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Dwarf Fortress => DF Suggestions => Topic started by: NW_Kohaku on January 27, 2011, 03:32:46 am

Title: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution
Post by: NW_Kohaku on January 27, 2011, 03:32:46 am

To start from the broadest objective, and work inward, the purpose of this thread is to create a well-formatted, organized proposal to solve a tricky problem in what Dwarf Fortress currently lacks as a game, and how I believe I have found a way to correct these problems. 

Note: For the sake of your sanity and eyesight, I reccomend cranking page zoom up to at least 150%, if not 200%, to make the text a little easier to read, and leaning back a bit and relaxing.  Smoke 'em if you got 'em, this is a long series of posts.

Oh crap! This thing hits the character cap for several posts?!  Screw that, give me the tl;dr version!

Just click HERE for the tl;dr version (http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=76007.msg1920009#msg1920009)!  Please comment on the pictures!  Tell me what is confusing, what you don't like, and what you think is easy to understand!

The original thread can be found here (http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=22015.0), however, the reason that this thread had to be created is that the arguments I am going to outline start to really take off after about 20 pages of text, and continue for about 25 pages after that.  (The major idea that this whole thread revolves around starts on page 31 (http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=22015.450), however.) People quite understandably did not want to have to slog through the entire evolution of the idea when it took place over essentially a hundred pages worth of text just as a means of entry to the argument. 

I also want to say that, although what I am advocating for is "my idea" or "my vision" or whatever pretentious label might be slapped on it by myself or others, I want to recognize that there are dozens of people whose ideas I pondered over and built upon in creating this.  Not just the likes of Silverionmox or Draco18s, who came up with the basis of this idea, but also the many people I argued with, some of which quite heatedly, and in threads in different forums.  I remember that at least one person (I'm sorry, I can't recall who, exactly because I'd have to track down what thread had that particular argument to find out,) had felt that I was not listening to the arguments that were arising around what I was advocating.  This is not only not true, it was actually the arguments against what I was proposing that did the most to build its later, better-thought-out forms.  Argument, even heated argument, is a powerful force for creation, as there is no better way to find the weaknesses of your ideas than to expose it to your harshest critics, and see what portions of your ideas stand on their own, and what gets holes punched into it.  Unfortunately, this person felt I was ignoring him or her because I was pointing him/her back to a previous argument and response session, as I felt it was a topic already covered, and that I had already responded to his/her arguments.  This is why this reboot is necessary, to make clear what I am (and am not) arguing for. 

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The Problem:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

First, I need to explain why I felt the need to expand the scope of the solution to be greater than the original problem.  This was because, in part, I recognized a problem of greater scope, and saw that farming was the perfect way to tackle the problem. 

Basically, I noted a few months ago that there were essentially only two ways to really play Dwarf Fortress, and this was to go full-scale into the military aspects (which meant modding in tougher and tougher monsters, or restricting your means of dealing with monsters until the game still posed a challenge militarily), or to go into exploring the game as a physics sandbox, and create massive super-cities like Undergrotto, or else to build water-based computers out of gears, pressure plates, water, and logic gates.  Why do we only play these two ways?  Because just "playing the game" was not sufficient.  You see, the game is "hard" at first, but this is only because people don't understand what they are doing because there is no tutorial, and smash into the "learning cliff".  Once you've scaled it, Dwarf Fortress is fairly easy.  You just need to set up what basically amounts to a wall between you and the nasties outside, and then have a farm, still, beds, and whatever other amenities you deign build for your dwarves.  Once you have cleared this basic hurdle to immediate survival, the game throws very little at you as a growing challenge.

Now, I have already done a suggestion that deals with this problem from the perspective of trying to make late-game content more challenging by making dwarven society more complex the larger your fortress becomes through introducing social stratification and a need for luxuries to appease a higher class of dwarves (http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=61620.0).  This, however, takes on the same problem from a different perspective.

Here's why this problem needs to be solved from the perspective of "Improved Farming":  At first, the suggestion was to take up more space, time, and dwarves per unit of food that you need to put into generating food.  Early on in the Improved Farming thread (referred to from here on as IF), Footkerchief hit on the core of the problem with this solution, when he said that the real problem was that farming was a "free stuff button".  You see, as long as farming was nothing more than zoning land, and designating dwarves to throw seeds at the zone and eventually pick up all the stuff that grew out of that land, then we aren't really changing anything by requiring more dwarves or more time to do the work.  If you require more land to produce the same amount of food, the player just zones more land (and eventually adds more dwarves to the farming labor to manage the sheer acreage).  If you require more labor activities for dwarves, then you just wind up throwing more dwarves at the problem.  If you require a longer growing time, you just double the  farmland for every time you double the growing time, and wind up with the same amount of food per unit time.  Either way, all this really changes is what percentage of your fortress's population is going to be farming at any given time, and doesn't do much to actually change gameplay or make it more interesting.

Then began the process of trying to add more to the process of farming, such as adding nutrients that must be managed, so as to make the game more realistic, and then the outcry began because many people could not see this as anything but micromanagement.  They didn't want more complex farming, and they didn't want to think about farming at all.  Cries of "if you like farming, just play Harvest Moon" arose, and they basically didn't see anything wrong with farming being simple, because if you only play DF for the bloodshed, why would you care about farming?

What we need to do is not to just change the way in which the player is asked to solve the problem, especially by just making what the player does have to become more complex, or to front-load everything onto a player so that we "add another hour of setup time when you start a fort."  We need a change in philosophy.  We need to reconstruct this portion of the game to make the player tackle the entire problem from a different perspective, one that should hopefully be more rewarding, and hence, more fun, not merely "making farming harder" or "making farming more complex". 

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Physiocracy:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

This is obviously a reference to the philosophical movement, the Physiocrats (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physiocracy) (without going into too much detail, these were the first economists, who theorized that all wealth was derived from land, and that therefore, land was wealth, and eventually gave birth to lassaiz-faire economics), but I'm only using it fairly loosely, here, to help illustrate my point. 

Basically, I am arguing that the game needs to recognize itself as Physiocratic in nature.  Like with an RTS game, or like with farmers in real life, players need to handle their environments with some respect for the idea that they cannot just have everything for free, that their resources are limited, and therefore need to be spent wisely to return the best profit.  And, like with the Physiocrats, your primary resources in the game can essentially be seen in terms of the three basics of dwarfiness: Soil, Stone, and Dwarves.  In order to make a game with serious choice and decision-making involved, all these things must have some sort of finite limit on their potential. 

Now then, I'm throwing around a lot of abstract terms, so let me bring this down to earth a little to illustrate what all this means. 

First, I want to go back to the whole "free stuff button" problem.

Currently, stone is effectively free stuff - you almost always have far more of it than you can store in stockpiles or get rid of, and therefore, you will use it without even considering it a cost - it's free!  Anything you can make from stone, you make it from stone, because stone is free - free rock mugs, free statues, free tables, free chairs, free doors!

Currently, wood is limited in supply, but still fairly cheap - you can make a huge variety of things out of wood, but really, you tend to stick to barrels and bins and beds, and maybe some charcoal, but not too much.  Wood is something you can't just consume completely without any care in the world.  You have to put at least some thought into conserving it for the things you really do need, because you only have so much of it in any given year.

Currently, however, steel and to a lesser extent, bronze are relatively difficult to make.  You need fuel, metal that you have to find and are in somewhat limited (although still fairly abundant) quantities, and you're prone to supply shortages.  You can't just build steel chairs for all your dwarves, you have to really consider what your priorities are for steel. (And also note that steel and wood are both inifinite, they're just limited by the amount you can harvest per unit time.)

Of course, finally, farmable biological materials are free stuff.  This means food, cloth, dye, and basically anything else you can get away with growing on a farm.  Just throw seeds at soil, designate a few farmers, and watch the limitless resources pile up.  I even run into more problems accidentally designating too much farm, resulting in food that I can never store or even harvest properly.  (It does keep my children and nobles occupied harvesting it all, though...) I produce clothing, and use it as my primary export fairly frequently when playing, if only because I like to play at economics, even though the economic model of this game is broken, and the clothing mills are functionally expandable to an almost unlimited degree.  I can basically buy an entire caravan with one bin's worth of clothing, but wind up just giving away five or six of them, just to reduce my load of exportable materials. 

Frankly, these are the ONLY concerns about resources/materials that you really have in Dwarf Fortress.

So yes, you can add a few more jobs onto the processing part, or a little more land onto the farming part, but it doesn't change the fact that it's still basically like glass when you have magma and sand or like stone - it's free stuff, you'll never run out of it, so there's no reason to ever consider it.  Food is a default, automatic, easy gimmie, and will continue to be even if you have to up the number of dwarves working - most players just wind up killing off dwarves that they wind up have idling because they can't find any jobs for them, anyway.  Simply assigning a larger proportion of their labor to farming is no difficulty, and if their entire supply chain is automatic and thought-free, then the problem will always remain.

This is why we need to move to a new philosophy on resources, so that there is a real decision for the player to make, and for there to really be something there to manage.  We need to make materials have some sort of meaningful cost. 

The best way to do this is to make farming in-game more like real-life farming...



A biology teacher I had in college once described to my class that farming was essentially just a man-made ecosystem.  You harness nature so as to produce the materials that humans find valuable are created as efficiently as possible.  However, it is still an ecosystem, if less of a self-contained one, and ecosystems are ruled by Conservation of Mass and Energy.

Ecosystems generally contain the same mass that they have contained for thousands or even millions of years (excepting obvious eroding ecosystems, like rivers), the same chemical components and atoms generally occupy the same soil, turn into plants, get eaten by animals, are excreted back into the same soil again and again and again.  Ecosystems, meanwhile, pass energy through the ecosystem through this same mass that is always conserved - sunlight is converted into usable chemical energy by plants, and as various animals and decomposers pass the energy on through consuming the previous holders of chemical energy, that energy is eventually lost into waste heat.

Farms, again, are just ways of converting soil nutrients into materials that contain chemical energy (food), which can then be used (eaten, or used as cloth or other biological products) by the farming species.  We then burn through the energy in that matter that was once soil, and eventually, it is reduced back to a state where it is ready to be turned back into soil by decomposer organisms (urine, feces, and decaying corpses).

The problem with farms is that we remove that mass from the ground, and then we don't always replace it.  Food is removed from the area where it is grown, and needs to be replaced in the form of fertilizer.  All the mass that is taken out of the ground must be replaced.  This means that you need to manage your farmlands and lands in general from a perspective of having to balance out the ecology of your land, making sure you replace anything you take out of the ground.  That is to say, very roughly speaking, you have to recycle the same "mass" over and over again.

To a certain extent, I know that I'm going to get hit with a "dirty tree-hugging hippy" (or at least "undwarfy" or "elfish") stigma for talking in terms of ecology, but there is a huge difference between being a "dirty tree-hugging hippy", and being a farmer who cares about making sure that the soil will be capable of providing him with food come the next year.  It's not for love of every living thing on God's Green Earth that a farmer plants a tree to act as a windbreak to prevent soil erosion from taking his soil away.  It's because his soil is his most precious resource, and the basis of his livelihood, and as such, it is something he has to build up and protect at all costs. 

This is the way that I want to change the paradigm by which farming is viewed: You have a limited amount of useful mass, and as you use up nutrients in the soil, you need to replace them somehow.  You have a finite amount of ways to do this, but this is still a renewable resource.  Your job as a player is to manage your resources as well as you can.  You need to keep your crops watered, which requires access to water, obviously, but also water in greater quantities the more that you grow crops that depend upon water.  For many locations that you might inhabit, there is a finite amount of water that will enter the map per year, and you have only that much water to meter out to all your agricultural projects and whatever water-drinking your dwarves or livestock will need to do.  Assuming we have feces and urine, this will be a major way to "recycle" your soil nutrients - if you eat your food, and it passes back on out the other end of a dwarf, then you can compost that into more usable soil, but this shouldn't be entirely perfect, and there will always be goods that you trade to the outside world that will represent a net escape of nutrients from your soil.  You will need to use some methods of adding a little extra nutrients into your soil.  Dead bodies, amusingly enough, are a great additional source of nutrients.  Protect your dwarfy environment: compost those goblin corpses!  Still, you can probably only kill so many things for the purposes of replenishing farms.  I'll go into all of these different things in much more detail in their own sections later on.

To go back to the "three dwarfy resources" of Soil, Stone, and Dwarves, this is about making soil a depletable, yet renewable, resource.  Stone is already a depletable resource, if a very plentiful one.  Dwarves need to be made more rare and valuable as a resource, but that's what my other thread on social structure is for.  The idea is that if your soil is not something you can take for granted, you will then have to be forced to actually budget what you do with it.  Similar in effect to an RTS game, if you can build just about any military unit you want, but you are limited to only x amount of minerals and y amount of vespene gas per unit time, then you have to pick what units you build with that limited amount of resources per unit of time.  It's not a matter of "making farming too much micromanagement", it's a matter of "making farming only give you so much, so you have to prioritize what you want out of it". 

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The Solution (guidelines):

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

I'll start off by saying that those who were arguing against some of the previous suggestions in the IF thread were correct in that we should avoid needless micromanagement, especially with anything that can be considered extremely routine.  My general philosophy regarding gaming is that if you can easily reduce some sort of routine function down to the sort of "If ____, then ____" type of statement that you can build a script to play that portion of the game for you, then it's probably best if that part of the game actually was played for you. 

The basics of the system are that we introduce a soil nutrient mechanic.  This means that soil will have some hidden numbers associated with it that indicates how much of various nutrients (the NPK "macronutrients"), water, acidity, and potentially other numbers.  These numbers will be adjusted up and down as crops are planted and grow, and generally speaking, you will need to reset the numbers in the soil to certain levels before you can grow the same crop again.  This can be achieved either by planting another crop or set of crops that will push the numbers back to where they came from, or it can be accomplished by adding something, like adding fertilizer or water, through the actions of a farming dwarf. 

This will, however, not be how a player interacts with their farm in general.  This sort of routine "push the add fertilizer button to not die" mechanic should be handled by the dwarves and AI routines, with some guidance from the player.  There needs to be an interface that allows the player to set guidelines on what sort of fertilizers the dwarves can use, and how often it can be used, or some sort of general upper limit per year of fertilizer use to allow players to manage how much of your finite materials can be spent per area. 

Because different plants need different nutrients, and because some plants can actually restore certain nutrients to the soil, this should have an effect of at least heavily encouraging, if not demanding, two-cycle, three-cycle, or even four-cycle crop rotations.  In general, real medieval farmers, even if they had no idea how or why anything worked, had a very clear understanding that maintaining their soil fertility was of utmost importance, and had developed over the course of generations very strict guidelines for how to treat them.  As time went on, societies went from simpler two-cycle fallow-planting cycles to more advanced cycles that allowed the farms to grow nitrogen-fixing plants that would both renew the soil, but also provide an edible or sellable crop while preparing the soil for the next planting of their prime cash crop. 

Players should plan out a cycle of crops on several fields, set into the farming interface (which I will describe later) the plan that they have for their fields set on repeat for the next two to four years, and then be able to let the dwarven farm overseer by-and-large handle the rest of the day-to-day work.

With that said, unlike most of what is already in Dwarf Fortress, this should not be entirely front-loaded.  In fact, I've spent a considerable amount of time working out how to make farming no longer a concern only for the very first few minutes of gameplay, and then a total non-issue beyond the initial setup.  In fact, as a goal of this whole project, farming should be either easy or entirely optional for the early parts of the game or when you have few dwarves.

The entire point of this suggestion is to make players have to make decisions about how best to manipulate the ecosystem around them so as to gather all the biological materials that they need for their fortress.  Farms are, as I said before, man-made (well, dwarf-made) ecosystems.  They are demonstrations of the knowledge, power, and mastery dwarves have over their surroundings.  For a small number of dwarves, simply hunting and gathering should be sufficient.  For a small number of dwarves, crop rotations and major farming operations should not be necessary.  As part of what I suggest, Plump Helmets, the classic dwarven early farming staple, should require nothing more than a log and water and some time alone to grow.  This means that you are functionally doing is just converting what was already growing in the above- (or under-) ground soil naturally as a tree (or tree-like mushroom) into the ready-made farm for your classic plump helmets.  Logs are instant farm material, just add water.  The problem is that as your fortress grows, it will become more and more prohibitive to cut down trees for every single plump helmet you grow.  Likewise, you can't feed a major fortress on just hunting or herbalism, as the soil should only provide for so many random plants, and only so many wild animals should be willing to come within dwarven lands.  The larger your fortress becomes, the more you have to stretch the basic resources of the soil, and the more elaborate your systems for doing so must become. 

To reiterate this point, this means that starting farms for plump helmet growth should be a fairly simple matter of "plump helmet farms need one log and water to build".  Water, which I will go into more detail on later, should not require the sort of mussing around with that it takes now, but instead be available by bucket-brigade dumping, provided you have access to water and a bucket.  Logs are already fairly easily understood and commonly available.  Hopefully, the micromanagement of having to re-designate trees for clearing, and instead setting a zone-based forestry system can be implimented, and I suggested that already, and will do so again in a special "lumber" section of this rant.  This means that making early farms should not require any kind of special setup or non-intuitive setups that punish "teh noobs".  It should be fairly straightforward, yet at the same time, inefficient, and not sustainable for larger, long-term settlements.

As players make larger fortresses, they will start to run into the need to fuel their agriculture with other forms of fertilizer.  Trees don't grow on trees, you know.  In fact, growing trees by farm is a potential goal of this, and growing trees plus crops to eat by feeding them the trees you previously grew makes for a rather pointless exercise as long as this game is serious about keeping track of conservation of mass.  Hopefully, the soil of the entire map will be tracked, which means that if you plunder the natural resources heavily enough, you can deal lasting damage to the landscape if you are rapacious enough in your resource consumption.  (Which, I am sure, will suddenly make a prime goal of many players to make the most blasted Hellscape out of their controlled territory.)  This means that, as the amount of resources that players wish to draw out of their soil increases, the degree of elaboration in the systems must rise to make the greatest possible use of their soil.  As with real-life farms, unchecked natural growth will be curtailed, and dwarves will exert more direct control over their landscape, so as to ensure that soil nutrients are being used as efficiently as possible.

For example, manual bucket-brigade watering systems will eventually need to be replaced with a serious irrigation system.  Again, some crops will take more water than others, and some embark sites will have more water to start with than others.  There should only be a finite amount of water that enters a map per year or so, which means that we will need to rethink the way that water is added to the map in this game, but I'll cover that in its own section.  For now, let us just say that there is a finite amount of water, and the more your farms expand, the more water you will need to draw into your fortress, which may eventually become impossible in certain dry embarks, forcing strict conservation of water, or in other, wetter embarks, will at least force more sophisticated methods for intaking large quantities of water per year to your farms.  (Don't forget this means that your waterworks will become a potential vulnerability to be defended.)  There is also the problem of the size of your farms - small farms are a small amount of land to cover by bucket brigading water from a well to the desired farm plot.  The larger the farm becomes, the more sense it makes to develop a real irrigation system.

Another problem you will need to handle is fertilization.  Crop rotations are nice, and will probably be implimented fairly soon to conserve on fertilizer, but crop rotations alone are insufficient.  You need regular fertilizers.  This means manure and other biological fertilizers, including compost made of some of the various dead things your fortress will inevitably pile up.  Fish bones are a prime source of soil nutrients.  Grind them up, and throw them into the soil.  No part of the buffalo goes to waste.  You can also grind up certain choice stones, like apatite or phosphorite, and use them as an inorganic fertilizer, which is actually what we do in modern real-life farming.  The problem with this is that it is non-sustainable (both in-game and in real life) as there is only a finite amount of this stuff lying around, and you can eventually run out of it.  I'll go into this in much more detail in another section, however.

Ultimately, other problems may come up when you do start seriously remaking the entire landscape in your own (twisted) image, especially considering as later seiges will probably force you to completely seal off as best you can your fortress.  Pests are a major problem in single-cash-crop farming.  The more you remake an environment to serve as a place for only a certain kind of crop to thrive, the more inviting a target you make your farms for pests, whether they are insects, fungi, bacterial, or otherwise in nature.  This can serve as a functional limit on the amount that a single type of crop might be relied upon, lest you invite disaster.  This means you need to build into your system a greater variety of crops with a greater variety of needs as you expand your farms. 

Depending on how many improvements to the game that we can put into the game in the package of "Improved Farming", we may even have more complex implications, as well.  We could, for example, have an air quality feature, where fortresses that try to seal themselves off from the world completely will suddenly have problems keeping enough oxygen inside their fortress for their people to breathe.  Oxygen-producing underground plants would then be a solution to this new problem, if you don't want to punch more chimneys into your fort, but they will need to be fed with nutrients, as well, and edible mushrooms that are more easily grown underground may take up oxygen, rather than produce it, and oxygen-producers may not be edible, while marginally-edible crops may split the difference by producing some oxygen, but at a cost of not being very good crops.  Thus, a choice is forced on the player as to how to balance the conflicting goals of wanting to eat, wanting to breathe, and wanting to not open your fortress up to the surface where they will get picked off by attackers. 

When speaking of choices, there is also the choice of what, exactly, you want to grow in your farms, as we can expand what can be grown on farms.  One thing I want to do is make livestock eat food (which means either grazing or growing feed for animals rather than dwarves) and drink water, as well as drop manure (let them graze on fields that "fallow" with some sort of grass, and they will spread that fertilizer/manure across the fields for your dwarves).  If we can grow trees on farms, or even fruit orchards, then you have choices to be made when talking about balancing nutrients to go to growing your own supply of wood (for building or for fuel or even chemicals from potash), fruit from orchards, food crops, meat from livestock, fiber materials (for making rope, clothes, etc.), dyes, and basically everything that you use in the game besides that which comes from stone or ore.  This is to say that it accomplishes what I said back at the beginning of this post, where I talked about Soil, Stone, and Dwarves as the three main resources by consolidating everything biological down to being purchased from a single resource, soil nutrients, which you must manage and make meaningful decisions based around ensuring that you will have enough soil nutrients being used to produce all the biological materials your dwarves will be using.

To recap this whole section, I do not want to "make building a farm more complicated".  I want to make building a farm more simple, actually.  I just want to make expanding a farm more complicated, and, for that matter, make it necessary to expand from just your single starting 5x10 farm that we now assume is the only thing we will ever need.

Given how some people have responded in the past to this idea, and how some people seem to just like not having any real systems for needing any real social support structure for the war efforts they produce, a choice that some people may seem to prefer may be to simply build a "lean, mean machine", where they have very few dwarves, and survive on little infrastructure or need for complex farms, and maybe just trade for food.  That's fine, too, so long as you keep your fortress fairly small, and military-oriented.  In fact, I want to discuss this more in the "Working with other suggestions" section.

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Ecological Diversity and Underground Ecology:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

One other major goal, which I feel should be part of this "first post" argument, is that plants should become far more diverse.  Not just in terms of a "farm mod" where there becomes a truly massive chart of plants that can be grown, but having serious ecological diversity, where tropical regions have tropical plants, and arctic regions have arctic plants.  Basically, when a player embarks in a different biome, they should be able to expect an entirely different set of potential crops to be available to them, so that every fort feels a little bit different.  These plants should not just be aesthetically different, either, but have substantial differences in their growth times, water and nutrient needs, and sensitivity to climate and potential pest problems. 

Underground, the ecology may not become all that much more diverse than its already bizzare ecosystem already is, but there is something that needs to be seriously addressed in the matter of how the ecosystem works to begin with.  So far, plants (or rather, mushrooms or whatever they are) just grow any time there is soil.  There will need to be some sort of source of energy for the underground biomes.  Yes, "magic" is sort of an answer, but there needs to be some serious rules for what makes the magic operate, and why and how the plant-like life can harness it to grow.

In fact, having a rule system for what makes whatever magical system grows the things that grow underground might even make for a dual-biome system, where there might be underground climates that change based upon abundance or scarcity or even different kinds of whatever magical energy source forms the basis for underground lifeforms.

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Choices

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

There is more than just the problem of the game being "too easy", it's also a problem of the game being "too shallow".  DF has complexity, but not very much depth.  I like to compare it to the creatures in 40d - they had plenty of stats on them, but really, all that mattered in a creature's stats was their size.  Right now, there's very little plant diversity because there's only one or two metrics you can really even judge a plant on - the rate at which you get food, and the value of whatever other use you might be able to get out of that plant.  Nobody wants hide root because it's just a silver barb or a dimple cup, but worse.

We can make the game much more deep and involved than it currently is, but it requires that we actually add into the game the metrics by which we can actually differentiate one plant from another.

I'm going to post this link to Extra Credits' monologue on choice (http://www.escapistmagazine.com/videos/view/extra-credits/2590-Choice-and-Conflict), who make several very good arguments about game design worth watching.  The key to setting up a challenging or difficult choice is that you need to make the player want to further at least two mutually exclusive goals at the same time.  If all your choices are based upon just one metric (having enough food), then you can't make a player stop and choose, it's just a matter of solving the math problem of "what course of action will get me the most food for the least effort?"  There's nothing much in that decision tree that gives a player some sort of conflicting desire to do anything else, except maybe some players' desire to spend as little time thinking about a farming system as is absolutely mandatory. 

In order to set up conflict in the choices, I have involved several ways in which the player's innate desire (get as much valuable stuff as possible) are in conflict with other desires the player has. (The fear of an environmental backlash from overexploitation of the land, long-term degradation of the land versus short-term boosts in productivity, the threat of pests vs. the potential to grow greater numbers of more valuable crops, the choice between different forms of biological resources if trees are put on farms to compete with food crops, as are very tedious to grow but powerful alchemical ingredients when I get around to my next suggestion on alchemy, and of course the simple amount of player time and dwarf labor it takes to design and manage systems of ever-increasing complexity.) 

Do you not believe that these are sufficient conflicting desires?  I am always open to more suggestions on how to set up a conflict of player choice, but at the same time, you need to make sure it actually does this in a way that sets up a conflict of choice, and is not just a way to try to make the game "harder" without really adding to the depth of choice.  If all you have is one calculation to make on what is the best way to get enough seeds to sustain your farm, then once you have made that calculation, and make it every time, then the game is just as "easy" as it was before you made it "harder" - the problem is solved, and there is nothing else to think about.

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The rest of this is to be continued over the next several posts, due to the limit of a mere 40,000 characters.  I'm going to leave several of these posts blank for placeholders to fill in later on.  I know it's a bit of the poor organization I'm trying to avoid to do this, but I have literally worked on this post so far all afternoon, and kind of just want to get something put up on the board at this point, and will backfill the details later.  For now, I want the general idea up.

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution
Post by: NW_Kohaku on January 27, 2011, 03:33:13 am

Urine and Feces  (or more specifically, decomposition and rot):

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Before going into the mechanics of the suggestion, I want to go ahead and make a special argument for what is one of the more controversial issues that I want to incorporate into this suggestion.

There are two directions I want to argue, one to Toady, and the other to basically the forum at large, and I want to start with a quote from Toady.

From a Reddit article (http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/cuvnl/tarn_adams_creator_of_dwarf_fortress_his_response/):

Quote from: ToadyOne

I like fertilizer, animal tracking and sewers. I dislike potty breaks. This is an example of realism that I think has a lot of potential for trouble. Potty breaks in adventure mode might be realistic, but there are immersion issues there. He he he, I mean in the sense of the player being kicked out of their groove. The other kind of immersion wouldn't be so bad, because sewers are common adventure environments. In dwarf mode, dwarves already take a lot of time out for self-maintenance, and this would be a more senseless kind, compared to something like eating.

So then, as the suggestion (directed at Toady), I think the best way to handle self-maintainance would be to deal with "potty breaks" by rolling it in with drinking.  You probably wouldn't even need to have a separate counter, just make dwarves need to go pee as soon as they've finished drinking.  I think I once did a calculation on how much booze dwarves would need to drink proportionately, considering how much they drink at once, and the answer was something like 55 gallons of booze in one chug.  So yeah, after pulling that stunt, they have to hit the latrine. 

A positive/negative aspect of this would be that sewers would be made somewhat more simple by the fact that you could very easily control where dwarves will need their latrines by just controling the booze stockpiles, and putting your major restroom facilities right next to it. 

The next logical step would be to make the elimination of solid waste be related to eating solid foods.  Since we don't have proper control over making dwarves eat in the dining halls we built just for that purpose, then toilet spacing might need to be based around where you have tables, and making sure that things like prisons have access to the plumbing, which could make for some interesting escape attempts, really.

there's a problem with the way that DF iterates many of the counters in the game, in general. 

That is, apparently, almost everything in the game that iterates iterates every single frame. 

This is a big problem for FPS because it means that every single frame of the game requires iterating through the entire creature list (living and dead) and iterating things like hunger and thirst and the like. 

Also, because the game stores hunger and thirst in unsigned shorts, the exact number of frames it takes to starve or get hungry is based arbitrarily upon the size of the container.  (The maximum hunger value is the maximum value of an unsigned short - 65535.)

Instead of having iterations of every stat for every creature every frame, we could instead start working off of a "scheduler" system for many of these iterations.

For example, water only gets checked for movement every (IIRC) 11 frames, and only 1 in 4 tiles actually move (in order) during that time.  This keeps the game from having to calculate every single water tile's movement every frame, and cuts the FPS loss from fluids to 1/44 of what it would be. 

This same principle can be applied to hunger and thirst, as well as bathroom breaks:

Each unit has a unit ID, and a place in the vector of creatures. 

You can set up a schedule so that a creature's hunger and thirst are iterated every 1000 frames.  (This is an arbitrary number, and can be whatever makes sense.) That is, in the first frame, every creature with a unit ID ending in *000 adds to its current hunger and thirst levels and checks for things like hair growth and the like.  Then, the next frame, every creature with a unit ID ending in *001 adds to its current hunger and thirst levels.

You don't have to just add 1.  You don't have to just add 1,000, either.  You can add 647 if you want to, because you don't have to deal with whole integers for whole frames, anymore. 

This means that you can set creature metabolism modifiers so that creatures like elephants don't starve so much. 

You can then also make this number based upon attributes (so larger, stronger, faster creatures burn more calories and need to eat more often, while small, lethargic people keep their calories) and break down the need for all meals to instantly reset hunger to 0 in dwarves, so that dwarves with large appetites will take stacks of food with them when eating. 

By doing this, you can actually make dwarves take breaks less often than they already do, since you can adjust the rate of those meters filling up because you are no longer bound to the one-frame-one-iteration standard.

AND it saves FPS!

The only cost is that, depending on the size of the scheduler period, and the size of the iteration to hunger/thirst/sleepiness, there may be sudden large jumps in the hunger/thirst/sleepiness values, so keeping a reasonably small period (that is, keeping it to something small like going for a full loop every 1000 frames rather than 100,000 frames) has to be balanced against making a situation where a dwarf has only a single scheduler period to eat or die. 

---

Beyond that, there's combined breaks - when a dwarf goes on break, instead of going on break to do a single thing, they can make a combined break, where, if they're thirsty at all, they will also take a drinking break during the same break as their eating break.  They can even grab food and drink in the same trip now that we have code for carrying multiple stacks of items going to the same location. 

This leads to a simple solution for where to find time for bathroom breaks: Just make them go when they're done eating or drinking.  It can also simplify where you need to put the bathrooms: right next to the dining halls. 

That way, you don't have any actual extra number of breaks dwarves go on, and if you make the actual time (number of turns) spent during the process of eating or drinking shorter, then you can even make the time spent on a given break not even significantly larger than it already is, provided you have an efficient fortress layout.

One of the key things in dealing with this, however, if we are to make a system of balanced inputs and outputs into the ecosystem, then we are possibly going to need some sort of nutrition system or the like to be able to, essentially, measure the nutrient value of a character's poop.  (Yes, I feel silly just for typing that, but this is serious.)   Basically, if we are going to have dwarves drinking booze but possibly also just water, then some villainous leaders might try to game the system by horrifically forcing their dwarves to drink plain water, just to get some bonus nitrogen out of their urine, assuming that the entire urine system makes all urine uniformly nitrogen-rich and of uniform quantities. 

This means that we might need to have some sort of nutrition system in place to track how many nutrients are being put into a dwarf's body, and how much are ready to be expelled, (a growing dwarf, whether because they are a child, adding on muscle, or just becoming fat should soak up nutrients they are not going to excrete to add to their mass) and a method of tracking the nutrient content of a sewer's worth of biological waste.  To a certain extent, nutrient value might just be tracked by invisibly segregating different nutrient numbers in a given tile's clump of poo (72 units of nitrogen, 120 units of phosphorous, 31 units of potassium, etc.), but just saying "pile of poo" with no visible direct measurement (except maybe raw mass) of what nutrient content that pile actually has. 

---

Now for the forum-goers at large, one of the most recurring things I've seen in the urine/feces arguments seems to be an insistance that "it would be gross, and would add nothing to the game".  Even when people talk about designing sewer systems, I've seen people respond immediately with how it's not adding anything to the game. 

Well, I hope I've made a case for conservation of matter thus far, but I'll try and go back into it...

You just can't have a very realistic farm without having a limited supply of fertilizer to spend on it, and feces and urine is by far the best way to manage this.  Making those two your primary sources of fertilizer means that your fertilizer production is tied directly to how many animals you have living in your fortress, which means how much food they consume, which means how much food is being eaten.  This links food production and food consumption to fertilizer production, which is needed, in turn, for food production, creating a balanced chain that repeats itself.  Growing fabrics for clothing can be turned around with some sort of "compost pile" building that can turn tattered clothes (and other biologicals) into fertilizer of like value to what you might get out of the waste produced when creatures eat food. 

Perhaps the best way to describe why this is important is to talk about the "ecosystem" argument again in more detail.  What we have currently in DF is a system where matter springs into existence from nothing, and then dissapears into nothing if we ever manage to get rid of it (but more likely, it just stays in our fortress forever).  What we really should be striving for, if we are to have a truly realistic experience, is to have what some ecology sciency peoples call "Cradle to Cradle Technology".  That is, anything that is biological ultimately comes from the soil.  Raw materials (like food) are extracted from the soil, and become useful materials (like animals, dwarves, clothes, etc.) that eventually reach the end of their useful life (or lives, period, for dwarves and animals) and we must then begin the process of rot and decay, so that the soil is replinished with the matter that it gave up to create a new set of raw materials.  There is no creation or destruction, just change from one form, one link in the chain, to the next.

Yes, sure, this means we'll have someone throwing poo, and some people will be able to point at our game and say, "Hey, someone who plays that game throws poo! Only monkeys play that game!"  The thing is, however, that if we do this, we will be able to respond to those people, "Our game accurately models the life cycle of bioindustrial products.  Plus you can kill things with magma.  Your game only lets you kill things with swords, and you don't even have a serious farming system.  Who would play such simplistic childrens' games?"

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Forestry, Wild Soil, Soil Erosion, and Ecological Damage

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Right, so now, it's time to talk about the chance to be a real tree-hugging hippy, or, much, much more likely, the chance to utterly rape the earth.

In essence, this idea was spawned from following the idea of having tracked soil nutrient levels in the wild to its fullest logical conclusions, so I think it would be best to start with the part that is most related to the rest of farming, first.

Tracking the "wild soil", the soil that is not a part of your farms as a large (possibly embark tile-sized) chunk of dirt, the way that I'm pretty sure things like vermin are partially treated, would serve the most immediate purpose of preventing someone from simply constructing a farm, depleting the soil, and then reconstructing it over again.  Farms that are deconstructed would have their "zone" simply turn from a farm zone into a "wild" sub-zone, which would then potentially be averaged in with the rest of that wild zone.  If it were placed in an elevation or layer that does not already have a wild soil set of stats (such as farming on a muddied stone layer unlrelated to a cavern layer, or a muddied artificial floor on the surface), it would create one.

It can, however, be used to represent something much more interesting with a little bit more modeling.

For example, if wild soil is going to have its own stats and plants growing on it, why not simply have the broad wild soil on the surface consume the current mechanics for how wild plants grow already?  We have soil nutrients, a selection of wild plants that may grow, including grasses, shrubs, and trees, and some sort of mechanic for measuring how much water will be dropped on the soil in a given year that adjusts grass growth rates already.

This creates something that can potentially make forestry and herbalism a little more interesting.  Currently, trees regrow eternally, as do shrubs.  If we let dwarves completely strip the land bare, we are consuming the soil nutrients from the surface just as surely as if we had been reckless with our farms.  If we continually strip out resources from the wild soil, it will become barren and lifeless, or at least, not suitable for growing certain kinds of plants, just like how overtaxing farm soil will do so.  The biome might functionally have to shift from a forest to a grassland as trees become no longer supportable temporarily, and grasslands might slip into deserts. (This can be reversed by leaving plenty of dead goblins to rot out in the fields, where they will turn into nutrients for the soil to support new wild flora.)

In fact, we could even start thinking of the wild soil as just being "farms" where the plants that are growing are outside of player control.  In fact, if we go that far, we can even start to think of farms as what they are in real life - a zone where we have designated only one type of crop to be produced, and whose seeds we plant, but which is just a slice of nature we are trying to artificially control, and where wild plants can try to grow if we don't keep it weeded.  Potentially, even beneficial shrubs might grow in a farm that is poorly maintained.

In order to do this, we need to generate a list of off-map "virtual seeds" for all of the plants, which work similarly to the way that vermin work currently - they are simply a resevoir of a certain number of potential plants that can start growing somewhere on the map when conditions for that plant are favorable.  Any plant that survives long enough to hit a flowering stage will add virtual seeds to the world.  These virtual seeds have no fixed location, being a sort of Shrodenger's Gun, and can be revealed to be anywhere whenever they are needed to appear.  Completely eliminating every seed in a location can potentially cause a local extinction of that kind of flora.

Balancing this, there needs to be some sort of drift of new seeds into an area.  Every visitor, whether a migrant or trader, can have some odds of accidentally carrying a wild seed with them from where they came from or some land they traversed to get to where you are.  Odds for this need to be stacked in favor of more durable seeds - it's hard to accidentally bring a peach pit with you without realizing, but a prickly burr will more likely cling to your pant leg.  Wild animals should also carry seeds like this from nearby locations, and a certain number of wind-borne seeds should blow in from lands outside your rapacious grasp.

Likewise, massive ecological damage, such as Boatmurdering your entire surface with magma, should cause the overall number of seeds to plummet, making local extinctions much more likely.  There needs to be a die-off for seeds every set period of time (the New Year, being as it is right at the change of Winter sounds as good as any) to make seeds that cannot turn into viable sprouts will die off eventually, with ecological trauma, whether it is a cold snap, prolonged drought, mountaintop removal or stripmining project, paving the surface or building castles on top of natural terrain, or magma flooding should have an ability to really decimate seed populations.

Although fauna are a different subject to be covered in a separate section, fauna should not want to visit any land that has no plant life for them to eat (or does not attract grazing fauna for them to eat if they are predators), and as such, hunting wild animals should also be impacted.

(I suddenly feel the need to create sub-sections, but whatever...)

The seeds that will actually grow are based upon the soil conditions in the area that they are growing.  The game should basically draw up a chart based on the soil, and see how well the seeds' ideal growing conditions match up with the actual soil conditions of each soil zone, with some possible random skewing to one direction or the other to represent small patches of fertility or infertility in some areas.  Seeds from the top candidates are selected by a random roll against this weighted list to start growing as a sprout.  This check does not have to occur very frequently at all, maybe once a game month, and can just have the start of the sprouting period randomly offset a number of days.

Sprouts should obviously have an impact on the soil quality that they grow from - wild soil zones, in fact, may need to have larger integer nutrient tracking numbers than I was already thinking of if it is to contain roughly 2304 tiles worth of soil's data.  (A 16-bit number still only has an average of 28 values per tile.  Hopefully, the soil will be less volatile than farms, of course, but still, 16 bits of data is a good baseline.)  Sprouts should gradually grow into their full blooming states without any need for dwarven intervention, although certain environmental factors should of course be a factor.  Trampling should obviously have negative effects, but also drought, pests (yes, they affect wild plants, too), herbivorous fauna, and potentially a sudden scarcity of a given nutrient they rely upon can cut down on growth speed. 

Boatmurdering your soil should, ironically enough, actually help give your soil a giant bump up in soil nutrients, even if it kills off the sprouts and seeds.  Any survivors, or any seeds you re-introduce or are introduced to your lands from outside sources will find the soil to have plenty of nutrients, however.

This, however, brings me around to one of the next points I wanted to talk about - soil erosion.

I remember reading something about how grasslands are actually a form of artificial biome created by large herbivorous herd creatures for their own convenience.  Obvoiusly, this is not a conscious choice, but it is the impact of their presence.  You see, most temperate areas have basically two default settings - forest and desert.  Forests have plenty of water and soil nutrients, while deserts have little water and soil nutrients.  Forests are created when an area with water but no soil nutrients supports lichen and moss for a while to break down the rocks in the area, and create some thin soil.  This eventually gives you some room for grass to start growing in the thin soil, and help break down the rocks, and build up the soil even further, while the roots of the grass prevent the soil from washing away.  Gradually, when there is enough soil to support them, shrubs, and finally trees start to move in, and these giant plants take advantage of their size to strangle all other competition by spreading their leaves, and leaving smaller plants like grass to starve in the shade.  Eventually, with time, rich enough soil and enough rainfall gives you rainforests, where titanic trees compete to grow taller, and strangle all their competition. 

This all depends on the soil being able to retain its nutrients, however.  If the soil ever loses its nutrients, you have to go all the way back to lichen and start over again, and this process takes thousands of years.  And the soil loses its nutrients whenever it rains, or water covers the area (something I will cover more in the Water Management section), and there are no plant roots to prevent the soil from just washing away down the river.

Cattle or other herbivorous herd animals trample and kill anything bigger than shrubs, however, and keep their land grassy.  They also poo, and add soil nutrients in that way.  Now then, grasses can survive in very dry climates, and basically just wait out droughts in desert-like conditions for the time to spring back to life.  So can succulents, like cactuses.  Grasses also cling to their soil nutrients, keeping the soil rich.  Grazing animals can prevent a wet area from gradually building up to a forest, but they can also keep a dry area as a grassland when it would otherwise decline into a desert because of the lack of water.  Cattle revitalize the soil with their droppings, and the grasses they help to grow keeps the soil nutrients in the area. 

The destruction of wild grazing animals in dry areas causes what is called "Desertification", where grassland gives way to desert.

Now, this natural process can be interesting to understand, but it should also be part of a very compelling ecological model for Dwarf Fortress - we can have our dwarves potentially causing the desertification of the land they plunder for all its resources.  (Or, theoretically, we could build up the soil, and create a forest where once there was nothing but sparse, dry shrubs, but seriously, what are you, an elf?!)

To do this, we need a model for soil erosion, where soil is degraded by rainfall or water drainage (see the Water Management section), and where grass or sprouts or other plants will protect the soil they reside upon, and tiles adjacent.  Tiles not adjacent to the plantlife will start to suffer a form of "soil nutrient damage".  Rainwater is more damaging than flooding from another source, but the hows and whys of this are for another section.  Potentially, a large enough patch of grassless soil will need to be severed from the general embark tile-wide zone, to create a new zone with the damaged soil that will not grow anything in that particular area.  This can potentially happen if you have a trail of particularly heavily trampled soil, such as near a fortress enterance.  It will eventually become dead, desert soil with no water-soluable nutrients (I.E. nitrogen and phosphorous) at all.

In total, we may eventually be able to truly have visitors capable of judging the environmental impact of your fortress from a great distance - if, suddenly, there is a ring of black, smoldering death around your fort where vibrant forest surrounds it, elves need not even count your tree kill ratio to know you are their most horrifying nightmare come to life.  If your magic green thumb can coax to life even the most barren of lands with vibrant biodiversity, then everyone will call you a hippy elf and properly shun you for your eco-friendly crap. 

Either way, when we talk about Dwarf Fortress for its ability to simulate something complex or detailed, what better way is there to do this than to simulate the utter god-like mastery over their environments that Dwarves hold by letting them turn lush greenery into permanent deserts as part of a simulation from the lowliest grass blade to the whole of a chunk of a continent?

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution
Post by: NW_Kohaku on January 27, 2011, 03:33:48 am

NPK soil nutrients

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Basically, the root of the system, this is the most basic method by which we can make crops more interesting and dynamic.  To sum the progress of the thread up, while I was initially in favor of a very simple system, I was successfully convinced of the need for a more robust system to track soil nutrients.  Generally, I'm working with a 6-variable model right now, although there's things I am wavering on expanding into making more variables to include.  These variables are Water, N, P, K, pH, and biomass.

NPK stands for Nitrogen, Phosphorous, and Potassium, which are the three "Macronutrients", the most important atomic components in the soil.  Photosynthesis converts CO₂ and H₂O into simple sugars, like C₆H₁₂O₆.  Most of the building blocks of life are made of some combination of CHON or CHONP, so NPK are important components, but air and water are far more heavily used, while NPK are used in that specific order of prevalance.  With that said, they are all critical, it just requires lesser and lesser amounts by mass.  Air is not being measured in any of these systems so far, although it is certainly an exciting future pathway for the game to explore, especially if we are to have oxygen-producing subterranean plants.  Water is functionally the biggest "super nutrient" in the game, then, followed by NPK.

As they are arranged in order of how much is used by volume, they are also arranged in terms of how water-soluable they are, and by extention, how easily plants can gain access to them.  Water obviously flows easily through soil, nitrogen is very soluable, while potassium is very likely to bind to the clays in the soil, and is not very water soluable.  Water soluability affects how much runoff occurs IRL, although that may or may not need to be modeled.  Water soluability also affects how available a nutrient is to the plant's roots.  If something is water soluable, it flows through the soil, and the roots can easily be there to suck up the nutrients, while less soluable K requires the roots to dig right next to where the K ions are to suck them up.

This ultimately means that Water and Nitrogen are values that will fluctuate more wildly, while Potassium is very stable.  Water is something you will constantly need to replinish (although, honestly thinking about it, in a sealed cavern, you could probably find ways to reclaim the water).  Replacing nitrogen is the main point of crop rotations, and the soil can be depleted of nitrogen within just a year or two of planting "heavy feeder" plants.  Phosphorous takes a middle road on this, while Potassium is something that you can probably go for a few years without worrying about. 

Something about nitrogen, however, is that while you need plenty of it, it is also the easiest nutrient to replace, whether by planting nitrogen-fixing crops, like peanuts, or just by using urea, the primary component of urine, to make ammonia, which is how the overwhelming of nitrogen fertilizer is applied to the world's crops. 

Nitrogen fixation occurs because certain root-dwelling microorganisms of plants like clover, peanuts, and beans are capable of converting the stable N₂ in the atmosphere into a usable form for living beings.  Crop rotation is based around the planting of nitrogen fixating plants to restore nitrogen to the soil between the growth of nitrogen-heavy plants like wheat, rice, corn, or other major starch foods.

Phosphorous and potassium, however, are not so easily replaced from the functionally infinite well of atmospheric gasses, and generally, the best, most renewable means of replacing them is to just use dead or decaying materials to replace what you have taken out of the soil.

It is, however, entirely possible to mine for mineral fertilizers, such as apatite stones for use as a phosphorous fertilizer.

This would mean that expanding farms beyond the "easy soil layers", and "making your own soil" by muddying the stone would probably become a long-term project.  You would need to start with crushing some mineral fertilizers down to gravel, keeping them muddy, and trying to grow "rockbreaker" plants (or rather, moss and lichen) to break the fertilizer stones down into a useful soil.  (Of course, letting logs rot into soil by growing mushrooms also works to a degree.)

To a certain degree, it's not really worth retyping all this text, and reposting it is just a waste of character limits, so I'm just going to punch in a link to the post on how we could represent NPK to the player (http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=22015.msg1419551#msg1419551), this post on fertilizers (http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=22015.msg1420235#msg1420235) (in fact, page 32 in general outlines the basis of this), and this link to a series of posts modeling how this could be raw-ified (http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=22015.msg1445642#msg1445642). 

There are still two more variables that I have to really go into, however, and those are soil pH and biomass.

Soil pH (acidity) is another very long-term variable.  In fact, it should take about a year to adjust a soil's pH a single whole number one way or the other.  Soil acidity is altered by the process of decomposition, so places like forests where plenty of rotting leaves fall will have more acidic soil, while deserts will have more basic soil, and different plants are adapted to different soil types.  Generally, you want very slightly acidic soil, however. 

Fertilizers, especially ammonia and urea, can alter soil acidity, while plants themselves don't generally do much to do so.  The general point of soil acidity, however, is that it's very slow and labor-intensive to change it, so it's probably better to just try to avoid having a soil acidity problem in the first place, or grow your plants to just suit local soil acidity rather than alter soil to be perfect for the crops you want. 

Biomass, meanwhile, exists largely for the purposes of growing funguses, which cannot photosynthesize, and as such, need something to decay to grow and gain chemical energy from.  Biomass is a measure of the available carbohydrates in the soil, generally from "dead stuff" in the soil.  At low values, it represents depleted/eroded soil, where few plants besides ground cover.  At medium values, it represents increasingly rich humus, suitable for sustaining most crop plants.  At very high values, it can represent an outright sludge of decaying material that may invite bacteria causing soil toxicity, but which is perfectly suitable for "crop" fungus. In cases of "mundane" fungus, biomass may be essentially the only nutrient worth tracking besides water.

Speaking of extra stats that may be trackable, soil drainage is another potential variable that I didn't talk about in a serious manner, but could potentially be a useful means of differentiating certain plants from other ones.  Plants such as grapes, for example, require plenty of drainage, and drainage is very difficult and expensive to build into your soil.  It basically requires manually creating raised planting beds, or artificially adding a slope to the landscape to create drainage.  Both of these are extremely labor-intensive operations, and represent massive allocations of time and effort to make certain types of crops more viable for farming.  (That is, if you want the best wines, you have to put in the effort to manually terraform your landscape for that purpose, and that purpose alone.)

Now then, as I say in one of those posts, I think that what we need to do is track all these numbers in terms of 0 to 255, at a minimum, as a means of having a serious way of nuancing the differences between one season's soil and another.  Potassium, for example, only goes up or down two or three points in some of the proposed plants I made up, so that there is only a very subtle change in soil fertility unless you ignore it for long periods.

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Water Management

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Ultimately, if we are going to be serious about farming, water has to be a major part of this.

There are a few separate issues, all of which fall generally under "water", which range from watering the crops and irrigation to water availability to the mineral content of bodies of water and their effects on soil erosion, as well as general weather for modeling droughts or other significant hazards to farming.

Irrigation Methods:

Before I start, I should reiterate something from the NPK system, since I believe I glossed over this point, and let it be covered by a post I linked back to (which not all of you will necessarily follow): Water is a separate integer value that represents the moistness of the soil.  Actually flooding the tile with water (as in having a 1/7 water depth or more) will cause the water value of that tile to instantly max out, which may be harmful to many crops which are not suited for actual flooding.  Part of the system I have outlined is that you can kill plants with too much of something, including making their soil too swampy, although there are some exceptions that cannot be drowned.

First, and most simply, you can just plain put your fields outside.  Above-ground farms with no ceiling above them should be capable of just soaking up rain in any sufficiently humid climate.  A slightly more elegant weather system will probably be required, but I'll focus on that in another sub-section.  For now, I believe that the best way to model keeping crops watered through rainfall would be to declare the rain that falls when the game declares "it is raining" to be the especially heavy rains, while some unannounced invisible light showers can be simulated behind the scenes to keep the overall rainfall suitable for simply having open-air fields with no irrigation methods.  Basically, while showers occur, the game invisibly waters the fields for you.

Next, and least efficiently, we should be able to "bucket brigade" our water.  To a certain extent, this will be the "default" watering method of any underground farming method, and would heavily encourage building your reservoirs as close to the farm plots as possible.  This should obviously become very inefficient as farms grow larger, and would probably require multiple reservoirs near every set of farm plots to compensate, but by that time, you should really have moved on to better irrigation methods.

Beyond that, there is the "controlled flood" method.  Suitable for things like initial muddying or just before planting, flooding the soil obviously gets things wet in a hurry, but as I said earlier, it should be deadly to most plants that are already planted.  Some crops (like something modeled upon celery or rice) may be able to survive simply being planted in standing water.  (In fact, the reason why you grow rice in standing water is not because rice needs it, but because rice is one of only a few plants that survive that sort of treatment, and it makes an effective weedkiller.)  Generally, though, this should be discouraged, even if it is the most familiar method, currently.

Finally, we get to methods of true irrigation, and there was some contention regarding how best to do this.  In the interest of giving the idea a fair hearing, Silverionmox was a proponent of simply having visible water trenches dug alongside farm plots filled with certain levels of water that simply supplied water through the sides of the trench.  His main argument for this was that it would involve systems already part of how we deal with water, and he believed it was not a good idea to mix means of transporting water.

On the other hand, I was a proponent of a separate system of sending water to farm tiles.  There are two possible ways of doing this.  The more basic method would be to have farm tiles "improved" by having special furrows for letting water through, or a special "water trench" tile that only carries smaller amounts of water than are normally displayed in the game, aside from possibly in buckets. 

The "dwarfier" response to the need for irrigation, which I favor the most, would be to involve some sort of plumbing system with small pipes (not the kind you can walk through, which are slated to be introduced, but a smaller one just for water), which just have regularly punched holes in them to act as a "drip feed system". 

Gravity or pump-driven water pressure would allow either one of these irrigation systems to send water down its track, and we could abstract it to automatically evenly distribute the water.  The advantage of this sort of system is that if it is a system where the numbers are not based upon the already in-game physics system, it would be much easier for the dwarven AI to be able to understand, and hence control, and hence automate the entire irrigation process.  You can simply make each copper sprinkler pipe connect to a designated sluice or other control system, and dwarves could simply stand on top of that sluice's tile for as long as they need the sluice open, and it will close off the water supply as soon as they are done manually keeping it open, preventing any messy problems with irrigation systems being left open to flood your fort. 

Even more advanced irrigation systems may involve letting fertilizers become added into the reservoirs or sluices, so that fertilizer is distributed at the same time as water is distributed to the farm zones. Ammonia/nitrogen fertilizers are highly soluble, so this is an easy way to keep nitrogen levels at a constant rate throughout the year.  Simply mixing a small amount of ammonia into the water as it heads through the sluice to the plants creates the "manure tea" that allows for a trickle of fertilizer along with the stream of water.

To point something out, each farming zone would likely require their own independent irrigation systems, as different crops consume water at different rates, and you can kill plants by flooding them with too much water, meaning giving every crop equal amounts of water can be problematic.

Another thing that is useful about transporting water through "small pipe" methods is that modeling it should be significantly less of a burden on the CPU than the current random water sloshing of the physics engine - a small pipe that just has a "funnels x water per tick" function will not be as processor-intensive, which will be important, since we're going to be talking about using much more water, when water is already a significant drain on processor power.

---

Water Availability:

As I have discussed at the beginning of this entire proposal, one of the ways in which I want to make players face a serious choice about how to manage their resources and food is to make the resources you can use to make growing food be finite, yet renewable.  While I have previously stated a goal of this to be trying to truly respect Conservation of Matter, water may well be a serious exception to this rule, as things like condensation rates and tracking of humidity levels may be too complex and finicky models even for Dwarf Fortress's standards.  Instead, water needs to be constantly introduced to an embark site, yet these rates of water input need to be better calibrated than they currently are. 

I want to also point out at this time, as I will probably have to point out in many areas, that the Volume and Mass (http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=61215.0) suggestion contains a proposal to rework the way that objects, and especially water are tracked, which would make the tracking of water supplies easier overall than they would otherwise be.

Water currently is introduced to maps through what can only be called infinite water generation points.  Edges of maps where water starts out, whether it is a small brook, a tiny underground lake, an aquifer, or an entire ocean, they all produce water at the same rate (on a per generation tile basis), and they all have infinite quantities of water.  This is perhaps most amusing in cavern lakes, as if you embark on an entire 16x16 embark, the lake will be entirely self-contained, and no water will regenerate in the lakes in the caverns.  Embarking in the exact same location as a 15x16 or anything smaller, however, will mean that, if any part of the lake is cut off, the water flow into the rest of the cavern lake will be infinitely renewed, even if only a single tile was cut off, just as if it were an entire ocean.

What needs to happen is that this game needs to start tracking water input sources, and setting finite limits on how much water will be introduced per water source.  The ocean can pretty much remain the way it is, as there is no real need to quantify how much water is in the ocean, we can pretty much assume it's infinite, but everything else needs to be a depletable source.

*** LATE EDIT: As of 2015, California, for example, is going through consecutive years of extreme or "exceptional" drought.  Over 80% of California's water consumption is in agriculture.  Much of the blame is being placed upon the fact that Californians chose very water-intensive crops, such as alfalfa (used to feed cattle) or almonds (used for almond milk) when their water tables were high. 

Again, as a form of engineering challenge, working with limited amounts of available water per year can be a serious consideration for players, setting a "roof" on what sustainable crops they can produce, especially if they have to balance growing food crops, trees, cloth, and feed/pasture grass for livestock.  Dry areas may force players into hard choices about priorities, limiting population, trading for food and cloth, or encourage extreme engineering to manage their water supply.

Ironically, in grasslands too dry to be arable, grass-fed cattle are actually somewhat more suitable as a source of food compared to more water-intensive plants, although these tend to require wide-ranging semi-nomadic cattle drives to keep fed.  Embarks on tundra, at least, will no longer be a trivial event of just eating nothing but meat and eggs from poultry farms.

Periodic drought as a "disaster" (possibly with embarks having warnings of how severe a drought can be) where depletable water sources do not refill as normal for one or more years in a row (little/no rainfall and little/no cavern lake, brook, or aquifer refilling due to lack of rainfall/snowpack) to add severe challenges to farming management.

Similarly, with some work, a "flood" might occur. River tiles have a natural set of entry tiles that spawn water continuously.  Adding additional tiles a z-level above them that spawn water periodically during flood season or a flood event could create for a more dynamic water source, especially if the seasonal floods, like the Nile floods, (or old cave floods,) had different soil nutrients in its mud (contaminants). 

Something similar with magma could represent volcanic eruptions.  Raising a magma pipe up in terms of where magma will spawn to for a season can produce a Fun surprise for dwarves.  (Especially if potentially triggered by excessive magma dumping, like abyss creatures were in 2d...) If there were walls in the way, preventing full magma expansion (and it wasn't being drained off elsewhere...) it could create local pyroclastic events.  Receding magma flows could leave behind either new igneous walls (like mafic gabbro or basalt if there was plenty of expansion area, or felsic granite and andersite if there was pyroclastic activity) and leave magma-flooding contaminants/nutrients in the soil.

/EDIT ***

Brooks, especially, should have very finite amounts of water inflow.  We might actually want to go from the current method of having a 7/7 water tile covered by a "floor" that allows walking over a "shallow" brook to simply having a 1/7 or 2/7 stream inside of a riverbed, especially since most of these riverbeds are already recessed a single z level and have ramps on them, anyway.  All creatures can "wade" through a 1/7 or 2/7 water supply, anyway.  Water could then be added to brooks at a smaller rate.  Rivers or other larger water bodies can still remain the way they are, but have better throttling over their water inputs, although river width should make a fairly major impact, already.

Every source of water (besides the ocean) needs to have some sort of throttle on the amount of water it can provide - rivers and brooks need to have some sort of counter that tells the game how much water will be flowing through that body of water.  This should not be static.  There are two primary sources of water for rivers and brooks, and they are rainfall and snowpack. 

Rainfall should periodically flood brooks and rivers with excess water that exceeds the soil's ability to retain the soil, leading to brooks that occasionally fill up with greater amounts of water, while they may occasionally run dry at times in drier climates.  Rainfall will require a separate climate tracker for "upstream" weather patterns, although this may not necessarily need to be more complex than the on-map weather tracking, nor does it need to be checked as often.  An arbitrary upstream spot should be selected, and have its weather rolled to see when brooks will flood from upstream sources, provided the source of a brook is far enough away from the map (sometimes brooks start on the embark site, meaning the weather on-map is the source of the brook).  This can mean that it may be dry in the embark, but it rained on the mountain that feeds the brook that runs through your map, so you can at least draw water from the brooks.

Snowpack is a far more regular and predictable source of water, which is why it is relied upon by farmers to supply water to their fields far more than rainfall is.  Snowpack involves the snow that falls upon the windward sides of mountains gradually melting through the Spring and Summer months, and being replenished through the Winter.  This naturally leads to higher water levels in brooks during the warmer seasons, and less (possibly none) in the colder seasons.

Such periodic water supplies mean wise farmers ensure they build reservoirs or dams to ensure they have supplies of water even during the dry periods. 

Another common surface water source is the murky pool, which I will cover in conjunction with on-map rainfall.  Currently, rainfall is simulated in a fairly granular way by having "raindrops" that drop entire 1/7 water units.  If they fall in a murky pool, they become regular surface water supplies.  If they fall anywhere else, they basically just dissapear, although they "wash off" any contaminant they touch, and douse dwarves caught in it in water. 

Rather than this, I think a slightly better way of handling this concept would be to involve the use of the previously mentioned system for tracking "wild soil" zones, as well as farm zones.  Rainfall gradually just adds to the water variable of that soil zone any time it is raining.  If the water variable become maxed out, then an overflow occurs, and every chunk of overflow water will produce a 1/7 water unit to be produced.  If there is a murky pool in or adjacent to the wild soil zone, the 1/7 water unit will be spawned at one open murky pool tile (since it is designed to emulate the low-lying land where water pools in rainstorms).  If there are no murky pool tiles open (such as by being built over or already hitting 7/7), then the water "floods", and is produced at a random spot in the soil zone.  This means that completely saturated soil will start behaving similar to the way that rainfall behaves now, except with every tile possibly spawning 1/7 water units. 

This means that areas on the surface with no soil will probably have to get hit by 1/7 water units, as well, as paved stones and mountains with exposed stone and no soil will just immediately "flood".  This can, however, get very processor-taxing, so a method of abstracting this process in a less processor-intensive manner may be advisable. 

This may also open up a desire for storm grates or sloped roads or slanted roofing (although this may be simulated with better recognition of ramps) that you could use to somehow direct rainfall, not only to make sure it doesn't flood undesirable areas, but also so that you can divert more rainfall into water resevoirs.  Of course, this can depend slightly upon the sheer ability of the game to even have enough an ability to display some of these things to the player.

Speaking of which, rainbarrels should be buildable, which would use these same mechanics to gradually have water fill them.  Combined with the perhaps more industrial scale of a completely paved surface with a storm grate down to a resevoir should give enterprising dwarves the ability to ensure that water is not wasted on silly surface soil where it can evaporate without their aiblity to exploit it to its fullest potential.

A final method of water supply would be the underground water supplies and lakes.  Lakes, underground lakes, and aquifers are all bodies of water that do not rely so much upon a "flow rate" as it relies upon having a massive quantity of stored water, with a generally fairly slight refilling rate.  This would mean that these lake-type water supplies can be depleted much faster than they will be capable of naturally refilling, which can mean that aquifers or underground lakes can theoretically be drained completely, with only a tiny trickle of incoming water to replinish it.  Countering this, however, pumping water into an aquifer or lake should replinish it, so just pumping water from an aquifer into an aquifer using power supplied by the water flow of the water from the aquifer will still be a perpetual motion machine of sorts. 

The actual way this would appear to the player should actually be somewhat similar to how it appears now, with water continuously arriving from off-map, up until the point where you completely exhaust the reserved water of the lake or aquifer, at which point the z-level of the water table either drops, or if it is at the lowest possible point, it simply does not produce more water except at the rate at which the resevoir refills, which may be glacially slow.

---

Soil Erosion:

This is one of those things where the concept is simple, but the implimentation may be extremely difficult, but it may be required as a means of achieving a truly excellent model for environmental factors, especially of the kind I was talking about back in the Forestry section. 

Water currently "muddies" stone or soil where water flows, allowing those areas to become fertile.  In a limited sense, this is relatively realistic, as water tends to dissolve soil nutrients, and then carry those nutrients with them as they flow, depositing some of them as they are carried by the water across a surface. 

To be a truly compelling model, however, water needs to be a bit more complex, and this may involve breaking the current water system to an extent to replace it with something a little more complex, more similar, again, to what I had suggested in Volume and Mass (http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=61215.0). 

Water, in order to act the way that I envision, needs to also have a soil nutrient tracking system.  This obviously shouldn't happen across every tile of water, but rather, across water bodies.  Contiguous water bodies need to have what amounts to their averaged-out dissolved soil nutrient content. 

When bodies of water meet, they need to average themselves out. 

When bodies of water flow over any surface, they create the "muddied" surface, or more accurately to the new method I am suggesting, create or add to a wild soil zone.  The newly created wild soil from mud should have soil nutrient levels matching that of the water, representing the deposited silt, while the water has its dissolved soil levels reduced to represent the loss of that silt.  The gain and loss of dissolved nutrient levels should, of course, be averaged by the number of units of water contained in the body of water, meaning large bodies of water will have barely noticeable changes in their nutrient content as they flow.

When bodies of water flow over already existing soil that does not have plants growing on top of the soil, soil erosion occurs, gradually taking nutrients from the soil, and putting it into the water body, increasing the water body's dissolved soil nutrient content, while decreasing the soil's retained soil nutrient levels.  This should occur much more quickly for the water-soluable nutrients of Nitrogen (10 times the rate of Potassium) and Phosphorous (3 times the rate of Potassium) more than it should for Potassium, the least soluable nutrient.  The amount of nutrients that water sucks up depends upon the volume of water compared to the surface area of soil it is leeching nutrients from.

Generally, different water sources should have different nutrient levels.  Murky pools should leech some nutrients from the surrounding land when it is being filled with rainwater, and should generally have fairly decent amounts of nutrients in them.  Rainfall itself, however, should have almost no nutrients, and only possible pollutants, although that is a matter for another section.  Brooks and rivers should contain nutrients brought by the gradual erosion of the mountains where they originate, but generally, brooks should be fairly pure, while only the widest, slowest rivers should carry massive amounts of silt from upstream, and the general length and area of the watershed of a river should be used to determine the dissolved mineral content of rivers.  Aquifers and lakes should generally pool a decent amount of dissolved nutrients, although water entering an aquifer is generally filtered by the soil, so that it has a lower saturation point.

Ultimately, this means that letting water flow over your fields is a bad idea, as you want them nutrient rich.  Having standing water that has time to settle, and which you can dump fertilizers into constantly, can allow farming of some types of crops like rice, since you can just bring the water itself up to saturation point, and make sure that there isn't too much water to dilute your overall amount of fertilizer.

Water added to soil that is less than the soil's saturation point does not produce soil erosion, so careful control of irrigation in underground chambers should not need to fear soil erosion, so long as nothing goes wrong... 

Soil erosion on the surface, however, after dwarves have properly trampled all the plants, can allow for the gradual change of an area of the map from forest or grassland into desert or muddy swamp where nothing lives.

---

Reverse Soil Erosion (Floodplains)

As an extrapolation upon floodplains, if a river actually has more nutrients in it than the soil it runs over, then it will wind up adding to soil fertility.  This will actually create soil if there is none, which basically replaces the current "muddy" system of irrigation. 

The quality of nutrients that are deposited, however, is dependent upon the source of the water.  A clear mountain stream probably has few nutrients in it.  A broad river that has emptied a continent, like the Nile or the Amazon river, especially when close to its delta, will be a slowly drifting, nutrient-clogged body of more mud than water. 

These major riverways are then useful for floodplain agriculture, where "reverse soil erosion" lets you purposefully flood your fields every year to replenish your fields the easy way.

Just as a game balance technique, however, there needs to be some limit to how effective this is, or everyone will want to embark on the Nile for free farm goodies.  Either the reverse soil erosion technique doesn't produce very good soil, and hence crops, compared to a better-managed system, or the amount of water per year that you can get from such a river needs to be fairly small.  The idea of draining a river (even a fairly slow-moving one) like the Nile or even the Mississippi is pretty absurd, however, so the first option would have to be the best, and make reverse soil erosion just not particularly attractive, even in extreme cases like a Nile (which is very rare in-game, already).

Since rivers are based upon their upstream flow rates, very large rivers like a Nile should have the sort of massive changes in water level that wind up creating a seasonal flooding - the water flow may drop the river's depth to where some tiles are accessible when they weren't before, and you can farm the unflooded tiles, simulating the Nile river delta... but beware years that lack a flood, and even more, the years with too much of a flood.

---

Magma Flooding

Magma, and the ashes and such that it leaves behind, are a tremendous source of nutrients, fresh from the core of the earth.  They can be fairly toxic and plagued with heavy metals, but magma should also be a prime means of very rapidly fertilizing a new soil, or creating one entirely.  Magma could potentially use methods similar or identical to the water flooding code to cause dramatic changes to the soil, or even leave a form of "magma soil" behind when it "evaporates" if there was no soil there before. 

Magma flooding can be a fast and easy way to replinish soil, although the heavy metal toxicity would be problematic for most plants if anything more than a light dusting took place, or water wasn't used afterwards to try to flush the heavy metals out.

---

Salt

Salt is another major issue when dealing with water.  Salt water is currently handled by a simple flag that indicates salinity in the same basic method of map data storage that water already currently uses.

This might have to change somewhat, although to an extent, for the purposes of map data, the binary flag for whether or not water is salinated enough for the purposes of being "contaminated" for drinking might be just fine as-is.  What we will probably need, however, is a new variable for salinity of both water and of soil.  (This starts off my even more expanded set of variables to cover "pollution".) 

Salt water from places like oceans should obviously have a high starting salinity, while fresh water has a low to negligible starting salinity.  These waters, separate from their sources, might be mixed, with the salinity diluted, but this is mainly for the purposes of soil salinity.

While almost any living organism needs salt, almost any organism will die if exposed to too much salt, as osmosis (through control of salt) is the primary way in which cells maintain proper hydration.  This means plants in salty soil die of thirst, and salting the soil can ensure the death of most plantlife (and subsequently, animal life).  Only plants called halophytes (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halophyte) are particularly adapted to salty water, and these are generally not crop plants, and would make poor ones, anyway, as they grow slower, but there's always making new plants up to fit the niche.

Irrigating soil with salty water, or some other means of accidental soil salinization (including even regular irrigation, see [url-http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soil_salination]the Wikipedia article part on irrigation[/url]) will increase salt "pollution" of the soil, and make farming significantly more difficult until the soil can be leeched of the salt.

Some of the previously mentioned halophytes are actually best used for this - saltbushes will concentrate the salt in their leaves, so that if the saltbushes are harvested, the salt is removed from the soil, and can be taken elsewhere for disposal or even eating, as apparently, people do eat these things. 

---

Weather:

Generally, the weather model currently in DF is fairly good for what we need it for.  It will need to be expanded to fit some of the changes I have talked about, however.

There should come wet and dry years, as well as merely wet or dry seasons.  Very stormy years, and possibly even things of rare, catastrophic nature, such as the eruption of the Krakatoa volcano, which caused "The Year Without a Summer" in North America and Europe, can liven up the battle against the elements themselves.  Droughts and floods, however, should generally be the main worries of farming dwarves.

Rain can also be more abstracted than it is currently.  Rain as it is now might be better made as slightly more rare than it currently is, and instead have "showers" that are more frequent, but with less obvious gameplay effects.  Showers produce small increases in wild soil water levels that allow wild plants or unirrigated farms to go the periods between the major rainstorms. 

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution
Post by: NW_Kohaku on January 27, 2011, 03:34:14 am

Pests, Wildlife, and Invasive Species

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

This was actually what I got the most excited about back in the last iteration of this thread over time, but not so many other people seemed to think as I did.

The basics of this system is what I already mentioned, pests are either vermin or invisible microorganisms that plague your crops occasionally.  I will explain that in this section, but I will also go into some expansions upon my original idea inspired by some of my more recent thoughts on how to better model a simulated ecosystem.  To this end, it will be a section on more than just vermin, and be about how animals interact with drastic artificial changes in their environment in general.

Pests: 

As mentioned earlier, pests exist to provide a balance against always growing the same crop by making crops vulnerable to being attacked by an invasion of pests.  If a fortress is reliant upon only one crop, and that crop is attacked by a disease that wipes out most of that species in one year, then you can face a total disaster as your entire harvest disappears before your eyes.  If you have a balance of 8 or so crops, then one is wiped out by a sudden pest invasion, you can probably try to conserve or purchase from outsiders to make up for the difference, but otherwise be fine. 

To really discuss how to change them, though, let me go over what we already have, first:  Vermin and major fauna already exist as a pool of potential creatures that live in the biome.  These creatures are spawned gradually on the map as other vermin or fauna are removed (by being killed, walking off the edge of the map, or just being replaced, if a vermin), so that there are only a certain number on the map at any given time.  Vermin are pretty ruthlessly slaughtered by cats, which hunt all vermin, whether a bug, a turtle, or a fairy, by using their special vermindar^TM that can detect the scuttling of a beetle from anywhere in the tri-county area.

Now then, this sets up what we can do with pests: Pests can be something like a specific kind of bug, like a bowl weevil that attacks cotton, or a microorganism like a disease or a fungus that you cannot even see as a vermin, and are much more restrained in your methods of combating them.  Regular fauna, like rabbits or wild herd herbivores that get into your fields somehow can also act as a kind of "big pest", but so long as we make them grazers, and let them have a desire to eat your best crops, that can probably become a fairly easy thing to model.

This means that either the plant itself has to designate what its natural enemies are in the raws, or the pests will have their specialties listed in their own raws.  The same can be said of the countermeasures against the pests - not only the poisons they are vulnerable to, but the pests should have some classifying tokens, such as flying insects having something like a [PEST:FLYING_INSECT] token that designates what their own natural predators are.

The actual arrival of pests depends on whether they were there to start with or not (in the biome), and how much of a given crop you are growing.  The closer they always were, and the more food you offer them, then the more likely they are to attack.

In order to model these pests properly, however, we must simulate many more pests on the field of play at once than we currently do.  This basically means we're going to need to abstract the system, and say that there are more insects in the field than we can actually see on the map at any one point in time.  It also means that cats can't just be our feline-shaped vermin-seeking missile system that completely sterilizes the whole fortress of any lifeform smaller than a gopher.

This means that pests might be tracked, instead, as a sort of amorphous multi-tile blob constituted of a very large number of insects, rather than a single creature, and not like a "swarm", but as an area that is merely "infected" with that kind of insect.  Parasitic fungi might not even appear on the map in any way at all, instead only appearing if you were to inspect the soil.  Some individual creatures may spawn for cats to zero in on, but this is something that requires a more specialized hoard of combatants to fight.

Counter-Pests:
Fighting the war against pests, dwarves can have access to their own armies of abstracted pest-hunting minions.  Spiders could become your vanguard of insect-hunters, jumping spiders pouncing upon crawling insects, while web-spinning spiders defend against aerial assault.  Against the stealthy threat of disease, an expansive counter-intelligence network of molds and fungi in the soil wait, ready to pounce upon their favorite meals - other diseases or fungi.

As pests arrive in your fortress, it should help push up the population of whatever creatures eat those pests, just as the arrival of certain plants invite the arrival of those pests in the first place.  Dwarves can attempt to culture or breed these vermin, and place them in their fields to protect against crop-attacking pests.  They can also gradually migrate into fields that are under serious threat by their favored prey.

Spiders can be fairly generalized - spiders generally just specialize on whether they hunt flying insects (by setting webs) or crawling insects (by pouncing or using trap-doors).  Fungi have to be more specialized, targeting only specific pests.  There would have to be a wide variety of soil fungi to protect against the wide array of diseases and parasitic fungi in the soil. 

Companion crops are another major way to protect against pests - certain crops have a natural ability to repel insects.  For example, peanuts are vulnerable to aphid attack.  Marigold flowers can be planted because their smell attracts the natural predators of aphids, and because of that, aphids also have an innate fear of the scent of a marigold, as well.  Rice farmers also use a type of lily called azolla when their rice has grown enough for the flooding of the paddie, as it covers the surface of the water, choking out any encroaching weed that might compete with the rice.  See this Wikipedia list (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_companion_plants) for examples.

Likewise, certain hornets lay their young as parasites in the bodies of caterpillars.  They eat their way out of the caterpillar, killing it in the process.  Some bushes have the power to release a pheromone that calls those hornets to come defend them from caterpillars when they are attacked - a protective ring of these types of bushes can keep dangerous leaf-eating caterpillars away from your crops by sending in hoards of hornets.

Dwarves with access to alchemical solutions may also try to dump poisons on their fields, in the hopes that it will do more damage to the insects killing their crops than it does to themselves when they eat the crops.  There may be some drawbacks to this course of action, however, as pesticides tend to kill far more than just the vermin they are trying to eliminate.  Pesticides are also notable for killing off the other counter-pest creatures, like beneficial spiders that hunt the pests.  You can stop the advance of pests for one year with pesticides, but if you kill off your counter-pests, then you are leaving yourself more vulnerable to the next wave if you can't kill them all with your pesticides.

Counter-Counter-Pests:
Bugs Bunny: "Of course you know, this means war."

Counter-pests should also have some weaknesses.  When there are spikes in plant populations, their parasitic predators will soon spike in population, and this allows for a spike in the population of the creatures that eat those pests.  This opens the door for the next thing up the food chain, or the diseases or parasitic fungi that attack your spidery allies to also spike in population, or small birds or insectivorous bats will swoop in, until the whole food chain hits an equilibrium.

Population modeling
As with the "virtual seeds" in the soil of the wilds around your fortress, the populations of all these vermin in the vermin wars need to be calculated off-board, and generally fairly invisibly to the player.  The player should basically only know of how the war is going by looking at his fields, and seeing a report that says how much damage the enemy has inflicted upon his crops, and what enemies are attacking.  The player should also only get a readout of what kind of counter-pests they have, and a vague sense of their numbers, as with a "numerous jumping spiders" and "few orb spiders". 

Every few growdur ticks, the foodchain is allowed to work - every creature is given its chance to attack its prey, and reduce the prey species' numbers, while at the same time, the access to food gives their own species a boost to their population (geometrically).  A certain number of prey creatures needs to be eaten in order to maintain the population, or starvation will actually decrease the predator population.  If it is a crop-targeting pest, then it instead deals damage to the overall "harvest" value of the crop, lowering the total number of harvestable crops.

If pests can go without being preyed upon, then their populations should start to truly explode, especially if they are bacterial or the like.  This can cause the sort of "Potato blight" scenario.  A dense population of crops unprotected by whatever predators evolved to kill the pests will allow the blight to utterly wipe out their prey crops, especially if it was an imported crop, when the pest's natural enemies have not yet emigrated to combat the growth of the pest. 

Also hopefully, it might be possible to create something akin to the "swarm of locusts" as a disaster that might occasionally strike your fortress.

Non-Vermin Fauna:
The game should also keep track of the number of plants and vermin on the field because it will attract or repel the herbivores or carnivores that feed upon the plants and vermin, as well.  Although an elk or a wolf is tracked individually, they should be attracted whenever their favored types of food are in abundance in an area, and this means that if you want to hunt specific prey, you might want to start ensuring that the types of plants or vermin that attract specific animals are in abundance in your region.  If you want to hunt unicorns, for example, and they are fond of a specific herb to graze upon, then growing some near the edge of your fortress as bait would lure them closer in.

Naturally, wild animals should now start eating either the grass and shrubs or the vermin or possibly the occasional megafauna attack on regular creatures.  This may require having more "herds" of animals on the map at the same time, so that predators can actually arrive on the map at the same time that at least a few kinds of herbivores are also on the map. 

Creatures like wild antelope or rabbits or elephants should also seek to eat any sort of plantlife they find, and hunt after more preferred crops.  If that means that your fields, and their nice dense rows of tastier vegetables are a juicier target than the open fields of mostly grass, then they'd prefer to get into your fields, if they can see any chance.  The same can also be said of grazing livestock animals like cows, which would love nothing more than to have a buffet in your tomato patch when you've been trying to get them to eat all that clover, instead.

"Pest" Plants:
Weeds are just plants whose seeds are in the soil, which are better suited to the soil or faster-growing than your desired crop, and which can crowd out the crops you were trying to grow.  Weeds might actually be another crop you have been planting in the past, such as clover to let fields fallow, when you are trying to grow corn, instead.  Weeds can be targeted by purposefully hitting those weeds with the pests that they are vulnerable to, or using some form of "weed killer" from alchemy, but the most selective form of weed killer which has the least impact on the land itself is a dwarf just uprooting the weed, and replanting the seeds of his chosen crop.

Invasive Species:
Because of the way that the system is set up, pests that are "locked out" of a farm initially, if you grow the crops in a greenhouse environment, would have unhindered growth until pests somehow found a way in.  The more that a population becomes abundant, however, the more likely it becomes that some creature will adapt or migrate to take advantage of the unchecked food source.  An initial wave of pests might seem unstoppable, only being countered by counter-pests once you can get them, breed them, and unleash them upon their foes.  Worse, it's kind of hard to have spiders ready and waiting on "guard mode" in your farms, because they need to have a prey species to survive upon or else they will starve and die off.  Basically, you can only launch your defenses after the invasion has already started.  It might be better to just not even try to sterilize your fields.

Likewise, "invasive weeds" might initially have no natural predators in the wild, and overtake the fields... until something either adapts to take it down, or some species is introduced that feeds upon those weeds.

Environmental Factors on Pests
Winters kill surface pests, especially insects, and especially during freezes.  Doing major tilling or movement of the soil or just digging through the soil should also kill plenty of insect pests.  Floods might bring in new microorganisms, as well, inviting new diseases or fungi that kill those diseases.

Earthworms, nematodes, and other beneficial vermin
Certain creatures in the soil could be of benefit to the soil and the crops in general.  Sterilized soil might lack these beneficial vermin, which may aerate the soil (adding to the drainage score), or help biodegrade excess biomass, or even clean up toxins in the soil.

Pollinators
Another type of beneficial vermin creature are the bee, the butterfly, the moth, the fly, the bird, and the bat.  Since many plants are incapable of fruiting without a pollination vector, and wind is not always the best means of pollination, bees and other pollinating insects and fliers are critical to growing food.  For underground farming, especially, bat-based pollination may be necessary. Underground, wind-based pollination is likely to go only one or two directions, if at all, based upon the cavern's physical layout, while water-based pollination is going to be torturously slow.  Having a movable bat colony that you could use to pollinate your crops could be a means of having a controlled farming system.

Dwarven control
To an extent, much of this warfare takes place in the abstract, invisibly, beyond the control of the dwarves, themselves, however they still need to have at least some management over the warfare of these vermin, as they play a major part in the success of their farms.

For starters, it should be possible for you to be able to see the vermin in the soil and then be able to mark some sort of vermin for capture by the appropriate dwarves from the menu where you look at the soil, and can see the list of vermin in that soil.

Once in captivity, you can release these vermin in areas of your choosing.  If you have no insects in your underground fields yet, for example, you might set up an airlocked fallow field for the purposes of breeding spiders to protect your fields.  You can bring in pests like flies or ants to serve as a food supply for the spiders to prey upon to build up their numbers.  In that way, you have a stable of spiders to hunt down any sudden invasion of pests to your fields that were formerly vermin-free.

On population models:
These are some resources on how these sorts of models can actually look:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lotka-Volterra_equation
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_modeling

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Fertilizers

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Let me get one thing out of the way, first off, to help people grasp the important part of this concept:

[size=12]Fertilizers must be expensive[/size]

I don't mean "expensive to buy from a caravan", I mean that they are rare, precious, and difficult to obtain, and worth conserving because of the difficulty of obtaining them.

Think Dune for a moment.  In Dune, water was so scarce and precious that you not only had to wear a special suit to preserve as much water as possible, but when someone died, a special burial practice was performed to preserve all the water they could, and when nobles threw water out on the floor, peasants would soak it up with rags to keep as much of the wasted precious resource for themselves as they possibly could. 

Fertilizers, likewise, need to be something that is really, really easy to waste, but for someone who needs every edge they can get, worth going through every possible trick to reclaim as much of that resource as they possibly can.

This means poo, by the way.  I'm talking about getting poo up to being a resource people cannot afford to waste by merely throwing it out and ignoring it.  And yes, this is a serious subject.

If we are going to make this a game where advanced farming is based around farming in crop rotations, and the "gaps" between the fertility of the field after one crop is done with the field, and the place where the field needs to be for the next crop to be able to grow are bridged by adding fertilizers (what I am proposing), then the key game balance issue upon which this entire system becomes either a brilliantly crafted challenge for new and advanced players alike, or a miserable joke where every problem can be solved by simply slapping the button for adding more of your nearly-infinite resources to the problem comes down to one major question:

How precious is your poo?

Yes, I'm serious, quit asking!

Making fertilizers that come from biological waste your primary source of fertilizer serves the important balancing purpose of giving you a set ready amount of fertilizers that you can use based upon the number of dwarves and livestock that you are actually feeding with your plants. 

Here's another important aspect to remember with using fertilizers, however: They rarely have one direct effect for using them.  There are about a dozen different variables for soil for a reason.  Everything you do to the soil will have an impact on more than one variable, not all of which are good.  This means overreliance upon any single resource will come back to bite you later on when you've managed to turn your soil toxic by trying to just apply the same fertilizers in absurd quantities to just force your soil to keep growing a single crop over and over.  To that end, I'm adding in some little guideline + and - symbols next to some of the fertilizers so you can keep track of what sorts of things this might have an impact on.

Urea - Untreated urine (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urine#Agriculture) contains mostly water and a chemical called Urea (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urea).  As a nitrate, it is useful both as a source of Nitrogen in the soil, and as an ingredient for the concoction of explosives, including Saltpetre, one of the key components of gunpowder.  Urea is broken down by common bacteria that live in most soils into ammonia, which most plants use as their nitrogen source.  Spreading untreated urine on your fields replinishes the most nitrogen for your buck (as well as phosphates and potassium to boot), but can have unintended consequences as it may raise the total soil bacteria population up to dangerous levels, and kill sensitive plants with biological toxins, add to soil salinity, is typically acid, and generally "burn" plants (biological toxins).  Some plants may be resistant to this burning, however, so weed-type plants are perfectly fine with you just going to town on them.  It is possible to dilute urine in water significantly enough that untreated urine can simply be applied directly to the fields.  A special function on the irrigation pumps may make this a decent idea. (Soil: N +++++, P ++, K ++++, BioM +, pH --, Na ++, BTox +++)

Lant (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lant)/Ammonia - Functionally, urine that has been allowed to age and to have bacteria process and break down the urine outside of the soil itself.  This is the primary source of ammonia in the Middle Ages and Ancient times, and was used quite extensively as a cleaning agent until the invention of the Haber-Bosch process in the 20th century.  (Yes, treated urine is used as a cleaning agent.)  Ammonia is generally known to be a weak base, as opposed to urine, which is generally a weak acid.  Both these would be impure forms of urea and ammonia, but the general rule should apply.  (Soil: N +++, P+, K+++, pH +)

This means we will need to have some sort of "Gong Farmer" job, and chamberpots, although "sewers" are pretty popular with the crowd that wants biological waste in the game.  If we use sewers, collecting all the useful urine, and separating it out from the common water and solid waste may be more difficult, and may require dwarves whose most unfortunate job it is to actually strain out the useful urine from the useless other waste that goes in the sewers. 

In some communities where Lant was positively necessary for the industry of the area, however, it should be noted that there were communal requirements that you actually save your urine, and keep it separate from any other waste so that as much of it could be harvested as possible.  How, exactly, such an edict could be put in place over your subjects, and what its social ramifications are might require further discussion, however.

Manure (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manure) and Night Soil (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Night_soil) - Solid waste provides another form of fertilizer, although, as the stuff the body couldn't use, is not quite as useful as a direct injection of nitrogen as urea is, although it would work well as a means of building up the humus layer.  Night soil is the manure of humans (or in our case, humanoids), and can put potential parasites and pathogens into the soil above and beyond the problems of regular manure.  Human waste also carries heavy metals, which can gradually accrue heavy metal pollution in the soil.  Applying manure or night soil directly to the fields can "burn" plants, which cannot take the increased bacterial activity and biological toxicity.  Composting the manure or night soil, however, leads to a significant drop (up to half) in the nitrogen content of the night soil, while at the same time, mitigating many of the downsides. (Soil: N ++++, P +, K +++, BioM ++, pH --, Humus ++, BTox ++++, MTox +(humanoid only))  May also add pests in the form of parasites and diseases the host animal passed out.

Compost - Night soil and manure left to compost outside the fields allows many of the biological processes that decompose those materials to take place away from the plants, where the toxic chemical byproducts of the funguses and worms and bacteria do not harm the more delicate of the crops you grow.  Composting can be done by a vat filled with fecal matter with worms to go at it and the like, but we might also try "composting by farm", and grow some kind of mold by tossing waste on it.  This would mean growing a type of "crop" purely on manure whose sole function is to generate a "fruit" of fertile soil for collection.  Composting can also take place with dead organic matter of all sorts, including clothing, wood, rotting food, dead creatures, etc. (Soil: N++, P+, K++, BioM ++, pH -, Humus ++, (Humanoid only - BTox +, MTox +))

Wierd has supplied a good source for far more detailed how-to-bake-your-own fertilizer (http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/4342), which includes data on specific nutrients that can be gleaned from specific composted biomass.

Bone Powder - I'll grind your bones to make the wheat to make my bread.  Bones are a good source of Phosphorus, compared to the other biological waste, and so grinding bones will get you some of that phosphorus that other sources are generally lacking in.  They're also less toxic than some of these other options, in general.  Phosphorus also is a key nutrient in getting a larger fruit from a plant, and you generally can't overdose on phosphorus the way that many other nutrients do, so bones become much more valuable as fertilizer than anything but a mood ingredient if this suggestion gets through. (Soil: N+, P ++++, K ++, pH +)

Dead trees - Many real-life mushroom farmers simply water logs and seed them with spores of mushrooms to let the mushrooms grow, or grow them in beds of sawdust while inside of limestone caves.  I've said multiple times that we could make the "easy start-up crop" of the game just be a plump helmet growing on a wet log.  They obviously have plenty of nutrients, but they really don't add them to the soil until decomposers are done with them, so it's mostly just decomposer fuel. (Soil: BioM +++++++++) The decomposers should add other nutrients, raise humus, drop pH, and raise soil biological toxicity.

Potash - Dead trees burned up so that their potassium content is more readily accessable.  It's not as ultimately "nutritious" for the soil as letting a dead tree decay, and harvesting the mushrooms that grow on it, but if you need potassium in a hurry, then it works. Generally, it's kind of a waste of a tree. (Soil: K ++++++, pH +, Na ++)

Slash and Burn - The quick and dirty way to turn a forest into a farm.  Watch the elves scream in horror!  Basically, this combines dead trees and potash to a degree, since it burns part and buries part of the tree to get some quick fertility into the soil.  The problem is that you can only really do this once, plus it generally causes some massive soil erosion problems a couple years down the road. (Soil: N++, P ++, K +++++, BioM ++++, Humus +, pH -, Na +, BTox ++)

Green Manure - Created by either simply tilling the husks of crops, grasses, or other plant matter into the soil, or by burning them to ashes, and tilling that into the soil.  Basically, it's dead trees or slash and burn, but with old crops or grasses.  Clover is typically grown without being "harvested", you just kill it and let it decompose so that you turn the clover itself into fertilizer when it's done acting as a nitrogen fixer.  Depending on whether you burn it or not, it should be the same as either the dead tree or slash and burn, but with less biomass or nutrients for less mass to return to the soil.

Saltpeter - You can make this by combining urine, manure, and straw or other dead plant matter, and leaving to "ferment" for a few weeks.  Or you can mine it.  It's a key component of gunpowder, but also a prime fertilizer.  Yes, gunpowder is made by fermenting decaying plant matter with human biological waste.  (Soil: N +++, K +++++, Na +)

Dead creatures - Similarly to the "dead trees" method, simply letting corpses and remains rot on your fields may be a functional means of both disposing of and benefitting from general "waste" materials.  Special types of mushrooms may prefer or demand growing on a corpse (while plants generally will not), so we might have something like "blood caps" that only grow from horribly mutilated bodies.  You could even farm them by simply having a trapdoor that opens up, drops goblin invaders 20 z-levels, and then splatters their pieces across the field.  "Goblin! Apply directly to the farm plot.  Goblin! Apply directly to the farm plot." Not too much different from dead trees, though, really.  (Soil: BioM ++++++, BTox ++)  Rots on its own, more toxic and less nutritious than trees.

Guano - You can mine guano, the droppings of seabird that eat sealife which are rich in phosphorus.  Places like Chile had peaks of guano islands created by thousands or millions of years of bird droppings on the island that were mined for phosphates as fertilizers.  England and Germany actually fought a war over access to mountains of bird crap just before World War 1 because they were so valuable in feeding the populace of Europe.  We'd have to have some kind of special geological formation to have a "guano" "stone" layer, though. (Soil: N +++, P +++++, K +++, Na +, pH -)

Apatite - A sedimentary stone that occurs in real life at the bottom of dried lake beds, but not in DF right now.  Maybe it could be something you find in limestone plus things limestone metamorphs into, like marble.  Apatite requires processing that would require coke/charcoal and sand to turn into a phosphorus gas that can be turned into a phosphorus salt.  The way it is made in modern day real life is with an electrical arc furnace, but theoretically, some kind of metal pressure cooker on top of a magma vent should be able to reproduce the pressure and heat.  It requires heavy-duty equipment and a air-tight set of feeding and capturing chambers that can withstand high temperature and pressure, plus sound understanding of the chemisty going on. May simply be declarable "outside the range of dwarven tech", though.  (Soil: P +++++++, pH +)

Sylvite - A salt that occurs in Rock Salt formations.  Valuable source for mining modern Potassium sources.  It's also a salt, though, so it will cause some big problems with salinity if used extensively.  Plus, like most of the "mining for fertilizer" solutions, it's just not sustainable - you have to keep finding or importing more of it.  (Soil: K +++++, Na ++++)

Flux stones - For liming the soil, which raises soil pH.  Technically limestone is traditional, but chalk, marble, and other flux-y materials are useful, as well.  Needs to be turned into a salt to really get into the soil, though, and it generally requires some breaking down to get back to Humus.  (Soil: pH +++++, Na ++, Humus --)

Sulfur/Brimstone - Will acidify soil if you need to.  Also a salt.  (Soil: pH ----, Na ++++, Humus --)

Peat Moss - It's like mining compost out of a bog, but it's fairly acidic.  Add with flux stones to nullify the acid.  (Soil: N++, P+, K++, BioM +++, pH ---, Humus ++++)

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Pollutants

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

This kind of became its own topic, but it should be a fairly short one.

Pollutants are an important part of the system, since they can penalize an over-reliance upon any given form of agriculture or fertilizer when used to an extreme degree.  When talking about pollutants, it's important to make clear how difficult it should be to remove pollution.  Some pollution types need to be harder to deal with than others, but pollution in general needs to have negative impacts that are at least notable or they lose all their meaning.  Having a form of crop that absorbs pollution is neat and should be included, but shouldn't also be a major valuable crop in other regards, or else the idea that something like soil salinity is a form of pollution and a real problem really fade away.  A salt shrub or grass that is only really useful for grazing livestock is fine.  Some kind of mushroom that grows in toxic waste dumps and is perfectly edible or useful as an industrial product while returning the soil to pristine form kills the whole notion that heavy metal pollution is something you should avoid doing to your fields.

