Table of Contents
Background
Was watching https://youtu.be/kb_t-sVVzF0 and got baited into the romance of farming again, and needed to distract myself from that since doing anything irl is too much effort.
One particular stand-out idea he mentions is that he runs an oil cartel with five of his fellow farmers - they grow sunflowers, they own a single oil press on a trailer between them, one of them handles selling and delivering the oil from that to a local potato chip (crisp) factory, and someone handles buying the waste oil from that and selling it back to the farmers, who then use it in their tractors etc. This reminded me of factory games.
Videogame shit
So casual farming games are cool (ex. Stardew Valley), and casual factory games are cool (ex. Satisfactory). The male fantasy of owning land and being able to do whatever the fuck you want with it, I don't know.
Hell, there's probably examples of Minecraft mods that already cover a suitably sandboxy do-whatever-the-fuck-you-want environment with farming and engineering, and people probably love it, because why wouldn't they.
Setting
Colourful low-poly 3d world, perhaps alien with made-up flora and fauna that are "close enough" to archetypes like cow/pig/poultry/sunflower/apple tree etc. Simulation that applies some level of natural pressures on the environment - predation, pollination, plants crowding each other out, grazing, watering (but please no high-effort free-space fluid sims). Relatively isolationist feel - maybe you have a moderately large island to work with, and your only NPC interaction is with a boat that periodically comes to trade with you? Small-scale multiplayer by default though - think community Minecraft servers.
Ecosystem should be fairly stable and resilient in the absence of player input, it shouldn't go full heat death if left alone for a month, it should represent something that existed for centuries before the player arrived and would happily continue for centuries if undisturbed. However, player input should be able to cause rippling effects with exciting results - "keeping alive what you want alive and killing what you want dead" should cause all sorts of wonderful chaos that comes with cultivation - predator populations being mismatched, overbreeding and extinction, soil depletion and erosion, fertilizer runoff pollution and algal blooms, etc. etc. etc. Animal domestication should be in, and be one angle of automation - happy critters that eat and shit and maybe do other desirable things like chase away pests or rodents, or sort through piles of items. Mechanical automation, of course, should also be included. Vehicles too. At lower tech levels it should have a reasonable degree of hand-feeding that perhaps harmonizes with farming processes rather than acting as something completely divorced from that. It should of course also have an Industry 4.0 endgame where you go full post-scarcity and uninstall or leave it as a screensaver.
The world should also be large enough to have a half-assed exploration component where you can roam around the untamed reaches and find cool shit even if you're burning your corner of the Amazon back at home base. Maybe some nice plains for joyriding too, cars or animals, with or without friends.
Implementation thoughts
Sim should lean towards 2d data structures as much as possible for simplicity - biosphere could be represented as a series of textures and leave open the possibility of GPU acceleration.
World doesn't need much if anything in the way of "true" 3D anyway, anything that is really desired can be glued on without dependence on the main biosphere sim. Main playable area could be heightmap geometry and the extent of player terraforming could be smoothing and digging channels (distinct from placing objects like concrete slabs, barns, machines, walkways etc.)
Might be worth exploring the potential of isometric viewport - might be cute to log into your community server on a mobile client or whatever. I'm still partial to "Satisfactory demake" vibes though, there's just something fun about running around in first/third person.