COMMUNITY - FORUMS - GENERAL DISCUSSION
Trees: Growth rate and logging

Caspian dropped this little tidbit in Discord today.

"Every tree/plant has a different growth rate. Typically the growth rates are relative to one another in a similar scale as they are on earth, but are generally sped up to keep gameplay interesting. For example, an oak tree on Earth takes 20-30 years to grow to maturity. That would be 20 - 30 weeks RT to grow in Elyria. I don't believe we want it to be that long, but we've yet to tweak all the values so I cannot give you an exact number yet. But it's on the order of weeks, not days."

I just want to point out, for the sake of avoiding easy griefing through clear-cutting, that it should take an equivalent amount of time to cut down a tree as well as it would in real life, adjusted for the game the same as growth is.

Anyone who has cut down a tree using an ax or saw knows that it takes a considerable amount of time to just fell a single tree, especially by yourself.

Ex. If IRL it takes 20 weeks for a tree to grow and 4 hours to cut it down, then they change it in-game to take 4 weeks for a tree to grow, then it should take at least 48 minutes to cut down that tree in the game.

Edit: this is getting a bit long so for those who don't care to read on, a few add-ons.
-The numbers above are arbitrary, designed to show an example of the idea.
-The amount of wood collected from cutting a tree should be worth the size of the tree, and thus the time spent, as if harvested by an untrained lumberjack. Those skilled in the process would get the same amount of wood, but may be able to cut down the tree quicker.


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12/10/2018 7:44:01 PM #1

Great info. Thanks for sharing!

And yeah, at 48 minutes per tree, that's a significant deterrent against griefing players with environmental destruction.


12/10/2018 7:46:54 PM #2

Well, games in the past have always gone with an unrealistic model for their gathering activities because they rely on the grind keeping you in game. The amount of wood that you would generally get from cutting down an entire tree would be ludicrously low.

I dont see any problem at all with having the action of cutting down a tree take a whole lot longer than in other games. The opposite end of that is that the tree should provide the appropriate amount of wood when cut down.

As long as they dont create it to be a grind, I dont think it will be a problem.


12/10/2018 7:48:08 PM #3

Not sure aout 48 minutes per se, but I do agree with having it take a realistic time to cut them down to keep people from jumping in and insta cutting everything.

Like Hieronymus said though, appreciate the share. Little details like this are important yet easy to miss.


12/10/2018 7:50:29 PM #4

I love the thought process of this, but could we add an ownership claim to the tree, for instance, if it's on your parcel you have tools to remove it at a faster pace, call it a boon or buff. But if you're trespassing, then it takes /amount/s full length of time to down the tree.


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12/10/2018 8:20:53 PM #5

For those of yall who played Life is Fuedal MMO, Oak trees took 3-4 Weeks to grow irl, a few seconds to cut, and only gave you 24 boards if the tree was the upmost quality. For them to keep a pretty long grow time on trees, they need to add

1)Lots more wood per tree, one full grown pine tree can supply hundreds if not a thousand planks.

2)A claiming system, Historically, with the British, they would claim the best timber in their colonies with a mark/seal so they could supply their navy with timber. Doing something similarly where a land owner can claim specific trees and make them much harder/illegal to cut, while keeping the meh trees at a normal logging pace, allowing for both protected trees, and trees anyone can cuy down.


12/10/2018 8:50:05 PM #6

Agreed with the lots more wood per tree as well, but that won't stop you from waking up one day to find the entire forest behind your house clearcut. With longer timers you'll more likely only have a group of trees felled.


12/10/2018 8:59:16 PM #7

48 minutes a tree? Does that mean I can just start the chopping process and than log out? If not, the number of RSI (Repetitive Strain Injury) complaint will severely rise in CoE. That will teach these lumberjack grievers a lesson. :)

That also means that building a wooden house may take several weeks of my real life time. Imagine how long it will take to build a wall around a settlement. I could hire some NPCs, but the price will be terrible high. Talking about my real life time. I don't even dare to guess how much Elyria time that will take.

A shack may take 2 or 3 days, unless I take a few days off from work.