There are a handful of pollution types I have settled upon: Soil acidity, salinity, biological toxins, and heavy metal toxins.

Soil pH and salinity are fairly well covered in other sections, so I don't want to rehash myself on those accounts.

Biological toxicity is a relatively easy-to-handle form of pollution compared to the three others.  Biological toxicity occurs from most forms of organic fertilizer, like rotting plant and animal matter or fecal matter.  It represents the toxicity of the by-products of the decomposer bacteria and fungi, which can be very harmful to many forms of general crop plants in anything more than small quantities, and can lead to infections just working on the soil for the farmers.  (How'd you like to work a field with rotting goblin corpses being tilled into the soil?)  Biological toxicity should be relatively fast and simple to deal with, since "decomposer crops" can just directly turn biomass into regular soil nutrients and clean up biological toxicity within about a few months to a year, depending upon how dense the pollution really is. 

*** LATE EDIT: Winner suggested (http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=76007.msg4000243#msg4000243) toxicity could be represented as pests that grow under certain conditions, which inherently hinder growth or cause disease for plants.  This could be a more overt method of showing the problems of poorly-handled fertilizer, and reduce the number of variables tracked, but may also add an additional layer of complexity in making plants have different reactions. 

Using companion crop planting, it should even be possible to plant some decomposer fungi in some of the farm slots that are growing a normal crop, to cut down on the biological toxicity, so long as the biological toxicity isn't at problematic levels already.  Such companion plantings would require a small dip in amount of land in direct food production in order to keep the land generally in food production without having to stop regular food production cycles to put decomposers in as its own separate crop cycle.

Heavy metals are another kettle of fish, entirely.  While salinity is a problem that requires salt leeching, and soil pH can make different crops potentially viable, heavy metal poisoning (mercury, lead, arsenic, cadmium, chromium, nickel, uranium, polonium, etc.) of the soil can be the worst kind of problem.  Aside from accumulating in the people who eat the plants as well as the plants, themselves, heavy metals can be extremely problematic in that they are extremely difficult to get out of the soil once they start to accumulate.  Few bacteria can do the job, although certain forms of plants can do so (such as willow, apparently).  Any plant or fungus that can be grown in highly toxic soil should probably take a very long time to gradually chip away at the problem, and generally be very slow-growing and of little economic value.

A sufficiently toxic patch of land from heavy metal toxins may just be so polluted you'd rather just move your farm elsewhere, rather than wait through the process of reclaiming that land.

Heavy metals are often a problem in real life thanks to the water runoff of mining operations, or else metal smelting operations.  How much it will be possible that toxic metal can be carried of in rain or groundwater that are contaminated from contact with open mining projects or furnaces is up to Toady how realistic he wants his simulation to be.  Some of the means of fertilization already have ways to accrue heavy metal toxicity, however. 

Also on the topic of runoff, fertilizer runoff can create water pollution, which I'll put into the "farming water" section.

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Alternative Farming and Living Resources

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Section in its own post due to character limits in posts (http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=76007.msg2000108#msg2000108)

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Livestock

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Section in its own post due to character limits in posts (http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=76007.msg2002652#msg2002652)

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Cross-Culture Agriculture

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Section in its own post due to character limits in posts (http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=76007.msg2002656#msg2002656)

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Plant Growth and Farming Skill

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Section in its own post due to character limits in posts (http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=76007.msg2009555#msg2009555)

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Advanced NPK, Crop Rotation, and Polycultures

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Section in its own post due to character limits in posts (http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=76007.msg2010576#msg2010576)

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Xenosynthesis

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Section in its own post due to character limits in posts (http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=76007.msg2019450#msg2019450)

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Nutrition Models

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Section in its own post due to character limits in posts (http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=76007.msg2051873#msg2051873)

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Food Webs

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Section in its own post due to character limits in posts (http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=76007.msg2066076#msg2066076)

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Animal House

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Section in its own post due to character limits in posts (http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=76007.msg2085655#msg2085655)

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Farming Water

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Section in its own post due to character limits in posts (http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=76007.msg2086823#msg2086823)

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution
Post by: NW_Kohaku on January 27, 2011, 03:34:36 am

The tl;dr Version:

Spoiler: The problems this tries to solve (click to show/hide)

The purpose of this thread is to solve several problems with the current game:

• Problem 1: Farming now is, generally, easy and boring.
  
  • Farming needs to be more interesting, with more crops that are different.
  • Current crops (especially above-ground) are nearly indistinguishable in how they are grown.
  • Farming should include more physical types of farms and farming techniques.
  • Different climates and biomes make no difference in how you farm or what you farm.
• Problem 2: Farming is currently a front-loaded challenge
  
  • We have a "learning cliff" currently - you have to know everything to get anywhere in the game.
  • Once you know everything, the game is too easy, all problems have been solved.
  • The goal should be to make something simple to start with, so any random new player survives their first year, but progressively more difficult as time goes on, challenging those who have mastered the basics
  • It should be possible for players to get by without knowing terribly many tricks, but with rewards for the player who truly masters the system, in much the same way as dwarfputing.
• Problem 3: Deep without micromanagement or pointless complexity
  
  • All automatable things should be automated.
  • Anything that is a simple "what's the quickest way to make the most food" math problem is a calculation, not a choice, and that is automatable.
  • Once all automatable functions are out of the way, high-level management choices should be made as a matter of a strategy, based upon comparing difficult-to-compare-mathematically things, such as short-term payoffs vs. long time setting up but better long-term payoffs.
  • The game needs to do the basic math calculations itself, but leave the grand strategy to players.
  • To keep players engaged, occasional challenges should arise to bring player attention back to the farms, but not in a micromanagement way.
• Problem 4: Creating a Medieval Fantasy Ecosystem Simulation
  
  • While abstracted, the game should leave players with the sense that this is an actual ecosystem, where the changes they make impact their world.
  • This can mean clear-cutting a forest leading to soil erosion that means no more "free trees", for example.
  • This can also empower players to purposefully alter the ecosystem to better suit their needs if they have a mastery of the concept.
  • If the game models real-world systems, even if abstracted, it creates learning opportunities through play.

The reason this thread is long is because it is arguing for why most simple solutions do not actually address all of these problems, and why a marginally more in-depth solution is needed.  Specifically:

Spoiler: The solutions proposed (click to show/hide)

• Solution 1: Multiple soil quality variables
  
  • Multiple variables for soil quality (instead of just a simple "fertility") mean that different methods of fertilization can be used without being a simple calculation. ("What gives me the most bang for my buck?") You cannot rely upon a single fertilizer type, you have to use several.
  • If you have differing amounts of different kinds of fertilizers, crops that consume different nutrients become more or less attractive from a strategic perspective - depending on certain types of crops means depending on keeping the flow of certain fertilizers moving.  This is a strategic, non-micromanagement choice, whereas a single fertility value simply requires automating the re-fertilization.
  • Some soil quality variables can be easy to change (like how recently plants have been watered) but others much more difficult (like if the soil is highly acidic), and some may be specific to the embark site (no growing tropical plants in an arctic tundra).  This means different embarks are going to require different crop types and farming methods that support them.
  • Several of these soil variables, especially the nearly impossible to change ones, may add variables to the game, but not terribly much complexity, as players will have few reasons to actually worry about soil acidity or salinity once you have already picked a plant suited for your soil.
  • Pollution variables can exist as a means of making players choose between short-term gains and long-term damage to their fields
• Solution 2: Pests
  
  • Pest creatures, from fungal infections to caterpillars eating leaves to locust swarms, can exist as a "disaster" form of macro-problem for players to deal with, keeping farming challenging and slightly unpredictable.
  • They can be controlled through both limiting the number of crops of a certain type (reducing the exposure to a single crippling pest infestation) and using natural pesticides - the predators of those pest creatures, or fragrant herbs that repel bugs.  (Birds, bats, and spiders eat insects, many herbs use pheromones to repel insects or attract predators of pests like wasps that lay their eggs inside caterpillar bodies.)
  • Since pests are not seen on-map, the relative population numbers of pests can be tabulated invisibly and infrequently, saving on processor power and not appearing complex to players.
  • Solutions to pests can be easy to understand, if not necessarily easy to implement - bat or bird nests near crops with birds/bats in them will keep pests down.  You then need to acquire and care for those creatures, however.
  • Since pests, especially diseases, are attracted to large, single-crop farms, it is a problem more for players who keep using simple farming methods for years, so it doesn't overwhelm players on their first few years, but challenges players in established forts to diversify.
• Solution 3: Different methods of obtaining Fertilizers
  
  • Crop rotations with crops like beans that are nitrogen fixators is a common and simple solution to one type of fertility deficiency, but not all.
  • Decomposing organic waste (including corpses, grinding down bones, and manure) into fertilizer is the most sustainable and reliable method.
  • Some fertilizers can be mined or traded for, but they are of finite or unreliable supply.  Minable Sulfur can be used to change soil acidity, and make some soil suitable for different crops long-term, however.
  • Exotic fertilizers, like magma, can be used, but require more elaborate engineering, and may cause soil pollution that limit what crops are viable
• Solution 4: Water Management
  
  • Water is consumed by farms.  This means you need to constantly bring more water into your fortress.
  • Water generation from off-map or aquifers would be slowed down, to make there be limits on how much water you can use.  This would mean desert embarks are tougher.
  • More elaborate systems are more efficient but take more time to set up and reward player engineering skills with better farm yields.  Simpler versions like bucket-watering are faster to set up, but consume more labor.  Newbie methods are not "wrong", and don't lead to dying, but there is strong incentive to learn.
• Solution 5: Polycultures - plants affect other plants
  
  • Plants can be planted with/near other plants, such as the fragrant herbs that repel some types of pests, or ground covers that reduce water consumption.
  • Plants like beans that add nitrogen to the soil can be planted with some crops instead of just in a cycle - supplying more nitrogen even as the crop grows.
  • It is an advanced farming method for advanced farmers, but not necessary for basic farming - an "advanced level" for people who master the system.
• Solution 6: More farmable materials
  
  • If you can farm trees for wood, plants for cloth, flammable oils, medicinal herbs, and many other resources besides just food (basically, anything that isn't mined can be farmed), then there is a reason to constantly upgrade farms - you want more than just basic survival on food, you want more stuff.  This lets the complexity of a farm for food become easy, but having to sustain more farms for more crops for more uses means that you are encouraged to farm more complex methods to gain greater yields for non-essential products.
• Solution 7: Nature plays by the same rules (but abstracted more)
  
  • Non-farm soil tiles have a generalized region that shares the same fertility and pollution values as farms.  This means that when grass/shrubs/trees grow, it takes nutrients from the soil.  When they burn or are decomposed, it returns nutrients to the soil, but if you harvest from the land without returning, then the soil loses fertility just like a farm.
  • Trees are therefore not an infinite resource anymore - you may have to farm them, yourself to get greater yields.
  • Wild animal and livestock populations play by pest rules, to a degree - you have control over what is attracted to your land, and livestock can get parasites.
  • You can eventually turn a land into a place where nothing grows or functionally change its biome if you work hard enough at it.  Garden of Eden or Hellscape, choice is yours.

"But what do I actually do as a Player?"

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

So, rather than an overview of what each button does, let's instead go over what you would want to do when you are first setting up a fort.

"I just embarked, I want to farm plump helmets, since those are traditionally fast and easy to farm."
OK, so dig yourself some nice open space in your new fortress for your farm to actually occupy.  Once that's done, you want to open up your land management menu, and get to designating the actual farming zone.

You'd open the menu with "l" and need to start designating the farm with "w" to bring up the second tab, the farm designation window.  From here, zone out your farming plot.  There's no real need for "building" a farming plot in this system, it's just designated as the land that your dwarves will work when they are trying to grow something. 

To actually get them working, open up the scheduler window by hitting "e" to activate that tab.  We will assume you actually brought plump helmet spawn, and haven't eaten them all or something silly at this point.  So, what you need to do is create a new farming block, for a good three or four months, and then scroll over, and select the plump helmet seeds.  In all odds, if you just dug out the place for this farm plot, you will need to add to the biomass and water levels of this plot to make it suitable to the plump helmets' growth.  Plump helmets can survive with little existing nutrients and even soil of any kind, but grow on rotting material like logs, so you can simply add several logs to the farm plot, and keep them wet to both grow plump helmets, and also build up the soil nutrients, paving the way for future underground crops to be planted in the same area.  To do this, you need to add some permissables - use "z" to start adding permissables of providing water by bucket and logs to grow those plump helmets on.  Use the + key to keep adding the number of logs you will permit the dwarves to apply to the ground until the ♠ symbol turns green.  Make sure the ≈ symbol is green as well by adding to the number of permissable buckets of water to apply to the soil, and use the * key to add ten bucketfuls at a time, or - until you hit a negative number, which should make an ∞ symbol appear, designating infinite uses of that (presumably plentiful) resource.

This means you have set up a schedule for that farm to be used for plump helmet farming for several months, and have given permission for the dwarves to use the resources they need to run that farm.  Dwarves will determine whether they need all the materials they are permitted to use or not at the time, but permissables give you a chance to throttle how much they are allowed to use if you have some other priorities for those resources.  The logs you are using, for example, are potentially useful in other industry, and you wouldn't want to throw all your logs at just farming if there are other uses you have for those logs.

Speaking of which, you probably don't have enough logs to sustain that farm forever.  You need to designate some area for clear-cutting to generate the wood you need for your farms and future industry.  The land management menu has replaced the old designation menu for the purposes of designating trees for cutting down.  Now, you designate a zone where trees grow (similar to the plot designation), and then set the area to be continually chopped down for lumber.  You do this with the "a" Forestry menu.  You can also set it for herbalism at the same time to gather some easy food to tide you over until your farms are working at full capacity, and get you the seeds for aboveground farming.  Herbalism, in fact, is a skill with a simultaniously more defined and less defined role now that farms and wild soil are made to be fairly similar.  Herbalism easily supports small numbers of dwarves that can manage to keep their harvesting areas safe from skulking goblin ambushers, but at the same time, plundering too many plants from the soil without returning nutrients can gradually lead to a more barren landscape with less plants overall.

Also, while you don't need to flood your fields anymore, if you have bucket brigades watering your fields, then the closer you can get a replinishable basin of water to your farms, the less distance the dwarves have to ferry water by bucket from the basin to the fields.  Maybe later, you can improve this system by building irrigation pipes connected to a pump or sluice that will take the "bucket brigade" out of the picture entirely.

---

Now let's assume you're ready for aboveground farming with some of those seeds you gathered.  You've walled in an area, and also managed to cut down or gather all the trees and shrubs in the area, and need to have a denser, more sustainable food source.  Now you can start really building your first self-sustainable farm system, one which doesn't require outside resources aside from the manure the living creatures in your fortress generates.  To do this, zone another farm in this aboveground area. 

Why do you need to go through this trouble?  Well, plump helmets require a constant supply of more trees cut down to serve as their biomass.  This means that eventually, you're going to be needing hundreds of trees cut down each year to just keep your plump helmet farms going, not even counting the rest of your industry.  That can get unsustainable fast.

Now, you're going to need to schedule a more complex system than you did before with the plump helmets.  First, make a block to harvest some staple crop in.  Let's assume it's wheat, and wheat takes 8 months to grow, starting from Slate/mid-Spring to Timber/late-Fall.  Wheat is a "heavy feeder", and needs plenty of nutrients in the soil to grow.  We'll assume that the soil just happened to already be mostly ready for the purposes of this demonstration, but you might need to spread several layers of fertilizer or grow some preliminary crop to prepare the soil for this wheat.  Growing wheat will probably require permissables set throughout the year for several applications of manure, water, and it will probably be a good idea to give permission to till the soil before the wheat is planted (this kills weeds). 

Now, because wheat is a heavy feeder, it will severely deplete the soil's nutrients, so we need to have a system in place that lets soil fertility climb back up, and it needs to do this without claiming hundreds of trees per year that you may not have on hand to keep feeding your agriculture industry. This means crop rotations.  You can first try to at least maximize your growing season, however, and try to grow something small and light-feeding, like onions, as a winter crop.  Light feeders won't consume as many of your resources, and may grow faster than some heavy feeders, but generally aren't as economically valuable or capable of feeding as many people as your heavy feeding staple crops usually will.  They will, however, give you a chance to really use up the last of your soil fertility while you go ahead and start adding more manure and biomass to allow soil bacteria a chance to break down your fertlizers into usable nutrients while still giving you something of economic value from your fields.

Now you need to schedule what you do for the next year, and we want this year to be based around the idea of replinishing the soil for the wheat the next year.  This means it's going to be a two-year crop rotation cycle, which has the advantage of simplicity, although it isn't as efficient as more advanced crop rotation cycles. 

Instead of merely "fallowing" the field, which lets weeds take over, we will instead schedule clover, which can serve as fodder for livestock.  Clover is a soil replinisher, it actually adds some nutrients to the soil as it grows, although it still does take up some other nutrients.  During the time that clover grows, however, we can send in our cattle and livestock as grazing herds, and let those cattle leave their own fresh fertilizer behind on the fields as they eat - giving us back some of those nutrients that the clover wasn't replinishing all by itself.  We can grow clover for part of this "set-aside year", and another replinishing crop that produces an edible crop, like peanuts or soy beans, during their particular season.  During all of this time, we keep on adding manure, helping push up the soil fertility in anticipation of the heavy feeders to come next year.

At the end of this second year, we can then set the scheduler to be on "repeat".  The wheat will then be slated to be grown the next year, and before it is planted, the soil will be tilled, fertilizers will be added, the wheat will be sewn, and wheat will be grown, watered, and harvested, all on auto-pilot by the dwarves.  A single scheduling session at the start of the first year is all you need to do to set this up.

Of course, that doesn't mean that farms will run perfectly forever - pests may strike, fertilizers may run low, droughts may occur, but generally, you can leave the day-to-day operation of the farm in the hands of the farmer dwarves, while you can focus on other aspects of the game.

---

This doesn't mean we have to stop at the simple, however, as the point of this is to allow players to enjoy far more variety in their fields, and to have more complex and nuanced systems, without actually forcing the player to perform any more complex a calculation than they actually want to perform.

We could also try to have a farm plot that grows alternative or more complex sets of crops - for example, orchards of fruit trees that require bees for their pollenation, and which must be spaced apart from one another to have space to grow, with grasses or even legumes growing in the spaces between to both maximize land use and restore nutrients to the soil.  So long as cattle only eat the grasses, and not the trees or their fruits, their fertilizers will be applied directly to the soil the orchards are using without any significant use of labor.  If the orchards are attacked by pests that destroy your fruit harvests, you can even try growing flowers that repell the enemy vermin, or attract insects that prey upon the vermin that are eating your fruits.

This requires use of the scheduler to create a polyculture - growing more than one plant on a single farm plot.  Using the scheduler, you need to add more than one type of seed to be planted, and the ratio of the seeds that you will plant. 

This would take care, however, as the soil conditions would need to be suitable for all those plants at the same time - so plants must be selected that require very similar growing conditions, but which won't actually compete with one another over space.

Meanwhile, another player may try their hand at a fishery and a chinampa, creating a floating "raft" to place their farms upon over the fisheries, so that fish and crops can be grown in a single location. 

Pretty Pictures:

Spoiler: Plot Viewer Window (click to show/hide)

(https://i.imgur.com/w5vE5nR.gif)
I get a little carried away naming things, sometimes.

Spoiler: Plot Zoner Window (click to show/hide)

(https://i.imgur.com/2SvYONt.gif)

Spoiler: Scheduler Window (click to show/hide)

(https://i.imgur.com/4R5Nl9D.gif)

Spoiler: Improvements Window (click to show/hide)

(https://i.imgur.com/rnje36D.gif)
The green thingy is a glass irrigation pump.  The brass irrigation plumbing has been built, and the dwarf is smiling about it, I guess.

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution
Post by: NW_Kohaku on January 27, 2011, 03:34:52 am

Fortress Interface (the how it could operate part)

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Now for the truly difficult part: The part where players are capable of approaching a complex system, yet being able to understand how to control their environment in as intuitive a manner as possible.  I'm going to try to break this up into different sections based upon the menu you use to access the information.

Direct Look

This actually brings me to my first little puzzle - how do you "look" at soil?  There's 4 different keys to "look" at something, 'k' is used for finding general objects, 'v' usually is used for units, 'q' is used for building operation, and 't' is used for components inside of constructed objects.  If something is just going to be the "soil", and not a "built farm", then keeping the standard method of viewing and controlling the soil as the 'q' button seems a little odd.

In viewing the soil, just as an object, I think I settle on the 'k' key, and having a special screen just for looking at the soil when you hit 'enter' at it as an object that sits on top of the floor.  Alternately, there might be some function of the farming interface that lets you look at specific soil, but I think that putting more information into the 'k' key, which is your primary "I want to look at objects" button, should be a good means of trying to find information on the soil without having to go into too many layers of screens in another interface.  (Unless there is some reason it would be very difficult to code putting different types of information in the k-look->enter menu, it would be better for intuitive information-gathering to make it k-look based.)

Direct looking at soil should give a list of all the vermin contained in the soil, as well as what seeds may be germinating at the time.  Detailed viewing of the soil should give a list of all relevant factors about the soil that the player is capable of knowing about the soil.  This includes everything in this mockup post (http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=22015.msg1419551#msg1419551)

Farming/Land Overseer Menu

The degree of high-level control the player will need to exert over the farmers with these changes mandates a whole interface dedicated to the task of land management, of which farming management is a major part.  To that end, I suggest taking up the 'l' binding, since fortress mode doesn't use that except in certain build contexts, and making this key call up the land overseer interface.

From this interface, everything you really need to know or do regarding farming (except control of individual farmers and the engineering of new locations to farm) and other tasks related to agriculture and land use are viewable and controllable.  This is split into several different tabs which should have their own keybindings for ease of control, similar to the military screen, although I would recommend just making the tabs ordered as "q", "w", "e", "r", "t", etc, so that they are organized based upon spatial reasoning than upon "u" being the most important letter in "supplies". 

I recommend the following tabs:
Farm Plot Viewer
Farm Plot Zoner
Farm Plot Scheduler
Farm Plot History
Farm Plot Improvements
Herbalism/Forestry Zoner
Ranch Manager
Biological Encyclopedia
Food Web Chart
Wild Land Data

Some sort of memory of what farm plot you were looking at should be involved, allowing you to switch to the History of that plot from the Viewer.

Farm Plot Viewer

• The 'default' view, the farm plot view is for taking a quick look at all your farm plots, and their status.
• This spawns a list of your currently zoned farm plots, from which you can choose which plot to zoom in on.
• There are sub-windows that let you view different aspects of the farm:
  
  • What plants are growing (and how full they are growing and how damaged the crop has been) (also, what irrigation method is being used)
  • Nutrient levels in the soil (see the first image) (Water, N, P, K, CEC/Drainage, and Humus level)
  • List of pests/vermin in the soil that farmers can see.  Diseases like bacteria and fungal infections can only be seen if they are attacking one of the plants in the area.  Vermin are color-coded by how they are enemies of your current crops (red), kill the pests of your current crop (green), kill your counter-pests (yellow), and are irrelevant to current pest battles (gray).  "Zooming in" on pests to get a detailed view (going to the encyclopedia?), including a rough estimate of their numbers in that one plot.  Either an icon or just a phrase or number could also be placed in the sub-window before zooming in to give an idea of numbers.
  • Pollutants are listed in another window, similar to nutrients, but for what doesn't fit on the first page (pH, salinity, biological toxins, and mineral toxins)
  • Magic energy fields' (or just Good/Evil and Savage if we aren't implementing that yet) influence can be viewed, if we are capable of directly seeing which spheres have power in the area of the farm plot.  This can be as simple as listing all the spheres active, and a simple statement from "negligible" to "overwhelming" influence in the area.
  • Climate of the field can be displayed.  This would give soil temperatures, how much rainfall can be expected, whether the area freezes in winter, and other information relating to the environment that affect plants.

Critical Issue: Nutrient Display Method:
Soil fertility displaying NPK soil stats are fairly difficult to describe in absolute terms without talking about soil chemistry in a game-breaking manner.  Talking about soil in terms of how the leaves are healthy (or magically foreseeing that they will be healthy) is a way of side-stepping this issue, but it becomes relative to the crop you are using now, and essentially impossible to foresee how another crop will react to the same soil.

If you see soil only relative to the current crop, you will need to ask the game to tell you how it treats a different crop, requiring you to actually pick that crop, and ask whether that crop will like this soil or not.  This gets compounded when you are talking about trying to choose multiple crops in a row - you will need to foresee where the soil's fertility will be after another crop is done using it.  This can be done with a good interface, which will let you forecast soil conditions several plantings in advance - queuing up multiple plantings, tallying the soil treatments that would take place, and then giving a list of what is then suitable for the soil at that time.  In this way, the soil is only ever described in terms relative to crops, but it will require some pretty tricky coding, and will have much potential bugginess.  This will require that at every step in the process of planning out multiple plantings into the future, the game will have to figure out how many applications of fertilizer (within a player-set limit to how much of each fertilizer may be spent per unit time) will be used to make soil conditions ideal for the next crop in line.  The player will probably want to punch through enough crops to make the soil once again ready for whichever crop started the cycle, creating a crop rotation schedule.  (This means that soil conditions after the last block, assuming that all the fertilizer available in the first block could be used upon the soil, would allow for the soil to be in very close to the same condition as the soil started the scheduling on.)  Considering that there may be three or so crops per year in a crop cycle of up to four or five years, this may mean generating a system that can go up to 15 plantings and 5 years into the future. 

For putting all the heavy lifting of this system on the computer and the code, however, this means that players can schedule crop rotation systems without ever having to consult wikis, raws, or spreadsheet calculation tables.  You can even introduce completely procedural plants without ever revealing the true stats of each crop to the player, and let the interface do the work of calculating how to present the information and how the crop rotation cycles can be built.  I believe this method of building the system would take a significant amount of time coding and bug fixing on top of everything else I have suggested, but would wind up giving the best possible experience for the playerbase once the system is in place, and would keep all but the most ardent haters of domestic production from refusing to farm because they would not like the interface.

The alternative to this is displaying soil fertility stats in absolute terms.   This would mean that they would be given the absolute value of the integers in the soil, and soil integer names, and absolute values of what each plant needs, and how much they alter the soil.  Much of the lifting is done by the player as they are forced to sit down with a spreadsheet or pen and paper, and try to plot out the exact sequence of actions that will manage to make a sustainable cycle.  This is much easier on the coder and the game, but a much greater challenge to the player, and I don't think very many players are going to want to really explore farming if this it is implemented in this way.  A few repeatable systems will probably be put up on the wiki, and few players will likely experiment beyond that point.  The overwhelming number of players would likely not want to use the farming system any more than they are absolutely forced to if this is how the system gets implemented

There are, of course, shades of gray between these two, but the first of those solutions is the ideal way to bring this system to the players.  All I can say is, "We love you Toady, but please bite the bullet, and make the complex, micromanagement-reducing interface for us."  I assume that the first of those solutions is used for the rest of this section.

Farm Plot Designator

• Allows players to designate new farming zones
• I would base this off a combination of how burrows currently allow you to color-code, and how farm plots (or the placement of floors or roads) are designated currently, just to make things easy
• An "undesignate plot" option would also need to exist.
• A "rename" as well, since it's more logical to be here.

Farm Scheduler
This is the meat of the system, where much of the actual work takes place.

It will unfortunately be much more crowded than some of the other tabs.  Several full-screen windows may be necessary.

For starters, there will need to be a farm plot selection screen, just so that it will not take up part of the screen for the rest of the menu selections.  Alternately, it just carries over what plot you were looking at in the Viewer section, so that you skip that part.

Scheduling involves several steps:

You must first build scheduling blocks, typically the length of time you want a crop to be cultivated.  This might generally be best to do on a per-month basis.  Every crop would take at least a couple months to cultivate, if not 7 or 8, but players may want extra months to ensure that dwarves have time to plant the seeds.

After this, the player has to select the type of crop that will be the primary crop.

All of the seeds that the player has access to is listed in a screen like the embark screen (where adding a new item to be taken with you takes you to a new categorical selection screen where you pick the specific item you want to add to your list), with color-coded icons designating how well they will handle the current soil.  Each icon's shape should be a different aspect of the soil, and the colors of the icons of course represent how well the seeds will do in soil with those qualities.  (Remembering that this may be a projected quality of the soil if this is not the first scheduling block in the schedule.  If, due to a shortage of labor or fertilizers, the quality does not reach its expected levels, the player will need to have a warning flash up.  Some sort of option over how intrusive the warning will be may be necessary, because a pause game and recenter warning may be desired if people are depending upon these crop rotation cycles working for years uninterrupted to survive.)

Every farm plot should also have a permitted amount of every kind of fertilizer to put into the fields per block.  Certain routine actions may be included in this "fertilizer" field, as well, such as activating or deactivating manual weeding in the field, including killing off (or chopping down, if a tree) any .  The application of chemicals to the soil would also fall under this category. Trying to seed the soil with some beneficial vermin could also count as a routine activity, which you could schedule in this field, as well.  How or if the soil is allowed to be tilled falls into this category, as well.  Because there are myriad different things that can be added into this list, and in different amounts, it may be best to build this section similarly to the embark screen's ability to pick specific things to bring with you on embark: Adding to the list brings up a menu where you select category, then specific item, then amount.

To create polycultures, so that, for example, azolla can be grown in the same field that already has rice growing in it, or other companion planting methods, another feature needs to be in place to allow for both selecting the additional seeds, as well as for setting a ratio of seeds to be planted.  This can use the same keys as the permissions for fertilizers and other routine actions - a button to add new types of crops in as a companion crop (from an embark screen type of second menu), and then using the + and - keys to adjust ratios of seeds to be planted, the way that you would adjust how many uses of fertilizer you give permission for using.

Some special types of farming require exceptions.  Orchards, for example, involve planting a tree, and harvesting its fruits or nuts for as long as the tree lives. 

Ranching also needs exceptions - you need to be able to set when a plot is going to be growing a cover crop like grass that is permissible for ranch hands to allow livestock to graze the plots of land.  (So that in a crop rotation cycle where the land is left to grow clover when it fallows, you can let cows graze the clover, and leave their droppings in the field.)  Herds should be given access to different farm plots during different scheduled stages in crop rotations in this screen.  Herds are designated in the Ranching screen.

An even more major exception would need to be created for aquatic farming methods - having options to flood fields and grow algae requires that the farming system be capable of recognizing flooded fields and set up the ability to farm from chinampas or farm seaweed or cultivate fisheries in conjunction with farms.  These could be handled much like dry farms, but with a recognition of what can be grown with flooded fields.

Since these are complex, time-consuming loops that players must build, having an import and export option (to a .txt file the way that embark profiles work) would help the process, letting players simply use their favorite crop rotation schedules over and over again if they can set up the initial conditions to start the loop in the first place.  In the case of a four-year crop rotation system, the player might export one of his field's schedule, and import it on the other three fields three times starting on different years, so that four different plots are running the same schedule, staggered out a year at a time.

Khym Chanur adds (http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=76007.msg3304844#msg3304844) that the crop rotation methods of a civ should become civ knowledge that players can import and start with. 

Khym also would like for the game, if possible, to calculate how much fertilizer would be required at that point in a farm, and recommend the appropriate amount of fertilizer permissions.

Farm History
Displays the past actions taken upon the farm plot.  Something perhaps looking a little like Legends Mode. 

This will show what crops have been grown in the past in the plot, what initial conditions of the soil were like then, what pests attacked, and how fiercely, and how many seeds were planted, and how much of the crop actually survived to harvesting.  It should also give a tally of how many dwarf hours of labor was put into that farm plot for that period (in per-month format, perhaps), not counting transit times.  It should also show the relative effects that planting season had upon the soil when the crop was harvested.

The purpose of this is to give players a better sense of the impact of their previous decisions, and to be able to see what worked and what failed.  To that end, it might be nice to keep the history of some plots that are deleted if they actually have at least a year's worth of history.

Farm Improvements
This gives the player a chance to designate the less routine types of work that are done to a field.

This includes the watering method of the farm plot.  Basic farming involves either rain watering or bucket-brigade watering of a farm plot.  Improving the irrigation of the land can involve making minor channels in the field itself, or using a series of copper or brass tubes as a "sprinkler" system by punching holes into them.  This would involve having a special irrigation pump built next to the farm, so that dwarves could control the pump and adjust how much water is allowed into the farm without direct player input, automating the whole process.  The brass tubes combined with an advanced irrigation pump should also allow for dwarves to carry fertilizer and apply fertilizer to the fields at the same time as they irrigate it by putting the fertilizer into a hopper on the advanced irrigation pump, saving some labor time by not forcing them to spread the fertilizer manually and water the soil, as well.  As a safety feature of the device, the pump should only be active for as long as the dwarf is actually manning the pump.  I say brass, but I would also accept "lead" or "copper" or maybe "bronze" or even some flavor of "gold" or "silver" if you've got nothing better to do with the stuff, but not "iron" or "steel" (which rust).  Using lead might actually lead to some heavy metal pollution in the soil, as well, so hey, that might be something Fun to sneak in there, right?  Adding in an advanced irrigation system would require building those special pumps next to the farm plot, or with a pipe section built to the farm plot, with no forks in the pipes off of the farm plots allowed.  (Each pump needs exactly one field to water.)  Making the upgrade to advanced irrigation piping takes having a sufficient number of piping pieces and application of a significant amount of labor.  Where the pieces actually go should be left to the dwarves themselves, so as to insure that the game can assume that a dwarf operating the special irrigation-only pump will consistently water every tile evenly, and that there is no overlapping watering.

Adding logs to a field, as with the example of farming plump helmets by growing them on logs, could be considered a one-time event, and be put in improvements.

The ability to designate specific plants for weeding or cutting down (if the plot is not set for automatic weeding) would also  have to fall into this category.

A means of purposefully adding counter-pests or even pests to your fields should also be possible in this menu.

Likewise, adding gravel of certain kinds of stone as a slow-release nutrient would be an improvement of the soil.

Any other one-shot action I didn't think of would go here.

Forestry Screen
In this screen, the player will have the ability to set zoning for the purposes of collecting resources from wild/uncared for soil locations.  This can actually just be a farming plot that you let grow wild, or a designated wild soil zone.  You can set these areas for cutting down any trees that grow to maturity, harvesting bushes with herbalism, and possibly also designating fishing zones, if "farming" also bleeds over into fishing.  This will allow players to no longer be forced to manually designate what trees to cut down - you can set which areas are to be cut down.  (Potentially, an advanced scheduling screen function might let you designate trees to be cut down at certain times of year.)  Options can also be included for other means of dealing with the wilds, as well, including slash-and-burn of the plants in the region for the purposes of slash-and-burn agriculture.

Ranching Screen
This screen exists for the purpose of organizing "herds" of animals.  Herds are for grouping animals with like dietary needs so that they can be managed by dwarves through areas that feature silage or grazing grass.  Herds need to be scheduled through the areas that they graze to manage overgrazing of fields, and to ensure that you don't leave a cow in the corn field where it can eat your best crops.

Biology Encyclopedia
This should form a searchable database of every plant, vermin, and creature that the player has encountered.  Including the best relative stats that can be displayed to the player involving their growing needs (if a plant), their combat potential (if a creature), their place in the Food Web, and their economic uses (like what an average version of that creature slaughters for).

Food Web
A companion to the Encyclopedia, this screen's purpose is to give a visual aid to the player in identifying the complex relationships between the various pests and vermin and their predators and prey.  When a plant, pest, or creature is selected, that creature is put at the center of the screen with its possible prey listed to the left, and possible predators listed to the right.  The player may scroll through the lists on both sides, and re-center upon any of those lifeforms, and also skip back over to the Encyclopedia entry of the lifeform they are looking at.

Wild Land
This screen combines the plot viewer functionalities with a free-roaming cursor, so that you can explore what areas in the wild  are most ready for your development, and also to give you some idea of some of the more complex actions taking place outside the immediate control of your farms.  It would give a sense, for example, of the magic energy fields that are shifting in the caverns outside your immediate zone of control (but which you have revealed). 

This section is not considered complete.  Suggestions are welcome and encouraged.

Adventurer Interface:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

This section is its own post due to post character limits (http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=76007.msg7125218#msg7125218)

Common concerns and questions:

"But how much FPS cost will this have?  Temperature is already a big drain on FPS, and this will require more calculations on tiles!"

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Note that temperature slowdown occurs because every tile is calculated for heat.  If you have a 4x4 embark (each embark tile being 48x48 regular tiles) with 200 z-levels, then you have 4 * 48 * 4 * 48 * 200 = 7,372,800 tiles in an embark.  Cycled through every temperature check. 

Now then, the soil system I am proposing makes soil a "floor covering", and in that same area, would be 147,496 tiles to check (and I further proposed conglomerating embark tiles worth of wild soil together at that, which would significantly reduce this number down to about 16 plus however many plots the player makes, which is not altogether dissimilar to what you just said in "tracked by layer", anyway).  These are performed on growdur cycles, which occur every 100 normal frames, further reducing the number of calculations taking place by two orders of magnitude.

Many of these calculations are not terribly complex, at that, and this is thanks in large part to keeping much of the system as an abstracted system outside the sight of the player.  You can fudge around nutrient values between soil tiles near one another if the player never can measure the exact amount of phosphorous that last tuft of grass took from that one tile. 

---

This suggestion's relation to other suggestions:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Part of what makes this suggestion a giant, sprawling mess that requires this reorganization is that I am also thinking in terms of how to rebuild several other aspects of the game, with regards to making a more involved experience on the part of the player.  Some part of what makes me appear to type this so breathlessly is that I am constantly thinking of the myriad other ways that the game might be improved, and how to manage the ramifications of one idea with another.  (If I spent half as much time typing as I do pacing and thinking about things, I would be even more verbose than I am now!) This means that some of what I am arguing for relies upon some other suggestions also being implimented at some point to work to its fullest potential. 

For starters, I think the entire "all the challenge of the game is in the first two years" aspect of the game should be overhauled, and that's why there is the Class Warfare (http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=61620.0) suggestion exists.  This would not only make dwarves themselves a more precious resource, but also create a whole class of new items that you would need to supply your dwarves with as your fortress advances, making play more complex as the game progresses from being a mere outpost to a true city.

To make this really make sense, and not simply be a chore heaped upon the player, however, a certain precondition has to be met.  You have to be able to declare what your fortress will be at some point in the game, and be able to say "No, don't send more dwarves, I want to stay at this stage, where it's still simple". 

Dwarven Imperialism (http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=64249.0) would help with this to a great degree.  I might just go back and make another, more sweeping suggestion at some point, but what relates most directly to what I am talking about now, what I want to focus on is having a way to declare what your fortress's purpose is.  If we can declare what purpose we want our fortress to have in the overarching story of our entire nation, then not only will we feel as players that the world outside our little fort is more important and has a place in the world other than being your own personal sandbox and shield against the waves of attacking goblins, elves, zombies, or whatever.  It also means that players can focus in on the one aspect of the game that we really want to play, and as such, the people that argume that "I don't want to have to farm" can have their preferred playstyle in the form of a military fort that might have its food supplied to it, provided it also trains raw recruits, holds a strategic pass, and sends soldiers out to the king or his generals whenever they are called upon to do so, and face more severe combat challenges to occupy them instead of facing the challenges of trying to manage more complex societies.  Players building cities for the purpose of trade or claiming and settling new lands, however, would need to worry far more about how to build a working society with larger populations, especially if we are dealing with rules from Class Warfare.  To a certain point, "build the largest city you can manage to maintain" might become the goal.

Bromance of the Dwarven Kingdoms (http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=76667.0) is a spiritual successor to that post.  It involves numerous diplomatic and military suggestions for focus on a fort's external challenges, as opposed to this thread's internal challenges.

Ultimately, I bring this up because I think that at a certain point, this game is going to have problems with its player base simply wanting the game to be different things for different players, and the best way to do that is to actually make the game BE different things for different players. 

The Stranger (http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=64267.0) is a thread about having travellers, which can potentially be a part of the entire caravan arc.  I'm getting a bit ahead of myself in mentioning this one, but having travellers that visit your fortress can be used as part of a system for trading biological materials from very distant lands, and also having a system of "regional specialties" basically depends upon having this sort of complex ecological diversity.  We can also advertise a certain regional specialty from our own fortress, and the like.

A very fun and thoughtful thread I have read while writing this is the Buzzin Beard thread (http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=77736.0) which covers uses for bees and honey.  If dwarves can grow flowers for bees to grow specific honey types, it opens up new doors to bee use, and multiple aspects of industry and production can be tied together.

Another major suggestion that would impact this one would be one of the several suggestions relating to making mining more difficult, such as  Realistic Mining (http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=24932.0). This would make expansion in general more of a serious issue for a fortress, and make caverns more useful as pre-excavated areas, and also make stone more precious as a resource, the way that we need to make soil and dwarves also more precious, as you would have less metal and stone automatically at your disposal, and excavating an entire mountain would be a more serious project than merely designating an entire mountain, and waiting a week for your dwarves to finish their Mountaintop Removal mining project.  For the ultimate extension of this idea, there is Volume and Mass (http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=61215.0) as a suggestion for an overhaul of the entire way in which you have to remove all the stone from a tile to make it accessable, rather than vaporizing whole walls.

With regards to the caverns system, I have had a couple of threads involving magic and the Gods, represented in Physical Gods (http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=64733.msg1516318#msg1516318) and this thread's own spin-off thread, Xenosynthesis (http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=76578.0).

For further suggestions on magic, Contract Magic (http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=109726.0).

Alchemical Material Property Tokens (http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=102403.msg3027251#msg3027251) is the long-delayed Alchemy thread I reference a few times.  It is meant to work hand-in-glove with procedural plants and crops to make more interesting types of farming possible.

Compare animals and observed animal traits (http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=151041.0) suggests how to add some interface features that allow players to have more insight into ranching animals without forcing players to rely on memory hacks for information.

Categorical or Algorithmic Exotic Taming (http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=104415.msg3087106#msg3087106) relates to the cultural knowledge aspects of the game, and as such, could be used in conjunction with farming, as well, giving crops taxa and knowledge about specific crop types could become civ knowledge.

Adventurer Personality Profiling (http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=105400.msg3122401#msg3122401).  Doesn't really relate, but since nobody reads this thread, I can just use it as a personal index of all my other threads for faster searching to reach back to everything I've written in the past.

Optional Starting Dwarf Numbers and Immigrant Control (http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=106290.0) reflects an argument for severely cutting immigration and making labor more valuable.

Raw-editable Procedural Worldgen Cities (http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=63054.msg1453010#msg1453010) for players to make their own types of cities.

Geologic Structures (http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=82309.msg2183808#msg2183808) are a collection of real-life geology phenomenons to add with the 3d ore veins.

Potential and Affinity (http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=122376.msg3994657#msg3994657) ties diet to potential growth rates.

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution
Post by: Max White on January 27, 2011, 05:08:01 am

Oh god, wall of text, It blinds me! Ah well, it must be read!
Wait, you mean to say in the origenal thread, people went so far as to say 'Just go play harvest moon if you want more farming'? For shame! Do people not know that complexity and depth are the heart of DF? Rest assured, there is nothing 'undwarfy' about being up for a greater challenge. It is in the spirt of the dwarf to face things larger then itself, as so many things are.

Well all in all a very compelling thread, and sad to say I agree with just about all points I have read. Boring, arn't I? Although on the topic of numbers and FPS, making a value for every squair to keep track of minerals has FPS lag potential. Instead, I propose that each farm plot have it's own value. You can't farm off a farm plot, so values for that land would be irrelevant.

Reading your thread, I had thoughts of a water flood chamber, to irrigate my farms, hooked up to a pressure plate at the bottem of a lake that dries up and floods from season to season, therefor making a repeater that goes on a yearly rotation. Truely, this is a dwarfs suggestion.

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution
Post by: Spamyouhou on January 27, 2011, 05:55:03 am

I have found the different ideas you've posted so far very compelling (Yes, I did read the entirety of your post !).
I usually play DF in short bursts and can't force myself to play the game once I have passed the point where my fortress is set up , and making farming a more important and challenging part of a large fortress (instead of just being a temporary annoyance at the beginning) would definitely renew my interest in DF.

In my opinion, what's really important when talking about improving farming is making it more complex without turning it into a huge micromanagement fest. That's why an intuitive and simple yet powerful interface to deal with the repetitive stuff (somewhat like the military interface even though it can be improved too) is needed. It should be easy to automate harvesting, planting, fertilizing etc so that the overseer can focus on decision making and planning a long term strategy.

Also, I believe there is also a need for animals to have bigger impact on the environment. Right now, it's possible to have 100+ animals (not counting the wild ones) running around without any effect on your fortress (except for lag, of course). They should affect the running of a fort both in a negative (they require a lot of food) and a positive way (they get rid of pests and weeds, produce some material for fertilizer, and maybe are the only source of meat if few caravans are able to reach your fort).

Anyway, I am really eager to see what Toady is going to do when he decides to take care of the `Farming improvement` part on the dev page.

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution
Post by: Kattaroten on January 27, 2011, 06:06:58 am

I like all of your ideas, except the one about the research menu... Research should only be incorporated in the game if it is in a way that fits the dwarf fortress theme better then a tech tree. Because i mean, who likes tech trees?

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution
Post by: NW_Kohaku on January 27, 2011, 11:09:16 am

It's always nice to see responses, especially for something I spent an entire day writing, just because it can always be intimidating.  That I actually get positive responses is better still.  Thank you guys for taking the time to read all this (and hopefully the parts I'm going to attach on in subsequent updates).

Anyway, I had problems in the last iteration of this discussion partly because people were not seeing "the whole picture", as it were, but arguing against individual parts because I was involved in long arguments about those specific parts, and people thought I was only proposing a single piece, without seeing the whole machine, as it were.  And trying to point someone to a disorganized 46-page thread riddled with what basically amounts to the same argument going back and forth didn't get too many takers willing to read that much, so it basically wound up being the same people who had actually been reading the thread all along versus everyone else. 

Worse, it was like I was in a catch 22 - if I talked about parts being made more complex, then I was "drowning players in complexity", if I talked about having parts of it automated, then I was "making a pointless mechanic if players don't use it, anyway". 

So, basically, I want to front-load the really pie-in-the-sky abstracts in this new argument.  The details down in the mud are what I'm trying to build down to.  The last thread basically worked in reverse of this method, starting with discussions on how to make interesting or realistic mechanics, and then trying to put an overarching theme or idea on top of that to make the pieces make sense in the context of one another, while growing in complexity.

Anyway, I'm worried I didn't reserve enough space for everything, even with five consecutive posts.  My first post was split into two because it goes over the "mere" 40,000 character (11 pages in a text editor) limit for one post.

I'm thinking maybe to just use that "Implimentation" list tree as an actual table of contents, and linking the headers to individual posts with certain explanations if I really need more tl;dr space for some of this.

Anyway, up next, I wanted to post some "frequently argued rebuttals", then go into the arguments for certain things like maybe urine and feces, before going into the real nuts and bolts, so that only someone who has slogged through most of the abstract argument gets to the details.

Quote from: Max White on January 27, 2011, 05:08:01 am

Although on the topic of numbers and FPS, making a value for every squair to keep track of minerals has FPS lag potential. Instead, I propose that each farm plot have it's own value. You can't farm off a farm plot, so values for that land would be irrelevant.

Having every tile track individual soil stats technically wouldn't cause FPS lag unless it actually managed to take up all your standard memory, and forced the computer to use Virtual RAM, it would instead just take up a lot more memory.  FPS lag is caused by pathfinding - if a dwarf wants to path to a stone to use in some process, the game currently calls upon a chart of every stone in the entire embark, and measures distance from dwarf to material for every single stone in the embark.  That takes up FPS.  If it's just a number for measuring what will grow there, then it shouldn't have many FPS problems.

That said, literally putting in a soil quality measurement of every tile on the map would blow up your computer's memory, no question.  Instead, I think that something that tracks "wild soil" by embark tile-shaped zones and possibly elevation (differentiating surface from cavern, and layers of cavern from one another) where only tiles that have some sort of "soil" or "muddy" contaminant on their floor would be a more memory-efficient means of tracking things.  Every tile is just averaged into the overall larger pool of nutrients that is shared across a large region of the map.

This could potentially carry over into farm tiles, as well, where an entire "farm plot" of as many as 100 tiles (but probably more like 10) can use the same data, but this would need some sort of sanity checking to make sure that you aren't just dumping fertilizer and water only on the one closest tile, and ignoring the others.

If we are talking about a farm plot of 10 tiles that has a nitrogen level of 100 out of 255, and it needs to be at least 120 at all times for a plant, and a single unit of ammonia adds 20 nitrogen per tile, and you can have a bucket with up to 10 ammonia, then you can carry 200 points of nitrogen in a single bucket, and it will be divided by 10 tiles, for a total of +20 nitrogen to the whole farm plot's nitrogen score.

Quote from: Kattaroten on January 27, 2011, 06:06:58 am

I like all of your ideas, except the one about the research menu... Research should only be incorporated in the game if it is in a way that fits the dwarf fortress theme better then a tech tree. Because i mean, who likes tech trees?

It's something I have some mixed feelings on, to be honest, but I think it can be rigged into a more interesting system if we can mix it with some procedural development. 

I'm well aware that players aren't likely to even be playing a game long enough to have serious development of new varieties of selectively bred crops on their own.  What I'm arguing for is that the game procedurally develops new selectively bred "superior versions" of some crop or another, based upon the history of the world.  This means that humans might have special forms of more productive wheat for trade than the wild wheat you might get from herbalism, and these would be different every time. 

Honestly, I'm not big on tech trees in general, myself, but Andeerz was really selling them a few months ago, as part of a way to have procedural growth of different races, and means of having trading of technologies and ideas to make one generated game become substantially different from another game.  It wouldn't be something that you could really build through very much in the span of time that players are making their forts, but it would be something that made worlds different more than just in terms of geology and a giant record in the "history" section of who killed what.

---

(And even my response is tl;dr... maybe this is getting to be some sort of clinical problem?)

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution
Post by: FGK dwarf on January 27, 2011, 02:50:57 pm

A very well-thought-out post, in my opinion [I should probably say I've not read the original thread]. Certainly farming needs a big overhaul. Some thoughts:

Quote from: NW_Kohaku on January 27, 2011, 11:09:16 am

That said, literally putting in a soil quality measurement of every tile on the map would blow up your computer's memory, no question.  Instead, I think that something that tracks "wild soil" by embark tile-shaped zones and possibly elevation (differentiating surface from cavern, and layers of cavern from one another) where only tiles that have some sort of "soil" or "muddy" contaminant on their floor would be a more memory-efficient means of tracking things.  Every tile is just averaged into the overall larger pool of nutrients that is shared across a large region of the map.

Soil quality need only be tracked for tiles that actually have soil, which won't be many (basically the surface, subsurface soil layers, and the caverns--farming on stone shouldn't be possible without moving soil from elsewhere. A 4x4 embark with 3 caverns, surface and say 4 subsurface soil layers would have (3+1+4)x4x4x48x48 = 300,000 tiles. If you want 4 bytes of data for each tile (water, nitrogen, phosporous and potassium) that's only an extra megabyte of RAM.

Maybe soil acidity could be introduced too? It could be changed by the application of lime.

Subterranean ecosystems could semi-plausibly be powered by:
1) decaying organic debris, whether brought in by your dwarves or washed in through the underground river system--this would make caves with no water pretty sterile, which is quite realistic.
2) Chemotrophs or lithotrophs--organisms that build organic matter out of inorganic (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chemotroph (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chemotroph) and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithotroph (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithotroph)). These might require special conditions such as the presence of particular rocks or hot vents (maybe proximity to magma?)

I like the idea of ramping up farming complexity as population grows. The early Plump Helmet Logs would be the dwarven equivalent of slash-and-burn agriculture, which can support a small number of people for a few years before the soil becomes depleted and they have to move on.

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution
Post by: aka010101 on January 27, 2011, 03:18:23 pm

Okay, The wall of text, as overwhelming as it was to read, has some truly awesome ideas, but one of the things that really grabbed me was one of the parts of kohaku's reply.

Quote

I'm well aware that players aren't likely to even be playing a game long enough to have serious development of new varieties of selectively bred crops on their own.  What I'm arguing for is that the game procedurally develops new selectively bred "superior versions" of some crop or another, based upon the history of the world.  This means that humans might have special forms of more productive wheat for trade than the wild wheat you might get from herbalism, and these would be different every time.

While i really like the idea of selectively breeding crops, i think it should be a bit more complex than that. Instead of having a single 'better' type of crop, should be different traits you can give it, such as how hardy it is, how fast it grows, and so on. This could also tie into the raws of the plants themselves, having certian traits for growth rate, nutritional needs, ect.
My other thought on this is while procedural advancement is fine for the AI civilizations, when it's a player controlled civ, i think you should have a bit more control, such as ordering your farmers to breed, say.. maybe a faster growing strain of pig tails for example. Then perhaps randomize it, so you may end up with a strain that's just faster growing, or maybe faster growing but a bit more adapted to your exact ecosystem, making it harder to export. Or perhaps you get something else, as accidental discoveries happen occasionally. But, as the player, i feel you should have some say in the direction of reasearch , but perhaps that's an argument for another thread.

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution
Post by: FGK dwarf on January 27, 2011, 03:52:45 pm

Quote from: aka010101 on January 27, 2011, 03:18:23 pm

...
While i really like the idea of selectively breeding crops, i think it should be a bit more complex than that. Instead of having a single 'better' type of crop, should be different traits you can give it, such as how hardy it is, how fast it grows, and so on. This could also tie into the raws of the plants themselves, having certian traits for growth rate, nutritional needs, ect.
My other thought on this is while procedural advancement is fine for the AI civilizations, when it's a player controlled civ, i think you should have a bit more control, such as ordering your farmers to breed, say.. maybe a faster growing strain of pig tails for example. Then perhaps randomize it, so you may end up with a strain that's just faster growing, or maybe faster growing but a bit more adapted to your exact ecosystem, making it harder to export. Or perhaps you get something else, as accidental discoveries happen occasionally. But, as the player, i feel you should have some say in the direction of reasearch , but perhaps that's an argument for another thread.

Well, actually this might work quite well without player input, just by natural selection. Plants that grow quicker will get harvested more frequently; plants better suited to dry conditions will produce more seeds when you try to grow them in an arid biome. The player will get more seeds out of these than the standard varieties available at embark, so they will in time come to dominate the pool of seeds available for planting.

(This assumes the plant traits can be passed on genetically, which I believe is already possible for animals...?)

If you wanted more player input, you might actively set up a farm that's slightly under-watered, and segregate the seeds from that to get successively more drought hardy crops. Or you might set aside all seeds that were harvested early in the season (might be difficult to manage though) to pick out the fast growers.

I think I'd prefer something like that than a general order to your planters/herbalists/whatever the plant-breeder profession will be to "breed for better X". It would be more fiddly to manage, but would really be a small perk, so if you don't want to bother with it then it can be ignored. If you had a "breed for better X" order, it would be trivial to just tell the Dorfs to do it and reap the benefit for no real effort.

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution
Post by: Uristocrat on January 27, 2011, 03:52:45 pm

I occurs to me that a lot of effort could be saved (and two long-standing requests could be commingled) by having dwarves take their potty breaks on site, in the fields.

Could also let us compost all those useless body parts that are hard to get rid of.

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution
Post by: jseah on January 27, 2011, 03:53:32 pm

Quote from: NW_Kohaku on January 27, 2011, 11:09:16 am

And trying to point someone to a disorganized 46-page thread riddled with what basically amounts to the same argument going back and forth didn't get too many takers willing to read that much, so it basically wound up being the same people who had actually been reading the thread all along versus everyone else. 

I read the whole thread.  Took me AGES.  Witnessed the enlightenment, almost. 

It's understandable why not many people wished to read the whole thing. 

Subscribed.  Can you bump this whenever you make a substantial update?

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution
Post by: NW_Kohaku on January 27, 2011, 03:57:51 pm

So many different responders within 24 hours of posting... I guess having a reboot really was a good idea to get more people into the discussion, because the last one became pretty inbred with mostly the same posters over and over again.

OK, first off, I tacked on the feces/urine argument into the second post.

Quote from: FGK dwarf on January 27, 2011, 02:50:57 pm

Soil quality need only be tracked for tiles that actually have soil, which won't be many (basically the surface, subsurface soil layers, and the caverns--farming on stone shouldn't be possible without moving soil from elsewhere. A 4x4 embark with 3 caverns, surface and say 4 subsurface soil layers would have (3+1+4)x4x4x48x48 = 300,000 tiles. If you want 4 bytes of data for each tile (water, nitrogen, phosporous and potassium) that's only an extra megabyte of RAM.

Maybe soil acidity could be introduced too? It could be changed by the application of lime.

I haven't gotten to this part of the suggestion yet, since it's part of the "nuts and bolts" I wanted to avoid at first, but one of the things we talked about is why you can't just have binary flags for water and NPK.  There needs to be changes over time, and building up soil (and yes, acidity was included, as was biomass, and there were talks about soil drainage and other more esoteric soil qualities) so that crop rotations can make some logical sense.  This means having more than just 2 values for every soil, and as a compromise, I was talking about 8 bits per soil nutrient, and six variables, for a total of 24 bits per individually tracked piece of soil.  Making larger "chunks" of soil that share their variables would allow for larger values that can have more nuanced changes in fertility over the course of game years without having to track half a megabyte of data just for soil fertility data.  After all, tracking an average of 10 tiles of farm with a single value that is two or four times longer in terms of bits will still have a net savings of two to five times the data.

Quote

Subterranean ecosystems could semi-plausibly be powered by:
1) decaying organic debris, whether brought in by your dwarves or washed in through the underground river system--this would make caves with no water pretty sterile, which is quite realistic.
2) Chemotrophs or lithotrophs--organisms that build organic matter out of inorganic (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chemotroph (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chemotroph) and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithotroph (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithotroph)). These might require special conditions such as the presence of particular rocks or hot vents (maybe proximity to magma?)

The problem with decaying organic debris is that there isn't nearly enough of it to explain cavern ecosystems.  Chemosynthesis was actually a part of a more advanced "magma farming" system I wanted to explore, but I think becomes a little too complicated, especially since magma and water don't play together too well right now, and I'm already asking for enough major system overhauls.

For now, I think it would be best to have some sort of more invented sci-fi explanation for cavern systems, and having some sort of fungus creature that can just tunnel straight through solid rock and leave behind muddy floors that can spawn even more decomposers picking up its waste would be a good starting point, but there needs to be a way to inject more energy into the system without perpetually increasing the amount of mass, and for that, we need a "magic energy source" in the Arthur C. Clarke sense that "any scientific principle you can't understand is functionally indistinguishable from magic" (paraphrased/rephrased to be made more applicable to the topic at hand).  It needs to have a measurable, predictable function to base farming off of it, which means it would behave in a measurable, predictable manner similar to science, but it basically would generate its energy from seemingly nowhere, or at least, generate it in a way that is functionally infinitely renewable without need for destruction of matter in the process to really be able to harness it for our purposes. 

Converting infinite magma sources into energy can accomplish this, but not all caverns really hook up to magma vents of their own.  Something magical about the caverns themselves (and having "cavern climates" from different flavors or densities of that magic) would be the best means of explaining how all this works.

Quote from: aka010101 on January 27, 2011, 03:18:23 pm

While i really like the idea of selectively breeding crops, i think it should be a bit more complex than that. Instead of having a single 'better' type of crop, should be different traits you can give it, such as how hardy it is, how fast it grows, and so on. This could also tie into the raws of the plants themselves, having certian traits for growth rate, nutritional needs, ect.
My other thought on this is while procedural advancement is fine for the AI civilizations, when it's a player controlled civ, i think you should have a bit more control, such as ordering your farmers to breed, say.. maybe a faster growing strain of pig tails for example. Then perhaps randomize it, so you may end up with a strain that's just faster growing, or maybe faster growing but a bit more adapted to your exact ecosystem, making it harder to export. Or perhaps you get something else, as accidental discoveries happen occasionally. But, as the player, i feel you should have some say in the direction of reasearch , but perhaps that's an argument for another thread.

Sorry, this is also a problem of my trying to be too abstract when talking about the subject.  You are correct in your assessments, and these are things I also want to try to fit in.

The balancing mechanism I want to put into "better crops" is that, generally, they are just more susceptable to pests and more generally delicate.  Modern agriculture makes up for this with pesticides, but dwarves obviously have this in very limited, if any, supply.  (Unless "dump magma on your fields, that solves everything" counts as a pesticide.)

To make a real-life analogue, the true miracle story is corn.  Corn started as a grass, not much different from wheat, but which has been so utterly unnaturally selected as to be almost unrecognizable when compared to its ancient predecessors. 

Native Americans relied upon their corn, but there was almost no real variety in corn, and as such, it was very susceptable to crop failures.  This is, in fact, believed to be one of the major reasons why the North American Native Americans, which did have an ancient civilization (the Mound-Builders), lost that civilization - a few years of successive crop failures made the people overthrew their leaders, and just went back to more "safe" methods of society, like hunting buffalo or smaller-scale subsistance farming in the areas more capable of sustaining such agriculture. 

Also consider the navel orange.  There is only one navel orange tree in the whole world because it cannot produce seeds, and was just a freak mutation.  It has existed for decades, and more trees are produced by "cloning" it by cutting off a branch, and letting it grow into a new tree.  Still, it's just one organism, with just one string of DNA, with no means of evolving defenses while organisms that might prey on it, such as disease, can evolve every year to better exploit the weaknesses of the navel orange tree.  They are all the same tree, so if one becomes vulnerable to a disease, they are all helpless against that disease.

---

fgsfds!  Three new posts while typing this one... well, might as well post it before I get caught in a neverending chain of trying to respond...

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution
Post by: NW_Kohaku on January 27, 2011, 04:16:01 pm

Quote from: Uristocrat on January 27, 2011, 03:52:45 pm

I occurs to me that a lot of effort could be saved (and two long-standing requests could be commingled) by having dwarves take their potty breaks on site, in the fields.

Could also let us compost all those useless body parts that are hard to get rid of.

The problem with this is that just dumping rotting waste onto a field is called "hot manure" or something similar, it's been a couple months since I looked it up, and this is bad for a wide variety of plants.  Hot manure is more nutrient-rich, but the little decomposing buggers create some toxic by-products that are just as poisonous to most plants as it is to most humanoids.  You want to have a "composting pile" device (either a building or a zone or a garbage dump or something) to let that hot manure turn all the way into more stable soil before adding it to most plants.

Quote from: jseah on January 27, 2011, 03:53:32 pm

I read the whole thread.  Took me AGES.  Witnessed the enlightenment, almost. 

It's understandable why not many people wished to read the whole thing. 

Subscribed.  Can you bump this whenever you make a substantial update?

Color me impressed.  I haven't even gotten around to re-reading it to make sure I can harvest all the surviving ideas for placement in this thread.

Anyway, I will make a post noting it whenever I do a major change to the thread.

Quote from: FGK dwarf on January 27, 2011, 03:52:45 pm

stuff on genetics

Well, we can't get too crazy about all of this, is the thing.  The key to making realistic Darwinian natural selection is that everything has to have a real cost, and those costs are difficult to model, currently.

For example, spiders aren't all web-spinners, and some are jumping spiders, which hunt down prey with good eyesight and powerful legs.  Webspinners catch flying insects, while jumping spiders catch crawling insects.  Here's the thing, spiders have evolved from one back to the other over and over again, depending on which insects were most prevalent, and hence, how they had to adapt to their prey.  A jumping spider that was becoming a web-spinner couldn't keep its powerful eyesight and legstrength because it needed to conserve its nutrients as much as it could while waiting for prey to land in its web.  Meanwhile, jumping spiders can't afford the massive nutrient cost of building webs out of precious protiens in amounts that take up about half its body mass if it isn't directly demanded for their survival.  The result is that when the spiders evolved from one then back to the other, they weren't "upgrading through evolution levels", they were gaining and losing abilities based upon what was most critical to their immediate survival, and throwing away anything not directly related to their survival. 

The thing about "genetics" as it is currently implimented is that there needs to be some real introduction of drawbacks to it.  Currently, cows eat nothing, but "beefy" cows can produce more meat per slaughter, and there is no drawback to this in any way.  So, why SHOULDN'T every creature eventually evolve into being perfect superman versions of their base creature type?

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution
Post by: NW_Kohaku on January 27, 2011, 07:17:41 pm

I threw together a quick bit on NPK.

To be honest, re-writing some of this stuff is a bit of a grind, so I am cutting this one a bit on the terse side, and throwing links back to the longish posts of days past.  If there's something you guys want me to elaborate more on, point it out.

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution
Post by: jseah on January 27, 2011, 07:35:42 pm

If you call that NPK part "a quick bit"...  I wonder what you call a "massive wall of text". 
Then again, you've hit the 40k character limit per post, so I guess we've seen that.

Will read myself to sleep with these.  ^^ 

Don't get me wrong, I love long detailed posts.  Wall of texts that actually present good information are a joy to read and think about.  I'm just up way too late and can't sleep. 

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution
Post by: NW_Kohaku on January 27, 2011, 07:58:14 pm

Maybe I feel more lazy for using links to old posts, rather than rewriting everything.  I'm honestly a little burned out on rewriting NPK stuff over and over again, though, so it seems like I have to force myself to do it harder than other things I want to explain.  I kind of want to write/revive some of the other topics in my web of suggestions.

Still, it was only 7,296 characters.  One of my mods had me writing a 100,000 character set of posts.

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution
Post by: FGK dwarf on January 28, 2011, 03:31:16 am

Quote from: NW_Kohaku on January 27, 2011, 04:16:01 pm

Quote from: FGK dwarf on January 27, 2011, 03:52:45 pm

stuff on genetics

more stuff on genetics

Oh, I totally agree! Costs of adaptation have to be taken into account, if genetics are implemented properly. Maybe something like the old game SimLife would work?

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution
Post by: sockless on January 28, 2011, 04:07:19 am

This seems to be a good approach to the agriculture problem. This would also slot nicely into the entire food system, like if your fortress is desolate, then animals won't come to graze there. You could then be able to send dwarfs on hunting and fishing expeditions to get animals from further away.

I think that the entire industry of DF has to be looked at in this way, as it's too easy to scale, just like farming. The "throw more dorfs at it" approach doesn't really work so well in the late game, as it's too easy. A way to sort of fix this problem would be something like Maslows Hierachy of Needs, but less abstract maybe.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslow%27s_hierarchy_of_needs (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslow%27s_hierarchy_of_needs)

(http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/6/60/Maslow%27s_Hierarchy_of_Needs.svg/500px-Maslow%27s_Hierarchy_of_Needs.svg.png)
This way, as your fortress goes on, your dwarfs demand more and more. The problem is that all this does is means that you just have to build more types workshops, which isn't really a solution to the problem, it just addresses some of the symptoms.
In a way though, that is just how it works in the real world, as we get higher standards of living, we demand more complex and better quality products.

<edit>Naturally, caves (and by extension caverns) have a lot of mud in them, I went caving recently and the whole place was covered in a clay/mud substance, so you don't have to do lots of explaining about how it got there.

<edit2>This would work especially well with this:
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=69453.0 (http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=69453.0)
Particularly the bit that talks about being able to store water in barrels and buy it from caravans.

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution
Post by: zwei on January 28, 2011, 10:12:14 am

Quote from: sockless on January 28, 2011, 04:07:19 am

A way to sort of fix this problem would be something like Maslows Hierachy of Needs, but less abstract maybe.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslow%27s_hierarchy_of_needs (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslow%27s_hierarchy_of_needs)

I thought DF implementes it rather well:

L1: Booze, Food, Beds
L2: Dealing with Invaders, Securing resources and industries.
L3: Assimilating and attrating Migrants, Preventing Tantrums
L4: Aesthetically/OCD pleasing fort.
L5: Megaproject, HFS, showing off on forums.

Now, L4/L5 are player derived, but basis is there...

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution
Post by: NW_Kohaku on January 28, 2011, 12:17:34 pm

Quote from: sockless on January 28, 2011, 04:07:19 am

<edit2>This would work especially well with this:
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=69453.0 (http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=69453.0)
Particularly the bit that talks about being able to store water in barrels and buy it from caravans.

Rethought this one, but for the purposes of avoiding an Orwellian Edit, just spoilering it

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Although it might seem a bit hypocritical, considering the size of this suggestion and some of my others, I'm not actually terribly fond of many of these megathreads, the cooking one included.

The food/cooking megathread is literally just a vaguely organized pile of ideas taken from various other people's threads.  No effort is made to turn these into a cohesive whole, give those ideas the arguments their creators had for that idea, or link back to the arguments their creators had for them.

When trying to make these suggestions that have very complex parts to them, I am trying to accomplish some goal that is complex enough to require changes to many working parts of the overall game, and every individual part is just serving to work with the others towards creating that overall goal. 

In a large idea's thread, the entire concept, as well as its individual parts can be argued, and that argument can improve the overall concept.

The arguments for and against a given thread are lost when you don't link the previous argument.  The forumgoers don't learn from their history, and are doomed to repeat the same arguments again and again because they don't see it was already fairly settled.

When you just have a "pile of ideas", they can't do that.  They're just bits of ideas thrown into a pile out of context, and all they can really be is maybe one little side item that gets added on.  Some of the better megathreads (Jiri Petru did a few) at least just act as a sort of "nexus" that links you to various competing threads that try to battle out different visions.  In fact, I think one of those was a cooking megathread that got sucked up into this cooking megathread.

(And dare I say it?  "What is a megathread? A miserable pile of ideas!"...  sorry.)

---

Quote from: sockless on January 28, 2011, 04:07:19 am

<edit>Naturally, caves (and by extension caverns) have a lot of mud in them, I went caving recently and the whole place was covered in a clay/mud substance, so you don't have to do lots of explaining about how it got there.

It's not how "mud" got to the bottom of a cavern that needs explaining, it's how that mud is somehow perfectly capable of supporting a large, biologically diverse ecosystem. 

From the most basic of perspectives, an ecosystem needs to be able to contain matter suitable for life (that is, water, carbon dioxide, nitrogen, phosphorous, and potassium, which, although maybe not all the nutrients would be properly present, is probably not the problem), and it needs to have a constant source of new energy.  Entropic decay ensures that energy is always being lost to heat dissipation, and it is not recovered from that state, so new energy has to be put into the cavern ecosystem, and sunlight obviously can't be it. 

Now, caverns that are near the surface can have some mushrooms and such because the "mud" there is a soup of rotting plant and animal matter brought into the caves by animals who eat and excrete in caves they occupy as lairs, but the "mud" in the deep reaches of the cave have no such rotting biological matter that regularly arrives from the surface.  That mud is barren and lifeless.

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution
Post by: Draco18s on January 28, 2011, 12:44:42 pm

I'm glad this got a bit of a resurrection, however I have pretty much made my points, and have little desire to reread this in detail.
My opinions have been taken into account, and I can wait for the democratic process to take effect.

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution
Post by: NW_Kohaku on January 28, 2011, 01:18:58 pm

I'm going to be reformatting the argument in its entirity to make it about the overarching system, and throw less focus upon NPK for it being only a component of the machine.  Hopefully, that will let us finally escape from Thunderdome, and it seems to be working so far.

In any event, I am fairly weary of rehashing the same argument, myself, but as soon as I get over this hump, there are some new things I think you'd like to see.  In fact, I might just throw out the forestry thing sooner rather than later, since I'm more interested in new ideas than old ones.

Also, we may live in a monarchy, but it seems to have some elements of a constitutional monarchy, here.  This entire Improved Farming thing is on the dev list thanks to Eternal Suggestions, after all.  The entire last round of argument started because Toady had said something about being interested in using the NPK system.

If I can rewrite and reformulate my argument and concept to make it persuasive to the majority of forumgoers, it sure can't hurt in making it persuasive to Toady.

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution
Post by: Draco18s on January 28, 2011, 01:53:54 pm

Quote from: NW_Kohaku on January 28, 2011, 01:18:58 pm

Also, we may live in a monarchy, but it seems to have some elements of a constitutional monarchy, here.

I decided after wards that it's more of a dictatorship.  The monarchy requires inheritance of the "crown" which hasn't happened yet.

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution
Post by: Vince7403 on January 28, 2011, 03:11:45 pm

I approve of the notion of dwarven outposts requiring latrines and sewers, mainly on the realism and ecosystem grounds already established. The people who may be thinking that it's not suitably dwarfy are failing to realize that, just like everything else in DF, sewers can be weaponized. Just imagine, trap rooms that dump invaders to drown in the sewer, that they might fertilize next year's crop! The glory, the stench of glory!

It is worth noting though, if it hasn't been mentioned before, that use of un-composted feces for fertilizer dramatically increases the risk of farmers to certain diseases, the details of which I can't remember at the moment.

Somewhat tangentially, farm plots could perhaps track the presence of earthworms (or fantastical equivalent), which themselves could become a useful resource if an associated industry could be made to breed them in captivity. Worms would, at first thought, accelerate the availability of incompletely decomposed resources in the soil/compost bed.

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution
Post by: NW_Kohaku on January 28, 2011, 05:54:18 pm

OK, Draco, I was going to make an update of the old stuff, but your comments have encouraged me to move on towards the new, instead. 

The new ideas I have had are what really excite me, anyway, and when I got really going on this one, I just couldn't slow down.  Funny how expanding upon the logical ramifications of simple changes long enough can get you to world-changing consequences.  I think I've really outdone myself in thinking of a way to make this game more of a "Fantasy World Simulator" this time.

Anyway, I was going to do pests and water management first, and you'll notice that water management is referenced several times in that post, so I'll have to do that part next, just to explain myself, but at least I am feeling more motivated to start doing it, so I'll probably shove that one out tommorow, or maybe tonight if I really want to just stay up until 4 AM writing again, and - oh crap, I have homework?!

edit: Oh, I forgot to talk about pollutants... well, there's always making another section, I've already made that last one long enough.  I won't be happy until we can make our dwarven dirt glow green with radioactive waste.

Anyway, I wanted to talk to Vince's concerns in that I actually thought about worm farming, and think it is a good idea, although I'm not sure quite how to fit it in at this particular moment.  Maybe remind me of it later, although I do like the concept of composting pits fed with worms, although the exact mechanics of worm wrangling will wait to a later day.

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution
Post by: Vince7403 on January 28, 2011, 06:32:09 pm

Well, yes, worm husbandry would be an advanced feature for later implementation. Basic nutrient tracking and resource cycling theory would have to come first, worms just seemed like something worth mentioning while I was there. At the moment, I'm not quite in the right mental state for serious algorithm wrangling, unfortunately, but the framework as presented so far seems sound.

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution
Post by: NW_Kohaku on January 28, 2011, 07:14:56 pm

Compared to what I've just been talking about, worms in and of themselves are simple, you just need to have a vermin counter for them.  It's the whole "how do you interact with them" question that I'm putting off.

I'm going to need to do water and pests and animals and fertilizers and crop types and crop rotations and alternate crops and oh yeah, why not, the whole interface for letting players actually deal with all this noise, so I have a lot on my slate for this, but I also have a couple other suggestion trees I want to pursue (Alchemy and Bromance of the Dwarven Kingdoms), which are something of a distraction, since I'm sort of itching to focus more on the new stuff, even though I need to reformat the old because that's the responsible thing that makes my argument actually make sense.

Well, I guess I'll just keep doing what I always do, and just vomit text about whatever the topic du jour might be.  And to think, I actually stayed away from these forums because I knew that coming back would mean I would not have a waking moment I spent on anything besides pounding out ungodly quantities of text!

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution
Post by: tsen on January 29, 2011, 03:03:34 am

This was mentioned peripherally, but soil itself could have relatively simple variables, while a farm 'building' could track much more detailed information to preserve memory.

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution
Post by: NW_Kohaku on January 29, 2011, 12:10:52 pm

It could, but if you read the "Forestry..." section I just put up, I think it's actually more exciting to have something complex going on, instead.

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution
Post by: NW_Kohaku on January 29, 2011, 07:06:37 pm

Water Management is added to the list.

This one was long, and I somewhat surprised myself by how much I wound up talking about, although not as much as the last one.

I also have to wonder why my last update got essentially no response, considering the amount of breadth I just tacked onto the suggestion as a whole.  Did nobody notice I added it?  Should I announce these updates louder?  Or did nobody feel like reading or commenting if they did read?  I certainly was excited when I started going on it.

Well, anyway, these last two should help make very compelling "Fantasy World Simulator" material, as they can make dwarves capable of directly impacting the ecology of the world around them, potentially even giving them an ability to alter the biome, or even terraform their world if given enough motivation to do so.  I'm leaning heavily towards making another section on pollution, which could allow us to really do wonderful and horrible things, like creating smoke-belching smithies just upwind of elven forests so that acid rain falls upon them. 

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution
Post by: jseah on January 29, 2011, 08:04:12 pm

Or maybe we're just struck speechless by the sheer scale and awesomeness. 

Deliberately turning the landscape around my fort into the harshest desert anyone has ever seen.  ^^
If nature poses a threat, destroy it. 
If the elves pose a threat... no, that's impossible. 

Either way, magma!  It even makes our farms better!

In any case, your water post has a missing bit. 
"having open-air fields with no irrigation methods.  Basically, while-"

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution
Post by: NW_Kohaku on January 29, 2011, 08:20:33 pm

Hmm... sometimes, I don't really proofread the long ones.  Plus I'm given to stopping typing mid-sentence when I think of something even better to write, and can't be bothered to finish waiting for my stupid fingers to catch up with my mind.

Right, well, fixing that.

Anyway, the idea of transforming some once-vibrant "good" or "mirthful" forest into our own personal Mordor should probably now be a goal of every DF player to do at least once.  Even better if we can start replacing not just the flora but the fauna in the surrounding environments, as well.

If I keep this up, it isn't going to be so much "Improved Farming" as it is "Improved Worlds Remolded In Our Own Image".

The quotes from the old Boatmurdered and Headshoots tales kind of inspire me, though.  "I've never seen a fortress that so closely resembles post-WWII Germany before."  Before, we could kill every living animal, but plants and vermin were out of reach... now, we can potentially start moving towards the ultimate goal of completely reducing our worlds to a Mars-like barrenness...

In fact, if we find a way to mine the iron out of the magma so that we can gradually deplete the iron core of the planet, we could theoretically reduce the effectiveness of the magnetosphere, allowing solar winds to strip the atmosphere from the planet, literally rendering the planet Mars-like...

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Violate the Earth!
Post by: NW_Kohaku on January 29, 2011, 11:08:50 pm

Minor update, I forgot to put in a sub-section on salt, so I added it in.  This represents the first additional "pollution" variable I'm throwing in for tracking.  I'm thinking of a few others, including toxic organics and toxic heavy metals, but that's for a special "pollution" section that I'll do later.

Since I figure that ecological devastation is more exciting to the average DF player, I'm going to try to hype that up a little more, and see if I can't get a few more people willing to bite and read through this proposal by playing a little more towards the destructive impulses that haunt the minds of all those corrupted by DF. 

Ultimately, utter environmental collapse is a bit of a tough act to top, so I think I'll go back down to the more mundane aspects of crop rotations and fertilizer control or maybe go with swarms of locusts or horrid mushroom blights and other pests, depending on mood.

Hopefully, some day, though, we can discover that "Losing is Fun!" in a wonderful new way when someone reenacts the downfall of the Mayans by managing to completely strip their land of all its nutrients by slash-and-burning everything away, and letting all their soil become useless and barren by soil erosion.

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Violate the Earth!
Post by: sockless on January 29, 2011, 11:11:12 pm

With the water mechanics, one could also bolster their stocks with barrels of water bought from traders, which is a fairly common practice, even in modern times. You could actually extend this to be for fertiliser too, so the traders would bring big sacks of fertiliser and barrels of water if you live in a desert biome. This would be even more essential if you had to use water to brew certain drinks.

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Violate the Earth!
Post by: NW_Kohaku on January 29, 2011, 11:28:56 pm

Thanks for taking the time to read, Sockless, it's nice to see more people willing to do so. (EDIT: Whoops, you already posted in this thread, haha, nevermind, but I still appreciate people reading.  It gets a little lonely if I'm just talking to myself.)

To the meat of it,

Fertilizers would actually be very valuable and certainly worth trading, yes. Many of these things would be uncommon and valuable, plus there is an almost limitless demand for them, so you could make quite a bit of money trading them.

Saltpeter (potassium nitrate) is a fertilizer, and also a prime component of gunpowder.  It can be manufactured with manure and wood ashes (potash), as well as mined (and is in the game already as a stone).  The formula for manufacture was discovered around 1270, so it's time period valid.

There are some stones you can mine for phosphorous (besides saltpeter), but they aren't currently in the game, and they would possibly be outside of dwarven means to refine, anyway.

Potassium can be mined in the form of Sylvite, which is a potassium salt that occurs naturally in rock salt formations.  Sylvite, however, is not just potassium, but also a salt, and as such, will salinate the land as it fertilizes it, which makes it less than ideal, as you just added a nutrient and a poison to the soil at the same time.

Water trading, I would expect, should have some serious premiums charged just based upon the mass of water, as you tend to go through it pretty quickly.  You'd either need a lot of camels, or some pretty serious wagon train to carry enough to make a significant impact on the supply of a fortress for a year.

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Violate the Earth!
Post by: Vince7403 on January 30, 2011, 03:33:41 am

Ground bones contain significant quantities of phosphorus - I've heard the famous French catacombs were raided for bones for this purpose during a farm blight in the 19th century, and while it seems plausible I'm not sure if it's true. Phosphorus can be isolated out of urine but I think it requires 19th century chemistry to do last I checked.

If you're going to be tracking salinity, it may be worth noting that all land-dwelling animals require dietary intake of sodium and potassium in salt form to live. Salt requirements for humans go up when sweating, which is why salt was/is such a big deal in Africa and other hot climates.

Of course, this is more along the lines of Dwarven Nutrition than Improved Farming. Perhaps salt requirements could go in around the same time as the game starts tracking whether your dwarves are getting complete protein... which would mean you could no longer survive on an all alcohol diet, sadly.

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Violate the Earth!
Post by: jseah on January 30, 2011, 05:27:54 am

RE: watering crops & irrigation

I think a good way to model this would be to have soil retain a drainage value as well. 
1/7 or higher water flowing over a tile would only max out the water stat as long as it was there.  After leaving, the soil should slowly "leak" water into the tiles around, above and below it depending on the drainage value. 
 - Specifically, I think there should be three drainage values.  One for sideways, one for up and one for downwards. 
 - In terms of units, 0 water is 0 water, and 255 water = 1/7
 - I'm not sure how that will be resolved since you can't divide 1/7 into 255 units and retain the data when it goes somewhere else
 - One way is to make 1/7 = 50 water and only absorb the 1/7 if the water value is <205.  This would make soil absorb ALOT of water and imply a square size of only a few feet on the side. 
 - The more complex way would be to give them another variable called absorption which goes from 0 to 255.  This is the maximum water the tile will hold.  With 1/7 water = 50, if the water value would go over the absorption value if the tiles takes up 1/7 water, it doesn't take up the water.  Similarly, if the water value goes over the absorption value from drainage from surrounding tiles, it spawns 1/7 water and loses 50 water value.  (you could model aquifers that way, by making aquifer layers have absorption and drainage, but that would mean allowing this to work in soil and rock walls, which the only way to get water into them is percolation from above, downwards drainage)

A stone floor has no soil and would have 0% drainage for sideways and upwards but 100% for downwards (default for any tile not a soil tile)
The drainage value indicates the difference in water values a tile will retain with it's neighbours without leaking water. 

So a tile A with 100 water next to a 70 water tile B would drain water until the difference was less than the drainage value. 
30% drainage on tile A would mean A holds on the water and doesn't drain (70 is within 30% of 100)
20% drainage on tile A would mean A loses 10 water to tile B (80 is within 20% of 100)
This could happen slowly, every "week" or so maybe. 

It would also solve the irrigation problem if high water soil in an irrigation ditch could drain water into the surrounding farm tiles and those would drain further inwards. 

Draining downwards is optional.  Essentially that's the potential for a roof to leak water.  Stone doesn't leak but soil and sand floors will.  The leakage of water to the floor below might not take it to 255. 

I realize this is rather CPU intensive.  Someone feel free to simplify it.  I'm just throwing out my thoughts here. 

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Violate the Earth!
Post by: AngleWyrm on January 30, 2011, 09:38:28 am

Possibly the number one problem with farming is it's poorly scaled productivity. It's a significant reason why the farming projects are a 'front-loaded' gaming experience. Just set up a couple 5x5 plots early on, and you're set for the remainder of the game. The sheer volume of food rolling off the fields is enough to take care of a full 200-dwarf fortress without further expansion. And that's even before considering butcherable animals, fishing, hunting and gathering.

A single 5x5 plot can be well tended by two farmers. If the entire game requires only two such plots, then only four farmers are needed out of the 200 end-game dwarves. A little reverse-engineering is in order, to design a richer employment for the dwarves, across the full length of the game. Instead of only four farmers out of two hundred dwarves, consider as a stable production target a percentage of maybe 1 in 5 dwarves employed as farmers. That would mean about 40 farmers at end-game, a ten-fold increase in employment.

This could be achieved by reducing the amount of crops harvested each season, increasing the growing time and/or increasing the amount of food/drink consumed by dwarves in a sitting.

A second reason why the farming aspect of the game is a front-loaded experience is the inclusion of an expensive irrigation phase to planning a farming plot. Currently they must be carved out near a surface lake that is the appropriate size, or a river must be tapped and directed through a floodgate to the site. Removing the overhead would encourage later expansion efforts. And a good way to do that would be to allow irrigation with buckets of water.

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Violate the Earth!
Post by: NW_Kohaku on January 30, 2011, 10:30:45 am

Quote from: Vince7403 on January 30, 2011, 03:33:41 am

Things on bones and salinity

Ground bones is already pencilled in as the "primary phosphorous source", especially since most other rotting matter is decent in Nitrogen and Potassium, but not Phosphorous.  I'm not sure that people would actually perform long-distance trading of ground bones, though, maybe just regular bones, since they are more versitile materials, and can be used in bone crafts if un-ground.

As for salinity in the diet, yes, I was thinking of that, as well, and may do a full bit on nutrition, since talking about nutrition was a way to make farming more interesting, as well.  (Salty diet means salty urine, which means salty fields if you apply urine directly to the fields as a fertilizer?) 

One of the problems, especially when I start talking about animals and the need to feed them, is that we're going to need to start making animals eat different amounts based upon their masses (and potentially metabolisms).  Elephants and hoary marmots would currently eat the same quantity of food if we don't make creatures start needing to eat more than one unit of food per meal.  Part of my suggestion was that we just start multiplying the amount of food dwarves eat up to some arbitrary number like 6 (because of their size), and that way, a single tile of farm's harvest of 1 to 5 units of food, which makes farmer skill have unrealistically huge impacts upon food production, and we can move towards something where a farm tile of 3x3 might produce between 15 and 30 units of food per harvest, which would feed 2.5 to 5 dwarves with 9 times as much land.

Nutritional requirements might also do interesting things to help encourage farming diversity, as well, although it may not be as necessary, eventually.  I'm already doing plenty to encourage diversity in what crops you plant, from crop rotations and pests.

Quote from: jseah on January 30, 2011, 05:27:54 am

RE: watering crops & irrigation

Really starting to suck you into it, now, isn't it?

I was thinking of a drainage value, although it was more to repesent the needs of different plants, since my research on different crops from around the world frequently mentioned the need for such-and-such a drainage.  Relating drainage to water loss would be another good, if somewhat complex, method of intigrating it into the whole.

As for how much water soil can hold, well... different soils will hold different amounts of water (http://www.hcswcd.org/services/educate/docs/absorb.pdf) in real life, and it's based upon the amount of biomass in the soil, although making the maximum size of one variable dependent upon another variable is just too freaky a system even for DF.  For now, let's just say that something like how many units of soil nutrient water that 1/7 map water will translate into is a "calibration" problem, one that can be determined after we have had a chance to look at how the whole system operates, and can fine-tune to something that makes the whole thing operate sensibly, since it's just a single variable that can be easily altered to suit the needs of making things "look right". There's also no problem with having 1/7 map water make up 127 nutrient water or 100 map water or anything else.

I'm not sure having three entirely separate variables for measuring the direction water seeps is justified, however, as I'm not sure how we could properly model upward or downward seepage all that well, unless we're going to have something specifically about refilling aquifers by having seepage or something like capilary action forcing groundwater to the surface.  (Unless by "upwards drainage" you mean evaporation?) 

Having water filter downwards and create or refil aquifers and caverns through that method might be interesting, although I would have to spend some serious time thinking through the exact mechanics of making that work properly.  At first, I was having trouble thinking of ways in which the player could interact with such a mechanic so that it would make any difference if we were using it as opposed to just abstracting aquifers refilling automatically, but if dwarves pave over enough open soil that allows water to permeate and refill the aquifer, you could potentially start causing even more overdrafting problems.  Such a thing is possible, but aquifers are generally large enough that I'm not sure fortress mode would have the capability to significantly impact that the way that you can make the patch of land you can actually reach turn into a desert.

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution
Post by: Silverionmox on January 30, 2011, 10:40:06 am

Quote from: tsen on January 29, 2011, 03:03:34 am

This was mentioned peripherally, but soil itself could have relatively simple variables, while a farm 'building' could track much more detailed information to preserve memory.

I'd rather think of the field as tool for organizing labour spatially. After all, a field is not a building, and the only reason it's different from its surroundings is because there are particular jobs being performed, continuously, that change it.

In the game, designating a field could resemble designating a burrow. You would then be able to issue and schedule various orders to that area, like plowing, removing boulders, cutting trees, corral animals, keep P content at level x, keep moisture at level y, etc.

This has the advantage that we only need to have one interface tool for the whole spectrum of soil-related activities (forestry, animal husbandry, farming). This is useful because you can then issue the order of "cut all trees of age 0 and higher" and "harvest all plants at age 0 except x,y,z " to a new field, and the dwarves will cut it clear, and keep it clear of any unwanted plants in the future too. A forestry operation needs exactly the same command. One could change the function of a field on a whim. Another example: schedule animals to be pastured in a field after the harvest, ensuring the field is fertilized with dung.

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Violate the Earth!
Post by: NW_Kohaku on January 30, 2011, 10:53:29 am

Yes, the more I play around with the concept of having farms as "zones", the more idea of just turning farms into patches of soil you've decided to manually manipulate really makes sense.

A "weed" is just a grass that you didn't want to grow on your farm that grows there because you didn't keep it out, and a farmer has to go and pluck it to let the crops you wanted to grow there grow there.  A "weed" might actually even be a useful crop in its own right, like a prickle berry.  Your own unnaturally introduced crops thanks to trade may become an invasive species in the local landscape because your farms are just wild soil you aren't actively managing.

Herbalism might just have its lines blurred with Farming with regards to "harvesting" activities.

There are some things to consider, however, as we will need some way of being clearer about being able to tell dwarves to completely sweep a given area clean of soil, and not mopping up the farm.

We also need to have some kind of good way to be able to lump zones of soil together for tracking purposes, or else we'll have to track soil on a per-tile basis, which can be very problematic if we let soil cover huge tracts of land on multiple z-levels in embarks wherever water happens to flood a large fortress.  If we have several variables with large variable sizes, it could hit many megabytes of data.

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Violate the Earth!
Post by: NW_Kohaku on January 30, 2011, 12:34:16 pm

Actually, it seems like a neat and interesting way to make elves have some flavor, now that I think about it...

Elves can grow crops without tilling the soil, they just manipulate fertility in wild soil or harvest fruits from trees like wild fig trees.  They might have some sort of psuedo-magical techniques for doing this, involving either manipulating weather (more showers) or generating fertilizers from proprietary techniques that make them unique as a race in a way that doesn't involve idiocy and hypocritical ethics.

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Violate the Earth!
Post by: The Phoenixian on January 30, 2011, 02:07:47 pm

I have to say, I like this idea: the choice between a simple but ultimately limited system that can only sustain your fortress so long, and the possibility of making a large and complex system with possible crops for many industries (like the sapphire growers you detailed in the previous thread) is one that in intrigues me.

Depending on the embark, I can't help but think, a system like this would provide a nice incentive and reward for those who build their own underground rivers (such as in Walledwar (http://mkv25.net/dfma/map-4896-walledwar)).



Turning away from idle thoughts and onto the caverns side discussion, I think an interesting way to both explain life in the caverns and have manipulative power over it would be a combination of magma, water, and air currents: water flowing from the surface brings in nutrients shapes some of the caves while Magma features, both existing vertical pipes and possibly new ones as well, provide both nutrients to certain plants and, in larger caverns, heat to power underground air currents and miniature weather systems. (Allowing dwarf made magma vents, rivers, and piping to alter those air currents and nutrient supplies.)

Of course, That's probably ridiculously complicated in practice and might be better put in a thread for overarching changes to caverns in general, but I wanted to see what impact it has here.

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Violate the Earth!
Post by: NW_Kohaku on January 30, 2011, 03:49:43 pm

Having read that Silverionmox post, and then reading an article today in Scientific American about "Learning to Live" with invasive species, I'm suddenly much more excited to start talking about pests again.  Just think: dwarves introducing invasive species into their habitat, with aboslutely no clue whether they will have beneficial or Fun consequences down the road.

The more I move to thinking in broad "manipulating ecologies" terms, the more excited I get about it, since it moves the game more into the dimension of being a balancing act between the desire to exploit all the mineral and biological riches dwarves can get their grubby hands upon, and the consequences of overtaxing the ecology and leading their fortress to become an uninhabitable toxic waste dump.  I think most players will probably very precariously straddle that line.

It is, after all, the ultimate aesop behind the whole "Digging too Deep" thing in the first place: Greed versus the odds of spectacular backfire.

Also, I think you can sell this game on being able to be a "Fantasy World Simulator" by doing something like this to a broader range of people who never played the game before just a teensy bit better than by talking about beating the entire elven race to death one by one with the dismembered leg of their queen.  Just a hunch.

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Violate the Earth!
Post by: Vince7403 on January 30, 2011, 04:14:55 pm

The cane toad shredded the ecology of northeast Australia and it's native to savage wilderness at worst, imagine what kinds of horrors we could inflict on the world if we could foolishly introduce bio-terminators from terrifying biomes for pest control purposes.

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Violate the Earth!
Post by: NW_Kohaku on January 30, 2011, 05:19:03 pm

Quote from: Vince7403 on January 30, 2011, 04:14:55 pm

The cane toad shredded the ecology of northeast Australia...

Something like that, yes.

I'm going to have to write a new section for the "arugment for" portion of the start of the thread to cover how I'm now expanding my thought on the whole system.

