So the main ideas here are: -Take advantage of the game's existing price modifier: Item quality. Why should a farmer suddenly get X% more for crops? It should be because they're growing better crops, right? - Less magical money bonuses. Items are worth more because the farmer produces better items. - Iridum-tier represents the pinnacle of a farmer's spec and is largely inaccessible to other specs. Farming > Rancher: Increases base and maximum animal happiness "1 heart" Based on the idea that happier animals give better stuff. Having 6 hearts instead of 5 means a roughly 20% quality increase, letting the player achieve higher quality goods and helping new animals upgrade faster. >> Shepherd: Gives animals another min/max heart(2-7, unlocking iridium quality while improving new animals to mid silver tier). Chance of their special item dramatically increased. For the true animal lover. >> Butcher: Incubators work 100% faster and barn animals are twice as likely to breed. Animals can be fed again to increase happiness/value faster. Animals sell for 25% more. For the man who loves bacon. Fatten them up! > Tiller: Increases base crop quality 10%, providing a good chance at silver quality goods. >> Agriculturalist: Crops grow 10% faster(minimum 1 day reduction) and have 15% higher quality (25% total, always silver or better, high chance of iridium with fertilizer) Gigantic crop chance doubled. Crops crops crops. Become the breadbasket of the world. >> Artisan: Artisan goods mature 50-100% faster. For the gourmet man. Age your wine, age your beer, age your cheese. Note that this does not affect the initial processing time, but instead reduces the time required to upgrade to silver-gold-iridium. Of course I don't really know if these talents are necessarily balanced against each other, but I do want to give each play style a chance to succeed. Thoughts?
according to this thread http://community.playstarbound.com/...y-actually-compete.126059/page-5#post-3057539 and especially the numbers nevyn21 provides shepherd is actually viable providing like a million gold per season per 60 sheeps. The breeding side I don't know it would need some serious testing. However it seems the animal caring side is actually bugged which makes it near impossible to test probably. The downside is more a timestandpoint since you will be a farmer and not a farmer who isn't really farming himself due to a fully automated farm. On the otherhand if you reach this point in the game that everything is taken care of and you only really walk around aimless the game gets actually pretty boring pretty fast imho. With that in mind, do we actually need a buff to those underappreciated professions or do we need a heavy hit on crops itself, or sprinklers ? I however agree with you that talents or skills should have more of an impact on the actual playstyle rather than providing a boring rpgstyle-%-bonus, which on the other could be inserted in the profession system itself as you mentioned. My personal oppinion is the current bonus to your stamina (by reducing the amount used) is actually enough. So what options do we actually have to insert new forms of gameplay? Rancher is all about animal products. And right now it is basically focused on the idea of just selling your products and take care of your animals. Thats fine. Shepheard for sheeps works as mentioned before. However there are so many animals that it is really specific and I need to ask the question why it only works for sheeps. Why not all "rare" animal goods like duckfeathers etc. I think it should provide some sort of bonus to all non basic animals. I havent heard anything on coopmaster. Would be interesting to see some numbers on a dozen deluxe coops producing like 12 ducks at all time, while producing voidmayonnaise all the time. Maybe iam gonna try this in my next playthrough, but on first thought it dosnt sound that bad.
It is upsetting that the crop and artisan game is so diverse while the animal game locks you into a small subset of an already small field. There are very few animal choices and being forced to pick ONE animal is pretty damn restrictive. That's why I structured the talent to support ALL animals. If the player loves animals they can them up to get the best products. Players who sell animals need to grow their numbers and increase their heart levels more quickly since they will be getting cycled out. It's not exactly fair to bring the super crops into play here. Starfruit/ancient fruit and rare fruit are all extremely powerful regardless of player choices. They won't dominate your farm until well past year 2 for all but the most intense power gamers. In that respect it is better to assume the player will be using normal crops and relying on regular animals to make ends meet, and to assume the talents are working in that arena. Let's worry about endgame balance elsewhere.
