Instanced or Mini-Community Gardening Plots

Hi all. Today I was thinking about Gardening. Currently it requires a house, either personal or free company. And with free company, you need to trust that no one else will touch your crops (including that random newbie that got invited a day ago). Private housing has more control, and free company housing allows people to work together. There are pros and cons to each, but at the end of the day, both options require a house. And this is definitely not something everyone has access too.

Gardening is an interesting little "mini-game" of its own, and also offers some very nice products. The problem with it is that it it limited to the number of households on the server. Hence, the idea of instanced gardening plots. There are several ways this could be set up, but here are some of my thoughts.

Small Plot - This plot is large enough to hold 2 Large garden boxes.
Medium Plot - This plot is large enough to hold 4 Large garden boxes.
Large Plot - This plot is large enough to hold 8 Large garden boxes.

Plot Set Up

4 Small Plots would be contained in a single Gardening Instance. For Example:
A | A || B | B
C | C || D | D

2 Medium Plots would be contained in a single Gardening Instance. For Example:
A | A || B | B
A | A || B | B

1 Large Plot would be contained in a single Gardening Instance. For Example:

A | A || A | A
A | A || A | A

Customization

Potential options for customization:
- Garden Boxes (No Box, Wood Box, Stone Box, Porcelain Box, etc. Dyable?)
- Open Terrain [around plots] (Grassy Meadow, Flower Field, Forest Clearing, Desert Irrigation, Fire-Cluster Heated Ice Beds)
- Green House (Option to change patterns on glass, perhaps based on main city states [or the furniture set themes. Carbuncle Green House anyone?]. Construct frame from Wood/Metal/Stone/etc. Change Glass-tint and door style single/double/arched/etc.)
- Arboretum (Combining aspects of Open Terrain and Greenhouse. Your greenhouse would have options around the inner edges, such as rose bushes, vines, mixed flowers, trees, etc. These could also be based on dungeons that cater to plant growth or areas with interesting or unique flora.)

Other Potential Things to Consider

- Garden Boxes / Greenhouses / Arboretums that take up 2, 4, or 8 full slots.
- Linking Small/Medium Plots by Terrain Choice (If you pick Forest Clearing, only other Forest Clearing plots will be in your instance.)
- Various Scarecrows/Remove Scarecrow (Does not give extra slot.)
- Share Plots with 2-3 other players.

Combination Examples

- Flower Field (Medium), Arboretum (St. Mocianne's Arboretum), No Box
- Forest Clearing (Large), Porcelain Box x 2, Stone Box x2, Wood Box x2, Porcelain Box (Metalic Gold) x2

Thoughts? Ideas? What else could we utilize? What else would you like to see?

you can bypass the 1000 limit by editing the original post.

on to the topic. it is interesting to say the least though having this much to do. the servers would most likely have to be upgraded to accommodate the new area and programming to and from. would it be like the workshops where we go to the door and select the garden? would it be a special fence we go through in the yard? just not sure how it can be implemented that the servers can still be stable in its current form. if they figure out if it can be done or not. it would free up for people for sure.

Thank you for the character limit tip.

As for the servers, I think of them very much like Free Company rooms, something the game is, technically, supposedly able to have for every single member in a FC, so that's the potential of hundreds of good sized rooms in each FC house. The instanced aspect of it would be such that the "zone" would only have to render in and be in use when 1 of the people is using it. Otherwise it is only utilizing the clock functions for growth of the plants.

I suspect, even with customization, these areas would be much less server-intensive than our FC rooms are. It should be much less server strain to enter a garden than it would be to enter a FC room with lots of items/moving furniture pieces/animations/etc. The intent is to make it as server-friendly as possible, while still opening up gardening to the entire player base, on their own terms.

I do actually love the idea of a special gate that we can enter through. One in each main area/terrain theme. I'd also expect there to be a teleport to garden, like you can teleport to your FC house. But a special gate would be very cool to start it off. It's definitely a separate area, that would not tax the serves much at all when no one is in them. If you own a large garden, you're in, you do your things, you're out. As soon as you're out, the only thing the game is doing is tracking your pants, not displaying the actual garden. One of the reasons the residential districts take up so much of the servers is because they are constantly running and constantly animating and maintaining everything in every single ward, in every single city.

At the end of the day, FFXIV seems to be on the path towards growth still. Which is a very good thing, but will also mean upgrading and adding more servers will be a necessity as time goes on and more and more is added. The idea of instanced gardens is to create something that is easier on the servers so that we can have it sooner rather than later. XD

I actually wouldn't mind this. We only have a small FC plot at the moment, so we can only have a max of 8 gardening slots, and I want to try to figure out the cross breeding stuff for the Blood Pepper (Rumoured to be from cross breeding/used in wind up ifrit minion), and I'm pretty paranoid about using the garden for my own stuff due to past events (Originally breeding for thavnarian onions and a newbie 'picked them for me' and he didn't log in for three weeks before I got them back)