Quote from: The Phoenixian on January 30, 2011, 02:07:47 pm

water flowing from the surface brings in nutrients shapes some of the caves while Magma features, both existing vertical pipes and possibly new ones as well, provide both nutrients to certain plants and, in larger caverns, heat to power underground air currents and miniature weather systems.

The Dwarf Fortress of five years from now laughs in the face of your pitiful concept of what a complex game is! Sorry, serious answer, serious answer...

I suppose that something like that is possible, although I'm not sure how, exactly, magma vents that maybe only touch the third cavern layer can create such uniform diversity throughout the entire cavern system. 

If energy for the ecosystem were coming from above and below, with a middle that had no energy source but to steal from higher or lower caverns (with very limited access between them), then you would expect something like the biodensities of the oceans: Abundant life at the surface or in shallow waters, where light can power the cycle of life, while deeper waters consist almost entirely of scavengers that pick off the detritus that sinks from the more abundant surface life, until you finally hit deep sea "black smoker" life forms that feed on the chemical energy of volcanic activity, but which have to stay clustered very close around those vents to survive.

We could, I suppose, reformat the caverns and their biodiversity around being stratified between scavengers of leftover biomaterial from the surface and a few things that only grow really down deep, but I honestly think some kind of magic that obeys at least some kind of rational, predictable law would be the best answer... especially since we're going to have to have magic, anyway, since we already have forgotten beasts, amethyst men, fire imps and of course the HFS down there to begin with.  You're just not explaining that stuff away without magic. 

We're a player base that likes its rationality and science, but we can't do that by blithely ignoring the magic when we see it and demanding everything else be totally uanffected by magic.  What we have to do is turn magic into science.  Inexplicable science that simply works because the game says so, but a science you can learn, understand, and possibly manipulate and even master. 

Ultimately, that's what the best of Sci-Fi is - "magic" made rational.  You start with something that breaks physics or what you know of physics with some psuedo-science rationalization, but then you work out the consequences, build the ground rules, and eventually turn it from a "what if <insert random thing here>" question into a fully formed exploration of the consequences of whatever it was you changed.

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Violate the Earth!
Post by: Waparius on January 30, 2011, 07:17:51 pm

Loving this thread. Especially reversing the difficulty curve of farming.

I have to admit though, sensible as a magical deep-down ecosystem is (I mean, come on, nether-caps are already a magic fungus), I am partial to the old, "The Cave River is Flooding" messages that came up every year in 2D. Some kind of combination of that might work best for the ecosystem down deep, with appropriate consequences to farming - Cavern Level 1 is mostly mundane, with plants growing around underground pools/rivers and piles of bat guano unless you actively fertilise the place, and few nasties. Level 2 is more magical, and thus more hazardous. Level 3 is all magic all the time.

This could also affect the kind of plants you can grow in particular regions as well - make a more valuable crop only grow deep-down, or on deep soil, in much the same way that sun-berries only grow on the surface. It gives even more of an incentive to open the caverns and live down there.

Another thing that could go in - or be used instead of magic - is "Mineral water", which allows certain things to grow but is not really very good for anything from the surface, what with all the electrolytes.

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Violate the Earth!
Post by: NW_Kohaku on January 30, 2011, 07:59:32 pm

Glad you're enjoying it.

Perhaps you (and the others in the thread) could extrapolate more on what, exactly, you'd like to see as the differences between cavern levels.  I know that I pretty much think the second layer of the caverns should just be removed, since it just takes up FPS and pretty much has nothing the other two layers don't have.

If we're talking about the cavern ecosystem anyway, though, we might as well keep changing the ecosystem on the table instead of just discussing ways to justify keeping what we have right now.

The thing about having a "magical energy field" that explains the reason why certain things can grow or live in certain environments reminds me a little of a suggestion thread from before I took my most recent DF hiatus.   Specifically, this one on the HFS (http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=64437.0), and also continued in another one I started on making physical gods (http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=64733.msg1516318#msg1516318).  Basically, if we have "energy fields" generated by the power spheres that have influence over an area, and that can act as a sort of source of static energy for various magical creatures, then we can start adding in guidelines over how these energy fields are created, tapped into, depleted, and renewed.

This is where I get into thinking about having underground climates... just as a Sunberry needs a Good sphere influence to grow in the wild, we could start having energy fields that create the necessary conditions for certain plants and animals to thrive.  When an energy field of a certain sphere is present, it allows creatures of that sphere to live there, and if it is repelled, then those creatures migrate or die.  Creatures that depend upon magic to survive, however, may be more versitile, being capable of survivng on multiple types of energy fields, or any type of energy field, so long as it has a sufficient power level.

Underground Climates, then, could change from one cavern layer to another, the way that surface biomes are Good or Evil and Savage or Benign, there could be different energy fields in the cavern layers that change what grows down there by supplying different energy sources.  Different levels of the caverns could even have different climates, so that more energy radiates in the deepest levels, causing more rare and valuable things to live down there, but also much more dangerous, magical things that can fall upon unwary dwarves, as well.

If you want to grow a crop that requires a certain energy field to supply its magical power to live, you better grow it at the right underground layer, giving you what Waparius was talking about.

In fact, if we are going the route of letting dwarves manipulate their environments, then we could also let them manipulate the energy fields, as well.  But on the surface, you screw up your environment, you created a desert.  In the deep caverns or even if you are colonizing the HFS, where the energies you are toying with are wild and powerful, if you mess with the energy fields and ruin "the environment", then you start creating conditions for utterly horrifying things to take place.  (The air becomes poison, dwarves turn into clowns, all kinds of Fun!)

EDIT: Ultimately, after having slaughtered the denizens of the HFS, the dwarves somehow manage to make everything worse, and then the Gods, in their infinite wisdom, push the last of the dwarves into the HFS, and seal it back up with a new metal, one even dwarves cannot dig through.  And then they turn into even more horrid things than that which they once slew, all the while waiting for someone or something foolish enough to unseal them once again.

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Violate the Earth!
Post by: sockless on January 30, 2011, 11:15:33 pm

The consumption of food could be implemented as a combination of calories and of mass/volume. That way, a dead boar could yield 120 kg of meat and a dead elephant would make >1 metric ton. As compared to the current way.
The inclusion of calories (Kilojoules to be more correct) would largely form the basis of nutrition, and if dwarves has less calories than they need, then they will work slower, and if they have too many, they get fat. If dwarves were iron deficient, they would also work slower, and other deficiencies would have other effects. Like vitamin C deficiency would result in them getting ill more (if random illnesses get implemented). Vitamins would also go the other way, so if you eat too much dog liver, you'd get vitamin A poisoning, which is really not good.
You wouldn't need to keep track of iron levels in soil though, as that just adds another level of complexity to the farming system and takes more space. Especially since iron is hard to get into soil, as you have to soak iron in acid, and then you have to put the resulting salt on the ground.

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Violate the Earth!
Post by: NW_Kohaku on January 31, 2011, 01:36:01 am

... I'm probably going to have to make a new spin-off thread about this whole thing, aren't I, because this just moves beyond what I can justify as being about "farming" anymore...

Anyway, thinking about how magic energy fields with vaguely scientific principles can work to provide power to plants and animals, I have to start thinking of this in terms slightly similar to that of a Tesla Coil that is wirelessly transmitting electricity.

Basically, certain events or objects in the world generate the energy fields.  To make a few simple, concrete examples, let's say these are things like "stone" or "magma" or "evil biome" that we all already understand. Magma generates a "magma sphere energy field", which spreads some arbitrary number of tiles away from every magma-filled tile on the map.  Fire Imps and Magma Men, being magma creatures, depend upon magma sphere energy, and cannot survive without magma sphere energy.  It's like water or food for them (especially since I doubt magma men need to drink any water), and if they can't get it regularly, they starve to death as they lose their basic access to what powers their not-quite-biologies.  (Fire Imps may be capable of living on similar spheres, like fire, but magma men may be forced to rely solely upon magma sphere, which means having to spend almost all of their lives within that arbitrary distance that a magma sphere can spread.)

Part of the underlying myth that DF seems to work on, in step with Lord of the Rings, is the concept that The Magic Goes Away, as TV Tropes uncreatively terms it.  Magic, apparently, has a really bad rate of entropic decay, and it's possible to break magic, but be unable to ever repair it.  Currently, killing all the megabeasts and fanciful creatures means you have just killed magic.  This implies, then, that magic could be a reciprocal concept - unicorns are in good forests not just because they need a good forest to survive in, but because they help create and spread good forests by their very presence.  Evil biomes and undead may work the same way - ghosts spread evil biomes, which infect corpses with zombieism that spread evil energies, as well.

This can lead back to part of what I talked about in the "deadlier HFS" topic, where elves need to ensure that their trees are not chopped down and live long lives because that is what powers their spirit deity, and knocking down trees weakens their spirit overall.  By chopping down trees, you are depleting the energy field of their deity, and functionally making gradual steps towards killing the nature spirits that elves revere as their god. 

We can also think in terms of actions - childbirth is a type of sphere, which would obviously be influenced by giving birth to children.  Children themselves are a sphere, but the act itself could potentially just have an energy field-generating effect that simply lingers in the area for a while.

If we think of spheres in terms of energy fields that are generated by concrete, observable objects and actions, we can then start thinking of ways in which we can manipulate these sphere-based energy fields, as well.  If plants only grow in evil areas, then we can perform desecrations of corpses in the area of the fields we want to plant our silver barbs to ensure that "evil"-type energies are available for the silver barbs to grow. Conversely, efforts to appease the dead may close off the "evil" energies that cause undead, and will drive away evil biome creatures, as well.

Temples, prayer, actions or items of sphere-related significance can be used to manipulate these energy fields, and if so, we could start controlling which forms of magic are prevalent in different areas of the map, and hence, control what flora and fauna are capable of spawning there.

I'll have to extrapolate more later, though, this was one of those things I mashed out because I couldn't sleep until I got what was on my head out, so I'll just leave this here to get some sleep.

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Violate the Earth!
Post by: sockless on January 31, 2011, 03:07:36 am

Yeah, the whole energies thing could be expanded to an entirely new thread, it's a more advanced concept that should be brought in later after the NPK system has been implemented, if it does get implemented.

The three main reasons nothing grows in caves, I've figured, is that the mud lacks biomass, it's far too basic, and it lacks light. Since the game has cave animals, there could quite conceivably be biomass from dead animals. Also, since this is a game, we could just make up some fungi that can live in basic conditions, plus we could have land based algae that live in caves.

I think that the nutrients system should be broken down into more than just NPK, as that doesn't fully cover what plants need to grow. Sodium needs to be incorporated into the system too, as some plants can't live near the sea and some plants thrive.

The composition of the soil needs to be taken into account too, as you get clay rich soil, sand rich soil, flinty soil, and a lot of other types, which can't just be described as level of biomass. So these variables need to be taken into account.

I don't really think that memory is too much of a constraint, since most dedicated DF players have plenty of RAM and DF doesn't require that much RAM. So there really isn't that much to worry about memory wise.

More thought however, needs to be put into worldgen, and how it's going to make stable ecosystems, without using up too much space or taking too long.

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Violate the Earth!
Post by: NW_Kohaku on January 31, 2011, 01:39:53 pm

I'm already talking about including several variables beyond NPK, including soil salinity, which I mentioned in the Water Management section I updated to the original string of posts.  If you didn't see it, it is in the second spoilered section of the third post.

As for clay or silty soils, we had discussions on this in the previous thread, and decided it was better to just have some sort of "default value" of nutrient variables assigned to each type of soil, without having to be so focused on grain size as to focus on whether sand is being broken down into finer silt.  (The difference between the two being grain size.)  See this wikipedia article on soil texture (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soil_texture) for more on it.

For right now, worldgen shouldn't be too much of a problem.  What I have been talking about is what occurs only when players are in control of a map.  Worldgen level modeling changes can come later, and represent civilizational impacts upon their environments, with things like dwarves clear-cutting nearby forests to fuel their metal industries, but that's not what I have discussed as of yet, and none of this impacts worldgen.

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Violate the Earth!
Post by: sockless on January 31, 2011, 08:42:19 pm

The soi types could be broken down into:

• Humus
• Sand
• Clay
• Silt
• Peat
• Rocks

This is because different plants require different amounts of different soil. One type could convert into different categories too, so humus could turn into peat.

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Violate the Earth!
Post by: harborpirate on February 01, 2011, 12:38:44 pm

A few things.

•I really like many of the ideas in this thread, especially making starting farming simple and finding ways to make the later game farming more interesting.

•What about something like magical stone types that cave plants are getting energy from? We would probably think of them as magnetic or radioactive, but that doesn't need explaining since dwarves would never understand it in this time period anyway.

•I notice you're not a fan of my cooking thread. That's ok. I'm bummed that you didn't notice that I've been unifying all suggestions into a working big picture in that thread, but rather than walls of text I like to narrow items down to concise suggestions. I actually asked toady in the dev thread whether he likes megathreads, and he said he was ambivalent on them since he reads all suggestions anyway. So a goal of unifying all suggestions together into a working whole is probably the ideal thing to do with them.

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Violate the Earth!
Post by: NW_Kohaku on February 01, 2011, 02:12:24 pm

Quote from: harborpirate on February 01, 2011, 12:38:44 pm

•I notice you're not a fan of my cooking thread. That's ok. I'm bummed that you didn't notice that I've been unifying all suggestions into a working big picture in that thread, but rather than walls of text I like to narrow items down to concise suggestions. I actually asked toady in the dev thread whether he likes megathreads, and he said he was ambivalent on them since he reads all suggestions anyway. So a goal of unifying all suggestions together into a working whole is probably the ideal thing to do with them.

Well, to be honest, once I posted it, I thought I was being a bit harsh.  I still don't think "throw everything into one big pot, even if two ideas conflict" is a good way to go about things, but I have to admit that part of what made me a little more harsh was that you weren't trying to link back to the original threads you were taking some of the ideas from, and it was a momentary spike of annoyance that set the tone of that post.

I'm not so much opposed to what you are doing, or the whole concept, but I like to have a unifying goal to achieve, some sort of experience the player is supposed to have, to guide what I am working at.

Oftentimes, suggestions are just "this would be more realistic".  It's an obvious goal to go for, and one I obviously follow myself, but it has to be tempered by recognizing the impact on play the suggestions will have.  You need to ask yourself what sort of changes in playstyle will this likely get out of players.  Games are ultimately about forms of conditioned response - if you lose when you do one thing, and don't lose or maybe even win if you do a second thing, players naturally become conditioned to doing the second thing.  At the time of the last thread, I had a pretty large argument in a separate thread about what constituted "interesting choices" (see Extra Credits' clip on the subject (http://www.escapistmagazine.com/videos/view/extra-credits/2590-Choice-and-Conflict)), and it partially helped me whittle down how much of this system you actually see and control, and how much of it works on autopilot. 

Anything that is a calculation (anything where one solution is clearly always better than all others) should be automated or at least, automatable.  Anything that players can't interact with isn't much of a system.  You need something where you set up conflicting goals for players to actually feel weighed down by choice.  This is partly what I am building this whole suggestion up towards - making the player choose between the value of the resources they can extract from the land (in terms of farming nutrients and hunting wildlife, but similar in terms of mining veins of blue stuff), and the fear of the potential disaster they can create for themselves if they are too greedy (in terms of depleting the soil, killing their farms, inviting a blight that wipes out their crops, and similar in terms to unleashing the HFS and having your fort overrun).

Also, honestly, I only read the first page, as at the time, I was still just coming back to the forum, and wanted to focus my catch-up reading material on the parts most important to the game itself.  (I read that FotF response, as well.)  So I wasn't aware of attempts to make it more cohesive.  I know it's not quite fair to throw out a massive thread, then not actually read someone else's big thread, but I wanted to get as much as I could out while the initial burst of energy was still going, and then come back to read that thread in its entirity later.

---

Quote from: harborpirate on February 01, 2011, 12:38:44 pm

•What about something like magical stone types that cave plants are getting energy from? We would probably think of them as magnetic or radioactive, but that doesn't need explaining since dwarves would never understand it in this time period anyway.

This is one of those things I'm thinking about.  "Green rocks" are kind of blah for a power source, but they could be a default or a supplement.  The advantage of green rocks is that they would be fairly obvious to see, understand, and manipulate.  The disadvantage is that they aren't particularly hard to manipulate, and that damages the dynamic I want to aim for.

I want player's actions to have consequences beyond their most immediate impact, so that there are long-range consequences that must be weighed against short-term consequences.  If all you are doing is moving a rock, you can just move the rock somewhere else when you're done with it, and you have no fear of long-term consequences.  If something like unicorns create the "Good" biome, then making unicorns really, really valuable, and letting dwarves slaughter them for their parts satisfies a short-term goal, but killing too many means they flee your fortress, never come back, and the "Good" biome dissapears. 

The point of most of this is to get players to experiment until they can find ways to make sustainable systems that balance competing natural forces in the game while generating the most of the resources the player wants to obtain.  Importantly, these competing forces you must balance are complex and dynamic enough that there isn't one single simple solution you can always apply to every situation, and can find easily on the wiki.  At the same time, total collapse of the system shouldn't be sudden and utterly irreverseable, it should have chances for the player to see warning signs, and make adjustments.  This means tempering the instinct to just "make more farms" whenever you want more biological material.  Things can't just scale perfectly, there has to be additional complexity as you scale.

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Violate the Earth!
Post by: Silverionmox on February 01, 2011, 04:12:21 pm

There aren't that many energy sources to pick from without venturing to the exceptional or the silly. The most feasible for the underground would be heat instead of light. Heat normally increases gradually with depth, so the upper caves would have sparse vegetation; lower level cave systems would be gradually more lush, until you're past the goldilocks zone and it's too hot for the heat-loving plants to survive. At that point you'll likely have caves that are more volcanic in origin, or the normal eroded caves but seared into a wasteland.

I'd be careful with rocks that generate zones that grow plants, because essentially they're magical horns of plenty. It's artifact-quality stuff. Plants that don't need energy are essentially perpetual motion machines and should be balanced with very slow growth rates, if they're present at all.

Plants that get their energy from movement (wind or water currents) would be cool.

In all the above options, the energy is used to synthesize nutrients to tissue and energy, so you'll still need those nutrients.

I think it would be nice for modding the game would just check for energy, instead of light specifically; the normal plants would have the tag [photosynthetic]; others could have [thermosynthetic], [kinesynthetic], [magmasynthetic], [spheresynthetic:gems], etc. So when it's time for a plant to grow, the game would check for a condition to be present (light, heat, etc.) and then considers the energy requirement fulfilled.

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Violate the Earth!
Post by: NW_Kohaku on February 01, 2011, 04:37:26 pm

Well, when I get into the underground, I think an "exceptional" source of energy would probably be the best way to go - it would allow us to tie in an ecosystem that is based upon the magic system that will eventually be in the game to explain this stuff.

I mean, we already have mushroom trees, living inorganic material men, floating intestines, and supposedly, we're going to get an update for grass made of purple worms.  We're dealing with "exceptional or silly" already, but we can at least put some sort of mechanics to rationalize it all in.  If certain aspects of the environment generate the energy for these creatures to survive, then they are innately bound to areas that have those energy fields, or at least eating a diet that involves eating something that lets them generate some of that energy, themselves.

Making "plantlife" that has some sort of ability to convert or create magical energy for survival can then form the basis of an ecosystem based upon some exotic "xenosynthesis".

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Violate the Earth!
Post by: NW_Kohaku on February 01, 2011, 04:49:46 pm

Actually, let me go into a little more depth on the concept of a "horn of plenty"...

To reiterate, one of the most key aspects of an ecosystem, aside from merely being a place where matter is recycled, but energy passes through and must be replinished, is that, while these things are renewable, they are also *FINITE*.  Competition for finite resources is the fundamental aspect that drives all of life.

This concept can (and almost certainly should) be applied to the energy fields I am talking about building the "xenosynthetic" ecosystem upon.  Whatever energy fields are out there, they are finite, and creatures must compete for who gets to have the energy from whatever glowing rock or open rift to another world or whatever supplies this energy. 

This could mean that it works like the chemosynthetic environments in "Black Smoker" vents - this type of life can only exist in finite quantities that are very densely packed around the source of this life.  The entire ecosystem is based on bacteria that can perform chemosynthesis, and bigger creatures don't so much eat the bacteria as allow them to grow within them for the purposes of generating their energy, and the bigger things on the food chain eat the things that symbiotically live with the bacteria.

A green rocks ecosystem could produce only enough energy for a finite amount of "plants" that live very close to the green rocks, and anything that is based off this kind of energy must eat those plants regularly to get their particular brand of energy in their system.

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Violate the Earth!
Post by: The Phoenixian on February 01, 2011, 10:12:27 pm

I don't have much to say about caves that isn't built off of an overhaul of how they work so...

Back on the core topic:

Here's a question: (and I'm mainly asking because it's been nagging me for a while.) How should the information in the system be presented to the player? I don't mean where he finds it, I agree with the farm overseer for the most part, but rather how it looks to the player.

Take for example the Lumper potato from the last farming thread.

NAME: Waterlump Tuber (The Lumper potato)

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

notes: This is based upon the Lumper potato strain.  For those who aren't that big on American/English/Irish history, the Lumper was the potato strain that fell victim to the Potato Blight that caused the Irish Potato Famine that led to millions of Irishpeople fleeing their native land to places like the United States. (See: http://www1.american.edu/ted/potato.htm) Unlike most modern potato strains, the lumper was actually not a particularly tasty potato, instead being rather watery.  It also grew somewhat slower than modern potatos because, as a early strain of potato that shares more in common with wild potatos than domesticated potatos, and as such, was leafier and spent more time blooming flowers.  The key to understanding why this was the crop that caused the famine is that these potatos were much easier to grow than other breeds (soil fertility-wise), and that they had essentially all the nutrients you needed to survive, except for Vitamin A and Calcium, which you could get from milk or cheese, which most poor people relied on for their needs.  This is why it became virtually the only crop grown in Ireland, making the lumper such an unprecedentedly easy target for the potato blight, which in turn made a single disease's rapid spread (thanks to the incredible density of the lumper population for that disease to feed upon) capable of starving a million people, and forcing even more people to flee the nation. 

PREFSTRING: lumps and knobs

EDIBLE: pest, cooked, grazer
TILE: 232
COLOR: 6 0 0

NUTRIENT_N: 130: 80: -22 (--)
NUTRIENT_P: 90: 50: -5 (-)
NUTRIENT_K: 90: 50: -2 (-)
SOIL_PH: 107: 127: 87: 147: 0
WATER_REQUIREMENT: -80 (--)
BIOMASS: 60: 130: 20: 190: 0

FULL_HARVEST: 33
VALUE: 1  (Actually, since this is a "for sustainance only" crop, I do think perhaps reducing the advantage for having a crappy crop (1 value basically means you get twice as many crops as a 2 value crop), so that we still count a 1 value crop as a 1.5 value crop for the purposes of balancing the equations.  This would make this plant only produce a FULL_HARVEST of 22.)

PEST:  Waterlump Blight, tuber weevil, wireworm

BIOME: Cold to warm, wet, marginal lands
SEASON: All year, aside from freezing
GROWDUR: 660

SEED TYPE: Destroys crop

Taking a look, The growth requirements are in eight bits, and I think that works well for the programming, However, I'm wondering if that's the best way for it to appear to the player in the game itself. Why can't they be divided in half or quartered in appearance for what the player sees?

For example, Acidity is between 0 and 255 but wouldn't it be better for the player to see a only between 0 and 140 (or more accurately 0.0 to 14.0)?

(and speaking of acid, part of me is wondering why you can't simply plow the fields with vitriol or lye to change acidity but somehow I think there's a rather more obvious answer to that one.)

Sorry if I missed an answer to this being said elsewhere but like I said, The question's been nagging me for a while.

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Violate the Earth!
Post by: NW_Kohaku on February 01, 2011, 10:30:39 pm

Well, you didn't miss it, because I haven't re-written that part, yet.  (And it's about fourth on my list, right now...)

I was putting that into psuedo-raw format, so that it could be seen similar to the way that the computer or modders would see it.  The sort of knowledge that lets players see what kind of nutrient levels a plant needs, or what percentage of a soil nutrient level each nutrient has, or even the names of the nutrients themselves, should all be obscured from the player in play.

In order to present the information to the player, however, it will be put into the same sort of text-based gradients that we get with, say, "decent quarters" versus a "great bedroom".  When looking at the soil itself, you would see something like what I detailed in this post (http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=22015.msg1419551#msg1419551), while you would be able to see when you are looking at the menu to choose what to plant a ranking of the crops based upon which crops you have are most suited to the soil you are cursoring over.  (For example, sorting the list by best matches first, and color-coding cutoff points, so that green crops are the "at least 90% match" crops, and yellow, brown, red, and dark grey all indicate worse suitability.)

If you were to look in the Farming Overseer for a guide on what you know about those waterlumps in particular, it would say it was something like a moderate feeder (no particular distinction of any one NPK nutrient from another, except when it is a nitrogen-fixer or somehow otherwise replinishes one of those), a crop that prefers cold but not freezing climates, prefers slightly acidic soil, and needs moderate amounts of water.

----
EDIT: Ah, and one more thing with regards to information presented to the player - the game should also give a "to make this field ideal..." interface that would tell you what steps the AI would take to prepare the field for planting a specific crop.  That is, if the field is not suitable for a crop because it lacks some kind of mineral, and some kind of fertilizer or combination of treatments to the farm would have to be performed by the farmers before planting a crop, the game should display that for you.  (That is, the exact calculations of how much fertilizer should be used is on the game, not the player, to calculate, and it just tells you how much the farmer dwarves will want to grab out of the stockpile to prepare the soil, should you want to plant that crop.)

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Violate the Earth!
Post by: NW_Kohaku on February 02, 2011, 02:12:32 am

I have completed the pests section.  See this post (http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=76007.msg1920008#msg1920008) to find it.

Well, I still feel like I'm forgetting something I wanted to say, but it's not as bad as the feeling I had with the NPK one, and I'm basically going to have to do an "advanced NPK" in order to clear all that out.

It was about 10k characters, that time, so I had to start a new post to fit it in.  I'm worried I won't have enough characters, having only reserved about 200,000 of them :P

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Violate the Earth!
Post by: NW_Kohaku on February 02, 2011, 03:27:15 pm

Made another update, adding some further exposition on the Pests section.

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Violate the Earth!
Post by: Andeerz on February 02, 2011, 04:21:48 pm

This thread is frikkin' rad.

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Violate the Earth!
Post by: jseah on February 02, 2011, 05:51:54 pm

Nice. XD

Just a nitpick: it's "nematode".  Also, they should really be classified as a microorganism, not a worm. 

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Violate the Earth!
Post by: NW_Kohaku on February 02, 2011, 05:57:35 pm

Right, well, they should be "toads".  Anyway, I don't think I said anything that implied they were worms, so if you could point out whatever point I did, I'll change it, but I can't find it.

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Violate the Earth!
Post by: sockless on February 02, 2011, 07:52:40 pm

One thing that's been nagging me is the point that pH is a logarithmic scale, how is this going to be implemented into the system, since the rate of change of pH then can't be constant, since it'll take a lot more stuff to move the pH from 10 to 9 as it would from 9-8, 10 times as much in fact.

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Violate the Earth!
Post by: The Phoenixian on February 02, 2011, 08:09:40 pm

Side comment:

The section on pests makes me think that, with the right build, it could be easily repurposed for that biological warfare in the event your dwarves were looking for a way to destroy enemy food production.

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Violate the Earth!
Post by: jseah on February 03, 2011, 03:11:56 am

"Earthworms, nematodes, and other beneficial vermin" implies that nematodes are vermin of some kind.  They're tiny and practically impossible to manipulate without a microscope.  Only way I can see dwarves doing anything with them is moving the soil itself. 

If you meant "Earthworms, Toads, and other beneficial vermin", then yeah, I can see that.  Not like I really expected nematodes to get in.  =P

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Violate the Earth!
Post by: NW_Kohaku on February 03, 2011, 12:48:18 pm

Quote from: sockless on February 02, 2011, 07:52:40 pm

One thing that's been nagging me is the point that pH is a logarithmic scale, how is this going to be implemented into the system, since the rate of change of pH then can't be constant, since it'll take a lot more stuff to move the pH from 10 to 9 as it would from 9-8, 10 times as much in fact.

It won't really need to be the actual pH scale, as that wasn't around for dwarfy times.  It just needs to allow dwarves to recognize soil acidity, and how to combat it.  All we need is the scale that operates in the range that plants will tolerate or not tolerate, and in which actions like liming the soil will have consistant effects.

Of course, whenever I read up on liming the soil, it says that it alters soil acidity by "about 1 on the scale", which means that liming the soil may have logarithmic effects on soil acidity, itself.

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Violate the Earth!
Post by: NW_Kohaku on February 03, 2011, 03:28:27 pm

A thought, on xenobiology, though.

If we (well, OK, *I*) want to make ecologies dependent upon microorganisms that were capable of processing the energies found in magical energy fields, then it means that what we are doing is eerily similar to another well-known attempt to bridge magic and science...

The following word presents disturbing images and is not for viewing from all audiences.  We would like to warn pregnant mothers and fanboys not to read the following word.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

midichlorians

(Let me just wait for the chorus of "DO NOT WANT" to subside...)

But basically, this would mean that, for example, zombies and other similar creatures are not merely undead, but are the result of a virus of some sort that merely waits to attack organic life forms that have lost their ability to resist invasion, and allow the hivemind-driven microorganisms to take over. 

The specific sphere in question would obviously have radically different effects on the organisms it powers, though.  A Marriage sphere, for example, might be driven by places where people are married or in the vicinity of where married people live (perhaps causing specific types of flowers that only bloom in wedding chapels, or in the homes of happily married couples).  Such a flower might become obvious symbols for love and marriage, and be highly desirable because of it.

(EDIT: OR should I just make a new thread for this, because all but 3-5 people are too scared to read the first few tl;dr posts, and get on to the subsequent discussion?)

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Violate the Earth!
Post by: Vince7403 on February 03, 2011, 09:40:59 pm

Toady One is, last I heard, philosophically opposed to making magic something which can be manipulated consistently, that is, magic would not be amenable to scientific inquiry. However, if we are going to go into tracking nutrients seriously, then the underground can't function like it does without adding an exotic source of energy, unless we allow for hugely increased activity of chemo-litho-trophic microbes or fantastical equivalent.

As far as exotic microbes go, I vastly prefer the Necromorph infection from Dead Space over the given example. For those who don't know,

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

 the Necromorph infection is capable of rapidly assimilating dead cells and reanimates them in new forms when in the presence of the psychic field emitted by, well, something on the planet.

Sadly, is is probably not useful in any way to the current discussion.

We may achieve more practical progress if we neglect the underground ecology at first and concentrate only on tended underground soil/mud plots and the surface. Just my opinion, but it seems like delaying the extra layers and concentrating on the core framework may be better. Of course, I'm not contributing much to the project so it's easy for me to say that, not being fully aware of all the ramifications.

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Violate the Earth!
Post by: NW_Kohaku on February 03, 2011, 10:00:54 pm

Quote from: Vince7403 on February 03, 2011, 09:40:59 pm

Toady One is, last I heard, philosophically opposed to making magic something which can be manipulated consistently, that is, magic would not be amenable to scientific inquiry. However, if we are going to go into tracking nutrients seriously, then the underground can't function like it does without adding an exotic source of energy, unless we allow for hugely increased activity of chemo-litho-trophic microbes or fantastical equivalent.

I don't suppose you could find me a quote? 

I'd be very interested to know what he has to say on the subject, and on what, specifically, he does or does not want magic to be like.

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Violate the Earth!
Post by: The Phoenixian on February 03, 2011, 10:13:17 pm

Quote from: NW_Kohaku on February 03, 2011, 10:00:54 pm

Quote from: Vince7403 on February 03, 2011, 09:40:59 pm

Toady One is, last I heard, philosophically opposed to making magic something which can be manipulated consistently, that is, magic would not be amenable to scientific inquiry. However, if we are going to go into tracking nutrients seriously, then the underground can't function like it does without adding an exotic source of energy, unless we allow for hugely increased activity of chemo-litho-trophic microbes or fantastical equivalent.

I don't suppose you could find me a quote? 

I'd be very interested to know what he has to say on the subject, and on what, specifically, he does or does not want magic to be like.

Not sure if this is precisely what you're looking for but there seems to be something of this nature in the DF talk seven about artifacts.

Here's a link: Transcript of DF talk 7. The relevant bits are right at the top.
http://www.bay12games.com/media/df_talk_7_transcript_2.html (http://www.bay12games.com/media/df_talk_7_transcript_2.html)

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Violate the Earth!
Post by: sockless on February 03, 2011, 11:53:27 pm

So I've been doing a bit of research about soil now because of this thread and I have a couple of questions about features to be included.

Are we going to include some form of cation exchange capability in this model?
Will we be able to do hydroponics?
How would you raise soil pH?

You can make calcium hydroxide from baking limestone in a kiln and mixing it with water. This could be used to lower soil pH and it is also used in tanning.

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Violate the Earth!
Post by: NW_Kohaku on February 03, 2011, 11:55:32 pm

Hmm... Thank you.  I don't really pay as much attention to the DF Talks since they tend to be more rambling than the more direct ones on the forums.  I tend to miss things because of that. 

I'd quote the whole section, but, well, it's pretty long, and I have enough long posts in this thread already.

It does say that he doesn't want it directly predictable, but also that he's not sure how he wants to do it.  However, that one was from almost an entire year ago, so his ideas may well have been shaped more concretely by now.

Oddly enough, Toady's comments on unpredictable magic mirror my own reasons why I got into some arguments about magic several months ago:  Sufficiently unpredictable wizards (that can cause volcanic eruptions inside your fortress or open the HFS or such) are such a massive catastrophe waiting to happen that there is no sane response other than to chuck a wizard into the magma the instant you see one.

He also talks about magic's sources, though, and that's pretty interesting as an angle.  Something else, though, that really grabs my attention is this quote:

Quote

But it could be the end of the world if having the artifact sword is somehow drawing your fortress closer to some kind of world of fire and then suddenly it like sucks into some kind of fire plane and your whole fortress catches on fire and then everyone wonders why there’s a new volcano.

I think this is the sort of thing that what I am attempting to model actually might be able to do.

What I have been working with and working towards is a model in which "manipulation" and "control" are two separate things.  Nature, in the model I am trying to create, is powerful and resilient enough that you can't just kill it outright, it will always spring back, but it's just that you can't really control the spring back.  Your actions have consequences beyond the immediately obvious, and you can set into motion a chain of events that you might not be prepared for.  (Not that this is much different from "Today, I learned about water pressure when I flooded my fort," but for the timescale.)

Consider if your fortress already has "fire" or "magma" spheres pretty well-represented, and then you go making more fire or magma sphere-generating artifacts, or you perform magma sphere-raising activities.  Especially if your ability to understand the exact levels of the sphere's influence in the area is limited to only being able to look and see the population levels of the xenosynthetic lifeforms in the area, not an "energy map", it could be very subtle when you are slowly getting your fortress towards a firey doom when the ecosystem/xenosystem hits the tipping point, and suddenly dwarves' bodies start getting taken over by fire sprites or something, and start turning into magma men.

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Violate the Earth!
Post by: NW_Kohaku on February 04, 2011, 12:20:41 am

Quote from: sockless on February 03, 2011, 11:53:27 pm

So I've been doing a bit of research about soil now because of this thread and I have a couple of questions about features to be included.

Are we going to include some form of cation exchange capability in this model?
Will we be able to do hydroponics?
How would you raise soil pH?

You can make calcium hydroxide from baking limestone in a kiln and mixing it with water. This could be used to lower soil pH and it is also used in tanning.

• ... *sigh* I'm not really sure.  I kind of want to say "no, this is too complex a subject matter already, I don't want to go stuffing even MORE stuff in willy-nilly".  A problem with it is that this sort of thing is fairly hard for the player to really manipulate.  It's something that alters the rates at which other variables become altered, which is playing a really odd Kevin Bacon game with soil that I'm not sure how to really convey to the player in a meaningful way, since we're already playing coy with NPK.  I guess I can do more research on it and give it more thought, though...
• Theoretically, you could, since I've already talked about having pipes filled with water that have minerals dissolved in the water.  However, I think "hydroponics" the way we think of it is very modern farming that involves very modern understanding of the chemistry of life to get right, and just beyond the time scope of DF.  I do think, however, that there is room for a sort of "kelp-farming" method involving plants that float over shallow water.  I remember seeing somethign on History Channel about one of the Native American civilizations like the Aztecs literally growing their food on a sort of raft in the river.  That's worth looking into.
• Generally, you don't want to lower soil pH, it's just something that happens when you use certain fertilizers, and you have to stop the tendency to make the soil overly acidified.  Urea applied to the soil will naturally turn the soil acidic, as it's an acid and all, and that's one of your primary nitrogen suppliers.  See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urea#Agriculture .  You have to treat your urea carefully to prevent over-acidifying the soil. Decaying plant matter also acidifies soil, which is why forests tend to have acidic soil in the first place.

---

EDIT: OK, I found a decent site that isn't so jargony as to be almost incomprehensible.  http://www.soilminerals.com/Cation_Exchange_Simplified.htm

I guess it's possible to use this, although I'm still not sure how, exactly. 

For one thing, I want to keep this about how nature works in cycles, and how there are multiple forces in equillibrium with one another.  CEC is just kind of a property of the soil.  You can't really change it, it's just "Too bad, your soil is too sandy to grow anything good on.  You should have embarked on clay, sucker!"

I could hypothetically introduce some sort of magic super-soil creating plant that turns sand into silt or even clay, but it's also sort of a one-way trip.  There's no counterveiling force gluing the particles back together. 

It's also something that has a direct impact on several other nutrients, most of which, for the purpose of keeping things to just NPK, aren't even talked about in the rest of this model, like calcium, sodium, and magnesium.  Only Potassium is really big on CEC, and it would act as a sort of "max K value".  Then it messes with acidity, which is already a variable that lies on the outside borders of usefulness.

... I kind of want some sort of soil science professor to come out here and help me with some of this research.  I wonder if I could email one?  Either that, or I might as well just change my major now, and at least get a degree out of this noise.  I've put more research into this than my classes which have projects coming up...

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Violate the Earth!
Post by: Vince7403 on February 04, 2011, 03:13:07 am

Probably best not to expand into too much complexity. A much simpler solution is that each plant has a list of soil types it can grow in, along with perhaps a value reflecting whether that soil type is sub-par and impedes its growth.

So, crop such-and-such requires, for example: High N, medium P, any K; moderate water; narrow range of acidity; will grow in silt, clay, loam, sandy loam (growth inhibited but possible), but not sandy soil. These sorts of requirements would, except for the exact chemistry, be understood to in-universe farmers and could be displayed on the crop information interface with in-universe terms.

I don't think a tolerable soil variable associated to a crop would impede performance too much, since it's only checked when a seed/sprout/spore first attempts to grow on a site and/or when the type of soil on a plant-occupied tile changes. The latter is unlikely to happen often, though floods could do it. Lava flow would probably do it too, but the plants are unlikely to survive unless they're magical fire-sphere plants that grow in the fire lands and are eaten by the fire elk and fire squirrels and so forth.

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Violate the Earth!
Post by: NW_Kohaku on February 04, 2011, 10:48:35 am

The problem with "can grow in silt, sandy clay, etc." is that then we no longer have player-created soils from things like flooding stone or muddy caverns.  The soil being worked in the rest of the thread isn't a "soil layer" the way that the game currently handles it, but a floor covering that ignores the wall/solid material below it.

Those base soil types can provide a ground-level set of nutrients, but the point of all this is that players can change these things to suit their needs.  I don't want to just say "sorry, nothing grows on sand."  Or even worse, "nothing grows outside of soil layers".

Furthermore, humus has the best CEC ratings, and humus is made of decayed plant matter.  In other words, it's the stuff made when we leave compost down as fertilizer, something that I'm trying to make (literally) dirt common, which would mean we'd probably need some different variable for modeling how deep the humus is, or some other crazy thing.

The things I'm reading on, drainage and CEC are generally related, and theoretically, I can merge those two together in a manner.  Soil quality also depends in part on the ratio of calcium to magnesium, both minerals we're not modelling, and high enough magnesium leads to fermenting alcohol and formaldehyde in the soil. 

Hypothetically, we could just use some sort of "magic super-lichen" that could break down sands or even gravel in a player-useful timeframe like a couple years at most.  The thing is making the reverse trip...  Hypothetically, this could take place with soil erosion, if we want this to be a fairly static number.  Alternately, we could have some system of continuously adding gravel or sand, which drops this number while maybe adding to other numbers, while letting the soil get worked by plantlife raises it again.

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Violate the Earth!
Post by: NW_Kohaku on February 04, 2011, 02:03:04 pm

Made a new spin-off thread to farm some ideas for this one: http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=76578.0

I'm also a little unsure of where to triage my efforts right now.  I don't want to be unsure of how to handle the final bits on soil and go ahead and finish, since I only have a few more sections to write, and I want to leave the Interface part for last, once I'm certain how I want the entire system to operate.

I guess I could put something in about pollution or livestock, which are just sort of dangling mini-topics to be tied up, but I'm not sure.

I suppose I should just go ahead and write the BotDK thread before it bursts from my skull, but feel uneasy about further splitting my attentions.

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Violate the Earth!
Post by: monk12 on February 04, 2011, 08:43:13 pm

AAAAHHHH SO MANY WORDS!

Every third paragraph my brain starts going off tangentially to what you're saying, and I sit there and cogitate on it for a few minutes before coming back to find you went in a similar direction I did, or a different direction I wanted to debate you on, or jumped the rails entirely into a new thought that sends me off on another tangent. Or, in short, you make me think too much :P

I'm not even going to touch the whole spheres/magic energy source/make the caverns make sense thing. Or rather, I'll do it at some later date in some other thread. I'll be in and out of this thread as individual bits provoke my brain cells.

Notably, the first tangent I went off on started when you highlighted how the problem is the (relative) lack of scarcity in DF. My thoughts really started rolling after you mentioned that each player wants DF to be different things. You're right- this is a game, and one of the objects of a game is to have a player make conscious decisions about how to most effectively manage their limited resources to achieve their goals. "A series of interesting choices," as I've heard it eloquently phrased. The thing is, in DF most of the goals beyond "survival" are self-imposed by the player, which means after the early stages of the fortress every player is going to be making different choices depending on what they want to do. At this point I stopped thinking about scarcity and optimal actions in regards to farming and applied it to the way we play DF as a whole.

After chewing it over a bit, I ended up breaking the way we play DF into two groups- World Shapers, and Creature Controllers. Creature Controllers are the players who like manipulating and learning about the inhabitants of the fantasy world that has been generated, both as individuals and as larger social units like family and fortresses; learning about their social lives, maximizing their happiness, optimizing their productivity, interacting with other races/civs/sites, playing with the economy and so forth. What the creatures do is the most interesting to them- the fortress itself is just a place to collect these interesting little dudes. World Shapers, on the other hand, manipulate and investigate the world around them; building megaconstructions, doing large mining projects, playing with eccentricities of physics and generally forcing the environment to bow to their needs. The creatures within the world are interesting in the sense they provide a way to measure and interact with the environment, but if a bunch of miners die, what of it? Obviously, many players are between these two extremes, but roll with me for the sake of argument.

Thinking all of these things was a bit of a paradigm shift for me, since it broke up what I had once considered a unique whole into discrete pieces. It also illustrated that everybody does a little bit of each part as part of surviving and making a sustainable fortress, and that tackling all of these hurdles at once creates the learning cliff we all know and love. What happens is that after everybody struggles to do the necessary bits of the other playstyle, they tend to ignore them in favor of spending their most precious resource (time) on things they have the most fun doing. So after feeling enlightened, I evaluated the suggestion itself in these new terms. Improved Farming enhances the World Shaping aspect of the game, since it necessarily involves learning more about the earth itself, life cycles, weather, water manipulation and so forth as you make further and further improvements.

Now what really excited me is the fact that, by your methods, you've made it possible to have very detailed refinements to this aspect of the game, complete with added challenges and a veritable font of new projects, WITHOUT forcing people who play the game differently to figure it out. If you enjoy this part of the game you'll have a blast assuming each successive challenge, and if you don't you can accept having suboptimal farm output provided it meets the minimum needs of the fortress, and you can supplement your food production with trade in order to spend more time focusing on the little dudes themselves.

At this point, I realized what you had actually done was make a way by which being good at one playstyle made you automatically better at other. You are better at the military aspect of the game because your bountiful self-sustaining farms make you able to ignore the depredations of sieges. You can succeed economically and socially because your awesome fields are producing nice things for your dwarves, and you're growing more than other sites because your unique embark makes you more suited for, say, redroot dye than they are.

And of course, THAT thought made me start pondering ways to get the same kind of progressive difficulty curve, since this ties right back into DF being everything for everyone. I could probably ramble on at this point (as if I haven't already, and I've still got nits to pick with what I've said), so I'll just stop, chew it over, and if it merits further discussion I'll go make my own thread.

And that was just tangent #1! I haven't even started thinking about FARMING YET!

I'll pop in later and make some more on-topic posts- I'll just use this space to thank you for giving me something to ponder at work tomorrow.

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Violate the Earth!
Post by: NW_Kohaku on February 04, 2011, 10:00:43 pm

Quote from: monk12 on February 04, 2011, 08:43:13 pm

AAAAHHHH SO MANY WORDS!

Every third paragraph my brain starts going off tangentially to what you're saying, and I sit there and cogitate on it for a few minutes before coming back to find you went in a similar direction I did, or a different direction I wanted to debate you on, or jumped the rails entirely into a new thought that sends me off on another tangent. Or, in short, you make me think too much :P

Thank you.  I'll take that as a compliment whether it really was or wasn't :P

Quote

After chewing it over a bit, I ended up breaking the way we play DF into two groups- World Shapers, and Creature Controllers.

I kind of see it as three major factions, four if you want to count Adventurer players as separate.  You've got one set who are the Roguelikes, they want the extra brutal world, and love it when their fortress goes down in flames, preferring to mod in even bigger challenges like Fortress Defense.  It's all military all the time.  Then you have the storytellers.  These are the people who enjoy the sort of vicarious living through dwarves, and tend to be the sorts of people who make suggestions for campfires or glass display cases or museums or other creature comforts, plus generally like all the graphics mods that make the world prettier and more accessable.  Basically, they like the game to be more like The Sims.  Then you have the architects.  These are the people who build titanic megaprojects, make residential floorplans that are fractal patterns, and create dwarfputers.  Dwarf Fortress is a physics engine for them, and being more creative and going one further than anyone else, and generally just discovering how to master every system in the game are what give them pleasure.

In one of the previous threads, someone related to me the "Three Magic: The Gathering Players (http://www.wizards.com/magic/magazine/article.aspx?x=mtgcom/daily/mr11b)", the three hypothetical players who had to be satisfied by the designers of M:tG with different cards:  Timmy, the kid who loved the really big monsters, and played because he thought summoning big things was fun; Johnny, the guy who played to have creative flair, and enjoyed coming up with the most unusual combinations possible; and Spike, the guy who only played to win, and went for pure bang for the buck potential.  It carries over into DF, as well.  The roguelike players are the Spikes - a bloodbath is all they're there for.  Johnnys love to be architects who shape their world to express themselves.  Timmys love the little colorful things and being surprised by the game. 

Just look at some of the players who only plant one type of crop all the time, every time.  They're only trying to do the bare minimum they can in one field of the game to get to the part they like - warfare.

Of course, very few people are extremes who conform entirely to one of these three camps.  I generally have a bit of a Spike in me for most games, but not DF, while I tend to be somewhat Timmy in this game, oddly.  Mostly, though, I like being Johnny.  I love understanding the concepts behind a game, and find it more fun than the game itself.  It's why I've spent this much time analyzing the hell out of the farming system.

This suggestion... doesn't really do much for the roguelikers, unfortunately.  I can just try to keep out of their way, and not trample on their fun while they wait for the Army Arc to come along.  I can try to put in plantlife that they might find interesting, some things that would make for the alchemistry to make flaming oil or the like, but I'm not sure if they'd even appreciate it, if it took understanding a farming system they didn't want to use in order to get it.  Storytellers get a farming experience that isn't such a chore at the start of the game, yet still rewards depth and experimentation.  It gives the architects something grand to be able to engineer - whole ecosystems they can sculpt in their image!

Quote

At this point, I realized what you had actually done was make a way by which being good at one playstyle made you automatically better at other.

... Wow... Never seen anyone give me this much credit before.  Not really sure how to react.  I should probably resist that one urge in the back of my head to throw a towel around my neck like a cape and laugh maniacly now that my "insidious master plan" has been revealed, though.

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Violate the Earth!
Post by: AngleWyrm on February 04, 2011, 10:02:51 pm

Quote from: NW_Kohaku on February 04, 2011, 10:48:35 am

The problem with "can grow in silt, sandy clay, etc." is that then we no longer have player-created soils from things like flooding stone or muddy caverns.

What we have here is two definitions of soil type, and as the variables become the definition of a soil type the categorical definitions such as silt or sandy clay approach conflict. Does silt have a set of values that make it silt? Would any mud that has been modified until it fits within those ranges then be silt by definition? If the values of a patch of sandy clay are modified until it fits the variables that describe loam, then is it still sandy clay?

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Violate the Earth!
Post by: NW_Kohaku on February 04, 2011, 10:22:38 pm

The soil types that are in the game now are not just made up names - they describe soil types based upon the grain size of the minerals. 

Non-organic soil starts out as part of mountains.  They get worn down to boulders, then rocks, then sand, then silt, then fine clay.  Sand, silt, and clay are all the same thing - really small rocks - and it doesn't really tell you anything about their material content (with the exception of the different colored sands - black sand is probably mafic basalt or obsidian worn down).

So yes, if you grind down sand to a finer consistency, then, by definition, it does become silt.  Very, very fine silt becomes clay.

Those other soil types, like silty clay or sandy silt are all just soils made of mixtures of different sizes of inorganic soils, and "loam" is a generally even balance of all three sizes. 

The only other types of soil are things like peat, which are organic soil types, and are naturally made up of organic matter.

This is partially why those soil types aren't particularly relevant to the conversation thus far - they have nothing to do with the actual mineral content of the soil.  It's only when you bring up something like drainage or CEC that it starts to matter.  Clay, because it is a much smaller volume, has a greater surface area to mass ratio, meaning its surface can adsorb more minerals like potassium.  Sand, because it has a greater volume, is the opposite.  However, simply having greater capacity to store potassium does not necessarily mean that soil will have potassium.

What's more, different minerals making those soils have different CECs - the black volcanic sands have a greater CEC.

Worse, Humus has the most ideal of all CECs.  It's the organic soil formed by simply letting things die and decompose, which has nothing to do with whether you have sand or clay beneath the soil to begin with.

Ultimately, if there's any soil that I've been talking about modelling thus far, it's the Humus, not the soil layers that form below it - it's what has all the minerals you dump in with fertilizers, and build up with decaying plant material and corpses and manure. 

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Violate the Earth!
Post by: Nicolo on February 04, 2011, 11:38:21 pm

Great thread!

It's started to bug me how the first farmplot I ever laid down in my forts would be the last and as my fortress developed, and as the fortress the biggest challenge I'd have would be the race to build or buy enough barrels to store the food from my one plot.

The problems are like you said,

1) Farmer skill is too overpowered in its current form. DF was clearly designed in the early game, where food shortages could potentially happen because there are not enough competent/skilled farmers balanced with the rest of your population to create food. As ones' population increases through migration, this should become more of a problem. It isn't however, because the field farmers' skills outpace the rest of your fort's ability to consume food instead of the other way around.

2) Land is too efficient. One tile of land, with a skilled enough planter combined with some growers, can feed multiple dwarfs indefinitely. Meanwhile, in the real world even the most undeveloped and technologically backward countries measure their 'economic footprint' in hectares. While that is a bit extreme, I think a middle ground could be found. OP's suggestion of needing multiple food items to satisfy a dwarf's hunger is a great one one. Perhaps a farmed tile could have an integer that increases each time the land is farmed, and decreases each time it is left fallow or fertilized - this number increasing the time it takes for a tile to produce a food item.

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Violate the Earth!
Post by: sockless on February 05, 2011, 12:19:22 am

About the rafts with plants on them: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aquaculture, I stumbled onto that when I was looking at CEC.

As about the soil types, a picture is worth a thousand words.
From Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soil_texture (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soil_texture))

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

(http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/65/SoilTextureTriangle.jpg)

That gives you a nice idea of how soil sizes work and what constitutes what.

I'm assuming that this will have some basic form of salinity too, as that is rather important in real life. But the problem then exists that salt is very hard to get out of soil.

I think that you should read this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alkali_soil#Solutions (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alkali_soil#Solutions), in respect to soil acidity and solutions to it for basic soil, since no-one has really discussed this.

Hydroponics doesn't necessarily mean that there is only water and a plant, the Wiki article says that you can grow plants in gravel and other substrates using hydroponics, which would be rather interesting, as you wouldn't necessarily have to make soil underground, as you could just crush up some rock and flow cavern water through it.. The first use of hydroponics was in 1st century AD, but wasn't used for hundreds of years until the 1600s, so it is technologically feasible, but it is technologically equivalent to greenhouses and the like.

Hydroponics really just having the nutrients in soil, in water. So you'd have your NPK system, but in water.

<edit>I just looked it up, and you need 90 acres to feed 100 people if you use irrigation and stuff, but that was in like the early days of agriculture.
From another source:

Quote

Each person needs --
vegan food -- 3000 sq. ft. (0.07 acres)
a few eggs/week -- 3,500 sq. ft. (0.08 acres)
one chicken/week -- 24,300 sq. ft. (0.56 acres)
one cow/year -- 67,300 sq. ft. (1.55 acres)

1 acre = 0.4 ha = 4047 m²

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Violate the Earth!
Post by: Interus on February 05, 2011, 01:04:41 am

Soooo much text.  I want to read it all, I really do, but this is like the third time I came back to this thread, and it's the only time I made any progress.  Granted, reading it from a phone is probably why the first two failed.  I may have to take your advice the next time I try.
 
I want to mention a couple things, but I'm sure somebody else already had and that would make me feel bad, but I also don't want to withhold it.  Mostly I just wanna talk.  You said something about wanting to keep nutrient values roughly the same through the life of a fortress.  Now, the part about nutrients either being released immediately after consumption, or used and eventually released when the dwarf dies or whatever, makes sense.  Any nutrients that are part of the system stay as part of the system.  But it also seems like any nutrients that are brought into the system would stay in it too.  Like, new immigrants, wandering animals, or several goblin sieges.  I'm kinda tired, so maybe some nutrients do disappear from the system naturally, and I just didn't read that part, or read it wrong.  I'd still be worried that the decay might be to much for a new fort, or not enough for one that suddenly finds itself with tons of blocks of goblin-meat compost.  It's just a poorly thought out concern, but it started bugging me as soon as I read that.

Secondly, as a minor point, and I'm almost completely certain that it's been mentioned, the spoiler rocks could probably function as a magic source.  I'm trying to figure out how that would work specifically, but I'm thinking it would basically replace whichever nutrients are most rare in caverns, and certain cave plants would grow better, when closer to one, the other, or both.  So lower caverns have more magical plants(that is, plants that are more magical, not just higher in number) than upper ones, and also more nutrient rich.

This is all poorly thought out, and I apologize.  It's just that, as I mentioned, I'm tired.  Also, the ideas you wrote are pretty exciting, and made me think too.  So far, I'm not actually sure how much I like them, but it's definitely better than the basic "need more time or produce less food" ideas that I've seen in some mods.  Expect me to be back, possibly with better thought out thoughts, once I've done some serious reading.

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Violate the Earth!
Post by: NW_Kohaku on February 05, 2011, 02:40:46 am

Sockless, could you spoiler that chart?  It's kind of huge. 

Anyway, yes, that chart and the wikipedia article that refernces it has been linked in the last thread several times.  Again, the real point of that is that it doesn't really matter much, because the granularity of the soil is not a really relevant aspect of soil fertility.  If anything, it will be compressed into a single "drainage" stat so that players aren't too handicapped by something that is really complexity beyond anything they can really control.

As for the alkaline soil, yes, I have seen that, as well.  That will come in the "Advanced NPK and Specific Fertilizers" section.

We've also had discussions on what sort of land area you need to "realistically" farm for the numbers of people we are talking about, and this will be mentioned in one of the closing sections on the thread. I should also point out that the neutrality of that article you referenced (which I've seen before in the thread) is very much disputable, as it is basically a pro-veganism screed.  Veganism wouldn't even be possible in medieval times thanks to Vitamin B₁₂ deficiency, as was raised back then.

For "hydroponics" in gravel... that's not really hydroponics except in some very technical definitions, and it's really beyond medieval farming methods, anyway.

For Aquaculture, that isn't farming by raft, that's fishing.  Or rather, it's fisheries, which would certainly be an option available to ancient, much less medieval fishermen.  Ironically, the article actually talks about how the Ancient Chinese first practiced this by trapping carp from their rivers.  There's also the interesting Algaculture article, where algae is purposefully grown in shallow vats so as to reduce it to fuel or fertilizer.

Aquaponics (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aquaponics), however, was what I was thinking of, and it entails using fish and plants floating on rafts above them in a symbiotic relationship to work properly.  This was performed by the Aztecs, in what were called Chinampas (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinampa) within the dwarven limits on technology, as opposed to true (water) hydroponics, which was not really done until the 17th century.  They are basically "rafts" that are built into shallow lakes (which dwarves can create artificially), which let the plants to clean the sediments out of the water (as in hydroponics), but instead of manually resupplying the nutrients, the way that hydroponics has to be carefully monitored for proper nutrient balance, you just let the wild fish excrete fertilizer into the water.  The plants clean the water of excrement for the fish to have clean water, and the fish go about excreting more.

I have already mentioned soil salinity in this thread.  Likewise, I have mentioned NPK in water.  Both are in the "Water Management" section.

Similar methods were used in some forms of rice paddy farming, apparently, letting small forms of carp or eels into the rice paddies to help fertilize the water, and hence soil.

I should probably get around to that "Alternative Farming" section soon.

---

Quote from: Interus on February 05, 2011, 01:04:41 am

But it also seems like any nutrients that are brought into the system would stay in it too.  Like, new immigrants, wandering animals, or several goblin sieges.

Yes, this is ultimately not going to be a perfect model of balance.  Dwarves will probably have some excess material to spend upon expanding soils, provided they conserve their materials well.  I can just produce leaks in the system - humanoid operations are just never perfectly efficient, after all.  There are also going to be some additional methods of producing some more fertilizers to throw into the farms, including through mining (which is non-renewable, hence short-term), and with breaking apart stone, including volcanic stone through the use of pest-vulnerable lichens and microorganisms, which can help lead to an overall throttle on the expansion of materials. 

This, and all other matters that really come down to "making the numbers look right" are really what should be left for the last steps of the construction of the system.  What you really need is to have the model constructed in theory before you can worry about making the constants fit the equation.

Quote from: Interus on February 05, 2011, 01:04:41 am

Secondly, as a minor point, and I'm almost completely certain that it's been mentioned, the spoiler rocks could probably function as a magic source.

I'm not sure whether or not that would be a good idea off the top of my head.  On the one hand, it does give a good reason to why some areas of the game may have more magical flora and fauna, and it would punish players with less useful caverns if they plundered the cotton candy stalls of all their gooey goodness.  On the other hand, I'm not sure I want to punish the players for that, necessarily.  There's already a punishment for eating too much of the cotton candy.  Plus, it's what's under the big top that holds the serious magical sources.  Colonizing the circus could be a really fun place if we have actual circus-raised crops, much less if we could do the "Total Victory Condition" of altering the circus to Dwarftopia, where every eerie corner turns into an overfull ocean of fermented ambrosia after shooing off the last of the clowns.

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Violate the Earth!
Post by: Silverionmox on February 05, 2011, 12:34:01 pm

A possible way to simplify the soil shenanigans is to just tag the different soil types and the different plant species. Loamy sand, for example, would get the [SAND] and [LOAM] tags; any plant with the [SAND] or [LOAM] tag could grow there. New player-created soils can get the same tags, that way they'll fit right in with the others. In addition, new tags can be defined, for example [MARSH], that can be added to existing soils and plants as well. This reduces complexity (for example, loamy sand and sandy loam would be functionally identical), but I don't think that takes away gameplay possibilities. For what it's worth, I've never heard about any historical people bothering to manipulate the grain size of the soil for plants except for potted plants and terrariums.

Since the humus is the biologically active part of the soil*, I suggest that it can only exist as a floor. Mixing it in with other soil would make it disappear or turn into that soil. It would be generated automatically on a soil square or replace a soil floor within a season if weather conditions allow and plants are present in the vicinity. I think it should be a requirement to grow plants.

*(rather than technically different, its existence/functionality depends on the context; therefore transporting it to an underground cave would be pointless, since vastly different organisms are needed there)

As a reminder, note that any industrial center receives food from the outside. I agree that tilling the fields shouldn't be the players burden, but Toady has been putting peasant villages with large fields in the game. Now they only need to bring their surplus to your fortress, willing or otherwise ;).

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Violate the Earth!
Post by: NW_Kohaku on February 05, 2011, 02:56:13 pm

No, I think a variable that vaguely represents both drainage and CEC should exist, and simply be a linear scale variable just like most of the others.  It's not ideal and perfectly realistic, but we have to abstract some things. 

It will basically mean that plants that like sandy soil with plenty of drainage (like, say, grapes) will just like a lower-CEC type of soil, and that's that.

I guess the scale of this CEC-D scale would like this (source on CEC values (http://soils.tfrec.wsu.edu/webnutritiongood/soilprops/04CEC.htm):

• 0-5: Gravel or rock.  Only things like lichen grow here.
• 5-10: (standard) Sand.  Few things grow here, and they probably have very extensive root structures, or are basic, tough grasses.
• 10-15: Loam. Generally average soil, good for plenty of crops once you build some humus.
• 15-25: Silty loam or silt.  Fine soil, with plenty of CEC.
• 25-50: Non-Kaolinite Clay.  Very fine soil, which can be rich in CEC-dependant nutrients.  Has drainage problems, so some plants can't tolerate it.
• 50+: (Humus), peat and, basically, swamps.  Soil that has serious drainage problems.  Most plants would have problems with this soil.  Technically, humus isn't a soil type in these game terms, since there's too little of it.

This is obviously only going up to around 50 - the scale can be expanded or contracted as necessary.  I wouldn't contract it to the point where sand is only 1 point different from loam, however.

All the other soil types would just fit somewhere into that scale, so black sand might be 20 on that scale, like a silt.   

Other than that, we might develop a "humus depth" variable, although it's debatable whether that's really necessary.  In fact, I almost would rather just have a humus depth meter than the "CEC-D" combined CEC and Drainage stat, since that relates to how long the player has been caring for the soil, and purposefully spending time building it up and not letting it get drained away, as opposed to what the soil was like when the player found it.

(And yes, Silverionmox, I'm thinking of soil as a "floor covering" instead of as a tile below where the crops grow.)

Also, on that note, I'm not sure many fortresses are "industrial centers".  A typical fortress probably only has 3-5 people in its "steel industry".  It's just that up to now, that was enough to buy entire caravans.  Those rural podunks that ship food in can have more population than a fortress does. 

I think trading for (or stealing) food is all well and good for players who want to go that route.  With the Caravan, Army, and Kingdom arcs, you'll be able to just send out expeditions to give you the things you lack.  I do think, however, that some people enjoy this kind of depth of play, and would love to build a working fishery or a chinampas or a terraced mountainside covered in rice paddies or have a pasture with sheep to graze and then let their herd of Giant Lions feed upon the sheep so you have a Giant Lion ranch.  Making these entertaining gameplay systems makes them worthwile to pursue, even if you don't really need to pursue them, strictly speaking. 

If you can have 50 cows, 50 horses, 50 of whatever else in your fort just because you bought a mating pair and shoved them in a pit for all eternity, then they're not fun or compelling, they're just stuff that's there.  If you have to work for your cows, make sure they aren't overgrazing or getting diseases, then having a large number of cows can make your fortress different from other fortresses, and be a part of the fun of the game.  At the same time, you don't have to raise cows if you don't want to.

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Violate the Earth!
Post by: Silverionmox on February 05, 2011, 07:22:56 pm

I was strictly speaking about soil granularity; even with tags there should still be a value for moisture absorption capacity indeed. Peat for example can soak up a lot of water, to the point where the landscape noticeably sinks when drainage ditches are dug and the water flows away. It's probably not worth the payoff to implement that specific effect though. The reason why I suggested tags is that it seems unlikely that soil types would play a role beyond the general classification, plant type distribution etc. In addition, we also need drainage values for other rocks and materials than soil, that might not be granular at all. So the question is how much distinction the program needs between the two values. For farming purposes they certainly can be combined.

As for the food imports, those are good for players that would rather be as little as possible involved with farming (but would rather have a military to protect villages, for example). If food imports are a viable option, then increasing farming complexity doesn't bother anyone. Whether an industrial, political, trading, religious or other center in medieval times, food went from their surroundings to there. In well-developed regions, taxes, tithes etc. amounted to 50%. Taxes in kind were typically delivered as bushels of grain to a warehouse in the city or near the cloister.

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Violate the Earth!
Post by: AngleWyrm on February 05, 2011, 07:43:32 pm

In the current 31.18 version, all of the player's farming needs are settled in the first year. After that, the player occasionally sets fields to fallow/planting as the food storage accumulates, and may also produce fertilizer for the fields, which can be set to auto-fertilize.

What additional actions will a player engage in, or consider with this more advanced farming model?

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Violate the Earth!
Post by: NW_Kohaku on February 05, 2011, 07:56:00 pm

Quote from: AngleWyrm on February 05, 2011, 07:43:32 pm

In the current 31.18 version, all of the player's farming needs are settled in the first year. After that, the player occasionally sets fields to fallow/planting as the food storage accumulates, and may also produce fertilizer for the fields, which can be set to auto-fertilize.

What additional actions will a player engage in, or consider with this more advanced farming model?

I kind of wrote this whole thread answering that.  Granted, there are some sections yet to be written, but generally speaking, this is all about things the player will do.  Can I answer with D. All the Above?  Because that question has a rather long answer.

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Violate the Earth!
Post by: monk12 on February 05, 2011, 08:02:14 pm

Quote from: AngleWyrm on February 05, 2011, 07:43:32 pm

In the current 31.18 version, all of the player's farming needs are settled in the first year. After that, the player occasionally sets fields to fallow/planting as the food storage accumulates, and may also produce fertilizer for the fields, which can be set to auto-fertilize.

What additional actions will a player engage in, or consider with this more advanced farming model?

Second post, first section is what you're looking for, methinks.

Back to reading....

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Violate the Earth!
Post by: NW_Kohaku on February 05, 2011, 08:11:51 pm

I need to update that section, too...

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Violate the Earth!
Post by: sockless on February 05, 2011, 08:21:21 pm

We must remember that DF is not a medieval simulator and is actually a fantasy world simulator. Hydroponics in substrates is very much hydroponics, since the gravel itself has little/no effect nutrient wise, and the water carries the nutrients instead. Hydroponics in gravel would be perfectly feasible, since we have other things that were never done in medieval times, like complex traps and coke making, neither of which were done in medieval times, coking was first done in Europe in the 17th century, which was also when hydroponics was first done in 'modern' Europe.

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Violate the Earth!
Post by: NW_Kohaku on February 05, 2011, 08:34:01 pm

Well, if a 0 CEC-D value soil type is "gravel", then you could certainly farm that gravel if you found the right kind of plant for that.  It's just not a special "hydroponics" form of farming, it's just regular farming on gravel by the way this system handles it.

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Violate the Earth!
Post by: sockless on February 05, 2011, 08:49:01 pm

Hmm, that would be a good way to implement it, but with 0, it might not work, as the nutrients would dissipate as soon as they appear, so maybe a value of 1. Technically, that's not really CED, which is more about chemistry and the ions bonding, but it's a fine term to use. The thing though is that I was thinking of having water run through the gravel, so you'd like crush up some rock and throw it into a channel, which you'd then run water through.

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Violate the Earth!
Post by: Interus on February 06, 2011, 01:02:22 am

Quote

Yes, this is ultimately not going to be a perfect model of balance.  Dwarves will probably have some excess material to spend upon expanding soils, provided they conserve their materials well.  I can just produce leaks in the system - humanoid operations are just never perfectly efficient, after all.  There are also going to be some additional methods of producing some more fertilizers to throw into the farms, including through mining (which is non-renewable, hence short-term), and with breaking apart stone, including volcanic stone through the use of pest-vulnerable lichens and microorganisms, which can help lead to an overall throttle on the expansion of materials.

I actually realized there's already a built in way of simply taking nutrients out of the system.  Or there was.  I don't know if dwarves are still unhappy about a friend being left to decay outside if they're given a memorial instead of a coffin.  But if the body is buried in a coffin instead of left out to rot, then any nutrients in the body are permanently secluded from the soil and the rest of the system.  So while dwarves will still return much of what they use, they won't add to it simply by being there, and they'll probably take a little out at a time as they die, though it wouldn't really be noticable, since whatever nutrients they had in their bodies weren't part of the soil yet anyway.

I still don't know about sieges, but you did say something about trying to balance this with people who really enjoy the military aspect so they don't have to worry about it as much, and a way to utilize enemy bodies as fertilizer might not be such a bad thing.


I didn't think about the idea that mining the spoiler rocks would mean that you also make the area less magical.  I was assuming that they'd be present, and somehow forgot that at least one of them could be dramatically impacted by the player, which would make growth rather difficult.  I just liked the idea of increasingly bizarre plant life as you got close to them.  Perhaps, and I'm not sure about this, a combination of plants that produce magic, which affects quite a bit of the surrounding area, and may linger after the plant dies, and plants that absorb the magic.  In the wild, both would be found growing near each other.

Actually, that's probably not a great idea, because unless the plants in the wild somehow auto-rotate instead, then it pretty much allows you to just grow both things in fields right next to each other and never worry about rotation from magic, though you would still have to deal with at least some of the other nutrients.  I believe you or somebody mentioned wandering creatures that produce magic-nutrients and that's probably a better way.  Then you'd probably have to have some tame ones and something like the fallow feeding field at times for them to mana-fertilize.

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Violate the Earth!
Post by: NW_Kohaku on February 06, 2011, 01:26:39 am

Quote from: Interus on February 06, 2011, 01:02:22 am

I actually realized there's already a built in way of simply taking nutrients out of the system.  Or there was.  I don't know if dwarves are still unhappy about a friend being left to decay outside if they're given a memorial instead of a coffin.  But if the body is buried in a coffin instead of left out to rot, then any nutrients in the body are permanently secluded from the soil and the rest of the system.  So while dwarves will still return much of what they use, they won't add to it simply by being there, and they'll probably take a little out at a time as they die, though it wouldn't really be noticable, since whatever nutrients they had in their bodies weren't part of the soil yet anyway.

Ah, yes.  This is why I never wanted to be buried when I died, even as a little child.  I just thought the idea that you would set land aside for dead people forever was just wasteful and stupid.

It kind of carries over to playing DF, I never liked burial by coffin.  I prefer "dwarfy funerals" by magma-flooding a burial chamber and casting it in obsidian, sending the body back to Armok/The Stone.

Quote from: Interus on February 06, 2011, 01:02:22 am

last two paragraphs of the post

I went and made a spin-off thread (http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=76578.0) just for this topic, although it's kind of loosely spun only vaguely in the direction of the topic.  Since that topic has less of a "price for entry" in terms of front-loaded reading, I figure it will get more traffic in general, and could stimulate more conversation in the community.  I'd like to try to get a general community conversation going on what things we want magical and what the magical effects should be, so posting further thoughts on this topic in that thread would be appreciated.

I'd also like to make caverns have an "underground biome", though, that depends on the magic fields present in the area, and cotton candy is present in EVERY cavern's lower levels, so it would make for an omnipresent magic field.

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Violate the Earth!
Post by: therahedwig on February 06, 2011, 06:05:54 pm

Quote from: NW_Kohaku on February 06, 2011, 01:26:39 am

Quote from: Interus on February 06, 2011, 01:02:22 am

I actually realized there's already a built in way of simply taking nutrients out of the system.  Or there was.  I don't know if dwarves are still unhappy about a friend being left to decay outside if they're given a memorial instead of a coffin.  But if the body is buried in a coffin instead of left out to rot, then any nutrients in the body are permanently secluded from the soil and the rest of the system.  So while dwarves will still return much of what they use, they won't add to it simply by being there, and they'll probably take a little out at a time as they die, though it wouldn't really be noticable, since whatever nutrients they had in their bodies weren't part of the soil yet anyway.

Ah, yes.  This is why I never wanted to be buried when I died, even as a little child.  I just thought the idea that you would set land aside for dead people forever was just wasteful and stupid.

It kind of carries over to playing DF, I never liked burial by coffin.  I prefer "dwarfy funerals" by magma-flooding a burial chamber and casting it in obsidian, sending the body back to Armok/The Stone.

Uh... guys? Coffins and the people inside them aren't eaten by any worms, but they do decompose, and the nutrients do go back into the earth and the groundwater('cept when you have those cheap-ass plastic-coffins, they don't decompose >_>). Otherwise the whole point of burying, at least for christians, gets lost.(The idea being that you return your body to the earth, and back into gods ownership, from whom you borrowed it)

The reason why people don't build over graveyards besides headstones, is partially so they can mourn and partially because people think it's creepy.(The headstone is mostly so heavy so your dearly beloved ones stay dead)

Furthermore, graveyards do get cleaned up(like when the family doesn't pay for the plot anymore, then the bones get stored up in a more archival fashion) except when they're monumental graveyards. /Raised by an art-historian.

The problem is STONE coffins in STONE tombs.

There's a Indian religious group that solve this problem by having the carion birds feed on their dead. They build this giantic tower, on top go the bodies, and from under they get the clean picked bones which then get burned.

/Mildly offtopic. ?

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Violate the Earth!
Post by: NW_Kohaku on February 06, 2011, 06:27:08 pm

Umm... not really.

Modern caskets are made of metal, designed to be pretty much hermetically sealed, put in a concrete vault, and the bodies are pumped full of embalming fluids.  None of that sounds particularly like the point is to "return to the soil".  You have to specifically ask for and pay for a "green burial" that involves the sort of "return to the soil" type of stuff you're talking about.

Even early Christians would try to put their dead in crypts, where they would presumably remain until the Final Judgement.  Even though it's not part of Christian or even Jewish dogma that you need to preserve the body for ressurection, they still tried to do it, perhaps because of Egyptian influence on the Jews, and Jewish influence on Christianity, which forbade cremation.

It's just that all of those get full, eventually, so they make more room by throwing out the dead nobody thinks anyone will miss so they can sell those plots again.

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Violate the Earth!
Post by: JmzLost on February 07, 2011, 03:07:46 am

Good job with the cohesive improvements, it's much easier to understand why a particular change should be made when it appears as part of a larger whole.  I, too, like the way the changes would make a deeper game without unduly penalizing those who choose not to invest their time in learning the nuances of farming.

Something I haven't seen mentioned is init options.  In the Dwarf Talk referenced earlier, Toady mentioned the ability to change the level of magic from just artifacts/FBs to flying dwarfs on magic carpets with guns shooting fire.  A similar idea could also work for farming, where the "simple farming" option would only check for soil, and not track the condition of the soil.  A "complex farming" option would enable the full suite of nutrients, soil erosion, pests and counter-pests and counter-counter-pests, etc.  This would allow the people who don't want to mess with farming to save on FPS (minor) and memory (major), much the same as we can turn off temperature, weather, and the economy now. 

A bit early to talk about init options I know, but thinking in terms of simple, medium, and complex could offer a way to split the farming improvements into groups that could be implemented over multiple releases, allowing some of it to be coded now*, more later, and the most complex aspects even later still. 
* "now" meaning "whenever Toady finds time to implement this, if he chooses to go in this direction"

Again, good job, and thank you for presenting this in a unified manner.

JMZ

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Violate the Earth!
Post by: NW_Kohaku on February 07, 2011, 03:17:23 am

I guess that if there were to be an init option (aside from just using the raws to make dwarves stop eating and drinking), then it would take out the whole system, and just make crops grow when you throw seeds at dirt... which is what we have now. 

But the thing is that init options are really only used when things are, generally speaking, badly implimented and something that can be removed from the game (old economy), or something that would be highly controversial (graphics).  There's no init option to turn the military off.  You just don't use the military, and rely upon engineering if you don't want to use it.  If you don't want to farm, then just try to find ways around needing to farm.

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Violate the Earth!
Post by: ungulateman on February 07, 2011, 03:42:34 am

[INVADERS:NO]

There's your option to turn the military off. ;)

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Violate the Earth!
Post by: zwei on February 07, 2011, 05:24:25 am

In same vein, you can turn of farming by modding a bit and removing need to eat/drink from dwarves...

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Violate the Earth!
Post by: NW_Kohaku on February 07, 2011, 11:51:30 am

Turning off invaders doesn't turn off what's in the caverns, as far as I know, but then, I've never actually turned it off, so I might be wrong on it.  Regardless, it doesn't turn the combat system off any more than removing dwarves' need to eat removes the farming system.  It just significantly reduces the application of it.  It's not like the Temperature init option, which shuts the whole system off so that magma is just really thick water.

Which brings me back to why, honestly, I don't really like the notion of an init option - it means the game will need two systems to handle the same one function.  I'd rather work it into the game that players can focus on aspects of the game that they want to focus upon and gloss over the parts they'd rather not than to have a giant wall of knobs that they manually set to turn one thing into regular mode, and another thing into dumbed-down no functionality mode.

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Violate the Earth!
Post by: Cespinarve on February 07, 2011, 11:54:17 am

Well, I read your first two posts twice, and skimmed the others- I was more interested in your ideas rather than the specifics of implementation. A quite brilliant post, I really hope Tarn takes the time to absorb the implications. I especially liked your Class thread, I read that in its entirety, and I really hope for that to be in the works. Since you already debated the lack of FPS hits by this, I would like to add my dislike of a research tech tree, as it seems to belong to a different genre of game, and doesn't fit with DF to moi. The Farm Overseer presents a problem of skills- from the looks of things, you really don't want an unskilled Overseer being in charge, so either his skill-set should be Planting, so that his direct experience leads to better job performance, or else it ties into the larger desire of being able to request specific skilled migrants from the liaison. Otherwise, waiting on a skilled Overseer immigrant could prove fatal, and it would be one more complexity to juggle when picking starting skills.

As to the military/invader discussion, I always turn off invaders since .31 military, because I find the interface to be very, very bad (i.e. finding what dwarves you want for the squad, and having every dwarf show up on each squad page and so on). I have not noticed anything come up from the caverns, but then, i tend to avoid caverns.

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Violate the Earth!
Post by: therahedwig on February 07, 2011, 12:16:24 pm

Quote from: NW_Kohaku on February 06, 2011, 06:27:08 pm

Umm... not really.

Modern caskets are made of metal, designed to be pretty much hermetically sealed, put in a concrete vault, and the bodies are pumped full of embalming fluids.  None of that sounds particularly like the point is to "return to the soil".  You have to specifically ask for and pay for a "green burial" that involves the sort of "return to the soil" type of stuff you're talking about.

Even early Christians would try to put their dead in crypts, where they would presumably remain until the Final Judgement.  Even though it's not part of Christian or even Jewish dogma that you need to preserve the body for ressurection, they still tried to do it, perhaps because of Egyptian influence on the Jews, and Jewish influence on Christianity, which forbade cremation.

It's just that all of those get full, eventually, so they make more room by throwing out the dead nobody thinks anyone will miss so they can sell those plots again.

That's weird, I've heard archeologists claim pretty much the opposite, and all coffins I've ever seen were made out of wood.

Regional differences again I suposse?

.... Yeah, looking into it it is a regional thing. In my own country(the netherlands) it was apparantly forbidden to balm bodies till about two years ago. And only in few countries they make coffins from metal.

My point is, what you speak of is rather modern is it not?(And probly cheaper when it comes to the coffins at the least...) so in a medieval setting they would have their bodies return to the earth.

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Violate the Earth!
Post by: NW_Kohaku on February 07, 2011, 12:55:53 pm

Quote from: Cespinarve on February 07, 2011, 11:54:17 am

Well, I read your first two posts twice, and skimmed the others- I was more interested in your ideas rather than the specifics of implementation. A quite brilliant post, I really hope Tarn takes the time to absorb the implications. Since you already debated the lack of FPS hits by this, I would like to add my dislike of a research tech tree, as it seems to belong to a different genre of game, and doesn't fit with DF to moi.

What I most fear about this is that Toady will have a difference of game design philosophy, and that I'll never really get to know it through anything other than Toady simply not ever commenting on or implimenting anything like this years down the road.

Toady commented somewhere that he never really plays long-term forts anymore, and I think it can really start showing in the way that the game plays right now.  Not only is there basically no late-game content, but the game has a serious amount of entropy which is only being partially addressed.  Especially 40d, where the world was basically a static collection of individuals who just sat around waiting to be killed, with nothing you could do but kill them, but even now, reading some of the devlog stuff, it's just, "Oh, well, the lord of this castle was eaten by a crocodile, and nobody's going to replace him, so I'll just move on to the next castle, and hope the queen there doesn't get eaten by a badger."

You can even see it in the Threetoe stories how much entropic decay seems to dominate the theme - characters from outside sources are introduced, then weeded out one by one until maybe a couple characters remain at the end of each story.  Every conversation seems to involve snarling, threats of death, or actual death.  Anything approaching diplomacy or teaching through methods other than someone dying are uncommon.  It's just a set of opposing forces that manage to survive the elimination process to remain the lone standing actors.

It's the way that the games play out - you build a custom world, filled with various peoples from nowhere, and gradually eliminate them until there's nothing but a barren void, and you have to generate a new world to play again, because you're all out of challenges since everyone's dead.

In order to make this a better game, it really needs to learn to be more sustainable, where players can enjoy coming back to "their world" over and over again, and I'm afraid it might not be something Toady considers very important.

To a certain extent, this is my trying to divine the mind of Toady from the piddly tea leaves left behind in the very few responses I've seen, so I can't really know for sure, but it's also hard to rule out the suspiscion.  It's also extremely frustrating because there are so few means of trying to get information about what he thinks on these sorts of things, and in places like Future of the Fortress, he'll often just ignore the bulk of my questions entirely.  How the Hell am I supposed to make a compelling argument to appeal to a total black box?!  How am I supposed to refine my suggestions when I can't tell if he disagrees with something or not, and if so, on what grounds he is uncomfortable with it?

Maybe he'll just think, "Oh, nobody wants to farm. If they want to farm, they should just play Harvest Moon." the way that some of the people from the previous thread responded.  Maybe he likes NPK just for the gritty realism of it, but has no intention of making an automated system for handling it, and rather enjoys the forced micromanagement.  I have no way of knowing.

---

Quote from: therahedwig on February 07, 2011, 12:16:24 pm

.... Yeah, looking into it it is a regional thing. In my own country(the netherlands) it was apparantly forbidden to balm bodies till about two years ago. And only in few countries they make coffins from metal.

My point is, what you speak of is rather modern is it not?(And probly cheaper when it comes to the coffins at the least...) so in a medieval setting they would have their bodies return to the earth.

Well, if this is a regional sensibility, then I don't think Toady is Dutch.  Dwarves definitely seem to have the Egyptian thing going on.  They demand elaborate tombs if they can, get sealed in stone coffins for all eternity without returning to any sort of soil, and they get buried with all their personal belongings, as well, instead of passing them on to their next of kin.  Death basically means everything about them and that they own gets sucked completely out of the cycle of life for all eternity, with no returning to any sort of cycle of life and death, and a potential for an ever-increasing number of ghosts that will glut the land.

Again, it's a sort of sign of a philosophy of gaming entropy, where dead things will continue to take up more and more space as time goes on.

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Violate the Earth!
Post by: AngleWyrm on February 07, 2011, 01:45:37 pm

Quote from: NW_Kohaku on February 07, 2011, 03:17:23 am

But the thing is that init options are really only used when things are, generally speaking, badly implimented and something that can be removed from the game (old economy), or something that would be highly controversial (graphics).

The ability to turn off a feature serves an important function. It causes the designer of the feature to consider that if it is not fun, but instead some sort of slog or drudgery, then people will simply turn it off.

It also lets the players customize their experience, focusing on what they enjoy.

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Violate the Earth!
Post by: NW_Kohaku on February 07, 2011, 01:56:55 pm

If the designer thinks that he is putting something in the game that nobody will find fun, then he probably would be better off trying to come up with a system that people would find fun than generating a feature that nobody wants to use.

I am doing what I can to take all criticisms of this system into account to reformat the suggestion to suit every form of playstyle as best as I am able.  If there is something you specifically do not find fun or interesting, then say why.  If you can say why you enjoy one aspect of a game or are leary of or dislike some other aspect of a game, I can try to work around those constraints, and offer as much of the things people like as I can while offering mitigations of or reworking the portions that people don't like.  Tech trees, for example, obviously get plenty of flak, and I've yet to really discuss that section, but I'll obviously have to refine the gameplay so that it avoids the problems tech trees encounter.

Simply saying "why bother having food at all?" doesn't do much to help, however, and saying that you only enjoy the military aspects of the game, and consider any attention to infrastructure or industry make me wonder (to turn the "Harvest Moon" argument around) if you wouldn't rather be playing Call of Duty or Starcraft right now, instead.

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Violate the Earth!
Post by: lordcooper on February 07, 2011, 02:06:48 pm

I'm sorry, that was the purest definition of TL;DR I have ever come across.

Any chance of a brief summary?

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Violate the Earth!
Post by: NW_Kohaku on February 07, 2011, 03:18:36 pm

Quote from: lordcooper on February 07, 2011, 02:06:48 pm

I'm sorry, that was the purest definition of TL;DR I have ever come across.

Any chance of a brief summary?

Actually, I hate to break it to you, but that kind of was the summary I made to get it easier to understand the last thread that ran completely wild.

I guess I could go into super-generalization mode, which wouldn't be making any of the arguments for why these things would be good for the game, although I'm fairly sure that proposing radical alterations to game functions that people may not see as being broken until I explain why they are broken will only end up with instant, emphatic rejection of the idea on the face of things. Especially since that's exactly why the last thread devolved into such a shouting match that it required this summary in the first place.

But hey, I guess I could give it one more shot, against my better judgement...

• The purpose of this thread is to create a degree of complexity and difficulty in farming that the current idea of farming (throwing seeds at mud) does not produce.
• The goal is to make farming initially simple, yet gradually more complex the larger your farms become, the more food you try to grow, the more you try to alter your environment, and the more you try to grow non-food products, as well.  The purpose being to reverse the current trend of setting up one farm plot once (which is unfortunately complex and confusing to do for new people currently), and forever after ignoring farming, meaning the game's farming gets very simple after an initial burst of complexity.
• To do this, various models are simulated, including soil fertility, water management, diseases for crops, and land pollution.
• To ensure this isn't a massive wad of incomprehensible gibberish, especially to starting players, much of this process has automation, and I am working on trying to reduce the interface down to become as simple and intuitive as possible.
• It is a goal to use automation to ensure that players do not have to worry about micromanagement of soil factors, but instead worry about how much they want to develop their farms versus how much effort it would take to make their farms expand.
• This should also make plants in general far more detailed, and allow for crops to be more than just food that takes X days to grow, but detailed and different from one another, the way that the jump to 31.xx from 40d vastly expanded the details of animals.

I hope that was both concise enough and reasoned enough to answer your question, because I don't know how to boil it down any further than that without my argument losing all meaning. 

Please comment on what I could potentially expand upon or strip down in that summarized summary to make it clearer, so that I can just use that as a copy-paste response to people who voice similar concerns.

While I can fully understand the idea that what I have written is tl;dr, (I know there are some things I leave open in tabs 'to read' for a long time, myself) I also don't really want to make a habit of having to re-write out different ways to try to explain the same subject because having to explain the same thing over and over again really starts to sap all my will to do this. If I write all this text, and people can't be bothered to read any of it before they start to argue against it, its an incredibly exasperating experience, and why I stopped going to the Bay12 forums for about three months after the last thread.

While I'm not accusing you of doing anything wrong in just asking for a summary, for the sake of my sanity, I would ask you please help me make a better summary so I don't have to keep doing it for everyone who asks, because there are a lot of people who ask.  I would prefer to have some sort of copy-paste response I can give them.

I am doing what I can to take all criticisms of this system into account to reformat the suggestion to suit every form of playstyle as best as I am able.  If there is something you specifically do not find fun or interesting, then say why.  If you can say why you enjoy one aspect of a game or are leary of or dislike some other aspect of a game, I can try to work around those constraints, and offer as much of the things people like as I can while offering mitigations of or reworking the portions that people don't like.  Tech trees, for example, obviously get plenty of flak, and I've yet to really discuss that section, but I'll obviously have to refine the gameplay so that it avoids the problems tech trees encounter.

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Violate the Earth!
Post by: Cespinarve on February 07, 2011, 03:59:09 pm

Well, now you've just depressed the crap out of me.

I feel the need to to bribe Toady to get him to read that post about entropic fort death, just to find out his thoughts. I totally agree, we need later content! ARGH, NOW I'M WAY TOO DEPRESSED

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Violate the Earth!
Post by: lordcooper on February 07, 2011, 04:12:07 pm

Thanks for the summary of the summary, you've piqued my interest enough to read through the OP (when I'm a little more awake ;))

Can't really help out with a copy-paste summary until I've fully read the OP, but I'll let you know tomorrow if I have any advice :)

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Violate the Earth!
Post by: NW_Kohaku on February 07, 2011, 04:26:33 pm

Quote from: Cespinarve on February 07, 2011, 03:59:09 pm

Well, now you've just depressed the crap out of me.

I feel the need to to bribe Toady to get him to read that post about entropic fort death, just to find out his thoughts. I totally agree, we need later content! ARGH, NOW I'M WAY TOO DEPRESSED

*ahem* 

"I AM IN DESPAIR!  THE CONCEPT OF GAMEPLAY ENTROPY HAS LEFT ME IN DESPAIR!" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sayonara,_Zetsubou-Sensei)

I wouldn't be too hard on him, though.  I obviously just talked about how frustrating it is to have to reiterate long, complex concepts to people repeatedly, and I know that it has to be a million times worse for Toady. 

That said, I think an "FAQ" section or occasional rewrite works wonders.  He at least tried that by reducing the hideously incomprehensible gibberish of the old devpage into the new one, which is more like a logical checklist than a pile composed of every thought he had on the game.  Perhaps he can try to do some similar organization on other topics.

Quote from: lordcooper on February 07, 2011, 04:12:07 pm

Thanks for the summary of the summary, you've piqued my interest enough to read through the OP (when I'm a little more awake ;))

Can't really help out with a copy-paste summary until I've fully read the OP, but I'll let you know tomorrow if I have any advice :)

Actually, I think I should just make the last of my "reserved" posts become the "Teal; deer" post, that just has a summarized summary for people who aren't willing to dive headfirst into the whole argument.  Then I'll just quote or link that.  That might be the most effective means of heading off problems.

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Violate the Earth!
Post by: Cespinarve on February 07, 2011, 05:15:34 pm

""I AM IN DESPAIR!  THE CONCEPT OF GAMEPLAY ENTROPY HAS LEFT ME IN DESPAIR!"

To be precise, the concept that Toady will let everything but early-game slide off his radar is what keeps me in despair. Tarn, it is time to add features that take time to test!

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Violate the Earth!
Post by: monk12 on February 07, 2011, 05:50:30 pm

From all indications, the reason that there is a dearth of late-game content in DF right now is because Toady is putting a lot of effort into making early game content fun and interesting, and the reason he is doing THAT is because a lot of the late-game content is going to be directly derived from the kinds of things happening in the early-mid game.

I will admit, however, that right now the game has a very gritty dark "decay of the great empires" thing going on. Especially in adventure mode, where the professional soldiers all want to join you because you are likely to lead them to death, and MAYBE a side of glory. I'm hoping worldgen options for flavor make it in one day, but that day is far, far off.

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Violate the Earth!
Post by: AngleWyrm on February 07, 2011, 05:54:44 pm

Quote from: NW_Kohaku on February 07, 2011, 03:18:36 pm

• To ensure this isn't a massive wad of incomprehensible gibberish, especially to starting players, much of this process has automation, and I am working on trying to reduce the interface down to become as simple and intuitive as possible.
• It is a goal to use automation to ensure that players do not have to worry about micromanagement of soil factors, but instead worry about how much they want to develop their farms versus how much effort it would take to make their farms expand.

A mechanic that might be interesting is to use amount of labor assigned as part of the definition of "how much effort it would take". Currently a 5x5 plot can be planted & harvested by two farmers, who keep up on the task. One farmer falls behind, and three gains very little in keeping the plot planted. If farmers had an additional job called Soil Maintenance that they could perform, then more farmers could be gainfully employed in the fields.

Soil Maintenance jobs could be generated whenever the soil conditions fall out of line with the crop that is planted in that soil. Then a dwarf would go add a bucket of water, or potash, or whatever kind of fertilizer moves the variables in the right direction. The ideal use of land then has a higher farmer count.

In the same way, farmers could get an additional job of Crop Maintenance, where they go to the field and check for vermin, and perform anti-vermin extermination efforts. This again adds to the labor and thus the number of farmers that make up the farming community within a fort.

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Violate the Earth!
Post by: NW_Kohaku on February 07, 2011, 06:37:11 pm

AngleWyrm, you DO realize those are all things that have already been discussed, right?  You were in those conversations in the last thread.  You've been posting in this thread. Several of those things are things that I've already put into the suggestion, which I brought up in response to questions you asked, and which you are now suggesting back to me.

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Violate the Earth!
Post by: AngleWyrm on February 07, 2011, 07:24:31 pm

It seems to me that clarity comes from bouncing an idea back and forth and refining it. Would you only allow yourself one go at this advanced farming idea, or have you revisited and improved upon it over time?

I'm only trying to make this suggestion better, the best way I know how.

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Violate the Earth!
Post by: Solace on February 07, 2011, 07:33:59 pm

As an alternate, or possibly expansion I guess, to keeping track of soil fertility, there could be bigger uses and tradeoffs for /what/ you're farming? Say, when you just start out, you have an aboveground farm, because the soil is right there, and it's probably even self-watering. 'course, your farmer dwarves are largely helpless, so you put a wall around it as quickly as possible. But, keep making that farm bigger and bigger... one ladder-wielding enemy could torch your entire food production and slower farmers, and it's a bigger and bigger buffet to attract vermin.

So, you hollow out a huge area underground, and also have to invest in some basic watering, maybe just dwarves with buckets to start off. Not as efficient as an automatic system or some kind, but a decent middle ground, work-wise. And of your options, maybe there's, you know, cave-wheat that takes a lot more personal involvement, maybe even some fertilizer to grow in addition to water. Or on the flipside, you could have mushrooms that grow on their own... in a constantly damp environment, and not too efficiently, space-wise. But if you have a lot of time to get a huge cavern set up and constant irrigation, you could have a basic food source that just takes harvesting, cleaning, and protecting from vermin.

