I assume currently the "history" of the tile you plant something on doesn't matter but I think it might be nice if each tile had fertility number that each plant type would reduce(or add like bean plants do) by a different amount and make the plant grow more slowly or even die if fertility level is too little or high enough to cause reverse osmosis. Each plant could also have a ideal fertility level that would increase chance of a high quality crop closer the soil's fertility level is to it. Having rain and such spread the fertility of a tile around to less fertile neighbors might be good too. Having separate levels for nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium would probably get too fiddly even if having nitrogen shorten growth time, phosphorus increase yield and potassium improve chance of high quality would be a nice approximation of their effects. Edit:For showing the current fertility level something like darkness and color of the hoed tile would probably work best.
ugh, I would not like this at all. You wouldn't have any time to explore if you had to tend to the soil of every crop etc. and, if you want a special layout for your farm, that might not happen because X crop can't grow where you want them ot somthing like that. This just sounds annoying to me
For people that wouldn't care too much about getting as many high quality crops as possible it probably wouldn't matter much other than having to remember to add fertilizer to the soil once a season or year and for people that care I think it would be nice to figure out for example that if you fertilize a tile twice you are likely to grow a hq pumpkin and after that growing a onion would still have decent chance due to having lower ideal fertility and then growing some grass to exhaust most of the fertility from soil and be able to repeat the process. For layout not being possible I don't see how would that be possible unless you for some reason can't craft enough fertilizer.
I wan't to get high quality crops, and I believe there allready are different ways to achieve this with fertilizers. Your first post just sounded really complicated, thats all. And for me at least, a very complicated system gets boring in the end. Here I thought you meant the farm land itself, and that different plan'ts couldn't grow with a plant that drained the soil to much etc, my bad - sorry.
They did something like that in Rune Factory 4 and it is a pain in the butt. It takes stamina to manufacture the fertilizer or bury the weeds. You need materials to manufacture it. If you want to buy it, it costs a ton but eventually it screws up with the economy balance. It becomes easier to just buy it and sell your high quality crops for an insane profit.
A simpler mechanic would be just crop rotation, where switching to a different crop (regardless of what the crop actually is) could give a small bonus. (much smaller than fertilizer, I would imagine.) It'd be very simple to program afaik, since it'd be more like "is crop same as previous planting, if yes=no bonus.
Hmm, I could see adding a compost bin to add rotten plants or items and minerals to it to create different and new types of fertilizer that has multiple benefits or unique ones based on what went into it.
