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Date & Time: Sept 7 4:03 AM Eastern
Frequency: weekly
World name: Excalibur
Character name: Deveryn Ev'liarsh
Area and coordinates: Island Sanctuary
Steps:
1. The cropland timer appears to be 48 hours for all crops.
2. I've been regularly harvesting my crops on that schedule: Wednesday, Friday, Sunday
3. I was expecting to harvest Tuesday night around 8:45 PM and I saw nothing
4. 4:00AM Wednesday, my crops are ready, so it seems the timer for the blossom phase reset.
The entire timer system for crops and animals are bad enough that they barely support even rounding of numbers (depending on the region, the daily cycle will either be at a nice time that aligns with your playtime, or waste a lot of time). And they also are relatively bad in its base design. Why is it that the workshop can effectively work hourly, while all other things rely on a daily timer instead? With an hourly cycle you can still just trigger all the things that need to be checked. And its not even that the entire island needs to be checked. Since well ahead in time you already know when the next action is going to happen. You can precalculate the time at which a recalc is needed (and in that also define the next timestamp). There is a lot of optimization possible here. Yet by using a fixed daily time, its just a lot of wasted opportunity.
And before you think, its a lot of calculating. The same calculations otherwise would be done whenever the player joins the island again. Only the moment of calculating is shifted. And these can still take the same approach, but dont. If you know a crop is being serviced, it doesnt matter if you join 100h after, you can calculate back those entire 100h and know exactly how many replants would have taken place, and what the timer is on them now. As it doesnt happen, its very easy (and logical) to assume it is being checked once daily. Note that this can also be even more efficient since it only needs to load this info upon loading the island.
If crops and animals would be checked each hour, even if there was a bug, they would have far less impact. the 48h timer then doesnt become 72h when using the services (an unneeded 50% increase), but only 49h (just 2% which is still worth it for the convenience). Which then could easily have been resolved by setting crop times to 47h (the 1h on that would also be nice for manual gathering as it keeps the gathering moment around the same time). If this was done, many people wouldnt even complain about the bug existing as they would barely even notice its effect (only once per 48 days they would miss out a crop cycle).
I realy hope they are going to bring out a big patch to resolve this mess.