Now, maybe you have a bustling fortress city, with nobles, and even the commoners are well payed, which pays tax dividends or whatever. So, all these dwarves are pickier, so even if you have all the food you need, you might be pressured to grow much more demanding food, to keep them all properly happy and paying taxes. Oranges, which only grow outside, require lots of water and fertilizer, and don't take temperature extremes well. Or some medically amazing fungus, which is equally finicky in it's own way. Maybe instead of just growing crops, you need to produce more and more meat, and farming animals for meat takes way more food than just eating the plants directly. Or more simply, underground trees, which need a z-level or two above them to be free too, and maybe a much thicker amount of soil below.

And hey, if there's eventually magic and all, why not super-magic plants, with ridiculous requirements? A golden apple tree that only produces fruit when underground, but surrounded by regular, unpicked apple trees, which require sunlight. Vampire moss, which itself must be fed large amounts of meat.

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Violate the Earth!
Post by: NW_Kohaku on February 07, 2011, 09:46:51 pm

Quote from: Solace on February 07, 2011, 07:33:59 pm

As an alternate, or possibly expansion I guess, to keeping track of soil fertility, there could be bigger uses and tradeoffs for /what/ you're farming?...

Actually, I was sort of torn between writing the "farming alternatives" section and writing the Interface section next, but went with the latter.  Everything that you've described is the sort of choice I would like to include, yes. 

I also would include growing your own planted forests, growing silage to feed ranch animals instead of feeding dwarves themselves (which would require more land, but silage is much easier to grow, using much more marginal soil and less water), the ability to start fisheries, decorative flowers/mushrooms which can raise happiness if planted and maintained as a sort of "park", oxygen- or light-producing subterranean plantlife if we get the air quality or lighting arcs in, alchemical components, and even some oddball uses, like the ability to grow your own "gems" from some sort of hardened plant sap or a crystal-forming mold. 

Even just in comparison between food crops, how much the crop demands of the soil, how much water it requires, how much maintainance it requires, its vulnerability to disease, potentially its ability to be stored/rate of rotting, nutritional value, and commercial value can all make a greater variety of choice.

By increasing the criteria by which plants can be differentiated, a large number of truly different crops can show up with a meaningful choice between them, rather than the "plump helmets with another name" choice we currently have to modding in plants.

---

Quote from: AngleWyrm on February 07, 2011, 07:24:31 pm

It seems to me that clarity comes from bouncing an idea back and forth and refining it. Would you only allow yourself one go at this advanced farming idea, or have you revisited and improved upon it over time?

I'm only trying to make this suggestion better, the best way I know how.

Is that what you were trying to do?  I had to wonder if you weren't really reading the responses or the original posts. 

Quote from: AngleWyrm on February 07, 2011, 05:54:44 pm

Soil Maintenance jobs could be generated whenever the soil conditions fall out of line with the crop that is planted in that soil. Then a dwarf would go add a bucket of water, or potash, or whatever kind of fertilizer moves the variables in the right direction. The ideal use of land then has a higher farmer count.

The part you talked about "soil maintainance jobs automatically being generated" seems especially confusing, because that is the automation of tasks like fertilization that I have been talking about the entire thread, and a good chunk of the previous thread.  I have, in fact, gone out of my way to stress that fact at pretty much every opportunity, and to assure people that they will not need to manually micromanage every field's nutrient levels, that instead, it will be automatically queued. 

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Violate the Earth!
Post by: AngleWyrm on February 07, 2011, 11:29:50 pm

It's not confusing, it is adding clarity to the generalization of automation. I have offered a specific and clear picture of how to do it, rather than just saying that it will be taken care of.

I am more interested in the ability of the system to employ additional farmers, so that the population of the fort has more jobs. Currently a 200-dwarf fortress is not gainfully employed, and I see farming as a way to address this issue. If the crop yields are reduced heavily, then the player may be able to start with just a few farmers, and add a percentage of their incoming immigrants as the need arises. Granted farming is only one piece of a fortresses overall activity, but that piece could be enlarged considerably without negative effect, and may even reduce the propensity for people to kill off their immigrants.

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Violate the Earth!
Post by: Solace on February 07, 2011, 11:42:43 pm

I suppose if you wanted to really simplify it, you could have a soil, fertile/not fertile boolean. Or on a slightly more complicated side, plants could subtract an amount of fertility by growing, different per plant. Fertility could increase by X for every Y time left fallow, or if fertilized. When magic or alchemy get in, there could be ways to add or subtract from the maximum fertility amount, or have it regenerate fertility faster. Before then, different kinds of soil could have their own max fertility, which would also mean some soil limits what you can plant, not just how often. Of course, you'd need a way to move the soil around, if you where doing that...

EDIT: For that matter, I wouldn't mind the ability to move around the "natural" floors. Dig out some diamonds, I get a free diamond floor... if only I had a use for a room way over there.

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Violate the Earth!
Post by: zwei on February 08, 2011, 07:48:56 am

I think early fort focus stems from how game is developed, i would guess that it goes something like this:

New build is made, new pocket world is generated, fort is started to playtest lastest changes. Repeat for any semi-major change.

With this approach, first X minutes of gameplay are going to be quite polished because they are all that is needed to test stuff like pottery industry. There was this bug where dwarves went to sleep and never woke up - when it was introduced to game, no fort lasted long enough to make it aparent there was a bug...

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Violate the Earth!
Post by: NW_Kohaku on February 08, 2011, 04:28:45 pm

Today is "Interface Mockup" day.  It is taking WAY too long to do this crap by spreadsheet.  Anyway, I should have a decent mockup sometime tonight, provided "tonight" includes 3 AM tommorow, as well.

Quote from: zwei on February 08, 2011, 07:48:56 am

I think early fort focus stems from how game is developed, i would guess that it goes something like this:

Yes, that's the sort of thing I am talking about... Same with the bugs in 31.01 with stats rusting but not rising.  Same with the too-fast skill gain and rust and the ability to dig out and build up whole mountains in a season - it's designed from the perspective of someone who never spends more than three game years in a fort.

If we have slower mining, slower smelting, and metal wear and replacement were designed for long-term fortresses, we would see a different system.  Now, it's just "designate the whole mountain and smelt everything".

Quote from: Solace on February 07, 2011, 11:42:43 pm

I suppose if you wanted to really simplify it, you could have a soil, fertile/not fertile boolean. Or on a slightly more complicated side, plants could subtract an amount of fertility by growing, different per plant. Fertility could increase by X for every Y time left fallow, or if fertilized. When magic or alchemy get in, there could be ways to add or subtract from the maximum fertility amount, or have it regenerate fertility faster. Before then, different kinds of soil could have their own max fertility, which would also mean some soil limits what you can plant, not just how often. Of course, you'd need a way to move the soil around, if you where doing that...

EDIT: For that matter, I wouldn't mind the ability to move around the "natural" floors. Dig out some diamonds, I get a free diamond floor... if only I had a use for a room way over there.

Unfortuantely, that's sort of the total opposite direction of where I was going - the objective is to make the game more complex in a way that doesn't overload the player, not to make the game really simple, so that there isn't any differentiation between plants and very obvious choices for the player.

The point of having a simulated ecosystem that is only vaguely within the player's control, as I outlined in the first few posts, is to make a "Simulated Fantasy World" where you aren't necessarily just pushing around lifeless blocks that obey your every whim, but are trying to make it in a complex, interdependant ecosystem that you don't really have absolute control over. 

Simplified systems destroy that sort of dynamic.  Complex systems with an interface designed to simplify and streamline what aspects you can control are what foster that sort of dynamic.  Complex systems are what make DF such a unique game.  Complex systems with an interface that makes it easy to understand and control are what DF should ideally be working towards.

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Violate the Earth!
Post by: penco on February 09, 2011, 09:37:19 am

I read the whole massive original post but not all the replies, so forgive me if this has already been said.

First off, I want to say that I strongly agree with "the problem" as you first stated it, which is that the game is just too darned easy, that the first 2 years are the only mildly challenging part, and that the game quickly becomes stagnant unless the player either jumps to difficulty mods/self-gimps or jumps to a total sandbox-mode gameplay mindset.

A sandbox mode is all fine, but a game that doesn't have any lasting challenge is pretty lame, I hate to say it. If I want to build stuff, I will play with Legos or maybe even Minecraft. What distinguishes DF from Minecraft is that there are forces that oppose your sandbox, and you are challenged to survive. This survival part is currently so brokenly easy that it is stupid.




Having said that, I really like the suggestion in general to make farming more difficult and to make resources more scarce. However, I am not sure if this is the best way to implement those changes mostly for technical reasons.

People report massive FPS spikes because of changes such as stone temperature with magma or constant water flow. I can't help but cringe when I think of my computer trying to chew another enormous set of variables for every square of soil (which is A LOT of squares). The problem is not so much that it will eat up memory. Rather, it will consume too much processor time. The game would constantly have to check a whole set of attributes on every soil tile on the map. That translates into a big slowdown.

Of course, this would not be such a big deal if DF didn't run entirely in a single thread.

One way to reduce the slowdown would be for soil quality, nutrients, etc to be tracked by layer rather than by tile. Since there are only a handful of layers of soil opposed to thousands of tiles, this would put a lot less strain on computers.



The changes you mentioned are awesome mainly because I really like the idea of limiting resources. However, I think that could really be accomplished without dramatically overhauling the soil system. Just make seeds more scarce. If each plant only had a % chance of producing a seed when processed, that would end the whole "infinite agriculture" problem. The % chance of getting a seed could be influenced by dwarven skill, whether the plot was fertilized, or what-have-you. This would be the way to re-implement some of the ideas you mentioned.

Overall, I don't know if your suggestion solves the original problem of the game being too easy. Even if crop yields are reduced greatly, it would still be very easy to thrive. First of all, you could just move your farms every few years to more fertile land. Second, with the huge availability of meats and fish, you really don't need to eat plants at all. Of course, you still need booze, but if you use all your ag resources to grow booze crops, you'd never run short of the stuff.



Compost and mass conservation are interesting ideas. Compost is pretty much win-win. It sucks wasting valuable wood as a fertilizer, and it would be nice to do something with all those corpses. "Potty time" could be implemented reasonably as long as it was combined with a cut to eating and drinking times.



------------------

Here are some suggestions of my own:


1) Slash n Burn

Allow dwarves to set fires above ground just like in adventure mode. This would burn all the flora in an area and then leave fertile soil for farming. This should be required before surface farming can occur. There would have to be some sort of fire containment mechanism like surrounding the plot with stones. After a certain number of seasons, the plot just stops producing (either based on soil nutrient variables or just based on a hard-coded amount of time based on the biome and soil type). It has to be destroyed, and substantial time needs to pass before the ground can be slashed, burned, and farmed again. In between, no plants grow in the space.

The benefit of this is that it requires your farmers to constantly move. It makes you choose between farming and having the option to harvest lumber and natural plants. It rewards players for keeping large amounts of surface open as opposed to walling off a small courtyard and doing farming there. Since crop yields would be finite, players would have to prioritize crops (food vs textile, basically)

Of course, this mechanic would have no place in underground farming, so for it to really make a difference, the above-ground crops should be much more valuable than below-ground ones. Below-ground crops should have lower value and some sort of catch to them that makes them finite, such as your idea of requiring logs for plump helmets. All below-ground crops need to have a catch like that.


2) Rebalanced meat industry

Any change attempting to rebalance farming needs to be accompanied by a rebalance to the meat industry. The only product absolutely unique to the farm industry is booze, since clothing can come from leather/silk and food can come from meat/fish.

First of all, the meat yield of an animal should be based on a logical idea of how much a dwarf consumes. Since a dwarf eats twice per season, one piece of meat should be equal to half a season's worth of food. Therefore, a kitten should produce just a fraction of an edible piece of meat. The butcher's shop and fishery should be reworked to track these fractional meat amounts and then finally give you an edible piece of food after enough meat has accumulated.

So...

-a cow should produce maybe ONE piece of meat
-an elephant should produce 2-3 pieces of meat.

Hide yields should be reworked accordingly based on the size of a dwarf relative to the size of a creature. It should take 5 or so cat hides to produce 1 cat leather. Likewise, a single elephant hide should produce several elephant leathers.

This would make meat and fish MUCH more scarce and, as a result, MUCH more valuable. It makes sense both realistically and economically. I've always thought it dumb that a single elephant can basically feed a fort for a season.


3) See above for suggestions regarding seed scarcity and tracking soil quality layer-wide as opposed to tile-wide.

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Violate the Earth!
Post by: NW_Kohaku on February 09, 2011, 12:07:08 pm

You didn't exactly write a brisk read, yourself, you know  :P

Quote from: penco on February 09, 2011, 09:37:19 am

People report massive FPS spikes because of changes such as stone temperature with magma or constant water flow. I can't help but cringe when I think of my computer trying to chew another enormous set of variables for every square of soil (which is A LOT of squares). The problem is not so much that it will eat up memory. Rather, it will consume too much processor time. The game would constantly have to check a whole set of attributes on every soil tile on the map. That translates into a big slowdown.

A fairly common concern.

Note that temperature slowdown occurs because every tile is calculated for heat.  If you have a 4x4 embark (each embark tile being 48x48 regular tiles) with 200 z-levels, then you have 4 * 48 * 4 * 48 * 200 = 7,372,800 tiles in an embark.  Cycled through every temperature check. 

Now then, the soil system I am proposing makes soil a "floor covering", and in that same area, would be 147,496 tiles to check (and I further proposed conglomerating embark tiles worth of wild soil together at that, which would significantly reduce this number down to about 16 plus however many plots the player makes, which is not altogether dissimilar to what you just said in "tracked by layer", anyway).  These are performed on growdur cycles, which occur every 100 normal frames, further reducing the number of calculations taking place by two orders of magnitude.

Many of these calculations are not terribly complex, at that, and this is thanks in large part to keeping much of the system as an abstracted system outside the sight of the player.  You can fudge around nutrient values between soil tiles near one another if the player never can measure the exact amount of phosphorous that last tuft of grass took from that one tile. 

Quote from: penco on February 09, 2011, 09:37:19 am

The changes you mentioned are awesome mainly because I really like the idea of limiting resources. However, I think that could really be accomplished without dramatically overhauling the soil system. Just make seeds more scarce. If each plant only had a % chance of producing a seed when processed, that would end the whole "infinite agriculture" problem. The % chance of getting a seed could be influenced by dwarven skill, whether the plot was fertilized, or what-have-you. This would be the way to re-implement some of the ideas you mentioned.

Overall, I don't know if your suggestion solves the original problem of the game being too easy. Even if crop yields are reduced greatly, it would still be very easy to thrive. First of all, you could just move your farms every few years to more fertile land. Second, with the huge availability of meats and fish, you really don't need to eat plants at all. Of course, you still need booze, but if you use all your ag resources to grow booze crops, you'd never run short of the stuff.

There is more than just the problem of the game being "too easy", it's also a problem of the game being "too shallow".  DF has complexity, but not very much depth.  I like to compare it to the creatures in 40d - they had plenty of stats on them, but really, all that mattered in a creature's stats was their size.  Right now, there's very little plant diversity because there's only one or two metrics you can really even judge a plant on - the rate at which you get food, and the value of whatever other use you might be able to get out of that plant.  Nobody wants hide root because it's just a silver barb or a dimple cup, but worse.

We can make the game much more deep and involved than it currently is, but it requires that we actually add into the game the metrics by which we can actually differentiate one plant from another.

Just changing seeds, or just changing how many dwarves work the fields doesn't address this problem.  Plants are already easy enough to care for that if you give them only one concern - getting enough seeds to keep planting them - then you're just changing the decision metric to still be only about judging how best to solve one simple math problem - what gives me the best probability of getting seeds? 

I'm going to post this link to Extra Credits' monologue on choice (http://www.escapistmagazine.com/videos/view/extra-credits/2590-Choice-and-Conflict) again, although you probably didn't see it the first time, anyway, so it's all good.  The key to setting up a challenging or difficult choice is that you need to make the player want to further at least two mutually exclusive goals at the same time.  If all your choices are based upon just one metric (having enough food, based entirely upon having enough seeds), then you can't make a player stop and choose, it's just a matter of solving the math problem of "what course of action will get me the most seeds, and hence, secure my food supply?"  There's nothing much in that decision tree that gives a player some sort of conflicting desire to do anything else, except maybe some players' desire to spend as little time thinking about a farming system as is absolutely mandatory. 

In order to set up conflict in the choices, I have involved several ways in which the player's innate desire (get as much valuable stuff as possible) are in conflict with other desires the player has. (The fear of an environmental backlash from overexploitation of the land, long-term degradation of the land versus short-term boosts in productivity, the threat of pests vs. the potential to grow greater numbers of more valuable crops, the choice between different forms of biological resources if trees are put on farms to compete with food crops, as are very tedious to grow but powerful alchemical ingredients when I get around to my next suggestion on alchemy, and of course the simple amount of player time and dwarf labor it takes to design and manage systems of ever-increasing complexity.) 

Do you not believe that these are sufficient conflicting desires?  I am always open to more suggestions on how to set up a conflict of player choice, but at the same time, you need to make sure it actually does this in a way that sets up a conflict of choice, and is not just a way to try to make the game "harder" without really adding to the depth of choice.  If all you have is one calculation to make on what is the best way to get enough seeds to sustain your farm, then once you have made that calculation, and make it every time, then the game is just as "easy" as it was before you made it "harder" - the problem is solved, and there is nothing else to think about.

Quote from: penco on February 09, 2011, 09:37:19 am

Here are some suggestions of my own:

1) Slash n Burn

This is somewhat similar to the way that we were discussing making Plump Helmets grow (by cutting down logs, and letting plump helmets grow on the logs in cool, moist caverns).  The specific idea that burning the tree on the spot as a means of producing potash, however, is a bit new.  I'll try to include that in my fertilizers section when I get to writing it.

Quote from: penco on February 09, 2011, 09:37:19 am

2) Rebalanced meat industry

I have talked extensively about this in several other threads, including the previous thread, and believe that the major solution to this is to let animals produce stupidly large amounts of meat, but to make dwarves eat more (and crops produce more food). 

If cows need to eat grass, and produce less meat than turning that field into a corn field would have produced, then you have essentially eliminated the problem of livestock producing more meat.  To make animals not worthless, those cows could eat grass from more marginal land, and their manure could help in the reclamation of soil fertility.  Herd size would need to be maintained at a level balanced to the fields you are capable of providing for their feeding.

If elephants need to eat a stack of 50 units of plant matter at a time, 250 in a year, then suddenly their 200 units of food when you slaughter them seems much less enticing.

---

Work continues on the Interface section.  This is taking far too long, but some of these decisions are much harder than I would really think they should be, in terms of deciding how to actually give players the buttons to actually push to make the things happen.

I expect this to be my most controversial section, since scheduling is still a bit on the obtuse side, even considering how long I have spent trying to find a way to reduce it down.

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Violate the Earth!
Post by: Solace on February 09, 2011, 02:53:20 pm

Quote from: NW_Kohaku on February 08, 2011, 04:28:45 pm

Unfortuantely, that's sort of the total opposite direction of where I was going - the objective is to make the game more complex in a way that doesn't overload the player, not to make the game really simple, so that there isn't any differentiation between plants and very obvious choices for the player.

The point of having a simulated ecosystem that is only vaguely within the player's control, as I outlined in the first few posts, is to make a "Simulated Fantasy World" where you aren't necessarily just pushing around lifeless blocks that obey your every whim, but are trying to make it in a complex, interdependant ecosystem that you don't really have absolute control over. 

Simplified systems destroy that sort of dynamic.  Complex systems with an interface designed to simplify and streamline what aspects you can control are what foster that sort of dynamic.  Complex systems are what make DF such a unique game.  Complex systems with an interface that makes it easy to understand and control are what DF should ideally be working towards.

Just because it's a simple system doesn't mean you can't have complicated effects or requirements from it. :P

*Say, an easy-to-grow early game plant, needs to be on the surface, and surrounded on all sides by empty space, so it eats up a lot of land. Maybe reduces the fertility of those spaces as well, so it can't be easily shifted one space over every season. You're basically paying in space, and space you have to carefully defend or laboriously clear out.
*A plant that gives a good output of some variety, but attracts a lot of vermin or weeds, or otherwise needs a lot of personal attention. Instead of paying in space, you're paying a lot more in dwarf-hours.
*Weeds in general. Plants do grow on their on in this game, anyway. I've also advocated for reproducing and digging vermin elsewhere. On the positive side, you could intentionally let edible vermin eat plants that are useless to your dwarves, and harvest /them/.
*Something like clovers, which add to fertility, but also aren't too useless themselves, mainly giving a small bit of food to livestock of some sort.
*Plants that give off miasma or magic effects, and therefore need to be blocked off and tended only by those that can handle their unharvested forms. Maybe a plant that gives off undrinkable water, which has to be collected and dealt with somehow.
*Weed-like plants which don't have to have the seeds harvested or be manually planted, but give low yields and therefore need a lot of space and water.
*Trees or such that aren't destroyed by being harvested, but take a lot longer to reach their first harvestable state. They may require areas above or beside them cleared, if not require sunlight itself. Possible varieties include a "honey-root" tree that can only be harvested from below.
*And, well, any other random requirements. Maybe a plant that requires bees or something to pollinate, requires being near to some other sort of plant, or needs a unique or at least rarer fertilizer or type of water. Beer-fruit, or something.

EDIT: Choice examples: Do I prioritize space efficiency or labor efficiency? What pays off in a few days, or pays off more in a few years? Do I set up only farms that can handle general-requirement plants, or do I make special areas for the miasma-emitting or vermin-attracting plants, and if so, how do I water them?

EDIT2: For that matter, the same plant could have different roles at different parts of the game. Strawberries are productive, but are really hard on fertility. Just starting out, you could move your tiny strawberry farm every season, but as time went on, that'd be harder and harder to do, so you stop planting them. But even later, you decide you've got a big enough system to handle all the fertilizers it needs.
For a more fantastical plant, some sort of corpse-tree. If you have one, you could feed it the bodies of invading goblins, no problem. But if you rely on it more and more, and suddenly you have ten to feed, now you need a whole industry to grow food for farm animals you slaughter to feed your grove of corpse-trees.

EDIT3: For that matter, ethical choices. Corpse-trees could produce better fruit if fed goblins than cows, but they could produce even better things if occasionally fed a dwarf. What to do...

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Violate the Earth!
Post by: penco on February 09, 2011, 02:56:15 pm

Thanks for the detailed response. The choice article you posted was interesting but not something that I wasn't already trying to get at with some of my suggestions. I think the primary choice in agriculture needs to be between safer but far less valuable below-ground crops and valuable above-ground crops that expose your dwarves and the food supply more to pests (birds, locusts, etc) and to attackers.

A secondary choice is between farming and livestock.

Farming:
-Fast, cheap food
-Extensive and valuable textiles industry
-In general, export-oriented (nice clothes don't provide a huge happiness boost but fetch a huge price)

Livestock:
-Very valuable but slower food (meat and milk)
-Cheaper, less versatile leather
-In general, domestically oriented (high happiness returns but with much less net value produced)


Livestock should require certain diets. Only less valuable beasts should want to eat underground plants, and most should want above-ground ones. Fish as animal feed could be good also.

(except in very rare cases, fish should be the absolute lowest-value food)

The thing that throws a wrench in this dichotomy is alcohol. It is virtually a requirement to be fully stocked with booze at all times. Currently, booze comes from plants only, which doesn't match at all with the plants vs livestock divide. This will be partly amended if mead is added after honey is implemented. Another easy solution would be to give the option to ferment milk (look it up).



I still think the best solution from an FPS perspective would be to track the quality of soil on a layer-wide level rather than by individual tiles. Huge reduction of variables to check and very little lost in terms of the suggestions you originally made.

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Violate the Earth!
Post by: jseah on February 09, 2011, 03:28:15 pm

Kohaku is probably going for more complex effects than that.  Permanent environmental damage, biome terraforming, that kind of thing. 

speed vs value isn't enough, from the post, Kohaku is going for 8 or more variables to juggle in the most complex farm. 

And instead of weighing between each variable to differentiate plants, the difference between plants is in the number of variables they require you to handle. 
Early game simplicity, late game complexity.  The bigger your farm, and the more food you need (IE. the later the game), the more variables you have to juggle. 

So, it's more like yield vs complexity than anything else. 

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Violate the Earth!
Post by: penco on February 09, 2011, 04:42:58 pm

When all is said and done, the only things you can choose between are speed and value. I guess you can throw safety into the equation, too.

Yield vs complexity is not much of a choice when you state it that way. Why would you choose complexity? Only if that choice produces more valuable results. In that case, complexity is just a time restraint. Again, speed vs value.

I know he mentions a whole bunch of abstract game mechanics, but when you present the choice to the player, it ultimately boils to a very small handful of actual player priorities:

-Speed
-Value
-Safety

The player can rank these priorities, and once they are ranked, the "choice" process is over, and the analytical process begins to determine which actual in-game actions will best match those priorities. The game mechanics are nothing more than a hurdle the player needs to clear in order to determine the best course of action.

If the goal of this project is just to introduce complexity, that's just silly. Complexity does not necessarily add anything good to a game.

From what I understand, the goal of this project is just to make a player's choices and priorities have more in-game consequences. Currently, it doesn't matter if I want value more than speed because there is no real conflict between those two priorities, and the same course of action will give you the most value at the highest speed (in most cases). The decision is not manifest at all in how the game plays out.

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Violate the Earth!
Post by: jseah on February 09, 2011, 05:50:50 pm

Complexity is not just a time restraint.  Complexity allows you to have many diverse impacts, that all follow logically from some previous action. 

Forget to crop rotate = crops fail to grow
Plant monocultures = pests move in
Use wrong fertilizers = soil ruined and/or biome change
Slash-and-burn = exposed farms outside walls & requires huge amount of space + soil erosion

Even repeats of the same situations will have it's nuances and will require a different approach to deal with. 
You could solve lack of crop rotations with fertilizers but that could change the soil pH.  The next time you run into the problem, doing the fertilizer trick again could push the pH too far for your wheat.  Or make a weed grow. 


Complexity gives the game the ability to present many different challenges, each of which will have a solution and create a different challenge (whether it is to obtain the fertilizer or building floodbanks or create a section that supports natural predators of a pest)

Also, by making plants depend on a more fundamental system, you get the ability to change the plants dynamically, rather than having to pre-script them (biome and weather).  You can make a desert garden with enough effort or turn a lush rainforest into a rocky badland. 

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Violate the Earth!
Post by: NW_Kohaku on February 09, 2011, 06:57:27 pm

Uh-oh, these things are being added on before I can read them...  I'll try to answer in order.

Quote from: Solace on February 09, 2011, 02:53:20 pm

Just because it's a simple system doesn't mean you can't have complicated effects or requirements from it. :P

Of course not.  I try to use simple or abstracted mechanics wherever I can, as I consider a "philosophical shift" in the game's design to be the most cost-effective means of producing a more compelling gameplay experience.

The thing is that, if there were parts of my original set of posts you did not read, I would encourage you to go back and read those, as I find several of the suggested ideas you have actually reflect many ideas already included in the suggestion.  I think that perhaps you latched onto a specific part of my idea a little too strongly, and aren't seeing the full bredth of this topic.  To an extent, however, I will admit this is a problem of the simple incompleteness of the topics thus far.

• Easy-to-grow early plants that are unsustainable in the long haul covers the "Plump Helmets on logs" discussions I had.  (These may not be in my original posts yet.)
• The same with the weaker-to-vermin plants - one of the things I want is some sort of procedural method for certain crops to have been "domesticated" and "unnaturally selected" into being much more ideal food crops, but at the expense of being much more vulnerable to disease.
• Weeds I'm pretty sure I've directly covered in the pests and weeds section.  In fact, an advantage of the current system is that a "weed" may be beneficial under other circumstances.  You could even go for "elven farming" of simply using herbalism and trying to gently entice the soil to grow weeds you favor more than weeds you cannot use as well.
• "Something like clover" is an integral part of the Crop Rotation system.  I have yet to write this section, but it is a high priority.
• Magic effect plants are amusing, and I haven't really explored them too well, and definitely try posting about it in the xenosynthesis thread (http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=76578.0) as well.  I'll try to include this in the underground plants and magic plants section when I write it, although it is probably going to be one of my last sections.
• Orchards are definitely going to be a part of this suggestion.  It will be covered in the "Alternative Farming" section, which is a moderate priority, but a fun one, so maybe I'll let it skip ahead.
• You know, seeing the bee thread made me think exactly of requiring bee pollenation.  I haven't sketched up any plans for how this would really work, yet, however, so maybe you could try to extrapolate on the idea?
• Space vs. labor efficiency is a choice I did, indeed, try to incorporate.  Orchards would be not only time-intensive, but also space-intensive. 
• Ethical choices are... well, not really choices to most DF players.  The problem with "ethical choice" is that for choice to be meaningful, there must be conflict.  Conflict means that they are not choosing "should I be good or be evil?" it means asking someone to be moral, but to force them to choose which of two conflicting moral values they value more.  I'm practically going to become a spokesman for this site at this rate, but there's a good extra credits clip that really explores the notion of what a very tough ethical choice looks like (http://www.escapistmagazine.com/videos/view/extra-credits/1974-Enriching-Lives).  I actually did another long shpeel in another forum on the ethical choice of "Leave No Man Behind" as a policy when it means that attempting rescue of a couple men left behind will almost certainly mean killing thirty or more men to save two.  What is a more important value?  Your duty as a commander, and the burden to ensure as many of those men, whose lives are your responsibility to bear, will be able to live as you possibly can?  Or the notion of comaraderie, and that you will never abandon your fellow soldier in need?  Both of these are valid ethical imperitives, and that is the basis of a real conflict in choice.  Asking a typical DF player if they want to kill their own men for profit as the "EEEEEEVIL" choice will have very, very predictable results, because DF players revel in the amorality of their choices.

---

Sorry kids, break time, I'll respond to the rest of these posts in order.[/list]

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Violate the Earth!
Post by: NW_Kohaku on February 09, 2011, 07:23:15 pm

Ahhhh.  jseah is doing a wonderful job of selling the idea, as well.  I've been such a motive force behind this topic that sometimes I feel more like I'm a salesman making a marketing pitch than a contributor in a collaborative idea.

Let me take this back up a level of abstraction for a moment, however, and talk about complexity and player control.

One of the real problems of the "complex but easy" nature of this game is that players generally have far too much direct, precise control over their problems.  Need a steel battleaxe?  Order one smithed.  Need steel?  Order it made.  Need fuel or iron ore?  Go designate something to be mined or deforested.

All of these "problems" are not real problems because their solutions are so utterly direct and simple.  The player has the ability to solve the problems they face with pinpoint precision, and no fear of any sort of unintended consequences for sloppy behavior.

Consider instead trying to get mechanical automation of some sort of function in a fortress, however.  Repeaters (http://df.magmawiki.com/index.php/Repeater) are elegant, indirect solutions to a problem of trying to automate a simple action of pressing a switch on and off over and over again.  What makes these systems neat and interesting is that you do not directly control them.  Even more advanced, see Computing (http://df.magmawiki.com/index.php/DF2010:Computing) - an orgy of using simple tools in obscenely complex ways to solve fairly simple problems, but in extremely indirect ways.

You see, giving players indirect means of solving their problems (or rather, taking away the easy, direct means) makes the problems much more compelling and interesting even without making there be some sort of conflict of choice in the solution to the problem itself.  The enjoyment of the problem comes from the simple ability of the player to react in a plethora of new and creative ways to try to find a better, more efficient way to solve the same fairly simple problem, because the problem cannot any longer be as simple to solve as just pushing the "solve this problem" button. 

If we have a multitude of factors which all conflict with one another in an unstable equillibrium, and trying to manipulate any one factor of this equillibrium will inherently have unintended consequences with a half dozen other factors, then the entire act of solving a fairly simple problem can potentially become a much more dramatic and compelling problem.  Forcing someone to choose between two conflicting desires is the start of a decent choice.  Forcing a player to chose how they balance a dozen competing desires, and how they can prioritize the spending of limited resources to satisfy multiple different conflicting needs creates a real source of difficulty to the player.

This is partially why I'm trying to throw not just one system, but a giant jumbled mess of systems that involve all aspects of industry related to food, fuel, textiles, medicine, trade, domestic happiness, and the sheer labor management of the fortress so that everything competes for the same limited resources you can divide between them.

And then I've got my other suggestions, such as Class Warfare (http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=61620.0) which proposes how to increase the complexity of social dynamics in the fortress, so that dwarves demand access to luxury goods, finer meals and foodstuffs, entertainment, and social justice.  This means that you'll need to address these problems indirectly using the same materials and taking away some of the resources used for the initial problem of farming.

This is why I consider it the groundwork of all future expansion of what Dwarf Fortress can be - it has to start moving away from simple, binary solutions of "push this button to solve this problem" before it can start to really add depth to its complexity.

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Violate the Earth!
Post by: Andeerz on February 09, 2011, 07:37:25 pm

Agreed!

And I have sort of an idea that is sort of applicable.  In essence it involves revamping the entire psychology of sentient entities in the game, giving them more autonomy through better modeling of motivation (reward vs. punishment, perception of value and ownership), as well as having the player interacting through delegation and through government (or lack thereof) rather than through direct orders.  Here are some posts that detail exactly what I mean: http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=74616.msg1897161#msg1897161

This would affect all aspects of the game, including farming, and set up a framework for a whole host of things.  I really need to start my own mega thread like this one concerning better modeling individual and group psychology to have more believable economics and governments and behavior in general emerge with as little hard-coding as possible (i.e. procedurally generated).

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Violate the Earth!
Post by: NW_Kohaku on February 09, 2011, 07:41:18 pm

Damnit, Andeerz, stop giving me more economics threads to read!  I'll never finish my thesis paper on Physiocracy suggestion thread at this rate!  :P

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Violate the Earth!
Post by: Andeerz on February 09, 2011, 07:44:49 pm

X3

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Violate the Earth!
Post by: Solace on February 09, 2011, 10:00:54 pm

Well, that's a bit too much to quote directly, so I guess I'm just going to have to reply indirectly as much as I can. :P First off, I'd like to mention I'm also an Extra Credits fan, as well as a general fan of design and philosophy. I've also found your opinions around here tend to be pretty interesting, so I hope I'm not being too much a bother.

As far as ethical choices go: Well, yeah, you're not ever going to give someone a "real" moral choice in a game, for two... three reasons.
*For one, as you mentioned, there's no reason not to go evil just for the heck of it. No matter how badly you torture something ingame, it's just a piece of code.
*I'll also have wildly different views on how moral a choice is depending on what I read into it. For example, either Extra Credits or a similar group railed against a moral choice in Mass Effect 2, where the choice designated "good" actually seemed fairly evil too. While they where right in their interpretation... they where only right if they didn't check out all the backstory for the setup: the choice really did have a glaringly obvious "right" and "wrong" option; it was a cop-out, not a general desire to attach good and bad to a situation with only bad.
*And last, well, you can of course disagree with what the game (the game's designers or writers) felt about what was good or bad, or how good or bad it was. Although that's not so bad in and of itself, since if you read a book on morals, you're obviously only hearing the author's point of view.

Now, for a while there, I actually didn't really understood what about my idea you didn't like, and was pretty much arguing on reflex. :P But, I think I got it, and also where we genuinely disagree:

Quote from: NW_Kohaku on February 09, 2011, 07:23:15 pm

I'm trying to throw not just one system, but a giant jumbled mess of systems that involve all aspects of industry related to food, fuel, textiles, medicine, trade, domestic happiness, and the sheer labor management of the fortress so that everything competes for the same limited resources you can divide between them.

The issue I have with that is (and I'm saying this while being totally in love with environmental simulators), the farming is just one part of dwarf fortress. It's already a jumbled mess! I have to dig out fortress areas, farm, mine ores, produce things, hunt, lay traps, equip and train up an army, fight stuff with the army, negotiate sales, and run whatever side projects (currently tending to revolve around water) I might need. On top of that, there's going to be magic and alchemy, the economy in the fortress, the economy in the world in general, and also somehow dealing with other nearby areas, and maybe running several forts at once, eventually. If I remember, the game's officially only about a third done, so I think it's a bit early to say we need to add more complexity in just to keep people on their toes.

That said, I would like the environment to be a lot more dynamic, and I really hope that the magic or alchemy will involve a way to create rain, or other sources of water. :P

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Violate the Earth!
Post by: NW_Kohaku on February 09, 2011, 10:20:23 pm

OOOOOOOKAY, KIDDOS!

It's not technically complete, but this thing has been sitting open for almost a week, now, and I've kind of hit the "fuck it, just post SOMETHING" phase of my emotional wellbeing, so with THAT wonderful enticement, I am proud to announce...

(drumroll, please)

Dun-dun-da-DUUUNNNN!

The Interface section (http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=76007.msg1920009#msg1920009) is now up!

So, this is probably the most controversial thing I'm going to put up, since it's easier to argue with implementation than theory, so obviously, it's the thing I only do most of the way, but what the Hell.  Rip into it, and tell me what parts are tastiest.

Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go drown my frustrations in a bag of Valentine's Day chocolate that I opened early.

(Sorry, Solace, will respond to you in a bit.)

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Violate the Earth!
Post by: NW_Kohaku on February 09, 2011, 10:31:34 pm

Quote from: Solace on February 09, 2011, 10:00:54 pm

stuff about not liking complexity for just adding in more complex systems

Excuse the sloppy semantics, then.

What I see as a problem is that many of these systems are fairly isolated.  Bees and ceramics are being added in, for example, as solutions to problems you might have... without adding in any more problems that they would actually solve.  They're just one more way to solve the same problems you used to have.  And to solve the problem of wanting those things, they have their own simple, isolated solutions, which never touch anything else.

What I'm trying to do is tie as many systems as possible in together that would have to do with the same general set of problems, and make them work with or against one another as competing ideas in one massive, interdepedent system, rather than as completely isolated simple systems that are just piled on in a disorganized jumble.

The point of this is to make everything related to biological resources all get tied into springing from just two major resources - the soil and the water.  Your herds of livestock, your crops, your lumber, your cloth, all your non-mineral (mined) materials are all tied in under the umbrella of the soil. 

This is why I talked way back at the beginning of the thread about focusing on just three major resources: Soil, Stone, and Dwarves.  This is Soil.  Class Warfare is to make Dwarves a more complex base resource from which all your other resources flow.  Suggestions which make mining more complex and difficult will also make the Stone a more complex resource (especially if they slow the rate of progress down and cause you to perform serious archetecture challenges to keep the ceiling from caving in). 

If everything is made to tie into these three base resources, then feeding any one system takes away resources from all the other systems that are fed by the same base resource.  This is one of the core delimmas I am trying to build up - that everything has an opportunity cost of everything else you could do with that resource.

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Violate the Earth!
Post by: Solace on February 10, 2011, 01:47:07 am

Ah, well, I guess I don't know what I'm arguing then, so I guess I'll concede the point here. XD I like your ideas, just not sure how my system kills them. :P

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Violate the Earth!
Post by: zwei on February 10, 2011, 04:19:28 am

Just coding heads up:

You could simply do the farming calculations every day/week/month.

Also there is "schedulle silmulation" approach: Your compute next "tick" when when numbers are required and simply do not do any computations inbetween.

With this approach, you could only track tiles that are important and only do it when it is necesary. It is very lightweight approach.

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Violate the Earth!
Post by: NW_Kohaku on February 10, 2011, 10:44:22 am

Zwei - this is functionally already what is going on.

---

Solace/Penco -
You should keep in mind that this idea's roots in the NPK system wasn't even mine.  I found the boulder and tried to push it up the mountain after others had abandoned it.  And kept trying and kept trying and kept trying until I became a master of boulder-mountain-mechanics. 

This current iteration of the thread didn't spring from my head fully-formed, but is the fruit of putting up an idea, watching people fire at will upon it, seeing what burned, and figuring out whether or not the jerks had a point.  It's the evolution of an idea after many generations of development over what a very broad group of people did or didn't want to see in their game.  Because of this, it's sort of taken on a sentience of its own, and has a pretty massive number of suggestions added into it. 

To respond to this, I've had to re-evaluate where I wanted this entire concept to go, and what it was that I really had a problem with in the game, and how I thought it can be solved (hence the starting out with "The Problem" section), trying to refine it to get past my personal biases and into the broadest, most widely-applicable problems that people have in this game, to try to reformat the game to build a game that better engages the player.

This sort of has the unfortunate side-effect, however, of meaning that just about every one of the first questions or comments that come from most people's minds when they only read the first parts of this thread are typically the same questions I've already heard from about five generations of thread participants in a row.  That doesn't mean your questions are unwelcome by a longshot, but it does mean that really building the idea upwards means going beyond the participation levels of some of the previous generations of participants, and working on some of the more advanced concepts, and really being introspective, and analysing what it is you really want out of the game, and what aspects of gameplay have really annoyed you, and trying to figure out how the aspects of gameplay you liked can be fit into the game while avoiding the annoying. 

Perhaps the best place to start would be to try to ask yourself, not "what would be neat", or "what would be a good historic farming thing to add on", but "what sort of play experience do I really want to have from a perfect, ideal DF five years down the road?" or "What sorts of games really made me stop, set the keyboard down, and think about how I wanted to proceed onwards in a way that didn't involve just trying to calculate the best way to get the one thing I wanted?"

---

Okay, I beat my head out trying to write that Interface section and make pictures, so someone had damn well better appreciate it, or I'm breaking out the chainsaw...

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Violate the Earth!
Post by: AngleWyrm on February 10, 2011, 04:28:11 pm

Quote from: NW_Kohaku on February 10, 2011, 10:44:22 am

This sort of has the unfortunate side-effect, however, of meaning that just about every one of the first questions or comments that come from most people's minds when they only read the first parts of this thread are typically the same questions I've already heard from about five generations of thread participants in a row.

There's a simple and elegant solution to this dilemma that has been used to good effect for years: Put up a FAQ in the first part of the thread, answering questions that come up a lot.

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Violate the Earth!
Post by: NW_Kohaku on February 10, 2011, 04:39:39 pm

I did.

The most asked questions are a part of one of the sections in the very front of this thread, and one of them is a section all to itself.

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Violate the Earth!
Post by: therahedwig on February 10, 2011, 07:11:49 pm

Pictures!

Ah, but are you not afraid people are going to run away crying at seeing how it resembles the military screen? ;)

In all seriousness, it looks good, but I think it will have the similar problem of the military screen of people not knowing where to start, without reading this thread.

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Violate the Earth!
Post by: NW_Kohaku on February 10, 2011, 07:50:46 pm

Thank you for looking at the pictures, therahedwig... I was going to cry if I had spent all that time on making them, and nobody even bothered to look.

... Cry and then pick some fights with people in the hopes I could lure them into the thread.

Anyway, I hope that I can avoid the military screen's most major mistake, which I see as (aside from the outright bugs) the desire to compact everything into one screen generating concatonated commands with no help file.

Frankly, I've put quite a bit of thought into doing this right, but I don't know of a way to give a clear picture of the scheduler without it looking at least somewhat like the military screen.

What I've tried to do is split this up into many smaller "tabs", so that information is spread out across multiple menus that are easily flipped through so that you can access one set of data and then go to one of several means of issuing commands to the dwarves.

I'm also curious as to what people think of the design decision to use "qwert" and "asdfg" as a means of tabbing through the tabs, with "zxcv" as the actual command buttons.  It would mean control is largely "Left hand on the home keys, right hand on the numpad" control style.

I can also switch this around if the "zxcv" part gets too annoying, and make the tabs be "qwertQWERT", with capitals being the "bottom" tabs, so that the action tabs are "asdfzxcv".

Or is spatial reasoning in a control scheme too wonky compared to the rest of DF?

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Violate the Earth!
Post by: therahedwig on February 10, 2011, 08:06:43 pm

I think before we wonder whether that would be too wonky in comparison with the rest of DF, we need to first realise that DF is in dire need of having a interation-design specialist looking at it. Hell, we should consider making a donation pool especially for that or something.
I'm doing a bachelor's in gamedesign, and when I had interface design it was used as a prime example of what not to do with your game.(On the other hand, while I missed the class, I have the feeling that the teacher might've been so stupid to critisize the ascii art, mostly because she was a stupid cow /offtopic)

Personally, I have to admit I prefer the keys to be linked to the words they represent. But I think I could get used to this as well.

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Violate the Earth!
Post by: NW_Kohaku on February 10, 2011, 08:16:24 pm

Well, spatial reasoning makes by far the most sense to me, and is what I can get used to down to the point of reflexively remembering my custom keymaps to games I haven't played in years, even including things like the special extra keys from OBSE put into Oblivion.  ("b" is for summoning the crocodile monster to take hits for me. "n" is for summoning the creature I backstab for soul traps.  "h" is for healing myself...)

I also tend to use "wesd" as a movement keymapping instead of "wasd", since e and d can be moving forward and back, while w and s can be right and left (respectively), and that puts all movement onto just two fingers, which don't have to move into any side areas, putting those fingers which can move to touch other keys the least on the keys I don't want to move my fingers off of the least.  I can't understand how people play with "e" as a use key, it makes no sense, you have to take your finger off the "right" key to press it.

So basically, this is a roundabout way of saying "It makes perfect sense to me to base things off of keeping all the controls in one localized area, and making it spatially logical, but then, I realize I'm weird, so I don't know if this will make sense to everyone else."

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Violate the Earth!
Post by: NW_Kohaku on February 10, 2011, 09:00:41 pm

Hmm... looking at it, I thought of a few changes I should make to the "Improvements" tab, just looking at it, as I should probably segregate out "fertilizers" involving minerals and more serious "make this entire farm plot into a raised bed with gravel underneath" types of major renovations to the soil.

I also wonder if I should just have a "use all" type of fertilizer use in the permissibles.

I should probably rewrite the scheduler section a little more to be clear about every piece of functionality.

Anything else that anyone sees that looks missing?

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Violate the Earth!
Post by: blizzerd on February 10, 2011, 09:12:25 pm

ive read the most important articles and i think that this would be an interesting idea as long as the current "herbalism" skills do not make the entire complex farming thing you described obsolete UNLESS you want to work underground

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Violate the Earth!
Post by: NW_Kohaku on February 10, 2011, 10:02:13 pm

Quote from: blizzerd on February 10, 2011, 09:12:25 pm

ive read the most important articles and i think that this would be an interesting idea as long as the current "herbalism" skills do not make the entire complex farming thing you described obsolete UNLESS you want to work underground

I think that herbalism could be a more serious alternative to farming than it is now, actually.

I mentioned before that I think herbalism could become "elven farming" - you don't really plow rows of soil, but you can do things to encourage your favored herbs to grow.

The thing about herbalism is that, thanks to its "just let it grow wild" approach, it's fairly low in labor, while its major downside should be that it's just plain not capable of supporting the same number of dwarves in the same amount of land.

That said, wild herbs would still take from the soil, so it would have to achieve some means of making a crop rotation cycle on its own, just from "weeds" competing on the soil, but if you harvest enough of the crops from the soil, then you can eventually take all the nutrients out of the soil - you'd still probably need to fertilize the soil even if you rely upon herbalism, it just might take more the form of opening up your sewer floodgates so that the water with "impurities" that make for good nutrients would flow out over the soil to refertilize the land.

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Violate the Earth!
Post by: NW_Kohaku on February 10, 2011, 10:28:06 pm

On the subject of the interface:

• Tell me what you think is or would be confusing.
• Tell me what needs extrapolation upon.
• Tell me what you don't like, and why you don't like it.
• If there is anything you do like, go ahead and say that, too.

The top one of those is the most important of the three.  Think about it from the perspective of the people who are coming into this blind, and think if this would be as bad as the military screen was in terms of difficulty to learn, or if this would be something that is a little clunky, but more like the embark screen, or some other screen where the interface is fairly straightforward and easy to understand.

I want most of all for people to be able to grasp what they are supposed to do mostly from just looking at the interface, and leafing through the tabs.

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Violate the Earth!
Post by: AngleWyrm on February 10, 2011, 10:35:52 pm

The navigation controls for the interface should be exactly the same as the rest of the game. They should not be new or improved. The reason to integrate them into the whole and present a consistent interface is so that people can quickly learn how to navigate once, and put it behind them.

Presenting different navigation methods for different parts of the game stalls the ability to walk around the UI, and subverts the learned behaviors picked up from the rest of the game. The confusion would then spread to every part of the game, wondering which set of controls to use for any given screen.

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Violate the Earth!
Post by: monk12 on February 10, 2011, 10:37:34 pm

Now, I may have missed it in the wall o' text there, but have you had thoughts on the effects/implementation of floodplains?

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Violate the Earth!
Post by: NW_Kohaku on February 10, 2011, 10:53:19 pm

Quote from: monk12 on February 10, 2011, 10:37:34 pm

Now, I may have missed it in the wall o' text there, but have you had thoughts on the effects/implementation of floodplains?

That's sort of part of the water management section.  I might need to go back and talk about that more in detail, but if water has its own nutrient values, and rivers collect silt as they stretch along a continent, then eventually rivers will become extremely silt-laden, and you could use those as easy fertilizers.

"Seasonal Flooding" should probably be described in more depth.  I'll put that in, as well.

---

Quote from: AngleWyrm on February 10, 2011, 10:35:52 pm

The navigation controls for the interface should be exactly the same as the rest of the game.

Okay, dissenting vote on the spatial reasoning layout recorded.

Thing is, I don't think there's anything really learned from the game in general... in some cases, the same type of object has a different letter in different menus.  You just learn that one command to that one specific menu.

For example: designated up/down stairs are "i".  constructed up/down stairs are "x".

Learning what to punch to designate stairs doesn't teach you want to punch to construct stairs... There isn't even something in the "build Construction" menu that uses an "i", either, so there's no necessity that the button be "x".

For that matter, in the military screen, "u" is Supplies.  "s" was taken, but that still means you have to remember "u" means supplies (or more likely, just look for what's highlighted).  Ammunition is even more odd - it's "f".  There isn't even an "f" in the word ammunition, so no idea how that got to be that hotkey.

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Violate the Earth!
Post by: Max White on February 10, 2011, 10:57:37 pm

So I noticed there was some strange [1] symbol at the top of the page... That isn't oftern!
I like it, mostly because it sort of reminds me of the military in a strange way, and since I spent so long learning how the military works, with any luck the skills will carry over, helping to trim the heavy learning curve.

Let's face it, you can survive a year without an army, but you would be hard pressed going without growing food, so if this is similar to the military screens, but slightly simplified, then new players will be more used to this interface by the time war comes around, so even though the learning curve is a little higher, it isn't as steep.

Good interface is good for more then planting!

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Violate the Earth!
Post by: NW_Kohaku on February 10, 2011, 11:34:56 pm

monk12: added onto the water management section.  Floodplains are now discussed directly.

Max White: Well, that's a pretty positive spin on things.

Again, I'm looking for things that you think need further explaination or things that are outright confusing, though, so tell me what parts you think aren't particularly clear, so that I can do what I can to improve them.

---

Oh, right, and I've been updating the first six posts somewhat quietly for a while now, so several little things are changed.  I put up my "to do list" at the end.  That should give you guys some indicator of some of the other topics I'm going to cover later on.

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Violate the Earth!
Post by: Max White on February 10, 2011, 11:44:28 pm

Quote from: NW_Kohaku on February 10, 2011, 11:34:56 pm

Max White: Well, that's a pretty positive spin on things.

I know, I'm sorry. I always feel bad about giving positive feedback, as you can't realy improve on something when people are saying it's already perfect. But still, the military screen has found its way into DF and has become an important part of the game, so why not use similar methodology elsewere? It could save toady work and let new players get used to this specific interface faster.

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Violate the Earth!
Post by: jseah on February 11, 2011, 09:43:46 am

Ok, I've read your interface section.  I understand how it will work, I think. 

Then again, I don't get confused by these things easily, having worked out DF's interface with nothing but the "help" portion of DF.  Including the military screen. 

It does seem more organized than DF's standard, so there's that. 
I'm concerned about how it would look if we played with a bigger area?  I use 75% of my 1024x768 screen when playing DF.  How should your interfaces stretch?

The other thing about the auto-calculating interface, I would like the option to have a manual version as well.  Just so I can check if my crop cycle really does match up or not. 

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Violate the Earth!
Post by: NW_Kohaku on February 11, 2011, 11:26:23 am

I made all of the screens to the same 80x25 grid that the game always runs.  There shouldn't be any difference between this and whatever setup you already have.

What do you mean by "manual", though?  Do you mean you want to see the absolute values of what is in the soil?

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Violate the Earth!
Post by: jseah on February 11, 2011, 12:05:36 pm

Well, because I find crunching numbers for a game fun provided they don't involve calculus. 
I remember making graphs of the sensor detection ranges of Aurora's ships in autograph.  That was a fun half an hour. 

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Violate the Earth!
Post by: NW_Kohaku on February 11, 2011, 12:23:28 pm

mmmmm... I kind of want to try to conform to Toady's general "don't show numbers on things you can't literally pick up and count" style of representation, though, as I find it more likely to be adopted, and I want to also try to assuage people's fears that this won't force them to actually do that.  In fact, that's sort of why I wanted to go out of the way to give them tools to not have to do that.

What I can say, however, is that the raws will still be there, still giving hard numbers.  It just won't be in-game.  You could use spreadsheets or the like, punch in the numbers of how each plant alters the soil, and find the patterns for the most efficient crop rotation cycles if you really wanted to go the "manual" route, and then punch in those crop rotations into the game itself. 

It won't, however, be a required method for farming, and you could just try the "trial-and-error" method of punching in how much fertilizer you need to add until you find a working system.

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Violate the Earth!
Post by: NW_Kohaku on February 11, 2011, 02:39:18 pm

Ugggh... Sometimes I can't believe the things I forget when I write some of these long posts.

OK, so I didn't put the soil indicators in the scheduler (d'oh, I left that spot blank for a reason, why didn't I remember to fill it?!).  I needed to include an "infinity" marker.  I need to extrapolate on the "exceptions" like orchards.  I need to put in that improvements to the soil bed button.  Biomass/humus difference. Maybe a few others...

I'm sort of writing this as my own to-do list, but I think that it also gives people who want to help look for flaws in the current mockup get an idea of what sort of things to look for, as well...

"Can you find some function you would want to perform that this interface does not display a means to do?"

Also, what symbols (I.E. characters from the tileset) would you guys think are most logical/appropriate for each of water, the soil nutrients, soil consistancy, humus depth, biomass, etc.?

---

Oh, and which do you guys find more helpful, a color-coded set of icons for soil nutrients with a foreground color representing "with the fertilizers and other permissable actions you are telling your dwarves to do" and a background color representing "if you did nothing", or would you rather the icon itself always have one color (so a ≈ symbol always means water), and the background represents "with the permissables", with no indication of what it would be without those permissables?

In other words, that water symbol on the scheduler would look like ≈ with a dark red background in the first method to represent that if your dwarves give that plot all the water you are telling them to give the plot, then it will have enough water, but if they don't bother, it will have too little water.

In the second method, where water is always a blue ≈ symbol, the icon represents only how well the soil will be treated if the dwarves have the time to do all the labor you are asking of them.  (Which would be a (dark) green background.)

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Violate the Earth!
Post by: NW_Kohaku on February 11, 2011, 03:52:27 pm

Right, so, upon reflection, the reason nobody caught a mistake like what I made must be because nobody understands what I am doing or trying to do anymore.

This means I must be playing this game 25 steps ahead in my own mind and I've only stopped and explained the past 15 of those steps, again, which means it's time to write another comprehensive "why this needs to happen" piece before I can go on explaining "how to make it happen".

This means I'm going to need to go back a few steps and explain the reason the Interface has to look like this, rather than just explain what it should look like. 

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Violate the Earth!
Post by: AngleWyrm on February 11, 2011, 04:31:43 pm

A significant problem with the screens is that one screen shows only current soil acceptability relative to some unnamed current crop, and a separate scheduling screen offers no feedback on the future of the soil. There's no way to see the impact of switching through the various crops and upgrades, because the data is hidden.

Since there is not data available to the player, even after heaps and gobs of talking about all kinds of new variables, the result is going to the wiki and looking up what sequence of crops is the best and planting that.

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Violate the Earth!
Post by: NW_Kohaku on February 11, 2011, 04:39:01 pm

Quote from: AngleWyrm on February 11, 2011, 04:31:43 pm

A significant problem with the screens is that one screen shows soil values relative to some unnamed current crop, and a separate scheduling screen offers no feedback on the future of the soil.

Since there is not data, even after heaps and gobs of talking about all kinds of new variables, the result is going to the wiki and looking up what sequence of crops is the best and planting that.

Yes, that's the set of symbols I was just talking about how I forgot to put in the scheduler (which I am putting in now).  The fact that nobody noticed until now means that people weren't following me up to the point where they would notice the mistake, which means I need to go back and explain the interface's individual functions a little more.

EDIT: Oh, and the "unnamed crop" is what is shown in another sub-window.  The point of the first "viewer" tab is to show you all the data on the farm plot.  The first "z" sub-menu shows "plants", which indicates what is growing there, and how far along they are towards harvest, plus maybe the most pressing problem that plant is facing.  In the second "x" sub-menu, you see "nutrients", which gives you the snapshot of the soil nutrient levels, and I chose to show that sub-window rather than the initial "z" plants menu because it would be more illustrative in showing how minerals can be displayed.

The fact that I have to explain all this, again, means I need to do a better job explaining why each tab is there and what it does for the player, instead of just saying what data it displays, and assuming everyone has caught up with me.

EDIT AGAIN:
OK, here are the symbols I'm tentatively putting in as color-coded markers in the scheduling screen:

≈ is water
τ is nitrogen
╢ is phosphorous
⌐ is potassium
♠ is biomass
¥ are pests
▄ is humus depth/CEC/drainage
¡ is soil acidity
² is toxicity and salinity
☼ represents if this plant is going to live in an energy field capable of supporting it

Color coding:
Cyan = way too much (doesn't grow)
Blue = too much (grows poorly)
Green = just right
Yellow = not enough to grow well, but will grow poorly
Red = not enough to grow at all
Gray = not even close

I'm going to post an updated version of the scheduling screen in a little bit, but you need to be able to pretty much be told what all those symbols stand for to get them.

For archival purposes:

Spoiler: Scheduler Window (v1) (click to show/hide)

(http://i53.tinypic.com/29ql3tg.gif)

Spoiler: Scheduler Window (v2) (click to show/hide)

(http://i52.tinypic.com/vrrg3d.gif)

Spoiler: Improvements Window (v1) (click to show/hide)

(http://i54.tinypic.com/1ysfg6.gif)
The green thingy is a glass irrigation pump.  The brass irrigation plumbing has been built, and the dwarf is smiling about it, I guess.

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Violate the Earth!
Post by: NW_Kohaku on February 11, 2011, 06:17:42 pm

OK, just in case I haven't scared everyone off by now, I'm going to try to interpret what almost amounts to my just talking to myself because I've gone insane...

On the scheduling screen, the objective you have as a player is to provide the plants you want to grow with the nutrients they need to grow.  These are the first five symbols (plus the last one, which represents you can grow that thing there at all).  You want these symbols all green.  If these symbols are not green you can add permissible actions to the permissibles list, which give dwarves permission to use resources. 

Basically, if you want to grow that crop right now badly enough, you can just keep ramping up the permissable fertilizer to use on the soil and just solve your problem by just throwing resources at the problem.

The next symbol represents pests.  Pests would actually be a bit hard to predict, but whatever. You don't want pests, so it's not actually color-coded to say "you have sufficient pests", it's an inverse scale.  Green means you have no or few pests of a kind that are particularly bad for your crops.  Yellow means there are some dangers, but you have means of keeping pest populations under control.  Red means unchecked pest problems.

The next three symbols represent land degredation factors.  You can't control these as easily, but they shouldn't go down most of the time, either.  They only go down when you're doing something like burning the soil with fertilizers or eroding the soil or accumulating toxins in the soil or acidifying the soil or raising the salinity of the soil or any sort of "bad stuff" you want to avoid doing.

When you give dwarves permission to use those resources, they determine on their own whether or not to use them.  You can give them permission to use infinite resources (or rather, as many as they can use), but you'll just run out of labor and resources if you try to just throw resources at every one of your problems.

Does this seem like a simple enough system?

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Violate the Earth!
Post by: zwei on February 12, 2011, 03:00:33 am

Quote from: NW_Kohaku on February 11, 2011, 04:39:01 pm

≈ is water
τ is nitrogen
╢ is phosphorous
⌐ is potassium
♠ is biomass
¥ are pests
▄ is humus depth/CEC/drainage
¡ is soil acidity
² is toxicity and salinity
☼ represents if this plant is going to live in an energy field capable of supporting it

² is better for phosphorus (game bones symbol)
⌐ is better for biomass (game rotten plants symbol)
≡ is better to potassium (potash bar)
# for salinity/toxicity (rock salt tile)

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Violate the Earth!
Post by: AngleWyrm on February 12, 2011, 03:08:37 am

Also, check out the medical tab; it has many shorthand coded entries, and yet it is still legible. How? Because it has a legend at the bottom of the screen that tells what each symbol means. This screen would be better with the addition of a legend somewhere near the bottom of the screen.

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Violate the Earth!
Post by: NW_Kohaku on February 12, 2011, 10:00:01 am

Potash isn't the primary source of potassium for farming, though.  Compost should be.

What I was going for was the things they are actually represented by in the "look", since Nitrogen is checked by looking at leaves (so it's a sprout with leaves), Phosphorous is checked by looking at stems (so it looks like a plant stem), and Potassium is supposed to be a leaf edge...  Although I thought about using something like the ♣ to represent a leaf more generally.  I kind of thought "♠" means mushroom, and that's what you up biomass to be able to grow.  I guess ⌐ works, too, although ▬ for logs also works.

I kind of thought of just using "X" for some sort of skull and crossbones to represent poisons in the soil (not just salt, but several different poisons tracked as separate variables in the soil, which I figured it was easier to just lump them together and just give a warning in this screen when any one got too high, and get people to look on the more detailed pages to find out which one was getting out of hand, since land pollution should be a fairly gradual process.) ² is the usual "death" icon, though, so I figured that was the best way to represent "toxic" in general.

---

As for a set of explanations for what each symbol means, I unfortunately don't think that's viable without taking up too much space in this one window.  (I've actually remembered more buttons that I want to add into this screen, to handle certain odd circumstances.) I think that players will just need to be told from a help window or a different window what these symbols mean.

---

I'm writing up a "So how would I actually use this menu?" piece to try to get people who read this to be able to get a better sense of how this would work and what they should expect.  Should be done sometime today, although I might add onto it later.

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Violate the Earth!
Post by: AngleWyrm on February 12, 2011, 03:33:23 pm

The mechanism of requiring people to select time blocks in months is needlessly tedious and cryptic. Plants are planted during the four seasons, and that is all the detail that is needed for a time block. Forcing players to select a starting and ending month just adds unnecessary hassle to every time block, forces players to translate the months, opens up opportunities to make mistakes selecting date ranges, and wastes screen real estate.

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Violate the Earth!
Post by: The Phoenixian on February 12, 2011, 04:24:20 pm

Hadn't read this in a while so belated thoughts on the Interface are as follows.

On the idea of using spacial key positioning:

It makes a lot of sense to me when it comes to using tabs like this. I like the idea of having everything clustered together rather than having it spread out all over the keyboard.

On specific key positioning (not much thought and maybe not useful but a bit):

q=view plot
This makes sense given the common use of q

Overall, it looks like the more important pieces to what a fortress will want to do are arranged first and clearly labeled. Seems to be well thought out. (Was some "Okay, What the [insert generic swear] does this mean?" when first looking at it but that seems to be typical of DF in our pre-tutorial era.)


Not too sure about my ability to comment on the symbology thanks to using a graphics pack all the time but thanks to not having seen the color codes before reading what they meant, I do have some comments on that.

Red, Yellow and Green make perfect sense (since they're commonly used for that anyways.)

Blue and gray were a bit confusing for a moment (Both were placed between yellow and green until I learned what they meant.)

After learning what they meant though it made pretty good sense.

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Violate the Earth!
Post by: NW_Kohaku on February 12, 2011, 06:51:24 pm

Quote from: AngleWyrm on February 12, 2011, 03:33:23 pm

The mechanism of requiring people to select time blocks in months is needlessly tedious and cryptic. Plants are planted during the four seasons, and that is all the detail that is needed for a time block. Forcing players to select a starting and ending month just adds unnecessary hassle to every time block, forces players to translate the months, opens up opportunities to make mistakes selecting date ranges, and wastes screen real estate.

If I'm changing everything else about farming, why would I have to keep to the notion that plants stick to seasons for their planting times?  Some of these planting seasons are 7 months long, some are only 2 months long, and orchards are just a yearly harvest time.  (Ah, I knew I should have picked longer periods in the example just to ensure confusions like this wouldn't happen...)  Maybe the seasons can be color-coded when you select them, though?  Green spring, red summer, brown autumn, and gray winter should give people a pretty clear idea of which months are in what seasons.

I'll need to remember that for a later mockup, when I get around to making more of them.

Quote from: The Phoenixian on February 12, 2011, 04:24:20 pm

Hadn't read this in a while so belated thoughts on the Interface are as follows.

Alright, thank you, and your opinions on this are noted.

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Violate the Earth!
Post by: NW_Kohaku on February 12, 2011, 11:03:01 pm

Well, shot my plans to Hell today.

I went out for an extended period (AAAAGH! HATEFUL SUN!), and when I came back, I wound up spending most of my time coming up with ways to revise the entire scheduling screen.

(OK, so now we need to have a way of selecting companion crops, and that means changing something else on the screen, as well.)

I went wiki-crawling again...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tillage
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No-till
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intercropping
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beneficial_weed
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Companion_planting
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integrated_pest_management
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permaculture

So naturally, reading something new set me off on planning how best to model these things, again.

Companion planting/intercropping will be a pretty strange idea for most people, I'm sure... However, the idea we'd set up something like a primary crop, with a companion crop that repels pests, but takes up a bit of the space in a plot really appeals to me.  Then there's polyculture, where you grow coconut and banana trees with ginger as three tiers of crops in the same plot of land.

It's also one of those things that people don't need to know to start out, but which heavily rewards knowing what it is you're doing very well.

I just need to figure out a way to include it without making people's heads explode.

---

OK, so let me just put this out as a post-it note on what I need to be able to do in the scheduler...

I need to pick a main crop.  I need to be able to pick secondary crops, and then set some sort of ratio of crops.  (Would having more than one crop in a tile be possible?)  This requires at least one button for selecting ratios of crops, which could be its own sub-menu, because the scheduler is going to have more dials than a 767 if I don't start using sub-menus.

I need to set permissables, which include catagories for tillage, irrigation, fertilizers, pesticides/alchemical products, liming, placing pests.  This requires two buttons, one for adding and one for removing permissables, plus use of the +-*/ keys for adding and subtracting them.  0 should be a possible value, and -1 should mean "infinite".  Hitting enter at a permissable should just give you some sort of detailed view of what that permissable is, and what it is supposed to do.

I need to set farming block lengths.  There needs to be at least one button for just creating the block, and hitting enter at the block should let you alter the block in a sub-menu.

Herds need a button just to add them as grazers.

Then I need a button for setting up the cycle to be a repeating rotation.

Anything else I might be forgetting?

---

Oh, and maybe two buttons for auto-setting the amount of fertilizers on one or all of the permissables to green every indicator.

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Violate the Earth!
Post by: Solace on February 13, 2011, 03:17:26 am

I guess, speaking really generally, I wouldn't mind seeing something like that eventually, but there's a lot of stuff that'd take that level of work I'd want to see first. Which is why I'd advocate for a simpler system, to solve "farming is too easy and basic" in the meanwhile, before it got that crazy level of complicated.

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Violate the Earth!
Post by: NW_Kohaku on February 13, 2011, 10:00:15 am

Small steps generally isn't the way you can really build something like DF.

Every time you add something, you make something that can break or become buggy.  Every time you add something, you can break or make buggy something else.  Why introduce these bugs in multiple steps, when you can get them all over with at once, and make the entire process go quicker?

It's why 31.01 came out with so many extra stats on its materials that didn't even really do anything - Toady was just trying to cut off a future need to expand the game by adding in the stubs for features he might presumably want later.  He has to build expecting what his next hundred steps are going to be in making this game, because otherwise he has to go back and bulldoze much of his own work every next step he takes.

Maybe this wouldn't all be released in one version, but the framwork for making it all really should be.  Having a soil nutrient system (it's on the devpage) without having an interface for it is pretty silly.  Having this interdependant system with half the dependencies dummied out would just make an absurdly unbalanced system, and players aren't really going to accept "it'll make sense when I get around to finishing it 3 years from now" as an answer.  You at least need to give it the semblance of a coherent system, and then you can tweak it once it's there.

Anyway, I think I know how to put together the interface again, although it might be a day or two before it's actually updated.  I want to get this "how the player uses it" section up soon.

Once I get a good idea of what the interface looks like, I can then start working on ways to reduce the interface.

The scheduler is a bit of a behemoth, especially compared to some of the lightweight tabs like the zoner.  I'm going to segregate as many actual functions as possible into sub-menus, so that as much relevant information can be presented to the player as possible when they are making decisions. 

Not having the relevant information to make informed decisions on hand when you make those decisions is one of those negative aspects of DF's UI.

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Violate the Earth!
Post by: NW_Kohaku on February 13, 2011, 04:08:56 pm

"How it works" section now up.

I've finished the noob-friendly walkthrough so that people can get a sense of what they do with the interface, and how it would work for them.  Hopefully, more people will be able to look at the interface, and comment on how it works with that guide.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

"But what do I actually do as a Player?"
So, rather than an overview of what each button does, let's instead go over what you would want to do when you are first setting up a fort.

"I just embarked, I want to farm plump helmets, since those are traditionally fast and easy to farm."
OK, so dig yourself some nice open space in your new fortress for your farm to actually occupy.  Once that's done, you want to open up your land management menu, and get to designating the actual farming zone.

You'd open the menu with "l" and need to start designating the farm with "w" to bring up the second tab, the farm designation window.  From here, zone out your farming plot.  There's no real need for "building" a farming plot in this system, it's just designated as the land that your dwarves will work when they are trying to grow something. 

To actually get them working, open up the scheduler window by hitting "e" to activate that tab.  We will assume you actually brought plump helmet spawn, and haven't eaten them all or something silly at this point.  So, what you need to do is create a new farming block, for a good three or four months, and then scroll over, and select the plump helmet seeds.  In all odds, if you just dug out the place for this farm plot, you will need to add to the biomass and water levels of this plot to make it suitable to the plump helmets' growth.  Plump helmets can survive with little existing nutrients and even soil of any kind, but grow on rotting material like logs, so you can simply add several logs to the farm plot, and keep them wet to both grow plump helmets, and also build up the soil nutrients, paving the way for future underground crops to be planted in the same area.  To do this, you need to add some permissables - use "z" to start adding permissables of providing water by bucket and logs to grow those plump helmets on.  Use the + key to keep adding the number of logs you will permit the dwarves to apply to the ground until the ♠ symbol turns green.  Make sure the ≈ symbol is green as well by adding to the number of permissable buckets of water to apply to the soil, and use the * key to add ten bucketfuls at a time, or - until you hit a negative number, which should make an ∞ symbol appear, designating infinite uses of that (presumably plentiful) resource.

This means you have set up a schedule for that farm to be used for plump helmet farming for several months, and have given permission for the dwarves to use the resources they need to run that farm.  Dwarves will determine whether they need all the materials they are permitted to use or not at the time, but permissables give you a chance to throttle how much they are allowed to use if you have some other priorities for those resources.  The logs you are using, for example, are potentially useful in other industry, and you wouldn't want to throw all your logs at just farming if there are other uses you have for those logs.

Speaking of which, you probably don't have enough logs to sustain that farm forever.  You need to designate some area for clear-cutting to generate the wood you need for your farms and future industry.  The land management menu has replaced the old designation menu for the purposes of designating trees for cutting down.  Now, you designate a zone where trees grow (similar to the plot designation), and then set the area to be continually chopped down for lumber.  You do this with the "a" Forestry menu.  You can also set it for herbalism at the same time to gather some easy food to tide you over until your farms are working at full capacity, and get you the seeds for aboveground farming.  Herbalism, in fact, is a skill with a simultaniously more defined and less defined role now that farms and wild soil are made to be fairly similar.  Herbalism easily supports small numbers of dwarves that can manage to keep their harvesting areas safe from skulking goblin ambushers, but at the same time, plundering too many plants from the soil without returning nutrients can gradually lead to a more barren landscape with less plants overall.

Also, while you don't need to flood your fields anymore, if you have bucket brigades watering your fields, then the closer you can get a replinishable basin of water to your farms, the less distance the dwarves have to ferry water by bucket from the basin to the fields.  Maybe later, you can improve this system by building irrigation pipes connected to a pump or sluice that will take the "bucket brigade" out of the picture entirely.

---

Now let's assume you're ready for aboveground farming with some of those seeds you gathered.  You've walled in an area, and also managed to cut down or gather all the trees and shrubs in the area, and need to have a denser, more sustainable food source.  Now you can start really building your first self-sustainable farm system, one which doesn't require outside resources aside from the manure the living creatures in your fortress generates.  To do this, zone another farm in this aboveground area. 

Why do you need to go through this trouble?  Well, plump helmets require a constant supply of more trees cut down to serve as their biomass.  This means that eventually, you're going to be needing hundreds of trees cut down each year to just keep your plump helmet farms going, not even counting the rest of your industry.  That can get unsustainable fast.

Now, you're going to need to schedule a more complex system than you did before with the plump helmets.  First, make a block to harvest some staple crop in.  Let's assume it's wheat, and wheat takes 8 months to grow, starting from Slate/mid-Spring to Timber/late-Fall.  Wheat is a "heavy feeder", and needs plenty of nutrients in the soil to grow.  We'll assume that the soil just happened to already be mostly ready for the purposes of this demonstration, but you might need to spread several layers of fertilizer or grow some preliminary crop to prepare the soil for this wheat.  Growing wheat will probably require permissables set throughout the year for several applications of manure, water, and it will probably be a good idea to give permission to till the soil before the wheat is planted (this kills weeds). 

Now, because wheat is a heavy feeder, it will severely deplete the soil's nutrients, so we need to have a system in place that lets soil fertility climb back up, and it needs to do this without claiming hundreds of trees per year that you may not have on hand to keep feeding your agriculture industry. This means crop rotations.  You can first try to at least maximize your growing season, however, and try to grow something small and light-feeding, like onions, as a winter crop.  Light feeders won't consume as many of your resources, and may grow faster than some heavy feeders, but generally aren't as economically valuable or capable of feeding as many people as your heavy feeding staple crops usually will.  They will, however, give you a chance to really use up the last of your soil fertility while you go ahead and start adding more manure and biomass to allow soil bacteria a chance to break down your fertlizers into usable nutrients while still giving you something of economic value from your fields.

Now you need to schedule what you do for the next year, and we want this year to be based around the idea of replinishing the soil for the wheat the next year.  This means it's going to be a two-year crop rotation cycle, which has the advantage of simplicity, although it isn't as efficient as more advanced crop rotation cycles. 

Instead of merely "fallowing" the field, which lets weeds take over, we will instead schedule clover, which can serve as fodder for livestock.  Clover is a soil replinisher, it actually adds some nutrients to the soil as it grows, although it still does take up some other nutrients.  During the time that clover grows, however, we can send in our cattle and livestock as grazing herds, and let those cattle leave their own fresh fertilizer behind on the fields as they eat - giving us back some of those nutrients that the clover wasn't replinishing all by itself.  We can grow clover for part of this "set-aside year", and another replinishing crop that produces an edible crop, like peanuts or soy beans, during their particular season.  During all of this time, we keep on adding manure, helping push up the soil fertility in anticipation of the heavy feeders to come next year.

At the end of this second year, we can then set the scheduler to be on "repeat".  The wheat will then be slated to be grown the next year, and before it is planted, the soil will be tilled, fertilizers will be added, the wheat will be sewn, and wheat will be grown, watered, and harvested, all on auto-pilot by the dwarves.  A single scheduling session at the start of the first year is all you need to do to set this up.

Of course, that doesn't mean that farms will run perfectly forever - pests may strike, fertilizers may run low, droughts may occur, but generally, you can leave the day-to-day operation of the farm in the hands of the farmer dwarves, while you can focus on other aspects of the game.

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Violate the Earth!
Post by: The Phoenixian on February 13, 2011, 04:28:58 pm

Quote from: AngleWyrm on February 12, 2011, 03:08:37 am

Also, check out the medical tab; it has many shorthand coded entries, and yet it is still legible. How? Because it has a legend at the bottom of the screen that tells what each symbol means. This screen would be better with the addition of a legend somewhere near the bottom of the screen.

Quote from: NW_Kohaku on February 12, 2011, 10:00:01 am

As for a set of explanations for what each symbol means, I unfortunately don't think that's viable without taking up too much space in this one window.  (I've actually remembered more buttons that I want to add into this screen, to handle certain odd circumstances.) I think that players will just need to be told from a help window or a different window what these symbols mean.

Ah, A thought here: While it players would need to be told in a help/legends window, perhaps a link could be left as a ?:Legend (or somesuch) next to the bits that would be most confusing to someone first encountering it. (Such as the symbol chart)

Though I suspect it's something you've already thought of.

Also, because I flunked out of the Ninja academy: The "How it works" section is pretty much how I thought it would work.

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Violate the Earth!
Post by: NW_Kohaku on February 13, 2011, 04:41:49 pm

Quote from: The Phoenixian on February 13, 2011, 04:28:58 pm

Ah, A thought here: While it players would need to be told in a help/legends window, perhaps a link could be left as a ?:Legend (or somesuch) next to the bits that would be most confusing to someone first encountering it. (Such as the symbol chart)

Though I suspect it's something you've already thought of.

Also, because I flunked out of the Ninja academy: The "How it works" section is pretty much how I thought it would work.

Yeah, a help page summary of symbols is probably going to be mandatory.  (Of course, it will also be up on the wiki within a week or so...)

I'm glad several of you have been able to keep up, however, I'm also keenly aware of the fact that the overwhelming majority of forum-users are just going to take one look at my thread, and decide to, at most, give a short skim of it, and I think having some sort of tl;dr version of the thread with a link to a simplified, quick "how to use it" section and some pretty pictures is the most concise way I can present this information to the Twitter-age people who are leary of reading anything with more than 500 characters unless they have guaratees of porn or a chance to shout out their opinions on politics or game consoles or something at the end.

Simply making a thread with a suggestion isn't enough, I have to also make it accessable enough that people are willing to read it.  Just like DF needs to have at least enough playability to get someone to be willing to learn its interface, no matter how good the systems behind it are.  I'm trying to take the time out to both make it extremely complex and deep and also accessable enough for someone to want to try reading/playing what I am offering.

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Violate the Earth!
Post by: NW_Kohaku on February 13, 2011, 09:35:39 pm

Fertilizers section is now ready for your perusal.

---

Random thought on symbols:

Since we've been talking about card suit symbols, what if the soil nutrients were symbolized as follows:

♣ - Nitrogen
♦ - Phosphorus
♥ - Potassium
♠ - Biomass

Those are the most heavily symbolic of the symbols, anyway, since we don't even really tell players what NPK means.  That way, even without knowing which one of those nutrients is what, you can just tell the card suits are related soil nutrient values.  Might as well let them just think "I need more clubs and don't need to put as many diamonds in the soil".  I could put the symbols in the nutrient view, as well, so that players can see that ♣ is next to one of the soil descriptors in the view plot window.

---

OK... so what to do next?  I can do alternate crop types and fisheries, the growth process, pollution, and the Advanced NPK system where I explain the exact mechanics of the variables.  After that, there's the livestock and then the nutrition and then the xenobiology sections.

How can I write so much crap and still have so much left to write?!

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Violate the Earth!
Post by: NW_Kohaku on February 15, 2011, 03:36:10 pm

Got a little sidetracked... Pollutants should be out soon.

---

Quote from: NW_Kohaku

Quote from: G-Flex on February 15, 2011, 02:12:03 pm

I agree. In general, if you're going to simulate societies, you cannot adequately simulate one aspect without adequately simulating the others (within reason). Obviously, if the game were solely about war, you could make the other parts more abstract and still have a successful simulation, but that isn't the case here. Simulated cultures need to be viewed on a sort of holistic level, with each aspect influencing the others and the whole, and that's where DF could feasibly shine.

To be honest, this ties into why I'm so afraid that fantasy races in DF will just wind up as copies of each other with different flavor. I don't know that there's a serious risk of this, but think about it: Even dwarves have their own flavors of large-scale agriculture and woodworking even when entirely below-ground. I'd rather that dwarves, say, suck at farming altogether, and have limited access to relatively poor underground "wood", and have to consider what implications that has for their species and the questions it raises... rather than them having "forestry, but underground" and "agriculture, but underground".

To an extent, this requires some greater complexity of modeling.

In the farming thread, I've actually been musing to myself that the altered way in which herbalism and weed growth can be abstracted would allow for an "elven farming" method that does not involve actual direct farming, but rather the culturing of certain soil conditions and purposeful introduction of specific pests (or hunting of undesirable pests) could allow a careful enough culture to grow "weeds" of marketable food crops and freak tons of rope reed to make into clothing that you trade with dwarves.

Dwarves will, unless we somehow bar them from certain aboveground farming techniques or technologies altogether, generally have the ability to do everything, even living aboveground, if the player chooses to do so, although whether you live above or below ground and farm will have pretty massive differences in how the game will play out when choosing to grow plants without access to photosynthesis as an energy source means you have to play with xenosynthesis and potenially dangerous magic energy sources for the ecology coming from the caverns.

Goblins, being carnivores, would have to either be hunters or dedicated ranchers to feed themselves.  Either having cattle drives, or having some sort of magic-fueled slop farming to feed their livestock.  All you need to do is make livestock need to eat, too, and put limits on how much grass grows in an area, and you've already got the major difference in goblin farming.

There's a lot of differentiation you can create, but it takes a complexity of modeling to make meaningful differentiation.

Quote from: G-Flex

Quote from: NW_Kohaku

To an extent, this requires some greater complexity of modeling.

Agreed.

Quote

Dwarves will, unless we somehow bar them from certain aboveground farming techniques or technologies altogether, generally have the ability to do everything, even living aboveground, if the player chooses to do so, although whether you live above or below ground and farm will have pretty massive differences in how the game will play out when choosing to grow plants without access to photosynthesis as an energy source means you have to play with xenosynthesis and potenially dangerous magic energy sources for the ecology coming from the caverns.

I don't think this needs to apply to dwarves any more than it applies to, say, humans or elves, really (except perhaps for cultural reasons).

The fact is that dwarves are adapted to life underground. That much is obvious. As such, it makes sense to me that their biology and/or culture are adapted less to life above-ground. For instance, I don't think it's really fair, and is actually kind of boring, to assume that dwarves have just as much of a knack for typical above-ground agriculture as humans despite not doing it and not caring much for the sun.

Quote

Goblins, being carnivores, would have to either be hunters or dedicated ranchers to feed themselves.  Either having cattle drives, or having some sort of magic-fueled slop farming to feed their livestock.  All you need to do is make livestock need to eat, too, and put limits on how much grass grows in an area, and you've already got the major difference in goblin farming.

I'm not sure ranching alone is even close to efficient enough to sustain a large society, so there would have to be something else going on. Basically, there's a reason why larger human societies needed agriculture to begin with. That being said, this necessitates either something magical, or something militaristic (raids for resources, etc.), or some other consideration to account for this. But see, to me, that's the fun part: Starting with some assumption (like "dwarves live underground" and "goblins are mostly carnivorous") and trying to find ways for it to actually work. To me, you can create pretty compelling entities that way, and ones that act realistically (in terms of their behavior being realistic, not "realistic" in the sense of replicating Earth).

I just hate to see dwarves as "humans, except stockier and better at living underground". To me, it's a lot more meaningful if their underground life is more difficult in certain ways. For instance, I'd like it if dwarven underground farming weren't nearly as efficient as the human variety; after all, it's not as if dwarves don't have their explicitly and implicit advantages as well. It would also fairly neatly justify the fact that dwarven societies tend to be a little more sparse, less expansionist, and more isolated/low-population, whereas humans (fueled by agriculture) have more sprawling, massive, expanding settlements, and elves can basically live wherever in the woods they feel like by ostensibly living in a harmonious ecology with the world around them.

Of course, if dwarven underground farming is relatively inefficient, that means dwarves must have other compelling reasons not to just set up shop above-ground and farm there. Why this would be the case, I'm not sure, but possibilities are certainly open. For example, maybe they're less naturally capable of dealing with certain adverse environmental conditions (after all, underground areas don't have weather and stay at a relatively stable temperature year-round).

Basically, my point is that I want to see compelling differences between races, not just the flavorful but essentially meaningless "they make beer, except they do it in caves" variety. Dwarves being the standard player race in this game, there's probably a big temptation to make them good at absolutely everything, but I don't really think that should be the case. I'd rather see dwarves do interesting things with stone and glass and metal and clay than see them use wood for everything like a human would, for example. "How would dwarves live?" is a pretty interesting question that could result in some pretty interesting answers, and I don't think the game should avoid that. The proliferation of underground forests already kind of feels like it skirts the question in favor of shoehorning in above-ground elements so that the dwarves have access to them no matter where they live, so that they can engage in industry that, by all reason, the humans and elves should be more inclined towards.

Quote

There's a lot of differentiation you can create, but it takes a complexity of modeling to make meaningful differentiation.

Definitely. Even a question like "why don't humans dig underground or as well as often as dwarves?" has answers like "because dwarves don't get blacklung or heavy metal poisoning" that require more simulation than the game currently has to offer.

The thing is, either we can make a farming system, and then not let dwarves use all of it, in which case, it seems like a bit of a waste to actually model it all, or we can let dwarves do everything, and then just say that there's some sort of social mores that dwarves don't actually do that sort of thing usually (like, say, building forts in a flat swamp instead of near a mountain), but that the player can merrily break all social tradition without repercussion.

I think, to an extent, the reason why dwarves are so "overpowered" is simply because all the things that are in the game are the things dwarves do well, and anything that elves are supposed to do well aren't in the game.  If elves as a playable race aren't in the game yet, why give them something you'll never play in Vanilla, when you could be adding more fun things for Vanilla players to enjoy?

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Violate the Earth!
Post by: G-Flex on February 15, 2011, 03:56:39 pm

Quote from: NW_Kohaku on February 15, 2011, 03:36:10 pm

The thing is, either we can make a farming system, and then not let dwarves use all of it, in which case, it seems like a bit of a waste to actually model it all, or we can let dwarves do everything, and then just say that there's some sort of social mores that dwarves don't actually do that sort of thing usually (like, say, building forts in a flat swamp instead of near a mountain), but that the player can merrily break all social tradition without repercussion.

I don't see why it would be a waste, since the other races would still use it, and other races being available in fortress mode is also a valid goal.

I'm also not saying that dwarves flat-out shouldn't be able to use above-ground farming successfully, just that the disadvantages to them should somehow outweigh the benefits (and those benefits should be more than just cultural, even if they're mostly circumstantial).

Also, a complex farming system could still be applied to underground crops as well. There's no reason why not, and it's not like I'm suggesting underground farming be removed. I'm only saying that it makes sense for underground farming to be less efficient, and less capable of sustaining the kind of sprawl that dwarves don't really have in the first place, and that it would make sense if (on a more cultural level), dwarves just didn't have the kind of expertise on par with the humans when it comes to above-ground farming (hell, they're hardly accustomed to rain!).

Quote

I think, to an extent, the reason why dwarves are so "overpowered" is simply because all the things that are in the game are the things dwarves do well, and anything that elves are supposed to do well aren't in the game.  If elves as a playable race aren't in the game yet, why give them something you'll never play in Vanilla, when you could be adding more fun things for Vanilla players to enjoy?

I agree, but we have to consider the larger simulation as well, as well as the fact that implementing non-dwarf stuff is a necessary step on the way to allowing non-dwarf play.

I mean, hell, I want to see big complicated elven tree-compounds even if I don't want to build them in Fortress Mode. We can at least visit them, right?

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Violate the Earth!
Post by: NW_Kohaku on February 15, 2011, 04:25:32 pm

Quote from: G-Flex on February 15, 2011, 03:56:39 pm

I don't see why it would be a waste, since the other races would still use it, and other races being available in fortress mode is also a valid goal.

It's only a waste until you actually can play as those races.

Basically, I think it's putting the cart before the horse.  I think that adding in features that dwarves can't use is a solution to a problem (making alternate play modes) that hasn't yet been created.  When the addition of other race play modes becomes imminent, then the need to add in special technologies, lifestyles, and other key differentiations becomes a real problem that demands solving. 

Until then, players will want to see game mode changes that they can actually do something with. 

To a certain extent, most of my suggestions involve actually creating the problems that players then have to solve, rather than trying to solve non-existant problems just to add something into the game.  This is why there are complaints about "Some Sort of Honeybee (http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=76606.0)" when Toady is just throwing out small additions.

Quote from: G-Flex on February 15, 2011, 03:56:39 pm

Also, a complex farming system could still be applied to underground crops as well. There's no reason why not, and it's not like I'm suggesting underground farming be removed. I'm only saying that it makes sense for underground farming to be less efficient,

I'm actually trying to spin off an "exotic energy source (http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=76007.msg1938131#msg1938131)" discussion on magic energy fields (http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=76578.0) to describe how plants grow underground.  Basically, instead of just growing as if they were aboveground plants just by magic, they grow underground by... well... by magic, but it's magic with rules. 

Kidding aside, as an overall expansion upon the idea of what a farm really is, I'm working on an idea of dwarves impacting ecosystems, and underground ecosystems are just plain magical, so I want to try to make a convincing simulation of a magic-based ecosystem while I'm at it.

Quote from: G-Flex on February 15, 2011, 03:56:39 pm

I'm also not saying that dwarves flat-out shouldn't be able to use above-ground farming successfully, just that the disadvantages to them should somehow outweigh the benefits (and those benefits should be more than just cultural, even if they're mostly circumstantial).[/url]

Right, I'll agree on that front, and think that some sort of dwarven "disability" that makes aboveground farming somehow not advisable is a good idea, and that it warrants discussing what sort of reasons dwarves would want to undertake underground farming if it is less efficient or more dangerous than aboveground farming. 

So... What sort of dwarven disability would there be that could make growing aboveground food not preferable to growing underground food?

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Violate the Earth!
Post by: G-Flex on February 15, 2011, 04:51:19 pm

Quote from: NW_Kohaku on February 15, 2011, 04:25:32 pm

Basically, I think it's putting the cart before the horse.  I think that adding in features that dwarves can't use is a solution to a problem (making alternate play modes) that hasn't yet been created.  When the addition of other race play modes becomes imminent, then the need to add in special technologies, lifestyles, and other key differentiations becomes a real problem that demands solving.

You could view it that way, or you could say that adding other play modes is only possible when those features have already been implemented. They really go hand-in-hand, where you don't want to implement elves as a player race until you have their tree forts, but you also don't want to implement tree forts too long before the player cares that they exist. That being said, I certainly understand prioritizing features towards dwarves specifically, as has been done so far.

Quote

Right, I'll agree on that front, and think that some sort of dwarven "disability" that makes aboveground farming somehow not advisable is a good idea, and that it warrants discussing what sort of reasons dwarves would want to undertake underground farming if it is less efficient or more dangerous than aboveground farming. 

So... What sort of dwarven disability would there be that could make growing aboveground food not preferable to growing underground food?

• Defensive/logistical reasons. A self-sustaining underground fortress is a whole lot easier to defend and manage than a fortress that's mostly underground but has vast above-ground pastures and fields.
• Dwarves, as I mentioned before, wouldn't be as accustomed to the things you have to deal with topside. Certainly dwarves do understand things like weather and seasons, but they're not something dwarves have to deal with very often, so they might not be as used to doing so, or as good at it. Above-ground farming would present almost literally a whole new world of things for dwarves to have to understand, predict, and deal with, and as human agriculture and almanacs can attest, that stuff is complicated and takes effort even if things like "rain" and "snow" and "clouds" are totally normal to you, which isn't the case for dwarves. Basically, they'd have to sink a lot of cost into figuring out things that humans have figured out almost by default.
• On that note, to reiterate another point, maybe dwarven biology isn't quite as good at standing up to the rigors of harsh weather/climate, since they normally don't have to deal with that; seasons barely exist to them in their underground homes, and weather doesn't exist much at all. This makes underground farming a bit more comfortable and safe to them.
• For similar reasons, underground farming might be more reliable, at least on smaller scales. I'm sure it might have its downsides, but on the other hand, you don't have to deal with having an exceptionally cold winter, or some of the other environmental effects that you have above ground. For a race that doesn't really deal with seasons and doesn't care much for farming, it makes sense to grow crops in a manner that you can do year-round without having to worry about such things.
• Dwarves live in mountainous regions, where typical above-ground farming might be more difficult to begin with, although certainly not impossible.
• As I said, dwarves don't seem to have the kind of expansionist mindset that humans have, and if that's the case, they might not need the kind of large-scale agriculture necessary for sustaining large human populations. This goes into issues of what dwarves are inclined towards doing as a race; whereas humans are big on survival/adaptation/expansion, perhaps dwarves are more content to live in smaller, more stable populations and focus on crafts and other forms of cultural advancement.

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Violate the Earth!
Post by: NW_Kohaku on February 15, 2011, 05:26:56 pm

Quote from: G-Flex on February 15, 2011, 04:51:19 pm

Defensive/logistical reasons. A self-sustaining underground fortress is a whole lot easier to defend and manage than a fortress that's mostly underground but has vast above-ground pastures and fields.

This is something implied, but not forced with the current system.

You can still make a "surface dwarven settlement", and just wall it in.  If we, at the very least, make sure there aren't "stone greenhouses" that grow aboveground crops underneath a stone roof, then at the very least, you invite fliers to attack, although we don't have enough serious flying threats to make that a perfect solution.

Also, why are humans capable of doing it?

If humans are just plain willing to accept the casualties of aboveground farming, while dwarves aren't, then it's just a cultural difference.

Quote from: G-Flex on February 15, 2011, 04:51:19 pm

Dwarves, as I mentioned before, wouldn't be as accustomed to the things you have to deal with topside. Certainly dwarves do understand things like weather and seasons, but they're not something dwarves have to deal with very often, so they might not be as used to doing so, or as good at it. Above-ground farming would present almost literally a whole new world of things for dwarves to have to understand, predict, and deal with, and as human agriculture and almanacs can attest, that stuff is complicated and takes effort even if things like "rain" and "snow" and "clouds" are totally normal to you, which isn't the case for dwarves. Basically, they'd have to sink a lot of cost into figuring out things that humans have figured out almost by default.

While I can agree with and understand this concept in theory, it meets very stiff resistance when you start talking about how you would apply this sort of idea.

