Talk:Tutorials/Crop farming

Created combination farming page
This is meant to combine the farming pages for Carrots, Potatoes, and Wheat, which have nearly identical mechanics and methods. I've also reorganized much of the info, and trimmed some graphics that were both superfluous and ugly, and some dubious farming methods. --Mental Mouse 11:24, 11 September 2013 (UTC)

What is this "points" business?
I'm heading off somewhere so I can't deal with it now, but the discussion of "points" in the growth rates is notably different from the previously known mechanics -- what version did it change in? --MentalMouse42 (talk) 13:59, 11 May 2014 (UTC)
 * There are two aspects here: the calculation of "points" and the use of that in determining the growth chance.
 * Looking through previous code versions, I don't see any evidence that the points calculation was ever different as far back as I can easily check. I see the description at this old revision roughly matches (although I suspect they messed up converting the code into pseudocode), for example, and in Special:PermanentLink/237025 the pseudocode matches the calculation of "points".
 * As for the use of the points, it looks like in 1.0.0 the use of these "points" was changed from a 1 in floor(100/points) chance to grow per tick (making the points be approximately the growth chance percentage) to the current 1 in floor(25/points)+1, and was otherwise that way as far back as I can easily check.
 * The current description was probably introduced in Special:PermanentLink/237073 (although since the image there was deleted I can only assume it was the same as File:Wheat Influence 2.png that replaced it) and seems based on an assumption that the growth chance is p×3 percent rather than either 1 in 100/p or 1 in 25/p+1. p×3 percent is a reasonable approximation for 1 in 25/p+1 over the possible range of p, for what that's worth.
 * As for the term "points", feel free to improve the terminology. As for the source, the tallying of "points" is at and then the formula "1 in floor( 25 / points + 1 )" comes from . I've also just checked that the code structure is the same in 14w19a. Anomie x (talk) 19:54, 11 May 2014 (UTC)
 * Well, if it's coming from source, then it's authoritative. But it is rather different from the adding up of percentages that was there originally (with the ugly and unmaintainable image of 9 squares).  Are you saying that you think that was actually an approximation of this scheme, rather than a different algorithm that changed between versions? --MentalMouse42 (talk) 00:50, 12 May 2014 (UTC)
 * That's what it looks like to me: like in the beta period people looked at the code and worked out that what I'm calling "points" was effectively the percent chance of growth, then later someone realized things changed (in 1.0.0) so crops grew about 3 times faster for hydrated fields but didn't know the details so they just multiplied the rates by 3. Anomie x (talk) 03:03, 12 May 2014 (UTC)
 * OK then, looks like you've brought the Wiki another nugget of "ground truth". --MentalMouse42 (talk) 03:41, 12 May 2014 (UTC)
 * Ah, one more thing. Is that floor(25/points)+1, or floor(25/(points+1))?  Since the points can't be zero, it's not obvious. --MentalMouse42 (talk) 03:56, 12 May 2014 (UTC)
 * floor(25/points)+1. Standard order of operations applies. Anomie x (talk) 10:27, 12 May 2014 (UTC)