Hi everyone,
A lot has changed since my last post, so I will have to cram quite a few things into this one. The biggest changes are that seed gathering has now been added to the game, and that the seed market in the port has changed a lot.
Starting with a follow-up on the last post, I finished the wild clusters for all current plants, and I have added them into the game (their spawn-chances are not finalised, but they all spawn and are in different biomes). This means you can now find tobacco, etc. in the wild, and can harvest them with your gathering hut to get access to these resources a little earlier than before.
Let me move on to the seed market. With the switch to artefact mode (some time ago), the way the seed market worked became a little.. awkward. It still worked in tiers, which you could unlock by sending money to the Queen - even though this was no longer part of the victory condition. To compensate, I added more seeds to each tier in artefact mode, which just meant that seeds were available permanently and without any challenge - which was not ideal.
I have now changed this for both score and artefact modes. In both modes, the seeds offered in the port are now linked to each ship - so each ship will offer between 0 and 3 types of seeds (ships are more likely to offer multiple seeds as your colony grows), and each ship offers these seeds at a different price. Some will be 50% more expensive than the seed’s base price - others will offer it for up to 30% less. This means you will have to consider whether you purchase a seed you need offered at a high price, or whether you want to wait for it to be offered cheaper.
With this change also comes a new way to gain seeds: Gathering them. As your gatherers can now gather any type of wild plant, they can also gather these wild plants in order to collect seeds from them. This means your gatherers will still collect the plants, but will no longer provide the produce to your village - instead, they will gather the seeds from them, and once they have enough, you will gain a new bag of seeds to make a field. As a result, finding a wild plant you are looking for can turn into a much more important event than before, as you e.g. race to collect the seeds from it to finally have a stable income of medicinal herbs for your defences.
This also means that you can now gather seeds for fruit trees and flax, meaning that both banana fields and flax fields can now be placed from the farm (see today's image). As a result, the linen maker also no longer comes with its own field, and instead requires flax plants to turn into linen.
Quantities provided by clusters/fields, quantities needed to get seeds, and prices of the goods are still a little experimental and all over the place, but I will upload the latest version to the experimental branch soon so you can try it and I will appreciate all feedback on it.
Until next time!