Homegrown 0.3.5 - Plant Health

A bit of a quicker update this time! I've been making a few tweaks and improvements to the way plant health works, as well as making some adjustments the vegetable quality system.

Gamer Tier+ patrons can download and play Homegrown here.

And for Programmer Tier+ patrons the code is available here.

Health and Dying

I felt that the old system was slightly too punishing, especially at the start of the game. If you made a mistake and one plot of your vegetables died, that could be a huge loss to your total wealth. So I made a few tweaks to make the game a bit more forgiving, while still rewarding the player for looking after their plants well.

It's now pretty much impossible to kill your plants. Instead, the worse you look after them, the worse their "performance" will be. This includes things like growing slower, yielding smaller harvests, and producing lower quality vegetables. Plants that are completely neglected will stop growing altogether - but they won't die!

With a bit of love and attention you'll always be able to bring these poor plants back to life. You may not be able to get them back to full health again, but you'll at least get a harvest from them.

Produce Quality

Even though your plants don't die anymore, there are still plenty of benefits to looking after them as best as you can. The main one of these is the vegetable quality system, which has had a few little changes in this update.

There are two main quality ratings for vegetables, "standard" and "good". The chance of getting a "good" quality vegetable when you harvest is now directly proportional to the health of the plant. If your plant is 100% healthy you'll definitely get good quality produce from it. If your plant has 0% health then you definitely won't. Everything else is somewhere in between.

So let's say you have a field of 100 carrot plants that all have around 70% health. When you harvest them you can expect to receive around 70 "good" quality carrots, and 30 "standard" quality ones. The good quality carrots sell for more in the shop, so looking after your plants properly directly translates into more profit!

Premium Quality

I've also added one new quality rating for your produce - premium quality! Only the healthiest plants will be able to produce a vegetable of premium quality, and even then it's still pretty rare. The chance is around 1 in 200 for a plant with perfect health.

I have some upcoming features that will make use of these special vegetables, but for now they're just a nice little bonus and sell for 7x the price of a standard tier vegetable!

Age

While plants can no longer die from being mistreated, they also won't go on living forever. When plants get old their health will now slowly start to deteriorate. This doesn't start happening until after they're fully mature and it happens quite slowly, so for most plants you probably won't notice any difference because you'll have already harvested them.

This change is most relevant for fruiting plants, such as the tomatoes or blueberry bush. Once they're fully grown the clock starts ticking, so you'll only be able to get a certain number of harvests from them before you need to replace the plants. The exact time it takes varies for different species, and can also be extended by using the right compost (after I've done the compost update).

New Collectible

The collectible item for this version is this very pretty decorative wheelbarrow, which you can buy in the tool shop for 9,999 coins. Don't forget to copy across your achievements.dat file if you want to keep any previously unlocked trophies. All unlocked trophies will spawn in your house storage when you start a new game.

Coming soon...

Next up it's the big compost update! You'll be able to create your own compost mixtures yourself, picking and choosing what sorts of buffs and effects you want it to have.