We need farm mods!

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thereaverofdarkness
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We need farm mods!

Post by thereaverofdarkness »

I've been spending a lot of time trying to think what Factorio needs to add that spark to make it more exciting, and I think I've stumbled upon something good. Almost everything you do in the game is work towards getting further in the research tree. Every research you unlock, every building you place, every automated construction network, even your defenses simply protect your manufacturing processes. That's all fine and good as it gives you a lot of busy work, and the game stays interesting for many hundreds of hours on just that.

But I think what the game needs now is more extracurricular pursuits, features that give you a goal other than research. Lots of different goals, perhaps. Things that potentially cost a lot, and may force you to go through a lot of research to get to them. But things that can take you off the beaten path and make you feel like there is more purpose to your factory, or perhaps just something original to do when you're standing around in your base feeling bored. There are many mods I've seen that expand the backbone of advancement in the game, but comparatively few (and poorly developed) mods which add branches to this tree.

I've come up with a few ideas for alternative pursuits, but today I would like to focus on farming. We can learn something here from other games which have farming, or which have wildlife that can be used for food. SimFarm, Age of Empires, Caesar, Minecraft, Don't Starve, and Stardew Valley immediately come to mind. I'll go over three ideas I have for types of farming mods that could be added and explain how other games influence ideas or demonstrate concepts, and then I'll give a shout out to three existing mods which involve farming and tell what they did well and what could be improved.


GROWING CROPS
The basic idea of growing crops is to plant fields which produce some useful plants. Usually we think of these as producing food, but there are plenty of other uses for crops as well. In many games, you grow crops to eat, or to sell and get money. Those features don't fit into Factorio very well, so let's focus instead on crops as used in manufacturing. Firstly, unless we found some seeds in the ship, I don't think we'll have access to our Earth crops, so we'll have to make do with the native wildlife. Mods could add new types of vegetation, and perhaps get creative with the alien designs. Someone could perhaps write something that treats the different tree styles from Alien Biomes as separate plants so that they can yield different resources.

Once we have some crops to work with, farms can be added which would very slowly produce materials, but at low cost (mostly water, maybe some nutrients) and they would absorb rather than produce pollution. It would be up to the player to realize it takes a very large amount of space to get a good rate of material production going, and they could busy theirself with expanding the farm while waiting for things to be produced. Ideally these should provide optional resources so that a player does not feel forced to build farms, but rather can choose to do so if they prefer the style. The farming resources could be mandatory to progress in the farming side game, or could provide the same type of resources used for basic progression that can already be obtained in other ways. There could be entire tech lines involving crops, enabling you to produce more and more materials as you gradually explore to find new crop types, clear more land space for farming, and research new farming technologies.

You've probably played some farming games, but if you haven't then I advise you to take a peek at some videos of farming gameplay if you're interested. In most games you at least have to water your crops, but in some games the crop care is much more in-depth. In SimFarm, the player not only plants crops and waits for them to grow, you must also take care of them. You've got to first know your environment and season, and check the seed catalog to find out which crops grow well in your region at this time of year, then you want to check the almanac to see which crops are in demand. Sun exposure, rainfall, wind, and temperature are all environmental factors that affect crop growth. Once you've planted your crops, you've got to take care of them by ensuring they have enough fertilizer, spraying them with pesticides, herbicides, or fungicides as needed. You have to manage your use of spray chemicals as overuse can lead to disease-resistant pests/weeds/fungi, or can poison your crops. When the crops are harvested, their sell value is affected by their quality. You can even store them to wait for crop demand to go up, and some crops actually go up in quality when stored for a limited time. But don't wait too long or they go bad. Many of these details from SimFarm and other games can be co-opted for use in Factorio mods, however the mod developer would need to get creative to adapt the basic ideas to fit better with this alien world and emphasis on factories.

