instead of a bakery and bread.
After you build a brewery and pub- at T4-T5, a new luxury/entertainment item to produce- potato vodka.
Upgrade a brewery to T5 to create a distillery, or leave it alone to produce beer.
Potatoes also would be a good quality feed source for cows, while deer tend to leave the plants alone due to the toxins in the stems and flowers.
Potatoes will deplete soil fertility, prefer fertile sandy soil, and we all know about the Great Potato Famine- so crop rotation and soil management will be key.
Maybe for your headcanon, but the beauty of this game is that it’s alternate universe, and kind of set in a limbo between medieval times and the American West. And if we’re gonna play the “wrong timeframe” card, half the current game would have to go out the window as the Industrial Revolution (in other words, heavy tool-using buildings) weren’t a thing until the 1700s-1800s.
So I say yes to potatoes. Why not?
There is no timeframe for the game since it’s a fantasy world. While the buildings have a medieval/colonial theme the game isn’t set in the middle ages period of Earth.
I’d be much more in favor of adding onions, and especially artichokes (which is essentially a domesticated thistle which was a common vegetable since late Roman age and thus a good medieval food, and is also perfect for preservation).
Heavy tool-using buildings existed long before the industrial revolution.
Water-powered grain mills for example were in use in Roman times; some of the larger ones were capable of milling enough flour to keep cities of over 10000 people supplied from a single establishment.
Grain is starch. Potatoes are a root vegetable, but they are a starch as well. They could be added as a replacement for grain/bread in the different food types needed, and would also work as feed for cows. So- not exactly the same as turnips and carrots, but with some similarities. It would be an option so people can choose to grow grain for their cows, and potatoes for their people (or the other way around), or only potatoes or only grain for both. The food category “Grain” becomes “Starches”, which would include bread and potatoes.
Add spices and chopped leeks- pioneer home-fries.
(And I wouldn’t mind if they added onions, but we do already have leeks.)
Still surprised no one has talked about the potato gun idea- imagine the look on a Raider’s face as he gets smashed in the gut by a high velocity spud…
They used pistons, camshafts and cogs made out of metal, had blast furnaces (including water-powered ones) and finery forges, constructed tower clocks like this one, whipsaws and gang saws connected to water wheels and since the 1400s (or possibly earlier), the tower windmill as you might know it from the Netherlands appeared, where only the cap and sails rotate towards the wind and not the whole mill on a central spindle as before. That’s the one we see ingame. Of course the internal mechanics of later design by Agostino Ramelli and other such engineers became even more complex (though that’s still closer to Medieval times than the Industrial Revolution). But in general, I don’t see why “heavy metal tools” couldn’t refer to those used in the late Medieval times.
I mean, we can’t even construct a windmill (or the simpler watermill) without those ingame, so I doubt that’s restricted to modern technology.
I think the whole problem with everyone getting their own headcanon is that New World potatoes might fit right in with the headcanon of one player, but brake someone else’s immersion (their headcannon). The same way rice fields or cotton fields would for others. I would have no problems with early guns and cannons in the game, or paper money, someone else associates that with much later times and their immersion is broken.
Not that I have anything against potatoes or corn or whatever per se, but it’s not as easy as “you imagine your world, I’ll imagine mine”. Or else, no one would be bothered by adding lightsabres - but I doubt that would fly well with most.
Modern potato varieties can vary from 2-4 months in grow season length, talking about full-size spuds. Our “baby” potatoes that we grow in containers can be ready for harvest in as short as 2 months, depending on variety.
But in general, and taking into consideration that these would be early (historically) cultivated varities- 3-4 months. Meaning you are not getting 2 crops of potatoes in the same field in the same year. They are going to affect soil fertility- so potatoes + clover would be best, to help keep fertility from tanking quickly. Plus if you keep growing potato after potato after potato- Irish Potato Famine is a real risk.
