Interactive gardens in housing

CallmeFishmeal

Hello all,

It's time again that I bring up my desire for ZOS to add interactive gardens for our houses, and my ideas of how to make it work. I'd love for everyone to add their thoughts as well so I can update this post again in the future with new and updated ideas.

I think adding a small garden patch so players can plant a few alchemy reagents, food ingredients and showy flowers will have a huge beneficial impact to the game. I'm not talking about a huge garden that will kill overland harvesting, just something like you get out of a hireling email with an added cooldown. I think there should be different rules/cooldowns/requirements for each "category" of things you are able to plant in these gardens. For example:

The garden itself-
Because some houses do not have yards, there can be a "garden bed" "flower bed" furniture plan for players to craft and place in their homes. Of course this would have to be a small patch just big enough for 2 or 3 seeds and not take us much room for smaller houses. There can even be "small" "med" and "large" sizes. Some of the larger houses with big yards may already have a predetermined garden spot. Players have the option to let visitors harvest also or disable others harvesting.

Alchemy Reagents-
Players have a small chance to obtain a seed from harvesting overland nodes. A corn flower seed may drop when harvesting a corn flower node, columbine seed with columbine and so on. These seeds can either be sold in guild stores or be planted in any home with a garden. Alchemy reagents will have the longest cooldown, allowing players to only harvest once every 24 hours or so. The seed is good up to 3-5 harvests before it dies out.

Food ingredients-
Because most ingredients are less valuable, growing ingredients is a bit more relaxed. Players can plant seeds like tomatoes, bananas, grapes, greens, corn, rye, wheat, ect, which will grow that ingredient and can be harvest more frequently. This will be perfect for those who may not have play but like doing daily writs, being able to easily port to your house and harvest a corn you need for your writ. Ingredients can be harvested once ever 8-12 hours or so.

Showy flowers-
These are seeds of flowers shown all throughout Tamriel that may not be obtainable through the luxury vendor, achievement furniture or any other means. (Crown store opportunities come'o'knocking.)

Additional skill lines-
With addition to gardens comes additional non combat skills or CP points. Passives may include reduction of total growth times, increased harvests, increased chance for seeds to drop and more!

I'd like to hear what you think about gardens in ESO, and what you would like to add or do differently.

Carcamongus

Your houses are excellent and you bring up ideas for my favorite category: the conservatory.

We need planters and assorted garden beds, as you suggested. I usually choose to buy houses that come with water and space for a garden, but I'd like to be able to add plants to any properties. I make do with those Summerset hedges, but it just isn't the same as real soil. Hell, I wouldn't complain if we could customize the bodies of water as well, for instance by buying ponds or small lakes. We should have more waterfalls as well.

Some of my favorite trees are the willows, since they're beautiful and their foliage is dense. However, they can only be bought from the crown store and are limited to two or three varieties. We need more large trees of the sort that block the sun.

More mushrooms. It might be a long while before we get anywhere near the Shivering Isles, but it wouldn't hurt if devs released a bit of that place's flora.

Why be limited to visuals? How about the ability to add sounds to the garden, such as cicadas, crickets, birds, etc?

I'd love to be able to hide a few velociraptors beneath tall grass. For some reason, though, I think this will never come to be.

CallmeFishmeal

Carcamongus wrote: »

Your houses are excellent and you bring up ideas for my favorite category: the conservatory.

We need planters and assorted garden beds, as you suggested. I usually choose to buy houses that come with water and space for a garden, but I'd like to be able to add plants to any properties. I make do with those Summerset hedges, but it just isn't the same as real soil. Hell, I wouldn't complain if we could customize the bodies of water as well, for instance by buying ponds or small lakes. We should have more waterfalls as well.

Some of my favorite trees are the willows, since they're beautiful and their foliage is dense. However, they can only be bought from the crown store and are limited to two or three varieties. We need more large trees of the sort that block the sun.

More mushrooms. It might be a long while before we get anywhere near the Shivering Isles, but it wouldn't hurt if devs released a bit of that place's flora.

Why be limited to visuals? How about the ability to add sounds to the garden, such as cicadas, crickets, birds, etc?

I'd love to be able to hide a few velociraptors beneath tall grass. For some reason, though, I think this will never come to be.

I really love your ideas about adding sounds to the garden, and you have an excellent point about buying small ponds! Since we now have the hourglass that turns your house from day/night, we can have cicada sounds playing in our nighttime garden and bird songs during the day. Adding small ponds could someday open the idea up for adding a fishing hole in houses. Fantastic ideas, thanks for sharing.

