Board Thread:Suggestions forum/@comment-38964304-20190506133333

With 1.14 being out, and the composter being a thing ingame, I thought: "Wow, Mojang could not have fucked up composting any more, and I am thoroughly dissappointed."

So I got an idea, what if there were more ways than just bonemeal to boost the growthrate of our crops?

My thinking is, what if you could, for example, grind the ashy stone and gravel and dirt (or perhaps some seperate source of ash) of mordor or somewhere similar down to ash powder (think redstone's item but greyish black) which would act like a bonemeal alternative? What if livestock periodically dropped manure in the same way chickens drop eggs, to the same end? What if there was a container that you could throw useless plant life into (wheat, flowers, grass, leaf blocks, cornstalks, vines, saplings, that sort) that would automatically create a compost item. The mod's composter might have an interface like a forge, but with no fuel slot, and no secondary item slots. You'd throw said plantlife into the composter, and then you'd wait a reasonable period of time (longer to balance, because no fuel), upon which fertilizer would appear in the output slot. Farmhand NPCs might be coded to accept compost, ashes, and manure just like they do with bonemeal, and would take the first of those items they see in a farm chest into the inventory slot previously meant for just bonemeal.

Now you might be asking 'why go through all this if we have bonemeal?' Well, the idea would be that each fertilizer might have varying levels of effect. So perhaps, bonemeal might be nerfed to not do so well at growing things, or otherwise the other methods would be a variety of stronger and weaker. Ash would be better than bonemeal, compost and fertilizer would beat both of them. The benefit to using stronger fertilizers may be a greater crop yield, or even just less attempts needed to grow something, including trees. Lord knows it sucks trying to grow a baobab, and you burn through nearly a stack of bonemeal.

FARMHAND HOE SLOT:

Another idea, what if there was a hoe slot for farmhands, so that you could swap out the hoe they're holding for a better one? What this would do for the farmhand npc is increase or decrease it's harvest/planting speed and general efficiency. So for instance,

1 (Worst) to 10 (Best)

1. Wood

2. Stone

3. Bronze (I don't think there's individual copper and tin hoes but they'd be below bronze if so)

4. Iron/Faction hoes (uruk, dwarf, etc) (Or maybe faction hoes could be a notch up?)

5. And so forth, with mithril being the greatest.

This would give the player more freedom in deciding how well their farm operates. If they can spare the mithril, or gold, or what have you, then they should be able to use it to boost their farmer's efficiency ratings through the tools that they use. This could also work to increase crop yield, but at a balanced rate. A mithril hoe might yield double (or less, depending on balancing) the crops of the least efficient hoes like wood and stone and bronze, whereas iron and faction hoes might be somewhere in between.

Thank you for reading my suggestion, feel free to add your thoughts on to this, any criticism is welcome 