Gardening and World Reagents

[indigo marsh]

With Wallaru on the horizon, it would be nice to see an expansion to gardening mechanics. Every world adds new reagents that are used for crafting gear or spells or whatever else, but what I'd like to see with Wallaru is some kind of gardening that enables you to craft the gear you want.

Most of the time mobs drop seeds that I either feed to my pet or quick sell, and I feel like this is wasted potential. Mobs could drop seeds that are related to the world itself, maybe a lower tier seed that you have to cultivate into a higher tier seed similar to some of the beastmoon seed mechanics. You could take the seed to a crafter in the world and use the world reagents to craft into a better, higher tier seed. Or simply through the process of gardening, the seed you get back at the end of gardening a seed could be either the same tier or a higher tier seed. The different teirs of seeds could be more challenging and more rewarding. Gardening these new seeds could give you more reagents, world themed pet snacks, furniture, the world's music scrolls, etc, until you can plant a plot of the highest tier that gives you some sort of penultimate reward, maybe even some of the boss drops.

Also, instead of everyone having the Red Barn Farm that gives a boost to planting speed, seeds of a certain world would love the home that matches the world they're from, giving players a reason beyond "it looks cool" to want a different house. Seeds from Wallaru would love a Wallaru house, seeds from Zafaria would love a Zafaria house, etc.

That kind of philosophy could be extended to the soil that players put down also. Instead of a normal / enchanted soil I feel like there's also potential to add more soil types that only certain plants can be planted in. You could have sandy soils for plants from all the desert worlds, or snowy soils, or enchanted soil, etc. Having diverse requirements for seeds and gardening would make it a lot more interesting of a gameplay mechanic to explore.

Maybe the world reagent is literally just a seed. You would walk around the world, press X on the "reagent" and you'd get a seed that you need to cultivate and then use the resulting reagents as crafting material.

[hollow shoal]

this is an L but the rest of it seems aight

[frank dome]

Tbh it would be interesting to see reagents become integrated with cantrips. So if you’re familiar with the gardening spells and the cantrip spells you’ll notice there’s some overlap, basically the same spells. (Tbh gardening spells probably all could be transitioned to cantrip spells). It would be cool if say there was a plant based reagent and you had to take care of its needs in a world much like you do the plants in your house. And then afterwards you can harvest it. I really didn’t care for the polygons in Novus. To me it’s not interesting to realm hop over and over again collecting the same reagent and only that reagent. It feels like there needs to be something more interesting with reagent harvests. Whether it’s putting them in instances in hidden nooks to reward replayed boss fights, or involving cantrips somehow, it just feels outdated I guess is the right word to walk through secluded realms, avoid all other players to keep the reagents for yourself, and realm hop repeatedly

[proven terrace]

I would really love gardening cantrips, and other fun ways to use them to enhance gameplay for farming etc.

[crisp tide]

Reagents have also just been “solved” for too long, in that ‘walking around and happening to find stuff’ was probably the intended way, but now recipes are designed around players knowing and following the optimal pathing for a given reagent, and thus forcing them to farm it by realm hopping and waiting. Lemuria was the worst case of this, where only one reagent would spawn in a given realm to artificially make the realm hop strategy worse, but it ended up forcing players to realm hop because that was the only way to get old ones at any reasonable pace. It turned the reagent farm into an actual grind complete with time gated loot and everything

There’s also been a loss—probably due to inflation—of “genetically good” reagents like sunstone, replaced instead by specific reagents for every recipe. That’s not new—see agave leaves/turquoise in Azteca—but it is new to never be able to use excess reagents in other recipes. You just never need them again. That makes collecting reagents feel pretty worthless, and again contributes to that “grindy” feeling

You would pick up a reagent on the ground because “I might need it someday,” but now that day will probably never come

[indigo marsh]

I really enjoy the simplicity of gardening currently, where I only need to be concerned about one plant basically, but I also want a little bit more complexity to gardening and want it to feel a little bit more interesting by adding some more unique requirements like the different soil types for different seeds and different houses that seeds like.

I like red barn farm and the botanical garden houses but I want more of a reason to buy the homes that Buxley sells like the Krokotopia tents and stuff