FARMING CHANGES
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* The decay time for seed bags, hoes, scythes, knives and axes has been increased to 90.
* Maintenance has been removed. It was bugged and not actually doing anything, and rather than fix it I decided to just delete it since it's an extra layer of gold and time that wasn't needed.
* Bundles can now be made of up to 90 of a single raw material. The minimum of 30 still applies. Syntax is now FIELD BUNDLE <amount> <item>.
* Seed bags can now hold up to 100 of a single seed. Syntax for buying them is changed to ASK IVES BUY <amount> <seed>. Gold cost for seeds is 3gp per seed.
* Fertilizer effect now lasts on a tile across multiple replants, and is cleared at the start of a new Aetolian year,
* Fertilizer now costs 300 gold per bag and contains 40 applications.
* There is an artifact version of the seedbag in the artifact shop: a venantium seedbox. Can hold up to ten different types of farming seeds, each one up to a quantity of 1000. You can SCATTER <seedname> for a seed in this seedbox to plant that seed in a 3x3 location around you, assuming each tile is prepared to receive a seed (e.g. tilled or trellis). You can EMPTY <seed> FROM SEEDBOX to get rid of one of the seeds inside it to free up a slot.
* Growth time on hemp has been lowered to 13 (from 14). This allows the same number of harvests per year but gives a wider margin to collect all potential harvests.
* Growth time on pine has been lowered to 19 (from 24). This allows the same number of harvests per year but gives a wider margin to collect all potential harvests.
* Mature plants won't instantly die on season change, giving a bit of time to ensure you can harvest them. They'll still die eventually though so don't leave them too long.
* Costs for animals from Ives has been drastically reduced. Cows were 1000gp and are now 300gp, other animals have similar reductions.

These changes are largely aimed at decreasing the amount of gold it takes to produce a commodity for the farmer, increasing potential profits. Fertilizer in particular was almost never worth using (unless you just didn't care about gold at all) and got the most adjustment.


PRODUCTION CHANGES
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* There is now a weekly quest you can do to help out a production facility!
- You can only do this quest once per RL week, and only for one facility. i.e. if I do the weekly quest for the Clothier, I can't do the Tannery's or Lumber Mill's.
- It resets on Sunday GMT. You can check COOLDOWNS QUESTS to see the exact timing.
- Only citizens of that facility's city can undertake the quest. Talk to the named NPC inside the facility to begin it.
- Do note that this quest is more or less exactly the same for all facilities/cities. We may include some variation in the future, but it was too much work for this release.
- Completion of the quest will reward the player with some gold and a commodity ticket. A commodity ticket can be taken to the city warehouse and exchanged for 15 of a commodity of your choice (except stone) using WAREHOUSE EXCHANGE TICKET FOR <comm>.
- There's also a credit milestone for completing it!
- Commodity tickets expire after 30 days, so don't hoard them!
* The completion of a weekly quest will cause the facility to instantly process the next 30 operations i.e. a TPI of 1 second for the next 30 operations. This is held in reserve as a 'Productivity' value on the info screen if there isn't 30 operations left in the queue.
* TPI has been changed. Rather than the time it takes to process 1 raw resource, it's now the time it takes to complete an entire single operation of raw->commodity. i.e. so 3 dough to 2 cookies is now a single TPI tick, instead of 3.
* Facility taxes are now applied per TPI operation. -Technically- this is how it worked before, but per the above change the way TPI works has been worked.
* TPI and raw:comm ratios have been changed for all levels of all facilities.
* Facility operations now work on a round-robin basis. Instead of processing an entire single order all at once, the facility will work down the entire queue and do one operation from each before returning to the top of the queue again. Commodities are sent to the warehouse as they are finished.
* Due to the above, the warehouse no longer charges a fee for holding a commodity if it's holding 50 or less of it for you.
* Due to this new round-robin method, orders by the same person will now be consolidated. i.e. if you submit 400 hemp, then later 300 hemp, it'll be consolidated into the original 400 hemp order instead of adding a new queue entry.
* Apprentices have been reworked. Instead of a boost to TPI, they instead allow a single parallel operation per apprentice. Apprentice parallel operations are 50% slower than the main operation. This works 'smartly' in that the main full-speed operation will overtake an apprentice's half-speed operation when it has finished its current item.
* Commodity costs for building and upgrading production facilities have been removed. Commodity refunds will be handed out to cities sometime soon. Before you go too crazy using the city's gold to upgrade everything to max, please remember you'll want to keep at least 15 million in reserve so you can build at least level 1 of the three facilities Mining will introduce. Note: The upkeep costs are still in place.


Pricing thoughts
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Some super quick thoughts for cities on how to price things, using cloth from a single farm as an example:
- A single farm can produce about 550 cloth (with a level 3 clothier) per Aetolia year.
- It might cost a farmer about 8gp per cloth from pure Farming costs - actual cost per cloth should be lower than this but I'm taking a potentially worst case scenario. 8*550 = 4400gp cost to the farmer. I'm purposefully excluding the costs of obtaining Farming/a farm, and also the cost of a shed since it's a one-off.
- NPC comm shops sell cloth at about 75-110gp. We'll set the city to sell at 75 to keep things highly competitive.
- Set the city to buy cloth at 60gp. 60*550 = 33000 gross profit for the farmer.
- Set the facility to charge a tax of 250gp per operation. Level 3 clothier = 10 cloth per operation, so 25gp per cloth. This works out to be about 55 operations, so 13750 tax to the farmer.
- 33000 - 4400 - 13750 = 14850 net profit for the farmer.
- City is gaining a profit of 40gp per cloth (buying at 60, selling at 75, taxing for 25) so 22000 gold profit for the city.

This is of course a perfect theotrical example that assumes the demand is there to buy that 550 cloth per farm per Aetolian year. Don't use my numbers at face value, it's just a quick thought experiment!

Penned by my hand on Falsday, the 3rd of Midsummer, in the year 488 MA.
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