These are a few ideas I had that seemed cool to me and would add a bit to the gameplay. These are all ideas. I have no idea how to implement them, so I’m just throwing them out there so people can see them. Bees Overhaul! Beehives now require actual bees to operate first. Each beehive needs one drone and one queen (I don’t know if the basic ones should be found in a store or just caught in the wild). When a queen and a drone are put in a beehive, they will produce honeycombs (queen affects the type of honeycomb) as well as more bees (they produce drones more frequently than they produce queens, and the current drone affects the type of bee produced) You can also put additional drones in a secondary equip slot, because drone will die faster than queens do, so it can automatically add the next drone to the beehive. Beehives don’t make honey anymore. I feel like it makes more sense for them to make a raw good, rather than an artisan good, right from the start. You can turn honeycombs into honey in a maker machine (maybe a centrifuge or something like that) They’ll take 4 or 5 hours to refine the honeycombs (maybe the higher tier honeycombs will take longer?) I also think that there could be a more interesting change to the way you get better honey. Instead of flowers simply changing the honey you get, the flowers will slowly mutate the drones in the beehives. It should be done on a timed basis (so the less valuable flowers, like the Tulip, would mutate one drone faster; while the Fairy Rose would be the slowest) Also each slower can mutate a drone, so multiple flowers can speed up the process. (that way you’d me more motivated to have equal amounts of flowers and beehives) Tulip: Drone mutation every 4 daysBlue Jazz: Drone mutation every 5 days Summer Spangle: Drone mutation every 6 days Poppy: Drone mutation every 7 days Fairy Rose: Drone mutation every 8 days And in this light, the thing that affects what kind of honey you produce depends on what type of queen you have in the beehive. The drone that is equipped is what influences what kind of drone is produced. So if you have a Fairy Rose drone and a standard queen, they will produce both Fairy Rose drones and queens. Drones are produced faster (maybe every 3 or 4 days) while queens take longer and it depends on the queen type (standard queen might take 7 days to produce another standard queen while a Fairy Rose queen might take 14 days to produce another Fairy Rose Queen. Another idea, which is a lot more of a loose thing right now, is breeding bees to create different bees. So far, I’ve just based the bees off of which flower were already in the game. But maybe you could create different and possibly better bees through breeding bees. Idea 1) You could take 2 flower bred bees (like a Fairy Rose drone and a Tulip queen) and it could create a totally new type of bee. Of course, I have no idea what kinds of new bees should be made or what they should be like. Idea 2) Or maybe, so it’s a bit simpler, each queen has a specific breeding trait that it passes on to other bees. These traits would influence honeycomb production in some way or another. Standard Queens would have the trait of simply producing queens of whatever drone is equipped with it, so the whole process still works right. But other queens could affect different things (faster honey production, produce a cool side product, etc) Also Fruit Trees! A smaller idea I had was with trees. The new feature of trees producing higher quality fruit per year they are mature is cool, and I thought about taking it a step further. In some Harvest Moon games, such as A New Beginning, you would increase the star rank (out of 5 stars) with fertilizer. This process was a bit more monotonous, because you needed to apply fertilizer every day until the trees got to 5 stars. But the cool thing was that for every star rank the tree rose, it would produce one more fruit. So a 4 star apple tree would produce 4 4-star apples. This could be applied to Stardew Valley, where every year that the tree is mature and producing fruit after the first year, it could also increase in the amount of fruit produced. Silver Star Apple Tree: 2 Silver Star Apples Gold Star Apple Tree: 3 Gold Star Apples Iridium Star Apple Tree: 4 Iridium Star Apples Anyway, these are a few ideas I had, and hopefully they sound interesting to you as well!
Cool ideas! Only thing I kind of disagree upon is how the flowers affect the bees and the honeycombs. I don't know if you were going for a more realistic approach or not, but the type of honey bees produce IRL is affected by the plants they frequently pollinate, which is why we have things such as blueberry and clover honey. Having the flowers mutate the honeybees themselves seems a little tedious, especially since it already takes like 14 days for a Fairy Rose to grow, then you add the suggested 8 days to mutate the bee and the season is almost over by then. Unless you can keep control of the bees? Would mutated Fairy Rose honeybees be able to survive into the fall season? That would be kind of cool, making Fairy Rose honey in a season that isn't summer . Also, what about winter time? Do we like, keep the bees inside the shed to keep them from dying off? lol don't wanna murder the bees you spent all year breeding
Not sure about all the mutation stuff myself (I'm with the above poster that it sounds a bit tedious) but I actually really do like the idea of the hives producing raw honeycomb first and us then being required to process it in a machine of some sort to make the jar of honey we're used to. It would make the hive/bees into "livestock" like the other animals rather than just a machine the way they are now. I'd also like it if we could hear and see little bees buzzing around the hive when it was processing honeycomb, it would just add to the immersion a little more.
My idea would be to keep the bees after you breed them. So there would be more work near the beginning, but the rewards would also be great. Because you'd eventually be able to get better honey, like Fairy Rose, more often and in other seasons. Hopefully I've made it sound less tedious, and just more front heavy in the work. For winter, it should remain how it is already, where you don't get honey. And the bees would just be inactive, not dead lol. You would just store the bees you've bred up until winter, and then reuse them once Spring rolls around again. I should addressed that part. Thanks! I definitely like the little bees buzzing around idea.
