Anyone who has planted a garden in real life knows that when you put a seed or sprout in the ground, it's never a sure thing for it to produce a yield. For players looking for an in-game experience that captures this uncertainty, some additional mechanics could be implemented (perhaps toggleable as difficulty settings) to model the effects of irrigation, fertility, pollination and predation on your soil and crops. Irrigation Plants require water to be thrive, and some require more or less than others. Making the rounds to water all of your crops by hand is impractical on any but the smallest scales of farming, so farmers will typically employ other means of bringing water to their crops. If I am correct in assuming that the landscape of Stardew Valley will be shapeable via digging, then players could be able to dig holes or trenches to serve as ponds or swales for the collection of rainwater. Swales could also be dug to divert water from other bodies of water. Proximity of soil to such waterworks would increase its moisture content, requiring less (or no) additional watering depending on crop, proximity, and time elapsed since the last rainfall. Depending on how deep the resource collection, crafting, and technology side of things goes in this game, pumps and irrigation piping could be employed to provide a similar benefit to dug swales. There should be tangible benefits vs. drawbacks of one approach vs the other -- perhaps mechanized irrigation could be more expensive to implement, but faster and less dependent upon rainfall. In terms of the effect on crop production, plants should grow slower when they do not have the amount of soil moisture they require. So a day spent without adequate hydration would not count toward the plant's time to maturity, and too many consecutive days of dehydration would eventually kill the plant outright. Different crops could require different levels of soil moisture, making some plants optimal for varying proximities to your waterworks (for example, put your cranberries right on your swales, with your tomatoes not far behind, and some root vegetables a bit further back than that). Soil Fertility There's already a great thread on the go discussing some soil fertility ideas over here. In a nutshell, each tile of farmland could have N-P-K (nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium) values stored, which get increased or decreased depending on what grows there. Fertilizers, both organic or chemical, could be used to improve these nutrient levels, and each should have their own benefits and drawbacks. Crop rotation and interplanting of crop varieties can also help prevent the depletion of particular nutrients. Pollination Not every blossom is sure to bear fruit. There could be a possibility (represented as a % chance) that a plant does not provide a yield due to lack of pollination. Certain plants could be grown as attractors for pollinators, and proximity to these plants could increase the chance of crop pollination. Bee swarms could be sought out and captured in hives to be kept on-farm, further increasing the likelihood of pollination for the whole farm. The more hives you keep, the better the likelihood. Predation We aren't the only ones who like to eat the plants that we grow. Predation by insects, birds and mammals is a substantial problem for gardeners, and these risks can be translated into a chance of loss in-game as well. Herbivores, both domestic (if totally free-ranged) and wild may help themselves to your crops if they are able to get near them. Fencing in your fields can keep out your livestock and less mobile wild herbivores, but you may have to train your dog(s) to keep the more nimble wild deer out of your fields. Free-ranging chickens can help reduce the presence of insects on the farm, as they scratch up and devour larvae before they can become a problem. Cats can hunt small, wild animals like birds, mice, rats and rabbits, decreasing their likelihood of getting to your crops before you do. Planting large areas all with the same crop (called monoculture) increases the risk of insect predation, since you are providing them with an easily identifiable, all-you-can-eat buffet. Interplanting polycultured crops reduces this risk, at the cost of less convenient harvests. Store-bought pesticides can be employed to protect monocultured crops from insect predation, at the cost of less valuable returns for non-organic crops.
I think it would be aw some to have beehives that increased the pollination, or rather decreased the possibility if not bearing fruit.
