I have a mushroom farm tunnel that is currently 8 blocks wide and 200 blocks long.
The crops only grow if you're less than 124 blocks (I think?) away from them, due to the viewing distance and chunk-loading limitations. This is bad for me, because even though I've built a city on top of my mushroom tunnel, I have to stay within the city in order for my mushrooms to grow. This is pointless, because I've already built a city here. I need to travel away from the mushrooms in order to build things, but they won't grow if I do that... so I either don't build things, and my mushrooms grow, or I build things, and they don't grow.
This could be fixed: When re-entering the 124-block zone of your crops, the game could just calculate the time you've been away from the zone, and instantly grow your crops accordingly.
I hate making a farm somewhere, only to have it rendered useless because I have to go build something.
This is actually a pretty reasonable idea. It doesn't seem logical that crops shouldn't grow if you're not nearby - perhaps something to be fixed in an update, although I fear that hardware limitations might stand in the way.
I don't really think hardware limitations would matter. The game would just need to store a value or two, and that would be all. I don't think this was ever changed in the PC version, probably because everyone uses mods and Creative Mode, so there's not really a need for growing crops, especially a lot of them =\ I play to survive, mostly, so I love growing crops.
But yeah, all the game would have to do is look at you as soon as you leave the radius of your crops, then look at you again when you come back within the radius, and calculate how much in-game time has passed between those two points. To make it easier, if you have lots of crops near close to each other (such as my mushroom tunnel), all of the crops should count as one single crop, that way the game would only have to store one value for the whole of the crops: the in-game time and "date" (a number that would reset once every certain number of days, in order to avoid an end-game where the game runs out of date values) of when you leave the radius.
The crops only grow if you're less than 124 blocks (I think?) away from them, due to the viewing distance and chunk-loading limitations. This is bad for me, because even though I've built a city on top of my mushroom tunnel, I have to stay within the city in order for my mushrooms to grow. This is pointless, because I've already built a city here. I need to travel away from the mushrooms in order to build things, but they won't grow if I do that... so I either don't build things, and my mushrooms grow, or I build things, and they don't grow.
This could be fixed: When re-entering the 124-block zone of your crops, the game could just calculate the time you've been away from the zone, and instantly grow your crops accordingly.
I hate making a farm somewhere, only to have it rendered useless because I have to go build something.
Thoughts?
I don't really think hardware limitations would matter. The game would just need to store a value or two, and that would be all. I don't think this was ever changed in the PC version, probably because everyone uses mods and Creative Mode, so there's not really a need for growing crops, especially a lot of them =\ I play to survive, mostly, so I love growing crops.
But yeah, all the game would have to do is look at you as soon as you leave the radius of your crops, then look at you again when you come back within the radius, and calculate how much in-game time has passed between those two points. To make it easier, if you have lots of crops near close to each other (such as my mushroom tunnel), all of the crops should count as one single crop, that way the game would only have to store one value for the whole of the crops: the in-game time and "date" (a number that would reset once every certain number of days, in order to avoid an end-game where the game runs out of date values) of when you leave the radius.