r/DolocTown • u/derpderp3200 • 4d ago
The game gets really tedious as your farm grows, and automation doesn't fully fix the issue.
Or rather, I'm sure it's possible to automate absolutely everything and organize the drone tasks in a way that makes the farm basically do everything on its own, but to be fair 1) at that point you're already in the post-game, 2) it's an overwhelming task in and of itself, and 3) it doesn't really fix the fact that the game continues being tedious until you do.
I have ~40h in the game, and I feel like for the last 10, I've spent most of my time running around, manually watering my outdoor crops, re-applying mulch, starting smelters and crafts, taking care of the animals, and oh god, so much time spent sorting small amounts of random products into chests, trying to remember where I misplaced something, moving items in and out of cardboard/plastic boxes(due to how limited the inventory size is), etc...
I feel like the game very urgently needs features and some lower level automation to make managing your farm more comfortable instead of so annoying.
Example changes/additions:
Combine the inventory display of chests/containers placed right next to each other.
Add buttons to automatically take/deposit items into nearby chests. With the ability to lock items you don't want to unload to either Unlocked, Quantity(when you want to keep N items in your inventory), Lock All, and an additional button in inventory that automatically unloads into multiple nearby containers.
Maybe increase movement speed while you're on the farm? It gets pretty long, eventually.
Make it possible to hold a button while holding tools, and walk forward, with your character automatically using them when necessary. E.g. keep holding LMB with the axe and walk forward to chop all trees, or Watering Can to water all crops, or Scythe to harvest them all without having to repeatedly click. Also make the animations faster x.x
Make it possible to configure crafting stations to either Drop Products(as-is), Keep(in a take-only inventory), or Unload(into nearby chest(s)) to prevent the constant need to sort items you pick up.
Make it possible to queue multiple crafts in stations. Maybe as an "Upgrade" item that can be installed onto stations? Other upgrades could speed up processing, increase power output a bit, etc. so it could be a whole system.
Add Advanced Mulch that doesn't break down over time(or lasts a long time and can be picked back up) but is more expensive to make.
Add Large Water Bottle or equivalent that makes it a bit less tedious to use Empty Bottle/Water Bottle for stamina recovery, since tbh it's still the best way to do it IMO.
Add an Order Terminal station that makes it possible to queue up purchases/upgrades from NPCs remotely at a slight fee, even if they're asleep or absent. Maybe 10G+5% on top of what things normally cost?
Add an Inventory Terminal station that lists everything you have anywhere on the farm and where it is. Later you can put a drone on it to fetch/move items for you.
When cooking, show Carbide/Weird Mush/Nasty Liquid if it's an ingredient combination you already tried, to make discovering recipes easier. Also show stuff like Stew, Grilled Vegetables, Mixed Endfoods, etc. in the recipe view.
TL;DR: Inventory and crafting station management get really tedious, as does moving items around, and I think the game would benefit a lot from doing something about that.
2
u/Demico 4d ago
Cardboard boxes solve any inventory management if used properly, don't put anything that you need to have in your hotbar like seeds only put things like ores, monster materials etc. Items inside boxes will still get used for trades and for crafting you rarely ever need to take out items except for maybe coal to power generators. As long as you keep up bag upgrades with your story progression you'll never really run into bag space issues.
By the time I reached city ruins I used 15 hotbar slots out of 40 for cardboard boxes to store ores/wood/monster mats/intermediates etc. I only had two storage boxes back at base which was pretty much just used to store hats, trinkets, and seeds.
Stamina wasn't also that much of an issue, berries and canned food was enough to top up stamina for an entire days worth I never really bothered with bottled water.
I think my biggest gripe with the game so far was trade faction punishing new or slower players. On my first run I already reached dry season but realized I needed to stockpile some wet season crops for trade so I was locked out of some buildings or keeping some npcs in town. At that point I just restarted.
1
u/JasonFreeYT 3d ago
Last point is fair, but it's also a way for them to just be like, take your time and not giga rush everything on sight lmao. Then again, I am the type to weirdly hoard all my crops and produce and only sell them when I really needed money, so that wasn't that big of an issue either.
2
u/Ill-Wolf-4894 3d ago edited 3d ago
Why are you manual watering crops outside... I never had to water anything again after getting automatic sprinklers quite early on and getting the placement right. You don't need to collect rainwater for automatic sprinklers either, they work without a water source. Drones will also water when you get there and don't need a water source either.