When I started talking about needing to fill out encyclopedias or almanacs to be able to really see what the requirements of plants are for growing them in the proposed interface, a good portion of the people who read that see "Research" and think "Tech Tree".

It may not be impossible to implement, but it makes passage of the suggestion as a whole much more opposed.

Researching plants to understand them also adds to the interface complexity, since you then need to start obscuring parts of the interface that give you data until you have enough research accrued to pass whatever threshold value you have for actually learning the important information on a plant.

That said, I'm not really opposed to it, it's just something I'm not going to prioritize fighting for.  Unlike the interdependent systems in this suggestion, this is really something that can be slapped on after everything else.

Quote from: G-Flex on February 15, 2011, 04:51:19 pm

On that note, to reiterate another point, maybe dwarven biology isn't quite as good at standing up to the rigors of harsh weather/climate, since they normally don't have to deal with that; seasons barely exist to them in their underground homes, and weather doesn't exist much at all. This makes underground farming a bit more comfortable and safe to them.[/li]
[li]For similar reasons, underground farming might be more reliable, at least on smaller scales. I'm sure it might have its downsides, but on the other hand, you don't have to deal with having an exceptionally cold winter, or some of the other environmental effects that you have above ground. For a race that doesn't really deal with seasons and doesn't care much for farming, it makes sense to grow crops in a manner that you can do year-round without having to worry about such things.

Heh, that brings up the question of why aboveground farming is year-round, while underground farming is seasonal, again... In the Xenosynthesis thread, I mentioned that perhaps underground magic fields are seasonal, and quarry bushes need a magic type only available during certain times of year.

This sounds like a pretty viable concept... although caves tend to be slightly colder, and a "stocky" body is better at retaining heat, so it would make more sense that they be better in cold climates, but worse in hot climates (meaning heat stroke would be a problem... maybe they don't sweat the way that humans do, either?)

The problem with this, however, is why do they wind up being good at working a hot forge directly over a magma vent, then?

Quote from: G-Flex on February 15, 2011, 04:51:19 pm

• Dwarves live in mountainous regions, where typical above-ground farming might be more difficult to begin with, although certainly not impossible.
• As I said, dwarves don't seem to have the kind of expansionist mindset that humans have, and if that's the case, they might not need the kind of large-scale agriculture necessary for sustaining large human populations. This goes into issues of what dwarves are inclined towards doing as a race; whereas humans are big on survival/adaptation/expansion, perhaps dwarves are more content to live in smaller, more stable populations and focus on crafts and other forms of cultural advancement.

These are cultural claims, again.

Actually, it almost seems like you could say "Dwarves are humans that went to live in the mountains, where the metal ores are, and their bodies adapted to cave life", more than you can say "Dwarves are largely unsuited to surface life".

In Dragon Age's setting, dwarves just hate the surface and surface ways as a matter of cultural stubbornness, even if it is clearly self-destructive. 

Maybe we just need something that introduces some societal ramifications to working aboveground?  Only an "untouchable caste" or the like can work aboveground? 

That, or make cave adaptation a much more crippling disease that is much harder to get over, and have immigrants arrive at your fortress through the caverns or make tunnel roads to reach your fortress...

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Violate the Earth!
Post by: G-Flex on February 15, 2011, 05:54:45 pm

Quote from: NW_Kohaku on February 15, 2011, 05:26:56 pm

Quote from: G-Flex on February 15, 2011, 04:51:19 pm

Defensive/logistical reasons. A self-sustaining underground fortress is a whole lot easier to defend and manage than a fortress that's mostly underground but has vast above-ground pastures and fields.

This is something implied, but not forced with the current system.

You can still make a "surface dwarven settlement", and just wall it in.  If we, at the very least, make sure there aren't "stone greenhouses" that grow aboveground crops underneath a stone roof, then at the very least, you invite fliers to attack, although we don't have enough serious flying threats to make that a perfect solution.

Also, why are humans capable of doing it?

If humans are just plain willing to accept the casualties of aboveground farming, while dwarves aren't, then it's just a cultural difference.

First off, I understand the game currently doesn't simulate this well. I'm not talking about the game as it stands, I'm just thinking out loud about concepts.

At any rate, humans deal with it because they don't live underground in the first place. Of course, then the question becomes "why not?" which I go into at least a little bit elsewhere.

Quote

Quote from: G-Flex on February 15, 2011, 04:51:19 pm

Dwarves, as I mentioned before, wouldn't be as accustomed to the things you have to deal with topside. Certainly dwarves do understand things like weather and seasons, but they're not something dwarves have to deal with very often, so they might not be as used to doing so, or as good at it. Above-ground farming would present almost literally a whole new world of things for dwarves to have to understand, predict, and deal with, and as human agriculture and almanacs can attest, that stuff is complicated and takes effort even if things like "rain" and "snow" and "clouds" are totally normal to you, which isn't the case for dwarves. Basically, they'd have to sink a lot of cost into figuring out things that humans have figured out almost by default.

While I can agree with and understand this concept in theory, it meets very stiff resistance when you start talking about how you would apply this sort of idea.

When I started talking about needing to fill out encyclopedias or almanacs to be able to really see what the requirements of plants are for growing them in the proposed interface, a good portion of the people who read that see "Research" and think "Tech Tree".

It may not be impossible to implement, but it makes passage of the suggestion as a whole much more opposed.

Researching plants to understand them also adds to the interface complexity, since you then need to start obscuring parts of the interface that give you data until you have enough research accrued to pass whatever threshold value you have for actually learning the important information on a plant.

That said, I'm not really opposed to it, it's just something I'm not going to prioritize fighting for.  Unlike the interdependent systems in this suggestion, this is really something that can be slapped on after everything else.

It would have to be implemented in a relatively abstract way, yes, and I'm not sure how you'd do that. I agree that it's a difficult thing to propose, but I don't think it's impossible either.

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Quote from: G-Flex on February 15, 2011, 04:51:19 pm

On that note, to reiterate another point, maybe dwarven biology isn't quite as good at standing up to the rigors of harsh weather/climate, since they normally don't have to deal with that; seasons barely exist to them in their underground homes, and weather doesn't exist much at all. This makes underground farming a bit more comfortable and safe to them.[/li]
[li]For similar reasons, underground farming might be more reliable, at least on smaller scales. I'm sure it might have its downsides, but on the other hand, you don't have to deal with having an exceptionally cold winter, or some of the other environmental effects that you have above ground. For a race that doesn't really deal with seasons and doesn't care much for farming, it makes sense to grow crops in a manner that you can do year-round without having to worry about such things.

Heh, that brings up the question of why aboveground farming is year-round, while underground farming is seasonal, again... In the Xenosynthesis thread, I mentioned that perhaps underground magic fields are seasonal, and quarry bushes need a magic type only available during certain times of year.

In my opinion, underground farming is seasonal and aboveground farming is not because:

• Underground farming was made seasonal because, hey, it's farming, and that's seasonal.
• Aboveground farming is mostly an afterthought in its current iteration.

In other words, I don't dwell on it much because it just seems like an arbitrary quirk of development.

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This sounds like a pretty viable concept... although caves tend to be slightly colder, and a "stocky" body is better at retaining heat, so it would make more sense that they be better in cold climates, but worse in hot climates (meaning heat stroke would be a problem... maybe they don't sweat the way that humans do, either?)

The problem with this, however, is why do they wind up being good at working a hot forge directly over a magma vent, then?

Eh, maybe their metabolisms (or something else) just don't function quite the same way as those of humans. Also, retaining your body heat doesn't necessarily mean you'll be as good at fighting off things like frostbite.

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Quote from: G-Flex on February 15, 2011, 04:51:19 pm

• Dwarves live in mountainous regions, where typical above-ground farming might be more difficult to begin with, although certainly not impossible.
• As I said, dwarves don't seem to have the kind of expansionist mindset that humans have, and if that's the case, they might not need the kind of large-scale agriculture necessary for sustaining large human populations. This goes into issues of what dwarves are inclined towards doing as a race; whereas humans are big on survival/adaptation/expansion, perhaps dwarves are more content to live in smaller, more stable populations and focus on crafts and other forms of cultural advancement.

These are cultural claims, again.

Actually, it almost seems like you could say "Dwarves are humans that went to live in the mountains, where the metal ores are, and their bodies adapted to cave life", more than you can say "Dwarves are largely unsuited to surface life".

They're cultural, but maybe they also aren't. It depends why they live underground. You could develop a physiological basis for this for sure. Dwarves are good at seeing in low light, dealing with mineral-based toxins, and working in three dimensions in curvy passageways and that sort of thing. Those can be fairly innate traits, and one of those (spatial reasoning) already is. On the flip side of that, they need to be less adapted to outdoor life than humans are, or else, again, it doesn't make much sense anymore.

Normally, though, adapting to one circumstance means you're no longer adapted quite as much to the opposing circumstance... so how does that apply in this case? Maybe they don't see as sharply as humans do in normal/bright light levels (which actually is true of many nocturnal animals); they could even be very near-sighted in comparison, not having to see things a mile off like we do. Maybe they can't run as fast, although that probably doesn't matter too much. Maybe their brains don't really have circadian rhythms the way humans' do (how could you underground for generations?), and the day-night cycle screws them up or they rely on a completely different sort of biological clock. Maybe they're more susceptible to the allergens/toxins you find above-ground than humans are. For instance, water cleanliness being such a huge problem back in the day, it's possible they just can't tolerate those kinds of diseases as well, since underground water sources don't have those problems as much (perhaps in favor of different ones). Perhaps their skin and eyes are more sensitive to, and easily damaged by, sunlight. At any rate, the point is that reasons can be contrived or derived if necessary, and that dwarves living underground can certainly be said to have a biological basis/incentive if it's decided as such.

Also, dwarves could have any other number of neurological/innate psychological differences from humans, which for one reason or another would give them difficulty working above-ground. I can't think of any examples right now, though, except sense-related ones (including the more obscure senses; again referring to spatial sense, perhaps they have difficulty having a "feel" for a large area like a field, since they're adapted to tighter spaces, whereas they're better at dealing with corridors and corners and three dimensions?).

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Maybe we just need something that introduces some societal ramifications to working aboveground?  Only an "untouchable caste" or the like can work aboveground? 

That, or make cave adaptation a much more crippling disease that is much harder to get over, and have immigrants arrive at your fortress through the caverns or make tunnel roads to reach your fortress...

Considering how much dwarves love labor, I don't see them ever really having a slave/untouchable caste to do work for them. After all, if you have a subhuman caste in your society, you don't have them do the stuff you find virtuous or fulfilling, and dwarves seem to think that way about toil and labor. That's just my opinion, though.

I think it's definitely a good idea to have dwarven settlements connected more via tunnels. They already sort of are, so I think that should be a possibility for dwarven fortresses, at least at some point after their settlement.

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Violate the Earth!
Post by: Maklak on February 15, 2011, 06:53:22 pm

I've read through all initial posts and some discussion afterwards, but not all of it.

Here are my thoughts on the subject.

I'm ok with grazing animals as long as I can just wall off a section of aboveground, put there a pasture and milking / cheesemaking workshop, animals will stay there and won't affect my FPS much. Maybe also give them a water source.

I'm ok with sometimes having to water my farmplots, but not with reallistic restrictions of water availability. I use "freezing water replicator" exploit, and just water from murky pools when it rains wouldn't be enough for me. A brook / river should have enough water for a town. Besides underground tree farms, and large-scale obsidian casting require large amounts of water.

I find keeping track of various nutrients to be more than I'm willing to bother with farming. I'd preffer to have just one abstract "fertilizer level" rather than NPK. It would gradually deplete, and deplete faster with the same crop growing over and over on the same plot, increase slowly when plot is fallow, and could be replenished by potash and some other fertilizers. I don't like current mechanics, where fertilizer dissapears entirely after each season, it should do so gradually. 

Brewing booze should require water.

Bigger plots would nerf farming considerably. If 3x3 plots only grew one plant each, people would need to build more of them.

Higher consumption, and overal balancing of cooking and butchering would also help farming considerably. 

Corpses don't make good compost. They rot, and attract bad kind of vermin and bacteria. In fact, one of advices in making compost, is not to add any animal leftovers. For composting you want plants, and maybe small amounts of gringed stones, eggshells, ash and bone. Still, I'd rather use my bones for crossbow bolts than fertilizer. 
Coposting would still be a nice way of getting rid of torn clothes, but I generally assume dwarfs do some things behind the scenes, including composting, and going to toilets.

Vermin is mostly fine as it is now, but it could be attracted to farms, and decrase amounts of crops.

Predator - prey equation from wikipedia looks too quirky. It only considers single predator and single prey, while to me it seems, that predators can switch to whatever pray is availible, and migrate. Still, I'm partly wrong in this view, as we are occasionally getting populational explosions of some species, just not as much as those equations would suggest. Still, that would make for somewhat interesting if game behaviour of animal populations. On year you get flooded by groundhogs, and 2 winters later sieged by packs of hungry wolves.

Look up permaculture. It is an attempt at creating sustainable agriculture. It is not one way to set up farms, but rather an umbrella term for many, including partially edible forests. It is generally based on the idea of creating diversified ecosystems composed largely of edible parts. It is not hyper-optimized for pumping out lare amounts of cash crops, requires much knowledge and work to set up, but is an interesting idea. Also, rather then fallow plots every now and then, it actually includes plants, that won't be harvested in every planting. I don't think something like that is applicable in DF, as we want monocultures, and I mentioned it mostly because you said, you haven't found any farming system, that gives crops every time.

Please don't answer mith more than 2 screens of text.

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Violate the Earth!
Post by: NW_Kohaku on February 15, 2011, 07:35:51 pm

Maklak: I'll get to you in a bit.

Quote from: G-Flex on February 15, 2011, 05:54:45 pm

First off, I understand the game currently doesn't simulate this well. I'm not talking about the game as it stands, I'm just thinking out loud about concepts.

Well, if the objective here is to come up with plausable interpretations for why dwarves are like the way they are, and there are meaningful differences between that and humans, then there's nothing wrong with making a suggestion that doesn't fly, it just means you need to go back to the drawing board for another one.  "I'm just thinking out loud about concepts," is a line signifying disowning your idea.

Saying that dwarves don't farm aboveground because of the risk of death while humans are willing to put up with a few attacks implies either that attacks against humans are not as bad as attacks on dwarves, human villagers are stronger and better at combat generally than dwarves, or that dwarves are either cowards or humans are suicidally brave.

I doubt all of those would be attractive options to the typical DF player...

Quote from: G-Flex on February 15, 2011, 05:54:45 pm

It would have to be implemented in a relatively abstract way, yes, and I'm not sure how you'd do that. I agree that it's a difficult thing to propose, but I don't think it's impossible either.

I'd also have to ask "why don't they know, aren't there dwarves on the surface?"  Also, if the only bar to entry as an aboveground farmer is needing to do some research, then once it's done, there's no reason not to farm like a human.

Quote from: G-Flex on February 15, 2011, 05:54:45 pm

Eh, maybe their metabolisms (or something else) just don't function quite the same way as those of humans. Also, retaining your body heat doesn't necessarily mean you'll be as good at fighting off things like frostbite.

That's fairly vague.  How could someone's metabolism be "different" in a way that they retain heat well, but are still vulnerable to frostbite?

Quote from: G-Flex on February 15, 2011, 05:54:45 pm

Normally, though, adapting to one circumstance means you're no longer adapted quite as much to the opposing circumstance... so how does that apply in this case? Maybe they don't see as sharply as humans do in normal/bright light levels (which actually is true of many nocturnal animals); they could even be very near-sighted in comparison, not having to see things a mile off like we do. Maybe they can't run as fast, although that probably doesn't matter too much. Maybe their brains don't really have circadian rhythms the way humans' do (how could you underground for generations?), and the day-night cycle screws them up or they rely on a completely different sort of biological clock. Maybe they're more susceptible to the allergens/toxins you find above-ground than humans are. For instance, water cleanliness being such a huge problem back in the day, it's possible they just can't tolerate those kinds of diseases as well, since underground water sources don't have those problems as much (perhaps in favor of different ones). Perhaps their skin and eyes are more sensitive to, and easily damaged by, sunlight. At any rate, the point is that reasons can be contrived or derived if necessary, and that dwarves living underground can certainly be said to have a biological basis/incentive if it's decided as such.

Also, dwarves could have any other number of neurological/innate psychological differences from humans, which for one reason or another would give them difficulty working above-ground. I can't think of any examples right now, though, except sense-related ones (including the more obscure senses; again referring to spatial sense, perhaps they have difficulty having a "feel" for a large area like a field, since they're adapted to tighter spaces, whereas they're better at dealing with corridors and corners and three dimensions?).

Ahhh, the good stuff.

I've actually had some fun with the idea that "dwarves are neanderthals":

Quote from: NW_Kohaku on January 31, 2011, 02:35:56 pm

Dwarves, meanwhile, I've always thought of more along the lines of the Neanderthals.  They're shorter, stockier, better suited for slightly colder climates because their bodies are more compact.  They have short legs that make them poor long-distance runners, and poorly adapted for open plains, but they also have powerful upper body strength, and can make great ambush hunters where their slow speed and poor running stamina isn't as much a problem.

History Channel had a special on it, speculating that early humans would have competed with neanderthals over food resources, but while humans hunted with bows, neanderthals hunted like true dwarves would - they attacked the biggest, most dangerous game they could find (wooly mammoths, basically, elephants) by jumping on its back from ambush and trying to hack its throat out with a sharpened stone spear before the mammoth could toss the neanderthal off, and gore him/her horrifically.  Remains of neanderthals were examined to reveal hunters often broke multiple limbs on multiple occasions and had several wounds that implied they had been impaled in major organs in their short, violent lives.

Long story short, neanderthals were the real-life dwarves.

Something like having unease in eating aboveground foods or vulnerability to aboveground diseases sounds fairly interesting.  It could be similar to cave adaptation, in fact.  There could be a "cave food adaptation", where dwarves are not capable of handling aboveground foods or diseases after a long time underground, eating only underground food. 

It takes some serious work at acclimating to surface life for a dwarf, and maybe the dwarf could be seen as a little odd for having done it. 

The starting seven might be "surface acclimated", and capable of eating the strange above-ground food, but migrants might very well not be, and will be unhappy and probably even incapacitatingly sick until they can acclimate their bodies to aboveground food in small but gradually larger doses. 

Underground farming would just be an easier alternative, then.

Quote from: G-Flex on February 15, 2011, 05:54:45 pm

Considering how much dwarves love labor, I don't see them ever really having a slave/untouchable caste to do work for them. After all, if you have a subhuman caste in your society, you don't have them do the stuff you find virtuous or fulfilling, and dwarves seem to think that way about toil and labor. That's just my opinion, though.

I think it's definitely a good idea to have dwarven settlements connected more via tunnels. They already sort of are, so I think that should be a possibility for dwarven fortresses, at least at some point after their settlement.

Castes in human societies are often divided along what jobs people do. 

Tanning leather requires letting the hide "cure" in urine, feces, and possibly even scrubbing it with the brains of animals.  It was such a horrid process, with such a terrible odor, that the real-life "untouchables" are the descendants of tanners.  In several of their religions, tanning is so horrid a process that ever having done it taints your soul and the soul of your descendants.

Compare to government officials, priests, and military generally being the top ranks of every society, as well as merchants and craftsmen forming a middle class, with a labor and farming class below that.

Maybe lumberjacks are the lowest rungs of dwarven society, while legendary microcline mug crafters, weaponsmiths, soldiers, and maybe miners are the highest-praised.

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Violate the Earth!
Post by: G-Flex on February 15, 2011, 07:53:12 pm

Quote from: NW_Kohaku on February 15, 2011, 07:35:51 pm

Well, if the objective here is to come up with plausable interpretations for why dwarves are like the way they are, and there are meaningful differences between that and humans, then there's nothing wrong with making a suggestion that doesn't fly, it just means you need to go back to the drawing board for another one.  "I'm just thinking out loud about concepts," is a line signifying disowning your idea.

First off, I was referring to the fact that we shouldn't discount ideas just because some of the game's current limitations pose problems for them. For instance, you mentioned just building walls around things; yes, that's currently an impenetrable defense, but we shouldn't assume that will always be the case, as it shouldn't be and probably won't be. I'm also not implicitly disowning my ideas, just saying that the first step is to consider the conceptual possibilities, then consider which of those are worth implementing and how.

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Saying that dwarves don't farm aboveground because of the risk of death while humans are willing to put up with a few attacks implies either that attacks against humans are not as bad as attacks on dwarves, human villagers are stronger and better at combat generally than dwarves, or that dwarves are either cowards or humans are suicidally brave.

This is untrue. It could also imply that dwarves have an alternative that humans don't have access to.

My point was that dwarves are more capable of living underground than humans, and already do so, so farming above-ground instead of underground would provide unnecessary added risk to them. With humans, yes, they have to deal with that risk, but only because living underground is a much worse option to them for other reasons (including risks dwarves are more equipped to deal with). There are risks associated with above-ground and below-ground living, and each race is equipped to handle with one or the other more effectively, and even disregarding that, a race exposing themselves to both sets of risks is unnecessary unless there's damn good reason for doing so (see: the few examples of real-life underground settlements). That's what I was getting at.

Quote from: G-Flex on February 15, 2011, 05:54:45 pm

I'd also have to ask "why don't they know, aren't there dwarves on the surface?"  Also, if the only bar to entry as an aboveground farmer is needing to do some research, then once it's done, there's no reason not to farm like a human.

Yeah, but it's research that, to some degree, every farmer would have to do. Stuff we take for granted, like being able to tell when it might rain. My point is that there's more effort involved in training farmers when they don't even have the level of knowledge (of weather, seasons, etc.) that pretty much all humans take for granted. It doesn't make it impossible, just presents an additional barrier to entry, so to speak. Obviously on a societal level it would just become a sunk cost, but even then, it's much harder for even a society as a whole to learn about things they don't expose themselves to daily, and you still have to explain that stuff to the farmers involved. Point is, underground is just more intuitive to them.

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Quote from: G-Flex on February 15, 2011, 05:54:45 pm

Eh, maybe their metabolisms (or something else) just don't function quite the same way as those of humans. Also, retaining your body heat doesn't necessarily mean you'll be as good at fighting off things like frostbite.

That's fairly vague.  How could someone's metabolism be "different" in a way that they retain heat well, but are still vulnerable to frostbite?

I didn't mean to imply that; metabolism has little to do with frostbite. My point was that even if your core retains heat well, it doesn't prevent your extremities and skin from becoming frostbitten, at least not to the same extent to which it protects you against hypothermia. I guess being stocky still is an advantage overall in that sense, though (considering what you say about neanderthals).

I mentioned metabolism because the way the body regulates metabolism is very important to thermal homeostasis, and dwarven bodies might differ a little from humans, and might not be able to adapt to the same kinds of changes in environment, or in the same way.

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It takes some serious work at acclimating to surface life for a dwarf, and maybe the dwarf could be seen as a little odd for having done it.

Yep, and in some ways, it needn't be entirely possible, in the sense that you can't make up for every physiological disadvantage. You can't exactly become farther-sighted that much just by trying, or gain greater resistance to all forms of disease (you know, like expecting a cat to build up a human-like Tylenol tolerance), or rewire your brain's sensory systems all that much.

That being said, some acclimation would certainly be possible.

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The starting seven might be "surface acclimated", and capable of eating the strange above-ground food, but migrants might very well not be, and will be unhappy and probably even incapacitatingly sick until they can acclimate their bodies to aboveground food in small but gradually larger doses.

Yeah, I see the founding dwarves as being either foolhardy, or tough-as-nails, or otherwise just willing to brave extremes (by their standards) in order to found a new settlement. Sort of like human expeditions, in that sense. Of course, in the future, we'll probably have more complicated starting scenarios than "seven dwarves on a mission".

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Maybe lumberjacks are the lowest rungs of dwarven society, while legendary microcline mug crafters, weaponsmiths, soldiers, and maybe miners are the highest-praised.

Yeah, there's definitely some room for play there. However, I like to see dwarves as being a little more egalitarian than humans tended to be. Seems to be way things are shaping up anyway, nobles aside.

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Violate the Earth!
Post by: NW_Kohaku on February 15, 2011, 07:55:05 pm

Quote from: Maklak on February 15, 2011, 06:53:22 pm

Please don't answer mith more than 2 screens of text.

I'll try.

OK, going from the top down...

"I want my water exploits to still work" is not really a great reason to stop changes from being made to systems.  Generally, exploits caused by incomplete coding (like the entire "can prop up an entire fortress on a single bar of soap") can be fun, but really, they are going to have to be fixed eventually, and we'll all learn to adapt to the way the game works post-patch.  That's what the exploits are in the first place: adaptations to the way things are now. 

That said, yes, a brook should probably have enough water for a town under generally normal circumstances.  (I.E. not an unusually huge farming operation or no massive "flood the world" action or extreme obsidian farming operations.  Which is to say, abnormally normal for DF.)  Arguments over how much water each water source should provide is something more like arguing over the rate at which skills are learned by dwarves: It's a variable you can tweak fairly easily once the whole thing is implemented in the game.  The variable having a default value that is too high or low is not going to be a terribly big problem, since it generally is so easy to simply change the variable to match the desired levels.

About "nerfing farms"... Nerfing farms isn't what I want to accomplish.  What I want to accomplish is the creation of a much more deep and compelling simulation of the DF ecosystem and how the dwarves interact with the land.  I want to go beyond the simple "needs labor to make food" problem, and create a whole new set of simulated systems within the game. 

In much the same way that remaking the creature raws completely changed the way that animals are treated in game from simply being differentiated by size, I hope to put in a system that makes plants far more complex and diverse and have far more meaningful values to them than merely "can you eat it?"

I'll look into the way that corpses create compost again, then.  I was mostly thinking of making them generally more toxic than regular compost, anyway, and having players use a special kind of decomposer "crop" that is inedible, but just serves as a means of turning really toxic materials like goblin corpses into more "safe" compost.

I have been looking up permaculture.  It's sort of what I want to implicitly try to guide players towards creating, without having to force their hands on it.  Permaculture systems that allow players to basically set a system into motion, and completely step back and let the dwarves take care of everything on their own without your direct guidance would hopefully be the reward of really getting to know the local ecosystem, and how best to balance your needs with the impact you have on the land around you.

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Violate the Earth!
Post by: G-Flex on February 15, 2011, 07:57:28 pm

Quote from: NW_Kohaku on February 15, 2011, 07:55:05 pm

About "nerfing farms"... Nerfing farms isn't what I want to accomplish.  What I want to accomplish is the creation of a much more deep and compelling simulation of the DF ecosystem and how the dwarves interact with the land.  I want to go beyond the simple "needs labor to make food" problem, and create a whole new set of simulated systems within the game.

I agree. Requiring larger farms (while not a bad thing, in my opinion), for instance, does not make farming more meaningfully difficult, even. It just means you have to have one or two more farmers.

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Violate the Earth!
Post by: NW_Kohaku on February 15, 2011, 09:11:57 pm

Quote from: G-Flex on February 15, 2011, 07:53:12 pm

There are risks associated with above-ground and below-ground living, and each race is equipped to handle with one or the other more effectively, and even disregarding that, a race exposing themselves to both sets of risks is unnecessary unless there's damn good reason for doing so (see: the few examples of real-life underground settlements). That's what I was getting at.

Care to share a link to a resource on those, by the way?  I don't know very much about real-life underground settlements, and I'd be interested to learn.

Quote from: G-Flex on February 15, 2011, 07:53:12 pm

I mentioned metabolism because the way the body regulates metabolism is very important to thermal homeostasis, and dwarven bodies might differ a little from humans, and might not be able to adapt to the same kinds of changes in environment, or in the same way.

So this would be "like a dog, dwarves don't sweat"?

Quote from: G-Flex on February 15, 2011, 07:53:12 pm

Yep, and in some ways, it needn't be entirely possible, in the sense that you can't make up for every physiological disadvantage. You can't exactly become farther-sighted that much just by trying, or gain greater resistance to all forms of disease (you know, like expecting a cat to build up a human-like Tylenol tolerance), or rewire your brain's sensory systems all that much.

That being said, some acclimation would certainly be possible.

If we start getting into an entirely physiological reason why dwarves can't live aboveground, however, it raises a question of "how do they manage to do it at all"?  They still fight aboveground, at least theoretically.  Elsewise, they couldn't have wars with the elves.  Or at least, they couldn't have any war that wasn't completely defensive and fought literally no further than their doorstep.  (Not that such a thing isn't what we have now, but that's supposed to change soon-ish.)

Some dwarves are supposed to actually live in other cultures.  Does that mean they're "degenerating" into humans?  Or should they just have some in-game penalties for being surface dwellers being added in?

Quote from: G-Flex on February 15, 2011, 07:53:12 pm

Yeah, I see the founding dwarves as being either foolhardy, or tough-as-nails, or otherwise just willing to brave extremes (by their standards) in order to found a new settlement. Sort of like human expeditions, in that sense. Of course, in the future, we'll probably have more complicated starting scenarios than "seven dwarves on a mission".

*Movie Announcer Voice* "SEVEN DWARVES. WITH ONE DESIRE!"

Ah, sorry...

Quote from: G-Flex on February 15, 2011, 07:53:12 pm

Yeah, there's definitely some room for play there. However, I like to see dwarves as being a little more egalitarian than humans tended to be. Seems to be way things are shaping up anyway, nobles aside.

Well, it's not hard to be more egalitarian than that...

Of course, talking about social class is more a thing for that other thread of mine (http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=61620.0). 

The thing is, what sort of social ramifications would there be to farming aboveground that could be accurately reflected in-game?  Would nobody want to migrate to an above-ground farming fort because that reeks of low class, and as such, only the most desperate refugees would immigrate there?  Would player forts be considered some sort of riff-raff, not worthy of proper trade with the mountainhome until they started living a proper dwarven lifestyle, and become outsiders and outcasts?

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Violate the Earth!
Post by: G-Flex on February 16, 2011, 06:11:35 am

Quote from: NW_Kohaku on February 15, 2011, 09:11:57 pm

Quote from: G-Flex on February 15, 2011, 07:53:12 pm

There are risks associated with above-ground and below-ground living, and each race is equipped to handle with one or the other more effectively, and even disregarding that, a race exposing themselves to both sets of risks is unnecessary unless there's damn good reason for doing so (see: the few examples of real-life underground settlements). That's what I was getting at.

Care to share a link to a resource on those, by the way?  I don't know very much about real-life underground settlements, and I'd be interested to learn.

There were apparently some built in Turkey (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaymakl%C4%B1_Underground_City), although I don't know if the people there really spent that much time actually living below-ground (it's hard to say, and they certainly weren't self-sufficient!).

The one I was originally thinking of was Derinkuyu Underground City (http://k43.pbase.com/u38/chuy/upload/25029062.MapofDerinkayuUndergroundCity.JPG). There are some pretty spacious areas in there.

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Quote from: G-Flex on February 15, 2011, 07:53:12 pm

I mentioned metabolism because the way the body regulates metabolism is very important to thermal homeostasis, and dwarven bodies might differ a little from humans, and might not be able to adapt to the same kinds of changes in environment, or in the same way.

So this would be "like a dog, dwarves don't sweat"?

Maybe! That's certainly one possibility.

Quote

If we start getting into an entirely physiological reason why dwarves can't live aboveground, however, it raises a question of "how do they manage to do it at all"?  They still fight aboveground, at least theoretically.  Elsewise, they couldn't have wars with the elves.  Or at least, they couldn't have any war that wasn't completely defensive and fought literally no further than their doorstep.  (Not that such a thing isn't what we have now, but that's supposed to change soon-ish.)

I agree, although it's less of a "can't live aboveground" and more "have incentives not to live aboveground". Of the potential inherent reasons I listed, for the most part they don't have to totally forbid above-ground interaction, just make it more difficult.

Personally, I have no problem with dwarves having difficulty fighting the elves on their home turf. Dwarves are underground (and largely mountain-dwelling) creatures, so it makes perfect sense to me that a deep forest would be a somewhat alien environment for them. When necessary, I suppose they could form alliances with, say, humans, and engage in tactics suited to them (like digging tunnels, fighting at night, and otherwise leveraging what strengths they have).

Considering what elves would probably be like, and what dwarves would probably be like, I don't know if I see them fighting each other much at all to begin with. I have no idea what this is like in Threetoe's stories, but I don't really see dwarves and elves stepping on each other's toes all that much (they don't really compete for much), although they probably wouldn't have the friendliest of relationships either.

Quote

Some dwarves are supposed to actually live in other cultures.  Does that mean they're "degenerating" into humans?  Or should they just have some in-game penalties for being surface dwellers being added in?

A dwarf living in a human city would be suboptimal, sure, in that (by human standards) they would have certain handicaps. On the other hand, they would have certain advantages that humans might find valuable. If you're the only dwarf in a town of one hundred, sure, you might be nearsighted and sensitive to sunlight, but your dwarven advantages would be quite useful where you live when they do apply (it's not as if humans don't mine, or never have to work in the dark).

There's value in diversity; even when an individual can't compete with his peers in most areas (or is otherwise largely "disadvantaged"), his having unique skills/traits makes him a boon to the group as a whole, and makes him valuable. This happens even in human evolution. For instance, red-green colorblindness: It certainly isn't a "good" trait, and we certainly wouldn't be better off if everybody were colorblind, but there are actually potential advantages (at least in a primitive group) of having at least one guy in the group who is, because there's value in perceiving things differently, even if that means perceiving them slightly worse overall; you'd notice a few things that other people don't, and the rest of the group more than makes up for the fact that you don't notice some of the things they do (the US Army even did a study showing that colorblind people could spot some camouflage colors better than most).

So yeah, basic point: A dwarf would be disadvantaged living in a human city in a broad sense, but still would probably be valuable or even indispensable for his dwarven traits, which would be rare or unique in the group.

Quote

The thing is, what sort of social ramifications would there be to farming aboveground that could be accurately reflected in-game?  Would nobody want to migrate to an above-ground farming fort because that reeks of low class, and as such, only the most desperate refugees would immigrate there?  Would player forts be considered some sort of riff-raff, not worthy of proper trade with the mountainhome until they started living a proper dwarven lifestyle, and become outsiders and outcasts?

Diplomatic tensions in general could be tense, as well. Right now, all we really have right now in terms of diplomatic relations are sieges (in case you constantly kill off their caravans, or are at war), trade, migration, and things like elven wood diplomacy. Given how development is going right now, I think we'll see slightly more complex diplomacy in the (relatively) near future, but we're also talking about things that are more taboo than wrong, which has more nuanced/subtle effects. Dwarves being less inclined to immigrate could work, and trade could be more difficult, if only in the sense that the trader doesn't care for you as much and might want a bit more profit or be less willing to suit your needs. Any other diplomatic tensions that exist in the future could be heightened as well.

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Violate the Earth!
Post by: Silverionmox on February 16, 2011, 05:01:50 pm

Quote from: NW_Kohaku on February 15, 2011, 07:55:05 pm

I'll look into the way that corpses create compost again, then.  I was mostly thinking of making them generally more toxic than regular compost, anyway, and having players use a special kind of decomposer "crop" that is inedible, but just serves as a means of turning really toxic materials like goblin corpses into more "safe" compost.

Corpses are really concentrated nutrients. Battlefields on cropland were known to boost the yield of the fields several years afterwards. The big danger with corpses is the transmission of diseases and the attraction of pests (and necromancers). It's also necessary to give them time to decompose of course.. Then again, regular (human) manure also needs sufficient time to let the (human) germs die down. So chemical toxicity won't be a problem.

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Violate the Earth!
Post by: G-Flex on February 16, 2011, 06:06:03 pm

There's a reason why it takes several years. Human corpses are more putrid than compost is, and it takes a while before it becomes at all sanitary. I'd much rather work with horse manure than rotting human corpses.

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Violate the Earth!
Post by: NW_Kohaku on February 17, 2011, 10:44:47 am

Quote from: pervez khan on February 17, 2011, 08:00:06 am

I agree with you.

Heh, I guess I'll assume that's to do with the entire thread, and not just the last post?

Thanks for the support, although if you have any sort of comments you want to make about things you would like to see or concerns, don't be shy about them.

Quote from: G-Flex on February 16, 2011, 06:06:03 pm

There's a reason why it takes several years. Human corpses are more putrid than compost is, and it takes a while before it becomes at all sanitary. I'd much rather work with horse manure than rotting human corpses.

I already made them less "nutritious" than trees and include more "biological toxins" values added onto the soil, although I guess I can ramp that one up a little more. 

Dwarves would potentially have access to more/better fungal crops that could potentially be useful toxin-reducers in the soil, though. 

Right now, I'm actually idling on my "Pollutants" section, but I'm talking about pH, salinity, biological toxicity, and heavy metal toxicity as the pollutant factors.  Biological toxicity in the soil would probably be relatively easy to take care of, requiring some simple mushroom crop that may be inedible or useless otherwise, but which can drop biological toxicity.  Other methods would be certain pests like worms. 

With companion planting, you could grow some of those mushrooms in the same farm plot as a regular crop, just taking up some of your available growing space, and drop toxicity at the same time as you add in other fertilizers and grow a major staple crop.

Companion planting would become the "advanced mode" of farming, since it's much more complex to grow multiple plants with different requirements in the same plot at the same time, and manage the ratios of planting, but it would allow farms to be much more efficient, as they could juggle multiple soil factors in varying degrees at a time, allowing for the sort of "Permaculture", or even "Forest Gardens (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forest_garden)", which I would see as kind of getting closer to what elves do.

Making advanced permacultures like Forest Gardens the elven way of farming seems like a pretty exciting, fitting, and unique way to give elves some sort of competitive edge.

Quote from: G-Flex on February 16, 2011, 06:11:35 am

There were apparently some built in Turkey (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaymakl%C4%B1_Underground_City), although I don't know if the people there really spent that much time actually living below-ground (it's hard to say, and they certainly weren't self-sufficient!).

The one I was originally thinking of was Derinkuyu Underground City (http://k43.pbase.com/u38/chuy/upload/25029062.MapofDerinkayuUndergroundCity.JPG). There are some pretty spacious areas in there.

Yes, but they don't really grow fungus farms down there, so it's not of particularly great help.  I was more thinking of something along the lines of an actual mushroom-farming cave.  I know there are some in modern times, but I don't know of any ancient ones.

Quote from: G-Flex on February 16, 2011, 06:11:35 am

Diplomatic tensions in general could be tense, as well. Right now, all we really have right now in terms of diplomatic relations are sieges (in case you constantly kill off their caravans, or are at war), trade, migration, and things like elven wood diplomacy. Given how development is going right now, I think we'll see slightly more complex diplomacy in the (relatively) near future, but we're also talking about things that are more taboo than wrong, which has more nuanced/subtle effects. Dwarves being less inclined to immigrate could work, and trade could be more difficult, if only in the sense that the trader doesn't care for you as much and might want a bit more profit or be less willing to suit your needs. Any other diplomatic tensions that exist in the future could be heightened as well.

This one could be pretty fun.  I'd have to talk about it in the class warfare thread, instead, however, since that's more of a cultural issue.  Not that I don't want to talk about it, but that I want to finish this thread before I really go and get myself distracted.

Sorry for not responding earlier, but I didn't see anything that particularly sparked more conversation.

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Violate the Earth!
Post by: G-Flex on February 17, 2011, 11:06:27 am

The thing about growing cave mushrooms is that, in the real world, mushrooms are a really, really, really bad crop and don't provide a hell of a lot of energy. Obviously, we aren't talking about real-world mushrooms, though, so that matters a bit less.

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Violate the Earth!
Post by: NW_Kohaku on February 19, 2011, 05:45:26 pm

All right, Pollutants (http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=76007.msg1920008#msg1920008) is up.

Sorry for the delay, I was distracted by the shiney of multiple other threads and the new version.  I need to get the rest of this thread pounded out before I go play with other things, I know, I know.  I'll try to get another section out the output door by the end of tonight, barring some other major debate I get sucked into.

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Violate the Earth!
Post by: The Phoenixian on February 19, 2011, 06:16:18 pm

A thought on pollutants: I agree that surface farming should match real life. Underground plants in the deep caves however would grow in places with much more natural metal concentrations, (what with veins and clusters of ore often running though the caves) perhaps they would be more able to tolerate heavy metals?

On the flip side, underground crops might be more susceptible to diseases and biological toxicity from outside the caves. One would expect that their ecosystems are somewhat more closed and that might make them less able to adapt to such things. (Note that I really have no more than guesses about these kind of things though.)

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Violate the Earth!
Post by: NW_Kohaku on February 19, 2011, 06:53:36 pm

Underground plant heavy metal resistance can make some sense, but keep in mind that even if a plant is capable of surviving growing in a radioactive uranium-dusted soil (or cessium or polonium or cadmium or whatever), then that doesn't mean that the people who eat that plant's fruit are going to be able to tolerate the radioactive uranium quite as well.

The Bikini Atoll (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bikini_Atoll), and the native peoples who still cannot eat any of the plants that grow on their home islands, even though some plantlife has returned, can attest to that.

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Violate the Earth!
Post by: sockless on February 19, 2011, 08:18:37 pm

Polonium is very very bad when ingested, to all life forms. The alpha and beta radiation tears up your insides very fast, think Russian ex-spy.

Anyway, dwarves would probably be better adapted to underground life in several ways. To start with, they would get sunburn a lot easier than humans get it, since they live underground and don't have much melanin in their skin. Secondly, they would probably have very good vision in the dark, probably similar to a cats; somehow with detriment their light vision, maybe most dwarves are short sighted (myopic) since they don't have to have very good far sight. They would probably be stronger than humans too, but with less cardio fitness, since they'd do less running, but a lot more lifting of heavy objects.

This isn't to say that all dwarves would be like that, since you'd get long sighted dwarves and weak dwarves as well.

Thinking of implementation of all this, a start has sort of been made already, since cows now need grass to graze on.

First, farming should be a more full time job, requiring weeding and potentially watering (if it wouldn't suffer the same bug as making plaster casts). Plants should also require at least 1 or 2 seasons to grow and the above ground plants should have their growing seasons fixed. It should also require more land. At this point, the muddied ground thing could be fixed too, so that underground layers don't require mud if they are soil. Maybe it could be linked to light/dark as well, instead of subterranean/above ground.

Secondly, a start should be made on fertiliser. This should start with just a single value, nutrients. This would go down over time, depending on the soil type, so basically a basic CEC-D implementation. Maybe water would be linked to the CEC-D value too.

Next, pH could be added in. Pests could be added in as well.

After these basics have been done, they could be refined to the final product.

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Violate the Earth!
Post by: NW_Kohaku on February 20, 2011, 12:54:58 am

OK, I've finally gone and done it.  I ran out of character limit on the five "proposal" sections, and will now just need to drop links from the start of the thread to each successive post I make on a new section.

Alternate Crops and Living Resources

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Alright, the fun stuff.  This is the laundry list of alternate uses for farms, and alternate means of producing food and resources, so that farms aren't just for food, and real choices can be made regarding their uses.

• Orchards - Trees grown for fruit.  This will require some special coding, but the idea is that once planted, they take a certain period of time to reach what could be called "full treehood".  After that, they fruit once every year.  Orchards would be fairly large and space inefficient, but could be potentially nutrient-efficient, and not require much beyond watering and occasional additions of compost and weeding.  Orchards in general produce valuable fruit in exchange for not producing very much food overall per unit space they take up, thanks both to only fruiting once per year, and also their relative size overall.
• Trees for Lumber - Trees growing in the wild provide some resources for dwarves, but if they can deplete the lands around their fortresses, then dwarves need to be able to grow trees in safe areas where they can manage the growth of these resources.  Farming trees, especially underground, already exists to an extent, but this makes it "official".  Trees can be put into the same mechanics as grass and crops, and grow to certain points where they can then be "ripe" for lumber.  This allows players to directly impact how their forests grow, and possibly manage them efficiently, or turn it all into barren desert.
• Decorative Flowers/Fungi - Pretty things for painting happy little dwarves.  Oh, and they're good for bees, too.  Flowers and fungi can be used in decorative objects and improve the mood of natural-beauty-inclined dwarves. Bees produce different honey varieties based upon the flowers they can access (http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=77736.0).
• Parks - An extension on the above, you can make unpicked flowers and flowering trees into decorated rooms all their own.  Imagine an in-game underground city square, where multi-story buildings stand stacked up along a double road leading to the royal palace at the end of the great cavern, and in the middle, an underground park, illuminated by glowing fungal trees, with mossy "grass", and benches for dwarves to take "picnics" in the mountainhome's grand park.  Fungal arrangements, made of faintly glowing mushrooms of different colors, arranged and carefully cultured by the most tasteful fungalists in the kingdom create "flowerbeds" underground and illuminate towering statues commemorating the greatest deeds in dwarven history.  Legendary dining rooms?  What dwarf (or even foreigner barbarian) wouldn't drop to their knees in awe of such a masterpiece of dwarven skill and power over nature?
• Oxygen and Light Farms - Depending on how the game develops in terms of having air quality and lighting concerns, plants, especially underground plants, could become necessary regulators of the air, and a means of lighting corridors without needing burning oil taking up all the good oxygen.  Bioluminescent mosses could be cultivated, and then packed onto walls as simple guidelights.
• Pastures and Grass Farms - For livestock, obviously.  Grasses and pastures are a valuable asset in the crop rotation cycles, and if you have livestock, then you have both fertilizer in the form of manure, and also more mouths to feed.  Growing grass for direct grazing, but also for harvest as silage to be fed to caged animals would be an important part of a balanced farm.
• Lures for Wildlife - As an extension of the entire "pests" model I talked about, different plants and vermin can be used as "lures" for enticing wildlife into your area.  Placing plenty of tasty vegetables out in the open might lure rabbits or other herbivores into your lands for them to target and try to swipe.  Some creatures may be insectivorous, like owls and bats and swallows, and swoop in on maps with certain amounts or certain species of insects.  Some creatures may be large carnivores like lions or wolves, and hunt only large prey, requiring some other larger creatures like cattle be out in the fields before they will attack.  Some creatures may like only certain types of plants or animals, and only appear on your map if you can foster their particular favored prey on your map.
• Insect Repellant - The inverse of the above, certain types of plants can repel the invasion of certain pest or creature species.  Protecting your crops with a defensive ring of pest-repelling companion crops can be the difference between a plague of locusts and a healthy crop.
• Algaculture (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Algaculture) - Agriculture in water.  Algaculture is the purposeful growth of algae, seaweed, and potentially other water plants like water lilies.  This means treating those water units with soil nutrient levels as actual farm zones, and growing seaweed or water lilies in the water for use as a crop or silage for livestock.  Rice farmers would flood their rice paddies and grow Azolla as a companion crop to prevent any other weeds from competing with the rice. There are also edible seaweeds.
• Fisheries - Why stop livestock ranching to just land animals?  We can stock our own ponds and cisterns with fish, and cultivate aquatic ecosystems with algaculture to provide the basis for aquatic life.  Fish, crabs, cave lobsters, and more can all be purposefully ranched by dwarves inside of partitioned areas under controlled flooding conditions.  Fish could start eating algae and other aquatic plants and produce their own fertilizers, just like land animals.
• Aquaponics (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aquaponics) - Combining the two, we could construct dwarven Chinampas (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinampa).  A small artificial pier with soil placed over a pond or cistern with a fishery - fish provide natural fertilizer, and also are a food source of their own, while growing a plant bed that provides food and oxygen to the fish in the water.  It creates a small, self-sustained ecosystem of their own.
• Alchemical Resources - Alchemy can't really start without having access to herbs.  While mineral components are always a useful base for alchemy to start in, nature is the greatest alchemical laboratory that could ever be created - synthesizing all manner of compounds with precision beyond that of dwarven hands.  Poisons and antidotes, strength and weakness, life and death distilled into a bottle.  You can also find pesticides, the ability to change one material you have plenty of into the resource that is scarce without trade, and many more.  Alchemy can go hand-in-hand with many of the more complex features of the system I have thus far outlined, as food needs to be fairly simple for players to produce, but if they're trying to make plants that are useful in alchemy, whose use is optional, and whose benefits are potentially phenomenal, then you can make truly challenging requirements of players to set up complex systems that demand careful planning and attention payed to the farm plots that grow mystic alchemical herbs.
• Spices - Rare spices from deep in the dwarven mines, or the far reaches of elf-dominated jungles.  In combination with one of the food preparation thread's ideas, spices can be both a means of producing higher-quality food that more civilized fortresses demand, but also as a wonderful trading resource.  Spices that can only grow in very particular climates or biomes can demand staggering prices from merchants who risk life and limb to trade them across the world at fantastic profit.
• Magic Manipulation - I have already set up a Xenosynthesis thread about this, and will have a Xenosynthesis section on this topic, but underground plants will need to have a magical energy source that is not the sun if they are to survive underground.  This means creating magic energy areas, and letting plants themselves manipulate the amount of magical energy that is available in an area.  With proper plant management, you could change an area rich in one sphere of magic to an area rich in another.
• Environment Manipulation - By a grand extension of all the systems I have talked about thus far, you could potentially change the entire biome of the land where you embarked.  With careful management, deserts can be made into forests, and attract the creatures that live in forests, making your fortress a green oasis in a desolate wasteland.  Alternatively, you can Boatmurder your fortress into a desolate wasteland where once a pristine landscape thrived.
• Food, Alcohol, Dyes, Fabrics, Oils, etc. - All the things that we already can produce with farms, listed mostly for completeness.  We can make alcohol plants different from food plants, so that barley grains are poor food plants, but good beer plants, while regular wheat makes poor alcohol, and the like.  We already have dimple cups as a plant that has no use except as a dye.  We already have some small choice to make in our crop planting.

Add to all this the vast differences between plants when they can alter around a dozen individual soil variables, and have demands of those soil variables to differentiate one another, and the simple act of picking which plant to plant in your soil can become a truly meaningful choice for the player.

---

Something from the Buzzing Beard thread (http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=77736.0) about honey caught my eye, and may provide a good additional use for flowers and alchemy alike.

We already have syndromes.  We already have materials that can be passed on through different "phases" of production, so that an animal's skin influences its leather.  We are slated to have flowers that can grow in farms according to the devapge and, presumably, wild.  Toady stated that he would want bees to visit flowers to collect nectar for honey, but that the lack of flowers right now has simply made that impossible.

I think that the only problem is that honey is going to be made with hundreds of individual wildflowers that the bees visit. You'd need to have a way of "diluting" syndromes.  One poisonous flower among hundreds of normal flowers should create a minimal effect.

(EDIT: I'm told that bees will actually prefer to stick to just one honey type at a time, anyway, although they may switch honey types that they collect over time to avoid a specific shortfall of honey due to losing access to a given type of flower.)

This is something that the game needs, anyway, since there is no realism in how poisons work based upon dosage - a real-life spider bite is generally harmless simply because spiders dose their venoms to attack a creature that weighs something like a gram, and a 70 kg human will just dilute that venom throughout their body so thoroughly that spider venom is harmless. (This is excepting necrotic venoms which only attack local tissues, which basically means that the area around the bite will become necrotic, but the person in general should be OK so long as subsequent infections don't bring them down.)

If you theoretically had some sort of magic flower that has magic nectar, you could theoretically put bees in a location where they can only visit those magic flowers, and the honey they produce would have that magic flower's syndrome effect in the form of a honey.  Hence, you could put whatever kind of crazy syndromes you want onto that flower, and the bees should be able to make it into magic honey that does whatever crazy magic effect the game allows.

Bees that can process magic honey might also serve to alter the way in which the nectar works, as well as simply collect it, so that an alchemist might be able to make a flower into one alchemical product, and the honey of that flower into another product.

Bees are not the only pollinators, there are also bats (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pollination_syndrome#Bat_pollination_.28chiropterophily.29) as well as most any other flyer.  A bat colony that is domesticated and used to pollinate underground flowering plants, including underground crops sounds delightfully fantasy-like.

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Violate the Earth!
Post by: AngleWyrm on February 20, 2011, 05:09:29 am

Quote from: NW_Kohaku on February 20, 2011, 12:54:58 am

Add to all this the vast differences between plants when they can alter around a dozen individual soil variables, and have demands of those soil variables to differentiate one another, and the simple act of picking which plant to plant in your soil can become a truly meaningful choice for the player.

The plan of "vast differences" coupled with the plan for "around a dozen individual soil variables" is not functional. It will produce a scenario where almost all soil states don't grow anything at all. In order to produce a choice of crop, hundreds of plant types would need to exist, which is far too much labor and won't be any fun to pick through. This is the top end of complexity, where more becomes a meaningless bore. I don't want to try to shuffle through a list of hundreds of plant types in order to plant something, and nobody is going to create that many anyway.

The result will be that as the number of individual soil variables goes up, the "vast differences" will have to go down, until all plants have a very similar wide spectrum of values over which they can grow. This will make it possible to actually choose between two or more crops that can grow in particular conditions. Which makes the "dozen individual soil variables" essentialy redundant.

Realistically the number of plant types will be measured in dozens, not hundreds or thousands. The player is going to choose between those dozens, and the complexity of the decision space should match that choice.

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Violate the Earth!
Post by: Silverionmox on February 20, 2011, 06:42:01 am

Keep in mind though, that soil states aren't generated randomly. Neither are the available plants. In a given embark the available soil will match the available plants.

In addition, a grow/not grow dichotomy is to be avoided. There will be plants that do decently over a wide range, but especially well in a small range.

The many variables are needed in order to assure that farming can go wrong in a variety of ways, and need a variety of ways to fix it.

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Violate the Earth!
Post by: AngleWyrm on February 20, 2011, 07:43:27 am

Quote from: Silverionmox on February 20, 2011, 06:42:01 am

In addition, a grow/not grow dichotomy is to be avoided. There will be plants that do decently over a wide range, but especially well in a small range.

Let's say that any given plant at least grows over 90% of the range of values for a given metric; that the bottom 5% is too little and the top 5% is too much of a given soil metric for a given plant. That means that if there was only a single variable, then there's a 90% chance that a given plant and a given soil combination would work.

Now let's look at what happens when we make it ten variables, and all of them have the same 90% coverage with only 5% on the ends that doesn't grow. In order for any given plant to grow, it must be in the 90% span of all ten metrics. That's 0.9^10 = 34% coverage. Another way to look at it is to say that even in this extreme of a 90% span of allowable values in all variables, about 2/3 of all plants cannot grow in any given soil type.

And this scenario is the exact opposite of "vast differences" in plant soil preferences. If we narrow the ranges to create more variety in plant preferences, the number of plants that can grow in a soil quickly drops off.

Engineering an acceptable solution could be done like this: Let's say we decide that the idea of having only 1/4 of all plant types grow on any given soil is a reasonable distribution. Furthermore, we wish to have a variety in plant soil preferences, say only 50% of the range of any given variable is viable. Then the math becomes 0.5^x = 1/4, where x represents the number of variables needed to achieve this goal. Solving for x: x = log(1/4) / log(0.5) = 2 variables.

Another scenario: have only 1/20 of all plant types grow in any randomly selected soil sample, and have plant preferences set to 50% of each variable's range. The result: x = 4.3 variables. Since variables can only be an integer, we can fudge around with it by setting x=5, and then letting the percentage range or number of plant types change. Let's let the percent range change, so that the formula is: x^5=1/20. Solving for x, the span of viability on each of five variables becomes about 55% of the range.

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Violate the Earth!
Post by: NW_Kohaku on February 20, 2011, 10:42:35 am

Anglewyrm, you're sort of arguing against one of the basic goals of the system, here.  Of course part of the point is to have hundreds of different types of growable plants.

You're looking at this whole thing as a sort of binary game, where there has to be one plant for every single possible value of every soil variable, which isn't at all what this is going for.  What this is going for is simulating an ecolosystem that is player-manipulable.  I'm trying to make an interconnected system of plants, animals, fungi, and bacteria that seem like a real living system to the player, and which the player can interact with to gain the resources they need in either an efficient and sustainable way, a ruthlessly efficient and unsustainable way, an inefficient but sustainable way, or a foolishly inefficient and unsustainable way.

The differences between some of the nutrients can be fairly subtle, and somewhat intentionally so - almost all plants are going to want NPK.  The differences between pollutants is more major.  Pollutants are supposed to be bad, and there are supposed to only be a couple of plants that can survive heavily polluted lands.  Their purpose isn't to have an entirely separate set of hundreds of plants for the "growing plants in radioactive waste" end of the spectrum, it's to not have hundreds of plants that grow in radioactive waste.  Arguing that this system means there will have to be an equal number of "don't live in horribly polluted land" plants as "do live in horribly polluted land" plants is frankly a little odd. 

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Violate the Earth!
Post by: AngleWyrm on February 20, 2011, 11:00:15 am

Quote from: NW_Kohaku on February 20, 2011, 12:54:58 am

...and the simple act of picking which plant to plant in your soil can become a truly meaningful choice for the player.

This requires at least two viable plants to plant in any given soil, on average. Any less takes away from "truly meaningful choice".

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Violate the Earth!
Post by: NW_Kohaku on February 20, 2011, 11:14:56 am

Quote from: AngleWyrm on February 20, 2011, 11:00:15 am

Quote from: NW_Kohaku on February 20, 2011, 12:54:58 am

...and the simple act of picking which plant to plant in your soil can become a truly meaningful choice for the player.

This requires at least two viable plants to plant in your soil, on average. Any less and there is no "truly meaningful choice".

I'm talking about making hundreds of plants possible in the game.  I specifically said so multiple times.  I have absolutely no idea where you are coming up with this notion that I'm saying anything other than that. 

Did you read that last spoilered-out post?  The part about all the different things you can farm?  If plants can have over a dozen different purposes, from industrial uses to decorative ones to environment manipulating ones to trade to oxygen production to light production to alchemy components to just plain food and drink production, then you have meaningful choice even in the same soil conditions. 

Each of those does different things to the soil, and that means that in order to reset the soil conditions to do it again, you need to go to different lengths to get the soil back.  That doesn't mean an entire set of plants for every single possible permutation of soil conditions, that just means that different plants may require different amounts of care to get back to the right starting point.

This doesn't, however, mean that I need to have hundreds of plants possible for every single permutation of soil conditions, which is just absurd.  Land pollution is something you want to avoid because plants won't grow in heavily polluted soil. That's why you want to avoid choices that will pollute land you want to continue cultivating, even if it means passing up shorter-term benefits.  That shouldn't be a radical concept.

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Violate the Earth!
Post by: NW_Kohaku on February 20, 2011, 02:59:18 pm

Actually, let me try a more illustrative example of why the notion that we need to have plants that survive in both "high" and "low" amounts in every variable is rather odd.

If we go by a system where every single variable had a set of plants suited for every value the integer could hold, then that means we would need to do the same for one of the variables - water.

This means that roughly half the plants would need water in the soil, and drain water out of the soil when they grew, but the other half would then need dry soil, and create water from nowhere and add it to the soil as they grew but die if they added too much.  This is just a little kooky. 

It is not at all out of line to suggest that some variables are generally good for plants, like water, and either soil nutrients or biomass, while some other variables are generally bad for plants, like soil pollution, and that the overwhelming majority of plants generally want water, good soil, and a low concentration of toxins in the soil.

There are some variables which exist purely to differentiate where one set of plants can grow as opposed to another set of plants, such as to prevent palm trees from growing in a tundra, or a cactus from growing in a marsh, which would include environment, pH, and the CEC-D variables, but this does not at all apply to every single variable I have talked about.

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Violate the Earth!
Post by: NW_Kohaku on February 20, 2011, 06:42:55 pm

Livestock

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

To be honest, the recent 31.19 release sort of stole the thunder of much of this section before I wrote it.  Much of what I would have proposed looks like it is going into the game, although a few minor tweaks are worth mentioning. Basically, it means the groundwork for most of this is already done, which is great news.

Basically, I want to incorporate the livestock management functions of the interface in with the general land management menu.  This means the ranching zones I was previously talking about are now the new pastures, and pastures should be controlled from the land management menu's ranching window. 

I also have talked about creating "herds", which are functionally similar to squads for animals, and still think this would be a good way to handle animals, especially when we start doing more complex things with their pastures, like having cattle drives that send cattle from one pasture/fallow field to another at certain scheduled times.

As for the "tweaks", there are a few things that should be included in the livestock raws to make things a little more reasonable.  For starters, the amount of grass that animals graze / hunger knocked down a unit of food should be a function of creature size, as should the amount of milk that a creature gives.  Currently, goats, pigs, cows, and water buffalo give the same amount of milk in spite of being of vastly different sizes and having vastly different grazing requirements.  With that said, some sort of species metabolic multiplier should factor in to make some creatures hungrier for their size, or give more milk for their size.  Cows, for example, are generally used as the prime milk-producing animal because they can produce the most milk per cost of feeding and raising them.  This would also make larger or smaller creatures of the same species (which give more meat) also eat more in general, although I will talk about that more in the Nutrition section.

Finally, it would be a good idea to include a more complex system for handling butchery of creatures, so that the process is not so micromanagement-heavy.  Having a system where you can mark all creatures of a certain species that are not marked as "protected" above the minimum population limit, and potentially of adult age (so that they grow to full size) are automatically marked for slaughter would be a useful tool for automating late-game meat industry, along with automating driving livestock from one field of grass to another as they graze upon it.

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Violate the Earth!
Post by: NW_Kohaku on February 20, 2011, 06:43:23 pm

Cross-Culture Agriculture

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

This basically comes down to a few different cultural quirks for each civilization...

Humans: Basically, similar to the dwarves, but fully focused on aboveground crops, and without the metal-pipe-based advanced irrigation systems.  Humans may need to be represented as being less efficient than dwarven farming methods that are well-performed, since each farmer is mostly on his own, and not benefitting from dwarven engineering in terms of aquaducts and irrigation. 

Human farmers would historically use a crop rotation system with fallow fields and the use of manure on the fallow fields to rebuild the soil in the fallow period for each field, in a monoculture/fallow cycle consisting of perhaps two or three cycles.  Most of this is fairly well-represented already in human civilizations as Toady has already built them.

Dwarves: Dwarves that aren't under your control up to thus far in the game's development have seemed to favor underground farming exclusively, and cave fish and the like for fishing, but somehow have a wide range of aboveground livestock and hunted animal leather.  This seems to imply they like underground farming with aboveground grazing.  This sort of setup is probably fairly similar to how players already initially set up their forts, except players are pretty quick to also go forage some aboveground shrubs with the herbalist skill. 

I imagine dwarves would probably have a view towards turning the soil into an industrial resource more than most races, to be put to maximum efficiency through the use of superior dwarven engineering.  This means advanced irrigation systems like those brass water pipes carrying water around to individual farm plots to water crops in measured amounts, and deliver measured amounts of fertilizers. Dwarves would also probably rely upon tracts of monoculture farming plots in caverns which are sealed off from the fort, so that if pests get in, they can simply seal the room off until everything inside dies, and kill pest infestations through starvation.  The notions of advanced polycultures should probably be beyond the non-player dwarven cultures.

Elves: If there's anything that elves really should become masters of, aside from perhaps magic, then farming really should be it.  That isn't to say that they should have the giant rows of crops, but rather that they should have permacultures (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permaculture) such as forest gardening (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forest_garden).  Rather than tending giant rows of crops, they simply set up self-sustaining ecosystems that produce abundant food, fiber, dyes, and all other materials they need through extremely careful and well-planned polycultures and orchards.  They basically just grow their fig trees and bananas and apples and all sorts of other fruits in a way that they let nature produce an excess without having to rely upon any serious labor, without having to fight away pests, and without a real concern to totally maximize on the productivity of the land.  They pretty much just set up an orchard, and then go gathering fruit when they get hungry.  Perfect system for a people who want to just sit around and talk about protecting nature without doing much but getting drunk on fruit wines all day.

Goblins: Goblins are a bit fun and unusual to think about.  They need to eat meat, and that means serious ranching activities.  I've already said that there are three major ways in which this can be accomplished... First, you can have goblin cowboys who go out on massive cattledrives, grazing the grasslands and occasionally sending back some cows for slaughter, working these cattledrives to come back in cycles.  They could hunt, but they can't really hunt enough to make a real city or invasion force, although the Mongol hordes did manage to make a pretty good showing for themselves, but they were also a nomadic population to begin with. 

Second, you can have heavy fishing industries, potentially cavern fishing, since they sure don't have access to the ocean much of the time.  Having a really major fishing industry would probably require some purposeful engineering projects to change the waterways in the caverns, however, which are more the sorts of things dwarves do than goblins.  They could still fish the old-fashioned way, of course.

Third, and what I think is most viable, goblins could have some sort of slop-farming operation going on.  They grow some disgusting fungus that grows in caves on all sorts of refuse from dead creatures or the by-products of cavern creatures, and feed it to very large numbers of livestock that are kept in very crowded pins or stacks of cages, like a modern-day farm for chickens or pigs.  The slaves could be the unlucky muck farmers.  They would basically just be trying to grow as much moss and mold and such that grazers could eat before they slaughter the animals, the way that players are probably adapting to an all-animal fortress right now.

Of course, a combination of all three is certainly possible, and would expand their ability to produce food overall, and so may be the best overall solution.

Kobolds:  Kobolds currently seem set to starve most of the time.  They are supposedly a more parasitic entity, but I would think that they could at least become better scavengers, and become capable of gathering with herbalism and hunting vermin or small animals as well just as a means of avoiding starvation at the very least.

Animalpeoples:  Most of these animal peoples seem to subsist upon hunting and gathering, primarily.  Considering their small camp sizes, this is probably the easiest method of farming for them, anyway.

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Violate the Earth!
Post by: jseah on February 21, 2011, 05:32:08 pm

Just to say I'm still here.  Still liking it!

In my mind, the future DF having all of this would be a pretty nice game. 

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Violate the Earth!
Post by: sockless on February 21, 2011, 11:49:29 pm

Anglewyrm:
Your maths is flawed.
You are assuming that the soil values are completely random and mutually exclusive; they are not. The chances are, that if some of the variables are right for a plant to grow, then the others will be too, maybe one or two variables would need to be fixed for it to grow well, but most plants would be able to grow in most soil types.

The NPK system is used for the vast majority of plants anyway, so if that was wrong, you would be able to grow very little. The only 2 variables that would really make a difference to whether a plant grows or not would be salinity and pH, but that should be around right for most plants.

Anyway, as Kotaku has said, the idea proposed in this thread is that there will be hundreds of different plants. For this scenario, we will imagine that your reasoning was sound. Lets assume that there are only 100 plants, a small value, there would be 34 different plants for you to grow. Right now there are 21 plants in total, 3 of which we can't actually grow. So it doesn't matter if two thirds of plants wouldn't grow, because there would be heaps of plants anyway.

You may try to rebut that Toady can not be bothered to code 100 different plants. This is probably true, especially since he'd have to research every plant. Instead, he could leave it to the community to make the RAWs and just package it into the game.

---

Kotaku:

I don't seem to see much information on how seeds will be implemented. Here's how I think that they should be:

Berries:	Berries should be planted straight, since I don't think that dorfs could be bothered eating around the seeds of strawberries.
Tubers:	Tubers are commonly grown by replanting a part of the roots (potato), but they can be planted by seed too (carrot).
Grain:	Since grains are the seeds, grain would work as both seed and food.
Fruit:	Fruit seeds and stones can be kept after being eaten, so they would stay like the classical plants in the game.
Nuts:	Nuts would work the same as grains.

Also, fruit should be able to be thrown on soil to grow as well.

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Violate the Earth!
Post by: NW_Kohaku on February 22, 2011, 09:13:32 am

Quote from: sockless on February 21, 2011, 11:49:29 pm

You may try to rebut that Toady can not be bothered to code 100 different plants. This is probably true, especially since he'd have to research every plant. Instead, he could leave it to the community to make the RAWs and just package it into the game.

Actually, I have talked a little with Sphalerite on that front.  He made a piece of code that generates procedural crops for the current farming system, and he might be interested in putting together a variation on it that will allow for a fairly set strict of balancing rules to create a good sample size of crops.  I could always just create a bunch of them by hand, as well, since those are generally fun.

Setting up some bounds for a procedural set of crops would also generally be interesting, anyway, since that means we could easily just have procedural plants every game, anyway.  That way, you could enjoy the detective work of finding out how best to balance your ecology every single game.

Quote from: sockless on February 21, 2011, 11:49:29 pm

Kotaku:

I don't seem to see much information on how seeds will be implemented. Here's how I think that they should be:

You have good timing, I was actually just about to write the "Plant Growth Stages and Farming Tasks" section, and had actually forgotten to mention the seed collection methods.

In the last thread, when I did a mockup, I wound up having special tokens where seeds would either require destroying the crop (I.E. the crop was a seed) or that they would produce seeds upon destroying the crop (like a fruit, you can pluck out the seeds, and use those for a new tree even while using the tree's fruit).

Having just two ways of doing things seems rather... boring, though, doesn't it?  Maybe there should be some crazy extra ways to create seeds?  Seeds that can only be created through alchemy, and their fruits don't bear seeds at all.  You have to use alchemy to create another seed for each plant.  I don't know what you could grow from a plant like that, but it must be unbelievably rare and valuable.

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Violate the Earth!
Post by: Andeerz on February 22, 2011, 04:31:09 pm

Argh!  I have not had time to read all of this thread, and I do not know if the following idea has been explored with regard to procedural generation of crops.

I don't know if you have yet read "Guns, Germs, and Steel", but there is a considerable section dedicated to crop and animal domestication from wild species and how this influenced the progress of various cultures around the world.  It also goes into detail as to what attributes made one plant or animal species domesticatable(sp?) and others not as likely or virtually impossible to domesticate.  These factors would be awesome to look into when it comes to procedurally generating crops or domesticated animals and what civs use which domesticated animals or crops in world gen.  I wish I had the book on me right now... it has a wonderful summary of exact attributes.

Good examples given in the book include why corn took so long to domesticate, why certain wheat like grasses were never or never could have been domesticated by humans to yield a wheat-equivalent in the Americas, why animals like zebras and wildebeasts were never domesticated in Africa, why horses, sheep, chickens, pigs, and cows were able to be domesticated and not their relatives, etc... 

I know plant and animal domestication could take centuries if not millennia depending on species and other factors.  Therefore it would certainly be beyond the time scope of fortress mode and possibly even world gen, but if not, then maybe it could be worth modeling...  But even if the process of domestication is not plausible or useful to model, I still think the underlying characteristics of what makes things domesticatable should be!

Just some food for thought!  I might return to this later!

:3

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Violate the Earth!
Post by: NW_Kohaku on February 22, 2011, 05:58:56 pm

Plant Growth Stages and Farming Skill

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Weeding, Plowing, Tilling, and Burning:
Before crops are planted, the field needs to be cleared of any existing plants.  This means choosing one of weeding away specific plants by hand, plowing or tilling the whole field, and possibly burning the plants in the field before tilling the soil in order to kill all the unwanted plants in the future farm plot. 

Plowing or tilling the soil has the advantage of killing almost any plant already in the soil and killing most of the seeds that would allow more weeds to grow back in that soil.  This helps insure that the crops you want grown have no competition from weeds that can crowd them out.  Tilling of the soil can occur by hand (by using sticks), by using a metal tool like a hoe or mattock (a pick will do if you don't want extra tools being created for specialized tasks), or by using a wooden or steel plow (nothing less than steel is really strong enough to work well, although blue metal can certainly work) in conjunction with a draft animal like a horse or ox.  (Anything that carries wagons in trade works.)  The amount of time plowing takes should go from intolerably slow on the end of tilling soil by hand to reasonably fast if using a steel plow hauled by draft animal.

Tilling the soil has several effects besides killing plants already on the tiles and killing seeds - it can aerate the soil (reduce CEC-D), and benefit some soil bacteria that help in decomposing biomass, but can also dry the soil out, make the soil lose some of its stored nitrogen, and reduce the ability to store water and certain nutrients (also represented by reducing CEC-D), makes soil more vulnerable to soil erosion (if water is run over the soil, there is no root structure to prevent soil from eroding), and can make the soil more attractive to certain forms of insects or pests to move in.

A zero tillage (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero_tillage) system is one where you avoid plowing or tilling the soil.  In modern times, zero tillage is rising in popularity for soil conservation reasons, but it also requires advanced farming machinery and access to pesticides, so it may be simply beyond dwarves to practice full zero-tillage policies, although they might have ways to reduce the amount of tilling they need to do.  Most notably, use of specific cover crops and polycultures in general can allow dwarves to go several seasons without having to till the soil, which could potentially knock down labor needs.

Because messing with CEC-D is so difficult, however, it may be advisable to simply make tillage hurt humus, instead, which is something that players can rebuild more readily than CEC-D.  CEC-D is something that, realisitically speaking, you're stuck with.  You can maybe create artificial flowerbeds for small numbers of crops, but you can't do that for a whole field.

Burning the fields or slash and burning away trees is also an option to add nutrients back to the soil in a hurry, and would definitely kill off all the weeds.  Burning clover fields used as cover crops before tilling the ashes into the soil is also a way to maximize the nitrogen fixation potential of clover fields. It also kills pretty much everything in the soil, good and bad insects alike.  This can lead to vulnerabilities to certain pests if you kill off all their natural predators.

Most fertilizers are added during the clearing/tilling period, as well, although water and possibly nitrogen through "manure tea" can be added during growth.

Competition for space:
When a field spot is empty, dwarves can try planting seeds there.  (The actual planting process should be very fast, and it may be appropriate to have dwarves carry a whole stack of seeds that they just toss into several tiles all at once.)  This adds the seeds that your dwarves are trying to grow to the list of seeds in the soil at that time that are competing to grow in that space. 

In the game right now, with the multiple grass types, every form of grass competes to become the longest grass.  This code can be reused for all the growable plants in the game, by making tiles initially unclaimed by seeds, and letting them compete to grow up to a certain threshold value before they can manage to edge out their competition, and start starving rival plants of their sunlight. 

This is how weeds can be portrayed in the game - if a seed or an already-growing plant is in the same tile as a crop you are trying to grow, the weed can try growing in the same tile.  This weed will compete with the crop, and unless the crop is hardy enough to prevail on its own, some pest will target and eat the weed, or a farmer pulls out the weed, then the weed can crowd out a crop before it has a chance to dominate its tile and prevent weeds from growing.

Once a weed has some dominance on the field, it may be worth leaving the crop still in the field, but with declining growth values so that a dwarf farmer can kill the weed and give the crop a chance to grow again.

"Dominance" may actually mean different things, depending on how Toady wants to go with the game's tracking of plants in soil, as well.  Polycultures where plants are literally placed on top of or directly next to one another may be possible, so that some plants may actually grow sharing the same tile, making companion planting a much more interesting feature.  Since ancient times, rice farmers have planted azolla (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Azolla) with rice as they flooded the rice paddies once the rice stalks had grown long enough that they cleared the water line, since the azolla would cover the water's surface, preventing any sunlight from reaching any weed that would try to grow and compete with the rice, while the rice had already grown tall enough that the azolla was no longer a threat to the rice itself. 

If we do not have something quite so complex as having multiple plants growing in the same tile, there would still need to be a sort of mechanic that allows plants in one tile to have an impact on the tiles around it.  Tall trees, for example, may shade out nearby plants, causing plants in adjacent areas to have less access to sunlight, and making trees actually compete with one another.  Certain plants actually enjoy the shade, and grow better right next to tall trees, while other plants cannot stand having anything but direct sunlight. 

This can require a new variable to adequately represent how much different plants compete for space.  Taller trees, for example, may actually only take up one tile, but still "crowd" plants that are nearby, preventing other tall trees from growing near them.  This could be expressed by having crowding plants become unable to grow near other crowding plants, forcing plants to be grown in a checker pattern, or by skipping rows, or even having no plants touch at all, being planted only every other row and every other column, so that only one space in four actually has a plant in it.  (This being most likely for orchards with many trees crowding one another.)

Smaller plants or weeds whose crowding variable makes it "smaller than its tile" would be able to grow near the crowding plants.  In the real world, some plants prefer growing in the shade of other plants to growing alone, and so, some flowers, crops, or weeds may actually be well-suited to growing alongside orchard trees or other very crowding plants that would not compete as well without those crowding plants pushing out their competition.  Tall trees may also sometimes be grown with shorter trees that do not crowd as much, with the space between these taken up by small underbrush or grass plants that can work with the trees that would generally crowd out most other plants.

Basically, the idea is that you have a set number of sizes for plants - let's say 7 just because, although this has nothing to do with the 7/7 fluids thing.  So, if a plant has 4 crowding, it occupies its entire tile.  If the plant is a tree or something, it might have a 5, 6, or 7.  If it's a 5, it blocks off anything but a 3 or less in the tile next to it, although diagonals might have up to a 5, as well.  Hence, a 5-crowding tree could be planted as a checkerboard of trees with smaller 3-crowding plants.  Then, a 6-crowder could have a 2-crowding plant nearby (which would be something fairly small that likes the shade, like a flower or vine) and a 3-crowder in the diagonals.  A 7-crowder would force nothing more than a 1-crowder adjacent, and 2-crowder in the diagonals.

Growth Value:
So far, I have been discussing a handful of variables that are relevant to the growth of a crop.  Each of these factors needs to apply each "growdur" tick.  A growdur is 100 time units (1 second in playtime at 100 FPS), so everything plants do is at a scale of about 1/10th that of most creatures.  This helps reduce the CPU processing time taken up by plants, which are fairly inert most of the time, after all. 

At the growdur tick, rather than simply iterating a growth point towards a crop being harvestable (as is the case now), the plant will make a calculation to see how well it can grow in general. 

Every soil variable for the plant needs to have an "ideal" range, where the plant will grow at its maximum speed.  Outside this ideal range, there should be a declining rate of growth, down to a range where one factor of the soil is so bad that it kills all growth of the plant entirely.  This is probably best achieved by having a maximum growth rate, which is multiplied by a variable between 1.0 (if the variable is in the ideal range) gradiating down to 0.5 (if the variable is at the marginal range) to 0 (if conditions are intolerable to the plant).  This means that any one variable, if intolerable, will completely kill plant growth until that variable is changed.  During this time, the farmer skill multiplier is also multiplied in, and pests have a chance to eat some of the crop, reducing its total growth values, as well.

This means that plants should generally have a wider range of tolerance for certain variables than others - some crops will need plenty of water, and others are more drought resistant.  They both want a fairly high water value (but not overwhelming), but suffer less for being in dryer soil.

Farmer Activities:
Farmers should generally have a lot more to do in this system than in previous ones.  Dwarfish farmers now must till the soil or perform other more labor-intensive soil preparation activities, apply fertilizers, plant seeds, weed the soil if their crops are threatened by weeds, irrigate the soil (by bucket if necessary), harvest crops, and perform some other tasks like restructuring soil beds if necessary.  This should probably be more than enough tasks to keep plenty of farmers busy even if each individual task is fairly short.

This brings up the question of what role, exactly, farmer skill should have in the growing of crops so that a legendary farmer is distinguishable from a dabbling one.  Legendary farmers might be able to perform certain tasks instantly, while dabbling farmers are slower, but this would make a dabbling farmer incapable of running a farm at all if it takes them too long to perform basic tasks like tilling the soil. 

As a sort of compromise in how much impact a farmer's skill can have on the growth of a crop, then there can be a variable for the farmer's skill in setting up the field in the first place.  A multiplier that is applied to the growth value at every, or at least certain, portions of the plant's growth, so that a dabbling farmer will have a 1.0 multiplier to growth speed, while legendary farmers would be gaining 1.5 or 1.6 plant growth speed, for a +60% total potential crop yield.  Not the same as the difference between having no food units and having 5 food units that we have now, but that sort of massive difference maybe shouldn't be so heavily represented.  The scale can be made different, of course, with plant growth being multiplied by a factor of .5 to 1.1 or 1.0 to 2.2 or some similar multiplier.  The farmer's skill check for the field can still be applied at the planting of the seeds, which would presumably indicate an ability to prepare the soil and plant seeds in a way that gives those plants the greatest possible advantage in growing compared to their weed rivals, and to have the best chance to grow larger fruits.  (If this growth multiplier applies at the weed crowding phase before a plant can dominate the tile, then it gives a major advantage to weeds to have a less than 1.0 growth multiplier, and a major advantage to the desired crops to have a more than 1.0 growth multiplier when competing for space.)

Farmers are also called into play to apply fertilizers and water.  Legendary farmers may be more exact in the amount of fertilizers and irrigation that they allow onto their land, while dabbling farmers may be more sloppy, overzealously fertilizing or watering their plants, or underestimating the amount they need. 

Another task farmers may need to perform are soil bed alterations.  This means doing something like applying gravel or sacks of dirt to an otherwise fairly barren cavern floor to start the process of farming by breaking down the gravel or soil and building up the humus while expanding your total farmland.  It can also mean changing the current soil's consistency by liming the soil to alter soil pH, or building a raised farming bed to alter the soil's CEC-D values.  With the exception of adding small amounts of gravel as a nutrient booster, these can be fairly major alterations to the soil that take a significant chunk of time to perform.  Altering the soil to have a different CEC-D value is a major undertaking, and could damage many of the soil nutrients and humus depth, requiring building up the soil for a couple years to compensate.

Harvesting:
Each plant will try to hit a blooming (harvest) period at a certain point, which is when it signals it is ready for harvest, regardless of how much growth the plant has actually done.  Plants which do not hit a threshold value by that point simply wither and die without having any harvestable crop at all.  Plants which get past this threshold value produce one harvestable crop per certain amount of growth beyond the threshold value, both of these values being determined by the crop's raws.  This means that certain plants could require very small threshold values, but produce few fruits to harvest, while other crops could have very high threshold values but have a high chance of producing very large stacks of crops if you are capable of passing that threshold value.  (For example, one plant might have a minimum threshold of 100 growth and 25 growth to produce every unit of food beyond that, while another plant could have a minimum threshold of 200 growth, but produce a unit of food per 5 growth beyond that.  If both plants hit 250 growth, the first one would have 6 units of food, while the second would have 10, but if they only hit 199 growth, the first plant would have 3 units of food, while the second would not produce any food at all.)

All other aspects of harvesting should be as they are currently, generally speaking.  Having children help in the harvest is a good thing to keep in (although maybe having nobles refuse to help harvest is a good idea), since they historically did help in such things, as harvesting the crop as quickly as possible was a major concern of farming cultures.

Ratoon Crops and Orchards:
Certain plants are not necessarily killed entirely when they are harvested. 

Orchards and trees in general only are removed when chopped down.  An orchard tree would need to have a set amount of growth that has to occur before it becomes a "fruitable tree", at which point it becomes a full tree on screen to the player, and a new growth value cycle has to start for creating the actual fruits that are harvestable.  Harvesting the fruits of an orchard tree resets this value, but leaves the tree portion, making growth for the successive years easier. 

Ratoon crops are crops that you can leave a portion of the stalk and roots intact while harvesting just the fruiting body of the crop.  Rice, for example, is a potentially ratoon crop in warm enough climates, and many equatorial Asian cultures can make three or even more harvests of rice in a year because they only cut off the top of the rice plant where the rice itself grows, letting the stalk regrow the grains of rice that are its seeds the way that a lawnmower leaves most of the grass in your lawn intact for the grass to grow again.  Such ratoon harvests of rice can keep the same stalk for up to around 10 years of harvests with three harvests per year, should the weather stay warm enough that the stalk never dies, helping give rice its ability to feed massive numbers of people with relatively little land.

Such ratoon harvests are a little more tricky to calculate, but could be performed by cutting the growth value of a harvested plant down to a certain number in a harvest, and then resetting a new ratoon harvest date, and letting the growth value climb back up again, so that there can be another harvest of the same crop without having to have another planting.

Gathering Seeds:
Each type of crop needs to have a way of obtaining seeds for the next planting.  Generally, plants can fall into two categories, of either having a seed that is a waste product of using the crop (such as an apple's apple seeds, which are not needed in any processing of the apple itself), or as the actual "fruit" of the crop itself (such as corn kernels, where the seeds are the edible and useful parts, themselves), where farmers would want to hold off a certain number of the crops to use as the seeds for the next harvest.  This would require some sort of expansion of the cooking menu that lets you hold aside a certain number of the seeds/crops for planting only (unless a dwarf is so hungry they break orders and eat your next year's seeds). 

Some crops, especially alchemical or magical ones, might not produce normal seeds at all, or produce seeds for other, more mundane crops.  This might require some alchemical process to turn a mundane seed into these special seeds, and require alchemy every time you want a seed for that plant before growing them.  Such plants would be useful in making sure certain alchemical reactions are very rare and time-consuming to perform, so that certain alchemical reactions may be powerful, but suitably challenging enough to acquire the components to perform that they make most players think twice before even attempting them, especially if the crops themselves have very stringent requirements for the sort of soils that they grow in.

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Violate the Earth!
Post by: NW_Kohaku on February 22, 2011, 06:05:45 pm

Ahh, after a double-up of short ones, I'm back to climbing the real hump articles.

The next three are going to be some of the most difficult for me to complete, since they involve the most technical and far-reaching of the sections, but they're also the last three before I can finally say that this suggestion is "complete", or at least, a full version 2.0 of the suggestion, which I can then muddle around with.  I certainly still need to do some more work on the interface section, which I kind of left only mostly complete.

Quote from: Andeerz on February 22, 2011, 04:31:09 pm

I don't know if you have yet read "Guns, Germs, and Steel", but there is a considerable section dedicated to crop and animal domestication from wild species and how this influenced the progress of various cultures around the world. 

[...]

Just some food for thought!  I might return to this later!

I know, I've been meaning to read that one for a while, now.  I guess I'll have to give it a look-over before trying to get much more serious with this, although I want to sort of just get the last few sections put onto digital paper, and then try to fiddle around with the exact mechanics of it from there.

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Violate the Earth!
Post by: AngleWyrm on February 22, 2011, 06:40:02 pm

Quote from: sockless on February 21, 2011, 11:49:29 pm

You are assuming that the soil values are completely random and mutually exclusive; they are not. The chances are, that if some of the variables are right for a plant to grow, then the others will be too, maybe one or two variables would need to be fixed for it to grow well, but most plants would be able to grow in most soil types.

What I'm assuming is that they are independent variables, not mutually exclusive. That is to say, it is possible to have 1% in one variable and 99% in another variable, and furthermore that there isn't a dependency that says if one measurement is at 50% another will never be at 5%. The assertion that "Chances are if some of the variables are right, then others will be too" has only now been stated. If there are rules of dependency, they will need considerably more clarity before they can be programmed and analysed.

I've explored a couple possible scenarios, and given calculatable solutions for each of them. If you have another set of values you wish to try, then just plug them into the formula: spanPercent ^ numVariables = growPercent, where spanPercent is the average width of growable conditions in a typical variable, and growPercent is the percentage of all plants that will grow there, on average.

Note that these are average values, and they are part of the plant specifications. It is possible to have one measurement where everything above 10% is acceptable and another where everything below 90% is acceptable, and they average out to two variables with a 90% viability range. The design of the framework and the design of the plants that will live in it are interdependent, not independent.

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Violate the Earth!
Post by: NW_Kohaku on February 22, 2011, 06:53:39 pm

Quote from: AngleWyrm on February 22, 2011, 06:40:02 pm

What I'm assuming is that they are independent variables, not mutually exclusive. That is to say, it is possible to have 1% in one variable and 99% in another variable, and furthermore that there isn't a dependency that says if one measurement is at 50% another will never be at 5%. The assertion that "Chances are if some of the variables are right, then others will be too" has only now been stated. If there are rules of dependency, they will need considerably more clarity before they can be programmed and analysed.

You still seem to be assuming that there should be plants that grow with absolutely no water, however, which shouldn't be the case.  The point isn't to make a system where plants grow in every condition, the point is to make a system where plants have different required amounts of work to reset the conditions back to an initial growing point. 

You don't grow a new plant to add water to the soil, you just water the soil to add water to the soil.  Barring some freaky magic plant, all plants drain water from the soil and require soil moisture to be within some acceptable range of values to grow properly.

The NPK values should be relatively close to one another, since anything that adds to one generally has an effect on the other, although they could generally be considered "independent" of one another.

Pollution variables are all "bad stuff", and things that you want to keep low, just as you generally want to keep NPK and water high.

Crop rotation works to make some variables, like Nitrogen, get rebuilt or at least less thoroughly used while fertilizers are added to the soil. 

Potassium shouldn't be added to the soil through any means besides fertilizers.

The difference between plants is in how much of what nutrients they use, what tolerances they have for lacks of or abundances of certain variables, but not so that plants can knock the soil potassium content around like a ping pong ball fully up and down the scale with alternating plantings.

Anyway, the section I just posted addresses much of this, and the next section I tackle should have the rest of the detailed information on this, so it should hopefully all be made crystal clear by tommorow or the day after at the latest.

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Violate the Earth!
Post by: NW_Kohaku on February 22, 2011, 10:50:05 pm

Advanced NPK, Crop Rotation, and Polycultures

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

In the previous NPK section, I talked in general terms about how this system of variables would work to give a framework for thinking about the system before going on to make sections regarding sets of variables in specifics.  Now, this section is about bringing these ideas together to make the more detailed mechanics of the system work.

I'll just do a grand list of the variables now, although most don't need any more introduction than I have already given them.

• Soil Nutrients: These are generally the "good" things, which you want plenty of, although some plants can overdose on water or nutrients like nitrogen.
• Energy Source: This means "sunlight" for aboveground crops, but for magic crops, it means how much access it has to a magic field. (Obviously not from the "soil", and not a variable recorded "as part of the soil", but a necessary thing to check.)
• Air quality: If we are working with air quality, some "crops" may need air of proper quality to grow properly. (Also not a soil variable, but required for checking.)
• Water: See the Water Management section
• Nitrogen: For this and the next four, see the previous NPK sections and the Fertilizer sections
• Phosphorous
• Potassium
• Biomass
• Soil Consistency: These are the things where plants are genuinely divided, some liking different soil types than others.
• Soil pH: A factor of your starting soil, and the amount of decomposition that occurs.  Decomposition makes soil acidic, so forests have acidic soils, while deserts tend to have basic soils.  Plants generally segregate themselves by how acidic the soil they can stand
• CEC-D: A factor mainly of what type of soil you are farming upon, CEC-D is a combination of Cation Exchange Capacity and Drainage into a single stat.  Low CEC-D represents very high drainage values in the soil, and is found in sandy soils, while clays or peat will have very low drainage and high CEC, and as such, will have a high CEC-D value.  Some plants demand more drainage than others.  CEC-D is impacted by Humus, as Humus has relatively low drainage and the highest CEC values, so the more humus that develops, the higher CEC-D functionally becomes, even if the CEC-D variable itself is unchanging.  This functional CEC-D determines the maximum amount of water and potassium that the soil can carry before it is spilled out of the soil.  Note that in conjunction with the soil erosion factors discussed in the Water Management section, this means sandy soil is in more danger of eroding.
• Humus Depth: A factor of how much the soil has been built up.  This should gradually rise, barring unusual actions or soil erosion, and this should also impact on the functional CEC-D rating.  Whenever "functional CEC-D" is checked, a fraction of humus depth can be added to the hard CEC-D rating (like 1/5th) to find the functional CEC-D rating.  Humus depth of certain minimum amounts are required for different plants, although some shallow humus tolerant plants may have much more trouble with weeds with deeper humus.
• Crowding: A measure of how much the roots and leaves of other plants already impact the soil.  May not be a soil variable recorded in the soil itself.
• Temperature: Again, obviously not a "soil" variable, and not recorded in the soil itself, but plants are most heavily divided on how much cold or heat they tolerate.  This should be broad enough that players will know just by what temperature reading there is on the embark what sort of plants they can expect to plant.
• Soil Pollution: Pollution is generally "bad stuff", and plants usually want as little of it as possible.  To make coding of this a little easier, however, it might make sense to make this an "inverse number", so that high values mean little pollution, and that way it is easier to make the color-coded indicators in the Interface section will say that "red" means "too much pollution" and not "too little pollution".
• Salinity: See the Water Management section
• Biological Toxins: See Pollutants section
• Heavy Metal Toxins: See Pollutants section
• Pests: Again, not a soil variable, but here for completeness

Now then, the purpose of having all these different variables is to not only give a chance to simulate a very wide variety of situations which require a wide variety of solutions, but also to give you a reason to use crop rotations and other polyculture methods to increase the overall productivity of your farms.

Monocultures are tracts of land that are dedicated to growing only a single crop.  Monocultures are the "classic" way of thinking about how a farm works, as it means that they are dedicated solely to producing just one major cash crop, and then returning the soil to a state where that single cash crop can be produced again by applying fertilizer and fallowing the field.  These are preferred for their simplicity and ability to produce just one plant as much as possible.

In times when the major nutrients are depleted, fertilizers need to be added to the soil to reclaim it, although this adds biomass and biological toxins to the soil, depending on how aggressively you fertilize.  In times when there are large amounts of biomass and biological toxins on your soil, you need to spend time with decomposers on your soil to return the soil to a state tolerable to most plants.  This means cycles of productivity and a reclamation state (whether in a fallow state, or using a crop that will renew the soil). 

Monocultures are what most players will probably want to try first for as long as they can get away with it - just produce one crop as best they can.  This isn't particularly land or space or fertilizer efficient, but it should be enough to work for just food production, for reasonably small fortresses.  Between trade and some basic farming, small forts that are mostly military-based should be able to get by, so long as they have the trade goods to buy their constant food needs.

Polyculutres are more advanced methods of farming that involve growing multiple types of crops on the same farm plot.  This can be through crop rotations, where plants are grown in cycles, or through companion planting, where different plants are planted at the same time right next to each other. 

Crop rotations, scheduled through the Interface to repeat on a basis of once every one to five years, allow you to get your fields into a state of readiness to grow major cash crops, then spend time rebuilding the nutrients those cash crops deplete from the soil by fallowing the fields, applying fertilizer, giving the fertilizer time to be worked into the soil by decomposers, if necessary and working with alternating crops in a cycle.  Heavy feeding crops that deplete much of the soil are followed by light feeders that don't need as many nutrients, and then nitrogen fixation plants that can tolerate some of the heavy fertilizers can work the soil back up to being ready for the heavy feeders again.  This sort of farming is the traditional method of farming before heavy reliance upon fertilizers made plantation farming more attractive, and is still seeing considerable use today.  Most players who aren't afraid of the farming system will probably want to move to at least this method of farming, provided they have spent enough time to try to play with the systems, and learn how to control what they want to happen.

Companion planting is a more advanced method of farming.  Companion planting requires picking several plants that are capable of growing well with one another without competing for space or light, and growing them in the same plot.  Companion planting means that one plant's strengths can cover for another plant's weaknesses.  A plant that is vulnerable to a particular pest can be planted in the same field as a plant that repels those same pests, or that attracts the natural predator of the pests.  If certain plants crowd one another out, you can use plants that are less crowding to maximize the amount of land you are cultivating.  If some plants are heavy feeders, you can grow them right alongside the nitrogen fixators that replenish the soil for them, saving a step in the crop rotations.  Decomposer fungi can be grown right alongside the normal crops so as to keep the biological toxicity levels down if you add some of the more biologically toxic compost.  This sort of advanced farming method is what a good number of the players should be able to graduate to when they have experience with how the plants they are working with can be managed, spending less time in overt crop rotation cycles and more time letting a good portion of the field produce food year-round while other portions of the same field are spent keeping the soil conditions in good shape for the food producing plants.  This is much more difficult for players to plan for, however, as it means that they need to satisfy the growing conditions of multiple types of plants all at the same time, meaning that only a finite number of plants even can grow in conjunction with one another, even if they don't crowd or compete with one another. 

