Lo-Fi Games

I'm sure we've all seen them growing. Companies that produce a lot of crops use pesticides to get rid of them, but seeing as how we don't have access to them, we would need to pick them out one by one.

Instead of people assigned to farms just standing around while they're not harvesting or putting water in, they would comb through the crop and make sure they are not only growing properly, but making sure there are no weeds that might hinder the crop's ability to grow. One check a day would be enough.

If that were the case I'd like to see a lot more fleshed out around it before implementation. Otherwise it could be a lot of tedious micromanagement for what some might consider less than realistic mechanics.

Outside the game I have a lot of interest in agriculture, and I'm working on getting an agricultural forest going eventually (WHICH I WOULD LOVE TO SEE IN KENSHI!) so I know a fair bit about weeds. Also agro-forestry makes you look at the plants and other organisms in your plot a bit differently. Secondary forest-products are the bulk of your produce in an agricultural forest. Anyway, what I'm trying to say in a roundabout way is that a significant number of "weeds" in a garden are actually medicinal. Still a significant number of those "weeds" are also hyperaccumulators of contaminants in the soil that would otherwise be degrading your produce, and by accumulating those contaminants in the "weeds" vegetation instead you are able to remediate the soil of that contamination.

I guess my TL;DR point is, the weeds in our gardens are often beneficial and it's primarily an aesthetic that we focus so much on their removal. Unless the weed is actually competing for sunlight, or its roots go so deep and it's so thirsty that it competes for water, the weed will not degrade your produce and in some circumstances would enhance it by at least protecting the soil from evaporation.

Some of those other changes, however, that I could see being implemented with this is if maybe herbalism might be added and a character with the herbalism skill might be able to make salves or poultices that enhance healing somehow, or perhaps there could be a variety of "weeds" that invade with more rarer varieties having more sought after properties. An herb that makes your squaddies not feel pain might make them fight with fewer penalties for their wounds, for example.

If that's an idea the community and the Kenshi team are interested in, the herbalism skill might also be used to selectively weed, and perhaps over time you might be able to weed out the inferior plants and end up with a plot of 100 of those rare plants that make you feel no pain.

Just some thoughts on balancing it out.

Off the top of my head some of those other herbs might have effects like:

- lower metabolism: hunger slows down a fair bit, but so does running speed and dexterity. -1 to each.
- poison: a salve can be added to a blade to cause poison damage. Maybe also to food? For the rogues....
- poison (knockout): each successive hit with this poison raises KO point by 20 while under effect.
- slow bleeding: a poultice that drops the bleeding rate when used on a wound.