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Nice.
Some really good fix. 50% less conversation will be game changer.
Also the building priority being lower, great.
Would be cool if this can be changed ingame like settlers game used to do it.
Thanks a lot
Wow! Did not expect this tonight. Great surprise. 
Cooking improvements! I love it!
Building improvements coming soon! Great!
More plants and variety! And seeds! Yeah!
I think I’m going to love this alpha!
Kyth.
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I thought we were having steamed clams.
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Can’t wait for the building improvements ones they are ready for testing
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All plants now sometimes drop seeds on harvest that can be replanted. Seeds disappear after 1 week if not replanted (to avoid clogging inventory).
whooooa, this is cool!
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Well, well, well… That’s quite a surprise. After spending 40 minutes with the new release, I have to give it some criticism because I cannot agree with some of the additions.
I always thought plants deserved some love in SH. The problem is the new plants are 100% ugly and not really needed. Radioactive floating alien flowers are not something I’d use for cooking and the models of new cacti are overly complicated, besides the tulip cacti do not fit the gray-ish desert setting at all. The Sugarbell/Wax Plant combo is way too far-fetched because both ingredients could be obtained if we had beehives. High level Herbalist could craft a beehive base from a log, some hay and a bunch of herbs, after some time bees would move in. I know you guys want to give us cake and candles, but I think this started to go the wrong way.
To sum it up: while I love the technical changes new plants get a thumb down from me.
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Uhm, I liked the plants. From the concepts it seems Rayya is planned to be a very colorful town, and have colorful plants would be a nice touch. And floating plants is already present, foxlilly is floating.
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I agree with you in the sense that the new plant stuff needs more work. But saying that it’s 100% bad is a bit unfair, and overstated.
I think the tulip cacti are quite cute, except it bothers me that they – just like the sugar flower thingies – come with floaty bits. The flowers must be connected to the plant, else it looks weird. Just one block that connects the flower to the body, just like the Wild Cactus model or the forest biome flowers.
I agree with this. I get that TR wanted to add sugar for desserts and stuff. But the wheel should not be reinvented… either get it from sugar canes or sugar beets (or just use honey), but no radioactive floating plant should be involved. Reserve those for magic stuff. If TR really, really wants to add finctional plants for sugar scattered around the wild, then please, please, please… make them look like normal plants.
And now about the radioactive floating plant itself… That thing looks absolutely weird and inconsistent with everything else. They float, they glow, and they have that weird square platform underneath that none of the other plants have; as if the entire thing was artificial, left on the planet by aliens for the lols.
They are quite simple, actually. Especially when you look at it with a Pear Cactus next to it. If anything, they are actually far too symmetric. Plus, they, as mentioned above, slightly suffer from the “floating alien stuff” problem.
Actually, there are really pretty and vibrant flowers that grow in the desert. Take a look at the devil’s thorn (left). It has vibrant yellow flowers, laying in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by sand and rock. Plus, many cactuses tend to have some really big, big flowers, sometimes bigger than the plant itself.
I imagine they were trying to go down the path of having multiple sources of acquisition. Like with fiber, which can be obtained from verious types of plants plus sheep. The concerns with sugarbell (radioactivity) has been talked about already, so let’s hop to the Wax Plant…
Now, now… I believe this is one of those moments when somebody thinks up a concept (a plant that gives wax?) and gives it a simple name to reflect what’s going on, which in our case is the Wax Plant.
There’s an actual plant that goes by that name, and the one we have looks nothing like it. Now, when it comes to fictional stuff, there’s a lot of freedom when it comes to names. As such, this isn’t a ground breaking issue, I just felt like this should be noted.
As for the beehives… Yes, definitely sugar(honey) and wax could be made from those. But handling bees isn’t something any random Joe can do without practice, so adding beehives would need a bit more extra thought game-mechanic-wise. So either a new class would have to deal with that, or an existing class (farmer?) would have to do it.
Alternatively a new mechanic could be added, where regular workers could develop various skills as for what things they can handle.
The way isn’t 100% wrong, it just needs some adjustments. New plants and new resources are definitely welcome. It’s just that they tried to reinvent the wheel with alien sugar plants, even though the traditional sugar plants from the real world would have been just fine.
The concept of wax plant isn’t wrong. They just look weird and flat… some random colorful stubs scattered all over. People around the world harvested wax from certain plants for a while. This is, of course, less known than the famous beeswax and animal tallow wax, and we don’t often hear of candles made of plant wax, but they exist.
When I began typing this, I was hoping to apply some aloe vera to that giant thumbs down @Pawel_Malecki applied, but looking back to this post, well, it didn’t go too well… I am sorry about that. 
He makes a fair point: something somewhere went a bit wrong, though, it isn’t super bad. Floating plants need to start following the laws of physics, and hearthlings should stop eating radioactive sugar. Some of the new plants might need another “does it look ok? pass” and things would be back on track again. Nothing too bad.
At least nobody yet mentioned how tedious it is to replant the forest after chopping it down. (Oh, shoot, I just did.) So, that being said, some automated replanting mechanism would definitely be welcome. Like a dedicated forest zone where hearthlings would automatically plant the tree seeds.
@BrunoSupremo I don’t think fox lily was available before this update? Or it was at some point that I missed?
Either way, the point stands: floating plant bits look silly.
PS: Aloe vera plant needs to be added in game.
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I read that the plant wax is very difficult to make, and that it was precious. That could be a thing to consider, since RC are traders. If I was a RC trader, and I was selling a candle made from precious plant wax instead of just normal bee wax, I’d ask more for it just because it’s made of plant wax.
