Yes, I know I am normally of the “get the basics working before adding bells and whistles” school of game design, but I had this idea that could make good use of silk…
And while yes, it’s sort of teasing (and if considered at all probably could go waaaaaaay down the priority list), it might be something to add!
Yay and A Mulberry Tree. The tree would grow 1 leaf every 8 hours and 1 mulberry every 24 hours … when the tree has 3 leaves you can add a silk worm to the tree. The silk worm will eat 2 leaves per day and you can add more worms to the tree if they have enough leaves to eat … add too many silk worms to fast and tree dies as well as the worms. Every 7 days you will get 1 silk cocoon and 1 worm or something like that .
Well, yes…you’d have to have a mulberry. Not sure about the leaf part (the graphics/animation would be kind of fussy with all the growing and eating) but the harvest rate sounds about right.
Might be able to do a more simplified version, where the tree can support x number of worms (like a field takes a set number of seeds), and weekly you can harvest them as cocoons, with a random chance of a new worm. I would say unless you get quite a bit of thread from each, the yield of cocoons would have to be 50% and better to make it at all feasible.
Now, mulberries are good eating and brewing, so if you combine the functionality of a fruit tree and a field, that would be really cool, but I think it would be way unbalanced and overpowered even though it would be producing potentially expensive/coveted items.