12/10/2018 9:01:38 PM #8

OPC scripting could take a lot of the 'chore' out of it if it was (for a game) an unusually long time to fell a tree

researching two man crosscut saws will be a thing


12/10/2018 9:27:18 PM #9

Problems may arise if the tree growth is too slow, and you'll have entice counties that were once forests turned into grasslands because everyone is trying to build, and trees cant grow fast enough to support the growth


12/10/2018 9:36:35 PM #10

Good wood is quite valuable. It stands to reason there should be some difficulty in acquiring it. I'd assume also that the amount of wood you could gather from a tree could be quite impressive depending on the tree.


12/10/2018 10:41:25 PM #11

The skill of the forester should have a big impact on the time it takes to cut down a tree. it may take novices 4 hours, but skilled lumber jacks can probably fell a tree in 1/4 of the time or less, especially if they have equipment like saws.


12/10/2018 11:41:17 PM #12

It really does not take long to fell a normal tree, even with an axe. What takes time is everything that follows: limbing, bucking, milling/splitting, curing, etc.

That's not super helpful for talking about griefing by cutting down as many trees as possible as fast as possible, but I would guess there's room for balancing via fatigue mechanisms there as well?

12/10/2018 11:42:53 PM #13

I'm not sure if you were using a dull hatchet to chop down that tree for it to take 4 hours...but IRL, every time I have chopped down a tree bigger than I can reach around with both arms (I am 5'10"), it takes me 8-15 minutes, depending on if it was alive (not deadwood), the axe I was using at the time and if I was pacing myself because it was the only one I was chopping down or had many more to go that day. I've been chopping wood since I was 6 and in the several decades since I have never seen anyone take longer than about an hour and a half to chop down a tree of above mentioned size....not even a newbie. And btw, about the Oak that was mentioned taking 20-30 years to reach maturity, that is extremely small and barely within maturity. Most Oaks take 50-60 years to reach a maturity level that gives the prime amount of lumber per growing size/time vs the minimum of the stated 20-30 years...which if you were going by the amount of boards you get from an average 50-60 year old oak that gives a 10-12 foot long trunk that is 18-20 inches wide, you get roughly 12 2"x6"x10' boards (those dimensions are after they have been planed down) along with a few smaller odd shaped boards and usually an odd shaped core beam. Now of course...the hand sawing of all this lumber takes much longer than the 8-15 minutes of chopping it down. My dad and I used to lumber out a tree in about 2 hours, but most people take a little longer.

All in all, chopping down a tree doesn't take that long. It's the hauling it away/lumbering it into usable lumber that takes the bulk of time.



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12/10/2018 11:57:57 PM #14

If I were a griefer, I would chop down the smaller trees. Thats much faster and still deals long-term damage. Anyway... I feel, chopping down a normally aged tree should be slower than realistic to prevent griefing, instead doing the rest of the work like sawing and cutting off branches could be sped up to compensate and have realistic times for the whole process. like 5 minutes for getting it down plus one minute to get the branches off.

Still... its up to ingame characters and law management to prevent people from cutting all those trees. If you allow your entire surrounding wood to get cut down, you deserve it. Its not like its just 100 trees, the world is huge and the same will be true for woods. Now, if we are talking about kypiqs trees or other similarly huge trees, its a completely different story. One player alone simply wont be able to get them down in a reasonable amount of time.


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12/11/2018 12:03:00 AM #15

Posted By Gromschlog at 4:57 PM - Mon Dec 10 2018

If I were a griefer, I would chop down the smaller trees. Thats much faster and still deals long-term damage. Anyway... I feel, chopping down a normally aged tree should be slower than realistic to prevent griefing, instead doing the rest of the work like sawing and cutting off branches could be sped up to compensate and have realistic times for the whole process. like 5 minutes for getting it down plus one minute to get the branches off.

Still... its up to ingame characters and law management to prevent people from cutting all those trees. If you allow your entire surrounding wood to get cut down, you deserve it. Its not like its just 100 trees, the world is huge and the same will be true for woods. Now, if we are talking about kypiqs trees or other similarly huge trees, its a completely different story. One player alone simply wont be able to get them down in a reasonable amount of time.

Agreed about the smaller trees. I can chop down a 4-6 inch wide tree in about 10 seconds if I'm just clear cutting, as the smaller ones are much much softer and it only takes 4-5 strokes to fell one.

As far as the Kypiq Ironwood trees, I thought Caspian had said they were indestructible. Did they change that?



-The largest cause of war is selfishness. The hardest thing to achieve in life is mutual selflessness.

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