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Yes, fox lily is here since a19
http://www.stonehearth.net/dt-rc-tier-2-quests/
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Actually beeswax used to be the expensive stuff because it smells sweetly while burning and other sources of candle wax smell rather bad and were used for cheap candles (animal oil waxes have very distinct, ugly odour of acrolein which makes you cry in high concentrations and plant wax candles are not very pure so they smell like burnt wood). Yes, plant wax is difficult to make (read about candletree wax to see what I mean) but it is way inferior to other wax types (as a chemist I could give you a long lecture about how plant waxes are not suitable for solid products but do greatly as a base for liquid products like varnishes). I excluded mineral oil waxes because I don’t expect to have crude oil in SH so this is out of question.
As for colourful RC town: flowering cacti are definitely a way to go, the thing is the new ones are way too bright. Darker vibe like for the current herb cacti seems way more authentic. My personal type would be pebble plants because I love when nature gets a bit tricky: Lithops - Wikipedia
For the source of sugar: if you really want plant source for sugar I’d opt for sugar cane because this opens the discussion about water plants which are a commonly forgotten thing in many sandbox games leaving bodies of water empty and lifeless.
I don’t know if I like the fact the foliage is getting fantastic in SH. While I am quite OK with fictional animals I’d rather stick to realistic plants. I was even considering making a mod which replaces silkweed, brightbells and frostsnaps with real plants (frostsnap flower colour is 100% unrealistic because biological blue pigments require ridiculously basic environment to be stable, pH 10 at least, that’s why you don’t have blue roses and tulips without going the GMO way).
Modelling plants is quite tricky with voxels. This is one of the cases where I’d love the ability to use .obj models instead of .qb files. In Minecraft for example the decision was to go for not-strictly-voxel plants because voxels are way too limiting.
Level 4 Herbalist would do.
I don’t mind the argument that it’s okay so long as it could have evolved blue pigments with pH resistivity, the flowers can be blue. You talkj about GMo, which I think tells that you can have DNA producing blue pigments, but whether you mean pigments in just very basic environments or blue pigments in general I don’t know.
Oh, and then there is still this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x4I9mmd-2Rc, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3g246c6Bv58
Guys, gameplay > realism. fantasy > reality.
We would never had plumbers jumping on turtles otherwise.
Another thing is that fantasy does not equal to magic. A floating plant can be (and I guess it is our case) just a chosen visual style, it does not mean the plant is magic or have some force that maintains it that way. (also, hearthling does not have arm and legs)
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I think it’s less about the floating part and more about it looking absurdly weird:
- It looks like three glowing pink pebbles levitating above a square platform
- Out of context it’s kind of impossible to tell this was supposed to be a plant
- And what the heck is that square thing on the floor supposed to be?
- All in all, it looks nothing like the plants we had so far
Furthermore… there’s a thing called consistency.
Yes, it is correct that hearthlings, and many living creatures have bits that are not connected with the main body. The constant motion of those parts distract the observers from them floating.
But plants are stationary, and the floaty bits start getting in focus. Now, we could ask why it is a problem, eh? This is when consistency comes into play…
The vast majority of plants have no floating bits. Brightbells have stems. Frostsnaps have stems. Acacia trees are connected to every part they own. So essentially, the rule seems to be that if it belongs to the plant, it is connected to the plant. Then we toss in something that has floaty bits… Wat?
The issue is less apparent with tulip cacti, because it’s only visible if zoomed in close and viewed from the right angle, but sugarbells look like levitating radioactive pebbles.
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Evolutionary biology provides a very simple answer to this: insects do not see blue as well as they see all other colours, so flowers with blue petals are simply ineffective at attracting pollinators. Blue flowers are usually pollinated by wind or less typical pollinators (e.g. deep blue flowering Gentiana has a symbiotic relation with few highly specific butterflies).
I do not agree with that. Either you do attempt to keep things realistic with a subtle touch of fun (I’d call that adapting the reality for the purpose of the game) or go fully crazy with fictional stuff and I truly hate the second because it’s somewhat lazy and rarely gives satisfying results (it almost always gets childish).
This is a very philosophical problem related to the nature of art and creation. Running away from problems and accusations of lacking authenticity by going fully fictional is an easy solution. The result however has many flaws, one of the major ones being the childish result, the other is the lack of intuitiveness: many people know that sugarcane is the source of sugar, bees make wax and carrots can be used for soup. There’s simply no need to clarify anything. If you go fictional you have to provide all the instructions and a good explanation to make it solid. If I asked the devs why Sugarbells are radiating and have flying flowers over a square pads, could they be able to give me a good answer? Sadly I don’t think so (looks fresh and cool is not a good answer because these are a matter of taste and I do not think these look fresh and cool). I am not a dream-all-over American, I’m a sceptical European and I won’t buy any far-fetched fabrications.
Also: @CrazyCandy made a very good point about consistency. The new plants simply don’t seem connected to the existing ones in any way.
That being written: I don’t want to be harsh or anything. All I’ve written so far was meant as a brainstorm for the good of SH development. I wish the team good luck and support them all the way. If they want to hear any more criticism from me I can provide it and I can try to suggest them alternative solutions if they want to (in fact I always try to provide alternative solutions to a problem because just telling something is bad is not very helpful). I may sound harsh but that’s the way I am, please be assured I love this game and will keep supporting it. If the devs decide to do something I cannot accept there’s always an option to “mod it out”.
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I didn’t knew they glow. This is what I see:
Perks of low settings
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This still makes them an UFO.
Nah, I didn’t liked that one either, just the cactus