Many companion plantings involve a single heavy-feeding primary crop with other crops that help the primary crop grow or maximize yield of a given field.  Nitrogen fixators alongside nitrogen-hungry crops being an obvious example.  Ground covers that act as type of mulch that keeps in soil moisture as well as keeps out weeds and stops soil erosion are another common companion crop.  Having some form of tree or thick-stalked plant serve as both a crop in their own right as well as the "post" for crops that grow on vines are another.

For classic examples of companion crops, Native Americans planted the "Three Sisters (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Sisters_(agriculture))", corn, beans, and squash, where corn was planted first as a primary crop, then beans were planted to serve as nitrogen fixators that grew around the roots of the corn.  Finally, once the other two were established, squash was planted, which served as ground cover, preventing any weeds from encroaching on the fields.

Rice paddies, meanwhile, would often use plants like azolla or other water lily-like plants to be both nitrogen fixator and ground cover at the same time.

Forest garden permacultures are the most advanced method of farming.  This is the "elven farming" method I mentioned earlier.  Forest gardens would practically become "do nothing agriculture", because the polyculture is balanced so well that the plants are left to care for themselves.  This requires having a very specific and balanced set of trees, shrubs, grasses, and pests in perfect balance to be sustainable without the need for direct intervention except the need to regulate water or fertilizer inputs to match the food that you take out of the system.  It's basically like setting up a biodome.  This should be extremely rare, and only possible under extremely strict conditions, and as such, would be something like the dwarfputers, where only a few people even try to understand the system thoroughly enough to actually accomplish this sort of feat.  It mostly exists as the extreme end of designing a complex system so as to be as efficient as possible.


Thank Heph for this video, it really made my brain explode when I saw it: http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/willie_smits_restores_a_rainforest.html

That's polyculture in action, turning a barren wasteland into a rainforest.  It's something I doubt very many players would master, but that's the entire point of putting it in: To give players something to build up to.  You don't need to do that, but if you do, you've created something absolutely amazing.  The stuff in that video doesn't take modern technology to do, the set of pineapples and palms and ginger and other ground vegetation as a system to replenish the soil was used by Native Americans of the Caribbean before Europeans ever "discovered" the people living there. 

I recently talked to one of my professors about Dwarf Fortress, talking about how the geology was so realistic that I actually developed an interest in, and learned a great deal about geology just because I played this game.  She was impressed and said that she never really considered games as a potential teaching tool before (obviously not one to have spent much time on them before), and this is one of those things that I think can really make Dwarf Fortress more than a game.  It can become a simulated world that teaches us more about the real world if we just make the simulation accurate enough.

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Violate the Earth!
Post by: NW_Kohaku on February 22, 2011, 10:55:55 pm

OK, I had nothing really better to do with my night, so I went ahead and wrote another section, which brings me much closer to the conclusion.  This one is the sort of "closing argument" it feels like, since it's tying together so much.

I still need to go back and change it, now, though, since now that I think about it, I need to talk about the specific mechanics of the variable size again.

Speaking of going back and changing stuff, I went and wrote in a couple more sections on the Plant Growth section that I forgot to mention, and felt that was the best place to stuff it.

I only have a couple more sections to write, really.  One is the xenobiology section, which I'm still not entirely sure how I want to handle it, so it's going to be the last major hump to clear, but after that, it's just the nutrition section, and that's the home stretch.  I'm almost done with this monster.   :P  After that, it's just trying to make up my mind on the Interface section.

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Violate the Earth!
Post by: Ethicalfive on February 24, 2011, 12:33:21 am

Ok, so this thread is a huge monster, I can't possibly read through it all without devoting a few hours! (did a quick search though to make sure I dont re-post anothers suggestion)

Mushrooms need reworking! I forgive toady for not understanding the nature of fungi, much like most people dont understand the nature of dwarf fortress.

They come as primary decomposers(Wood,straw) and secondary decomposers(manure,compost) or even as mycorizal(synergistic with plant roots). Right now you chuck some plump helmet spawn in barren earth and they grow. I'd love to see wood or straw dragged to mushroom beds for primary decomposers, then secondary decomposers can be planted on the bed, then a plant crop could be planted on the rich mushroom compost. Something like that.

I think it's ignorant and simple minded to treat fungi and plants as the same thing, when infact, fungi have more in common with us than they do plants(fact) I'd love to see better mushroom support implemented at some point and would add interest to the fort, plus with less uses for wood now, would be an interesting application IMO.

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Violate the Earth!
Post by: NW_Kohaku on February 24, 2011, 10:34:58 am

Quote from: Ethicalfive on February 24, 2011, 12:33:21 am

Ok, so this thread is a huge monster, I can't possibly read through it all without devoting a few hours! (did a quick search though to make sure I dont re-post anothers suggestion)

Well, it's certainly become a monster, I can't deny.  (I was taken by a secretive mood, and planepacked far too many ideas into a single thread.)  It's almost "complete" by the definition that I've written out most of the arguments I want to make and can form a complete system, but I still need to go back and rewrite a lot of this.

Anyway, I hope that I can create something that isn't too overwhelming for the players, while at the same time producing that sort of "living world" feeling with a massive backstory to it that Toady seems to be working towards with a comprehensive ecology system.  Something that makes a real simulated fantasy world instead of a set of tools for the player to interact with to produce more materials.

To that end, mushrooms become different from plants.  I think the reason why mushrooms are just plants that grow when you throw "mushroom seeds" at mud was because early on, the game was nothing more than a game where every aspect of the game was designed from the standpoint of what the player will get from it.  Dwarf Fortress has since moved on to making the most realistic simulation of a world it possibly can, even when it's outside the player's control what actually happens in that world. 

I think this thread represents the best way to move farming and the ecosystem from a simple tool that the player uses to extract resources up to a living system the player just tries to interact with in a limited way.  (And that means that mushrooms are more mushroomy.)

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Violate the Earth!
Post by: Andeerz on February 24, 2011, 02:58:50 pm

Quote from: NW_Kohaku on February 24, 2011, 10:34:58 am

I think this thread represents the best way to move farming and the ecosystem from a simple tool that the player uses to extract resources up to a living system the player just tries to interact with in a limited way.  (And that means that mushrooms are more mushroomy.)

I agree.  :3

...but I still wanna see something about what I suggested in my last post in this thread... >.>  ...eventually... or maybe I could gather the info for you and present my findings to you and see what you think!

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Violate the Earth!
Post by: NW_Kohaku on February 24, 2011, 03:29:56 pm

Quote from: Andeerz on February 24, 2011, 02:58:50 pm

I agree.  :3

...but I still wanna see something about what I suggested in my last post in this thread... >.>  ...eventually... or maybe I could gather the info for you and present my findings to you and see what you think!

I'm sorry if I gave the impression I blew you off, because I haven't. 

I've kicked around the idea of procedural crop domestication before, although it hasn't gotten the best of responses.  The thing about unnatural selection is that it takes some sort of compensatory drawbacks in the forms of things like vunlerability to pests and disease. 

I want to get the Xenosynthesis and Nutrition sections down plus patch up Interface, then I can declare the "rough draft" done, and I can try getting some rough formulas for some procedural generation going. 

"Guns, Germs, and Steel" is unfortunately one of the Jared Diamond books I haven't read.  I'll try to get to it sometime over the weekend.

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Violate the Earth!
Post by: G-Flex on February 24, 2011, 03:45:51 pm

Quote from: NW_Kohaku on February 24, 2011, 10:34:58 am

Anyway, I hope that I can create something that isn't too overwhelming for the players, while at the same time producing that sort of "living world" feeling with a massive backstory to it that Toady seems to be working towards with a comprehensive ecology system.  Something that makes a real simulated fantasy world instead of a set of tools for the player to interact with to produce more materials.

I understand what you're doing here, but don't you think you're coming off more as if you're trying to design game systems yourself rather than give input?

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Violate the Earth!
Post by: NW_Kohaku on February 24, 2011, 04:09:32 pm

Quote from: G-Flex on February 24, 2011, 03:45:51 pm

I understand what you're doing here, but don't you think you're coming off more as if you're trying to design game systems yourself rather than give input?

Not really, this is Toady's magnum opus of a game, after all.  He's the ultimate gatekeeper of what goes in or out of it (barring mods or hacks).

Everyone has an idea of what they want Dwarf Fortress can be or should be, and aren't afraid to express that quite emphatically.  Steampunk versus magical and beardless versus bearded and the like rage.  Some people have put out very detailed plans for how things like pathfinding can be performed.  You've done quite a bit of work on how combat should be handled.

All I've done here is try to make my best guess at what Toady wants to do with his game, and try to match the sorts of things I find exciting and compelling in a gameworld to his mode of telling the story of his gameworld. 

Toady has said things like how he doesn't know how to start up a cave-in system because he isn't sure how to convey information to the player on how much stress any given load-bearing wall is under.  If someone decides to try to crack that particular nut, and comes up with a proposed system for how to handle and display the stress and load of walls and supports, they'll be suggesting a way for Toady to code something into the game, but that doesn't mean it's any less a suggestion.

After that, all I can do is hope that I've made a compelling enough argument that Toady will concede that at least some of it is a good idea, and try to put it in. 

If I can come up with practical applications for every little feature I want in, I think I have a better shot of convincing Toady to put those features in.

If I can come up with a rough sketch of how to do it, I think I have a better shot of convincing Toady that it isn't "just too complicated" to work on. 

I'm doing what I can to create a proposal that has something to cater to all the demographics of DF players, and presents something that will appeal to Toady in the best way I know how.  Barring any direct feedback, that means I have to make some gross assumptions, but it's the best that I can manage, and I think it's better to try to take those risks than just sit quietly in the dark and do nothing.

---

EDIT:
One of the things that really set me off on this path was this quote:

Quote from: Toady One on July 19, 2010, 06:24:53 am

We haven't made any final decisions.  I think a NPK+pH model does give you something back, because you'd get some really great varied local landscapes and it would take care of crop rotation, composting, naturally poor soil, or whatever else, but it introduces a farming interface problem to dwarf mode in terms of conveying the information in wholesome terms and allowing you to solve problems that come up.

I've tried to get more information from Toady on what he means or what he wants to do, but it generally winds up causing fights in the Future of the Fortress thread when I try, and it's just hard to get any sort of clear statements on his intent, but...

Here, he's talking about how he wants varied plants, composting, naturally poor soil, but that he is having trouble coming up with ways to let the player interact with such a situation. 

This is why I've tried to come up with a plan for entailing everything that people could want in an ecological simulation, and then tried to come up with a way of actually having mechanics that could be explained to the player - the thing Toady was saying he was having trouble coming up with a good way of doing. 

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Violate the Earth!
Post by: G-Flex on February 24, 2011, 05:06:07 pm

Yeah, I get what you mean and I probably acted a little reactionary there. I just find that the best way to give suggestions is to identify game problems/goals, what concerns are there, what would be necessary to fix (or reach) them, and then perhaps some examples... whereas some people (not necessarily you I'm talking about here) jump straight to "here's my giant-ass overwrought suggestion for a magic system" -- which we've all seen before -- before really considering that such information has a very low signal-to-noise ratio when more abstract feedback (in this case, "what this game needs to get out of a magic system and what design concerns need to be dealt with and how") is necessary before even embarking on more specific suggestions.

Again, I'm not complaining about you here, probably just misdirecting frustrations a little bit.

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Violate the Earth!
Post by: NW_Kohaku on February 24, 2011, 05:27:07 pm

Well, the stuff in the first post represents the abstract feedback and framework I put on this post... and honestly, I worried that I spent too much time talking about abstracts and not enough going into the things like Interface.

It was really the Interface section I consider the most important, since after all the "here's why we need to do something" and "here's what could be done", it's the Interface that Toady specifically flagged as the thing that most troubled him.

The problem is that I really need to throw down the whole system before I can really talk about how to interact with that system meaningfully.  I got a little antsy and tried to write the Interface section a little early, just so that it was there.

Not having a fully-written-out idea that I can reference and go down the checklist for, it made writing the Interface section a bit difficult, so I want to finish off the rest of the things that are going to be entailed in the proposal so that I can wrap all of that into a single big proposed Interface idea.

Toady said he's not sure he'll ever get around to realistic cave-ins because he's not sure of how to display the information to the player.  He's said he wants to do the sorts of farming things I find really exciting, but that he's not sure he knows how to display that information to the player.  Well, nothing succeeds like success, right? If I can make a way to show how to display that information to the player, then it proves it's possible.  If he doesn't want to take my exact suggestion, so be it, but it at least shows it can be done, and hopefully that makes it much more likely he'll throw in all those neat complex simulation things that make me giddy to imagine.

The recent ceramics stuff is a good example - I was proposing porcelain about a year ago, and while what we actually got wasn't really what I asked for, it's certainly close enough that I can just mod over what I really want.  That's certainly good enough for me. 

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Violate the Earth!
Post by: NW_Kohaku on February 25, 2011, 07:25:54 pm

Xenosynthesis

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

So... Magic.  A hot topic in the forums, to say the least, but I did a spin-off thread on the subject (http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=76578.0), and managed to get some generally positive results from most anyone who read the topic.

On the surface, plants use sunlight to power their ecosystems through the use of photosynthesis.  Underground, plants would have to take advantage of a different energy source to power their biologies.  The cavern ecosystem simply doesn't run on just the scraps of the surface, and it's not really based on chemosynthesis, either.  We have floating guts, hungry heads, and amethyst men living in an environment with underground trees whose wood is permanently at the freezing point of water, even years after they have been cut down.  We have a clearly magical ecosystem, and that means that these xenomorphic plant and animal systems need a xenosynthetic energy source. 

This means, as an ecosystem, magic is the "sunlight" that powers the plants underground.  This means bringing the sphere system into the game as a source of magic power.  As the game currently has "good" and "evil" and "savage" biomes, it should be possible to have something like a half-dozen to a dozen or more types of different magic "flavors" that can power the ecosystems of underground, as well as the way that evil biomes already exist aboveground.  This means that in the cavern systems, there would be some magical fields that might apply to only one or two levels of the caverns per embark tile.  The surface might have evil alignment in the northern mountains, and savage alignment in the southern jungle, while the first cavern might have a "dreams" sphere alignment in the north and a lack of any magical influence in the south, the second cavern might have "dreams" up north again, while the south has "duty" as a sphere.  In the third caverns, "darkness" and "blight" might have hold.  (And the HFS has a sphere all its own, potentially with some HFS "plantlife" made of living glass tendrils that slice at passerby.)  Each of these spheres has their own associated life forms that live in their niches, making the strange yet colorful underground worlds actually vary from place to place like the surface biomes do already.

Mushrooms still exist, but they are a separate type of "crop" that needs biomass and water.  They need a constant supply of "dead stuff" to feed them, and they should also possibly be capable of breaking down the "underground crop" distinction.  Mundane mushrooms can grow above or underground.  Magical mushrooms (which may have more in common with plants and just look like mushrooms) would simply need to grow near the magic fields that power them, and could grow above or underground.  In a chunk of the underground with absolutely no magic, only mushrooms will be capable of growing.  If what you want is just mushrooms, that's certainly a good thing - you have nothing to fear from crowding weeds or magical pests in a magic-dead area with no sunlight, so your fungi can grow in utter peace.  It does, however, mean that you will need to constantly supply the mushrooms with new biomass to feed upon.

Writing this now, in the wake of 31.19, however, there is a big opportunity for changing the way that plants and animals in general work.  Metals have already been made rare, but plants are always available in the same varieties (excepting only the sphere-aligned ones, and even then, you can trade for those sometimes,) and as such, you can pretty much always have full access to infinite supplies of prepared food to sell and the textiles industry, plus a pretty good chance of either glass or ceramics.  Stone materials are, of course, always available in functionally infinite quantities anywhere. 

Metals and other ores and minerals could be potentially tied to different magical effects.  Plenty of iron and flux is a great boon, so maybe the magical fields in areas that are so beneficial are much less beneficial in other areas.  You can harvest much more food  in magical fields that only occur when you don't have iron and flux in massive quantities.  In many fairy tails, cold iron (wrought iron) is a weakness of magical creatures and magic in general.  Maybe pig tails or other textile industry products depend on magic fields that are averse to some sort of magical field disruption caused by iron.  That way, the abundance of one material creates the absence of another. 

This obviously applies over to other underground xenosynthetic plants that require different magic fields as their energy sources.  A magma sphere might be great for alchemical ingredient plants like "fire grass" that can be used to make flammable liquids or explosives or heat sources, but are unsuitable for farming many other types of underground crops.  Underground trees and underground textiles might require different or even opposing magic types, making players have to either choose between the two, or manage conflicting magic zones.  The more different kinds of economically viable magic plants there are (and alchemy may be the best way to simulate this), then the more conflict you can create between player desires for one resource over another.

Having access to the magic fields for these plants is like having access to sunlight for mundane surface plants.  You can't just import a sunberry and start planting them wherever, they need their magic to grow. 

There is a limited amount of this magic in the area for them to absorb.  Like photosynthetic plants, xenosynthetic plants might have "leaves" of one form or another that tries to grow to the best spots to absorb as much magic as possible, and in the face of competition, may grow weed-like tendencies to try to "shade out" their competition by growing their leaves in the way of the rival xenosynthetic plants by absorbing all the magical flows for themselves, starving the rivals.  This means that the same crowding rules for sunlight might be applied to crowding for magic, as well.  (Of course, magic plants might just literally up and do battle with one another, suddenly growing flaming vines to smite their planty foes.)

Another idea for creating a "magical climate" might be to make some magic fields fluctuate by season, rather than being a permanent static feature of the caverns area.  Currently, sweet pods are a seasonal crop underground, in spite of the caves having no real season.  Something to make the caverns more dynamic and changing could be a waxing and waning of magic power, causing certain creatures from competing magical spheres to wax and wane in dominance of the area with the coming and going of seasons.

Similar to some of the other changes that one can make gradually to biomes on the surface in general, however, I've recently started taking to the idea that players can manipulate the sphere magic biomes, such as what creates the zombies in the evil biomes,  through some player actions.  The start of this idea being here (http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=64437.0), and being developed in this later thread (http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=64733.msg1516318#msg1516318) before I really tried to put forward the Xenosynthesis (http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=76578.0) thread.  This would mean that, while dwarves have little actual access to magic (barring something like capturing zombies or unicorns and dumping them on invaders) they can have some means of controlling the magical climate of their area the way that they have some control over the type of biome they are farming in through soil cultivation or soil erosion. 

Rather than having a simple magic field that is unchanging like the way that the evil of a region is unchanging now, or even the way that rainfall is unchanging in a region is unchanging, dwarves could perform some actions that could raise or lower the different magical sphere factors in their environments. 

This means the presence of unburied/unmemorialized dead can raise the "death" sphere of the place, causing more haunting, and also changing the environment to have death-sphere-related flora and fauna, as well.  Zombies could be powered by a strong death sphere influence, as could corpse berries or the like.

While it is possible for artifacts to cause a general change in the magic of the area around them, it is somewhat problematic to have actual physical objects create magical effects, since you could just move them some place when you want a magical field to be applied, and then try to find some way to just move that artifact (or turn off its effect) in order to have very direct control over magic. 

Of course, having a "source of magic" like a crystal glass statue that you can't move, but can shatter if you so choose could be a fairly viable strategy.  In the caverns, a strange ruin built around a crystal glass statue could be discovered, and around it, magical plants of great value and rarity are grown, but so too are dangers to your fort.  You can try to exploit this ruin's wealth, or shatter that statue and kill the magic, just to be safe.  Who knows if the powers of the statue will change if you drink too deep of the powers of this unknown magical artifact, and why did the previous culture fall into ruins, anyway?  Well, obviously, it's risky, but just taking a LITTLE won't hurt, right?  Wow, that worked out fine!  How about a little more, then...

Other sources of magic might be an open portal to another world or dimension.  This may not necessarily be a crossable portal (from this side), but it would mean that players would have little they could do about the portal, except maybe try to close it, if that were possible, by going through it and closing it from the other side.  The HFS could be a portal, itself, if it is not literally meant to be directly below the magma sea.

Some features like underground rivers or lakes might be a type of portal, where the water comes from another watery dimension, and so do the snakemen and giant toads and such.  If the watery magic rises in power, the cavern lakes can start flooding and more creatures can spawn out of those lakes, although some of the benefits of cavern water (like all the plants that grow there and resources you can gain from them) go up as the risks of cavern floods go up. 

The flora and fauna of the region absorb the magic, but it is also possible to have some of the flora and fauna also generate some of the magical energy in the area.  Something like a corpse bloom might grow when there is plenty of death in the area, and if left alone, may gradually add some death magic into the area, which might be consumed (dropping the area magic power) by other creatures, like zombies.  Zombies would then need to have access to that death magic, and not be able to leave the area of their death magic without gradually growing "hungry" for that death magic, and the zombie will fall apart if they do not have death magic to sustain them.  Hence, they can only make some temporary forays into the areas not covered by the death magic.  Of course, if they can find and murder a living creature, and desecrate its corpse in a way that adds death magic to the area, they can sustain themselves on the death magic they have released, and maybe spread their death sphere so that more corpse blooms grow in the area.

Conversely, some sort of Memento Morii Morninglory might be planted that could still the dead, and drop the area death magic, so that if you were being attacked by zombies, then, like with pests, you could plant something that actively drained the death magic from the area, depriving the zombies from the death magic they need to "survive" upon.  That might even work to repel zombies and such entirely, since they may have an instinctive aversion to even trying to go into areas that have those flowers that weaken their ability to sustain themselves (although they will pursue a living being they see run into that area, they won't go exploring that area on their own).

A pest might even have magical properties.  A ghast fly swarm might be attracted to corpses just lying around a battlefield unburied or otherwise removed from the open air.  The ghast flies would then generate death magic that could raise some of those dead goblin soldiers on your doorstep to become goblin zombies. Only by ensuring that you have the means to repel some ghast flies can you ensure that death doesn't visit your doorstep with return visitors.  Releasing spiders to catch and kill the flies would stop them from being able to raise the death magic levels enough to raise zombies, as would simply burying the goblin invaders in a shallow mass grave.

The other route that this magic can go down is marrying spheres to divine magic.

Potentially, if sphere magic is crossed over with divine magic, so that each sphere represents a god or force, such as the elves' forest deity, there could be two factors of each magic sphere - the amount of power and influence that deity or sphere's force has in the area, and also how much they favor your fortress generally.  Hence, a forest spirit could be very weak and it wouldn't matter how happy or angry it was with your fortress, since it couldn't do anything to you, anyway.  A powerful forest spirit, however, may demand much of your fortress lest you lose its favor, and the powerful force of nature or deity will find ways to seek its vengeance upon your fort. 

Making such a magical force an irrational, emotional being completely immune to logic and sympathy could help make magic an even more dangerous toy to play with.  The goddess of love doesn't care a thing about how well the relationships work out, she just wants as many people falling in love with one another as possible.  Love at first sight is all that matters.  How dare you talk back about a goblin and a dwarf never being meant to be?! HOW COULD YOU BETRAY ME LIKE THAT?!  WELL, MAYBE THIS GIANT SWARM OF KILLER FLUFFY TEDDYBEARS AND LIVING RED ROSE STRANGLERS AREN'T MEANT TO BE TEARING OUT YOUR EYEBALLS, EITHER!

Hence, the dwarven god of Justice demands someone be hammered for committing the crime of not fulfilling a mandate, no matter the fact that it's not really anyone's fault that there wasn't any way for the fortress to make or trade for rose gold.  You have to see justice impassively carried out no matter how irrational it might be.

This would also mean that religious services and festivals and the like could be used as sources of (or ways to drain) magical power for the area.  A religious festival praying for a better harvest may actually generate the magical power needed to make one possible.

---

In the light of Xenosynthesis and magical underground flowers, creatures similar to bees underground make perfect sense, as many flowers in underground fields would have no means of pollenating other flowers, especially since the wind is much less dynamic in a cave.  Attracting a pollenating insect like a bee with nectar so that they could help the plant breed would make perfect evolutionary sense as a logical extrapolation starting from the position of an arbitrarily magical underground flower. 

In fact, such plants might just need a bee-like creature to pollenate them.  This "beneficial pest" might be required to be available in the soil or artificially hived and set in the area of the crops, lest the harvest be stunted for lack of pollenation.  (Possibly involving a multiplier of crops harvested based upon the number of pollenating insects, up to a logical maximum, so that you could normally get only a small number of crops from a harvest, but get up to 5 times as much depending on having a sufficient number of nearby pollenating insects.)

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Violate the Earth!
Post by: NW_Kohaku on February 25, 2011, 07:30:28 pm

I'm not sure I did everything I really wanted to do in this last one, although I covered all the major topics, at least.  It's obviously more vague because I haven't been able to really hammer out all the details on this one like I have the other things, and get a very specific idea of how these things can work.

This is partially because I'm not really sure what sort of spheres we will be working with, though, ultimately.

Anyway, there's only a little more to go in this thread before I think I can really say I have the rough draft done.  Nutrition modelling and then the Interface meddling. 

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Quote from: G-Flex on February 24, 2011, 05:06:07 pm

Yeah, I get what you mean and I probably acted a little reactionary there. I just find that the best way to give suggestions is to identify game problems/goals, what concerns are there, what would be necessary to fix (or reach) them, and then perhaps some examples... whereas some people (not necessarily you I'm talking about here) jump straight to "here's my giant-ass overwrought suggestion for a magic system" -- which we've all seen before -- before really considering that such information has a very low signal-to-noise ratio when more abstract feedback (in this case, "what this game needs to get out of a magic system and what design concerns need to be dealt with and how") is necessary before even embarking on more specific suggestions.

Again, I'm not complaining about you here, probably just misdirecting frustrations a little bit.

Actually, on thinking about this for a while, I don't suppose you could try to share what you consider to be "the best way to suggest things" with me?  I could certainly use refinement of technique.

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Violate the Earth!
Post by: G-Flex on February 25, 2011, 09:36:54 pm

I can't critique your suggestions too much because I haven't really read the majority of it (in fact, I need to give this thread more of a look).

In general, though? A good suggestion is what's useful to the developer. It all stems from that. Identifying a problem with the game is useful, or reasons why a problem might be caused or how to solve it. This much is obvious enough, but a lot of people don't focus on that.


I think an example would be useful here. Let's talk about, say, magic. Farming would be another easy example, since it's another broad feature set with serious gameplay implications, but magic is even more open for discussion since it doesn't really exist yet. An example of good feedback (in my opinion) would be to bring up what kinds of gameplay aspects you'd like to see magic accomplish, and why. For instance, I'd like to see a sort of mystical, subtle system with all its implications explored (e.g. the implications of being able to purify water magically) rather than magic being seen as utilitarian spell-slinging and/or not really affecting the gameworld as a whole very much even when it should (e.g. D&D in both regards, really), because I feel like that can create a more profound, believable world more rooted in realistic behavior and folklore than it would be rooted in magic systems for the sake of generic fantasy magic and fireballs.

An example of bad feedback would be any given example of someone creating a thread throwing out some huge overwrought idea for a magic system that he think would be neat, without so much regard for how it satisfies the design goals of the game. The problem here is twofold: First off, if anything's going to help Toady out, it's not specifics, it's abstract design feedback. Saying "I'd like magic to focus on general concepts A and B for reasons X and Y related to the game's design goals P and Q, and here's a bit of reasoning" is more useful by itself than a giant post saying "I'd like magic to be specifically A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, and I because I think it would be fun", because the former is more constructive from the perspective of a developers. If I'm a developer, I want to know what the players want from the game, or what they want to see from it, or what they see as problems in it, and to give feedback related to design goals and decisions; a suggestion without this, without much awareness of the game's actual developmental process, is nearly useless. Secondly, the latter sort of suggestion has a terrible signal-to-noise ratio. The more work you put into the specifics of a suggested system, the more your returns diminish, because the more and more likely it gets that the developer's implementation would have already diverged by that point, and specific implementation details usually aren't the sort of thing the developer is looking for anyway.

Illustrated example: Take my basic magic suggestion above, about magic being subtle and all that jazz. Now, I could go further and describe some basic ways that could work, like herbalistic medicine, minor alchemy, spiritual hedge-magic, and so forth. That's still pretty useful, because those are nice food for thought and flesh out the kind of thing I'm getting at. I could also go one step further with, say, alchemy, and say what general flavors of effect alchemy should be able to produce. I could then go more steps forward, and come up with this huge system of what alchemical "elements" are involved, what effects each of them has, how they are combined, and so forth, with charts and tables and essentially a fully fleshed-out system. At this point, the problem is that the developer will likely have lost me at one of the much earlier steps, because it's doubtful that his own design decisions will take him in the exact same direction as me, and even if they did, those implementation details aren't up to me to begin with. Basically, spreading a whole suggested and detailed system on the table out like that only serves as a working proof-of-concept that a more general suggestion or idea can work (which is what I believe you're trying to do), but some threads here have forgotten that, delving straight into "HERE'S MY IDEA FOR A MAGIC SYSTEM", which is utterly useless because even if they did state a more general purpose for it, the vast majority of the effort has gone into specific details that are almost guaranteed to go either unconsidered or simply unused, because a game developer will get much more out of "here's the kind of stuff I want, why I want it, and how it would suit the game" than "here's some very very specific details of how I would do this thing I want", especially in terms of cost vs. benefit.

I apologize if I'm overexplaining, but it's because I feel like I'm probably not explaining it well.

tl;dr Toady gains more from "I want this type of feature to have these gameplay characteristics because it would suit the game in this way" than he does from a long rambling post about how differently colored magical obelisks guarded by silver lava-surfers underneath the planet can be ground down and mixed in variable proportions (see attached Excel spreadsheet) to produce different healing potions that are then injected under the skin using bee stingers attached to plungers made out of vulcanized rubber you negotiated from the rubber tree spirit that refills its supply exactly 150 ticks and half that if you're an elf but if it's a full moon there's a risk that the rubber will be poisoned and you'll have to rub obelisk dust on it BEFORE touching it with bare hands or else the gods (see other attached Excel spreadsheet) will piss on you in a color related to their sphere of influence a number of times equal to the current day of the month multiplied by the phase of the moon, unless it's the Wyld Hunt (see my other suggestion thread!!!) in which case the Huntsman has the possibility of killing the dwarf instead, _{leading to his ghost poisoning all obelisk dust in your stockpiles, which reverses all their effects, and the potion has to be injected by someone who isn't an elf because elfs are only good for magma burial and also they need blood magic because they need something to differentiate them from the dwarves (see my suggestion thread on blood magic) but really the most important thing is that the obelisks are involved somehow and if you can do that I'm happy because I saw 2001 when I was a kid and that's what it makes me think of}

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Violate the Earth!
Post by: NW_Kohaku on February 26, 2011, 11:50:55 am

Hmmm... I kind of do both.

The thing starts as a purely abstract, and works its way in talking about features, then I get into proof-of-concepty things near the end.  (I want to finish off with a mockup set of plants just to illustrate what sort of things we could do, although I have absolutely no doubts that Toady won't want to use the procedurally generated random crap that gets spit out in favor of whatever procedurally generated stuff he can program to be spit out.)

Maybe it's the starting off from the detailed and technical end of the spectrum and working to the more abstract growth that the thread performed (where people were arguing how many tiles of farm or how many farmers would take to feed 100 dwarves), but I sort of felt like it wasn't really a complete suggestion until I threw in exact numbers that would make the whole thing work.  I kind of felt bad that I didn't put in precise numbers in the earlier NPK section, so I wrote another Advnaced NPK section, and then felt that needed to be more detailed, since it's not a complete suggestion until it has an exact metric.

That said, I think there's something worth disagreeing about with what you have said, in that I don't think that people really always grasp what it is they really want with these suggestions.  Especially with things like the magic arguments, some people just seem to declare they want random kill-your-whole-fort on a roll of 1 magic or Tolkien magic or D&D magic without really thinking any of it through, and without really being willing to discuss it.  Taking the time to actually think about how it would have to be implemented, and how the player actually has to interact with it has made me do some pretty serious revisions to this suggestion, which just talking about my feelings wouldn't have done.

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Violate the Earth!
Post by: G-Flex on February 26, 2011, 02:59:53 pm

I think there's some truth in what each of us is saying.

Quote from: NW_Kohaku on February 26, 2011, 11:50:55 am

That said, I think there's something worth disagreeing about with what you have said, in that I don't think that people really always grasp what it is they really want with these suggestions.  Especially with things like the magic arguments, some people just seem to declare they want random kill-your-whole-fort on a roll of 1 magic or Tolkien magic or D&D magic without really thinking any of it through, and without really being willing to discuss it.  Taking the time to actually think about how it would have to be implemented, and how the player actually has to interact with it has made me do some pretty serious revisions to this suggestion, which just talking about my feelings wouldn't have done.

The part of "thinking it through" I'm referring to is the abstract stuff, though. In this case, what purpose would a given type of magic serve to the game, and how? I mean, people not grasping the purpose of the suggestion (or what they want by it) is a big part of the problem I'm addressing here.

Of course, thinking through an implementation is a good way to examine your own suggestion and provide a proof-of-concept. However, some people seem to take a totally different approach. An approach we both seem to agree is good is the kind where you think about what sort of purpose a suggested thing would have for the game, and why, and all that other crap I mentioned, and then possibly flesh out the idea using proof-of-concept details in order to examine it further and show that it is feasible. However, fleshing out a suggestion doesn't imply that you have engaged in those first steps, or that you're even fleshing it out for the same reasons; some suggestions just come off as masturbatory armchair-game-design, where the suggester is taking more of a "this would be cool!" approach to show off some hideously specific thing he's devised with no real rhyme or reason to doing so. It reminds me of those letters people would send to Nintendo back when they were little kids, with crude drawings of monsters and stuff (http://sydlexia.com/old_smb2_ideas.htm), where the point is more to show off random cool ideas floating around in your head rather than get at actual design issues and try to solve them. My ridiculous strawman example at the end of the last post would be a (fairly stupidly extreme) example of that, where it's just an overwrought string of superficially-"cool" ideas that don't really contribute to discussion at all. I mean, it's not hard to come up with arbitrary examples of game systems, but it's a lot of wasted effort compared to doing so as a supplement to actual design considerations being put forward.

Quote from: NW_Kohaku on February 26, 2011, 11:50:55 am

The thing starts as a purely abstract, and works its way in talking about features, then I get into proof-of-concepty things near the end.  (I want to finish off with a mockup set of plants just to illustrate what sort of things we could do, although I have absolutely no doubts that Toady won't want to use the procedurally generated random crap that gets spit out in favor of whatever procedurally generated stuff he can program to be spit out.)

For example, this is a perfectly reasonable way to go about things, because you're not just throwing complex systems into discussion for the sake of "here's my system for farming I threw together in my head because it's cool"; you're doing it for the sake of demonstrating the sort of design goals and considerations you're talking about, the importance and purpose of which you've already established.

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Violate the Earth!
Post by: jseah on March 02, 2011, 08:24:10 pm

Awesome read.  ^^

If you don't mind getting more "work", could I make the humble suggestion that you break the implementation into a few major chunks that could be done incrementally?  I think it would be much easier to implement in sections rather than a completely new addition. 

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Violate the Earth!
Post by: NW_Kohaku on March 07, 2011, 11:00:21 am

Nutrition Models

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

As I have discussed in the Volume and Mass (http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=61215.0) thread, dwarves currently do not have a very good system for eating.  Although it may require some (desperately needed) stacking or hauling improvements as a prerequisite, having dwarves simply eat more in a single sitting may solve many problems in the game right now.

Currently, livestock that graze will eat grass tiles that grow in the fields, and the amount they eat is based upon size.

Thing is, the amount of food the animals eat is directly proportionate to their species' average size alone.  Toady obviously just sat down dividing the number 60,000,000 by the animal's average size.

Meanwhile, the animal's milk production is oddly the same no matter the creature size, making goats the best milk-producers, since they are fairly small and eat little.  Cows are only useful for the meat they produce.

Now, making the amount of food a creature eats derived from its size is not a bad idea by itself, but we can make the game calculate out that part on its own, so that larger or smaller versions of the same animals eat more or less food.  What should go into the raws is something about metabolism so that you can throttle up or down how much food that animal needs to eat per mass of the creature. 

Likewise, the size of the cow or goat should have a direct impact on how much milk it can produce, with a variable that makes cows much better milk producers for their size than a horse is.

This means setting some standard model, and multiplying it by the size of the animal, then possibly adjusting by certain traits of the animal.

Already being strong makes animals more beefy and more massive, so there is an evolutionary advantage for being smaller and hence, eating less, if there is a strain on the food supply, while being stronger is an evolutionary advantage when you are fighting against predators that hunt you in great numbers because there is a plentiful food supply.  That's the sort of evolutionary equilibrium we need.

Other traits on the animals, such as speed should also affect metabolism - slower creatures should consume less energy and hence, eat less, basically, and this should be a multiplier on the food consumption rate, as well.  Cold-blooded creatures should get a massive bonus to their ability to go on little food, at the expense of vulnerability to cold and a penalty to their speed when they are exposed to cold, should that ever be implemented.

This is all talking about animals, however, and not dwarves.  Dwarves need to have food requirements based upon their own mass and their own stats, as well.  Even things like being more intelligent should probably have some calorie-based penalty.  Basically, larger dwarves with better stats eat more.  This means starting from a point of either multiplying what the average dwarf eats by about 4 or 5 times, and modifying it from there based upon stats and mass.  We can also just multiply the whole amount of meat that is provided by animals that are butchered (http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=78061.0) and the amount of food that is produced by fields to match what is needed for the chosen nutrition model. (The amount of "4 to 5 times" was derived from the statement that a cow's meat should be able to feed a human for about a year, and a whole lot of reverse engineering of the numbers in the Down With Prepared Meals thread (http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=60681.msg1385502#msg1385502).)

A problem is we don't want dwarves taking more food breaks, we want dwarves to be capable of grabbing all they need to eat all at once.  This means at least some fundamental ability for dwarves to carry more than one kind of object if the food stack doesn't already have 5 or so food items left in it.  This is, basically, more stacking and hauling requirements.

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Waste is a problem directly related to nutrition.  As I already have expressed, the action of producing waste can be related to the action of eating or drinking.  Waste is used to recycle nutrients that have been consumed by dwarves and animals alike.  Different animals produce different waste with different potential nutrient values based upon what they have eaten.  This can have more than one potential level of abstraction or simulation.

On the lowest level, waste is just waste.  There is no difference between even "yellow filth" and "brown filth".  This is the view of those who want a single "filth" material (http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=52643.0) for the purposes of making it a fluid.  This is unfortunately very uninteresting, but also very simple.  Needless to say, after the massive complexities I have tried exploring in this thread, "simple" is not necessarily a virtue for its own sake in my book.

On a slightly higher level, we can have an abstracted waste system, where a creature's diet has some say in what waste they produce - based upon what type of food eater they are, the game can make some decisions on what sort of nutrients they produce - with grazers and browsers having different nutrient values than carnivores.  Sentient beings can have a separate category of waste entirely. 

On the more simulation side, plants can have a nutrient value based upon what it takes to grow a given plant (so all strawberries have the same nutrient values that are just raw-set), and this is added to a creature's nutrition values. 

---

Nutrition also has been a topic of some discussion in general.

More complex dietary information may be abstracted away, but there could be some purpose in having a way of checking to make sure that dwarves are eating a varied diet, more than simply eating something other than plump helmets once a year.  A simple fruit/vegetable/cereal grain/meat and dairy division can work, making a sort of "food group" dietary division, as could having some sort of basic protein/vitamin C/omega-3 fatty acid/whatever vitamin checking system, with syndromes attached to not having enough of any one nutrient.

The problem is, I haven't really set up good constraints on what to have in this sort of dietary requirements, and it mostly requires the "prepared meal" type of suggestions to become really useful and meaningful, so I think I'll actually skip out of this side of the debate, at least for now.  Being unsure of where, exactly, I want to go, this section has stumped me for a while, and I will come back to it later, if in this suggestion thread at all.

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Violate the Earth!
Post by: NW_Kohaku on March 07, 2011, 11:06:05 am

Sorry for the delay on this, I had trouble deciding on what I wanted to argue for in the nutrition model, so I decided to just put it off, and wound up just deciding to open up and play Mass Effect 2, which had been just sitting around for a while, so I haven't been on much for the last week. :P

Anyway, I'm getting about ready to work on revising some of the other suggestions I've littered the forum with over the past year, and I sort of want this suggestion complete, which means I need to go back to the Interface section again, and actually complete that.

Again, I worry that I'm sort of at a state where the idea I have is so complex and nuanced that everyone who reads this thread is going to have a different idea of what it is, but I still hope that the people who are still reading this can give me some comments on what flaws they see, especially with the way that the Interface can work.

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Violate the Earth!
Post by: The Phoenixian on March 10, 2011, 10:45:57 am

OnIn response to Xenosynthesis

Faux edit: not sure what to list this as after writing it: it doesn't seem to actually be xenosynthesis...
The idea itself is nice but part of me doesn't quite like it.  It seems a bit simple: replacing the sun with simply another, more manipulable source of sustenance. (Though I may have missed something, I'm not sure.)

I'd much more like to see it as one of several parts of any ecosystem rather than the whole.

For an example, let's say you had a very large underground chamber, like the current cavern layers though probably larger, in which grew "Sun-cap" a subterranean tree that feeds off of wind, and a biomass feeding "glow shrub", both of which provide sustenance to the photosynthetic Nethercap the constant coldness of which provided a source for aircurrents (especially when around lava or fire generating plants.)

Also, I'd argue that any naturally existing ecosystem should be capable of being brought up into a permaculture even if some of the original parts of the ecology can't survive in the once it's fully developed.

(Back to the example, the nethercap might live a meager existence off of the brightness of lava and glow shrubs could be anywhere there was biomass before they meet and the system starts to grow enough for suncaps to develop and while the influx of surface plant life that suncaps allows might crowd out glow shrubs they were still necessary to the initial growth.)

(For that matter it would be nice to see rainforests and such above ground too, where certain plants above ground altered the weather and otherwise changed the biome to what it would not have been otherwise)

On retrospect, that's probably more something that would be found under ecology altering plants or complex biomes than xenosynthesis...


On Nutrition models

Not much to say but I agree with pretty much everything here. Waste especially so though. It may not be pretty but it adds enough that it's necessary at least in some form.

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Violate the Earth!
Post by: JohnieRWilkins on March 10, 2011, 10:58:57 am

I think that all underground plants are fungi. They don't undergo photosynthesis and I assume that all underground plants simply feed by metabolizing organic matter. I don't know how that organic matter gets there. And I certainly don't know how forming large tree-textured mushrooms is an evolutionary advantage to fungus. Maybe they can spread their spores farther?

I certainly want an answer to how tower caps meet their energy demands.

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Violate the Earth!
Post by: The Phoenixian on March 10, 2011, 01:23:13 pm

Well I'd expect you'd have to have something else down there if you'd want more than just a minor, slowlived kind of life at least, whether feeding on magic, oil, heat, kinetic energy, some strange source of light, or chemical energy present in certain minerals.

Though for biomass, one could partially explain it by having underground rivers begin with rivers and streams that start at the surface but are diverted into caves and carrying silt and other things in with them.

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Violate the Earth!
Post by: JohnieRWilkins on March 10, 2011, 01:42:37 pm

Quote from: The Phoenixian on March 10, 2011, 01:23:13 pm

kinetic energy,

I'm getting disturbing images of a living rubber band.

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Violate the Earth!
Post by: G-Flex on March 10, 2011, 10:03:50 pm

Quote from: The Phoenixian on March 10, 2011, 10:45:57 am

"Sun-cap" a subterranean tree that feeds off of wind, and a biomass feeding "glow shrub", both of which provide sustenance to the photosynthetic Nethercap the constant coldness of which provided a source for aircurrents (especially when around lava or fire generating plants.)

Wind doesn't provide a lot of energy at all. Something that has to survive on wind alone wouldn't have enough energy to visibly glow.

Also, constant coldness is thermodynamically a very awful and creepy thing, and I really don't want to think about the implications of it. Then again, we sort of have to, because they exist.

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Violate the Earth!
Post by: Jeoshua on March 10, 2011, 10:18:12 pm

I think Nethercap is so cold because it uses the temperature of the surrounding environment in some way, converting it into energy for it's own use.  This implies very strange and non-standard biochemistry... possibly even magic.

The most damnable thing about Nethercap is that when made into furniture it retains this heat-sucking property.  This implies that it doesn't really die when you cut it up.  Something that sucks heat energy out of anything up to and including magma for life energy that doesn't die when you cut it up into little pieces.

Truly the most terrifying of plants.

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Violate the Earth!
Post by: G-Flex on March 10, 2011, 10:30:35 pm

Quote from: Jeoshua on March 10, 2011, 10:18:12 pm

I think Nethercap is so cold because it uses the temperature of the surrounding environment in some way, converting it into energy for it's own use.  This implies very strange and non-standard biochemistry... possibly even magic.

Yet the heat isn't evidently doing anything. It would have to be stored in the form of potential energy, unless the things have locomotion or grow extremely fast without bound, or something silly like that. Or the energy is totally destroyed, with is a thermodynamic nightmare impossible without magic.

Of course, there pretty evidently is magic going on here, so yeah.

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Violate the Earth!
Post by: irmo on March 10, 2011, 11:01:29 pm

Quote from: G-Flex on March 10, 2011, 10:30:35 pm

Yet the heat isn't evidently doing anything. It would have to be stored in the form of potential energy, unless the things have locomotion or grow extremely fast without bound, or something silly like that. Or the energy is totally destroyed, with is a thermodynamic nightmare impossible without magic.

OR we use magic to avoid the thermodynamic nightmare.

Each nether-cap contains tiny portals to the Nether Plane, which is very cold. Their energy metabolism is a heat engine using the portal as a sink, with chemical reactions powered by the temperature gradient from the surface to the core of the mushroom. Only a small fraction of the heat they absorb from the environment is bioavailable; the rest just goes through the portal. Their efficiency is horrendously low but that's okay because their heat and cold sources are both basically unlimited.

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Violate the Earth!
Post by: NW_Kohaku on March 11, 2011, 12:33:28 pm

Quote from: JohnieRWilkins on March 10, 2011, 10:58:57 am

I think that all underground plants are fungi. They don't undergo photosynthesis and I assume that all underground plants simply feed by metabolizing organic matter. I don't know how that organic matter gets there. And I certainly don't know how forming large tree-textured mushrooms is an evolutionary advantage to fungus. Maybe they can spread their spores farther?

I certainly want an answer to how tower caps meet their energy demands.

Well, there's three major problems with "it's all fungi"...

First, fungi (or more specifically, scavengers and decomposers) are terribly entropic beings - their niche in the ecosystem is converting what little biochemical energy remains from the waste of the system, to ensure that all waste is returned back into the system.  No new energy is created or stored.  This means all underground life is unsustainable without massive amounts of organic compounds falling down into the cave system.  Note this mass is not going back UP.  Any caverns being filled with this much mass would fill up the entire cavern system incredibly quickly with dirt long before dwarves would be capable of finding and exploring them, no matter how those caverns formed in the first place. 

Second, it's largely unsustainable because you're basically funnelling incredible amounts of mineral wealth for the surface world down into the cavern system.  If we have a "real" ecosystem, the underground is either a MASSIVE parasitic ecosystem that feeds off of the surface ecosystem, which I don't think would be sustainable, or the sustainable underground ecosystem is run off of some other form of energy.

Third, few of the current underground plants seem like they are really mushrooms, anyway.  Take quarry bushes, with their leaves and their rock nuts.  Take tunnel tubes, which seem like references to tube worms from "black smoker" undersea volcanos (which are chemosynthetic).  And like I said in the section itself, we have floating guts (basically, slime monsters), flying heads, and amethyst men.  It's clearly magical life (I can't really call a plump helmet man or an amethyst man an "animal" exactly, but...) down there already, so we might as well extend the magic to magic underground plants, too.  (And then there's the "always at 0 celcius, even after cutting it down" nether-cap...)

Honestly, I tend to think that nether-caps and tower caps and whatever are just mushroom-shaped magical... creatures.  I'm not sure I can say they are "plants" necessarily, either, but that they exibit properties close enough to plants to be used like them. 

Quote from: The Phoenixian on March 10, 2011, 10:45:57 am

OnIn response to Xenosynthesis

[...]

I'd much more like to see it as one of several parts of any ecosystem rather than the whole.

[...]

OK, well, that's basically just more complexity, and why not throw in more complexity at this point?  :P

I've already talked about mushrooms being able to grow "off the grid" of magic, and I think that at a certain point, we could also say that some magic plants are not "aboveground" or "underground" at all, that they just don't need sunlight, they only need magic (or they only need light in general).  That said, that sun-cap had better be a freaking giant lightbulb in disguise to actually replicate the energy output of a sun, even if you are putting the plants right up next to them.  (Would dwarves be hit with their cave adaptation nausea for it?) 

That would require the lighting arc be complete, however.  There's also the wind and air purity systems that we could put in, yes, but while it's great to tie all these things in with one another, there should also be some other forms of magic ecosystems, because clearly that suncap is a magic plant, and it just has some potentially symbiotic relationships.  We could put in the baseline of this system without having to wait for every other portion of the game to be complete...

I think something like a chemosynthetic "plant" that requires access to magma in the way that current "wet" plants require being within two tiles of water might be feasable. 

Rainforests that alter their own biome might be possible, in the sense that we are already talking about trying to make the game recognize that you can change a grassland into a desert, and make animals recognize that the biome has changed, and that they want to now attempt migrating to a new biome if there are prey species available.  This would require a broader check of what goes into a biome, however...

Rather than having a (perhaps seasonal or yearly, no point in doing this too often) check on just migratory animals, there might be a whole "feedback system" check, where some of the properties of the biome are alterable, such as rainfall and how much water is being put into the system in general.

Quote from: The Phoenixian on March 10, 2011, 10:45:57 am

On Nutrition models

Not much to say but I agree with pretty much everything here. Waste especially so though. It may not be pretty but it adds enough that it's necessary at least in some form.

Actually, that reminds me of something I forgot to add to the nutrition section... I wanted to talk about food webs, and because I left off on the nutrition system for so long, it slipped my mind that I wanted to do it...

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Violate the Earth!
Post by: NW_Kohaku on March 11, 2011, 03:08:43 pm

I guess a couple other things I should respond to...

Quote from: jseah on March 02, 2011, 08:24:10 pm

Awesome read.  ^^

If you don't mind getting more "work", could I make the humble suggestion that you break the implementation into a few major chunks that could be done incrementally?  I think it would be much easier to implement in sections rather than a completely new addition.

Well, this could be problematic, since the game would be very, very wierd with some things incomplete on one side or another, if we are trying to make everything interconnected, but only have some of the connections up at one point or another.  The 31.19 problem was that some of the groundwork was laid before much of the things that made the groundwork necessary or even particularly functional were put in.

First off, there's going to be a massive raw break involved.  I think you should probably do as many of the raw changes all at once as possible, just because the raw breaks should be limited, and just make most of the new tokens just be dummy tokens that don't really do anything.

Beyond that, you need the interface (even if the buttons don't really do much), since there's no point in putting in nutrient models without having a way to actually see or react to that data.

Beyond that, you could probably work with water, NPK, and biomass, and work in the other soil factors later.  This would require the entire soil datatype rewrite at this point, plus the plant growth model and farming skills.  You'd probably need at least some placeholder fertilizers at this point, if not the entire nutrient model.  The basics of soil erosion and the like would also need to be in there, but the soil erosion by water and such might be able to wait, if you don't mind having a version or three that don't have flooding to create mud.  This would be the big one, obviously, since it's when most of the systems come up and online at once.

Beyond this, would probably be something like pests and food webs (although water management could come before that).  This means putting in the complex chain of who eats what, rather than a simple grazer tag.

Water management could be another next step, allowing for watery soil erosion, as well as magma flooding, droughts, and other water-related problems.  The change to make water carry soil nutrients inside of it could take place at this point (or in the previous big push).  It could also allow for the water-based farming methods at this point.

Real fertilizers (meaning waste management) would come after that.

Then you could do the crowding, competition, weeds, and polycultures sections.

Soil types and more biome-dependant plants.

Pollutants.

Xenosynthesis.

Invasive species, and dwarf-created biome changes.

Alternative farming methods that haven't already been put in (meaning the stuff like algaculture and Chinampas and flowers).

The ability to create procedural plants takes the last bit of this, although it could go in earlier, I think having the basics of the system working before you deal with procedural might be better, although that's just personal opinion.

Still, this is thinking about it only in the broadest of terms, and I don't know if it's really helpful (in the sense that G-Flex was talking about) to talk about these things.  I guess what it really comes down to is that there would have to be a major update that adds much of the groundwork for the system all at once, which would probably be massively buggy and have many portions of the system non-functional or with dummy placeholders. (Like dwarves just producing fertilizer from thin air to apply to the fields.)

---

Quote from: irmo on March 10, 2011, 11:01:29 pm

Quote from: G-Flex on March 10, 2011, 10:30:35 pm

Yet the heat isn't evidently doing anything. It would have to be stored in the form of potential energy, unless the things have locomotion or grow extremely fast without bound, or something silly like that. Or the energy is totally destroyed, with is a thermodynamic nightmare impossible without magic.

OR we use magic to avoid the thermodynamic nightmare.

Each nether-cap contains tiny portals to the Nether Plane, which is very cold. Their energy metabolism is a heat engine using the portal as a sink, with chemical reactions powered by the temperature gradient from the surface to the core of the mushroom. Only a small fraction of the heat they absorb from the environment is bioavailable; the rest just goes through the portal. Their efficiency is horrendously low but that's okay because their heat and cold sources are both basically unlimited.

If we are talking about xenosynthesis as I have been talking about it, then nether-caps might be producers of magic.  I'm not sure what kind of magic "creates cold" (which would be reducing heat in real-world terms, although perhaps not in a magical set of physics), so it could be that it opens a portal to a frost dimension or a nether dimension or a shadow dimension, but if the nether "wood" "produces" cold even after death, then maybe it generates a heat-regulating (it should raise temperature up to freezing, as well as lower it...) magic field, even after the chemical process the nether cap itself survives upon has ceased.

The nether cap "sprout" could be a relatively normal (term used relatively) magic underground plant until it reaches some sort of maturity state where it can produce a stable portal to its alternate dimensional energy source where it can feed upon the energies found within the portal.  Until this point, maybe it is just a mushroom, feeding off of biomasses or chemosynthesis of magma, or feeding off of the spilled-over energies of nearby magic-generating plants. 

Of course, if the energy of a nethercap comes from feeding heat into a portal to gain some magical output in return, then you would expect nethercaps to explode into life around magma vents.  They might just ring around magma vents, and stay clustered around them (especially if they are chemosynthetic in their earlier stages).

Oh, and this reminds me... mushrooms aren't used by fungi for any reason other than mating/spore spreading.  The real fungus, as in the portion of the creature that do the eating and growing and life-sustaining work of the creature, are the functional equivalent of the roots, and since fungi don't need sunlight, they never grow the mushroom until they are mature and ready to expend the wasteful amounts of precious nutrients to create a mushroom for the purposes of breeding.  Once breeding is complete, the fungus rots its own mushroom to reabsorb those precious nutrients back into itself, as well.  Mushrooms are temporary structures, they don't grow like trees do.

Again, this is why I think of tower caps as just mushroom-shaped magic plants.  Maybe they have those magic portals on the inside of them, and so they grow into a sort of Dyson Sphere around the portal that it grows to capture radiating magical energy without being too close to the portal itself.  This would raise the question of why they would need a "trunk" to raise this sphere off the ground, however... Perhaps to keep out of the range of some mud-based parasites?  Maybe the stone floor itself disturbs the collection of energy or the stability of the portals, since the stone itself might have an "earth sphere" effect?

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Violate the Earth!
Post by: NW_Kohaku on March 11, 2011, 05:06:17 pm

Food Webs

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

A continuation of the previous section and the previous pests section, which is detailed enough to warrant a section of its own.  This thread in particular caught my eye as a reference (http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=78564.msg2029895#msg2029895), but I believe we need to work with a more complex model for what animals will eat than simply using a broad-stroke "Vermin-hunter" token, especially for as long as that means that a bat that eats insects will have to have the behavior model of a cat.

Instead, I believe we need to work out a system for creating broad predatory behaviors, and allowing the game to proceedurally generate the exact food webs from these.  This means that we start from the plants (or other energy-producers), work out what eats those plants, and then what are the predators of these "herbivores", and the predators of those predators. 

Some sort of nod towards energy loss needs to be made - real food chains rarely go beyond three links on land or five in the water, since a predator needs about ten times its mass (not population number, mass) of prey species to feed itself, and keeping a stable population requires a certain minimum number of a species just for having genetic diversity.  This could be a part of the previously discussed population models for pests, as well.  The mass of the vermin being eaten instead of pure number of vermin in existence can be part of the calculation taking place.  (The number of "links" is based upon the total amount of resources, especially energy, in the ecosystem - a highly energetic ecosystem, such as a world with a more powerful sun, or a highly magical ecosystem with xenosynthetic plants, could potentially support more links in the food chain.  An odd number of links in the chain help support more producers, since a food chain with only producers with no predators leads to overpopulation, a food chain with only plants and herbivores leads to overgrazing, but a predator reduces herbivore populations, and helps raise more producers in the system.)

Note that this means that creatures like amethyst men might become "producers" (in that they do not eat other creatures, but produce their own energy, presumably through being xenosynthetic), with predators of their own, provided they can digest something like an amethyst man's magical energy.  (Maybe that's the ecological role of a Forgotten Beast - eater of the craziest crap you can imagine.  Of course, how do you work that into an ecosystem, do they excrete slade or something?)

So, instead of having a "vermin-hunter" tag per se, we could use more specific criteria.  A web-spinning spider and a jumping spider are both insectivorous predators, but the web-spinner can only attack creatures that are stuck in its webs, which basically means they only prey upon flying insects (and will eat even small birds or bats that get caught in their webs if they are capable), while jumping spiders can't usually catch flying prey, but pounce upon crawling insects (or anything small enough they could take it in a fight and be capable of eating it later).  A wolf is a carnivorous preditor, of course, but it probably won't hunt anything the size of a mouse or smaller, since it's just not worth a wolf's time to try to eat it.  A wolf in a pack will hunt a large herbivore like a bison, but won't be foolish enough to attack a tiger unless the tiger is either on the verge of death, or the wolves are desperately hungry.  This means that what we need is a set of tokens for predators to choose their prey based upon their size, motive habits, capacity to defend itself, and the specializations of the predators in particular. 

Pack or solitary predators like wolves would also change what they hunt based upon how large a pack they have with them at the moment.  Solitary wolves eat smaller prey like rabbits, but larger packs of wolves will attack deer or larger herbivorous creatures that are too dangerous to take on alone. 

The game itself just semi-procedurally determines at the start of the world what animals eat what.  (With some way of manually overriding whether or not certain creatures eat other specific creatures for the purposes of modding.)  This would help prevent having to come up with a giant list of everything a wolf might possibly eat when it gets hungry enough - it just tries to hunt something that is of a certain percentage of its own size, and adjusts that based upon the size of the pack, and how many mouths it has to feed with a single kill, and how likely they are to be able to win the fight in the first place.

---

As a part of the previously mentioned nutritional model that simply uses "food groups" as a means of balancing nutrition, we could have a set of tokens for every plant that includes some guidelines on what kind of food the plant might provide - a grassy plant and a woody tree-like plant would have different kinds of creatures consuming them (if anything consumes trees at all), while fuits and vegetables and grains and seeds could be distinguished.  Flowering plants (including trees like apple trees) that have nectar that attracts insects (like bees) before they bear fruit would require a token, and possibly a nectar type associated with them (which would again relate back to the buzzing bee thread (http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=77736.0)), and then have their fruit or vegetable as a separate set of tokens.  The form the plant's seeds take can be another matter. Creatures may select to only eat fruits, eat fruit and vegetable matter, eat grassy matter, or even eat woody material, as well as having a capacity to drink nectar from a flower.  The ability to crack open nuts in nut-bearing plants can be another matter.  This can give us a somewhat more diverse base of herbivorous and omnivorous creatures by placing more specific food-type tokens on the plants themselves.

This means we need to get into the degree of specialization of predators, since there needs to be something between "attacks anything of this size range" and "attacks only this specific named creature".  We could use some of the tokens, like the previously mentioned flier token to change what predators will attack them.  Cats, after all, may potentially be aggressive enough hunters to kill a bug for fun, but they can't subsist on a diet of flies, no matter how good a hunter Scamps may be. 

(While we're at it, making orb-weaver spiders (web spiders) that do not aggressively attack prey by spitting webs at them, but by spinning a web, and waiting for prey to come to them would be a good thing to put in eventually, as well.  "Ambush predator" should mean more than just being hidden while they behave like every other ambulatory creature, it should also imply lying in wait.)

This could mean something like having jaws that are specific to certain types of tasks, like nut eating or grazing or predatory behavior.  (No more crocodile jaws that are exactly the same as a cow's jaws.)  If we start having creatures like turtles with serious ability to use their shells, then only creatures with shell-cracking capacities will be able to be their predators.  Taking a page of Darwin's, and nut-cracking beaks on a bird would have implied nut-eating ability, but preclude some forms of insectivorous feeding.  Longer beaks that are meant for preying upon insects that are tree parasites preclude nut eating.  This would allow for both the purposes of differentiating what sort of prey species any given creature eats, as well as making animals have bodies differentiated by more than number of limbs and general size.

Also possible is using a less concrete set of tokens for what a creature eats, instead using something like a "Hyperpredator" or "mesopredator" or "hypopredator" type of token, which indicates how much of each type of "food group" that a creature must eat.  (This would work well in conjunction with a dwarven nutrition model based upon food groups as a bonus.)

Magical ecosystems may also bring in very odd ecosystems, as some creatures may prey upon the magical nature of other creatures, being either magical parasites or carnivores - leading to that "eating" of an amethyst man either by disabling it (or somehow making itself a parasite the amethyst man itself cannot remove), and consuming some of its xenosynthetic organs or stored energy, or just consuming the creature outright. 

---

This also can potentially serve as a basis for "Procedural Evolution", a commonly postulated idea in the suggestions forums.  If we have a decent model of the costs of adaptations, in terms of how much mass they need to eat to stay alive, and development cycle time, we can actually have the basis for calculating some basic form of evolution. 

In talking to The Phoenixian, he was mentioning the difference that something like a rainforest has upon its ecology, and I think this could be broaded into talking about a Keystone Species (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keystone_species).  I'm not quite sure how to specifically model this on purpose as of yet, but it gives a good idea of how a creature can have a dramatic impact on its environment (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greater_Yellowstone_Ecosystem#Gray_Wolf_reintroduction).  Having something like elk that graze differently based upon the presence of a predator species, hence allowing different forms of trees to grow (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trophic_cascade) would be a serious power goal, but might be possible.  If we can get more advanced animal behavioral models, then having behavioral models that change based upon the presence of predators could be possible.

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Violate the Earth!
Post by: NW_Kohaku on March 13, 2011, 03:07:15 pm

OK, I'm going to go back to sweeping up the interface section, now.

Spoiler: Scheduler Window v3 (click to show/hide)

(http://i56.tinypic.com/242imas.gif)

Spoiler: Scheduler Window v2 (click to show/hide)

(http://i52.tinypic.com/vrrg3d.gif)

I went back and put in functions for polycultures and more graphic displays, so it crams a little bit more information into the same limited space.  Hopefully without being too much more unintelligible than it already is.

I also went ahead and changed the tabbing keys to "qwertQWERT" instead of "qwertasfdg", so that there are more keys for the scheduler.  I'll be changing all the other keys to match, obviously, but that doesn't need much updating. 

I'm also going to go in and make sure that the interface section is generally capable of displaying everything I think it needs to display, since I have a clearer picture in my head of what it needs to do now that I've spent more time pouring over the subject. 

In just trying to update this one image, though, I've been messing with a half-dozen things, already.

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Violate the Earth!
Post by: NW_Kohaku on March 17, 2011, 09:39:18 pm

Animal House

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

OK, a quick one (while he's away - no wait, have to stop making gratuitous random references everywhere) that is inspired by some of the Buzzing Bee thread stuff I was reading earlier.

Players should have some ability to create animal houses.  For example, birdhouses (similar to nest boxes) or bat colonies or another way to have player-made shelters that attract certain kinds of animals in a more general and robust (potentially moddable) system than simply having bee hives and nest boxes and maybe beaver dams that players can mess with somewhere down the road.  Some people have suggested a way of creating a "hive" for creatures like maggots or "zom-bees" out of corpses. 

Basically, unify all this code into a modular and reusable set of code that lets players build animal housing that allows players to have some better sense of control over some of these creatures, especially vermin-type creatures with beneficial properties.

If a player wanted to set up an underground farm, and protect it from vermin, for example, players might capture insectivorous bats (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microchiroptera) and house them in manufactured colonies (http://www.housesforbats.com/page/421717592) so that they could move bats to different fields to control insect populations whenever they attack the dwarves' fields.

Other uses might be to have specific "hen houses" or birdhouses for specific species of birds, although vermin-like creatures are the ones that would probably be most useful to generate manufactured housing for controlling their populations.

Cave spiders and purring maggots, for example, are fictitious commercially valuable vermin already in the game, and players often want to find ways to encourage their growth in specific locations (and prevent cats from killing them).  A cave spider nesting box plus some sort of ready-made food source (capturing an ant farm for food, or having a pool for flies or mosquitoes?) and a food source for that food source would create a viable mini-ecosystem for the large-scale production of spiders and maggots for commercial purposes.

Similarly, the "vermin" status of fish lead themselves to fisheries, but I'm going to do another "mini-section" on that.

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Violate the Earth!
Post by: NW_Kohaku on March 18, 2011, 09:15:45 am

Farming Water

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

I felt that the fisheries, algaculture, marsh farming, and chinampas might need a little further explanation, since I largely glossed over them.

This largely relies upon the notion that we can use bodies of water as a "field" with nutrient levels, and also upon the food web notions discussed in the earlier food web and pests sections.

Fisheries, especially, need some more in-depth discussion.  Apparently, the most ancient fisheries were actually created by some (hardcore) Chinese who found ways to trap carp (!) in pools as the flood waters in their major rivers receded.  Strangely, they bred the carp to be smaller instead of training them to kill invaders, (their dungeon masters must not have shown up, either,) so they eventually created the harmless goldfish from the large, feared predators.

For dwarves, trapping fish in aquariums is... odd currently.  You can trap fish, and they turn into fish items, and when released, they just sort of sit there and die.  And rot.  Not good.

What we could be doing, instead, is creating fisheries, constructed nets or grates or bars to allow certain sized creatures free passage, then flooded in pools and stocked with fish.  Provided there is some basis for their food chain (like phytoplankton, which basically requires nothing more but exposure to sunlight and some nutrients in the water to support, or possibly magic-based xenophytoplankton that grow in caverns with no sunlight) depending on the trophic level of the particular fish, players should have the ability to create fairly simple food chains that support game fish in large quantities. 

Food webs in the water tend to be much simpler than the food webs of terrestrial life forms, and ponds may form into true "food chains" where each species has only one prey species, and only three to five species in a stocked pond.

Considering all that I've already discussed, these fisheries would really only need the inclusion of many of the water-based equivalents of the food webs I have already discussed, plus an ability to build and designate fisheries, and an ability to designate areas for stocking with fish. 

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Algaculture is similar to a fishery, but actually even simpler.  You just need nutrient-laden shallow water and sunlight, and "seeding" the water with some seaweed or lily pads.  I highly doubt anything but an elf would really be into seaweed as a food source, but it's a very easy-to-grow (and extremely quick-growing) source of animal fodder, and potentially also fuel source for fires or reactions.

Although growing biofuels may be beyond dwarven tech, fast-growing seaweeds might at least be convertible into an alternate organic matter for charcoal, or failing that, fertilizer.

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Chinampas (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinampa) are the closest thing the ancient world gets to hydroponics.  Rather than irrigate a field by bringing water to the farm, they bring the farm to the water, and build artificial islands in the shallow end of a lake using netting to mitigate soil erosion.  This is also a method that uses a fishery as a source of fertilizer instead of cattle manure.  (It probably helps if humans dispose of waste well-diluted into that same water, as well...)

Technically speaking, this would require a greater "exception" and dedicated bit of coding to produce than other forms of farming, since it would mean that dwarves are building basically walls/floors of dirt that are built into the water, and letting the plant roots soak up water from below instead of more advanced irrigation systems, and drawing nutrients from nearby fisheries... excreting nutrients into the water.  (Just muddying the top of a built stone wall isn't really the same, since there isn't really reason the stone wall will inherently absorb the nutrients of the surrounding water in the current model in the game.)  The plants help make up the producer trophic level of the water, with some of the fish feeding off the roots that poke out of the soil-retaining nets, and the plants filtering out the impurities of the water for the fish, as well. (The fish probably still rely upon phytoplankton, however.)

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Marsh and paddie farming are more complex, and need similar exception coding to allow them. 

Marsh farming means that the water has to be kept at some low levels generally at all times, so the farm needs to be flooded, but sensitive to just how flooded it is. 

Rice paddies, meanwhile, are only flooded when they hit a certain stage of the rice plant's growth, to cut off any chance for weeds to grow (with waterlily-like azola grown as a companion crop to cut off any further weed growth), and as such needs further exceptions to make a multi-stage growth system, where dwarves can be trusted to irrigate the paddies on their own.  If using buckets or the irrigation pumps, this means purposefully dumping water beyond the saturation point until the area starts to flood, but only to a certain point, which requires more of that making sure the dwarves watch just how flooded the fields become. 

Both of these would be related to the Water Management section's talk about how soil becomes saturated (and hence, is capable of absorbing a set amount of water, itself), and also involve dwarves being able to "know" when and how to keep adding water to the fields to make sure they are at the right water levels.




One more topic to discuss is the concept of "Algal Blooms" and "Dead Zones" (http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/the_efficient_planet/2013/03/nitrogen_fixation_anniversary_modern_agriculture_needs_to_use_fertilizer.html).  Although this only really become a true menace in the modern world with the invention of the Haber-Bosch Process, the cheapness of artificial nitrogen fertilizers and the perceived dire consequences of a failed harvest led most farmers to simply over-fertilize their fields to be safe, leading to an overwhelming bulk of their fertilizer (80-90%) simply washing off the land in the next rainstorm, rather than being taken up by the plants, themselves. 

Aggressive fertilization could also hypothetically lead to an aquatic "pest" or even more dangerous outcome.  Life in the sea is dependent upon nutrients from land reaching the water, and so tremendous fertilizer runoff leads to tremendous blooming of plankton to the point that they can even consume all the generally slim amounts of dissolved oxygen in the ocean, leading to "dead zones" where only sulfur-based life forms can live. 

In a DF world, however, I might expect more magical and menacing reactions to a wasteful fertilization runoff, such as outright algae monsters rising from the depths to wreak revenge upon the dwarves.

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Violate the Earth!
Post by: jseah on March 19, 2011, 11:30:01 am

Looking good and liking it.  =)

Just posting to say I'm still here and watching.  Read all of it too!


I have a feeling that more dedicated and complex farming methods could wait until after the caravan arc.  Without trade to force specialization of forts, there would not be much pressure to produce food beyond what the fort needs. 

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Violate the Earth!
Post by: NW_Kohaku on March 19, 2011, 01:17:17 pm

Caravan arc and army arc are the two things that are definitely going to be complete before anything else that is major ever gets underway.  Like I've said before, I don't doubt that any of these changes, if they ever take place, are likely a couple years down the road, excepting maybe some minor animal-feeding habits.

Anyway, one of the things I have always liked about DF is how it gets me interested in all kinds of completely random, crazy things. 

Just recently, all this talk of bats now has me building a bat house for my back yard.  We've got a real insect problem around here, let's see how the little bastards enjoy some new neighbors...

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution
Post by: thunktone on June 12, 2011, 09:07:02 am

I really like the general thrust of all this. (Well as much as I managed to read anyway.) I just have a few points to make.

First, you talk about mass conservation. This is important but it should not be forgotten that very little biomass comes from the soil. Most is carbon (extracted from the air by photosynthesis) and water.

Also there are various ways for nutrients to be restored to surface biomes through erosion. Silt can be deposited by rivers when they flood. Sand and dust can be blown huge distances, e.g. the Amazon rainforest is apparently fertilised by the Sahara desert. Volcanic dust can be a powerful fertiliser too.

You mentioned somewhere that hunting could not sustain a fortress, but if hunting squads could be sent off your embark map then I think that it could. It would not be a reliable way to feed your dwarfs though. And I don't know what the hill dwarfs would eat.

Quote from: NW_Kohaku on January 27, 2011, 03:34:36 am

Herbalism easily supports small numbers of dwarves that can manage to keep their harvesting areas safe from skulking goblin ambushers, but at the same time, plundering too many plants from the soil without returning nutrients can gradually lead to a more barren landscape with less plants overall.

Well the amount of food gained from herbalism probably needs to be reduced. Foraging can be very sustainable though, especially in the time spans we are talking about with DF. A herbalist would struggle to gather enough food to feed just a few people, but it is possible, if food is preserved for late winter and early spring, to provide all the nutrients lacking from a meat based diet.

Quote from: NW_Kohaku on January 27, 2011, 03:34:36 am

...you might need to spread several layers of fertilizer or grow some preliminary crop to prepare the soil for this wheat.  Growing wheat will probably require permissables set throughout the year for several applications of manure, water, and it will probably be a good idea to give permission to till the soil before the wheat is planted (this kills weeds).

A little fertilizer goes a long way and too much will destroy a crop. Manure needs to be applied some time before the crop is planted as it will destroy plants like wheat if dropped on top.

Quote from: NW_Kohaku on January 27, 2011, 03:34:36 am

Instead of merely "fallowing" the field, which lets weeds take over

Potentially useful weeds though. A fallow field was not just to let the soil recover, it also provided a lot of green vegetables and various useful herbs and flowers. So this could be another use for the herbalist skill.

Quote from: NW_Kohaku on January 27, 2011, 03:34:36 am

we will instead schedule clover

Seems an odd choice. Clover tends to be established in cattle pastures by allowing sheep to graze there part of the year, spreading the seeds in their faeces. And I don't think letting cattle onto arable land is very wise. They would tend to compact the soil, damaging the tilth. Sweet pods would seem the natural choice to match with wheat in a two year cycle as I imagine them as some sort of pea that would fix nitrogen into the soil.

You could also set up a more sustainable plump helmet farm, growing them on straw instead of logs. It would be cool if you could get odd situations, like after drowning a noble in their bedroom, plump helmets sprout on their mattress.

Quote from: NW_Kohaku on January 27, 2011, 03:34:36 am

So long as cattle only eat the grasses, and not the trees or their fruits

No! Let the livestock eat fallen, fermenting fruit. Drunk yak would be too much Fun to leave out.

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution
Post by: Blah on May 02, 2012, 02:31:51 am

This is what I want to be changed in regards to food&booze production:

- Not every aboveground crop should grow in every biome.
- Not every underground crop should grow in every cavern layer.
- Not every animal should be able to graze in every biome.
- We should be forced to adapt our food&booze industries to the biome that we embark in. It's just too easy at the moment to set up a standard farm that always works 100% on every embark and provides everything.

I want to see embarks where dwarves can subsist solely on fishing and plump helmets with some booze imports for variety. Or embarks where breeding livestock or making cheese is a necessity to survive. Or embarks where mead is the only local source of booze.

Of course for this to be fun, the beekeeping, meat, fishing, cheesemaking industries need some improvements so that they can provide food and booze for a fortress without bugs or excessive micromanagement, but many good suggestions have been pet forward in that regard so I won't repeat them.

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution
Post by: NW_Kohaku on May 02, 2012, 07:29:11 am

Could you expand on what you mean by "not every underground crop should grow in every cavern"?

Sure, there's something very strange about growing one crop everywhere aboveground, but every cavern really does come off as being the same at the moment.  (Unless you mean something like the Xenosynthesis idea talked about earlier, to differentiate them.)

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution
Post by: Blah on May 02, 2012, 08:10:53 am

Quote

Could you expand on what you mean by "not every underground crop should grow in every cavern"?

Yea I suppose I should make more effort explaining this.

What I have in mind is a simple and effective way of making sure that the food & booze industry differs between biomes. This is done by

1) Creating an "aboveground fertility" parameter that's expressed as a number between, say, 0-4. Higher is better.
2) Same with an "underground fertility".
3) Adding a "fertility requirement" from 1-4 to all plants. Plants that require a fertility of 1 can only be grown in biomes with a fertility of 1 or higher, etc. Plump Helmets should require a fertility of 1 for sure.
4) When a biome is generated, both underground and aboveground fertility levels are randomized (with some restrictions so that deserts cannot have more than 1 aboveground fertility for example, good biomes are more fertile, evil biomes less, etc).
5) The exact fertility levels are displayed on the embark screen.
6) Halving farming yield would also be good.

It may be better to randomize fertility across regions (which are larger) than biomes because fortress are often built covering more than one biome. Anyway, why use this system?

It's consistent. If we see aboveground fertility 4 and underground fertility 1 on the embark screen we know what to expect.
People who want easy farming can embark on high fertility sites, those who want a challenge on low fertility sites. A site with 0 aboveground and 0 underground fertility? Build a meat/fish/mead industry and some booze imports for variety.
It's more realistic without going into excessive details like soil composition or humidity (too much information to be displayed on embark for starters).
It should be very easy to implement.

PS: having fertilizers raise fertility by 1 would also blend in nicely.

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution
Post by: NW_Kohaku on May 02, 2012, 09:48:05 am

If we are going by colloid grain size as important, then we'd only need to give some hint as to what types of soil (sand/silt/clay/loam) that we are dealing with on the top layers in embark, which should be fairly obvious, and readily available to the player.  I kind of miss having the ability to tell whether surface-apparent stones are igneous or sedimentary on embark. 

We could probably use an indicator of general salinity, as well.

Beyond that, drainage and water abundance information are already apparent just by biome and already displayed at embark. 

The information you need beyond that would all be a matter of play, as it would change frequently.

The rest of that stuff... well, I won't fault you for not reading the 48-page first thread, but suffice to say simple things like halving farm output means little without drastically changing how the entire farming system works. 

Also, keep in mind, this is already what's on the

devpages (http://www.bay12games.com/dwarves/dev.html):

Quote from: devpage

Farming Improvements

• Soil moisture tracking and ability to moisten soil (buckets or other irrigation)
• Soil nutrient requirements for plants and nutrient tracking to the extent the farming interface can provide decent feedback for you, fertilizers can reflect this
• Harvestable flowers and fruit growing on plants, ability to plant trees
• Weeds
• More pests

The point of this whole thread is to make the farms not have static fertility, but to instead make the player mindful that every time you are growing crops, you are depleting the soil of its nutrients to create those crops, and Conservation of Mass dictates that those nutrients be returned to the soil somehow. 

NPK plus water plus biomass (for fungi or other decomposers) as well as an energy source (sunlight, normally, but possibly also magic sources for magic plants) are a minimum for this, and can be displayed. 

To reflect climate differences, colloid grain size/drainage/CRC efficiency are included, as well as regional temperature, along with three pollution types, including salinity and heavy metal poisoning, which can exclude some regions from most forms of farming.  (Salty soils can only support saltgrasses normally, which are not particularly edible to humans, but useful for grazing cattle.)

The problem farms face is not simply that there isn't diversity, but that it is a "free stuff button" - fertility never declines, so you get infinite raw materials from just throwing seeds (which appear for free from using food items) at mud.  To require players to pay at least minimal attention to fertility (even if it only means dumping more goblin corpses into the compost pile and setting an automated fertilization between plantings), the game will establish some semblance of verisimilitude in this critical area of fortress construction.

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution
Post by: Blah on May 02, 2012, 01:38:59 pm

Quote

The problem farms face is not simply that there isn't diversity, but that it is a "free stuff button"

I'm mostly concerned about diversity and the monopoly farming has on food & booze production in every single fort. I disagree that free stuff is a problem. Resources are there to be taken. Farming just makes too many other industries nearly or fully obsolete.

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution
Post by: Draco18s on May 02, 2012, 01:43:18 pm

Quote from: Blah on May 02, 2012, 01:38:59 pm

I disagree that free stuff is a problem.

It's not so much that free stuff is a problem, it's that it's infinite free stuff forever.  A single 10x10 farm manned by a single dwarf will produce MORE food than an entire fortress can even eat.  And that one farmer?  He's not even busy full time.

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution
Post by: Babylon on May 02, 2012, 01:44:48 pm

I would prefer underground plants to be tied to cavern level and above ground plants to be tied to rain/drainage/temperature levels rather than using a 0-4 fertility scale.  Making underground plants only grow in certain cavern levels might be more work than it is worth, but I would think above ground crops could be tied to biomes in the same way that trees are.

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution
Post by: slothen on May 02, 2012, 02:25:21 pm

On the whole I agree agriculture needs a huge overhaul.  Free infinite stuff for no effort is bad.   For the majority of human history, securing and maintaining a stable food supply is the number 1 make or break requisite for a new settlement or civilization.  In dwarf fortress, food is in afterthought past the first year.

However, I do want to raise a point from the original post concerning the conservation of mass and energy.  That being, plant mass is not derived from soil, and farming the same soil for years won't make you run out of soil.  Fertilization exists to replace certain nutrients or chemicals in the soil, not the replace the soil itself.  Plant matter is basically all hydrogen, oxygen, and carbon, and all of that is derived from the air and water.

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution
Post by: Blah on May 02, 2012, 02:34:11 pm

Quote from: Babylon on May 02, 2012, 01:44:48 pm

I would think above ground crops could be tied to biomes in the same way that trees are.

That would be a mostly cosmetic change with no actual impact on gameplay unless you were forced to grow aboveground crops for wheat or cloth. What difference does it make to cultivate sewer brew over whip vine? None that matters really.

Quote

It's not so much that free stuff is a problem, it's that it's infinite free stuff forever.

I stand by my point. Perhaps if I explain the consequences of my proposal you'll see why free infinite stuff is not a problem (though reducing farming yield would be a good step).

If my proposal was implemented, each biome (depending on fertility) would be able to provide a varying number of plant types. Some biomes would provide everything you need. This is good for new players or people that like it that way. For people who like more difficulty, embarks exist where farming is more limited: in other words, you could not get EVERYTHING you need through farming. Only some stuff. Perhaps even very little (depending on your choice of biome). Then what do you do? Use alternative means of food & booze production: animal breeding, fishing, beekeeping. All of these should be infinite sources of food and booze because they're basic resources (It's the expensive resources like ore and gems that should be finite). None of these industries should give you everything you'd ever need though. That's the general idea - details may be tweaked.

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution
Post by: Draco18s on May 02, 2012, 05:28:42 pm

There is a difference between "free" and "infinite."

"Free" resources are the ones that you get through no work (stone is an example)
"Infinite" resources are the ones that you get through either no material input (food) or through renewable means (obsidian).

Free AND Infinite is the problem.

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution
Post by: NW_Kohaku on May 02, 2012, 05:57:08 pm

Quote from: slothen on May 02, 2012, 02:25:21 pm

However, I do want to raise a point from the original post concerning the conservation of mass and energy.  That being, plant mass is not derived from soil, and farming the same soil for years won't make you run out of soil.  Fertilization exists to replace certain nutrients or chemicals in the soil, not the replace the soil itself.  Plant matter is basically all hydrogen, oxygen, and carbon, and all of that is derived from the air and water.

I don't mean "mass" as in "all the soil is gone", I simply mean "if you continuously remove all the potassium from the soil in this area, then unless potassium is somehow put back into the soil, it will eventually get less common and run out". 

We're not tracking air (yet... although it WOULD be cool to have to use ventilation systems or else have enough oxygen-producing plants in your hermetically sealed cavern that must be magically powered to compensate for the lack of sunlight if you want to completely wall off your fortress...), and water is being tracked.

Part of the aspect of the water section of the thread was talking about how aquifers and streams could be made less infinite (infinitely renewing, but with a finite quantity of water that can be generated in a given year) so that water management can become a potential concern.  (Wouldn't be a problem in most cases, but a single brook might not be enough for a truly huge farm, and aquifers might become depleted.)

As far as minerals, however, part of what I want to see is that there is a real life cycle/nitrogen cycle/carbon cycle/phosphorus cycle going on, where nutrients like Nitrogen, Phosphorus, and Potassium are removed from the soil and put into crops that are then carried away, eaten by creatures who take those nutrients into their bodies, and when they die or excrete, that's where the nutrients are, ready for composting and return to the soil so that the cycle can be fed again.

This wouldn't require much actual effort on the player's part, other than assigning a compost duty and giving dwarves instructions on how much fertilizer they are allowed to use on each field.  (For simplicity of play, I suggested that farmer dwarves fertilize on their own initiative by reading the soil fertility, but where players can throttle how much fertilizer is allowed to be used if they need to conserve.)  The benefit, however, would be both the need to actually manage your fertilizers to make sure the soil isn't depleted, and use crop rotations to avoid overtaxing the soil, but also to produce the simple "ant farm" simulation quality of being able to see a realistic system working on its own once it is set up...

Nutrients in the soil become plants, plants become food, food is eaten by animals/dwarves, either the animal/dwarf dies or excretes waste that gets sent to compost, compost turns into fertilizer, fertilizer restores nutrients in the soil. 

Conservation of Mass. 

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution
Post by: NW_Kohaku on May 02, 2012, 06:23:54 pm

Quote from: Blah on May 02, 2012, 02:34:11 pm

If my proposal was implemented, each biome (depending on fertility) would be able to provide a varying number of plant types. Some biomes would provide everything you need. This is good for new players or people that like it that way. For people who like more difficulty, embarks exist where farming is more limited: in other words, you could not get EVERYTHING you need through farming. Only some stuff. Perhaps even very little (depending on your choice of biome). Then what do you do? Use alternative means of food & booze production: animal breeding, fishing, beekeeping. All of these should be infinite sources of food and booze because they're basic resources (It's the expensive resources like ore and gems that should be finite). None of these industries should give you everything you'd ever need though. That's the general idea - details may be tweaked.

It'd be nice if you could just skim my proposal, as well. 

The point of what I was setting up to do was that small-scale subsistence farming for a small fortress would be easy, but larger projects, including heavier tree-farming, would become more difficult.  Especially since wild-growing trees would no longer be infinite, and instead subject to the same rules of conservation of mass as farms.  (It would restore on its own if it were truly wild, but only so long as you don't over-poach the forests.) 

Growing tree farms, textile farms, food farms, magical resource for alchemy farms, etc. would all strain your ability to balance a self-contained dwarf-made ecosystem to an ever-growing degree.

Animals will eventually need to be fed somehow.  Pasturing a cow is easy, but takes a large amount of arable land to renew those resources without intervention.  Growing fodder and feeding it to a cow in a pen is more resource-intensive, but gets you extra food, but it is generally easier to just go for just growing more crops and skipping the cow entirely if you want the most food for the least arable land.  (And real-life medieval peasants often did not eat meat frequently unless they happened to catch a rabbit that was in their fields or something, and stuck to cheese and eggs for protein, because just keeping a chicken alive with some extra grain for feed was easier than raising chickens for slaughter.)

Some animal products are also in drastic need of rebalancing, although generally just making animals eat things will take care of some of the problem.  Right now, the best food-production system in the game is a crocodile because it lays so many eggs and doesn't need to eat.  But just as raising fodder in a farm for a cow is less efficient than just using that land for wheat, a carnivore that needs to eat a cow that needs to eat fodder from a farm is even less efficient.  Eggs in general need to be less numerous (an egg of any size is a full meal, so creatures with huge egg clutches are unreasonably good food producers), while milking is severely underpowered (cows should be producing roughly 10 to 14 times as much milk as the current rate of milking). 

Food consumption in general needs rebalancing, as well - roughly 5 times as much food should be consumed as is currently consumed.  I also would like to see a nutritional model, so that strict vegan diets or all-egg based diets aren't the easy answer.

The purpose of this idea is to make basic farming easy for new people, but difficult to master into having "infinite" resources for everything that can be grown organically, and with a progressive incline in difficulty as you ask for more and more from the soil. 

The purpose of the pests section specifically makes large single-crop plantations much more difficult farms to maintain (because they foster the growth of pests that are specialized in killing your crops in an age before pesticides).  Branching into polycultures that let you protect cash crops from pests by taking advantage of natural predators and plants that repel pest species is a complex task for advanced players who wish to explore the full nuance of the system, but can be skipped by basic players.  This also directly gives players a reason to have variety in their plantings.

The biome-based (and temperature-based) crop discriminations you are talking about are already included in the system I outlined in this thread. 

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution
Post by: Andeerz on May 02, 2012, 10:26:34 pm

The only qualm I have about this thread's proposal at all, and I've mentioned this somewhere before, is that I believe that MUCH more land should be required for farming, and I mean on par with what human farms are like in the game and would be required in real life.  To put it in other words, not only do I think people need to eat around 5 times more than they actually do in the game, I think the rate of production of food should be reduced per tile of farmland.  This would open the game up to some very fun, not to mention realistic, challenges, such as having to manage and protect lands outside of the immediate embark area (unless farming is done extensively underground under the embark area).

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution
Post by: dizzyelk on May 02, 2012, 10:56:05 pm

Haven't seen this thread yet, and just checked out the first posts. NW_Kohaku, you never cease to amaze me. I stand in awe of the sheer amount of words you're consistently able to put forth. Tomorrow, I plan on checking this thread out early. But right now? All those words make my head hurt.

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution
Post by: Draco18s on May 02, 2012, 11:10:34 pm

Quote from: Andeerz on May 02, 2012, 10:26:34 pm

The only qualm I have about this thread's proposal at all, and I've mentioned this somewhere before, is that I believe that MUCH more land should be required for farming, and I mean on par with what human farms are like in the game and would be required in real life.

I half agree and half don't agree.

While I agree that farms need more space, it is my opinion that four to six 10x10 plots is where I feel is "right" (for 200 dwarves).

A 10x10 underground farm (when ceilings collapse again, anyway) is difficult to make fit.  Four of them are an engineering challenge.

It's large enough to make the player go "wow, I need lots of room" but small enough to not take up three quarters of the embark's surface area.

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution
Post by: Andrew425 on May 03, 2012, 02:03:45 am

Two things that i'd like to add.

I think wood is far to sparse in this game as is, making it used even more often is a difficult idea. Perhaps be able to either import massive amounts of potash or the ability to mine it could help. Also perhaps all farms would naturally regrow themselves without any input. Maybe if the field is fallow for 7 seasons it can go from 0% fertilized to 100%

And I think the need for farmers is important. During the medieval times over (guess) 80% of the people worked the land or where very close to the production of it. In a fortress of 200 I think at least 100 should be farmers and the rest be craftspeople. Perhaps re-label farmers(fields) to peasants as everyone who doesn't have a job assigned to them is automatically a peasant and tills the farmlands

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution
Post by: expwnent on May 03, 2012, 02:04:40 am

Looks interesting.

How do you distinguish between "free stuff" and steel? With sufficient trading and/or goblinite, steel is an infinite resource, and with a good enough army, you can reliably take down any goblin invasion. Is that also a free stuff button? Is it the difficulty which makes the distinction, or the complexity, or the time?

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution
Post by: Blah on May 03, 2012, 02:51:43 am

Requiring farms to occupy more land to produce is fine for me. Requiring more farmers is fine also. Just not too much. Tripling farm size and farmers required seems about right. I don't want it to be realistic because otherwise almost everyone would be a farmer with too few dwarves left for other professions.

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution
Post by: Andeerz on May 03, 2012, 05:49:05 am

Well, let's say we have absolutely realistic crop land requirements (like more than a 4x4 embark area's worth of surface land needed to feed 200 dwarves). 

How about this, which is how I ideally see it: when trading and economic stuff become better fleshed out in the game, if you want a fort of primarily non-farming people, import your food.  And/or perhaps when managing lands outside of the embark area and other game mechanics become a possibility, delegate farming to people and lands outside of the embark area, relinquishing you the player from direct management; at that point, perhaps part of the role of your fort could be to protect these vital farm lands and those working the lands (like many IRL forts!!!).  And if you want to manage the embark area to be a huge farming operation, go ahead.  The options should be there for whatever you want to do.  And the OP's suggested game mechanics would still be awesomely relevant for these scenarios.

Also, who says that 200 dwarves will always be the max amount of dwarves in a fort?     

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution
Post by: Draco18s on May 03, 2012, 07:35:22 am

Quote from: expwnent on May 03, 2012, 02:04:40 am

How do you distinguish between "free stuff" and steel? With sufficient trading and/or goblinite, steel is an infinite resource, and with a good enough army, you can reliably take down any goblin invasion. Is that also a free stuff button? Is it the difficulty which makes the distinction, or the complexity, or the time?

Goblinite is another issue that I take issue with.

And you don't need an army.  You don't even need a lot of traps.

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution
Post by: NW_Kohaku on May 03, 2012, 09:55:32 am

Quote from: Andeerz on May 02, 2012, 10:26:34 pm

The only qualm I have about this thread's proposal at all, and I've mentioned this somewhere before, is that I believe that MUCH more land should be required for farming, and I mean on par with what human farms are like in the game and would be required in real life.  To put it in other words, not only do I think people need to eat around 5 times more than they actually do in the game, I think the rate of production of food should be reduced per tile of farmland.  This would open the game up to some very fun, not to mention realistic, challenges, such as having to manage and protect lands outside of the immediate embark area (unless farming is done extensively underground under the embark area).

Well, part of what I want to do is make it so that if you use the techniques of that era, then you will be correct - it takes up a huge amount of space. 

However, part of what you can do is have full irrigation, more complex crop rotation schedules, you can balance your fertilizer loads more carefully, take advantage of polycultures and aquaculture and grow your cattle's fodder on salty/swampy ground that isn't suitable for standard agriculture, use "natural pesticides" like fostering spider colonies and bat colonies to keep pests down and otherwise have tricks that give you an edge if you know how to use them.

Simply tilling everything into one giant patch of wheat for a single staple crop was what they did largely because wheat was the most easily traded crop, and the easiest to store for long periods of time.  Wheat actually takes more land to feed the same amount of people than growing vegetables does, and many medieval farmers would actually subsist on smaller vegetable gardens and a small orchard of fruit trees for much of the year, and only use bread to get through the winter, along with the few winter crops they could still grow (like onions or turnips or other root vegetables, and potatoes once they were brought back from South America).

Part of the reason the Muslim world was capable of exploding in population, wealth, and power during the Middle Ages was that they had more complex land management systems, public works including irrigation that Christian Europe didn't have, and could feed a much greater populace with less farmers.

