Documentation is fine, but behavior of sprayed water is a little confusing

[jefferyharrell]

I guess my question should start with this: Is the documentation currently up to date?

It says, among many other things, that "at stages 3 & 5" crops "consume 1 PK." Being kind of obsessive about things, I wondered whether that meant 1 PK was taken out of the soil during the growth cycle from stage 2 to stage 3 (and 4 to 5) or from stage 3 to stage 4 (and 5 to 6). So I started a new game, cheated myself a million bucks and set up an experiment. I sowed wheat on a field and used ALT-Y to force growth cycles, watching the numbers in the HUD.

During the cycle from stage 3 to 4, PK dropped by 1, just as expected, from PK = 4 to PK = 3. But no more PK was consumed at all; the crop went all the way to withered with PK = 3. No errors in the log file or anything.

Now, just to be clear: If the documentation is wrong, that's fine! No biggie, just wondering. I would actually strongly prefer that changes in the soil be a little unpredictable rather than totally deterministic; knowing for a fact exactly what I have to do to get an optimal harvest every time would get tedious, I think.

So I'm just asking to ask, really. Hope you take my question in the spirit in which it's intended.

Thanks so much for the mod. I adore it.

[jefferyharrell]

You can pretty much disregard everything I wrote before. There are two reasons why the observations I made yesterday were flawed.

First, I discovered that I had screwed up the installation of the mod into my map. I don't know exactly where I made the error, but I started fresh and re-installed the mod into a clean copy of my map and most of the strange things I was seeing went away. I suspect that I may have transposed two digits in an ID somewhere or something like that.

The other thing I discovered is that the way your documentation counts growth stages is off-by-one from the way they're counted by the Field Status mod. Field Status describes freshly sown (sowed?) crop as stage zero, then the first visible growth stage as stage 1 and so on, then the crops are harvestable in stages 4, 5 and 6, and in stage 7 they're withered. Your numbering calls the freshly sown crop stage 1, then 5–7 are harvestable, then 8 is withered. So the documentation is correct; I was just misinterpreting it.

Thank you again for this magnificent mod. The more time I spent trying to "debug" my problem tonight, the more I came to appreciate how elegant this mod really is under the hood.

Though I'm still a little stumped by the effect of sprayed water. By my reckoning, it seems like there's no way to use sprayed water to increase the soil moisture level by just one internal level, right? If you spray a cultivated or planted field with water, the moisture goes up by one level for water and one for the "dark texture" for a total of ~28%. If you plow a field then leave it overnight the moisture goes down by one level (assuming no other effects), but if you spray water then plow the moisture goes up by one level for the water layer and then down one level because the field is plowed, for a net change to the moisture of zero. But it's not possible to spray water on the field and combine it with any other actions in such a way that the total change to the moisture is just +14%, right? Am I doing the math right on that one?

[DeckerMMIV]

[..] your documentation counts growth stages is off-by-one from the way they're counted by the Field Status mod.

Actually it is GIANTS Software's own no-documentation which have this "problem", if I may be so bold to say so.

In their LUA-scripts, they subtract (or add) one to the value that is used when manipulating the foliage-layer's growth channels:
http://ls-mods.de/scriptDocumentation.php?lua_file=FSUtils - line 24, see comment.

As I see it, there are these "growth stages" for most fruits/crops, though some may differ slightly:

 Growth state| Script LUA | Map I3D : GE channels 4-7
-------------+------------+---------------------------
 nothing     |    n/a     |     0     [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ]
 seeded      |     0      |     1     [X] [ ] [ ] [ ]
 growth      |     1      |     2     [ ] [X] [ ] [ ]
 growth      |     2      |     3     [X] [X] [ ] [ ]
 growth      |     3      |     4     [ ] [ ] [X] [ ]
 harvestable |     4      |     5     [X] [ ] [X] [ ]
 harvestable |     5      |     6     [ ] [X] [X] [ ]
 harvestable |     6      |     7     [X] [X] [X] [ ]
 withered    |     7      |     8     [ ] [ ] [ ] [X]
 cutted      |     8      |     9     [X] [ ] [ ] [X]
 defoliaged  |     9      |    10     [ ] [X] [ ] [X]
 (unused)    |            |    11     [X] [X] [ ] [X]
 (unused)    |            |    12     [ ] [ ] [X] [X]
 (unused)    |            |    13     [X] [ ] [X] [X]
 (unused)    |            |    14     [ ] [X] [X] [X]
 (unused)    |            |    15     [X] [X] [X] [X]
-------------+------------+---------------------------

Why GIANTS Software decided to not represent the nothing - i.e. nothing seeded nor growing - with a value in their LUA scripts, is beyond me to comprehend. Maybe it was a design decision back then when Farming Simulator 2008 was initially created.

Regarding spraying water, then yes you are correct; it is not possible to get a 14% moisture increase when spraying water - as it produces both the "dark texture" (+14%) and an internal water-layer (+14%).

To only get that 14% moisture increase, you would need to spray liquid-fertilizer / herbicide / slurry (which makes that "dark texture"), or if available in the map; spread compost (which must then be untouched until next growth-cycle).