WIP: Natural Diversity

[kid1293]

I must chime in with @ancientmuse and @tanypredator - You should absolutely
keep it as blueberry resource (with different models). Later you or someone else can
make a food chain to sort out different berries if we want that.

We are spamming the game with food right now. All kinds.
It is getting to much for my taste. But the opposite - a few meat,grain,vegetables...
can be a bit boring. Hard to keep a balance that suits all players.

Berry bushes about the size of your other replacements. Goes well with your grass/thatch

Might as well harvest the whole bush. Don't break the game mechanics too much.
And besides - there are already spawning things all over the map now.

Hmmm..  I like apple blossoms. Nice touch @tanypredator !

[tanypredator]

can we get a clarification on what a blue berry is??? i see some mention a small plant. here we call huckleberries blue berries. they do grow on a bush similar to the pic. rasberry grows on thorny shrubs about the height of the reeds. strawberries grow close to the ground. we do have a black berry similar to rasberry but black. and what grandma called black caps which are smaller in size than a blackberry are sweeter.they are shaped like the tip of a finger. not trying to confuse anyone or cause a debate. was thinking that in different parts of the world things have different names.

Hmm, you are right I suppose I thought of blueberries more close to what your grandma called black caps - here in Urals we have full forests of that berry.

No, I googled, it isn't.

[Tom Sawyer]

That's what I imagine when I think of blueberries. So I would not mind if there are small or bigger patches of low bushes covering the forest floor in summer. At least in some locations to gather wild fruits. But it's my idea of a typical Nordic landscape and not a specification for this mod here. It's all up to Bartender.

[Nilla]

My blueberries are like the forests from Tom and drawing from Tany. I love to walk in these kind of forests, picking these kind of small berries from small, low plants. It's tedious, but worth the effort. But on this webpage we are from different countries, different continents and the plants are different. American blueberries are bigger, growing on larger bushes. They don't grow wild here in northern Europe, but we can buy a plant and grow them in our gardens. They give a much larger harvest but are not quite as sweet and tasty as the wild ones. The same thing with raspberries and blackberries; you can grow big berries from high plants in your garden but the small berries from the smaller wilder bushes are sweeter.

I am pretty sure, it's the same thing with a lot of common plants: They look different; are different on different locations of the world. I can remember, that I was a bit shocked, as Tany made her wild oats. Here it's a terrible weed. The only weed I know of, that has a law, that says the a farmer have to remove it from his fields, but obvious on other parts of the world, it's just a wild form of oats, that can be used as food.

I think we have to get used to this and accept, that the nature in Banished doesn't always look like the nature outside our windows. If someone like Tom or Necora have an ambition to make a mod with a geographical theme, of cause the plants ought to fit to that part of the world but otherwise; as long as it looks good and make sense. it's good to me.

[Tom Sawyer]

American blueberries are bigger, growing on larger bushes.

I've heard of the fact that in America everything is bigger. But I always thought it was a stereotype.

[Gatherer]

I vote for general "berries". A small hut to process them further into all the different types (strawberries, blueberries, cranberries,...) can be added later if the player chooses too. But berries should always be available to the player just like "fish". The inventory window is already cramped too much (we need an update to this too; buttons to sort by limits/flags).

[Necora]

I'm gonna chime in on what a blueberry is... as they are a huge cash crop around here so there are lots of them.

There are two 'types' of blueberry, farmed type or 'high bush' and wild type or 'low bush' (which is also farmed, but hey). The wild type are what Tom and Nilla are referring to, and are small shrubby bushes that grow no more than 1 ft from the ground in forests/borders of forests and thickets mainly, but spread out about 30cm radius or more. They produce small berries less than 1cm in diameter, which are a range of colours from dark blue even purple to almost white and are very sweet. These are the ones you'll find growing wild here and also in places like the Alps in Northern Italy/Southern Austria. The high bush variety are the ones that have been farmed for a long time and so have been selected for their height (easy harvesting) and yield, which is a lot of larger berries over 1cm in diameter. These are more uniform in size, shape, and in (pale) blue colour, and are a much fleshier berry with less taste than their wild low bush counterparts. In Canada, you'll mostly find the wild type low bush variety in Nova Scotia, where as the larger high bush variety are farmed out west.