Even then, it's worth noting that medieval farmers were only part-time workers - they really only worked hard during the plowing and the harvest.  They did almost literally nothing during the Winter.  Farmers were known to "waste away" during the Winter, not eating, not going outside, not doing anything but staying near a fire, and losing 50+ pounds of muscle during the Winter months. 

The ancient Egyptians, in fact, had farmers, not slaves, build their pyramids - when the Nile flooded, and farmers had nothing better to do with their time, the Pharaohs came up with public works projects for them to work on in the meantime in order to prevent 2/3rds of their populace from doing nothing but getting drunk and causing trouble for three months at a time.

Also likewise, people will tell you that Asian rice paddy farming is the most land-efficient means of food production, which is true, but it's also the most labor-intensive form of food production.  An ancient family working with wood or stone tools in a field of wheat could work 3 acres of wheat farming.  Before the Industrial Revolution, with metal tools and better irrigation techniques, this rose to 10 acres.  Rice Paddies?  1 acre per family straight up until modern mechanized farming.  Sure, you get 3 harvests per year in tropical regions, but rice paddies are extremely maintenance-intensive. 

Now, how many acres can a fruit orchard handle?  If you have cattle-drivers in mostly arid semi-desert grasslands how many acres can a small number of cowboys cover with a herd of cattle? 

Land area and labor required to produce a given amount of food are not necessarily proportional to one another.

I'm presuming players will probably want to graduate up to the Muslim levels of land management, where it can still be realistic, but not take up 90% of your fortress farming.

---

EDIT:
Or, to say this a different way, I can understand why you would start from a place of saying "this should take X amount more space to run a farm", because the farms we have now are very much a matter of every individual crop being basically the same, however, that's not the sort of system I am trying to make. 

I am making an assumption from the start that real-life farms would never expect to get maximum yield consistently.  Nor should the player if they're smart, but that's another matter.  Let's assume for a second that we could have gotten 3 times as much actual grain from a wheat field than historical farmers did simply through the use of more intensive fertilization and irrigation so that the crops didn't wither without rain. 

There's also the fact that basically all crops in the game now are fairly similar in how they grow, and growing more crops in this game is generally a function of how much land you are using for agriculture.  Now, let's talk about how we have crops that have different nutrient consumption rates, and how we are limited in our use of fertilizers.  Hypothetically, we could grow much more land-efficient crops that take more labor per acre to grow those crops. 

Alternately, it takes very little effort to just set up a nest box or farmer's workshop and have a pasture for chickens or cows over "wild" land that you don't till or work, and let be fertilized naturally by the chicken and cow manure that falls out of them naturally as they go.  That takes little labor, but a lot of land if you aren't going to manually optimize the fields.  Also likewise, you can set up fruit orchards, where the apple trees you harvest for fruit still need care and maintenance, and definitely needs labor to harvest, but obviously not as much as plowing a field and constantly having to refertilize the soils.

You have choices between how much land you use, how much labor you use, and how much of your fertilizers you are going to use to get the most crops based upon what resources you are most feeling the squeeze on at the time.  The optimal choice depends on your given circumstance.

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution
Post by: NW_Kohaku on May 03, 2012, 10:27:12 am

Quote from: expwnent on May 03, 2012, 02:04:40 am

Looks interesting.

How do you distinguish between "free stuff" and steel? With sufficient trading and/or goblinite, steel is an infinite resource, and with a good enough army, you can reliably take down any goblin invasion. Is that also a free stuff button? Is it the difficulty which makes the distinction, or the complexity, or the time?

Goblinite is something that probably won't be infinite forever - we might be getting historical goblins so that we can actually permanently deplete a goblin army, or at least have goblins that don't have unlimited iron armor to toss on their waves of expendable grunts.

But that's not really the point of your question...

I see "free" as something that takes no particular effort or thought to gain.  I was playing Minecraft recently - food in that game is close to free, as well.  After you have seeds and some tilled land, wheat grows automatically, you just have to punch the wheat and reseed it.  Feed that grain to cows you don't have to take care of, and they multiply.  Stone is functionally free - you're not going to have much trouble finding more, and you should always keep a pick on you, anyway.  Just point yourself at the nearest cliff face and hold down the trigger.  Diamonds are not so free - they take going very far out of your way to find them.  You have to take care not to let them fall into lurking pools of magma.  It takes iron picks to mine them.  They're very rare, so you should only use Fortune enchanted picks to mine them, as well. 

This is actually a pretty complex topic, because goblinite shouldn't be so "free", it should be hard to get, but it often isn't if you just know how to build a magma flood chamber or otherwise completely dominate sieges.  It's not meant to be free, but it functionally is because of how the game is currently set up.

This is a large part of why I am aiming at this degree of complexity in the system for farming - when the arguments over this thread started, it was a war between one faction that said that the current system was unrealistic, and we needed to have a fertility gauge and more land and more dwarves working that land to make the game more realistic, and another faction arguing back that it would only be too much micromanagement for the player, and wouldn't result in any real complex decisions. 

What I tried to do is create a system that would be complex enough that it would always require thought to set up a proper system - sort of in the same sense that goblin sieges are hard when you are surprised by them, but can become easy when you know what you're doing, but hopefully without it becoming as totally exploitably easy as goblins become.  Conversely, I also do not want to require constant babysitting and pushing a "refertilize field" button. 

So, part of the challenge is in setting up a crop rotation system or some other form of self-sustaining system.  Fertilizers are limited but renewable, as are most water supplies.  You have to manage them and your land as best you can to provide what you need.  That would be the first stage of complexity - setting up a self-sustaining dwarf-made ecosystem that can supply excess food to your community. 

The second part of the challenge comes in the form of "disaster management" from pests, droughts, or other major, non-micromanagy external forces that push change upon you, and demand you react.  The crop-pest-predator relationship gives you a sequence of measures and countermeasures to use against pests, as does polycultures, using, for example, setting up a defensive ring of flowers that have a scent that attracts a predator of a given pest, or else drives off a given pest to protect crops vulnerable to that given pest inside that ring. 

Because it is unpredictable, and you are required to constantly keep land management practices in mind (there are pollutants, soil erosion and other problems that can be sprung on the player), it should never become "free" in the sense that you can just permanently forget about it, but at the same time, isn't just a tedious grind of the same stuff over and over.

That's the plan, anyway...

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution
Post by: NW_Kohaku on May 03, 2012, 10:54:17 am

Quote from: Andrew425 on May 03, 2012, 02:03:45 am

Two things that i'd like to add.

I think wood is far to sparse in this game as is, making it used even more often is a difficult idea. Perhaps be able to either import massive amounts of potash or the ability to mine it could help.

Potassium can be mined in real life, in the form of minerals like Sylvite (which is found in rock salt deposits), and you can also mine Phosphorous from Apatite (found on the beds of ancient lakes made of ancient dead organisms) or from Guano deposits.

It is notable that in real-life, we rely upon mined phosphorous for our fertilizers, and we are actually facing a crisis of potentially running out of easily mined sources, and as such, soil scientists have been raising the alarm about how we need to work more to keep the current supply of phosphorus self-sustaining, rather than relying upon trying to find endless sources of a non-renewable resource.  (See: Peak Oil.)

Quote from: Andrew425 on May 03, 2012, 02:03:45 am

Also perhaps all farms would naturally regrow themselves without any input.

This doesn't actually happen just that easily, but if you "fallow" a field, you can use "green manure", which means using a nitrogen-fixating crop (as in, it takes nitrogen from the air, and puts it back in the soil) and then till the plant you just grew back into the soil so that all the nutrients in the entire plant go back to the soil. 

Also, keep in mind there's regular manure, and dead bodies of animals that eat all that plant matter.  Plus goblinite can also refer to just composting dead goblins for their precious minerals. 

For both of these, though, it's in the "Fertilizers" section which is the second section in this post (http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=76007.msg1920008#msg1920008).

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution
Post by: Uristocrat on May 03, 2012, 03:39:32 pm

Quote from: NW_Kohaku on May 03, 2012, 10:54:17 am

Potassium can be mined in real life, in the form of minerals like Sylvite (which is found in rock salt deposits), and you can also mine Phosphorous from Apatite (found on the beds of ancient lakes made of ancient dead organisms) or from Guano deposits.

I note that we already have sylvite, though you can only find it if you already have rock salt.  No apatite, though.  Guano would be interesting for other !!scientific!! reasons.

I can only imagine the fun of dropping a bit of magma into the guano-lined hallway while the goblin/zombie siege is walking through it.....

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution
Post by: Andeerz on May 03, 2012, 04:50:52 pm

NW_Kohaku:

Awesome.  In that case, I have no qualms.  From how you describe how things will be modeled, agriculture would end up taking up about as much land as it would in real life.

I'd like to emphasize something, though. 

Quote from: NW_Kohaku on May 03, 2012, 09:55:32 am

Simply tilling everything into one giant patch of wheat for a single staple crop was what they did largely because wheat was the most easily traded crop, and the easiest to store for long periods of time.  Wheat actually takes more land to feed the same amount of people than growing vegetables does, and many medieval farmers would actually subsist on smaller vegetable gardens and a small orchard of fruit trees for much of the year, and only use bread to get through the winter, along with the few winter crops they could still grow (like onions or turnips or other root vegetables, and potatoes once they were brought back from South America).

I have some doubts about some of what you say here.  I'd wager the two big reasons for use of grains like wheat are the storage thing and, more importantly, that wheat and other grains are MUCH MUCH MUCH more energy rich than most vegetables (compare, for example, 1 cup of wheat grain = 600+ calories, whereas 1 cup of fava beans is around 250 or so calories and turnips is less than 50 calories... and before you say anything about protein content, non-refined, whole wheat contains about as much protein as beans).  I mean, that's not to downplay the importance of other vegetable crops in the middle ages (in ANY culture), but beans, carrots, nuts, and leafy greens supplemented what was (and still is for most of the world) a grain based diet, and their consumption was always secondary to consumption of grains for the most part regardless of time of year.  Also, yields of fruit orchards are dismal compared to the yields of equivalent areas of grain crops, especially during the middle ages.  And I seriously doubt your statement that it takes more land to feed people with wheat than other non-grain plants.  Do you have the source?  This really interests me.

Well, that's the only nitpick I felt I had to make.  But, yeah.  Frikkin' sweet regardless!

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution
Post by: NW_Kohaku on May 03, 2012, 06:11:02 pm

Quote from: Andeerz on May 03, 2012, 04:50:52 pm

I have some doubts about some of what you say here.  I'd wager the two big reasons for use of grains like wheat are the storage thing and, more importantly, that wheat and other grains are MUCH MUCH MUCH more energy rich than most vegetables (compare, for example, 1 cup of wheat grain = 600+ calories, whereas 1 cup of fava beans is around 250 or so calories and turnips is less than 50 calories... and before you say anything about protein content, non-refined, whole wheat contains about as much protein as beans).  I mean, that's not to downplay the importance of other vegetable crops in the middle ages (in ANY culture), but beans, carrots, nuts, and leafy greens supplemented what was (and still is for most of the world) a grain based diet, and their consumption was always secondary to consumption of grains for the most part regardless of time of year.  Also, yields of fruit orchards are dismal compared to the yields of equivalent areas of grain crops, especially during the middle ages.  And I seriously doubt your statement that it takes more land to feed people with wheat than other non-grain plants.  Do you have the source?  This really interests me.

Wheat is simply not as efficient land-wise as other forms of vegetables.  The reason wheat was used was, again, it was capable of being stored for long periods of time (possibly even years) in containers, so long as weevils didn't get into your granary.

Wheat, potatoes (when they became available after travel to South America - these were a great source of nutrients, and some breeds of potato could supply all necessary nutritional value to a peasant supplemented only by milk), beans, and some types of root vegetables were the only available stored foods without "processing". 

This is more important than it might sound at first because if you're going for a "big harvest" of an orchard like what happens in modern times, when all the orange trees bear fruit at the same time, and migrant workers come and pick them all within a couple days, then in an era without refrigeration, those oranges would be rotten within days.  Instead, you tend to have just single fruit trees per family, and possibly extra fruit trees if you can turn, say, apples into cider that can keep well. 

Keep in mind also that everyone drank.  The water was often stagnant, and so you'd have to alcohol up your water (or water down your alcohol, whatever) in order to kill the germs.  Children included, of course.  In fact, it's odd that only dwarves are alcohol dependent.  Drinking water from most sources in DF should have a serious chance to make you sick. 

Incidentally, most alcohol had a serious chance to make you sick, as well.  The way that medieval brewers worked their art was an incredibly risky business, and you don't have people reenacting their brewing techniques for a reason. 

This is a blog post with some good information on the likes of pottage:
http://merryfarmer.net/2011/11/14/medieval-monday-the-peasant-diet/

There's conflicting information on this, but it seems like I overreached in my statements, and they do indeed eat bread, but also whatever vegetables were available locally. 

They also did not get their protein supply from just eating bread, however - they kept cows and/or chickens, and got their protein from dairy products.  "The Commons" was a, well, common fixture of any village, and an ancient right, and this was a common pasture where all the villagers could keep their cows or chickens to graze somewhere near the village so that fresh milk could be obtained.  Only children typically drank milk, adults usually had the cheese made from that milk.

Many farmers also fished, trapped, hunted or gathered wild nuts or mushrooms to further supplement their diet. 

---

As for wheat taking more area, you can look here: http://www.answerbag.com/q_view/373019

This person links some websites with a lot of related good information, as well...

As opposed to the roughly two acres of land (nearly 100,000 square feet) it takes to feed a peasant on wheat alone (source: http://faculty.history.wisc.edu/sommerville/123/123%2013%20Society.htm ), this person says that with "Intensive Gardening" (which means crowding the crops close together and not tilling the soil), "Successive Planting", "Companion Planting" (growing compatible crops together in condensed spaces so that they crowd out weeds), and "Perfect Soil", you can feed a person on 144 square feet with a vegetable garden using vegetables that are higher yield like tomatoes.  That said, "Successive Planting" includes freak tons of fertilizers, and you're not going to have perfect soil. 

Also, on the subject of taking two acres of land to feed the peasants, keep in mind that they were not using good land.  Farms would be divided up so that the sons could inherit the farms of their fathers until they were so small they could not be divided any more without starving both son's families.  When population expanded, they would move out to less and less arable land, and had to work more land to make up for the shortfalls in their crops.  Every patch of land that feasibly could be arable was used for agriculture of some form or another.

By the way, 2 acres in DF terms, assuming Toady's 2m tiles is 2000 tiles per dwarf to eat.  144 square feet in DF terms is 4 tiles per dwarf to eat.  So making the most of your land KIND OF makes a difference.

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution
Post by: Andeerz on May 03, 2012, 06:14:54 pm

Wow.  Thanks!!!  Dayummm... mind blown.  :D

So, yeah.  DEFINITELY no qualms now.

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution
Post by: NW_Kohaku on May 03, 2012, 07:07:56 pm

geez... I spent like half an hour looking up links, and you just respond in three minutes :P

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution
Post by: Andeerz on May 03, 2012, 07:20:05 pm

LOL!  Well, I still need to read them thoroughly.  When I get home I will...

[EDIT:]

Well I had some free time at worked and I read the stuff you linked me!  It seems to make sense what you said!  Though you made your point, I wonder how yields per land unit for wheat compared to other crops during not-so-ideal conditions.  The stuff about gardens for individual peasant families and households is pretty amazing to me, and from stuff I've been reading, it's very surprising to me how complete a peasant diet could be!  And I was surprised that fish and meat in some places played a significant (yet often extremely small) part of common folks' diet.  And it's cool to see how people supplemented the protein portion of their diet.  The bit about almond milk blew my mind, BTW.

I feel that if you adequately model the properties of the plants and what kind of work it takes to grow them, then the realism will emerge on its own, including the land required, the requirements of storing/preparing/etc. food, the tradability of whatever food, and peoples' diets.

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution
Post by: NW_Kohaku on May 04, 2012, 11:42:47 am

Well, it depends partially on the region they lived in and the era they lived in.

The Medieval Warm Period would have sucked to be alive - more people, same amount of arable land producing the same amount of food. 

In fact, just after the Bubonic Plague swept through was the best time to be alive - so much of the population was gone that people could reconsolidate farms back into places where you could grow more crops than just mostly wheat, and you had a boom in growing grapes and tomatoes and the like. 

Basically, when researching this thread, I went through an awful lot of organic farming sites.  Essentially, "organic farming" and "organic living" are just fancy ways to say "eating like a medieval peasant".

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution
Post by: Babylon on May 04, 2012, 01:11:21 pm

Quote from: NW_Kohaku on May 04, 2012, 11:42:47 am

In fact, just after the Bubonic Plague swept through was the best time to be alive - so much of the population was gone that people could reconsolidate farms back into places where you could grow more crops than just mostly wheat, and you had a boom in growing grapes and tomatoes and the like. 

That would be why it sparked a rennaisance

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution
Post by: Graknorke on May 09, 2012, 01:26:48 pm

I don't really have much to contribute other than that I like the general idea.
Some of the overly-complex specifics like having 5 different kinds of nutrient rather than having a couple of general ones aren't something I particularly want but I'm sure that if they became a thing then I wouldn't quit playing or anything.
I do particularly like the idea of farming in zones rather than in definate plots though, for one it makes the whole thing about scheduling easier to handle; and it also gets rid of the slightly strange message, "UristMcTantrumer has toppled the field" (or something to that effect).

Since you haven't yet compiled a list of your suggestions, do you have anything about a 'continue worldgen' setting under 'start playing'?

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution
Post by: NW_Kohaku on May 09, 2012, 01:55:28 pm

Quote from: Graknorke on May 09, 2012, 01:26:48 pm

I don't really have much to contribute other than that I like the general idea.
Some of the overly-complex specifics like having 5 different kinds of nutrient rather than having a couple of general ones aren't something I particularly want but I'm sure that if they became a thing then I wouldn't quit playing or anything.
I do particularly like the idea of farming in zones rather than in definate plots though, for one it makes the whole thing about scheduling easier to handle; and it also gets rid of the slightly strange message, "UristMcTantrumer has toppled the field" (or something to that effect).

Well, water is special, and a distinction between N and the P/K is worth having because Nitrogen fixators and crop cycles are meant to support nitrates, but they don't supply the other two.  Just going ahead and splitting the P and K up shouldn't be much of a big deal either way beyond that point. 

Biomass as a fifth variable in order to have a special stat for mushroom-type crops is just fallout from some other discussions, but it would basically mean you are using a different type of stat gained from different raw materials used as fertilizer in order to raise the important fertility stats. 

In other words, in any given field, the fertility would usually functionally be either 4-variable or 2-variable, since the biomass variable would only apply to the mushroom-type crops that just need dead things to decompose and water. 

Quote from: Graknorke on May 09, 2012, 01:26:48 pm

Since you haven't yet compiled a list of your suggestions, do you have anything about a 'continue worldgen' setting under 'start playing'?

I haven't written a thread about that exact subject, and have mainly just commented on the threads of others who have. 

The closest I have come is with the so-called Kingdom Mode (http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=76667.0) suggestions, where you could play the most abstract game mode that runs years as "turns".  Time would be advancing very fast, but you'd be actively playing the game at that point.

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution
Post by: NiknudStunod on May 09, 2012, 04:00:23 pm

Quote from: NW_Kohaku on May 03, 2012, 06:11:02 pm

Quote from: Andeerz on May 03, 2012, 04:50:52 pm

I have some doubts about some of what you say here.  I'd wager the two big reasons for use of grains like wheat are the storage thing and, more importantly, that wheat and other grains are MUCH MUCH MUCH more energy rich than most vegetables (compare, for example, 1 cup of wheat grain = 600+ calories, whereas 1 cup of fava beans is around 250 or so calories and turnips is less than 50 calories... and before you say anything about protein content, non-refined, whole wheat contains about as much protein as beans).  I mean, that's not to downplay the importance of other vegetable crops in the middle ages (in ANY culture), but beans, carrots, nuts, and leafy greens supplemented what was (and still is for most of the world) a grain based diet, and their consumption was always secondary to consumption of grains for the most part regardless of time of year.  Also, yields of fruit orchards are dismal compared to the yields of equivalent areas of grain crops, especially during the middle ages.  And I seriously doubt your statement that it takes more land to feed people with wheat than other non-grain plants.  Do you have the source?  This really interests me.

Wheat is simply not as efficient land-wise as other forms of vegetables.  The reason wheat was used was, again, it was capable of being stored for long periods of time (possibly even years) in containers, so long as weevils didn't get into your granary.

Wheat, potatoes (when they became available after travel to South America - these were a great source of nutrients, and some breeds of potato could supply all necessary nutritional value to a peasant supplemented only by milk), beans, and some types of root vegetables were the only available stored foods without "processing". 

This is more important than it might sound at first because if you're going for a "big harvest" of an orchard like what happens in modern times, when all the orange trees bear fruit at the same time, and migrant workers come and pick them all within a couple days, then in an era without refrigeration, those oranges would be rotten within days.  Instead, you tend to have just single fruit trees per family, and possibly extra fruit trees if you can turn, say, apples into cider that can keep well. 

Keep in mind also that everyone drank.  The water was often stagnant, and so you'd have to alcohol up your water (or water down your alcohol, whatever) in order to kill the germs.  Children included, of course.  In fact, it's odd that only dwarves are alcohol dependent.  Drinking water from most sources in DF should have a serious chance to make you sick. 

Incidentally, most alcohol had a serious chance to make you sick, as well.  The way that medieval brewers worked their art was an incredibly risky business, and you don't have people reenacting their brewing techniques for a reason. 

This is a blog post with some good information on the likes of pottage:
http://merryfarmer.net/2011/11/14/medieval-monday-the-peasant-diet/

There's conflicting information on this, but it seems like I overreached in my statements, and they do indeed eat bread, but also whatever vegetables were available locally. 

They also did not get their protein supply from just eating bread, however - they kept cows and/or chickens, and got their protein from dairy products.  "The Commons" was a, well, common fixture of any village, and an ancient right, and this was a common pasture where all the villagers could keep their cows or chickens to graze somewhere near the village so that fresh milk could be obtained.  Only children typically drank milk, adults usually had the cheese made from that milk.

Many farmers also fished, trapped, hunted or gathered wild nuts or mushrooms to further supplement their diet. 

---

As for wheat taking more area, you can look here: http://www.answerbag.com/q_view/373019

This person links some websites with a lot of related good information, as well...

As opposed to the roughly two acres of land (nearly 100,000 square feet) it takes to feed a peasant on wheat alone (source: http://faculty.history.wisc.edu/sommerville/123/123%2013%20Society.htm ), this person says that with "Intensive Gardening" (which means crowding the crops close together and not tilling the soil), "Successive Planting", "Companion Planting" (growing compatible crops together in condensed spaces so that they crowd out weeds), and "Perfect Soil", you can feed a person on 144 square feet with a vegetable garden using vegetables that are higher yield like tomatoes.  That said, "Successive Planting" includes freak tons of fertilizers, and you're not going to have perfect soil. 

Also, on the subject of taking two acres of land to feed the peasants, keep in mind that they were not using good land.  Farms would be divided up so that the sons could inherit the farms of their fathers until they were so small they could not be divided any more without starving both son's families.  When population expanded, they would move out to less and less arable land, and had to work more land to make up for the shortfalls in their crops.  Every patch of land that feasibly could be arable was used for agriculture of some form or another.

Actually it can be argued that the reason wheat and other grains were some of the first crops to be mass produced is one of the dwarfiest reasons of all......Beer.  Fermenting grains was one of the earliest forms of preserving food for long winters.  You may be able to thank beer for civilazation taking hold and prospering.

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution
Post by: Andeerz on May 09, 2012, 04:48:16 pm

That was actually mentioned in half-seriousness in my favorite book "Guns, Germs, and Steel" (which everyone should read!!! It's awesome, trust me!) 

And, hell yeah, that is dwarfy!

Read this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_beer

Best, ever!  Anyway, according to this and other things I read (as well as nice links shared by NW_Kohaku) beer has been around since almost 9000 BCE, and was commonly drank (daily, I might add!!!)  by people of all classes, ages, and soforth throughout medieval Europe!  Seems like humans and Dwarves are much more similar than we think...

Actually... maybe the founder of human civilization was actually a dwarf!  I could imagine... Urist McCaveman made some beer one day from a personal garden of wild grains (and maybe other wild "grasses" heh heh...) and bestowed his gift upon us savage humans... then people liked it so much, they started a large-scale agricultural industry centered around that most tasty of beverages.

And it makes sense from a nutritional point of view: beer has always been a source of calories and nutrients with a long shelf-life (a liquid bread, if you will), as well as a tasty form of hydration (given it wasn't too alcoholic, which a lot of fermented grain and fruit drinks in history weren't necessarily as alcoholic as beer you might commonly find today... think about Spanish cidra). 

So cool... 

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution
Post by: Mr. Palau on May 20, 2012, 08:12:57 pm

This games needs to make agriculture harder in order to realisticaly simulate the time period it is based on, and the dynamics of a non-industrial economy/bump.

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution
Post by: Graknorke on May 21, 2012, 11:48:13 am

Quote from: Mr. Palau on May 20, 2012, 08:12:57 pm

This games needs to make agriculture harder in order to realisticaly simulate the time period it is based on, and the dynamics of a non-industrial economy/bump.

It rather irritates me when people mention time-periods, if not because Dwarf Fortress is set in a technically indefinite range of times, assuming your computer could keep on storing the memory of various historical events.
Also because you shouldn't look at realism; look at gameplay value. Realism is why all of the mainstream shooters are Brown - The Game, bundled with Grey - the Industrial and City Pack.
In fact, realism tends to make things worse in many cases, because real life is boring. Real life as a reference for complex and deep gameplay mechanics though is fine, becase it contains the most detail of pretty much anything, obviously.

And I forgot the point I was making?

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution
Post by: Draco18s on May 21, 2012, 11:53:09 am

Quote from: Graknorke on May 21, 2012, 11:48:13 am

Quote from: Mr. Palau on May 20, 2012, 08:12:57 pm

This games needs to make agriculture harder in order to realisticaly simulate the time period it is based on, and the dynamics of a non-industrial economy/bump.

It rather irritates me when people mention time-periods, if not because Dwarf Fortress is set in a technically indefinite range of times, assuming your computer could keep on storing the memory of various historical events.
Also because you shouldn't look at realism; look at gameplay value. Realism is why all of the mainstream shooters are Brown - The Game, bundled with Grey - the Industrial and City Pack.
In fact, realism tends to make things worse in many cases, because real life is boring. Real life as a reference for complex and deep gameplay mechanics though is fine, becase it contains the most detail of pretty much anything, obviously.

And I forgot the point I was making?

While true, anything post-1400s is considered outside of DF's timeline.

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution
Post by: Graknorke on May 21, 2012, 12:14:16 pm

Quote from: Draco18s on May 21, 2012, 11:53:09 am

Quote from: Graknorke on May 21, 2012, 11:48:13 am

Quote from: Mr. Palau on May 20, 2012, 08:12:57 pm

This games needs to make agriculture harder in order to realisticaly simulate the time period it is based on, and the dynamics of a non-industrial economy/bump.

It rather irritates me when people mention time-periods, if not because Dwarf Fortress is set in a technically indefinite range of times, assuming your computer could keep on storing the memory of various historical events.
Also because you shouldn't look at realism; look at gameplay value. Realism is why all of the mainstream shooters are Brown - The Game, bundled with Grey - the Industrial and City Pack.
In fact, realism tends to make things worse in many cases, because real life is boring. Real life as a reference for complex and deep gameplay mechanics though is fine, becase it contains the most detail of pretty much anything, obviously.

And I forgot the point I was making?

While true, anything post-1400s is considered outside of DF's timeline.

Are you sure? Because they seem to be able to handle this no problems. (http://www.thesciencelab.co.uk/chemistry/GCSE/changingmaterials/metals/extractionofaluminium.htm)

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution
Post by: therahedwig on May 21, 2012, 01:12:33 pm

Actually, they can't do that with bauxite. They can only dig up native aluminium.

Mind you, there's still the whole magma forges thing, but then again there's also adamantine and werewolves. A little bit of fantasy next to the historical accuracy is probably the true face of dwarf fortress rather then this cold-dead cut-off point.

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution
Post by: Graknorke on May 21, 2012, 01:30:38 pm

That was the point I was trying to make. Basically, "because it's realistic" cannot be the sole argument for implementing something. It just... it drains the fluidity and life out of something.

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution
Post by: NW_Kohaku on May 21, 2012, 01:37:58 pm

Quote from: Graknorke on May 21, 2012, 01:30:38 pm

That was the point I was trying to make. Basically, "because it's realistic" cannot be the sole argument for implementing something. It just... it drains the fluidity and life out of something.

Then how about because it makes the game more deep?

Currently, we grow a functionally infinite number of things by throwing seeds at mud, and one tile of farm grows food for 4 dwarves. 

Farming is very, very easy, and it produces organic goods in such quantities that it makes all basis for trade of goods meaningless, even before you get to the point where all crops can be grown in all regions, so long as you have seeds. 

If we are going to have meaningful trade, we need to have regional specialties where a fort with sandy soil and warm weather might be good at growing grapes to make into wine that can be traded to colder climates with acidic silty clay soils that might trade blackberries back. 

The thing about farming is that it is practically the foundation of half of the game's raw materials (the other being mining), so making it no longer easy to get limitless amounts of raw materials is therefore required before we can make any sort of changes to economics that will make the game a deep and meaningful experience.

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution
Post by: Draco18s on May 21, 2012, 03:09:43 pm

Quote from: Graknorke on May 21, 2012, 12:14:16 pm

Quote from: Draco18s on May 21, 2012, 11:53:09 am

While true, anything post-1400s is considered outside of DF's timeline.

Are you sure? Because they seem to be able to handle this no problems. (http://www.thesciencelab.co.uk/chemistry/GCSE/changingmaterials/metals/extractionofaluminium.htm)

The "aluminum from bauxite" issue aside, it's frequently been posted by Toady that technological innovations past "about 1400" are looked at with a more critical eye before saying "yay" or "nay," and that it tends to fall on the "nay" side.*  It's to curtail people suggesting things for the game that are "too modern" for Toady's vision of the game.  Fantastical elements (such as cotton candy, clowns, curses, and magic) fall into a different category entirely.

*Steel production being the one item that falls FAR on the modern side of the 1400s cutoff, but which is justified because we're playing fucking dwarves and that humans don't have access to this metal.

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution
Post by: Andeerz on May 21, 2012, 04:52:19 pm

Though what qualifies as steel is often different depending on what you look at...  If we are speaking purely on the basis of carbon vs. iron content, steel existed since well before the advent of proper blast furnaces and the Bessemer Process and the like in Western Europe... in fact, I think steel production is well within the technological constraints of the game.  Even furnaces capable of properly smelting iron into liquid have existed in one culture or another well before 1400 AD, and were utilized to produce economically significant, historically influential quantities of high- and intermediate-carbon steels, as well as cast iron.   

I can give RL instances and references if pressed to...

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution
Post by: NW_Kohaku on May 21, 2012, 05:12:25 pm

Steel did exist - it's what the high-quality swords and armor were made of, after all, but it had to be hand-forged by highly trained masters, you couldn't mass-produce it, and it was extremely expensive. 

There's a reason the Japanese put so many myths into their swords - steel was even more scarce in Japan, and they couldn't afford to even have steel armor, just a few swords or spears, and so their weapons were passed down for generations.  If you were to look at the details page of a katana from a warrior family, it would have thousands of kills, and be considered an artifact. :P

... wait, what did this have to do with farming, again?

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution
Post by: Mr. Palau on May 21, 2012, 05:27:58 pm

Quote from: NW_Kohaku on May 21, 2012, 01:37:58 pm

Quote from: Graknorke on May 21, 2012, 01:30:38 pm

That was the point I was trying to make. Basically, "because it's realistic" cannot be the sole argument for implementing something. It just... it drains the fluidity and life out of something.

Then how about because it makes the game more deep?

Currently, we grow a functionally infinite number of things by throwing seeds at mud, and one tile of farm grows food for 4 dwarves. 

Farming is very, very easy, and it produces organic goods in such quantities that it makes all basis for trade of goods meaningless, even before you get to the point where all crops can be grown in all regions, so long as you have seeds. 

If we are going to have meaningful trade, we need to have regional specialties where a fort with sandy soil and warm weather might be good at growing grapes to make into wine that can be traded to colder climates with acidic silty clay soils that might trade blackberries back. 

The thing about farming is that it is practically the foundation of half of the game's raw materials (the other being mining), so making it no longer easy to get limitless amounts of raw materials is therefore required before we can make any sort of changes to economics that will make the game a deep and meaningful experience.

QFT

Not to mention that now farming is so trivial it is hardly even possible for a competent fortress to die due to soley starvation. In fact, I don't think I have ever had a non melancholy dwarf die due to starvation, in my many hundreds of hours worth of dwarf fortress. If it had ever gotten to the point where that could happen, I will ussually have quit by then, but that is only after half the fortress is dying. Hell after the first year of a fortress the only reason I will ever have a shortage of booze is because I forgot to tell the brewer to do his job.

Whereas in real life many new settlements died due to starvation, James town is almost an example, and likely many other I forgot about because they all died.

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution
Post by: Khym Chanur on May 21, 2012, 06:01:52 pm

Some thoughts on the interface:

1) When you designate a plot to grow (for example) plump helmets, it should automatically set the minimum number of buckets of water and logs needed per harvest, based on the size of the plot; you can then tweak the numbers down if you want to conserve resources at the price of sub-optimal growing.  Similarly, if you want to mono-crop cave wheat, it should automatically set the amount of fertilizer you'll need to add.

2) There should be some lists of crop-rotation schedules that the Dwarven civilization has found to be useful, and you can just select one of these to use it for a plot, rather than having to always manually set up crop rotations yourself for each plot.  You could also create and save you own rotation lists, similar to embark profiles.

3) There should be a site-wide farming resources screen, to tell you how much of each type of resource you're using per year/season, and at what rate you're leaching out nutrients if you're not using enough crop rotation and/or fertilization.  It could also be used to set up defaults for resource usages as done in point #1.  For example, you could set it so that when a new crop is designated the automatic setting for bone meal is only one half of what it required for the crop, and you'd have to manually increase it if you wanted more.

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution
Post by: NW_Kohaku on May 21, 2012, 08:10:12 pm

Quote from: Khym Chanur on May 21, 2012, 06:01:52 pm

Some thoughts on the interface:

1) When you designate a plot to grow (for example) plump helmets, it should automatically set the minimum number of buckets of water and logs needed per harvest, based on the size of the plot; you can then tweak the numbers down if you want to conserve resources at the price of sub-optimal growing.  Similarly, if you want to mono-crop cave wheat, it should automatically set the amount of fertilizer you'll need to add.

2) There should be some lists of crop-rotation schedules that the Dwarven civilization has found to be useful, and you can just select one of these to use it for a plot, rather than having to always manually set up crop rotations yourself for each plot.  You could also create and save you own rotation lists, similar to embark profiles.

3) There should be a site-wide farming resources screen, to tell you how much of each type of resource you're using per year/season, and at what rate you're leaching out nutrients if you're not using enough crop rotation and/or fertilization.  It could also be used to set up defaults for resource usages as done in point #1.  For example, you could set it so that when a new crop is designated the automatic setting for bone meal is only one half of what it required for the crop, and you'd have to manually increase it if you wanted more.

I especially like the second one... I'll edit it into the proper segment.

For the first, however, while it's good to tell players how much the game is going to estimate the farms will need, the idea of permissions is that the farmers decide for themselves how much a plot needs, and you can just limit it - you might say that you're permitted to use 125% of what you expect a farm plot to need (just in case), but the farmers should only use 100% of what the farm needs. 

However, I do like the idea of a poorly-trained farmer being either too stingy or generous with some of the fertilizers or water. 

EDIT: ah, the import/export option was already there, but added the rest.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Quote from: NW_Kohaku on January 27, 2011, 03:34:36 am

Since these are complex, time-consuming loops that players must build, having an import and export option (to a .txt file the way that embark profiles work) would help the process, letting players simply use their favorite crop rotation schedules over and over again if they can set up the initial conditions to start the loop in the first place.  In the case of a four-year crop rotation system, the player might export one of his field's schedule, and import it on the other three fields three times starting on different years, so that four different plots are running the same schedule, staggered out a year at a time.

Khym Chanur adds (http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=76007.msg3304844#msg3304844) that the crop rotation methods of a civ should become civ knowledge that players can import and start with. 

Khym also would like for the game, if possible, to calculate how much fertilizer would be required at that point in a farm, and recommend the appropriate amount of fertilizer permissions.

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution
Post by: Graknorke on May 22, 2012, 02:25:45 pm

Oh, I wasn't disagreeing that farming should be changed, I was just saying that using realism as the sole argument for something is not a good move (Unless you're looking to make a reality simulator. Don't know why anybody would want that but hey.). Realism is why, again, most war FPSs are covered in brown. It's a more "realistic" colour for things to be. It's still boring though.

I'd say that farmers should automatically "stockpile" some of the necessary resources on the farm before they need it, so they can just run back and forth from seeds to the farm, say, instead of having to run to the fertiliser stockpile, bring it to the farm, fertilise, go to the seeds, bring it to the farm, plant it. Either that or have 'teamwork' working properly on jobs that require multiple tasks to be completed. Like shared hauling for jobs instead of it being one dwarf making 4 runs each job.

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution
Post by: aka010101 on June 06, 2012, 10:00:47 pm

Quote from: Graknorke on May 22, 2012, 02:25:45 pm

Oh, I wasn't disagreeing that farming should be changed, I was just saying that using realism as the sole argument for something is not a good move (Unless you're looking to make a reality simulator. Don't know why anybody would want that but hey.). Realism is why, again, most war FPSs are covered in brown. It's a more "realistic" colour for things to be. It's still boring though.

Okay, gonna have to disagree with you on this at several points.

First, the eventual GOAL of DF is to be a fantasy world SIMULATOR where you can go and make a mark on the world, whether by adventuring or managing a civilization or what have you. Adding realism to the way the game works will make it MORE engaging and fun. And no, DF is never going to be totally realistic, this is a game where you control alcoholic midgets and some of your biggest threats are animated bronze statues and digging a hole into hell. What we REALLY want to avoid is micromanagement, because THAT is what makes the game less fun. But making it so you just don't plop down a tiny farm patch and have nothing to do with it the rest of the game? Fixing that will make things MORE interesting, not less. It'll add challenge and variety.

On a related note, the whole thing with 'realistic' games being brown and why that's not a good thing, is that game developers do the brown thing in an ATTEMPT to be realistic, but it simply grates on you because the real world Is NOT all greys and browns, and thus we find the narrow pallet irritating.

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution
Post by: Graknorke on June 07, 2012, 12:15:41 am

So wait, what exactly are we disagreeing on here?
All I was trying to say there is that realism on its own isn't a good enough excuse to add things. Game depth/improving overall gameplay quality should be the reason things are added. Which this suggestion does well, but some of the posters in the thread seemed to only see it as an issue of realism, so I was voicing my opinion on the matter.

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution
Post by: Silverionmox on June 07, 2012, 12:36:04 pm

One of the advantages of reality is that it is balanced. If you model a world to be fairly close to reality, it'll be balanced naturally, and disturbing the balance will cause effects that will seem natural, giving immersion and a sense of accomplishment.

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution
Post by: Draco18s on June 07, 2012, 12:37:43 pm

Quote from: Silverionmox on June 07, 2012, 12:36:04 pm

One of the advantages of reality is that it is balanced.

Actually, it's not.

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution
Post by: NW_Kohaku on June 07, 2012, 02:32:04 pm

Yeah, in reality, I tried making a character build based around knife-fighting, but I kept getting killed by people with guns.  Guns are so OP in reality.  The devs really need to nerf that. 

---

But more seriously, there are three benefits to realism.

First, verisimilitude, which is an important aspect of the game as a whole, is that players should be able to feel that they understand the world as though it were their own.  It's a magic world with dwarves and dragons, but rocks still fall, and minecarts fly through parabolic arcs if launched off a ramp, and fire is still hot, etc.  The game gets silly and "gamey" when you have things like atom-smashers or magma stacks in wooden reservoirs where the magma never cools, and supporting whole fortresses on crocodile eggs because crocodiles don't need to eat.  Those are immersion-breaking aspects of the game.

Second, intuitiveness of controls, which is related to the first, people don't intuitively assume you can block magma with a wooden door or atom-smash infinite quantities of material with a drawbridge.  If you can assume, however, that you need food to eat, and you get that food from a farm, and that farm needs to have fertilizer to be able to sustain growing food for more than a couple years without diminishing returns as you deplete the soil, then you are introducing complex mechanics that, at the same time, players are going to be able to understand pretty easily because it's based on the reality they already know.

Third, you have the ability to have Tangential Learning.  If you come across things like limestone, chalk, and marble as flux in DF, you start learning some properties of real-world chemistry and geology, even if only on accident.  If you want to learn more, there are links to wikipedia articles just waiting for you.  Though not so many people actually enjoy it, there is a real joy to be found in some people finding some new thing they never knew they'd be interested in by discovering some information through a game they like.

The problems with realism typically come up when you put realism as a goal to the exclusion of all other factors.

In this case, a balance of realism and some interface/gameplay mechanics that can be added to reduce the micromanagement aspects should give all the benefits of realism without the associated drawbacks of realism-blindness where gameplay is ignored in favor of realism at any cost.

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution
Post by: monk12 on June 07, 2012, 02:34:16 pm

Quote from: NW_Kohaku on June 07, 2012, 02:32:04 pm

Yeah, in reality, I tried making a character build based around knife-fighting, but I kept getting killed by people with guns.  Guns are so OP in reality.  The devs really need to nerf that.

Don't even get me started on how borked the Auction House is.

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution
Post by: Silverionmox on June 07, 2012, 04:05:18 pm

Quote from: Draco18s on June 07, 2012, 12:37:43 pm

Quote from: Silverionmox on June 07, 2012, 12:36:04 pm

One of the advantages of reality is that it is balanced.

Actually, it's not.

Entropy and the law of conservation of energy take care of it. No pain, no gain, and no infinite loop exploits.

In practice, you can set up a medieval tech country with villages, a few cities etc. and be assured that no single village is going to conquer the world because the weapons in your world happened to be designed a bit overpowered on the offensive side, without negative feedback loop to limit them.

Quote from: NW_Kohaku

Yeah, in reality, I tried making a character build based around knife-fighting, but I kept getting killed by people with guns.  Guns are so OP in reality.  The devs really need to nerf that.

But they already put in guns to nerf armored knights! They really should do something about the power creep. I bet they just put in atomic bombs to sell DLCs :p

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution
Post by: Draco18s on June 07, 2012, 05:14:59 pm

Quote from: Silverionmox on June 07, 2012, 04:05:18 pm

In practice, you can set up a medieval tech country with villages, a few cities etc. and be assured that no single village is going to conquer the world because the weapons in your world happened to be designed a bit overpowered on the offensive side, without negative feedback loop to limit them.

...Rome?  China?  Genghis Kahn?

The real world is full of infinite feedback loops.

One of the biggest being that if you have more territory than someone else, you've got more resources than they do, thus have the better (or larger) army, thus conquer them (and continue the cycle).

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution
Post by: NW_Kohaku on June 07, 2012, 08:28:01 pm

Actually, part of the reason all the great empires fell is because those ancient empires were economically dependent upon unlimited conquest to support themselves. 

As in, they didn't tax their own actual citizens, they only demanded tribute from the conquered cities in order to fund their current cities, and it required constant conquest to keep the whole machine going.  This is why Rome needed constant casus belli to declare war on new nations - they had a war-based economy, and the more that established cities had been brought into the fold, the more each war's spoils had to be divvied up. 

Eventually, they couldn't defend their own borders, they relied upon mercenaries in the form of barbarians, and then they couldn't get the money to pay them, so when the mercenaries turned and marched on Rome to demand their pay, there was nobody left to stop them.

The same can be said of many ancient empires, from the Assyrians to the Mongols.  (Although the Mongol downfall was more because it was based upon a cult of personality that couldn't survive the death of the charismatic leaders that held it together.)

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution
Post by: Draco18s on June 07, 2012, 09:11:50 pm

So essentially what you're saying is:

An empire that is "winning" only dies from within.  Which does nothing to counter the feedback loop, as if an empire was properly funded (say, Rome), it wouldn't collapse.

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution
Post by: NW_Kohaku on June 08, 2012, 09:50:52 am

Quote from: Draco18s on June 07, 2012, 09:11:50 pm

So essentially what you're saying is:

An empire that is "winning" only dies from within.  Which does nothing to counter the feedback loop, as if an empire was properly funded (say, Rome), it wouldn't collapse.

Well, the problem was that its growth was unsustainable.  It needed wealthy conquerable cities that were easily reached along the Mediterranean to expand to.  Marching through the German forests cost too much money, and the barbarians were not profitable enough to conquer, so once they had pretty much wrecked everything in the Middle East, the whole thing started to crumble. 

Saying that an empire that becomes too expansive to sustain itself from within (because of cultural strife, civil unrest, incapacity to sustain its economy, etc.) when it becomes large but could sustain itself when it was small, so that greater and greater resources must be spent upon simply keeping the empire together, leaving a smaller percentage for further conquest is a counterforce.

And that's pretty much the point of the whole Class Warfare thing - getting larger means more internal strife to up the challenge because external threats alone are not going to be able to challenge a well-managed established fortress.

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution
Post by: Graknorke on June 08, 2012, 04:38:35 pm

I think he was saying that those empires could feasibly have won if they had, at a point, slowed on the military expansion and focused on economics. Just because they didn't doesn't mean they couldn't.

Of course, I have no idea what economics go into running a country, besides that there's probably always a way of doing it better.

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution
Post by: Draco18s on June 08, 2012, 08:09:58 pm

Quote from: Graknorke on June 08, 2012, 04:38:35 pm

I think he was saying that those empires could feasibly have won if they had, at a point, slowed on the military expansion and focused on economics. Just because they didn't doesn't mean they couldn't.

Precisely.

Not that I know how an economy works either and how to make it efficient (but I can tell you: giving money to the people who already have it isn't going to do you any good: they aren't spending what they have so what are they going to do with even more?*).

*Also, the super rich aka the 1%, are not "job creators" and reducing the taxes on their personal income isn't a way to "create" jobs.

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution
Post by: Mr. Palau on June 09, 2012, 09:54:45 am

Quote from: Draco18s on June 08, 2012, 08:09:58 pm

Quote from: Graknorke on June 08, 2012, 04:38:35 pm

I think he was saying that those empires could feasibly have won if they had, at a point, slowed on the military expansion and focused on economics. Just because they didn't doesn't mean they couldn't.

Precisely.

Not that I know how an economy works either and how to make it efficient (but I can tell you: giving money to the people who already have it isn't going to do you any good: they aren't spending what they have so what are they going to do with even more?*).

*Also, the super rich aka the 1%, are not "job creators" and reducing the taxes on their personal income isn't a way to "create" jobs.

It has always been my belief that if the Roman Empire knew as much about economics as we do today, they would have conqured the world, or more likely, lasted way longer. So much of what they were doing was terrible economic policy. Debasing their currency, crushing the midle class, slavery, exempting the elite from taxation, forcing people to stay in their old jobs, forcing children to follow in the footsteps of their parents, decreasses in investment in infrastructure, failure to solve a chronic trade deficit with India, all examples of terrible economic policies enacted by the empire.

They deviated pretty heavily from the general recomendations of modest inequality, in order to sustain a higher class capable of undertaking private investments, while maintaining a midle class that can consume the benfits of those investments. Most notably in slavery. Slavery is to a midle class, and the economic benefits that brings, what matter is to anti-matter. Look at the south, it never industrialized to the extent the north did primarily because it lacked a midle class. It lacked a midle class because slavery deppressed wages for white-non-slave-owners. Why hire a free man when I can get a slave to do it for me, and whoose employment will cost less over time?

Same thing happened in Rome that happened in the south. You get a upper class who reap the benefits of the slave's labour, and what would have been the midle class havve had their wages suppressed to such an extent that they are now merely poor people.

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution
Post by: Silverionmox on June 09, 2012, 10:05:18 am

Why build an empire if you don't get to bleed your subjects dry? Maintaining a wealth transfer from the subjects to the core, geographically as wel as socially, is the reason to build an empire.

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution
Post by: Draco18s on June 09, 2012, 10:32:15 am

Quote from: Silverionmox on June 09, 2012, 10:05:18 am

Why build an empire if you don't get to bleed your subjects dry? Maintaining a wealth transfer from the subjects to the core, geographically as wel as socially, is the reason to build an empire.

Why don't you ask Muammar Gaddafi?

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution
Post by: 10ebbor10 on June 09, 2012, 11:14:33 am

There are better ways to increase the wealth of the core then relying on the income transfer from the conquered lands.

Wealth is basically money being thrown around.

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution
Post by: keyreper on June 14, 2012, 10:16:33 pm

ive scaned though this post and noticed one big problem, the things you are wanting to do will make it to where df will need a better 800$ computer to operate with out lag for the first 100 years of a fort, after that the plants will cause so much lag that it will be useless to play from the lag D:

EDIT: i read the rest of it :P it sounds good!

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution
Post by: PainRack on July 01, 2012, 05:11:01 pm

Quote

It has always been my belief that if the Roman Empire knew as much about economics as we do today, they would have conqured the world, or more likely, lasted way longer. So much of what they were doing was terrible economic policy. Debasing their currency, crushing the midle class, slavery, exempting the elite from taxation, forcing people to stay in their old jobs, forcing children to follow in the footsteps of their parents, decreasses in investment in infrastructure, failure to solve a chronic trade deficit with India, all examples of terrible economic policies enacted by the empire.

Maybe one should actually try reading MORE about the Roman Empire first?

The argument that Rome was a "war economy", reliant on constant conquests is blatently untrue. The WRE, ERE survived for centuries without significant conquests/sacking of enemy towns.

The Romans did "debase" their currency. However, the Romans were facing the unique problem that they weren't producing enough metals to base their currency on. If anything, its a matter of too much "riches" rather than anything.

There was SIGNIFICANT social mobility in the Roman Empire. Barbarians rising to become Emperors, if not trusted generals and nobles, the equesterian class and etc........ there were different trends of course within different dynasties but arguing that people were "stuck" to their old job is absurd.


The idea that "elites" were exempt from taxation is similarly laughable. We know from Republic Rome that the elites were expected to maintain  basic services/utilities/ baths if they were to remain elected and in power. Its a matter of patronage, and certainly nothing like our modern day civil service but just how do you think the Romans maintained their armies, if not via taxation?
No idea about India, but given Rome economic strength and trade, I doubt it.

The decrease in investment did not cause the fall of the Roman Empire. May I suggest that its the inverse which is more likely.

Quote

They deviated pretty heavily from the general recomendations of modest inequality, in order to sustain a higher class capable of undertaking private investments, while maintaining a midle class that can consume the benfits of those investments. Most notably in slavery. Slavery is to a midle class, and the economic benefits that brings, what matter is to anti-matter. Look at the south, it never industrialized to the extent the north did primarily because it lacked a midle class. It lacked a midle class because slavery deppressed wages for white-non-slave-owners. Why hire a free man when I can get a slave to do it for me, and whoose employment will cost less over time?

Except you're laughably wrong. Roman slavery was NOT the equivalent of 17th century slavery.

Slaves in the Roman era could own money, property and etc, and we learn of multiple slaves who did rise up to own property and join the Senator class, much less the lesser ranked equesterian. There's that pesky social mobility again. The inverse of course is that not all slaves were equal. Slaves assigned to work as labourers in mines were lowly paid and unlikely to advance, but THEN again, free coal miners during Industrial England were facing just as horrible conditions and pay.

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution
Post by: Andeerz on July 01, 2012, 06:18:08 pm

True dat, Pain Rack.

Mr. Palau, I can see the logic behind what you are saying, but there are so many factors (way more than even the many important things you state) that contributed towards the decline of the Roman Empire, that it is pretty much impossible for us to really know at this point what happened (though there are probably some really awesome mathematical economic models out there that might shed some light).  And it is not entirely certain that all of the things you stated are true.

That said, I hope that things like the "debasing their currency, crushing the midle class, slavery, exempting the elite from taxation, forcing people to stay in their old jobs, forcing children to follow in the footsteps of their parents, decreasses in investment in infrastructure, failure to solve a chronic trade deficit" that you state will eventually be phenomena that could actually arise in DF.  It would be nice for DF to be sophisticated enough eventually that it could actually be used as an economic simulator so that certain ideas as to what leads to the rise and fall of empires can actually be put to the test!  :D

Also... I'd like to emphasize that though economic THEORY has changed among academics throughout the ages, the way economies work has never changed.  We are just still trying to figure out how they actually work.

 

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution
Post by: Bertinator on July 14, 2012, 05:58:35 pm

This is a hellishly complicated solution to something that should not be that hard. There's something to be said for elegance. This is not an elegant solution. It's clunky and wasteful of valuable computing resources, when a lot of the things it proposes are either completely unnecessary or can be much more easily approximated. You're right that people having farms on 4 tiles that can support an entire fortress is stupid. If I remember right, for Dwarf physics with the minecart update, each tile should be around 6 feet by 6 feet. So that's a 12'x12' area to support 200 Dwarves. That's definitely an issue. It's a problem. It's also pretty simple to fix.

Plants grow ridiculously fast in DF currently. It takes around 25-42 days for plants to go from seed to harvest. In real life, crops usually take 120 days or more to grow. Of course, underground crops don't have access to the sun and shouldn't logically exist, so make take twice as long to grow. Suddenly farms have to grow at least 3-5 times larger to have the same output on the surface, and underground crops take 6-10 times as long. Already your plump helmet farm takes up 40 tiles instead of 4. That's with tweaks to the RAWS that anyone could do in a few minutes. The game is just as simple as when it started.

But you're still feeding a fortress on a tiny area with a single Legendary grower. So decrease yields. Right now a quarry bush an a single tile can produce at least 25 food per farming cycle with a legendary grower. That's already ridiculous, but a Legendary grower also takes a fraction of the time to plant seeds. Make it so you don't have plants processed into so much food. If a quarry bush needs to be processed to be edible, make it produce twice as much food instead, since it takes twice as much effort. Make it so Legendary growers produce the same yields as a Dabbling grower, but still plant faster. They'll able to make more food, and it'll require just as much farmland to produce that food. If you have only 2 crops per tile regardless of skill and quarry bushes only give 2 food with processing, suddenly a tile can only give up to 4 food per cycle instead of 25. That 40 tile farm is now 250 tiles, 500 if you're growing plants that don't require processing to eat. Not as big as it needs to be, but we're getting somewhere, and we have changed nothing about the game but the numbers. Everything is otherwise the exact same as it used to be. It's just as simple.

Of course, we're still talking about a pretty small amount of labor. 4-5 Legendary growers in a fortress of 200. Odds are you'll have way more Legendary Craftsdwarves with strange moods alone. So make it more labor intensive. This doesn't have to be anything micromanaged. Make it so when crops are growing, they need to be weeded/deverminized/maintained at certain points. You don't even have to call it anything specific. Just "maintaining crops". Planting and harvesting is 2 labors. If you make it so they need to be maintained once every month-ish, it takes 6 labors to produce a crop instead of 2. If you have underground crops, that's 10 labors. So for an underground farm to feed a fortress of 200, you now have 20-25 Legendary growers and a hell of a lot more growing space.

But things are even trickier than that. Since above ground crops take 120 days to complete and they have a much more limited planting range, your labor will spike considerably. There'll be a lot of very rapid planting in the beginning, medium effort at weeding throughout growth, and then finally a massive spike during harvest to prevent your plants from going to waste. That means a lot of cross-professioned haulers and crafters and other Dwarves ready to go at any time to help out with the growing and harvest efforts. Then you have to have labor lined up to process that food up until the next planting cycle. Grower-plant processors would probably be the easiest solution.

Just make above ground crops require Light instead of Above Ground, and suddenly you have a lot of choice with pretty little effort. Above ground farms take up half the space and use almost half the effort. However, they can only work if uncovered and exposed to the sun. Since they have to be above ground, you have to spend time walling them in. Even then, flying enemies can easily swoop in and use it as an entrance to your fortress. Or if there's an ill-timed ambush, you might find yourself able to lock yourself away in your fortress, but suddenly you don't have access to your food supply. So you go underground. But you quickly find it takes a ridiculous amount of space and labor to grow underground crops. So you're forced to strike a compromise. How big are my underground crop farms? How big are my above ground farms? Will my underground crops just be used to give growers something to do after the harvest, or will they supplement my food source considerably? Will I have a big enough underground farm and enough growers to sustain me in case my above ground crops are lost, or will I have just enough to hold me over until I can retake the surface?

Even then, we could still have a very much simplified and stripped-down variant of your system. Give farms, not each individual tile, a rating. Barren, Poor, Average, Fertile, or Very Fertile. Farms start out on Poor or Average. The lower the soil rating gets, the lower the yield gets. When it reaches Barren, it cannot grow anything and will automatically lay fallow until the Fertility increases. High-value cash crops that lead to happy thoughts and trade money deplete fertility very rapidly. Lower-value crops have less of an impact. Some of them might even help restore fertility. Fertility also slowly regenerates over time, so leaving a field fallow will help out. Because it regenerates, some low-to-mid-value plants might have no impact. But fertility can also be improved by using potash and other fertilizers. In fact, the only way soil can reach "Very Fertile" is with fertilizer; crop selection and letting fields lay fallow can only bring it up to Fertile. Barren wouldn't have a floor to it, so if your field is just barely at Poor and you dump high-value crops on them, it will take the field much longer to get back to Poor.

So you have to think to yourself, on top of the aboveground-underground dilemma, what kind of crops do I grow? Do I grow mostly high-value crops supplemented with a lot of fertilizer, with short-term gains but no sustainability? High-value crops but with low-yields to allow farms to regenerate? A mix, alternating fields year by year? Do I go for lots of low-value crops to save time and effort? What about importing most food and only having a small farming operation, stockpiling and hoping I can survive until more caravans arrive? What if I export it, letting it stockpile when I become sieged? What happens when the food I stockpile starts going bad?

That is my elegant solution. Changing numbers and making minor tweaks, for the most part. Simplifying your suggestion to a much easier, but still deep, solution. Farms take up over 60 times more space and much more effort by changing numbers and introducing weeding. Throw in fertility, and you've got a very simple, but very dynamic farming system that takes a fair bit of labor to keep going. You don't need to keep track of things like how much nitrogen or potassium is in the soil. You can get more or less all of the depth by just giving "Fertility" and making it take more time and labor with none of the unnecessary complexity.

Spoiler: "Additional Thoughts" (click to show/hide)

-Underground crops don't necessarily need to take longer or need more maintenance. You could simply have underground plants deplete Fertility much faster, forcing people to have very big fields with a lot of fallow or to use a lot of fertilizer. Or both. Some high-value underground crops could take a field from Very Fertile to Barren in a single cycle, and even the lowest-value underground crops would be unable to be farmed without depleting Fertility as much as a mid or high value aboveground crop. For extra fun, you could have the very most valuable crops made only underground, and make the alcohol made from them give temporary bonuses to Dwarfstats. So you could farm them, but it would take ages for the fields to recover without fertilizer, so it would be almost impossible to feed a fortress off them without designating and irrigating massive swaths of land just to maintain them or an absurd amount of fertilizer.

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution
Post by: Phlum on July 14, 2012, 10:07:28 pm

@Bertinator.

I don't think you understand. Your sugestion doesn't make farming a constant factor, just a much more annoying task that must be completed before continuing the fort. Also kohaku's posts are ment to be realistic to the point of killing your computer, this isn't really a problem. These ideas are so long term that they require new hardware to be invented. Judging on the current projection for dwarf fortress 1.0's release date, we should have plenty of new hardware.

PS. Trying to be as nice as possible here, you state distain for complex ideas In favor for shorter ones. Quite ironic that you took nine paragraphs to say "hey instead of adding all these compex, intriguing ideas, lets change how long it takes for crops to grow."

Oh almost forgot, I'm not responding to any hate messages they just clutter the thread.

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution
Post by: SquashMonster on July 14, 2012, 10:53:01 pm

I'm still working through your massive post, but something you mentioned earlier on made me think of a way to accomplish your goals that would be pretty simple, both to learn and probably to implement.  The rest of your ideas are probably good too, but I want to put this out there as a simple version:

Starting with your idea of plump helmets requiring a log, a seed, and some water, each plant has its own unique way to be a hassle.  Plump helmets can be reasonably harvested early on, they just take an inordinate amount of manual labor forever.  A particularly aggressive type of vine requires metal trellises.  Dimple cups release poisonous fumes unless ventilated.  Cave rice needs to be in 3/7 water and pollutes the water on harvest.  One per hundred mandrake roots is actually the top of a monster that awakens when someone pulls on his head.  Each ties in to a different dwarven industry that already has its own concerns, like metalworking, siege defense, irrigation, or military (respectively for the above examples).

Add to that the idea of pests being more common the more you use the plant.  Plump helmet pests are relatively benign - they just ruin a portion of your crop.  The other plants have more harmful pests.  Some generate lots of vermin, others generate creatures that eat your other food stocks, still others generate creatures that have an annoying poison, and some might even make tiny bugs that are on fire.

This means an early fort can use plump helmets, which are even easier than they are in current versions.  As the population grows, you need more plump helmets.  When you're growing too many plump helmets, pests kick in.  You need to diversify to two crops, so you pick whichever has the drawback you're most equipped for.  This lasts until your population grows large enough that you can't have just two crops without pests, so you do three.  The population growth forces you into the other industries, and as you near max population you have to start making some hard choices about how to support crops that have requirements completely inappropriate for your surroundings.

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution
Post by: Draco18s on July 14, 2012, 11:47:39 pm

Quote from: SquashMonster on July 14, 2012, 10:53:01 pm

as you near max population you have to start making some hard choices about how to support crops that have requirements completely inappropriate for your surroundings.

"Yes, that's right.  We need 400 bushels of cave wheat imported.  Yes yes, costs, costs.  We'll pay.  Very good.  8400 *Stone Mugs* are yours when you deliver."

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution
Post by: Xvareon on July 15, 2012, 12:23:51 am

You had me on 'compost goblin corpses'. Do it.

Wow, Kohaku, I'm impressed... very detailed and comprehensive write-up there.

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution
Post by: Bertinator on July 16, 2012, 07:40:06 am

Quote

Quite ironic that you took nine paragraphs to say

What can I say? I'm passionate about game design and I have way too much time on my hands. So yeah. I can definitely be a long-winded asshole.  :P

Quote from: Phlum on July 14, 2012, 10:07:28 pm

@Bertinator.

Also kohaku's posts are ment to be realistic to the point of killing your computer, this isn't really a problem. These ideas are so long term that they require new hardware to be invented. Judging on the current projection for dwarf fortress 1.0's release date, we should have plenty of new hardware.

Except that Dwarf Fortress's demands for CPU power for every other element of the game will also be rising constantly, and much faster. There's also only so much effort Toady can put in. It's not just about improving farming in Dwarf Fortress. It's improving farming but leaving time for everything else.

Quote

I don't think you understand. Your sugestion doesn't make farming a constant factor, just a much more annoying task that must be completed before continuing the fort.

...

PS. Trying to be as nice as possible here, you state distain for complex ideas In favor for shorter ones. Quite ironic that you took nine paragraphs to say "hey instead of adding all these compex, intriguing ideas, lets change how long it takes for crops to grow."

It's not that complexity is bad.

...

Well, actually, let me revise that. Complexity is an awful, terrible thing that should be taken behind the shed, shot several times, burnt, buried as deep underground as humanly possible, and never spoken of again. Depth is a wonderful, wonderful thing that you can pretty much never get enough of. Complexity inevitably comes with depth, but a lot of times you can strip out the complexity but keep most of the delicious depth. That's what I'm trying to do here. If I came off rude I apologize, but right now things are way too complicated in these ideas. Which doesn't mean the ideas themselves are all terrible. At heart, a lot of them are fantastic. But they could use some cutting down. Some of the things that would add depth add way more complexity than anything else, so should probably be completely rethought.

I also don't mean to be rude, but I don't think you did more than skim over my post. Increasing how long it takes for crops to grow and how much effort it takes are part of my suggestion, sure. But that's because it's the first, easiest step. It takes very little effort but makes a massive difference. Just changing the numbers to something realistic suddenly makes it so farms have to be 50 or 60 times larger to feed a 200-Dwarf fortress and so you need a small army of growers. That's the basics you iron out before you start making revisions to the system that could literally take months to fully implement.

The reason I think you just skimmed it is because you missed everything else I mentioned. You missed the part where above ground crops are significantly easier to grow than underground crops in terms of time and space, but are vulnerable to being cut off in a siege and could endanger your fortress, forcing you to weigh your dependence on them. That's trivial to implement, but it would contribute a hell of a lot to the depth of Dwarf Fortress without adding complexity. You also missed the part where I agreed with his biggest, core idea, but pointed out that it could be done much more simply without losing anything.

What I'm mainly trying to say is that you don't need to have things like the nitrogen content or acidity of the ground. The problem isn't that it's a lot of detail. It's just not intuitive. Not all detail is bad or makes things overly complicated. A lot of it is good for flourish or adding depth. Like the combat system. It goes into way more detail than a hitpoint system, but it's pretty simple to understand at its core because we can relate to it and digest the ideas easily. We know how a human body works. We know that have muscle sliced open or bones shattered are bad. We know that having your intestines spill out is bad. We know that having your brains torn to pieces is very bad. We also know that bruises on your skin are not so bad. It's detail, but it's not hard to understand because we know how it works without having it explained to us.

Not so with soil quality. Knowing how the acidity of a soil relates to its ability to sustain different types of crops isn't something that just pops to us in an instant. Most people that play will not be agricultural scientists and won't be intimately knowledgeable with how farming works. That makes it much harder for people to pick up, since they won't know what anything in the interface means, no matter how well designed it is. If I want to make my farm, I'll have to go on DF Wiki, and look at what all of the stats mean. I will then I have to look at each individual plant I might grow, figure out how it impacts the soil, the short-term benefits and the long-term benefits, cross-check with the soil I have, come up with some farming plans, and then crunch a lot of numbers to make sure I don't turn my landscape into hell on earth. I will probably have to look through half a dozen pages outside of these to get all the information I need, included different guides and suggestions for farming rotations to maintain soil quality. It could literally take hours for me to familiarize myself with it to the point where I can actually be functional with it. It's one thing to read for 5 minutes and know that one plant replenishes hydrogen and another helps with phosphorous. It's another to fully understand and process the information and use it to form a coherent, long-term farming plan and then merge that with the overall plans for my fortress.

Honestly, as a veteran player, that's already intimidating. But think of a new player. When I was new to Dwarf Fortress, just figuring out how farming and irrigation worked, figuring out what the plants did and how to effectively set up a farming industry. It took me several fortresses to master that. We are talking about something that can be set up in less than five minutes by someone who knows what they're doing and then they barely have to think about it again. It is something I would consider myself pants-on-head retarded for not knowing how to do now. It is also something that's intuitive at its core. Everyone knows that dirt + seeds = plants. Yet it was still difficult to get the hang of. Things like NPK, in contrast, are not intuitive and not easy to grasp at all. I don't even know if I heard of NPK before reading this thread, and I don't consider myself especially stupid or unknowledgeable.

Now, right now, as someone experienced with the game, I could probably learn how to do it and get a grasp of it. I could even do it quickly if it was designed well-enough. But if back then something like that were implemented, I would not be able to get it. Not when I was busy trying to figure out one ASCII squiggle from another and trying to figure out how to mine rock and make a workshop and assign bedrooms. I might eventually be able to get it, but it would add even more to an already steep learning curve. If Dwarf Fortress solely consisted of that, it wouldn't be insurmountable. But when, as a new player, you're already being thrown directly into the game with no tutorial, when you already have to learn how to do dozens of things and keystrokes at once and synthesize it all together into making a well-designed fortress, and when you are pretty much guaranteed to go through several fortresses and plenty of hours before you're even competent at the game, it's a little much to ask.

Which is why I suggested simplifying it to "fertility". Fertility is very intuitive. You don't really need to know much about farming to get it. Fertile soil = Crops grow well. Non-fertile soil = Crops don't grow as well. It's quick. It's easy to understand. But it still has decision-making. It still has crop rotations. You still have to not only expand, but evolve your farms as you get a bigger fortress, going from making underground turnips to fields on carefully developed 4-year rotation cycles. You have to figure out things like whether you go almost purely cash crops with a reliance on fertilizer that will eventually run out, or you keep growing underground turnips to keep your fields fertile and easy to manage indefinitely. You still have short term but high value vs long term but low value, simple vs efficient, and all the other things that make his system good. I even added a new underground vs above ground dynamic to his ideas. The only difference is it's made easier and more intuitive for the player. It's either fertile or not. It keeps every last bit of depth, but without the complexity or confusion.

As a final point, I'd also like to add that it makes a hell of a lot more sense to keep it simpler. Dwarves and other medieval fantasy races will have a very good feeling for the land. They will know how to work it and what crops to plant when and what rotations to use, and they're probably fantastic at it. But it's not a scientific knowledge. It's rough and uncertain and intuitive. They don't know about NPK or the details of soil erosion and desertification. They know what works through a combination of passed down knowledge, common sense, and trial-and-error. Since we're taking the role of a Dwarf overseer, it doesn't make much sense to give us details that the Dwarves themselves would not be privy to. You are literally making it more in-depth for the player than it would be for the Dwarf farmers, who probably aren't taking soil samples to their labs to test them for nutrients and acidity.

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution
Post by: Draco18s on July 16, 2012, 08:44:57 am

I disagree.

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution
Post by: jseah on July 20, 2012, 09:10:46 pm

You see though, I prefer the complexity.  Having to managed multiple factors of each subsystem (farming), balanced against those of others (mining, building, society, etc.) would make for a very powerful simulation. 

Perhaps we disagree on what sort of game DF should be like.  To me, DF is like a fantasy world simulator.  You put your touches on it, make your mark on the world, and watch it adapt or change.  Set it up, watch the dwarves do their thing, build a megaconstruction.  Or just turn the stuff you don't want to handle over to them and the AI fills in the blanks. 

Kind of like a very CPU-expensive interactive screensaver.  =P

EDIT:
To put it more selfishly... I want my polyculture tree farms dammit. 

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution
Post by: thisisjimmy on July 21, 2012, 01:43:55 pm

I agree that depth is good and complexity is to be avoided.  I think the majority of players would shy away from an overly complex system.  Sid Meier had some advice on this topic:

Quote

Do Your Research After The Game Is Done

Many of the most successful games of all time - SimCity, Grand Theft Auto, Civilization, Rollercoaster Tycoon, The Sims - have real-world themes, which broadens their potential audience by building the gameplay around concepts familiar to everyone.

However, creating a game about a real topic can lead to a natural but dangerous tendency to cram the product full of bits of trivia and obscure knowledge to show off the amount of research the designer has done. This tendency spoils the very reason why real-world themes are so valuable - that players come to the game with all the knowledge they already need.

Everybody knows that gunpowder is good for a strong military, that police stations reduce crime, and that carjacking is very illegal. As Sid puts it, "the player shouldn’t have to read the same books the designer has read in order to be able to play."

Games still have great potential to educate, just not in the ways that many educators expect. While designers should still be careful not to include anything factually incorrect, the value of an interactive experience is the interplay of simple concepts, not the inclusion of numerous facts and figures.

Many remember that the world’s earliest civilizations sprang up along river valleys -- the Nile, the Tigris/Euphrates, the Indus -- but nothing gets that concept across as effectively as a few simple rules in Civilization governing which tiles produce the most food during the early stages of agriculture. Furthermore, once the core work is done, research can be a very valuable way to flesh out a game’s depth, perhaps with historical scenarios, flavor text, or graphical details. Just remember that learning a new game is an intimidating experience, so don’t throw away the advantages of an approachable topic by expecting the player to already know all the details when the game starts.

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution
Post by: Draco18s on July 21, 2012, 02:47:24 pm

Quote from: thisisjimmy on July 21, 2012, 01:43:55 pm

I agree that depth is good and complexity is to be avoided.  I think the majority of players would shy away from an overly complex system.  Sid Meier had some advice on this topic:

And if you compare to the kind of system we're trying to advocate, it involves only three factors:

1) Water (duh).  Generally we aren't advocating any changes here, either the soil is wet or it is not, as the game currently uses it.
2) Phosphorous (this is the "make plants green" nutrient, not widely known but it's not so obscure as to introduce needless complexity)
2b) alternatively, nitrogen
3) ph level (acidic soil kills stuff, everyone knows this, same with soil that is too far alkaline)

The goal is to allow players to have crop rotation cycles that avoid the need to fertilize the soil (nitrogen fixing plants, etc), but it doesn't force them to go look up how it works in the real world at all.  And if they don't want to bother, they can just use fertilizer.

Plants have a favorite soil type, easily determinable in game (examine the plant/seeds), and the farm will tell you what kind of soil it has (examine it).  As well as easy options to alter the soil (similar to fertilizing, you tell the farmers to e.g. "make the soil more acidic" and they will attempt to do so), if no materials to do it, the game will inform you that you need X or Y, just like any other job.

All of these options allow the player to discover complex solutions, but doesn't needlessly force them into them.

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution
Post by: Andeerz on July 22, 2012, 07:13:10 pm

Amen.

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution
Post by: NW_Kohaku on January 25, 2013, 10:36:27 pm

* From its eternal slumber, the elder one awakes *

Sorry to have not responded in so long, but I was otherwise occupied for about half a year or so.

First off, I'd like to say one thing about the nature of comments: It is more helpful to me/appreciated to have someone "rude" taking a serious, deep look at what I am saying and respond with something well-reasoned that confronts my ideas than even having someone who merely says they agree, and far more than someone who doesn't bother to engage at all.  (Not that I want to discourage agreeing with me, mind you...)

I am talking about applying more than just a mechanic, but a mindset to this game, and concepts don't evolve unless they are challenged. 

So before anything else is done, I do want to say, "Thank You, Bertinator, I appreciate your taking the time to respond in a manner that shows you really, seriously thought about what you said."

Now, while I certainly don't disagree with anything that Draco has said, I want to try communicating the mindset behind why I said what I said, rather than the simpler information or data.  (In fact, a large reason why my initial manifesto of a post is so long is specifically because I am trying to shift people's viewpoints more than simply giving out facts and information.  And yes, I do recognize you've spent a decent chunk of time explaining your viewpoint, as well.)

---

Spoiler: My first goal, and why what you are proposing loses some of the depth of what I am proposing (click to show/hide)

Now then, moving onwards, I see basically two halves of your first post in this thread - the first half, you're basically just trying to say, "Here's how to accomplish the same goal with less complexity."

The problem is, "farms are too small/don't take enough labor" isn't the problem I'm trying to solve.  Yes, that would be a simpler way to solve that problem, but as the argument in the old thread evolved, I realized that there was a much greater problem that needed to be tackled.

Maybe it's that you read more and added more to your response as you thought about it, (I do that, too,) but the second half of your post shows you're grasping what it was I was really trying to get at:  The problem isn't one of "diffuclty", it's one of "choice".  (This is why I spent a huge chunk of the first post just talking about "what the real problem is".)

At a basic level, crops right now are not different enough from one another - even with what you are suggesting, basically all underground and aboveground crops are fairly similar. 

Yes, there's a difference created by a single variable of fertility, but that's just one choice, and that's not really enough.  Yes, there's a difference in rate of fertility use, but that's only a single variable, and single variable problems are not choices, they are calculations.  (For the distinction of choice versus calculation, Extra Credits has a wonderful and concise explanation (http://www.penny-arcade.com/patv/episode/choice-and-conflict).)

To give an example of why adding multiple variables changes something from simple routine calculations to a choice, first consider the concept of the DPS character in (MMO)RPGs.  Because they reduce their character down to how efficiently they can produce a single variable (damage over time), everything about that character becomes a simple calculation - "does this produce more damage over time than any other alternative?" It's a simple math problem, with a single right answer, and all other answers are wrong.

Now, there was a game I used to play a lot a few years ago called Battletech, in which you built futuristic robotic walking tanks called 'mechs and blew the crap out of your opponents.  When building your 'mechs, you chose a final weight that your chassis would support first, then could add components to that chassis up to its final weight.  But there was more than just mass involved - there was also "volume" in the form of critical slots.  Heavy (and often slower but more armored and powerful) 'mechs had much more mass than light 'mechs, but they all had the same volume.  You had some choices when you built 'mechs beyond just the weapons (which had differences plenty in both firing characteristics as well as range and drawbacks of their own) which often largely involved a choice between mass and volume.  Making the chassis out of Endo Steel alloy made it lighter, but took up some of your slots/volume because it was bulkier.  This was a no-brainer for the light 'mechs - you had volume to spare, but mass was precious.  For heavy 'mechs, meanwhile, volume was precious because they could carry several times as much mass, but had the same volume to fit it all in.  Denser materials were obvious choices. 

They also had heat - weapons generated heat, (lasers are light and take no ammo but generate tons of heat, while cannons are bulky and heavy and require ammo but generate less heat) and you needed heat sinks to counter that.  Heat sinks came in regular and double heat sink format - double heat sinks were twice as efficient at dissipating heat per ton, but occupied, you guessed it, more volume.  Plus, you don't have to run ice-cold, you can accept some drawbacks if you're willing to run a little hot. 

These are still things that can largely be reduced to a calculation (I actually did a middle school science fair on probabilities in this game to help me improve my game,) but just from the start, you can see how adding a variable or two can start to change the way that the game actually works out from being a strict this-is-more-damage-per-ton calculation to a more fluid, difficult-to-calculate game.  (Some weapons, for example, have less range and power but better accuracy, and the faster both the firing and target 'mech moves, the harder they are to hit, meaning that you have to build around how mobile your likely targets are going to be, as well as your own mobility.)

You see, every one of those variables?  They're a resource, and when you have multiple resources that can be depleted trying to achieve the same goal, you create a more fluid, multi-variable system.  And this doesn't necessarily make the game more complex, just more deep to have both minerals and vespene gas.  It's a pretty simple and intuitive calculation to see that you don't have much vespene gas, and may want to focus more on marines or other non-vespene using units when vespene-poor. 

By adding more variables/more differentiated resources into the equation, you create incomparables, things that cannot be so quickly and easily reduced to a simple equation with only one right solution that always works.  You have to evaluate the relative worth of your different resources to you, and which is more precious to you at the moment, to decide how best to spend your resources.

So, let's apply one of these "simple choices of resources" to Dwarf Fortress: Let's say we start off by making crops actually consume water, and need constant watering, whether by buckets or by irrigation system, as well as that we make water finite but renewable, rather than having infinitely-spawning aquifer/stream/cavern lake water.

Let's say you have two choices of crop types, one is going to provide more crops in less space and less labor, but takes large quantities of water.  The other prefers little water, but takes up huge amounts of land to produce sufficient food. 

Now, let's say you build a fortress in a tropical rain forest with a river in one playthrough, and a cold desert in another.  Which one of those "obvious choices" are you going to pick?  There's no reason to go for the arid plant in the rainforest, where you have the water, and farming the water-intensive plant is impossible in the desert.

This isn't something that takes up a tremendous amount of time calculating or learning something new, it's just making a change in the mechanics that will make playing in different climates force players to farm in different ways, making the choice of starting climate a more meaningful strategic choice. 

(Plus, it means that there are differentiated crops that can be traded from one region to another, meaning that you won't always find sites that have "everything".)

---

The goal of this thread is not to make "farming more difficult", I instead have several goals. The one we're talking about right now is creating strategic choices.  (The other goals will come later.)

That is, I want every type of crop in the game to have a cost.  Every crop has a drawback of some sort or another, and that makes blithely farming the same crop over and over no longer a viable strategy. 

The reason why plump helmets growing on wet logs is offered as only an initial strategy is because it's very inefficient with a resource that you have plenty of early on, but which becomes more precious as you go on: trees. 

Initially, even a desert has several trees you can easily harvest, but if you rely entirely upon charcoal, wooden barrels and beds, and using trees as the source of your food as well, even a rain forest will eventually be clear-cut out to greater and greater distances.  (And even if you have the trees on your map at all, you have to go out further and further into dangerous territory to claim them.) Worse, with non-farm tiles having their fertility calculated as a vague and abstracted wild fertility score, if you constantly clear-cut forests, you'll degrade the soil quality, and get less trees over time.

Note, that's not the same "kills your fort in your first year" problem that people tend to have with flooding their forts: It's a slow poison kill over time, something that gets the player that mastered the more obvious, immediate dangers, and merely walked into a longer-term, more subtle danger. 

Now, what this has to do with NPK is that your fertilizers are your resource for keeping fertility up.  However, by having multiple stats to each fertilizer and the farms, you can differentiate the fertilizers, whereas if you only have one stat with fertility, all fertilizers are basically the same.

Consider, for example what it means to have piercing and blunt damage in this game and what it means to combat to have its absurdly complex system (that you don't really need to understand to use).  Speardwarves are capable of effectively combating very different creatures from hammerdwarves.  You could reduce the game down to a simple hit point system and make each weapon just have damage, and it would be simpler, but you would lose a lot of what makes your choices in what sort of equipment you give your dwarves. 

Now consider the difference having marksdwarves and the option to build magma moats and drawbridges that fling attackers into magma make to your strategic choices: I generally don't even bother with the effort of seriously training military dwarves, and just rely upon complex traps because I enjoy building the traps more than I enjoy the visceral combat.  Many people, however, love the complexity that I don't want to bother with.

All these options increase the differences in how players can experience the game based upon their own choices and playstyles.  We have that choice, and that's fantastic.

Part of why I want to include heavy metal pollution, for example, is to let magma be an option to fertilize the land. With it, you can fertilize the land nigh-infinitely on demand with proper engineering, but it has a drawback: You put heavy metals into the soil, and that can kill many types of crops, making it unsustainable unless you use only specific crops that either purify the soil after magma-irrigating it, or by just relying upon metal-happy crops.  It makes magma fertilization a vastly different kind of choice of what kind of fort you want to create.  The same goes for the raft-based floating farms, and having them rely upon keeping a certain fish stock in the water to keep your farm going.  If you have salty soils, you will have to adapt by growing saltgrasses that are only fit for livestock - meaning your location again changes the nature of how you feed your fortress, as you'll be more cattle-reliant.

And it's not really all that complex for the player to have a heavy metal pollution stat - as long as they don't add heavy metals to their soil by dumping magma on it, they don't have to care about it.  It doesn't really change that fast, and it's just a happy green light saying everything's OK that they don't have to understand until they do something that turns it red.

So to go back to the big three of NPK, having three different minerals tracked, and having most basic types of fertilizer have those three minerals in different quantities lets players "just dump more fertilizer at the problem" if they so choose, even if they're over-feeding on potassium, for example, and could have found a more fertilizer-efficient solution to their farming by varying their crops a little, or they could just accept the waste and keep on keeping on.  (Especially early on, when they aren't in a resource pinch quite yet.)

Nitrogen alone, for example, is what can be fixed with simple nitrogen-fixating plants (like beans, peanuts, and the clover in "fallow" fields) and many polycultures actually include a nitrogen-fixater like beans alongside a nitrogen-hungry plant like corn or wheat for just this reason... but crops don't live on nitrogen alone.  You need the phosphorous and potassium, as well, and that means adding in other fertilizers.  These other fertilizers might heavily favor one nutrient over another, and meanwhile, crops might heavily favor feeding on one nutrient over another (including those beans that actually restore nitrogen rather than feeding on it). 

Now, compare this to what you have said was a simpler alternative that accomplishes much the same thing: Just having one fertility, but having plants "differentiated" by how much they drop the soil down per harvest.  You're still only talking about a single-variable calculation, "how much food can I produce from this land per unit time".  Dropping multiple fertility levels at once simply means asking how much extra time it will take to reset the fertility up to levels where it can produce again, so if you have to spend six seasons resetting fertility and two seasons growing with one crop to produce a certain amount of food, and you have to spend two seasons growing and two seasons resetting the soil nutrients to grow 2/3rds as much food, you've still got a simple, straightforward calculation to make.

Once again, by creating more variables, you create more opportunities for incomparables to appear, and make the choices deeper without actually making them terribly more complex or mathematically-intensive.

You can sit down and calculate everything out if you want to, or you can just notice that strawberries make your fields too potassium-poor for what fertilizers you have, and that you can cut back onto wheat-and-bean agriculture that focuses more upon nitrogen. 

There are also other biological products that are farmable, as well: some animals are inefficient but can be quite useful to have, for example.  Maybe you want a moat full of alligators as a defense.  Alligators are carnivores, which means you need to farm cattle that are fed crops that means you need to expand your

You can farm trees for wood, cloth for clothing, oil for industrial uses or starting fires, and even magical or alchemical plants that have esoteric uses.  All of this, however, requires more advanced farming techniques beyond your basic farming methods, and carry more risks, and therefore, are the rewards of a player who takes the time to plan and go into the complexities they didn't need to go into and blew off as a new player.  (Again, I point to the dwarfputing and various machinery-based solutions to problems as a complexity no new player needs to learn, but where an advanced player can reap great benefits.)

---

Then, there's the pests. 

One of the things I remember watching on a documentary was that the ancient Chinese first invented fruit tree orchards using grafting, but that insects kept eating their fruits.  The Chinese noticed, however, that some trees had a specific kind of ant on them, and those ants didn't eat the oranges they were growing, and that, even better, they ate the insects eating their oranges.  The Chinese quickly learned how to foster the growth of these ant colonies, and even built little bamboo "bridges" from the boughs of one orchard tree to another to let the ants that protected the orange trees cross between trees more easily.

This is kind of like how hidden kobolds force you, as a player, to add additional defensive mechanisms to sniff out hiding enemies that evade traps: guard dogs at the gates.  (And you need to put them after a blind corner to prevent them from getting hit by goblins with crossbows as a slightly more complex defensive measure.)

Now, let's say that in DF, as you set up your orchards after a long, intensive process of growing the trees (possibly even via grafting, which would be a feat in and of itself of trade), and it's only once you have established those oranges that the pests come in.  Now, you have to defend the oranges by planting ant colonies to protect the orchards.  To make it a little more tricky, maybe the ants can be killed off by a disease or frost, themselves.  A wise player keeps some extra ant colonies in reserve in a safe portion of their fort in case the front lines are wiped out.  You'll need to feed those ants, though, so maybe sacrifice some meat that they'll eat by setting up a one-tile stockpile near them, and keeping it stocked with some meat. 

It's the same "the game creates a new problem you didn't see coming -> player builds a counter to that problem" mechanic that basically everything else in the game runs on... and it's actually not something front-loaded the way that everything else in the game is, you don't have to learn about it until well after you have established your fort.

Because these pests only set in when you have a large farm with established crops, it's again, not a first-year problem; Not one of the front-loaded things that makes learning DF so hard.  It's a third-year problem.  It's the additional difficulty added after you have proven you can survive levels one and two. 

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Spoiler: Why I believe the negatives of this complexity are not as bad as you believe (click to show/hide)

First, I'm not going to say that your concerns are unfounded or wrong - I share those concerns, and that is why I tried to take what steps I could to mitigate the negatives.

To address the notion of how what I am doing is nothing but complexity, I would first like to point to the difference between knowing how to build a car, and knowing how to drive a car.  Consider how utterly complex the calculations used in world generation is in the game right now, and consider that you don't need to know jack diddly about how they work to play Dwarf Fortress, at least, initially.

There is a difference in game mechanic complexity and being a complex game - and depth demands that the game have at least some level of complexity, but at the same time, that doesn't have to translate into the game being overwhelmingly complex for the player.

You don't need to understand the whole system to understand, as a starting player, that plump helmet farms are a simple starting farming setup, and that they require logs and water.  You don't need to know the exact raw values of the nutrient values of anything. 

Even when you start making farms that rely upon fertilizers and crop rotations, you don't really need to understand much more than "there isn't enough fertilizer yet".  You can just dump more fertilizer at the problem if that's all the complexity you want to face.

It's just when you're trying to really make the most of your farm that you need to actually spend the time (and only as much time as you really want to) to understand more about the mechanics. 

When I talked about the difference that consuming water alone would mean (with the desert plants and water-thirsty jungle plants), I glossed over one part: There's the difference between buckets and irrigation systems - one is a simple action for the player to take, but the other requires the player to spend the time to engineer a proper irrigation system and meter out how much water they will need.  One is an easy thing for the new player to take but where there is a significant cost in terms of labor needed for just bucket-brigading water around, the other is for the more advanced player who is willing to spend the time and work using the skills the game encourages to make their long-term job easier by setting up an automated system, but where it has the short-term costs of their attention and labor supply spent setting up the system. 

There's a difference between the "calculation" version of the MMO DPSer, where you are in a competitive environment and need every last scrap of damage or you will be defeated, and a single-player game where there are many possible complex solutions that save you labor in the long run, but which take a massive investment in planning and engineering to accomplish.  Just look at any of the things created with dwarfputing or the automated butchering systems.  You don't need to do them, but you can if you want to.  Farming is something you don't have to perfect, but you can. 

Further, farming plump helmets at first is easy for a reason: It costs something prohibitive (trees, which are limited in supply) the further in you go.  The larger your fortress gets, the more complex your farming plans have to be.

Your farms will need to become more sophisticated by necessity as you grow more crops because pests will invade and be more disastrous the more you rely upon a single, simpler crop, and therefore, the more those pests will force you to adopt elaborate defensive mechanisms against those pests, or else diversify your food sources to avoid the dangers of those pests.

That is, the longer you play, and the "better" you do (assuming some of what I talked about in Class Warfare comes through, and getting more dwarves is both hard and considered a reward) at the game, the harder the game gets, and therefore, the more skill you must demonstrate in managing a fortress.  It's one of those "ramping up the difficulty" things.

The point is not to force new players to learn everything all at once in a "difficulty cliff" as we have now, but to make the game easy at first, and then demand more as you go along. 

Re-introducing a difficulty curve to smooth out the "learning cliff", by the way?  That's also one of the goals I have.

Spoiler: On why this isn't as computationally complex as you seem to think (click to show/hide)

Many people don't seem to realize this, but every single frame (not creature turn, frame) of the game, the game iterates through every single creature in memory, and increments several variables.  This is hundreds of variables being incremented every frame, including the hunger, thirst, and sleep variables. 

It's not just those simple variables, either.  There's also beard length, fingernail length, eyelash length, the length of basically every body part's hair, as well as aging, hair grayness, etc. etc., dozens of variables constantly updated per dwarf on the map.

Those don't even have any game function at all!

Comparatively, I am proposing ways to actively reduce the strain this idea will have on the computer.  Remember, most of what I'm doing, in actual game computation terms, is just iterating a few numbers every now and then, just the same as beards growing longer overnight, but I'm also saying that their growth can be stretched out to being calculated only once every hundred or thousand frames, and the actual updates can be staggered across each individual farming zone.  Zones are also important, as they let soil data be abstracted into an area of several tiles, reducing the overall load of variables that must be updated down to tens of objects.  Things like pest population calculations or water flow rates from off the map can be done on a seasonal basis, since they don't need to overtly change in front of the player's eyes. 

All this adds up to this proposal having less game impact than the beard length growth that already exists in this game that nobody even notices.

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Spoiler: Automating to boredom versus Micromanagement (click to show/hide)

I left this towards the end, since it wasn't part of the main argument you were making, but it is one of the major goals I have, and want to add it while I'm on the topic, to help give a more complete view of what my goals are.

One of the things that caused this entire thread to spring into existence in the first place was the problem of how current farming is something that you "fire and forget", and is completely automated, and creating a complex system that just adds more micromanagement without adding thought. 

Consider the game Final Fantasy XII - in that game, Square tried to shake up its aging formula where you just kept mashing the same attack button at every monster by letting players set up AI routines that automated the simple stuff...  And discovered that once they eliminated the simple stuff, players basically only had to use the left stick to push their character from one fight to the next and collect loot, because there was nothing else left in the game once you eliminated the simple stuff.  The game lacked the depth to carry it beyond the boring and routine elements of the game.

Now, consider Dragon Age: Origins.  It has a similar system where you set up your AI script "standing orders", but it also includes more depth that the script can't handle because of spacial problems, like where to throw a cone of fire where it hits as many enemies as possible without frying your allies.  DAO manages to automate the boring parts where I just tell my fighter to keep bashing things and occasionally use a special skill, and lets me focus on the higher-level abstract levels of the tactics where I focus on corralling enemies into position for dropping my paralysis sigil for the maximum effect. 

Having a system that you can set up once and simply let go on forever without having to think about it is a problem in that it makes the elements of the game boring and predictable, while micromanagement of stupid, routine things is even more boring. 

This is a large part of the element that pests (and their counters, which include things like those ants and bats and spiders and insect-repelling herbs) do - they create a "macro level" disaster for players to deal with occasionally without having to make the "challenge" be something tedious like properly calculating out the proper rationing of fertilizers.  (Instead, you just suddenly have to deal with occasional weevil infestations as well as elf infestations.)

Spoiler: My final goal: My overall philosophy (click to show/hide)

I am also motivated by something else: letting players discover something about the world they do live in as they play the fantasy world.  It's this act of discovery that truly makes Dwarf Fortress special in my eyes, and why I want to further it.

While this may sound like it's going against what Thisisjimmy/Sid Meyer said, it actually isn't.  You see, there's a difference between making a game that demands you read the same books I read, and a game that presents things in a way that reveals a certain type of philosophy.

Consider Call of Duty: It's a game that doesn't really demand the player know much about world events (other than "terrorists are bad") but where it heavily reinforces with every ounce of its narrative and playstyle that the problems in the world can only be solved with ruthlessly efficient military force.  (And see Spec Ops: The Line for the rebuttal to the notion that all problems can be solved with hair-trigger leaps to violence based upon incomplete information.)

The philosophy I want to implant into the game is that farming is, at its core, a hijacking of nature.  One of my physical sciences classes described an ecosystem as an area where energy passes through the system, and matter changes state, but remains within the area.  All living creatures are the same matter constantly being exchanged, with energy from the sun powering all our lives, in a perpetual cycle, with no matter or energy ever being created or lost. 

There is a water cycle, a nitrogen cycle, food chains, cycles of every kind recycling the matter and consuming the energy we survive upon.  All of it in a dizzying spin of logistics if you ever stop to calculate everything.

It is taking the awesome power of nature, and constraining and warping it to fit the needs of humanity. (Dwarfmanity?) With that power comes a responsibility - you have to give back everything you take. When you hijack the cycle, you are responsible for maintaining it.

Hence, at a basic level, what I'm trying to do is let players take far more from their soil, but at the same time, make them recognize that their soil is one of their most precious resources, and vital to their survival.  It's about impressing the notion that you need to look before you leap, and preserve what you have, lest you face the consequences.

... and if anything is dwarfy and leads to !!FUN!!, it's creating a system that rewards those that patiently understand what they are messing with before they suffer the consequences of their actions.