FeedbackOnly

Just a few nodes to farm/grow each day would be nice

I_killed_Vivec

Psst... wanna buy some columbine seeds? Don't miss out, every garden should have them!

WiseSky

I would love this idea

amapola76

Love it. I would definitely spend both money and farming time in pursuit of these items.

I particularly love the ideas of seeds dropping rarely dropping from farmed items. This, plus the cooldown time, should keep things from affecting the economy too much, and pursuing seeds would give older/endgame players who don't care about PVP something else to do in the world. (Me, it's me.)

Housing guilds would also have new options for member events (garden tours/contests could be fun).

The only tiny, tiny quibble I have is that while I would also love interior garden planters, I'm having trouble picturing containers that would hold 2-3 seeds that would be harmonious and aesthetically pleasing. As someone who gardens extensively (indoors and outdoors) IRL, I'm picturing something more like a smaller round pot that would hold one plant, and a slightly larger, but still interior-friendly raised square planter that could hold four plants. (Best case scenario: one of each for every racial and zone style.) But, you know, the ESO art department is talented, so I trust them to come up with something appropriate.

spartaxoxo

They originally said they were going to do this but then scrapped the idea for whatever reason.

Cireous

My Gardner house is literally Garden themed, but cannot grow a single thing, so... yes please.

ZOS_Icy

Greetings,

This thread has been moved to the Housing section, as it is better suited there.

Thank you for your understanding.

amapola76

You know, just saying, this hard line push to move things out of the General Discussion section over the last several months has all but killed my interest in the forums (which in turn minimizes my engagement with the game), and I don't seem to be the only one... there are folks I've seen on this forum for several years, who used to post daily, and whose names I never seem to see anymore. What is the trade off here? I can't imagine any benefit it's giving that would be worth discouraging interest in the game.

Araneae6537

amapola76 wrote: »

You know, just saying, this hard line push to move things out of the General Discussion section over the last several months has all but killed my interest in the forums (which in turn minimizes my engagement with the game), and I don't seem to be the only one... there are folks I've seen on this forum for several years, who used to post daily, and whose names I never seem to see anymore. What is the trade off here? I can't imagine any benefit it's giving that would be worth discouraging interest in the game.

Is it really a big deal to not be in general? I usually browse Recent Topics but frequently check out Housing for any threads there I may have missed. This is how most forums work, no? All that I have been a part of anyway.

amapola76

Araneae6537 wrote: »

amapola76 wrote: »

You know, just saying, this hard line push to move things out of the General Discussion section over the last several months has all but killed my interest in the forums (which in turn minimizes my engagement with the game), and I don't seem to be the only one... there are folks I've seen on this forum for several years, who used to post daily, and whose names I never seem to see anymore. What is the trade off here? I can't imagine any benefit it's giving that would be worth discouraging interest in the game.

Is it really a big deal to not be in general? I usually browse Recent Topics but frequently check out Housing for any threads there I may have missed. This is how most forums work, no? All that I have been a part of anyway.

Yes.

(1) Many threads are about more than one sub-topic. One original post can contain, or elicit responses, related to housing, costumes, pets, skills, and any number of other topics. It is simply more logical to put those threads in general rather than arbitrarily choosing one (often ill-chosen) sub-forum.

(2) I'm not going to spend time going back and forth to various subforums just in case someone posts something that is interesting to me, personally, on any given day. I'm just not. I'm going to check out the general forum and do a quick skim of subject lines to see what people are talking about, and if I don't see something that interests me there, I'm out. That's just how it is. This is a game, not my job. Which is fine, if ZOS doesn't care about forum engagement, which I strongly suspect has become the case the last year or so. And ever since this has been happening, I'm on the forums less and less at all, which as I said above, does actually affect my interest in the game in general. Which in turn has already made me less likely to buy crown packs, and is eventually going to affect my interest in continuing to be a subscriber. YMMV. But for me, that's just the way it is, and I know for a fact that I'm not the only one who feels that way.

amapola76

Case in point, by the way: this is a very interesting and creative post by OP, and in the old days, it would have had dozens of substantive responses, by now, not a mere five or six.

w002exp

I like the idea of farmable nodes that can be harvested once per day per account. I also like the way I've seen other MMO's approach it by allowing you to farm your friend's instances once per a day as well. This has been a HUGE problem with housing in ESO, which is that there is little incentive to visit the homes of your friends.

I would do the same for other types of materials as well so that with each visit you could grab a node with a handful of materials for each crafting discipline.