So, we currently have farmland, which works great, but there are a few things that it doesn’t support well - larger plants, and plants that can be harvested multiple times. To correct this, I propose the addition of a new farmland type, the Orchard.
Similar to farmland, the orchard is a plot of land that can be dedicated to the cultivation of particular plants and is worked by the farmer. (I wrestled with making this a separate class and decided it wasn’t needed.). Unlike regular farmland, orchards are placed in scalable fields up to 30x30, in 5x5 chunks. Each 5x5 segment of the field can grow a single plant, placed center.
Fundamentally, Orchards are used to grow two kings of plants:
- multi-harvest plants, such as berry bushes and cactus fruit. Also addable under this category are “Orchard” trees - Apples, Peaches, Plums, Apricots, Figs, etc. All of these plant types have life cycles in three phases: Growth, where they are unharvestable until they reach maturity, the Harvestable/Harvested cycle, which can repeat a fixed or random ranged number of times, and Dying, which harvests once for a different yield. For example, a fig tree: Growth lasts 5 days, after which it can be harvested 8-12 times (with a 12 hour delay between re-harvests) to yield a basket of figs each time. Once it begins dying, it can be harvested one last time for 4 units of wood.
- Large-single harvest plants, such as trees, giant cacti, etc. This works like the regular farmland - the plant is planted, grows to maturity, and then is harvested. The only difference is that the plant can be larger. An example might be an Oak tree - unlike the farmland sapling version, this oak tree grows for a few more stages before being chopped down for wood.