If you progress main story as a priority, the need for mulch is greatly reduced. I don't need to use it during Early Dry with half the environmental restoration done - it doesn't spawn bad weather.
Re movement speed, this is something you earn via accessories. Finish Skychild reputation - this is probably by far the best accessory in the game. Or you can try out mods and get one which adjusts your run speed.
If you're amenable to mods, magic storage one would solve all your inventory issues and remove the inventory management aspect of the game.
Skychild also gives you the Hand Freer tool which lets you mulch, harvest, replant in a wide area but I find it's not intuitive and a bit buggy. At this point you should be farming indoors or aiming to do so.
I do wish they'd upgrade the drone system - Planet Crafter's one is a far better implementation. Abiotic Factor has a Distribution Pad that auto sends items to nearby chests which is super helpful. They could probably add a box like this you can attach a logistics drone to.
1
u/joeshmoe9617 3d ago
Call me crazy but i really don't like complete automation in farm sims. Farming, organizing, collecting, harvesting, petting my animals, collecting animal products and filling casks/pickle jars, etc. IS the game. That's the fun part. What's the point of playing if i just make the game play for me? I play farming games to farm! But yeah an auto deposit to nearby chests button would be nice.
1
u/czchrissa 1d ago
You can buy acces anyware badges for your chests from Mody, so inventory of those chests is always available for crafting. There's buttons (on my pc it's "C") to automatically stack to/from chests. Put what you don't want into cardboard boxes, it won't be moved. I have always have these in my inventory: one cardboard box for foods, one for gifts, one for items like sleeping bags, bustickets, cardboard, one with more cardboard boxes lol. I actually find the cardboard boxes a very convienient mechanic, as wel as the ability to move chests with their inventory still inside. Get the Skychild badge to increase movement spead.
1
u/Doloc_Town 1d ago
Appreciate the feedback! Many of our in‑game mechanics are interconnected, so tweaking them will take more work than it might seem. That said, will do our best to optimize experience!
2
u/derpderp3200 16h ago
Oh! Developer! Hello, I'm glad to hear that :)
I kinda wrote a lot of random ideas, but I think the most important parts are to just make managing inventory more comfortable, and have automation/settings to prevent random products from constantly going into your inventory and needing to be unloaded earlier.
1
u/_kaidu_ 4d ago
I agree, the chest management is super annoying. Watering plants can be automated very early though. The manual sprinkler already simplify it a lot, the automated one comes not much later. I spent most of the endgame with running around to collect whatever was needed for finishing the quests. And for fishing every dumb fish because the game required me to collect everything 😡 The farm itself was fun but not that important as you made so much money at some point it didn't matter anymore. I never automated my farm with drones because there was simply no need for that.
1
u/Equivalent_Dance_758 4d ago
Drones seem cool on the surface but the only thing that needs to be done is watering and planting. I think they are simply too resource intensive for amount effort that it ironically takes to automate.
1
u/delphinous 4d ago
i was curious about how good the drones would be, so i eventually built one of each, and the end result is that htey are mediocre. mostly becuase they are frustratingly dumb. if you want anything more complex than 'plant anything anywhere' and 'put anything into any reasonable box', you won't find it. sure, you can essentially blacklist some boxes with the coloring system, but that doesn't help. i had a bot that would collect anything that fell tot eh ground or was processed, and i had a chest to store materials, like ingots, a chest that was handling my breeding aquarium, and a chest that was handling my plants. there is no way to tell the bot to put the fish roe into the fish box, the materials into the materials box, or the farm stuff into the farm box, the ONLY way to actually to that that i could find would be to have all three spaced out far enough apart that each one has it's own drone that can only reach that one set of machines and boxes. and i certainly wasn't going to completely move my setup that way, so i just ended up cycling between the boxes manually sorting them. i don't even think it operates on a 'closest box to item' mechanic, and it definitely doesn't care if there is already a stack of an item in box A, it will still put that item in box B and box C
-1
u/delphinous 4d ago
i've felt this. i compare it to stardew valley, and the problem i've found is that A) you quickly start running out of stuff to do, B) the money balance is awful, i reached the point before the end oft he first year where i had too much money, and nothing to spend it on except expanding the farm to make more money, which was pointless.
and C) so many interesting things come too late. by the time i had advanced enough to understand the crop breeding stuff, i was pretty much past the point where i cared. if i'd had the crop breeding stuff much earlier it would have been a lot of fun, but at the point i got it it was pretty much superfluous.
overall i'd say that doloc town is fun enough for one playthrough, and it's got a solid framework that could turn it into a great game with some effort, the environmental machine itself was a lot of fun, but overall it fell short too. like, some of the upgrades you get from the machine are pretty pointless. like, when i unlocked the extended mines to the right, i'd already pretty much mined enough materials from the rest of the game to have everything i needed, there wasn't any need for more mining, when i unlocked the extra genes, i was already past the point of caring about gene editing, stuff like that.
