Inefficient farming

Hello,

Not sure if itā€™s a bug or not or how to go about this, but it seems my farmers can sometimes be a bitā€¦ Oddā€¦

When I start a new game, I immediately create 2 farmers and put them to work. They do well right up to the point where they have to harvest.

The farmers will start harvesting 2 different pumpkins. However, when farmer 1 has finished harvesting a single pumpkin, farmer 2 will stop harvesting his pumpkin in order to replant the empty patch left by farmer 1.

It seems like the farming goes a lot slower when the second farmer keeps stopping his work to replant a patch. He never seems to finish harvesting a single thing because heā€™s constantly refilling patches. My workaround to this issue is to assign a 3rd farmer to pick up the slack.

Tl;dr: Farmer never finishes harvesting something because he keeps planting seedlings instead.

Thanks for your help.

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Yeah, the farming system may still be strange. But normally you should have enough food until you promote more workers to farmers.

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It gets weirder than that. Iā€™ll watch a farmer harvest a single plant in one patch, run to another patch and harvest a single plant, run back to the first patch and harvest one plant, run back to the other patch and harvest, run to a third patch and hoe a new square, etc. I have three farmers and they all do this. Itā€™s insane to have the scheduler send them all over the place one square at a time.They spend 30% of their time running to the next ā€œassignmentā€.

Are you capable of sending us an image of your farms with your farmers in action :helicopter: ?

Why is this under suggestions?

Because it seems not to be a bug, but it can be improved

There is no actual suggestion in the original post, its misleading.

@Joel

I think also maybe being able to draft workers in for the actual harvest, but then only farmers can plant and maintain.

We see this in real world scenarios, apple picking and olive vineyards / hops / rice / wheat / grass, all of these used general labour for the harvest, but the farmers actually tend the land.

Yeah itā€™s not game blocking, I just assign an extra farmer and I can still support my town. Just inefficient.

@zigworf

Yeah Iā€™m sorry that thereā€™s no clear suggestion, I thought the suggestion was impliedā€¦

My suggestion is that they look into the mechanics of farming. When they have the time of course.

I really like the idea that @Battlewrath comes up with. Harvesting ā€˜readyā€™ plants could be an option left open to workers. That would allow them to get the food they need when the crops are ready, reducing spoilage, etc.

@ pwb I guess Iā€™m luckier than you! Mine will ignore new patches for a while, but they seem to be able to concentrate in one area. Another way of cutting the issue is to make small patches rather than large ones.

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I also then path way between each patch, to make them move faster.

I am pretty sure the workers do pick up the veggies from the farm plotā€¦when they are hungry! Ripe or not.

Hi @Joel
Thank you for reporting this.
I have made a fix in Alpha 14.

A bit of background for those interested: This used to work (because I fixed it in alpha 11 or 12 somewhere), but then it broke after we converted half of farming to use the BFS pathfinder, but the planting part was not BFS and all the priorities for each action became out of sync. Oh the joys of game development. :slight_smile:

-Yang

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yea, this farming issue has been around for several versions. I brought it up a couple of times, including here ( Farming issue is still at large )

ā€¦ and now Iā€™m kinda bitter/jealous that this post caught the devs attention and not mine

lol jokes aside, I have suggestions in my post for 2 solutions as well, 1 easy, 1 not so easy (depending on the code)

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@yshan
Cool! So awesome! Thanks for that. My farms will work much better now.

@Ridesdragons
Sorry for stealing the spotlight! I will return to lurking soon enough.

lol nah itā€™s fine joel, Iā€™ve used the parsee jealous joke before, too, when our new moderator made his debut (you know, that @jomaxro fella). Iā€™m just happy the farms will be getting fixed.

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@yshan, just want to confirm that the fix made it into dev 2786ā€¦