As for the natural resource discussion, I agree with not changing vanilla resources in the 'light version' (which is what I'm sure you made that for anyway), but I am all for different berry bushes and rawmaterials, I like the visual variation and also the more realism of having a mix of things to harvest from the map (mainly because it is what I do here at home, there are just so many berrys to get). As long as the vanilla stuff remains there, I don't see any problem introducing more variety from the map in the full mod because you are not going to break anything you just have to update the vanilla buildings to include them in recipes.

Having said that, I think my main concern is overpowering the maps with too much food, regardless of the type of it. I have learnt that it is very easy to overpower a gatherer, and it should not make the game too easy to feed yourself in the beginning with too much easily accessible on the map, which is why I am very keen on themed starts that allows you to chose from a mix of things that are either regional or selected to your tastes. It is also why I am keen on specialized forester/gatherer combinations that allow you to add some interesting diversity to the maps or unique ways to get certain resources such a the fodder by Red and your grasses.

Perhaps not having lots of specific clear resource buttons would be best, so if we do add lots of berries, then only a specified berry gatherer can go out and get them and everyone else ignores them unless clearing area for construction, like I've done with the traps and dens and things. Only a trapper can collect them.

[taniu]

It's all up to Bartender.I love the forest if @Bartender wants to add more berries just enjoy you that I will be more colorful forest.In English there are many different names of berries:Billberry.Blackberry,Blueberry,Black Mulberry ,Cloudberry ,Cowberry.Cranberry ,Huckleberry ,Raspberry ,Wild Strawberry.I send a couple of new pictures

[Bartender]

Wow, thank you all for the suggestions! I'm going to try to cover every subject that has been brought up and give my thoughts on it, but please let me know if I missed anything .

What is a Blueberry?
This is perhaps the most important question, and let me start by saying that the english language is horribly confusing in that respect. A lot of the fruits that are commonly refered to as 'berry', like strawberry or raspberry for example, are actually not berries in the biological sense. At the same time, tomatoes and bananas are actually berry fruits, while we would never refer to them as such. The most clear definition of a 'berry' in the common sense that we could give would be 'small, pulpy, edible fruit', which is actually not that clear at all.

Now what is refered to as 'blueberries' in english are actual berries, luckily. The only problem is, as you can see on the wiki page, that there are 19 different species within the genus of Vaccinium that are all called blueberry. This is where a lot of the discussion came from, and I think Nilla summarized it nicely in her post. We all have different ideas about what a blueberry is supposed to look like, because we are used to seeing different species.

This first mesh that I made is based on the Northern Highbush Blueberry (Vaccinium corymbosum). I chose this species because it is native to North America, which I believe would be the location Mr. Luke had in mind when creating the game.

Scaling
Scale is always a bit of a tricky thing in games. If I would have made my meshes for the other natural resources in proportion to the size of the villagers, they would have been about 3 pixels tall at the closest zoom range. This is not desirable both from a gameplay as well as a visual perspective, so I decided to keep them on roughly the same scale as the originals.

Since blueberries are naturally quite a bit larger than onions, I can make them more true to their natural size. This Northern Highbush Blueberry for example, grows to 1.8–3.7 m (6–12 feet), for which the current size fits nicely (I've attached a picture of the bush besides a full grown tree, for a clearer reference). On a side note, harvesting firewood from these bushes would not be unrealistic in that respect. With all my meshes, I try to adapt their sizes to what is natural yet still feels right in the game.

