immersive stick farms (Pollarding or coppicing)

[craggy walrus]

The need for more sticks is a constant in vintage story, whether for pit kilns, wattle fences or for tool handles. This results in players having to climb trees with shears to cut all the branches of if they want any kind of stick output from a tree. The trees around my base are often cut down the second they mature from saplings, which I find to be a shame when we could enjoy proper, immersive and historical techniques.

By cutting a tree close to the ground (or further up depending on animals in the area) player could, maybe by changing modes on an axe? begin pollarding or coppicing the trees instead of cutting them down. Vintage story already includes 2 (maybe 3 if willows are added as shown in the dev log) of the species of trees especially suited for this, that being oak and hazel.

[clear thicket]

Big fan and proponent of this one! Would be much more immersive and in-keeping with the game's ethos than simply "cut planks into sticks"

I also think trees having more growth stages in general would open up a lot of possibilities, but that's a more complex and systemic change (which could feed into a potential woodworking system, etc.)

A woodworking mechanic could allow sticks to be optionally replaced in some recipes, but with replacements that take actual effort and not just sticking two things in a crafting grid

As for implementing coppicing before a larger tree update, I could see it being mechanically simplest to modify a growing sapling, as opposed to dealing with pre-generated trees and log blocks. An oak sapling, for example, might be interacted with using an axe to turn it into a "coppiced oak sapling", which would then grow as a stump with shoots atop it. The shoots could be a one-time thing or regrow, depending on how temporary of an implementation it's intended to be

[craggy walrus]

I completely agree. Personally I would love to see the "normal" tree models be more in line with the fruit tree models. which could enable both coppicing or pollarding depending on the growth stage of the tree.

historically the tree shoots could be allowed to grow for different time for different purposes such as wicker and firewood. That could maybe be intergrated into a woodworking system

though it might be quite resource heavy for the game to keep track of all the growth stages of trees. I would love to see more dynamic forest but the more realistic expectation would probably be that only player planted tree would have growth stages.

[craggy walrus]

that would most likely be the best option. I hope that when (or if) there is a larger tree update that some animals already in the game like deer, goats or gazelles etc. would want to eat the spring shoots which might damage the coupes kind of like how some animals will eat crops. It would give players an incentive to go for pollarding instead of coppicing which would have to let the tree grow for some time.

Historically they had to grow for a few years after each cutting to reach the correct size again, though tree species and the desired length of the shoots, determined the length of time between cuttings.