Dev Update #7 - Farming Preview & Survey #1 Results

Hello Everyone!

Welcome to this week’s news post. We’ll be chatting Farming & also showing the results of the survey we posted a few weeks ago.

Alpha Release - v0.4.6-alpha

A new update has just been released. You can get the download and view the changelog here: https://www.patreon.com/posts/melvor-idle-2-v0-133058910

Let’s look at Farming

UI PREVIEW - STILL WIP https://i.golb.ink/u/nM8Qyj.png

Farming is the first new Skill scheduled to be released, due in the next 1-2 weeks. Let’s do a quick rundown on what to expect when it arrives.

At its core, Farming is still all about planting and harvesting crops. However, we’ve introduced new mechanics and some much needed quality of life everyone has been asking for (or just modded into the game).

The Farm

You’ll be growing a variety of crop types:

• Allotments

• Herbs

• Trees

• Orchard (Fruit Trees)

• Flowers

Fruit Trees will take some time to grow, but will provide multiple harvests of fruit before disappearing. Fruits will be used in Cooking and COW SKILL.

Flowers will provide a passive bonus to Farming as long as they are fully grown. Each Flower has a different bonus it provides, and will disappear after 5 or so days. The seeds are quite rare, so use them wisely.

Crop Maintenance

All crops will need to be maintained if you want to receive the maximum possible harvest quantity. By ignoring a crop’s maintenance needs, you’ll receive a final quantity debuff when eventually harvesting.

Watering

Every crop needs to be watered after you plant it. This is a simple free action you perform after planting a crop, and can be done at any time during its growth cycle.

Pests & Disease

Each crop has a level of Pests & Disease that it attracts. The higher level the crop, the more pests & disease it will attract. You’ll need protection to avoid any quantity debuffs.

These are individual stats, so you’ll need to manage pests & disease separately.

Pests & Disease protection comes in a few forms:

• Watering

• Shop upgrades

• Herblore Potions

• Flowers

• Whatever else we come up with

Compost

Compost will provide a bonus to the Farming Plot it is applied to. On release, this will simply be in the form of a Quantity boost. As Farming matures, the range of Compost to choose from will also increase, each providing unique bonuses.

Compost Bins

Compost will be acquired via the use of Compost Bins in Farming using products from Farming, Firemaking and Combat (For high level compost).

They act much like farming plots, taking 24 hours to compost before you can collect it. However, these don’t require maintenance like watering or protections from Pests or Disease.

Automation

Farming will come included with the ability to automate most of the interactive stuff, eventually giving you a mostly hands-off approach to training the skill.

The automations that will be made available include:

• Auto Harvest

• Auto Replant

• Auto Recompost

• Auto Water

Each automation can be toggled on/off for individual plots (QoL buttons included to mass toggle on/off).

Automations will not automate every single action you need to perform in Farming. Here is what you need look after:

• The crop you plant - Automation will only replant the same crop. It will not pick different crops to plant.

• The compost you apply - Much like planting, this automation only reapplies the compost used. You’ll need to manually change it if you want different compost.

• Resource upkeep - It’s up to you to ensure you have enough Seeds, Compost, & Bank Space for automations to run smoothly.

• We will implement some Quality of Life to help with replanting and recomposting management.

But don’t be fooled though - nothing is free. Automation comes at a cost to upkeep.

Farmhands

Farmhands will take care of your crops for you. They are simply purchased from the Shop, and become available when you wish to toggle them on or off.

Depending on their tier, they will only be able to look after crops up to a certain unlock level. Higher level crops require higher tiered Farmhands to automate.

They’re relatively “cheap” to purchase from the Shop, and you only need one per tier, but that’s because they don’t work for free.

Paying your Farmhands

Farmhands require a payment for each individual automation they are tasked to do. This cost is based on the level of the crop being automated, and the category the crop resides in.

Farmhands don’t accept straight GP as payment - only Wine. That’s right, you need to pay them in Wine for each automation they look after.

There will be two ways to obtain Wine:

• Buy it from the Shop

• Make it yourself (Not on release, but detailed below).

Automation is designed to be a consistent GP “sink”, but you will eventually be able to nullify that GP cost in the very late stages of Farming (when released).

