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This was already requested before on the weekly stream, and Mod Kieran explained that patches already have 250+ states that they can be in based on the plant type, it's growth stage, whether it is diseased or not at that particular stage, etc... He went on to say that implementing this would introduce too many states for the engine to handle and that it's not possible to do
Yep, they use something we call multilocs. Each piece of scenery is a loc (location). The multi side allows us to change it to upto 256 different locs based upon a player variable - allowing us to change its options and model for different players, despite being part of the main world :).
So if you think of say... allotment patches and the amount of different crops, diseased, dead and watered states - we are very close to 256 already. (Weeds also count!). Adding compost states would quadruple the amount (to support no compost, compost, super and ultra).