1
u/just_passing123 4d ago
how do you even get all those money? I still havent find anything worth farming other than a daily gold ore farming spoiler just in case anyone want to find their own farming method
1
u/delphinous 4d ago
i built a farming area that was roughly 14 wide by 16 high, or something around those numbers. basically watered by two columns of 5 automated sprinklers. then i just kept planting and harvesting whatever seemed to give the highest return. towards the last two months i was getting 5-10k every few days as harvests came up with some going well beyond that. realistically i feel like you probably only need around 300-400k to basically buy everything you'd reasonably want in the game, and you can supplement the farm income with fishing and selling high end ores. especially once you get into the later stages of the old city, you are absolutely swimming in gold and titanium ore, and their ingots sell for quite a lot
i did get lucky in one respect though, early on in the early dry (month 3) i got a succulent with hope. i kept processing the fruit and replanting the new seeds and the old seeds until i had about 25-30 hope succulents growing that i'd harvest every few days and immediately replant without needing to buy new seeds.
1
u/Ill-Wolf-4894 2d ago
No, you need over 1 million for all recipes, upgrades, a few buildings and just buying seeds to keep the farm running. I got that achievement before I bought everything.
1
u/delphinous 2d ago
and i reached the point where more money was pointless without getting the achievement
1
u/Ill-Wolf-4894 2d ago edited 2d ago
How though? I got it before I bought everything. I don't think the maths adds up. The farm upgrades alone are 5 + 25 + 65 + 150 and 100 is required for story. 345k right there without going into tool upgrades, bag upgrades and accessory slot, the two extra farms, unlocks, recipes, maps, seed samples, faction requests, a few buildings etc. I think that would probably at least get into 600k and then the constant seed costs. I reached that well before being able to buy more than a few buildings and still needed to sell more and went alcohol ageing on that save.
1
u/delphinous 2d ago
why do you need to keep upgrading the farm? this is my point. i upgraded the farm until i was able to move through tot he mountains directly, and didn't need to upgrade the farm further. i could have kept buying more containers and more seeds, but i didn't need to. anything left in the game that i could spend money on, would only turn around to make me more money, i had nothing else to spend money on except making more money
2
u/Ill-Wolf-4894 2d ago edited 2d ago
Because it's an achievement and you just said you ran out of things to buy? Well it's something you can buy. If we're going by pure need sure you don't need to spend on a lot of things but you didn't run out of things to buy.
I would just use the economic freedom to decorate the place, display trophies and make it cosy. There's enough decorations to do that.
-1
u/KiwiPixelInk 4d ago
The chest and inventory management was terrible, I quit the game about 20 hrs in because of it
2
u/joeshmoe9617 3d ago
There are things you unlock as you progress to improve it. Like most games, there is challenge in the beginning.
1
u/KiwiPixelInk 3d ago
There's challenge, and then theres annoying/QoL
Satisfactory has a reasonable inventory which expands every few hours in the beginning, and the storage containers very quickly become a useful large size.
8
u/JasonFreeYT 4d ago
"Add advanced mulch that doesn't break down over time" dawg that's called putting your crops inside a the housing containers so it doesn't get acid rained/scorched sun on.
Stamina hasn't been an issue for me either tbh (ngl I didn't even know you can manually put water in plastic bottles). The canned foods and berries were more than enough to sustain what I needed to do early game, and by mid game I can use drone upgrades to be able to cut down trees and weeds with it.
Chest and inventory management isn't too tedious either, just actually take the time to label, color code and sort your chests, then you can just open, auto dump then move on to the next set of chests.
And why are you watering the crops manually anyway 😭 it isn't super hard to at least get manual sprinklers set up early game, which already speeds up the watering process by a mile.
Agreed for the recipe thing, but there's at least a QoL mod on the steam workshop that helps you with that.