Resource types: Generic v.s. Specific
I'm afraid this is one of those recurring discussions that will never find one clear answer. Yet I agree with everyone that it's an important one, and that we modders should seriously ask ourselves this question every time it becomes relevant. Personally, I have doubted about this for a while, but in the end I believe that simplicity is key. Therefore, all variants will give the same, 'berry' resource. This is what I've done for the roots, onions, mushrooms and herbs, and for now I have decided that it is for the best if it stays that way.

Gathering
As all dropped berries will give the same resource type ('berries'), they will simply be picked up by the vanilla gatherer. In that sense, nothing changes to both the automated and manual gathering of the berries as a resource.

Spawning
I understand and appreciate the doubts that some of you might have about the proposed change to the spawning behaviour. Therefore I will try to explain some aspects of this change more clearly.

Firstly, in all my tests on spawning behaviour, I have never seen a resource get spawned more than 2 blocks away from its 'parent'. Also in the tests of this berry bush in particular, the berries have always spawned at a distance that looks like they could indeed have fallen from the bush. This does indeed mean that this type of behaviour does not work for smaller meshes. I would have to see how to go about this if I were to include smaller berry bush species, as there the distance would become unrealistic. It could mean that I only do bigger variants, but I haven't made a choice on which species I'm going to cover, so I'm keeping all options open for now.

Secondly, I do feel that the inclusion of this behaviour offers several advantages over the vanilla situation:
- It allows for more realistic placement of the berry bushes on the map (in small patches rather than single bushes spread out through the forest).
- The inclusion of the meadows in v1.0 already meant that the specific placement of the Gatherer building now has an impact on which resources are being gathered. This behaviour would make that feature even more meaningful.
- It introduces a trade-off effect between harvesting the berries and harvesting the bushes. In a cold winter, you might want to harvest some bushes for some quick firewood, but this does mean that the next summer, you will harvest less berries. Inversely, keeping the berry bushes means that you cannot use that piece of land for any other harvesting purposes.
- As mentioned in the original post, it offers a realistic way of introducing seasonality to both the mesh of the berry bush, and the harvesting of the berries.

I hope that answers everything . I really appreciate all the thoughts, it helps steering the development of the mod in the right direction.

[tanypredator]

Great to see that you take this all so much seriously!

"Firstly, in all my tests on spawning behaviour, I have never seen a resource get spawned more than 2 blocks away from its 'parent'." - there must be a peremeter "int _seedDistance = 1;" that rules this distance, but I have not tested it deep enough.

"I would have to see how to go about this if I were to include smaller berry bush species, as there the distance would become unrealistic. It could mean that I only do bigger variants" - as I suggested, you can make both small berries that would be naturalresource and big bushes, that would spawn berries on the ground.

My worry about foresters concerned the situation, when they clear place to plant their trees. They may clear bushes out as they do with your grass (or it seems to me that they do). Maybe better to add such bushes as a trees in this case, but that may be too complicated to make it compatible with all new trees and foresters mods (at the moment I'm enjoing new Necora's Maritimes Trees ).

[kid1293]

Most 'berries' are indeed bushes, so with a generic bush it all makes sense.

Who knows? Maybe soon we have a way to deal with the undergrowth in new ways.
Your grass meadows/patches are proving that.

I say, go for it the way you find best. This far it is very good! I am sure you do it
with respect for the forest and the people living in the forest.

[brads3]

i wonder if those low lying berries are dependant on colder climates?i know the berries here will not even live down south.this site is becoming educational.

[tanypredator]

Not sure about cold, but I think that wild animals eat those berries before cold comes You can find some berry leaves to put in tea at winter forest, but not berries. Or maybe only very few and rare.

[brads3]

i didn't mean they grew in winter but that they need the cold.apples need a cold dormant period to produce. or it could also be the acid soil from all those evergreens too.

[Bartender]

It's both actually ! Most blueberry species have a preference for very acidic soils indeed, and need a cold winter to bear fruit.