All posts tagged with "exciting farming simulation"

The Clockwork Razor: Purging Agriculture

Workin' the farm.

Workin’ the farm.

Food and farming have been a bit of what one might call a “sticky issue” in Clockwork Empires. New players have a heck of a time figuring out how to grow enough food to feed their colony. They have an intuition that one is meant to feed people, that food is grown in farms and cooked in a kitchen, but  how much do you need, and when? And what factors control these qualities? Hardcore players have created detailed charts out of data collected obsessively over hours of experimental play. They’ve cracked the system and learned how to optimize production.

There are two problems here. One, farm mechanics are effectively in a state of incomprehensible over-simulation. Two, the logistics of moving the food objects into the kitchen to be cooked is really the biggest time sink in food production.

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Down On The Farm

Lots of good stuff is wandering through the game this week as we finish a bunch more systems and lurch towards The Great Content-ing:

– Immigration is in – bands of migrants will arrive, ranging from people for your work crews to upper class capitalists and the wretched Aristocracy. (Not implemented yet: the jolly Population Dispersal Zeppelin.) This is implemented handily via our newly-finished event system from a few weeks back; other random events that can happen at present are wretched Novyrus peddlers and Invasions From The Deep.

– Various screens are being implemented, and David is sending them back to me with lots of jolly comments about how terrible they look.

– On the technical front, good progress is being made on the loading and saving front, using a plaintext save-file format (actually, more XML) which will hopefully alleviate some of the problems with the binary approach we used with Dredmor.

But what I actually want to talk to you about today is farming. Inspired by the fact that our citizens have had nothing to eat but berries and the occasional hunk of meat scavenged off of an auroch for the past eight months, we decided to implement farming this week.

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