Welcome back to yet another episode in our Modding Mondays series!
It’s already been a month since we last featured a popular fan-made mod here.
Today, we have the pleasure of talking about the Vegetable and Poultry Farms mod from creator Batyushki, whom you may remember from the Security mod we shared not so long ago.
Immersion is an important part of gaming: feeling like you’re part of the world and, to an extent, being able to engage in role-playing.
One way to achieve a greater level of immersion is by adding gameplay features that feel relevant without bloating what’s already in place. With Vegetable and Poultry Farms, Batyushki had two goals in mind: to add variety and a more realistic food supply for villages.
This was one of the first mods that I designed. I am a hobby farmer in real life and wanted to add some basic foods to the game. The mod has been through many versions and I’ve slowly improved and simplified it over time
-Batyushki
Agriculture and farming in the Medieval age were critically important: most peasants worked the land and played a key role in the production chain.
This mod introduces two major gameplay additions to Foundation. The first one, a poultry farm, is unlocked once you get 10 villagers. Once it has been built, you will be spawn chickens and geese (they respawn every two weeks).
Chickens produce eggs and poultry. The former is faster, but trades for less gold. On the other hand, geese, duck ponds and dovecotes produce only poultry. You want to keep that in mind once you start building your new poultry farms!
Additionally—and this is a nice touch—you collect dung from your animals using the dung heap. You can then turn dung into compost to grow your vegetables. The circle of life!
The other major inclusion from Batyushki’s mod are the vegetable farms. Unlocked once you get 20 villagers, you can build them according to your own taste just like wheat farms (by snapping together building parts in free-form) or use the simple, fixed farms.
The free-form farm requires both field workers and a processing worker, but produces more per acre of land than the simple field farms. Once you build a free-form farm you need to select which vegetable to grow, and paint the crop field.
Here’s a list of available vegetables:
- Beets
- Cabbage
- Beans
- Broccoli
Vegetables require compost (see above) and water to grow. Once you have vegetables ready for trade and stocked in a granary, you can add them to the vegetable cart, which acts as a market tender.
Creating the Vegetable and Poultry farm mod proved to be quite challenging. With a lot of hard work and the help of a fellow modder, Batyushki was able to see its completion:
One challenge with the mod was how to make the chickens and geese move. I knew this was technically possible but I didn’t know how to go about it. A fellow modder, Minotorious, created code that other modders can use to do simple movement animations. So in the end I didn’t have to solve the problem myself but was able to leverage the code Minotorious developed. I’m looking forward to many more collaborations with other modders going forward.
-Batyushki
We are always humbled to see such amazing content created for Foundation. The modding community is truly astonishing and we know it’s only going to get better as the game further evolves.