Life is Feudal Official Forum

[Jalpha]

It would be nice, and more realistic, if planting beans gave a slight increase in soil fertility.

This is common practice in modern agriculture and one which has been used by most, if not all, past cultures.

[Falsewall]

It would be nice, and more realistic, if planting beans gave a slight increase in soil fertility.

This is common practice in modern agriculture and one which has been used by most, if not all, past cultures.

I had a similar idea, but it involved crop rotations that doesn't increase soil fertility, but decrease the quality loss.

Plus it wouldn't make sense to have beans keep increasing the soil quality because eventually you would have a bunch of nitrogen and very little (lets say potasium and phosphorus)

[Jalpha]

Well in a real life situation most soils have plentiful potassium, but phosphorus is usually added to assist in root development early in the plants life, giving it a head-start. At least where I'm from (most soils are clay based).

The only thing that really forces plant rotations in modern agriculture is disease, which builds up when the same crop is planted in a field year after year.

LiF doesn't have that level of complexity however. All soil is either fertile or infertile, perhaps with an associated value. There is no distinction between chicken manure, which would be rather high in phosphorus compared to rabbit manure which would have much lower phosphorus but decent levels of nitrogen.

I understand that simply planting and harvesting beans could be too easy a method of raising soil fertility though, if that was your point. To counter this I suggest adding an option to legumes during their middle growth stage which lets you green manure the crop.

So you exchange time (for the plant to grow) and the seed used to plant the crop, for an increase in soil fertility. No other outputs would be acquired. This is also more in-line with the organic method of increasing soil fertility in agriculture.

I'd love to see more complexity with rotations and different nutrients added to the farming system, but I do worry that having tiles remember all that information may place a high load on the server.

[Falsewall]

Well said. I like the idea of letting the legumes die off in their prime for an increase in fertility. The reason I kind of half halfheartedly said phosphorus and potassium was due to me not knowing much about the intricacies of minerals in soil.

I kind of meant them as an insert mineral here kind of thing to argue about logic. All though after reading a bit more into crop rotation it seems like nitrogen fixation is about all one can do as far as having a plant help the soil quality. Phosphorus seems to need to be mixed into the soil in one way or another.

[Ok, so at this point, I am liking your idea more than crop rotation and want to move into server burden.]

Your suggestion is definitely good in its simplicity and ease of integration into the current system(something I am constantly thinking about whenever I create a suggestion thread).

Anyway originally I was going to recommend a nerf for constantly planting legumes to increase soil fertility, but after thinking over the green manure suggestion I think losing the legumes and the time to grow is a good enough trade off.

TL;DR
Green manure method sounds great.
Crop rotation doesn't sound so great now.
Green manure method is just as simple as your old method.