Sprinklers

Sprinklers will be a permanent unlock from the Shop, and are tiered much like Farmhands. Once purchased, they will remove the need to water crops entirely up to a certain level range they work on.

This also means the Farmhands won’t need to Water your crops, effectively reducing the total automation costs by 25%.

Farming Features arriving at a later date (Due to Construction Requirements)

Throughout the early stages of Alpha, we will be releasing Skills without all of their planned features. This is due to the reliance on unreleased Skills or content they will utilise.

There are many features of Farming that will require Construction to unlock, so these are not being released until Construction makes it into the game.

The Distillery

A late-game Farming unlock where you will be able to passively create your own liquid products from certain Farming ingredients.

Primarily, the Distillery will be used to create Wine via Grapes, eventually nullifying most of the GP cost to upkeep as you lose the reliance on the Shop to pay your Farmhands.

There will be other products you can create here - we plan to have a bit of fun as to what effects they may have on gameplay if used in certain situations.

The Distillery also comes equipped with its own dedicated Farming Plots, so you can grow your Grapes without affecting the other stuff you’re growing.

The Grain Mill

A mid-game Farming unlock where you will be able to passively create your own grain, which is going to be heavily used in COW SKILL.

Much like The Distillery, these will come with its own dedicated Plots to grow the product required to convert into Grain.

Survey #1 Summary & Results

A few weeks ago, we put out a survey to gather feedback on the upcoming content that players care about the most. We thought it would be interesting to share that data with y’all!

We were a little surprised by some of the results. For example, Thieving by far is the skill players are looking forward to the most out of the non-combat skills, followed by Astrology then Archaeology (Q1). 

Quests and Item Uses / Sources (i.e. viewing all uses & sources for items) were the two features that were voted as the most important for players (Q2), followed by Achievements and the Enhanced Equipping system. 

Players are by far looking forward to the completionist aspect of Quests the most, followed by the Main Storyline and then the puzzles/interactions they may have you solve (Q4). Note: There is an error in the PDF summary for this question as it does not highlight the completionist aspect correctly. Out of everyone that answered this question, 69.4% (nice) ticked completionist.

When it came to which skills players would like to see completely reworked, we weren’t surprised to see Agility and Summoning at the top (Q5). Archaeology and Astrology were the next two highest. 

On average, players prefer non-combat over combat (Q6). Idle mechanics are preferred over those that require interaction (Q8), however players still enjoy mechanics that require interaction in order to complete or progress (Q9) – MI1 Astrology, we’re looking at you. 

Out of those surveyed, players would like to choose their own path versus following one linear path (Q10), including figuring out how to progress versus having the game guide them (Q11). 

Thank you to all of those who filled out the survey! The next one will arrive in the coming weeks to go over the current state of the Alpha.

You can view all of the survey results in a PDF we put together here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1VKvRPyBT_Zk3wK1oD2sST6fscXnp9Xw0/view?usp=sharing

What’s coming to Alpha next

Next up on the Alpha Roadmap:

• Farming

• Mastery Guilds

• Codex (In-game Wiki of sorts)

What we have been working on 

Here is what we’ve been working on recently.

Development

Malcs:

• Full focus has been on getting Farming to a playable state.

• Some time dedicated to fixes for the new release.

Coolrox:

• Fixing + Investigating bugs reported in the Alpha.

• Added some improvements to our internal data editing tools.

• Added some improvements to the Modifier System.

• Made Items more modular in preparation for Farming and Combat, e.g. Allowing us to define a Food Item, that can also be Opened like a chest (or any other combinations).

Game Design

Prat:

• Finishing off cooking before heading off. 

• Prat is on leave and he’ll return in three weeks time.

Artwork

Tapi:

• Lots of farming related artwork!

General Recap

Can I share information about the Melvor Idle 2 Alpha publicly?

Unfortunately not. Please leave all public discussions to the team only and keep all feedback retained within Patreon channels & Google Forms.

There’s a lot of keen people wanting to know how it’s going! Their time will come to provide feedback with a more polished Alpha in the future.

Conclusion

That’s all for this week’s post! We’ll see you again at this time next week. 👋

• Malcs & Staw