Rarity of resources

[Chrondeath]

Rarity of resources

It's possible that this is already planned to be addressed in future development, but I figured I'd share my view while it's early.

I feel like there's a lack of....things to acquire that have value, or feel like they have value based on the effort to acquire them. The lack of desirable things reduces or removes my motivation to check the possible Ranch Exchange trades, look for crates, or go exploring.

When I say "resources", I'm mostly talking about food items and slimes. For food, there's a strong motivation to discover new items, but once you've found a single instance of a crop or chicken breed it's...not trivial, but not difficult (and certainly easier than finding them through exploration) to produce as many of them as you need from your farm. My first Mint Mango, for example, might take a while to find, but once I've found one I can plant several trees and produce as many of them as I need. It's like all the difficulty is in unlocking the item, and once it's unlocked it's no more or less valuable than any other food item.

Slimes are more valuable, not being reproducible at the farm, but most of them (pond slimes are the only one I don't have my fill of yet) are, once you reach an area where they live, not too difficult to acquire as many as you need. One or two trips per slime type has been sufficient to set my farm up to the point where I feel like I'm producing more of their plorts than the market can absorb (and I'm not even using largos).

Because of this, whenever I check the offered ranch exchange trade or find a crate, there's not really anything it could offer me that would motivate me to care about it. The main effort cost of resources on the ranch is the time spent picking them up and schlepping them around, so rewards from a trade or a crate or located in the wild aren't any more attractive than producing the same thing on my ranch.

I feel like there should be some kind of item that I want to acquire that I can't produce more easily myself. "Want to acquire" is key here--golden plorts fit the "rare" quality, but since there's nothing to do with them other than convert them to money, and money is easier to produce at the ranch, they're not really much of a motivator.

Roostros come the closest to what I'm thinking of, I think. They're not incredibly difficult to come by, but because they eventually expire, they're necessary for chicken production, and they only spawn rarely, I value each of the ones that I get...at least until I have enough of them stashed away in a silo to cover things if I happen to get a long enough run of non-roostro hatches.

I'm trying to think of other things that would give me the same feeling of value. Maybe if food items had a low chance to spawn as a special, upgraded version ("Golden Carrot?") that had some kind of desirable effect on slimes?

Alternatively, if there were things that had to go through some kind of multi-step process to produce, acquiring those directly from exploration or rewards could also be desirable. (I suppose plorts might quality, but I seem to already have plorts coming out of my ears, and if I wanted more it's not very difficult to scale up production).

Now, it could be that the goal is to eventually have enough new areas to explore that just collecting samples is enough to sustain the whole game, and once you've collected enough of everything you're effectively done...but that would be kind of at odds with the sandbox nature of the ranch, and the presence of the exchange and the crates suggests that I'm supposed to want what's in them.

[FarmerYuuma]

I understand what you mean and I totally agree with you.
On the other hand, I'm not sure how to help with this, which is kind of frustrating.