There could also be passive animal wildlife that can be used for farming to produce various resources, or perhaps even used for labor. One idea I have had in the past is to have ground bots for the earlier game which can move with their own AI but have to consider collision boxes in their movement, so they can't stack up on top of each other or fly over structures. A mod could be made to add intelligent wildlife which can be enslaved in a similar fashion and made to perform labor much like how bots work. Animals could also be used as livestock to produce goods, and you could keep them in pens as they grow. It could get quite interesting if you were able to tame biters and farm them or perhaps even co-opt them to fight for you. I saw an old mod that claimed to do just that, however very little information was available on the mod page and I didn't feel like installing an older version of the game just to try it.


MAKING GARDENS
One of the fascinating things about plants is the way they can be used to beautify the landscape or to provide ambiance. Plants can provide entertainment simply by existing. Alien plants can be made to look especially exotic and beautiful, and mods could be written to enable the player to take existing plants and alter them to produce new looks that would not be found in the wild. Growing them in arranged patterns and combining plants can generate an endless array of looks to your garden, but perhaps plant hybridization could be added to produce new plant types that don't even exist in the wild.

I'm not aware of any games with much gardening other than Minecraft (and Minecraft clones), and that's simply giving the player full control of the environment. In Minecraft you can pick flowers in the wild and arrange them at home any way you like. That's giving power to the player. If you give a player a wide variety of plants they can place almost anywhere, you can inspire them to create things you could have never imagined. There are a few Factorio mods that let the player place saplings to grow trees, but those don't even let you control the type of tree you get. It would be great to have some mods that add more vegetation types that can be both found in the wild and planted by the player.

If you perform a Google image search with the term 'Minecraft Garden', you will be presented with many images of unique gardens designed by players, showing the immense amount of variety that can be had simply by providing players with the tools to let their own ingenuity shine.

Another angle to making gardens could be as a large-scale effort to make peace with the biters. The player could have things they can plant to not only absorb pollution but perhaps actually reduce biter evolution and hostility, and maybe with enough development, even develop a symbiosis with them in which you give them things in trade for stuff only they can provide. Perhaps their bases could grow some resource that is valuable to the player, and you could destroy them to get a bit of it, or make peace to farm their bases for much larger amounts of it and have it replenish over time since their buildings are still alive.


LIVING OFF THE LAND
Sometimes it's more fun to avoid building your own garden, and instead embrace the world as your garden. Nature can be incredibly beautiful and calming. With mods that affect the kinds of flora and fauna found in various biomes, the player can find exploration to be a rewarding experience. Mods could also add unique materials which are only available from certain plants and animals, making exploration valuable for uncovering new resources. And if the resources are easy to obtain in small quantities from the plants or animals, then a player could elect to forage or hunt in the wild rather than build a farm. Already the player can collect wood and stone by hand, and even coal with the big rocks (are those vanilla or Alien Biomes?). While I get a greater output by putting mining drills on a coal or stone patch, I sometimes simply prefer to collect by hand. The availability of these limited rocks makes it a viable strategy. This could be expanded to cover many more resources which might be available only in specific biome types.

There are plenty of games in which you explore and forage in the wild for materials to thrive, but I'll talk about just two of them here: Don't Starve and Stardew Valley. While the player in Factorio has no need for personal upkeep, there is no reason to say it couldn't be added in a mod. Hunger and thirst bars could be added, or other sorts of personal resources such as oxygen, for instance. I remember these plants in Total Annihilation called gas bags that looked like balloons, and the idea popped into my head that you could have some alien balloon plant in Factorio which could be harvested by hand as one of multiple ways to get oxygen.

In Don't Starve, the player finds themself in a hostile world and must struggle to find food, clothing, and shelter. Animals aren't necessarily hostile but are defensive and usually run away when you try to catch them. Some may get defensive and lash out when cornered. Some will straight up fight you. You have to collect resources in the wild and build farms for food, or traps to catch animals. All the while you must manage your food, fuel, and other resources. I didn't play Don't Starve for long (Willow all the way, baby) but I rather enjoyed trying to catch rabbits and butterflies even though it was exceedingly difficult. As I understand it, catching those is about outsmarting them, and gets much easier once you understand the concept of how to do it.

