Hi,
Id like to propose an idea wich occured to me after discovering some key factors about soil and soil quality...
I like how there are different quality soil seeded throughout the map, and the fact that most things gathered from the tile in question decreases its quality. But rather than having it permanently depleted in quality (excluding fertilizing) Id rather see it slowly returning to its original quality.
One approach to this could be that instead of having only one quality number assigned to each soil tile, there would be "hard" actual quality and "soft" temporary quality. Whenever you gather/harvest something the soft quality goes down, if the soil is left alone for some amount of time (game day or whatever unit of time) it recovers 1 of the soft quality until it reaches its hard quality value.
You could all so fix it so that fertilizing could only increase the soft quality some 20 or 30 over the hard quality, and every day it would decrease towards the tiles original "hard" quality.
Having something like this would give the soil a natural ability to regain its vitality over time when you vary gathering spots or leave fields empty for few seasons, without making it possible to endlessly harvest good quality mushrooms, herbs etc from single spot and at the same time make it impossible to make totally worthless soil in to perfect farmland by just dumping a ton of dung on it.
What do you think?
Tripaha
ps. This game has amazing potential, and is allready really entertaining at this early stage!