Bio Engineer Archive
Thread: harvesting
I'm not very happy withthe new ruleson harvesting. now that everyone can harvest, the entire Ranger profession is becoming useless:
1. Increased supply of hides/meat/bones(HMB) will decrease the price as demand will not be that high.
2. The only people who will need more HMB are the rangers because the amount of raw supplies needed have been increased.
3. Soloing as a ranger is really useless now as we can only harvest 60% of what we used to. I used to easily harvest 60 units of meat from a tortur bull. now max out at 37. Totally kills soloing.
I have no idea how rangers make money... especially now.
with the lowered harvesting, is it time again to bring up the idea of rangers making organic harvesters(traps) that eat maintenance, take lots, and farm hide/meat/ or bone for you?
personally, im getting tired of hunting 4-5 hours for 1k of an organic(herbivore meat and avian meat is all i hunt now)
i still have 10k bone and 7k hide from the baz nitch craze, so i can make alot of camps still, but when that runs out, each htfb is going to representhalf anhour of hunting at least i fear
The harvesting issue aside, I'm all in favor of Organic Harvester Traps!
When artisans can rake in 7k x each Medium Harvester in resources a day, all while offline, but we have to spend our entire play session just to get 2k (on a good day!) of one resource... I think it is way overdue that Rangers get some Organics Traps akin to artisan personal harvesters.
Why not just get a schematic and certification at Trapping II or III for one Organics Trap that can be used to "extract" all three types of creature organics.
We would get an ability to Track Migrations (survey) so we could find prime spots to place our traps and then bait the traps with meat or flora (maintainance).
Does this make sense to anyone else?!
"The harvesting issue aside, I'm all in favor of Organic Harvester Traps!"
- I recall hearing that Creature Harvesters in the form of Farms existing at one point during the Beta.
- They were removed for some reason or another, probably because they interfered with the Scout profession.
- But, the idea of Ranger traps that harvest (rather than an Artisan created harvester) sounds reasonable. 
The only possible realistic animal harvester I can think of is a weir or a fish box.
Weirs are Native American fish traps made by putting a couple hundred stakes into shallow water in a pattern that is easy for fish to enter but too difficult for them to exit. These were very effective.
Fish boxes look like lobster crates and can be placed in small waterfalls. They catch usually brook-sized fish like trout.
Of course, sine nets are weighted nets that are cast into the water and drop to the bottom. Then you wait for fish to come in and start gobbling up the stuff kicked up into the water by the net dropping onto the bottom of the lake or sea. Then you snatch the net up and catch the fish.
I can't really picture an animal harvester. Static traps each catch one animal. Once an animal is caught alive it usually makes a noise or strugglesand keeps away all others. If an animal is killed its scent and sight usually ward off others of its species, and carrion animals are an issue.
The only 'harvestable' type trap I can recall ever reading about or imagine is somewhat cruel. It's deep trenches or tiger pits pre-dug so that hunters can make animals flee into the traps. Indians would force buffalo off cliffs if they could. No doubt ancient man did this with Wooly Mammoths and other herd animals as well.
Also, if you're starving, go into the center of a field and carefully dig a whole that is wider at the base than the top, like a vase:
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/___\
Then you wait a bit, then start at edge of the field and make plenty of noise as you make concentric circles growing ever tighter around the hole trap until you reach it. Use a stick to kill all the animals you catch inside.
Besides fishing harvesters, in which the fish have NO IDEA they're even in trouble, I can't really think of any feasible animal harvesters.
Again, if they restored harvests to normal, I never had enough getting the harvests I needed.
-- YP
I think everything wasgood until they cut our f***ing harvest by 50%.
Now I'm broke.
If this was to fix the economic problems by the increase in scout harvests through grouping, I wish they would have just kept harvests where they were to see if the grouped harvest really flooded the markets or not.
Personally, I've noticed a decrease in hide, bone and meat, and I've been succesfully charging double my usual prices.
Too bad, though, since I'm the one who used to get all the herbivore meat for stims, and have extra hides to sell. Now I can just get enough for our PAs medics.
-- YP
"but I don't want the harvesting of hides, meat, and bone to become devalued by harvestors."
- Agreed of course. If they were to add harvester traps, the entire hides/meat/bone market would have to be re-evaluated to ensure that there was enough demand for the increased supply.
- However... Perhaps if the harvester traps had a very small hopper size, and had to be checked on a regular basis, it might be feasible to implement them.
- As well, the traps would have to be spaced very far apart (to stop the inevitable "harvester city" that occurs around the higher mineral concentrations).
- With these constraints, it might be possible to limit mass harvesting to the dedicated few, without clogging the market with mass numbers of resources.
If the Harvester Traps are aquired very high up the Advanced Trapping branch (Trapping IV even!), there will be so few people able to make and use them thatI don't see how there would be much of an increase in organics supply.
It's not like I am suggesting that, though Rangers can make them, anyone can use them as is the case with every other type of harvester. I want something that only a dedicated few will have access to so that we could actualy take a break from the resource hunt for abit and actually do something else. Don't we deserve alittle break from the grind once we get to that level?
I do think that they should have a very limited hopper size though, say 2000-4000? That would require that you check your traps at least once a day. With enough traps laid out, that could take up quite abit of time.
The fish traps are another good idea. Fish is such a hard item to find due to how long it takes to catch any reasonable amounts. Maybe fish traps could be placed alittle lower down on the trapping branch, say Advanced Trapping II?
"It's not like I am suggesting that, though Rangers can make them, anyone can use them as is the case with every other type of harvester."
- That is what I understood.
- The use of these traps should be limited to Rangers (just as the other traps are currently limited to our use only).
"very limited hopper size though, say 2000-4000"
- Agreed, nice choice. Now the question is how fast would the harvester reach that limit?
"Fish is such a hard item to find due to how long it takes to catch any reasonable amounts."
- My question is how valuable are fish at the moment? Are the recipes requiring fish uber (so to speak)?
- If so, what would an increase in the fish supply do to the food market?
- I don't know enough about the use of fish to make an accurate determination. 
I honestly don't really know too many receipes and schematics that use fish. I would imagine that there are a few Chef dishes that require seafood and one of the petstims requires about 20 units as well. Other than that, I dont know.
I do know that since I live on an oasis and do alot of fishing, I can only haul in about 100 units an hour. Thats a **edit** long time to be fishing for so little yeild.
As for the harvester trap effeciancy, I would suggest a 2 - 2.5kph? Roughly the same as a personal harvester. I would also suggest that high density areas be very rare, about the same rate density as Tatooinian Wind and Water (highest I've seen was 64% wind)