In Stardew Valley (also didn't play it much), the player owns a plot of land which has run wild. You can chop down the trees, cut the grass and bushes, and break rocks either to clear land for farming, or just to collect the resources. If you like growing crops, once you till a lot of land it won't go wild again so you won't have to re-clear it. On the other hand, there is plenty of space in the rest of the game world to harvest trees, grass, and rocks if that's what you enjoy, and you can do it again later when these things grow back (yes the rocks grow back). I especially enjoyed collecting maple seeds, acorns, and pine cones (ew!) to make field snacks. They are useful as well as fun!


So that's a bunch of ideas for types of farming and wildlife mods that could be made. The general idea is to enhance the natural world with new features while also granting the player more gameplay options. There are lots of games which can give us ideas, so we can all let our creativity flow and brainstorm new features for Factorio that could be added via mods.

I want to give a shout out to three existing mods: 'Bio Industries', 'Precious, precious caffeine', and 'Cook Mod'.

Bio Industries
This is probably the closest you'll get to a farming mod aside from mods that give you saplings. Bio Industries has lots of crops in it which you can grow and use to produce various substances and materials used in manufacturing. What I don't like about it is that the farms are small metal boxes with a crop texture in the center. It feels like a factory, not a farm. The look and feel of a mod is very important, in fact this is the main reason I didn't enjoy Bob's Mods. They add a lot of complexity (and decent graphics), but it feels like more of the same. I'm getting tired of the vanilla feel of Factorio, what I want is mods that genuinely transform the experience into something new, so that I can blend the familiar with the fresh. Don't get me wrong, Bio Industries is an excellent mod, and so are all of Bob's mods. I'm simply pointing out what could make them a lot better.


Precious, precious caffeine
This mod is small. It simply adds a farming and production process to grow coffee beans, roast the beans, and brew coffee which provides a speed buff to the player. I like the look and feel of the mod, its features are unintrusive and easy to use or ignore as I choose, and my factory just looks nicer with coffee bushes in it. My main gripe with this mod, other than wanting more, would have to be that it's too easy. With a small amount of wood and stone, and a few assemblers, you can quickly brew enough coffee to last for the rest of the game. I had more fun producing the coffee than I did drinking it, so I wish that part of the mod would last throughout gameplay.


Cook Mod
I haven't played this mod and it looks pretty impressive so I might go try it out even though it's very old. It was only built for version 0.13. The mod adds several plants and crops as well as hunger and thirst bars. The graphics appear to be ripped in a tacky fashion from some other game, but whatever game it comes from had decent art. It looks tacky but it looks good. The only gripe I have at this point is that it's not up to date.



One last thing I'd like like to talk about is fishing. You could say it falls under the three 'f's: farming, foraging, and fishing. Several games have fishing and actually in most of them I don't like it. It usually involves casting the line and then waiting for a bite. Good examples are fishing in Minecraft or World of Warcraft. But some games make fishing more active, such as Stardew Valley or Amazon Trail. In Stardew Valley, you have to pull just the right amount or the fish gets loose. It's a very tricky and very active mini-game. But the fishing I enjoyed most in any game was in Amazon Trail. In that game you have a harpoon and look over the water. You'll see dark silhouettes of fish swimming around in the water and you can try to jab at them with your harpoon. As soon as you strike, all the fish dart away really quick. With any luck, your harpoon struck home and you caught a fish. Unfortunately, you must be careful what you catch. Your field guide is very useful to tell you about the details of a fish, its advantages and disadvantages or dangers. I once caught a piranha and opted to keep it because we were starving, but it chewed my leg so that might not have turned out positive after all. Fortunately we had more medical supplies than food at the time. Also, the field guide has images of the fish but it doesn't always look like the thing you caught. You have to try and identify your catch with the images provided. If you mis-identify, you might eat something poisonous or worse. That was a lot of fun.

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DaveMcW
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Re: We need farm mods!

Post by DaveMcW »

Twinsen wrote:When someone mentions Stardew Valley in the office.
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bobingabout
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Re: We need farm mods!

Post by bobingabout »

TL;DR

But I do want the ability to grow trees.
Creator of Bob's mods. Expanding your gameplay since version 0.9.8.
I also have a Patreon.

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