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With ALL that said, again, I do believe your concerns are valid ones - that's why I've striven to actually try answering those concerns as best I can while still trying to accomplish as much of the goals I want to see fulfilled as possible.  Just because I'm arguing for why I have said what I have already said doesn't mean I'm not still open to constructive criticism, such as what you've already suggested as alternatives.  Again, it's testing of ideas that forces the evolution of those ideas, so by all means poke more holes in what I said. 

Thank you once again for your time in reading and responding, and I hope you would like to continue to point out flaws and concerns - everyone needs a good editor, and I know I could use a little more editing when I tend to get on a roll like this.  By all means, there's probably something in what I've said that can be simplified/abstracted without shortchanging any of the goals.

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution
Post by: Wastedlabor on January 28, 2013, 05:54:03 am

You can tell these aren't elegant solutions by the amount of text it takes to explain them.

Here's my elegant solution:

* Farm tiles spawn vermin plagues.

Here's the player's expected reaction to it:

* Keep a vermin hunter pet army near the farm. Use food in animal traps hoping to save more food by doing so, and hoping rotting trap meat doesn't make dwarves even angrier.

End.

Where do I collect my check?

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution
Post by: NW_Kohaku on January 28, 2013, 11:25:16 am

The things I am explaining aren't all that complicated, it's just that I have to make a huge argument for why they are necessary, and what goals and point of view I am adopting.

It's the difference between data, information, and a point of view: 
Data is a declarative statement simple to convey, but doesn't really tell people much. (If X = 2, Y = 4, or if X = 0, Y = 0)  Data also comes in vast droves, of which the only useful thing is the information you can get from it. I can list a vast number of points on a graph without giving you a clear picture of what the graph actually tells you.

Information is not much harder to convey, can be very short, and is what is most useful, but it's being able to glean it from data that is difficult.  (Y = X²)  With information, you can predict the data for things you don't yet have data on.

A point of view, meanwhile, is that thing that lets you turn data into information.  For the purpose fo the math metaphor I'm using, it's knowing algebra and calculus in the first place.  (It's a familiarity with graphs, it's understanding calculus, and being able to quickly say the rate of change of Y = 2X.)

Unlike those other two, teaching someone calculus is much, much more difficult, and takes far more explanation. 

My post is so huge because I'm explaining why, not what.

This is partially evidenced by the fact that your "elegant solution" can only possibly attempt to solve one of the problems I just outlined in the post before yours as what I was trying to solve. I listed four problems.  (And your solution actually isn't far from the pest portion of what I listed, I simply included a few algorithms to track pest population, modify the odds of infestation by number of crops vulnerable to that pest, rather than be random, and make vermin foiled by simply having some plant or animal nest near your crops.)

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EDIT:
I also made a more concise version of the argument for people who don't want to read the whole argument a while ago (http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=76007.msg1920009#msg1920009). 

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution
Post by: 10ebbor10 on January 28, 2013, 11:50:44 am

Quote from: Wastedlabor on January 28, 2013, 05:54:03 am

You can tell these aren't elegant solutions by the amount of text it takes to explain them.

Here's my elegant solution:

* Farm tiles spawn vermin plagues.

Here's the player's expected reaction to it:

* Keep a vermin hunter pet army near the farm. Use food in animal traps hoping to save more food by doing so, and hoping rotting trap meat doesn't make dwarves even angrier.

End.

Where do I collect my check?

You don't. Adding an obstacle to the game doesn't make it fun.

There's depth and complexity. An elegant solution would add depth without complexity. NW_Kohau's suggestion adds depths, and also quite a bit of complexity. Yours add neither. the only thing it does is adding a resemblance of realism and another hassle for the player. After all, a game where one solution is clearly superious isn't a game, but a puzzle. Hence, your idea, where there's only 2 options (Use hunter pets or Die of starvation) isn't all that helpfull.

Oh, and a well thought out and expanded post doesn't say anything about the idea.

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution
Post by: NW_Kohaku on January 28, 2013, 11:57:42 am

Well, to boil this down to the original reason I wrote this thread...

There were two major camps arguing in the old Improved Farming thread: people who said farming was too easy, and needed to be more complex and realistic, and the people who said that those solutions would add too much micromanagement.

I wound up rewriting the thread to try to incorporate every argument, explain what the problems were, why they were problems, what the most commonly talked-about solutions were, why they didn't solve every problem, and then propose solutions, explain why they solved the problem, and then give examples of what they would look like in play.

... and it wound up a manifesto-sized document that very few people read, so the thread keeps going back to many of the same argument of simple solution-it only causes micromanagement rebuttal.

It's a difficult trap that I'm in - I can either gloss over details and make an obviously faulty argument that seems to dismiss complaints, or I can make a holistic argument about why all other options are faulty, and face complaints that it's too complex to even bother reading.

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution
Post by: zwei on January 28, 2013, 12:58:32 pm

Quote from: NW_Kohaku on January 28, 2013, 11:57:42 am

It's a difficult trap that I'm in - I can either gloss over details and make an obviously faulty argument that seems to dismiss complaints, or I can make a holistic argument about why all other options are faulty, and face complaints that it's too complex to even bother reading.

You either need to learn brevity and make short, concise point that do not tire people with details, or you need to make that manifesto fun to read.

For example this: http://thecriminallawyer.tumblr.com/post/29326904495/16-a-problems is very long read, but also lots of fun to read.

I would like to understand this discussion, but it feel like i have to spend day studying it to being.

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution
Post by: NW_Kohaku on January 28, 2013, 02:03:35 pm

Quote from: zwei on January 28, 2013, 12:58:32 pm

You either need to learn brevity and make short, concise point that do not tire people with details, or you need to make that manifesto fun to read.

For example this: http://thecriminallawyer.tumblr.com/post/29326904495/16-a-problems is very long read, but also lots of fun to read.

I would like to understand this discussion, but it feel like i have to spend day studying it to being.

That would be what I tried doing with the tl;dr version, (making it "more fun", and also having pictures,) but making pretty pictures to go along with it grew tiresome.

I suppose the best solution for now would be to just rewrite the tl;dr version to make it shorter than it is, since it's longer than I remember.

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution
Post by: NW_Kohaku on January 28, 2013, 03:54:44 pm

Alright...

I started just writing out a new one, and wound up creating something still kind of long, but close to as manageable as I could get without completely editing out large chunks of the conversation.  (Actually, I cut out the parts that were lead-ins to other possible overhauls, like magic biome types, and dietary models.)

Quote from: NW_Kohaku on January 27, 2011, 03:34:36 am

The tl;dr Version:

Spoiler: The problems this tries to solve (click to show/hide)

The purpose of this thread is to solve several problems with the current game:

• Problem 1: Farming now is, generally, easy and boring.
  
  • Farming needs to be more interesting, with more crops that are different.
  • Current crops (especially above-ground) are nearly indistinguishable in how they are grown.
  • Farming should include more physical types of farms and farming techniques.
  • Different climates and biomes make no difference in how you farm or what you farm.
• Problem 2: Farming is currently a front-loaded challenge
  
  • We have a "learning cliff" currently - you have to know everything to get anywhere in the game.
  • Once you know everything, the game is too easy, all problems have been solved.
  • The goal should be to make something simple to start with, so any random new player survives their first year, but progressively more difficult as time goes on, challenging those who have mastered the basics
  • It should be possible for players to get by without knowing terribly many tricks, but with rewards for the player who truly masters the system, in much the same way as dwarfputing.
• Problem 3: Deep without micromanagement or pointless complexity
  
  • All automatable things should be automated.
  • Anything that is a simple "what's the quickest way to make the most food" math problem is a calculation, not a choice, and that is automatable.
  • Once all automatable functions are out of the way, high-level management choices should be made as a matter of a strategy, based upon comparing difficult-to-compare-mathematically things, such as short-term payoffs vs. long time setting up but better long-term payoffs.
  • The game needs to do the basic math calculations itself, but leave the grand strategy to players.
  • To keep players engaged, occasional challenges should arise to bring player attention back to the farms, but not in a micromanagement way.
• Problem 4: Creating a Medieval Fantasy Ecosystem Simulation
  
  • While abstracted, the game should leave players with the sense that this is an actual ecosystem, where the changes they make impact their world.
  • This can mean clear-cutting a forest leading to soil erosion that means no more "free trees", for example.
  • This can also empower players to purposefully alter the ecosystem to better suit their needs if they have a mastery of the concept.
  • If the game models real-world systems, even if abstracted, it creates learning opportunities through play.

The reason this thread is long is because it is arguing for why most simple solutions do not actually address all of these problems, and why a marginally more in-depth solution is needed.  Specifically:

Spoiler: The solutions proposed (click to show/hide)

• Solution 1: Multiple soil quality variables
  
  • Multiple variables for soil quality (instead of just a simple "fertility") mean that different methods of fertilization can be used without being a simple calculation. ("What gives me the most bang for my buck?") You cannot rely upon a single fertilizer type, you have to use several.
  • If you have differing amounts of different kinds of fertilizers, crops that consume different nutrients become more or less attractive from a strategic perspective - depending on certain types of crops means depending on keeping the flow of certain fertilizers moving.  This is a strategic, non-micromanagement choice, whereas a single fertility value simply requires automating the re-fertilization.
  • Some soil quality variables can be easy to change (like how recently plants have been watered) but others much more difficult (like if the soil is highly acidic), and some may be specific to the embark site (no growing tropical plants in an arctic tundra).  This means different embarks are going to require different crop types and farming methods that support them.
  • Several of these soil variables, especially the nearly impossible to change ones, may add variables to the game, but not terribly much complexity, as players will have few reasons to actually worry about soil acidity or salinity once you have already picked a plant suited for your soil.
  • Pollution variables can exist as a means of making players choose between short-term gains and long-term damage to their fields
• Solution 2: Pests
  
  • Pest creatures, from fungal infections to caterpillars eating leaves to locust swarms, can exist as a "disaster" form of macro-problem for players to deal with, keeping farming challenging and slightly unpredictable.
  • They can be controlled through both limiting the number of crops of a certain type (reducing the exposure to a single crippling pest infestation) and using natural pesticides - the predators of those pest creatures, or fragrant herbs that repel bugs.  (Birds, bats, and spiders eat insects, many herbs use pheromones to repel insects or attract predators of pests like wasps that lay their eggs inside caterpillar bodies.)
  • Since pests are not seen on-map, the relative population numbers of pests can be tabulated invisibly and infrequently, saving on processor power and not appearing complex to players.
  • Solutions to pests can be easy to understand, if not necessarily easy to implement - bat or bird nests near crops with birds/bats in them will keep pests down.  You then need to acquire and care for those creatures, however.
  • Since pests, especially diseases, are attracted to large, single-crop farms, it is a problem more for players who keep using simple farming methods for years, so it doesn't overwhelm players on their first few years, but challenges players in established forts to diversify.
• Solution 3: Different methods of obtaining Fertilizers
  
  • Crop rotations with crops like beans that are nitrogen fixators is a common and simple solution to one type of fertility deficiency, but not all.
  • Decomposing organic waste (including corpses, grinding down bones, and manure) into fertilizer is the most sustainable and reliable method.
  • Some fertilizers can be mined or traded for, but they are of finite or unreliable supply.  Minable Sulfur can be used to change soil acidity, and make some soil suitable for different crops long-term, however.
  • Exotic fertilizers, like magma, can be used, but require more elaborate engineering, and may cause soil pollution that limit what crops are viable
• Solution 4: Water Management
  
  • Water is consumed by farms.  This means you need to constantly bring more water into your fortress.
  • Water generation from off-map or aquifers would be slowed down, to make there be limits on how much water you can use.  This would mean desert embarks are tougher.
  • More elaborate systems are more efficient but take more time to set up and reward player engineering skills with better farm yields.  Simpler versions like bucket-watering are faster to set up, but consume more labor.  Newbie methods are not "wrong", and don't lead to dying, but there is strong incentive to learn.
• Solution 5: Polycultures - plants affect other plants
  
  • Plants can be planted with/near other plants, such as the fragrant herbs that repel some types of pests, or ground covers that reduce water consumption.
  • Plants like beans that add nitrogen to the soil can be planted with some crops instead of just in a cycle - supplying more nitrogen even as the crop grows.
  • It is an advanced farming method for advanced farmers, but not necessary for basic farming - an "advanced level" for people who master the system.
• Solution 6: More farmable materials
  
  • If you can farm trees for wood, plants for cloth, flammable oils, medicinal herbs, and many other resources besides just food (basically, anything that isn't mined can be farmed), then there is a reason to constantly upgrade farms - you want more than just basic survival on food, you want more stuff.  This lets the complexity of a farm for food become easy, but having to sustain more farms for more crops for more uses means that you are encouraged to farm more complex methods to gain greater yields for non-essential products.
• Solution 7: Nature plays by the same rules (but abstracted more)
  
  • Non-farm soil tiles have a generalized region that shares the same fertility and pollution values as farms.  This means that when grass/shrubs/trees grow, it takes nutrients from the soil.  When they burn or are decomposed, it returns nutrients to the soil, but if you harvest from the land without returning, then the soil loses fertility just like a farm.
  • Trees are therefore not an infinite resource anymore - you may have to farm them, yourself to get greater yields.
  • Wild animal and livestock populations play by pest rules, to a degree - you have control over what is attracted to your land, and livestock can get parasites.
  • You can eventually turn a land into a place where nothing grows or functionally change its biome if you work hard enough at it.  Garden of Eden or Hellscape, choice is yours.

I'm still trying to cut off some of the most common arguments, even in tl;dr mode, so I could edit it down more from there if I wanted to, but then have to keep going back to explaining why this increases challenge over time...

---

Also, as one last thing, Toady's already planning on throwing something like this into DF, as seen on the dev pages:

Quote

Farming Improvements

• Soil moisture tracking and ability to moisten soil (buckets or other irrigation)
• Soil nutrient requirements for plants and nutrient tracking to the extent the farming interface can provide decent feedback for you, fertilizers can reflect this
• Harvestable flowers and fruit growing on plants, ability to plant trees
• Weeds
• More pests

When asked about it, Toady also said that he was interested in making the game as realistic as it could be while still being manageable, as his grandparents were farmers, and he had an interest in the topic. 

So, by and large, I'm not actually suggesting many concepts beyond what Toady was already considering doing, but that I'm suggesting ways of implementing the concepts in a way that makes the game non-micromanagey and as interesting as possible for players.

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution
Post by: Wastedlabor on January 28, 2013, 04:51:10 pm

In the end it's about the emergent stories it creates. If the system is just sunk complexity everybody will ignore it until it becomes a micromanagement problem, or just work around it (eggs anyone?).

AFAIK nobody has suggested that farmland could spawn non-vermin creatures. Stuff like, plump helmet men or giant moths. Unexperienced farmers wouldn't notice there's anything wrong with the plant when harvesting, then go store those spawns in inconvenient places where there may be no proper containment.

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution
Post by: Draco18s on January 28, 2013, 05:00:56 pm

Quote from: Wastedlabor on January 28, 2013, 04:51:10 pm

AFAIK nobody has suggested that farmland could spawn non-vermin creatures. Stuff like, plump helmet men or giant moths. Unexperienced farmers wouldn't notice there's anything wrong with the plant when harvesting, then go store those spawns in inconvenient places where there may be no proper containment.

And this solves long-term difficulty how?  All it does is throw super-difficult problems (solvable via military) at a new fortress that has little to no military.

The proposed solutions that actually work have no up-front costs/difficulties and cause problems over time if left unchecked, and is solvable by a good setup that may not be achievable from the get-go (multiple crop types + crop rotation, etc.)

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution
Post by: 10ebbor10 on January 28, 2013, 05:22:12 pm

Quote from: Draco18s on January 28, 2013, 05:00:56 pm

Quote from: Wastedlabor on January 28, 2013, 04:51:10 pm

AFAIK nobody has suggested that farmland could spawn non-vermin creatures. Stuff like, plump helmet men or giant moths. Unexperienced farmers wouldn't notice there's anything wrong with the plant when harvesting, then go store those spawns in inconvenient places where there may be no proper containment.

And this solves long-term difficulty how?  All it does is throw super-difficult problems (solvable via military) at a new fortress that has little to no military.

The proposed solutions that actually work have no up-front costs/difficulties and cause problems over time if left unchecked, and is solvable by a good setup that may not be achievable from the get-go (multiple crop types + crop rotation, etc.)

And more importantly, is entirely skippable if you really want to.

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution
Post by: NW_Kohaku on January 28, 2013, 05:32:38 pm

Quote from: Wastedlabor on January 28, 2013, 04:51:10 pm

In the end it's about the emergent stories it creates. If the system is just sunk complexity everybody will ignore it until it becomes a micromanagement problem, or just work around it (eggs anyone?).

AFAIK nobody has suggested that farmland could spawn non-vermin creatures. Stuff like, plump helmet men or giant moths. Unexperienced farmers wouldn't notice there's anything wrong with the plant when harvesting, then go store those spawns in inconvenient places where there may be no proper containment.

You might actually be interested in the Xenosynthesis (http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=76578.0) side-suggestion, which tries to weave this together with the magic biome concept (that are supposed to replace good and evil biomes eventually).  Part of the point is that messing with magic would cause all sorts of life-forms to become magically altered, and a negative consequence like this could be a possible result.

As for the emergent storytelling question...

Well, how much does needing to dig out a space for stockpiles and workshops or circumvent an aquifer or set up training for military lead to emergent stories on its own?

How much does the fact that you have to do these things change the character of the emergent stories compared to if you didn't have to actually excavate, build, or work towards training dwarves?

Part of the idea I'm trying to convey with farming is that it's a foundational building block of how we solve all tasks in the game.  You can make combat "harder" by adding larger, stronger monsters to fight, or you can make combat "harder" by not having steel weapons readily available, by making training military dwarves up to legendary skill levels significantly more difficult, or otherwise taking away some of the advantages that people take for granted.

If farming changes mean that you have to have an open-air orchard that leaves you more exposed to sieges, then "building an orchard" doesn't make an emergent story in and of itself, but it does severely change the way that those emergent stories about sieges or flying enemies turn out.

And besides that... isn't the whole point of emergent storytelling that it's not something strictly planned for?  It's something that springs up from interactive game elements that alter one another in unexpected ways.  Toady never planned on Boatmurder solutions to sieges or that they would lead to burning socks that kill a whole fortress. That was an emergent story that arose out of an emergent gameplay technique that caused an unforeseen consequence.

The only way to plan for emergent gameplay and storytelling is to create more interconnected gameplay mechanics that can cause such emergent behavior to arise.  Water flows are a big part of this specifically because engineering how water moves is something that plays upon one of DF's great strengths in the player's capacity to control the flow of water through emergent gameplay techniques.  There is also the use of fertilizers, based upon either manure collection or killing, decomposing, and transporting biological waste to the farms, all of which are a good source of emergent logistic techniques, including minecarts and drawbridge catapults.  Beyond that, the entire polyculture concept is based around letting crops interact with one another in potentially unexpected ways, especially if you include the part where the crops can be procedurally generated at worldgen each time.  ("It turns out that when you plant 'flaming trouser kumquats' with 'stinky matted bushes', they produce food while only needing a small supply of my mashed kitten fertilizers and water!")

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution
Post by: Draco18s on January 28, 2013, 05:45:07 pm

Quote from: 10ebbor10 on January 28, 2013, 05:22:12 pm

And more importantly, is entirely skippable if you really want to.

"Bring X with you, setup your farms with Y rotation."
Yep.  Pretty much.

Of course, I'm very pro-other changes as well (such as needing more than 0.52 dwarves needed as farmers to feed an entire fort of 214).

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution
Post by: NW_Kohaku on January 28, 2013, 06:01:43 pm

I do think it's worth saying, however, that while I will certainly explain and defend what I have suggested, especially if I don't think people quite understand what they are criticizing, I do want people to criticize the idea and help me make it better.

Simply saying "this idea is wrong" ends a conversation, "this idea doesn't solve the real problem because..." tells someone how they can come back with a better argument.

For example, to revist this...

Quote from: Wastedlabor on January 28, 2013, 04:51:10 pm

In the end it's about the emergent stories it creates. If the system is just sunk complexity everybody will ignore it until it becomes a micromanagement problem, or just work around it (eggs anyone?).

Eggs as they exist now are a result of incomplete implementation.  Livestock will need to eat eventually, and you'll no longer get your free eggs.  (You'll have to either set up pastures that have enough vermin and edible plants to feed those birds, or else set up troughs you stock with harvested feed... so you aren't getting away from farming by having livestock, anyway.)

Carnivores, in particular, are going to take feeding other animals, which means raising and caring for livestock just to feed it to the carnivores, and raising crops just to feed to the livestock. 

(I cut this portion out of the tl;dr version because it was too long, already, and was just an assumption of extension of current trends, not actually a part of farming...)

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution
Post by: Draco18s on January 28, 2013, 06:18:26 pm

Quote from: NW_Kohaku on January 28, 2013, 06:01:43 pm

Eggs as they exist now are a result of incomplete implementation.  Livestock will need to eat eventually, and you'll no longer get your free eggs.

Don't livestock already eat grass?

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution
Post by: NW_Kohaku on January 28, 2013, 06:28:45 pm

Quote from: Draco18s on January 28, 2013, 06:18:26 pm

Quote from: NW_Kohaku on January 28, 2013, 06:01:43 pm

Eggs as they exist now are a result of incomplete implementation.  Livestock will need to eat eventually, and you'll no longer get your free eggs.

Don't livestock already eat grass?

Only grazers do.  (Notably, since grazing was introduced, nobody really uses cows anymore...)

Most birds or reptiles are not grazers, and hence eggs are a source of infinite free food. (Turkeys, for example, produce large numbers of eggs with no need for food, themselves.)

Most broken of all, the best animals for infinite free food are things like crocodiles that not only don't eat anything, but also lay tremendous numbers of eggs that never get preyed upon, and also are huge creatures that produce tons of meat when butchered. (Although cows are larger, which is also why cow bites are stronger than alligator bites...)

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution
Post by: Draco18s on January 28, 2013, 06:31:51 pm

Quote from: NW_Kohaku on January 28, 2013, 06:28:45 pm

Only grazers do.  (Notably, since grazing was introduced, nobody really uses cows anymore...)

Touche.

Quote

(Although cows are larger, which is also why cow bites are stronger than alligator bites...)

I love Dwarf Fortress.

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution
Post by: jseah on January 29, 2013, 11:27:29 pm

Hi, just posting to say I'm still reading this. 

Amusingly, I have so far read everything except your tl;dr version.  >.>

I'll get to doing that. 

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution
Post by: winner on February 01, 2013, 12:12:28 am

I have a major in agricultural science.
I have read this entire thread,
and I make ecological simulations for fun.

So I feel entitled to an opinion about this.
(I'll let you know that opinion when I've finished testing these ideas in a toy program)

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution
Post by: wierd on February 01, 2013, 12:31:42 am

I sent NW_Kohaku a link to a short book on organic composting just a little bit ago. (Free on gutenberg!)

My mom also does extensive organic horticulture, and has for years.  I haven't had the opportunity to read this thread properly yet, but will offer advice after doing so too.

Currently too busy making industrial blueprints for my employer. :(



OK, reading the first bits with a quick glance, basically you need to impose limits without breaking the system spectacularly. This means you need crop management.

An example of modern failures of crop management, is the over-use of nitrogen fertilizers. They allow explosive growth of green plants, by permiting ready protein synthesis, but this also affects soil microbes, which use the nitrogen to destroy the soil's carbon based organic sponge, or humus. This results in a lower and lower capacity for the soil to retain and provide nutrients over time, resulting in less and less nutritious produce over time. Ideally, farmers would replenish this lost humus through liberal application of compost, but supplying compost at those scales to sustain massive intensive agriculture is simply not economically feasible.  This has resulted in the steady decline of fertility in modern agricultural regions over time. In short, the "green revolution" using synthetic fertilizers is simply not sustainable.

For a more historically accurate picture, we can look at crops as being one of 3 basic types: soil buildng, soil neutral, and soil depleting.

 Legumes and certain grasses are soil building. These are things like clover, alfalfa, and tall prarie grasses. These plant forms either fixate soil nutrients directly, such as legumes, or produce copious amounts of organic sponge raw materials, like gras straw and as such, build up the sod layer, making it more useful for agriculture.

Soil neutral plants only make use of an established sod layer, but don't disrupt the soil's equilibrium in a serious fashion. Most weed plants and leafy herb type plants are of this variety. They have requirements for different types of soils, (for instance, sorrels and mallows tend to thrive on poor soils, while cooking herb plants prefer richer soils.) But don't really change the biome significantly, and form a homeostasis with their environment when competing with other similar species in the ecosystem.

Soil depleting plants essentially "rape" the soil, draining it of vital reserves of nutrition, and force the farmer to have to correct the imbalance by growing a soil improving crop soon after.  These are things like cotton, especially, but also includes things like major vegetables, and some cereal grain crops.

As previously stated, the major modern deleterious factor is the destruction of humus in the soil by intensive cultivation coupled with nitrogen fertilizers. All plants require nitrogen to produce protiens within their cells, which is essential for them to live. Nitrogen from the air won't do, because it is too difficult to overcome the high energy triple bond of the N2 dimer, at least fr the plant. This is where soil building plants like clover and alfalfa come into play. As legumes, they serve as a symbiont for a very vital soil microbial fauna that is able to take nitrogen dimers from the atmosphere, and combine it with oxygen and alkaline earth ions to produce nitrate compounds, which they share with their symbiotic plant partner. (The plant provides them with a stable growing environment, reliable moisture supplies, and simple sugars for food.) The maximal benefit of these crops comes from composting the while plant bodies of these plants over the year, by tilling the plants under at the end of the season, and then allowing the field to lie fallow. This returns the nitrogen and soil humus reserves to the soil, with a surplus from the fixation processes of the legumes.

Depending on the aggressiveness of the depletions of the actual crops grown per crop, build, fallow cycle, differing amounts of building and fallowing will be required for sustained agriculture.

Coupling that with seasonal restrictions, and entire year fallowing times, ad you will quickly find that you need much more cropland that DF currently requires to provide stable food production in the long run, without destroying the soil. (Completely depleted soil is almost impossible to get started again, without very intensive and laborious efforts. In fact, fully delepted soils won't even grow weeds for cover, and will become blowing deserts!)

What needs to be done here, is to segregate surface crop cultivation, from subsurface crop cultivation, because the type of organism cultivated in those growing conditions have VERY VERY different requirements. Up until now, I have been referring only to surface horticulture.

Mycological species are NEVER producers. *all* species are soil depleters! Since they do not get any of their energy from sunlight, 100% of their biological energy comes from the decomposition of already existing organic materials.

In the case of DF, the native biome for these organisms are vast underground cavern systems with interspersed volcanic vents and cavern lakes. As such, the primary producers of this environment are likely to be autochemotrophs, which as far as I know, are all monocellular. These organisms usually have a sulfur respiraton cycle, and make use of mineral and geochemical energy sources to produce primary nutrients, and build up organic humus of sorts through their accumulation, and decay on the bottoms of these cavern system lakes and rivers. Periodic flooding must somehow trasport these organically rich silt deposits onto the cavern layers adjacent, where secondary fungiforms make use of it to produce food products for cavern organisms, who transport the nutrients further afeild via their droppings. Each time, energy will be lost from the natual processes of the organisms involved, so the primary concentration of nutriton would be found in the cavern lakes and rivers as silt.

Sustainable agriculture of subterrene crops would therefore require either periodical inundations of the croplands with fresh layers of cavern silt, or direct introduction of organic materials from the surface, such as compost, to sustain the nutritional and biological requirements of these crops. This means that unless very elaborate methods to artificially induce seasonal flooding with cavern water sources is enacted, underground crop production would be tied to the hip of surplus nutrients produced above ground, and transported below, to be sustainable.

We will have to conjure up numbers for the rates of consumption, ad production of these nutrients to establish a growing chart.

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution
Post by: NW_Kohaku on February 01, 2013, 02:11:01 am

Well, for starters, as I've tried to explain to some of the others in this thread, even I do try to keep things as relatively simple as possible while accomplishing the goals of the thread.  Hence, I've fudged together a few concepts into single variables that simplify things a little more than realistic.  (Even doing so, I'm still at 12 variables...)

For example, I have a single "biomass" variable that represents both only-partially-decomposed material (especially for growing mushrooms) at high values, heavily carbonaceous humus at mid-range values, and then a dearth of carbon at low values.  Likewise, colloid soil sizes and drainage are all reduced into a single variable gauging a general sense of sandy vs. heavily packed clay soils. 

That said, maybe there's a case to be made for something like splitting compost into its own variable, so that the notion of using something like a plump helmet to build up humus for later crops could be more heavily explored, but I'm still not terribly sure how well that would work, mechanically.

---

Almost all of the research I did for this thread was on organic farming since, almost definitionally, that's all dwarves are going to have access to.  (Barring some mining for apatite or a few other ways to find non-renewables naturally and magma farming.)  Hence, Haber-Bosch nitrogen overabundance isn't going to be a major factor. 

The only fertilizers that are going to be sustainably available will be the kind you compost yourself, and so it's going to be heavily carbonaceous.

---

We're going to assume that subterranean crops are simply not based upon any known (or even necessarily rational) ecosystem, and as such, I've taken to saying that the underground crops don't run on photosynthesis, but "xenosynthesis (http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=76007.msg2019450#msg2019450)" instead, and have their own magic-based ecosystem, where magic levels are tracked, and you can actually have "magic pollution" or possibly "magic erosion".

This is mostly done because there's just no way you can justify having decomposition of materials from the surface or chemosynthetic organisms that far from magma vents creating such a robust ecosystem.  (Especially since that "ecosystem" already contains things like amethyst men, cave dragons, and magma crabs that do things like live inside magma and spit rocks.  Plus, the underground mushrooms already include the Nether Cap, which magically keeps temperatures always at exactly 0 Celsius.  There's no point in pretending underground crops will be anything but magic.)

Aside from that, even the chemosynthetic creatures we're going to assume can somehow symbiotically live inside of a "plant" that can be cultivated the way that the tube worms symbiotically use those monocellular chemosynthetic organisms.

Ultimately, when it comes to underground ecosystems, much like Discworld, we're just going to have to desperately backfill rationalizations into an originally arbitrary and obviously magical system to have something that makes contiguous sense.

---

Beyond that, much of what you and I have written are in agreement.  I have yet to really read anything in the ebook you sent, however.  (And my eyes are starting to fail me for the night, so that will have to be a weekend endeavor.)

With that said, I'm less concerned with absolute accuracy and more concerned with accomplishing something that is automatable, not routine, diverse, interesting, not completely front-loaded on information for a new player, and which leads to the potential for any given fortress to be radically different because of the choices players made regarding how they would farm with as much realism as I can cram in beyond that.  If we get even half of this stuff into the game, it's already a far better teaching tool for how real-life agriculture works than any system in any game shy of an out-and-out farm simulation game. 

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution
Post by: wierd on February 01, 2013, 03:43:27 am

At the end of chapter 2, and the beginning of chapter 3, it begins dealing with carbon to nitrogen ratios of various plant materials, and covers the issue of supplying sufficient nitrogen to a composting system in depth. It lists several types of common leaf and plant materials for reference, and their ratios.  That should be somewhat helpful in building a model, at least for surface crops.


As for subterene crops, there is a potential-but-crazy mechanism that could account for at least some of the missing energy, and allow for a wider area of nutrient distribution from the volcanic vents.

Sometime last year, a group of researchers discovered something unusual about LEDs. They can operate at apparent overunity, if held at just the right voltage, by tapping thermal oscillations to push electrons over the bandgap. This means that more photonic energy is produced than comes from the electronic energy supplied, and the LED gets slightly cooler as a consequence.  Here's a press release from phys.org (http://phys.org/news/2012-03-efficiency.html)

There seems to exist an exotic subterene myconoid species that would seem to fit the bill here: Nether Caps.

Through some mysterious, and unexplained mechanism, they are always just barely above freezing. Open magma vents in the cavern systems would cause a very intense heat distribution, especially with volcanically active cavern lakes and rivers, which would introduce copious quantities of water vapor into the cavern atmosphere, which has a very high specific heat.  Yet, somehow, the caverns arent a hellish, nightmarish, hot and toxic environment, like they should be.  If we assume that these are our 'xenosynthetic' secondary producers, we have a potential source of both cavern climate control, atmospheric processing, and primary nutrient fixation in the cavern ecosystem. (Essentially, the "fungus" uses a special organic semiconductor molecule (many species actually produce organic semiconductors, including humans. Melanin is one such beast. (http://thesciencebulletin.wordpress.com/2012/06/28/melanin-a-bio-friendly-semiconductor/)) to make use of a low level ion gradient between the humus layer of the cavern silt, and it's own internal humors, by absorbing dangerous acidic compounds from the atmosphere, and using  the voltage difference that makes  (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Membrane_potential) to supply an initial electrochemical charge to that complex, which then makes use of the copious heat generated in the cavern by the volcanic activity to drive additional positive entropy reactions via this "over unity" mechanism.

Hoorah modern science. :D

The fruiting bodies of fungiforms are by no means the true manifestation of such organisms-- which are really teeming networks of mycelial fibrils that entwine and permeate their substrates.  Fruiting bodies are just mass aggregations of these mycelial fibrils that bind together in a communal mass between two genetically different mycelial cultures, which is who the fungus reproduces sexually to produce genetically diverse spores.  If we assume that the activity manifest at high levels in the nethercap wood, is conducted at widespread, but low levels in the soil beneath, out of sight, we have a direct food source that parasitical plant species could tap.

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution
Post by: wierd on February 01, 2013, 04:45:36 am

We really dont need to track certain variables, like mineral nutrition, really.

All we really need, are total energy in (sunlight, thermal, geochemical, et al) energy cost of reaction per trophic level, (EG, the growth of the plump helmet has to be factored as well, when figuring its energy content), total energy out, and energy capacity.

EG, we can 'fudge' soil depletion as a simple factor of how much energy the soil can supply, VS what can be supplied by sunlight, and what gets stored in a crop's biomass upon harvest.

EG, ratweed does not deplete the soil, because it can get 100% of its energy needs from the sun, but needs a baseline energy capacity to grow on the farm plot. It does not retain a very large amount of energy, which is why it produces a crappy alcohol. :D This also makes it a poor composting material, since it doesnt supply much energy in the compost.

while RopeReed may be soil depleting, requiring more energy than it can get from sunlight, but having a very high energy density per produce unit-- which is why it makes AWESOME alcohol. :D

We could say that bladeweed is a soil improving crop. It absorbs all the energy it needs from the sun, is implied to be nitrogen fixating, and produces a large amount of medium energy density biomass. Not suitable for alcohol, because most of the energy is protien. Instead makes alternative herbivore food, in addition to yucky green dye.

We could say similar things about hide root, and imply that it is like fibrous rhizome. Not suitable for consumption, but high in biomass energy and thus, good for composting.

Longland grass should probably be soil depleting, being a foodcrop that is high energy, and also an alcohol source of reasonable quality. Requires rich soil

Wild strawberry should be a low yeild crop, to make up for its relative high density-- while being soil neutral. This is in line with actual wild strawberry plants, which produce very few fruits.

prickle berry and fisher berry should be soil depleting.

Sunberry should be RADICALLY soil depleting, and prolific. I mean, practically murders soil. balanced by being so horrible to the soil, that you cant grow much else besides ratweeds afterwards.

Sliver barb should be soil building, with a radically low soil nutrient requirement. (useful for building up nearly dead soil) It should also be low yield. Its rarity means using it to revitalize soil likely only happen on blasted, horrible, dead and reanimating biomes, to which it is naturally indigenous. Valuable black dye is useful to trade for medium energy density crops, for immediate composting to help improve the soil more quickly.

whip vine can be the exception that proves the rule. I always imagine Kudzu as the basis for it. A high protein fodder, it is highly abundant, but is slightly soil building, but only just barely so. Makes really good compost, makes good dried herbivore food, makes a protein rich flour, is high sugar, and makes good wine. Balanced by being difficult to get. Requires already rich soil to grow.

This reduces the required variable count down to just 2 variables. Energy cost, and energy capacity.

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution
Post by: zwei on February 01, 2013, 07:34:48 am

In gist, you want system that allows easy farm setup for early fort and easy to set up fire-and-forget, but grossly inefficient farm.

But if player want to reap benefits, he should expend major effort and deal with issues that frequently arise.

I think that it is similar to forges: you can either use standart forge, but it is inefficient and short trem solution. In the end you want magma forges which come with their own set of dangers and challenges and possibly inefficiencies too (trade making fuel for long trips to magma sea forges or build expensive and labor intensive pump stack).

Frankly, given amount of variables discussed here opposed to simple fuel in case of forges, first and most important part of this suggestion should be new noble, "Lead Farmer", which would periodically check fields, available crops and make suggestions to alter what is grown to increase yield, demands on fertilizer production and import of seeds of plants he would deem necessary for production.

"Farm plot #11 currently growing Longland grass should be planted with Bladeweed next season to restore soil."

His suggestions should not be perfect (but improved by Analytical Ability, Intuition and Creativity attributes and Organizer, Farmer and Herbalist skills) so that farming minded player could make his crop cycles much better at cost of learming stuff behind them.

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution
Post by: 10ebbor10 on February 01, 2013, 11:47:59 am

Quote from: wierd on February 01, 2013, 04:45:36 am

This reduces the required variable count down to just 2 variables. Energy cost, and energy capacity.

Sadly, that reduces the gameplay options quite a bit, turning the farming in yet another simple optimalization thingy. (Since both variables are so interlated that they can basically be seen as one)

As for the new Noble Lead farmer. I don't think it will be so usefull, after all it's a suggestion that discourages people to learn more about the underlying system, as well as being rather complicated to implement. I'd just integrate it with the interface (ie, allowing us to sort things by different nutrition value, or even a more complicated searching thing that allows to search for multiple things at the same time*).

* Ie, I want a crop that grows quickly, in winter, doesn't use much of X, Y,Z, replensishes A and B and suchlike.

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution
Post by: NW_Kohaku on February 01, 2013, 01:26:48 pm

Quote from: zwei on February 01, 2013, 07:34:48 am

In gist, you want system that allows easy farm setup for early fort and easy to set up fire-and-forget, but grossly inefficient farm.

But if player want to reap benefits, he should expend major effort and deal with issues that frequently arise.

I think that it is similar to forges: you can either use standart forge, but it is inefficient and short trem solution. In the end you want magma forges which come with their own set of dangers and challenges and possibly inefficiencies too (trade making fuel for long trips to magma sea forges or build expensive and labor intensive pump stack).

Frankly, given amount of variables discussed here opposed to simple fuel in case of forges, first and most important part of this suggestion should be new noble, "Lead Farmer", which would periodically check fields, available crops and make suggestions to alter what is grown to increase yield, demands on fertilizer production and import of seeds of plants he would deem necessary for production.

"Farm plot #11 currently growing Longland grass should be planted with Bladeweed next season to restore soil."

His suggestions should not be perfect (but improved by Analytical Ability, Intuition and Creativity attributes and Organizer, Farmer and Herbalist skills) so that farming minded player could make his crop cycles much better at cost of learming stuff behind them.

I remember discussing suggestions like that, but it's been 2 years since this thread started...  Going back over the thread, though, Khym Chanur had a suggestion that I adopted where players can look at a screen where you can know what crops your home civ grew in what cycle, as well as the farming techniques of other known civs.  (Which only helps if you are in semi-familiar conditions, of course.)  I know I talked about things somewhat similar over in Class Warfare, as well, since reintroducing guild leader nobles that do things was part of the whole point, there.

Part of the problem, though, is that making a Lead Farmer that's worth listening to would be extremely complicated to program, as it would require making assessments of farming as a math problem when I've specifically set up farming not to be a simple math problem.

Having a mechanic where you can see, at the "I'm choosing what to plant" screen what crops the soil will currently support, what crops will take what amount of fertilizer before being able to be supported, and what crops are just not fit for the current soil or environment, no matter how you try to dink with it, is both easier to accomplish and also perhaps a bit more informative to the player for understanding how the whole thing works. 

(That is, rather than just telling you what to do, you know what you can do easily, and what is more difficult to do, and why it's more difficult.)

You might want to look at the (admittedly rather complex) Interface section (http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=76007.msg1920010#msg1920010) where it covers the scheduler, and also see the mock-up I made for it:

Spoiler: Scheduler Window (click to show/hide)

(http://i56.tinypic.com/242imas.gif)

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution
Post by: wierd on February 01, 2013, 01:36:13 pm

The idea about tieing into energy available as the kicker, implies that available sunlight will be different based on region.

For instance, a temperate region is temperate, because it has seasonal variation in intensity of sunlight, which alters the climate, which is why there is a winter. :D

If you couple this with a moisture requirement, and better weather simulation, you will directly end up with fertile temperate bands, and equitorial deserts, like is currently seen on earth, but with a much simplified system.

It is important to remember that the dwarves themselves wont know about the carbon to nitrogen ratios of their crops-- only that certain crops leech the soil, where others build it back.

The idea is to carefully tweak the sunlight requirements of plants to be "optimal" and "easy" only on temperate biomes. This way, embarking on that freezing glacier really does mean "you know what, you arent gonna grow food here."

Same with embarking on an evil desert-- low soil energy, low moisture == VERY HARD to build up the soil, and as such, VERY HARD to survive on.

The idea is that something like whipvine would be slightly soil building in the summer of a temperate biome, but aggressively soil depleting in the winter, while still retaining it's basic energy needs. The plant's needs dont change, the environment changes with the seasons, and with it the energy supplied by the sun. Also, some crops shouldnt be plantable in the winter anyway. Berries for instance.  I'd restrict winter months to longland grass and hide root only, for instance.

This could be further tied in with weather, as a local variable on sunlight and moisture availability. Rain increases soil moisture, but blocks out the sun for awhile, making the overall energy needed to grow the plants have to come from the soil's reserves.  (this isnt exactly accurate, but would make the farming system much more variable, and less "Fire and forget")

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution
Post by: NW_Kohaku on February 01, 2013, 01:48:38 pm

Quote from: wierd on February 01, 2013, 03:43:27 am

As for subterene crops, there is a potential-but-crazy mechanism that could account for at least some of the missing energy, and allow for a wider area of nutrient distribution from the volcanic vents.

Sometime last year, a group of researchers discovered something unusual about LEDs. They can operate at apparent overunity, if held at just the right voltage, by tapping thermal oscillations to push electrons over the bandgap. This means that more photonic energy is produced than comes from the electronic energy supplied, and the LED gets slightly cooler as a consequence.  Here's a press release from phys.org (http://phys.org/news/2012-03-efficiency.html)

There seems to exist an exotic subterene myconoid species that would seem to fit the bill here: Nether Caps.

Problem with that is that Nether Caps are not just infinite heat sinks, they're also infinite heat fountains - they are always 0 Celsius, even if outside temperatures are well below freezing.  That is, in sufficiently cold terrain, it would make sense to make hostile environment clothing/tents with an outer shell of nether wood, since it would actually insulate you from the extreme cold.  (And in extreme heat, it's of course just as good.)

The seeming canonical explanation for how Nether Caps work is that they are literally portals to a "Nether Dimension", which serves as a perfect heat exchanger to a well of infinite mass and specific heat capacity.

I.E. it is an "autotroph" in that it can introduce energy to an ecosystem, but it relies upon magically bridging in energy (or, usually, OUT energy) from another dimension. 

Plus, keep in mind, the wood stays 0 Celsius even after the mushroom is chopped down and dead for quite some time.  The heat-exchanging capacity of the wood is not a biological process. 

In fact, the tiny bridges to the nether dimension may not even be formed by the nether cap itself.  It may just be a fungus that grows around mollecular-scale bridges to the nether dimension that already exist, finding some way to xenosynthesize energy from the heat exchanging properties, or something of chemosynthetic value that they can extract through the portals.

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution
Post by: wierd on February 01, 2013, 01:55:37 pm

That's just quibbling over the mechanism--- I just tried to supply a possibly plausible (yet absolutely absurd at the same time!) one for how the cavern ecosystem could be sustained over large areas, and climate regulated.

Substituting your explanation, we have other issues-- it means that the nethercap concentrates this "netherworld portal" meta-material in its fruiting bodies, which would then deplete the environment of this exchange medium.  We would have to make the nether caps much more prolific, and outright delicious to cavern flora to provide a mechanism to redistribute it back into the cavern ecosystem, in order to balance that out.

(EG, imagine-- Dwarves harvest the loverly nethercaps to make dwarven icechests, because you just add water! This means that they are taking the meta-material out of the environment with thier economical activities, and slowly killing the cavern ecosystem by doing so.)

As for how to biologically capitalize on an infinite heat sink/fountain metamaterial--- the two thermoelectric effects already have this covered. (Seekbeck (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermoelectric_effect#Seebeck_effect) and Peltier (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermoelectric_effect#Peltier_effect))

This would be a less radical explanation for the infinite heat fountain characteristic of the nethercap besides being a netherworld metamaterial absorber--- The absurd degrees of energy conversions of the two above thermoelectric effects can be tied directly with the carnot efficiency, and its TOTALLY BONKERS WRONG values in the DF universe. :D (EG, the same crazy physics that enables purpetual motion water machines enables purpetual motion thermal engines too, and must-- because they are both in reality just heat engines (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heat_engine) when you get down to it.)

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution
Post by: NW_Kohaku on February 01, 2013, 02:10:26 pm

Quote from: wierd on February 01, 2013, 03:43:27 am

At the end of chapter 2, and the beginning of chapter 3, it begins dealing with carbon to nitrogen ratios of various plant materials, and covers the issue of supplying sufficient nitrogen to a composting system in depth. It lists several types of common leaf and plant materials for reference, and their ratios.  That should be somewhat helpful in building a model, at least for surface crops.

Well, thing is, this thread already has a model.  There are plenty of concepts here to work with.  I'm more looking for flaws in the model, or ways to accomplish the same goals with less complexity.

Quote from: wierd on February 01, 2013, 04:45:36 am

We really dont need to track certain variables, like mineral nutrition, really.

All we really need, are total energy in (sunlight, thermal, geochemical, et al) energy cost of reaction per trophic level, (EG, the growth of the plump helmet has to be factored as well, when figuring its energy content), total energy out, and energy capacity.

...

This reduces the required variable count down to just 2 variables. Energy cost, and energy capacity.

As I've said to many of the other people who want to reduce this down to just one or two variables, there's more to this than just trying to make something simple that gets a message of "soil fertility" across, I'm also interested in the gameplay impact of these choices.

In other words, I don't want reality, or a "close enough fudge" of reality, I want something that makes for a good game.

To repeat the basic explanation for why this suggestion is the suggestion it is, I am trying to accoplish the following goals:

Quote from: NW_Kohaku on January 28, 2013, 03:54:44 pm

Alright...

I started just writing out a new one, and wound up creating something still kind of long, but close to as manageable as I could get without completely editing out large chunks of the conversation.  (Actually, I cut out the parts that were lead-ins to other possible overhauls, like magic biome types, and dietary models.)

Quote from: NW_Kohaku on January 27, 2011, 03:34:36 am

The tl;dr Version:

Spoiler: The problems this tries to solve (click to show/hide)

The purpose of this thread is to solve several problems with the current game:

• Problem 1: Farming now is, generally, easy and boring.
  
  • Farming needs to be more interesting, with more crops that are different.
  • Current crops (especially above-ground) are nearly indistinguishable in how they are grown.
  • Farming should include more physical types of farms and farming techniques.
  • Different climates and biomes make no difference in how you farm or what you farm.
• Problem 2: Farming is currently a front-loaded challenge
  
  • We have a "learning cliff" currently - you have to know everything to get anywhere in the game.
  • Once you know everything, the game is too easy, all problems have been solved.
  • The goal should be to make something simple to start with, so any random new player survives their first year, but progressively more difficult as time goes on, challenging those who have mastered the basics
  • It should be possible for players to get by without knowing terribly many tricks, but with rewards for the player who truly masters the system, in much the same way as dwarfputing.
• Problem 3: Deep without micromanagement or pointless complexity
  
  • All automatable things should be automated.
  • Anything that is a simple "what's the quickest way to make the most food" math problem is a calculation, not a choice, and that is automatable.
  • Once all automatable functions are out of the way, high-level management choices should be made as a matter of a strategy, based upon comparing difficult-to-compare-mathematically things, such as short-term payoffs vs. long time setting up but better long-term payoffs.
  • The game needs to do the basic math calculations itself, but leave the grand strategy to players.
  • To keep players engaged, occasional challenges should arise to bring player attention back to the farms, but not in a micromanagement way.
• Problem 4: Creating a Medieval Fantasy Ecosystem Simulation
  
  • While abstracted, the game should leave players with the sense that this is an actual ecosystem, where the changes they make impact their world.
  • This can mean clear-cutting a forest leading to soil erosion that means no more "free trees", for example.
  • This can also empower players to purposefully alter the ecosystem to better suit their needs if they have a mastery of the concept.
  • If the game models real-world systems, even if abstracted, it creates learning opportunities through play.

The reason this thread is long is because it is arguing for why most simple solutions do not actually address all of these problems, and why a marginally more in-depth solution is needed.  Specifically:

Spoiler: The solutions proposed (click to show/hide)

• Solution 1: Multiple soil quality variables
  
  • Multiple variables for soil quality (instead of just a simple "fertility") mean that different methods of fertilization can be used without being a simple calculation. ("What gives me the most bang for my buck?") You cannot rely upon a single fertilizer type, you have to use several.
  • If you have differing amounts of different kinds of fertilizers, crops that consume different nutrients become more or less attractive from a strategic perspective - depending on certain types of crops means depending on keeping the flow of certain fertilizers moving.  This is a strategic, non-micromanagement choice, whereas a single fertility value simply requires automating the re-fertilization.
  • Some soil quality variables can be easy to change (like how recently plants have been watered) but others much more difficult (like if the soil is highly acidic), and some may be specific to the embark site (no growing tropical plants in an arctic tundra).  This means different embarks are going to require different crop types and farming methods that support them.
  • Several of these soil variables, especially the nearly impossible to change ones, may add variables to the game, but not terribly much complexity, as players will have few reasons to actually worry about soil acidity or salinity once you have already picked a plant suited for your soil.
  • Pollution variables can exist as a means of making players choose between short-term gains and long-term damage to their fields
• Solution 2: Pests
  
  • Pest creatures, from fungal infections to caterpillars eating leaves to locust swarms, can exist as a "disaster" form of macro-problem for players to deal with, keeping farming challenging and slightly unpredictable.
  • They can be controlled through both limiting the number of crops of a certain type (reducing the exposure to a single crippling pest infestation) and using natural pesticides - the predators of those pest creatures, or fragrant herbs that repel bugs.  (Birds, bats, and spiders eat insects, many herbs use pheromones to repel insects or attract predators of pests like wasps that lay their eggs inside caterpillar bodies.)
  • Since pests are not seen on-map, the relative population numbers of pests can be tabulated invisibly and infrequently, saving on processor power and not appearing complex to players.
  • Solutions to pests can be easy to understand, if not necessarily easy to implement - bat or bird nests near crops with birds/bats in them will keep pests down.  You then need to acquire and care for those creatures, however.
  • Since pests, especially diseases, are attracted to large, single-crop farms, it is a problem more for players who keep using simple farming methods for years, so it doesn't overwhelm players on their first few years, but challenges players in established forts to diversify.
• Solution 3: Different methods of obtaining Fertilizers
  
  • Crop rotations with crops like beans that are nitrogen fixators is a common and simple solution to one type of fertility deficiency, but not all.
  • Decomposing organic waste (including corpses, grinding down bones, and manure) into fertilizer is the most sustainable and reliable method.
  • Some fertilizers can be mined or traded for, but they are of finite or unreliable supply.  Minable Sulfur can be used to change soil acidity, and make some soil suitable for different crops long-term, however.
  • Exotic fertilizers, like magma, can be used, but require more elaborate engineering, and may cause soil pollution that limit what crops are viable
• Solution 4: Water Management
  
  • Water is consumed by farms.  This means you need to constantly bring more water into your fortress.
  • Water generation from off-map or aquifers would be slowed down, to make there be limits on how much water you can use.  This would mean desert embarks are tougher.
  • More elaborate systems are more efficient but take more time to set up and reward player engineering skills with better farm yields.  Simpler versions like bucket-watering are faster to set up, but consume more labor.  Newbie methods are not "wrong", and don't lead to dying, but there is strong incentive to learn.
• Solution 5: Polycultures - plants affect other plants
  
  • Plants can be planted with/near other plants, such as the fragrant herbs that repel some types of pests, or ground covers that reduce water consumption.
  • Plants like beans that add nitrogen to the soil can be planted with some crops instead of just in a cycle - supplying more nitrogen even as the crop grows.
  • It is an advanced farming method for advanced farmers, but not necessary for basic farming - an "advanced level" for people who master the system.
• Solution 6: More farmable materials
  
  • If you can farm trees for wood, plants for cloth, flammable oils, medicinal herbs, and many other resources besides just food (basically, anything that isn't mined can be farmed), then there is a reason to constantly upgrade farms - you want more than just basic survival on food, you want more stuff.  This lets the complexity of a farm for food become easy, but having to sustain more farms for more crops for more uses means that you are encouraged to farm more complex methods to gain greater yields for non-essential products.
• Solution 7: Nature plays by the same rules (but abstracted more)
  
  • Non-farm soil tiles have a generalized region that shares the same fertility and pollution values as farms.  This means that when grass/shrubs/trees grow, it takes nutrients from the soil.  When they burn or are decomposed, it returns nutrients to the soil, but if you harvest from the land without returning, then the soil loses fertility just like a farm.
  • Trees are therefore not an infinite resource anymore - you may have to farm them, yourself to get greater yields.
  • Wild animal and livestock populations play by pest rules, to a degree - you have control over what is attracted to your land, and livestock can get parasites.
  • You can eventually turn a land into a place where nothing grows or functionally change its biome if you work hard enough at it.  Garden of Eden or Hellscape, choice is yours.

I'm still trying to cut off some of the most common arguments, even in tl;dr mode, so I could edit it down more from there if I wanted to, but then have to keep going back to explaining why this increases challenge over time...

---

Also, as one last thing, Toady's already planning on throwing something like this into DF, as seen on the dev pages:

Quote

Farming Improvements

• Soil moisture tracking and ability to moisten soil (buckets or other irrigation)
• Soil nutrient requirements for plants and nutrient tracking to the extent the farming interface can provide decent feedback for you, fertilizers can reflect this
• Harvestable flowers and fruit growing on plants, ability to plant trees
• Weeds
• More pests

When asked about it, Toady also said that he was interested in making the game as realistic as it could be while still being manageable, as his grandparents were farmers, and he had an interest in the topic. 

So, by and large, I'm not actually suggesting many concepts beyond what Toady was already considering doing, but that I'm suggesting ways of implementing the concepts in a way that makes the game non-micromanagey and as interesting as possible for players.

A simple couple variables doesn't accomplish the goal of not making this game nothing more than a routine optimization strategy, as 10ebbor10 said. 

Each variable introduces the chance for each fertilizer to actually be differentiated. (I.E. what you were talking about with the difference between chicken waste and horse waste, and the difference between compost and hot manure - that takes variables to differentiate what those mean.) This means that you can start creating plants that need different soil nutrient concentrations, and are better-or-worse suited to different fertilizers, which are not infinite, and which make for more fluid choices as each fertilizer resource you have starts having different values to you based upon their relative abundance.  (I.E. You were talking about how carbonaceous fertilizers could not be viably produced in enough abundance to make up for the losses in soil fertility due to modern agricultural practices.) 

Adding variables that separate out water, biomass(carbon), NPK, as well as environmental variables like energy source, soil acidity, drainage/CEC, and finally pollutants like hot manure, heavy metals, and soil salinity all make the "math problem" of trying to make "what can I plant to get the greatest return in food per the least unit time and area" something that cannot be easily "solved" with a single perfect answer for the sheer number of changing variables.

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution
Post by: wierd on February 01, 2013, 02:18:35 pm

Actually, that doesnt make it into strange voodoo either, just adds unnecessary mathematical overhead.

Sustainable horticulture is already about know what your crops want-- farmers have built cheatsheets for soil management and crop cycles for years. They are called farmers almanacs. (though most are little more than pitiful astrology in a pulp paper wrapper.) Crop management *IS* just an optimization strategy, that once you get down, is very easy to keep up.

Adding weather effects to screw up the reliability of growing conditions would introduce far more FUN than an overly complicated growing algorithm.

Observe:

Let's say we are dealing with wild strawberry.  We will say it needs 4000 units of energy per tile to produce a crop, each crop is seasonal, so it's a 3 month period, making each month deliver approximately 1250 units of sunlight per tile, under "ideal" crop conditions. (Since this is a soil neutral crop.) In rolls a series of summer rain clouds that blankets out the sky's sunlight partially for the majority of the summer.  Instead of the 4000 units of sun, we only got 3000 units, or less.  That energy has to be made up for, so the soil neutral crop suddenly becomes a soil depleter, because the sun wasn't out. This means your soil will deplete if you don't watch the weather, and make adjustments!

This, even with the highly simplified system suggested. :D

The weather is unpredictable, and random based on the biome embarked upon-- Dust storms would be especially terrible for crop growth-- and would make evil biome embarks all the more difficult--

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution
Post by: Wastedlabor on February 01, 2013, 02:29:58 pm

Has it been suggested before to let plants mutate so the fort selects which subspecies to farm?

Subspecie properties wouldn't be obvious, so it would make sense to devote farming to several of them lest it turns out a variant is a lot less fertile or has a syndrome. It has the reward that great subspecies could be produced and, at some point in DF development, traded in to allow the civilization to become stronger. Of course you could make a fatal mistake and doom your civilization by exporting some seeds of "oblivion plump helmets".

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution
Post by: NW_Kohaku on February 01, 2013, 02:33:10 pm

Quote from: wierd on February 01, 2013, 01:55:37 pm

That's just quibbling over the mechanism--- I just tried to supply a possibly plausible (yet absolutely absurd at the same time!) one for how the cavern ecosystem could be sustained over large areas, and climate regulated.

It's not, it's an important conceptual difference, even if the mechanism is actually similar when you go beyond that.

It means recognizing what it means to talk about xenosythetic lifeforms, especially when we start expanding the magic plants available for farming... or, in other words, exactly what you start getting to in the next paragraph:

Quote from: wierd on February 01, 2013, 01:55:37 pm

Substituting your explanation, we have other issues-- it means that the nethercap concentrates this "netherworld portal" meta-material in its fruiting bodies, which would then deplete the environment of this exchange medium.  We would have to make the nether caps much more prolific, and outright delicious to cavern flora to provide a mechanism to redistribute it back into the cavern ecosystem, in order to balance that out.

Yes, that's exactly my point.

Keep in mind what it means to have "Nether Particles" that fungi grow around as an energy source - there's more than one dimension that we can link to, and it means that it's possible to conceptualize "Good" biomes as being based upon "Good Particles" that flood a region with Good Magic. 

Sunberries, for example, only grow in good regions, same with feather trees and bubble grass.  (Whose names, incidentally, are rather literal.  Feather trees have actual feathers and bubble grass actually is made of bubbles, making Good biomes look something like a Dr Seuss book.  Sunberries have what appear to be miniature magical suns inside them, and their alcohol is "liquid sunshine".)

Part of my point is that you can't just treat this as just another thing you can explain purely by known physics, there's something obviously magic going on, here, and your explanation has to take routinized magic into account.  (Hence, the references to Discworld.)

Sunberries can't just be strawberries that eat up more soil nutrients, they have to tap into some external magical energy source, and when taken out of that energy source, will not grow. 

If nether caps grow on nether particles, then there might be a finite number of nether particles in the caverns, and there may be a serious difference between what happens when there's lots of nether caps and when there aren't any nether caps in the area.  What happens if destroying nether wood releases nether particles into the air, and it causes "nether magic levels" in the area to spike?  What if nether caps are like a sink that keeps nether magic from going wild, and destroying all the nether caps alters the magical ecosystem? Does that start releasing shades into the caverns where unchecked nether magic levels are starting to spike?  Does it suddenly make the whole cavern colder? Does it make magic-hungry megapreditors like forgotten beasts come, attracted by the sweet scent of released magic?

If we are to treat caverns as a magic ecosystem, then the "plants" down there are the foodstuff of the amethyst men, cave dragons, and magma crabs.  All things with obviously magical biologies.  They eat not just nutrition (or in an amethyst man's case, they probably don't even need that) but the magic, or at least the magic-energy-synthesizing organisms the same way that all the creatures in deep sea volcanic vents rely upon symbiosis with chemosynthetic monocellular organisms.

The xenosynthesis concept means taking things beyond their first step of assuming arbitrary game mechanics are just arbitrary and you don't have to think them through any further - it means that you take seriously the concept that there are multiple energy sources in the game universe, and what their ramifications are.

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution
Post by: NW_Kohaku on February 01, 2013, 02:40:51 pm

Quote from: Wastedlabor on February 01, 2013, 02:29:58 pm

Has it been suggested before to let plants mutate so the fort selects which subspecies to farm?

Subspecie properties wouldn't be obvious, so it would make sense to devote farming to several of them lest it turns out a variant is a lot less fertile or has a syndrome. It has the reward that great subspecies could be produced and, at some point in DF development, traded in to allow the civilization to become stronger. Of course you could make a fatal mistake and doom your civilization by exporting some seeds of "oblivion plump helmets".

Yes, mostly in conjunction with procedurally generated plants in the first place.  (That is, rather than just using wild berries, and treating them as though they were domesticated, you can really only efficiently farm fully domesticated plants, meaning trade with the elves and humans for surface crops, not just plant wild berry seeds if you want good crops.)

Although it mechanically requires some means of informing the player of what, exactly, these things they can't look up on the wiki actually are and do in a sane way.  (Which requires a sort of "Civpedia" like interface built into the game.)

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution
Post by: NW_Kohaku on February 01, 2013, 02:49:10 pm

Quote from: wierd on February 01, 2013, 02:18:35 pm

Actually, that doesnt make it into strange voodoo either, just adds unnecessary mathematical overhead.

Sustainable horticulture is already about know what your crops want-- farmers have built cheatsheets for soil management and crop cycles for years. They are called farmers almanacs. (though most are little more than pitiful astrology in a pulp paper wrapper.) Crop management *IS* just an optimization strategy, that once you get down, is very easy to keep up.

Adding weather effects to screw up the reliability of growing conditions would introduce far more FUN than an overly complicated growing algorithm.

Observe:

Let's say we are dealing with wild strawberry.  We will say it needs 4000 units of energy per tile to produce a crop, each crop is seasonal, so it's a 3 month period, making each month deliver approximately 1250 units of sunlight per tile, under "ideal" crop conditions. (Since this is a soil neutral crop.) In rolls a series of summer rain clouds that blankets out the sky's sunlight partially for the majority of the summer.  Instead of the 4000 units of sun, we only got 3000 units, or less.  That energy has to be made up for, so the soil neutral crop suddenly becomes a soil depleter, because the sun wasn't out. This means your soil will deplete if you don't watch the weather, and make adjustments!

This, even with the highly simplified system suggested. :D

The weather is unpredictable, and random based on the biome embarked upon-- Dust storms would be especially terrible for crop growth-- and would make evil biome embarks all the more difficult--

Well, I think this line of conversation has been rehashed rather often in this thread.

Pests already produce much of what you are talking about as an additional layer of unpredictable complexity, as well.  I'm certainly not ruling these things out.

That said, I still think there's a serious value to making the cheat sheet a little more complex than "grow beans then fallow then corn" - by having multiple types of resources, the game is inherently going to give the player far more choices that are far less straightforward an answer, especially when you add in all those unpredictable factors that make a player have to react using what limited resources they have on hand.

(It's like saying that most RPGs would be made simpler by making everyone a fighter and basing everything on HP.  Sure, it's simpler, but it's far less interesting.)

Although I know it's a heavy read, if you could read the original line of posts through, it would help avoid rehashing the same conversations that we already had in the past.

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution
Post by: wierd on February 01, 2013, 02:49:34 pm

it's a neat idea, but the code backend for that would be atrocious. :( Every plant tile planted would have to keep a history of the two plants that provided it's heritage data, even after they are long since consumed, and the memory should have been freed.  This means that horticulture would gobble up resources like crazy, trying to track all the geneological data needed to properly simulate genetic expressions and mutations on otherwise fungible produce.

Yeech... I wouldnt want to code it....


--

Hmm..  I still dont like the idea of magic being a testable and verifiable energy source. It is just too plain hard to reconcile with mundane physics without causing a thermonuclear explosion, or causing real-manifested nightmares to spawn in children's bedrooms.  (Pratchett ironically, chose to include this later effect in his disc world even!)

I prefer to look at magic as an expression of what is unknown.  It is unknown how an amethyst man's biology works, therefore, his biology is clearly magical, since it defies conventional reason. (He COULD be purely photonically powered!) Same with a nethercap.  For a long time, people felt pregnancy was magical, for instance.  We have since learned that it is no such thing whatsoever. 

If we are going to start introducing exotic physics metamaterials, then we have to seriously consider all the consequences of that, which quickly becomes head exploding.

For instance, atomic scale wormholes to another dimension with perfect thermal properties held perfectly at 0c interacting with ordinary matter to reduce temperatures, would have very unpleasant effects upon ingestion in species not adapted to that-- It would freeze their digestive tracts, and in warm blooded animals, it would cause hypothermia, because the organism would be unable to regulate internal body temperatures! It would be its own kind of illness and associated syndrome of effects, caused by being contaminated with "nether particles" through ingestion. (though I suppose it would be GREAT for embalming people!) This throws a big monkey wrench into using them as an autotroph to make the cavern ecosystem plausible.

The method I suggested with the seebeck and peltier effects, would just mean the nethercaps have shiny metal striations in them, and their natural slow decomposition is what causes the inverse effect as a slow heat fountain.

Making magic into real forces and not just an artifact of applied ignorance has many very dangerous reprocussions. you should be *VERY* careful doing that!


**Note--

Not that I think all magic should be made out to be pure ignorance though.  Necromancers, Mummies that raise the dead, and the like are obviously REAL magic.  However, these occurrences are "extraordinary"-- 

We would need an explanation for why subterene environs are so obscenely magical, but why dwarves arent natural spell casters, despite living in, and consuming, immensely magically imbued environmental products.  Why dont dwarves have superpowers, and such-- for instance.  We would also need an explanation for why surface areas are routinely mundane excepting in specially magically dense areas, like undead reanimating biomes, and super happy cottoncandy grassed sunshine and dewdrop infested good biomes.

This gets into cosmological explanations, which are PRNG generated-- making them off limits, and or-- not really PRNG, but actually "Selected from formula", and requiring a cogent formula to build sensible cosmologies from.

We would also need explanations for why wild magical energies dont just conjure things up into existence willy nilly.

Pratchet balanced that, by saying "Belief" is a finite resource. (See for instance, the Hogfather story.) But then again, he has power over the cosmology to say that.  again, we dont-- PRNG generated worlds.

Balancing this is fundemental if you want a reasonably sensible xenosynthetic biosphere that runs on magic down there.

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution
Post by: NW_Kohaku on February 01, 2013, 03:13:31 pm

Quote from: wierd on February 01, 2013, 02:49:34 pm

it's a neat idea, but the code backend for that would be atrocious. :( Every plant tile planted would have to keep a history of the two plants that provided it's heritage data, even after they are long since consumed, and the memory should have been freed.  This means that horticulture would gobble up resources like crazy, trying to track all the geneological data needed to properly simulate genetic expressions and mutations on otherwise fungible produce.

Well, there are a few ways to make that less of a nightmare.

First, rather than keeping a genetic history of what was cross-pollinated, keep in mind that many species are self-pollinating, and frequently just mutate into beneficial conditions.

You could have just one base wild version of a plant, and then remember seeds/plants as just algorithmic additions of specific mutation modifiers that provide benefits. 

The way that domesticated animals work now, for example, is that you just have a remembered "natural domestication level" state for each animal. 

You could simply have some positive modifiers on a seed of a plant type (+20 crop yield) and then some negatives that are consequences of that type of mutation (vulnerability to pest X, attracts pest Y, consumes nitrogen +10). 

Quote from: wierd on February 01, 2013, 02:49:34 pm

Hmm..  I still dont like the idea of magic being a testable and verifiable energy source. It is just too plain hard to reconcile with mundane physics without causing a thermonuclear explosion, or causing real-manifested nightmares to spawn in children's bedrooms.  (Pratchett ironically, chose to include this later effect in his disc world even!)

Actually, real-manifested nightmares are kind of what boogeymen are, already. 

Anyway, yes, Pratchett is closer to what I'm aiming at.

Quote from: wierd on February 01, 2013, 02:49:34 pm

I prefer to look at magic as an expression of what is unknown.  It is unknown how an amethyst man's biology works, therefore, his biology is clearly magical, since it defies conventional reason. (He COULD be purely photonically powered!) Same with a nethercap.  For a long time, people felt pregnancy was magical, for instance.  We have since learned that it is no such thing whatsoever. 

If we are going to start introducing exotic physics metamaterials, then we have to seriously consider all the consequences of that, which quickly becomes head exploding.

And that's fantastic.

Keep in mind that unknown pregnancy actually did have knowable causes and effects.  Keep in mind that rotting in this game creates "miasma", which is at least unpleasant, but at some point, may include the capacity to spread disease.

Dwarves don't need to know how, exactly, nether particles work or why they exist, but they can still know they're bad news to leave out-of-control, and that bad things happen when you overharvest the nethercaps.  (You could even have superstitious responses to it in-game, like a "curse of the nethercaps" that freezes those who chop too greedy and too deep.)

Quote from: wierd on February 01, 2013, 02:49:34 pm

For instance, atomic scale wormholes to another dimension with perfect thermal properties held perfectly at 0c interacting with ordinary matter to reduce temperatures, would have very unpleasant effects upon ingestion in species not adapted to that-- It would freeze their digestive tracts, and in warm blooded animals, it would cause hypothermia, because the organism would be unable to regulate internal body temperatures! It would be its own kind of illness and associated syndrome of effects, caused by being contaminated with "nether particles" through ingestion. (though I suppose it would be GREAT for embalming people!) This throws a big monkey wrench into using them as an autotroph to make the cavern ecosystem plausible.

The method I suggested with the seebeck and peltier effects, would just mean the nethercaps have shiny metal striations in them, and their natural slow decomposition is what causes the inverse effect as a slow heat fountain.

Making magic into real forces and not just an artifact of applied ignorance has many very dangerous reprocussions. you should be *VERY* careful doing that!

And that's why you take care eating magic mushrooms. ("Never be the first to stick your hand into an unknown viscous material!")

Keep in mind, nether wood is wood, and nothing eats it besides maybe really magical creatures.  But if it's destroyed, it means that nether magic would be released upon its destruction.

The only difference, mechanically, between your magic mushroom that merely has probably-poisonous metal in it and my magic mushroom that has biology-shredding particles in it is how much the rest of the game's rationality can be affected by applying a consistent reasoning behind all the magical artifacts that can then be used to extrapolate later magical effects.  (And creating the capacity for emergent behavior is everything wonderful about Dwarf Fortress.)

It means that you have some sort of invisibly-tracked and rather vague concept of a nether magic level in your environment, and that nether magic goes down the more nether caps are there to sink their energy supply, keeping nether magic low.  When nether magic is high, though, you have an energy source for farming your own nether caps, or possibly even other nether-related "plants" underground.  If nether magic is too scarce or dead in a region, no more nether plants can grow for starving of magic.  If nether magic grows too high, the nether magic can have unintended consequences, including wild magic animals and pests like magic locusts coming in to feast off the abundance of free magic.

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution
Post by: Wastedlabor on February 01, 2013, 03:40:51 pm

Quote from: wierd on February 01, 2013, 02:49:34 pm

Every plant tile planted would have to keep a history of the two plants that provided it's heritage data

It wouldn't.  A mutated plant is just a new plant, like, any that could have been defined in the raws, but keeping the base name, unless the player wanted to rename it. Rather than making many micro changes from plant to plant, mutation can be a single big change (with it's own alert message). I think finding 1 subspecies of any plant (not per plant) every 3 years would be the highest rate I'd like myself.

Plant properties could be documented by the farmer equivalent of the bookkeeper. Of course dwarves wouldn't be aware of genetic evolution and believe rather in adaptation.

Dwarf psychology could play a role. A dwarf that likes plump helmet wine would be more interested in identifying a mutation in plump helmets that produces better wine.

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution
Post by: NW_Kohaku on February 01, 2013, 03:52:57 pm

Quote from: Wastedlabor on February 01, 2013, 03:40:51 pm

It wouldn't.  A mutated plant is just a new plant, like, any that could have been defined in the raws, but keeping the base name, unless the player wanted to rename it. Rather than making many micro changes from plant to plant, mutation can be a single big change (with it's own alert message). I think finding 1 subspecies of any plant (not per plant) every 3 years would be the highest rate I'd like myself.

Presuming this takes place in worldgen, though, there could still be an explosion in mutation permutations, although presumably, any mutation that was not wanted could just be discarded and deleted.

It could have the interesting side-effect of different cultures having strawberries that mutated in very different ways, which could help lead to concepts like invasive species.

Speaking of which, one of the key things about strawberries discussed in Guns, Germs, and Steel was that they never evolved to be large and appetizing to humans until after greenhouses were invented.  Fruits, especially, are evolved to be attractive to whatever species will help spread their seeds, and strawberries were tiny to attract small birds that spread their seeds.  They were impossible to domesticate and make huge and juicy for human tastes until humans put them in greenhouses that meant strawberries had to grow to human tastes to get their seeds spread.  In open air, birds would always beat the humans as seed-spreaders. 

Hence, positive mutation versions of all the fruits and plants should eventually emerge in-game in a manner similar to domestication of animals, like the difference between a dog and a wolf. One is evolved to live with humans that will use it and care for it, the other is wild.

At the simplest level, this can just be a linear scale like domestication, but you can also use a concept where specific negatives are introduced pseudo-randomly, like vulnerabilities to specific pests as you make a non-poisonous version of a type of nut or those needs for greater soil nutrients as a fruit becomes larger.

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution
Post by: wierd on February 01, 2013, 04:18:10 pm

That would have to be a very weakened and watered down version of evolution though. In nature, traits combine, and you get things like hybrid viggor.

An infamous example of this is the jumbo tomato. None of its progeny will be jumbo. The jumboness is a result of hybrid viggor. It is a specially selected cross of two non jumbo varieties that when combined, have synergistic traits.

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution
Post by: NW_Kohaku on February 01, 2013, 04:36:06 pm

Quote from: wierd on February 01, 2013, 04:18:10 pm

That would have to be a very weakened and watered down version of evolution though. In nature, traits combine, and you get things like hybrid viggor.

An infamous example of this is the jumbo tomato. None of its progeny will be jumbo. The jumboness is a result of hybrid viggor. It is a specially selected cross of two non jumbo varieties that when combined, have synergistic traits.

Well, it's the balancing act of realism versus what you can actually code, then, isn't it?

Current animal domestication is extremely simplified and not at all realistic, since it basically only tracks how innately tame a creature is based upon how tame its mother was when she got pregnant, and can result in domesticated animals within just a couple generations.

Real domestication is based more upon selecting the friendliest or most desirable-traited animal, and slaughtering the rest. 

Russian researchers, for example, are working on domesticating silver foxes, and one of the things they've wound up doing is winding up with foxes that bark like a dog, have floppy ears like dogs do, and greet humans in a friendly manner and want to play with humans... or in other words, it's basically a dog.

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution
Post by: wierd on February 01, 2013, 04:58:24 pm

I am familar with that research. The other side was "anti-domesticated" foxes, that were violently agrressive. :D

But yes-- that's why I said doing that right would be computationally expensive. :)

I suppose you could simulate hybrid vigor by having a couple of float values representing traits (instead of integer values), like size, nutrient density, etc.... and store that information in an array per seed produced.  We can fudge the memory retention, by having cross fert happen between plants growing in the same field together, as a distribution. (Eg, plant seeds from civ 1 next to seeds from civ 2 in the same field using the "x" expanded menu.), the crossing is statistical, rather than from fixed parentages, and across the whole planted stand. The resulting produce will store their trait array, which is copied to the seeds extracted upon processing. Information can be retained less expensively that way.

Viggor happens when values for traits between seeds planted exceed a standard deviation. (Eg, the seeds are very different.)

The array could hold simplified traits, like these:

<toxic>---<edible>
<coarse>--<pleasing texture>
<small>---<large>
<low yield>--<high yeild>
<disgusting>--<delicious>
<ugly>--<attractive>

Etc.  Each spectrum is a float value between 0 and 1.

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution
Post by: NW_Kohaku on February 01, 2013, 05:05:04 pm

Didn't see this edit at first...

Quote from: wierd on February 01, 2013, 02:49:34 pm

**Note--

Not that I think all magic should be made out to be pure ignorance though.  Necromancers, Mummies that raise the dead, and the like are obviously REAL magic.  However, these occurrences are "extraordinary"-- 

We would need an explanation for why subterene environs are so obscenely magical, but why dwarves arent natural spell casters, despite living in, and consuming, immensely magically imbued environmental products.  Why dont dwarves have superpowers, and such-- for instance.  We would also need an explanation for why surface areas are routinely mundane excepting in specially magically dense areas, like undead reanimating biomes, and super happy cottoncandy grassed sunshine and dewdrop infested good biomes.

This gets into cosmological explanations, which are PRNG generated-- making them off limits, and or-- not really PRNG, but actually "Selected from formula", and requiring a cogent formula to build sensible cosmologies from.

We would also need explanations for why wild magical energies dont just conjure things up into existence willy nilly.

Pratchet balanced that, by saying "Belief" is a finite resource. (See for instance, the Hogfather story.) But then again, he has power over the cosmology to say that.  again, we dont-- PRNG generated worlds.

Balancing this is fundemental if you want a reasonably sensible xenosynthetic biosphere that runs on magic down there.

Now this is really speaking my language...

Toady intends to replace the good/evil magic with different magic biomes later.  Specifically, he wants all the spheres (http://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/Sphere) that already exist to be the basis of magic... and there's some crazy large number like 60 of them, so he wants to categorize them into a dozen or so major types of magic with sub-magics.  Biomes would then have different levels of these types of spheres affecting them.

So, basically, like Pratchett, Toady can actually step in and declare a cosmology that exerts control over how the magic spheres are allocated over the map procedurally in the same way that he declared how deserts form.  It can be as arbitrary or deep as he wants it to be.

Consider that humans now will clear-cut forests to make grasslands for them to colonize in worldgen.  Elves have a special "living in touch with the spirit of the forest" type of druidism, and that may well manifest in their own magic biome that they foster out of specific types of forests and try to spread over the worldmap the same way that humans clear-cut forests to make grasslands they can farm.  (And some of the Threetoe stories involve goblins spreading an evil biome into conquered dwarven lands.)

Hence, you can spread and change a magic biome the same way as a mundane one.  If we can do that, possibly some creatures change one type of magic into another type.  Farming or ranching those plants or animals would mean depleting one magic type and growing another, causing a xeno-ecological shift, and spreading the magic biome you prefer beyond its previous bounds. (And since gods are tied to spheres, this can be related to holy crusades to spread the seat of a god's power.)

There can also be a similar biome field in the caverns, where you can walk out of the standard caverns, and into a nether-heavy cavern, or maybe a severely death-heavy cavern that is like an evil biome on the surface now.

As for why dwarves are not magical... well, they are, actually - they produce artifacts that are supposed to be magical.  It's possible they have an affinity for a certain type of magic in particular (like Artiface) whereas elves have an affinity for another. 

It's possible what they eat is tied to how they can create artifacts, and it's possible they developed some sort of magic-nullifying capacity to survive some of the weirdness of the caverns (with artifacts being an "outlet" for excess magic buildup that will drive them insane unless released).

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution
Post by: wierd on February 01, 2013, 05:18:12 pm

Some of those explanations are kinda weak though... hmm....  it would be better to claim that dwarves and elves are opposed aspects on an axis, where elves represent the life and growth of the surface world, where dwarves represent the consumption, breakdown, and decay end being subterrene. This would have strong tie-ins to the actual mythical origins of both fantasy creatures. (Pre tolkien mind! The Poetic Adda, in particular has the actual differences between the two being essentially abritrary, and imposed by the aesir, the gods. Dwarves live in the dark, where elves live in the light, but share a common ancestry.)

In this respect, if we are going to use meta-essences as world materials, then the vitality of the subterene is directly tied to the inverse state above, and vice-versa.  Cutting down 10,000 year old oak trees worshiped by elves makes the sporecaps grow below, by freeing up the limited reseource of life energy in the connected spheres of influence.

(Hence, the animosity between them.)

Compare their alignments, for instance.

Code: [Select]


Elves.                Dwarves
-----------------------
Worship nature.             Destroy nature
Spiritualism                       Decadence
Natural harmony.          Industrial might
Peace loving.                Built for war
Natural beauty.             Manufactured beauty
"Woodland friends".         "Animal servitors"
Above ground.                      Below ground
Surrounded by growth.       Surrounded by decay
Tall.                             Short
Fair.                            Coarse
Civil.                          Raucous
Temperent.              Drunken
.....



Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution
Post by: NW_Kohaku on February 01, 2013, 05:50:17 pm

Well, if they're weak, they just need a little more thorough exploration.

I think that the caverns may actually be at least partly insulated from the surface, at least as currently implemented, as caverns are the same no matter where you go.  Evil forest, good hills, glacier, ocean floor, doesn't matter, caverns are always the same.  The HFS, and whatever strange portal you find to it through the cotton candy, likewise, is some whole other ball game.  (And some have theorized that the leaking magic of the HFS is what causes the cavern ecosystem to grow larger and more violent creatures the closer to the HFS you go, and the further from the sources of mundane energy.)

Likewise, elves are not as inherently opposed to dwarves as goblins are.  (And goblins are also, generally, an evil perversion of elves/faeries.)

With that said, it is definitely that dwarves don't respect the magic of the nature whatevers that elves worship that are one of the prime drivers of conflict between them, and like I said, with each dwarven and human civ having different gods they could certain come into conflict "purifying" the land for their own respective causes. 

Also keep in mind that the Threetoe stories depict the nature spirit of the elves as explicitly creating all the animalpeoples (at least, on the surface... no word on what creates a fishman) so there's some precident in how new creatures are created on the spot from magic.  (Well, created a squirrelman from a squirrel and magic, but that's it.)

There's also that I'm not sure dwarves are purely creatures of the caverns, either, and that they are sort of living a liminal existence between the two worlds, especially with Hill Dwarves. 

Currently, (magic) biomes stop the instant you go below the surface, and all the layers beneath that are fixed no matter where you go, so I'm thinking what we might be moving into is a scenario where there are different cavern magic biomes, although for simplicity's sake, I wonder if Toady might not trim down the number of caverns if he starts doing that, or else just making all three caverns share the same magic biome, but with different "intensity" as you go deeper. 

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution
Post by: wierd on February 01, 2013, 05:59:28 pm

Without a concrete bound, it is impossible to conjecture usefully without devolving into useless navel gazing though. I'd defer on that directon and mindset until something more solid manifests.

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution
Post by: NW_Kohaku on February 01, 2013, 06:04:41 pm

Quote from: wierd on February 01, 2013, 05:59:28 pm

Without a concrete bound, it is impossible to conjecture usefully without devolving into useless navel gazing though. I'd defer on that directon and mindset until something more solid manifests.

Well, this is the suggestions forum.

Toady basically doesn't have a concrete idea of what he wants to do, but has some concepts, but has asked for people to come up with "strange and different" ways that magic can be involved in the game.

Many people are opposed to the sort of standard RPG magic, and don't want to see dwarves work like that, especially before Toady started adding in more of the more obviously fantastic things like necromancers that just shoot holes in the "strictly real-world mechanics" paradigm for DF. 

Hence, navel-gazing a compelling enough world that isn't revolving around 15 MP to cast Fireball would be a good use of the forum.  Tying the magic into things that aren't in the direct control of the dwarves, but where they are indirectly manipulable, like making nethercap harvesting tied to magic pollution, is a way to produce the sorts of concepts that Toady can use, and probably wouldn't have thought of on his own.


EDIT: 
This means, for example, coming up with a magic-based ecosystem that maintains some rational consistency for its magical explanations would mean that magical thundergoats from the Sky Magic biome might have a special thundergoat liver that is capable of digesting lightning magic, and if ground into powder and formed into a potion - especially if you have procedural alchemy (http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=102403.msg3027251#msg3027251) - would mean that you could create potions of insulation that would protect your dwarves from a lightning-spitting forgotten beast.

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution
Post by: Draco18s on February 01, 2013, 06:09:12 pm

Quote from: NW_Kohaku on February 01, 2013, 04:36:06 pm

Russian researchers, for example, are working on domesticating silver foxes, and one of the things they've wound up doing is winding up with foxes that bark like a dog, have floppy ears like dogs do, and greet humans in a friendly manner and want to play with humans... or in other words, it's basically a dog.

And also spotted.  They didn't end up silver either.

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution
Post by: wierd on February 01, 2013, 06:25:16 pm

He could look at the "consequences" angle to magic, normally seen in religions that practice or ascribe to it.

Take for instance, wicca. (No offense to that religion or any other. It's just a well known and convenient subject to put on the table for autopsy.)

In that tradition, any magic invoked has direct and also indirect consequences, associated with the intent and nature of the spell cast.  For instance, cursing someone *will* have adverse side effects for the one performing the curse, and the form of manifestation can be wild and unpredictable. (This is why the wiccans have their 'rede', to live, let live, and wish only good things on people.) In wiccan magic, the spell uses manifested will and intent to gain its power. It isn't wishing, it is invokation.  "He WILL catch fire." And not "I wish he would catch fire."  It basically boils down to belief as a real power; they belive the magic will work, so it does. That is why it requires a declaration, and not a desire. The deleterious consequences of using magic come from the law of unintended consequences. Your setting Urist McFisherdwarf on fire, caused him to run inside, causing the fortress to catch fire, and killing your whole family. Wasn't magic fun? *g*

(Actually spent a whole summer doing nothing but studying magical belief systems one year, to better understand human cultures.)

The powers that toady seems to be going for, is more the "divine gift" kind, which usually has different consequences, depending on the god, the god's alignment, and the god's temperment.

Neither of these are a "fire1: 5mp, fire2: 10mp, fire3: 20mp, flare:50mp" type squaresoft JRPG knockoff, but are instead much more in line with mythical and legendary magic users.

The consequence to using magic, is the consequence to using magic. It draws attention to you, and celebrity can be a terrible thing, especially whe people start paying more attention to the unintended effects of your magic, especially when they kill or hurt people.

If you note, magic users in folklore tend to use very guarded language, if they are benevolent magic users. They never say things like "then he will die." Or "if you do that, you will get sick." They instead allude to natural consequences in an ambiguous manner, like "wicked kings should not rule that way." Or "it isn't safe to play in the snow like that, you could catch your death."

It is the malicious magic users that use concrete, declarative language, and their delcarations tend toward finding ways to manifest while also causing trouble for the magic user. (Their spells find ways to bite them back.)



As for the "potion of magic thundergoat liver", that falls very promiently into the realm of sypathetic magic.  A mandrake looks like a sexual organ, so it must confer sexual potency, etc.  It is really more a form of "magic, through ignorance", and actual, invoked magic. It is the result of imprper understanding, coupled with belief.  A bezoar is really just a glorified gallstone, found in a goat's stomach. Goats aren't really magically immune to poison, and a bezoar has no power to nullify poison. However, the ignorant notice that goats can at some toxic plants and be fine, notice the bezoars inside the goats when they are slaughtered, and believe the bezoar is responsible for that apparent immunity, and that if the (ugh..) eat....(gross.....) the bezoar, they will be able to survive being poisoned as well.

It has the same declarative origins as real, high magic, (by eating this bezoar, I am immune t poison!) but is magic through ignorance, and carries all the consequences that doing an ignorant thing would have. (Like being sickened by eating a disgusting gallstone!)

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution
Post by: NW_Kohaku on February 01, 2013, 06:43:52 pm

However, Wicca is a magic system based around our real world, and it is therefore one more focused on intents, where magic is an interrupter of nature. 

DF has a much more mythic cosmos more suffused in magic. 

Take a look at the mythos of The Elder Scrolls, where the sun is not a ball of fire (yet), but actually a hole in the universe through which a god escaped reality into the Aether, a place beyond causality and time. Magic is funneled in from the Aether as its pure potential of outcomes that, in the Aether, devoid of time, would never have a chance to be. 

Further, the whole of the metaplot is based upon the concept of "mantling" gods, wherein mortals can act like gods until they gain their powers and force the gods to act like them, including the dragon god that controls time, forcing "Dragon Breaks" that result in complete breakdowns in causality. 

The entire concept of the Dragon Break was created just to explain that the next game in the series takes place in a timeline where nobody can understand what events actually happened during the timeline of the last game.  The Dragon Broke, every playthrough of the game happened simultaneously, and all possible outcomes simultaneously occurred, resulting in a lot of very confused people with conflicting accounts of the same events because they actually existed on different timelines that were then forced to merge.

Oh, and the whole thing takes place as a war between Gnostic elves who want to recreate the perfect potential before time and causality existed via destruction of physical reality, and Existentialist humans who want to create a whole new race of gods through mythic evolution.

---

It's not to say that wiccan-type magic can't exist at the same time, I even had another thread on magic like that (http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=109726.0), but that amethyst men and evil biomes that generate skeletal versions of any creature that once lived there are much more suited to a mythos that involves magic-suffused biomes.

In fact, they can merge together well, with magic-granting spirits or gods that require a magic field to feed off of, themselves, and where they gain greater power and status among the other spirits or gods as their domains are expanded. (Hence, they would encourage mortals to spread their domains the way that elves want to spread their nature spirit forests, and oppose the destruction of those forests violently.)

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution
Post by: wierd on February 01, 2013, 07:02:39 pm

[Yay! Somebody else who read the game books!]

Even in the TES universe, the declarative is what makes this happen. The mortal gods of men, manifest the way they do through belief.  Likewise, the interview with vivec about why he pursecuted the neravarines and the dissident priests shows that he was using the belief of the dunmer to hold daggoth ur in his prison, being seperated from his routine magic-bath in front of the heart, and forced to rely on other means.

In the TES universe, the motal races represent the "aspects of aspects" of the divine beings who perishd to make those manifestations possible. (The original et ada are literally dead. The ground is litterally their bodies, and the mortal races are literally their progeny.) The manifestations of the divines are really just myth echos, shaped by belief. That is why the wa to heaven by violence, "walk like them until they walk like you" is able to work. :D

It is also why the marukhati selective was able to smash anuiel into akatosh when they danced on their tower. :D

In the TES mythos, "NOTHING" is real, and everything exists because of beleif. MK himself even said so. :D

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution
Post by: NW_Kohaku on February 01, 2013, 09:19:22 pm

It's a subjective reality.  It's real because enough people believe it is, but only for as long as they believe it.  (Hence, believing the first emperor ascended into being a god makes it so, until they are forced to stop believing at sword-point, which makes him not a god anymore.)

Mantling is the shaping of perception when perception IS reality.

The path Vivec talked about was transcending godhood through creating an understanding of reality where you could perceive something beyond even what the gods could understand, and functionally mantling all of existence itself to shape the laws of reality to your design.

... buuuuut we're getting kinda far off topic, here.  I referred to TES to make a point on how magic can be conceived of in a game world.

---

Quote from: wierd on February 01, 2013, 06:25:16 pm

As for the "potion of magic thundergoat liver", that falls very promiently into the realm of sypathetic magic.  A mandrake looks like a sexual organ, so it must confer sexual potency, etc.  It is really more a form of "magic, through ignorance", and actual, invoked magic. It is the result of imprper understanding, coupled with belief.  A bezoar is really just a glorified gallstone, found in a goat's stomach. Goats aren't really magically immune to poison, and a bezoar has no power to nullify poison. However, the ignorant notice that goats can at some toxic plants and be fine, notice the bezoars inside the goats when they are slaughtered, and believe the bezoar is responsible for that apparent immunity, and that if the (ugh..) eat....(gross.....) the bezoar, they will be able to survive being poisoned as well.

It has the same declarative origins as real, high magic, (by eating this bezoar, I am immune t poison!) but is magic through ignorance, and carries all the consequences that doing an ignorant thing would have. (Like being sickened by eating a disgusting gallstone!)

That's only how you are explaining it because you are trying to look at the game world as a magic-through-ignorance mindset, however. 

If, however, you perceive magic as an energy source around which biological processes develop, then it's entirely possible that either such pseudo-symapthetic magic can actually work (which is what the alchemy concept is based around - being able to transitively pass properties of different animals and plants and minerals into finished products) or there can be a more rational consequence at work.

For example, in the same way you can say Nethercaps are actually developed around the collected mollecular-scale portals to the nether realm, and that therefore you can use that wood as an infinite heat sink wherever, even if stripped down or "refined" into a more concentrated form of nether portals, (however much danger there may be in attempting that stunt,) you can then distill down nether portals to a material that you can then work into other materials if you can find an alchemical reaction that will accept the material you put nether portals into as a reagent.  Hence, you might suffuse a metal with nether portals as you are working it by temporarily dimming their power to link to the nether realm, and when forging is finished, you have a sword or shield or other item that permanently contains the nether portal's effects because you have placed them within the metal.  (Hopefully in a stable and safe way...)

It's not so unscientific when you really get down to it to see that goats can eat poison, and then experiment with different body parts they have near their digestion tract to try to find what gives them their immunity.  (Provided you take adequate care for if you were wrong and experiment in a safe manner, not just assuming you were right with your first guess.)

Eventually, through blind experimentation, you will hit on something right, and that's really what most folk-medicines and even those handed-down farming techniques were based upon - experimentation upon a concept they didn't really understand the process, but where they could understand the inputs and the outputs were relatively reliable.  (I.E. building up a myth around why fields you left compost and manure on would produce greater crop yields, while those that didn't have those things would lose their fertility over the years.)

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution
Post by: wierd on February 01, 2013, 10:35:39 pm

Dont' misunderstand;

Science does not give us knowledge of what is.  It gives us knowledge of what things are not. The process provides us with more refined ideas, not pure ideas.  The scientist is not immune from ignorance, only less beholden.  This is very important to accept as true, if you want to avoid falling victim to hubris and observation biases.

As such, until the villagers test the bezoars on somebody that doesn't believe they work, in a double blind experiment, they wouldn't be able to determine that the bezoar is not really what is causing the poison immunity magic. (The belief in the bezoar is!)

As such, it is still ignorance, in the real sense, but they are unable to determine that their belief is physically untrue, bcause their beleif has real, measurable effects, which reinforce the beleif.

Eg, see this feedback cycle:

Stage 1)

I asked a fire imp how it makes fire. It says it simply wills the fire into being. I believe this, because I see it produce fire from is bare hands. As a spirit of fire, it wears no clothes, and carries no tinder. Fire simply appears where it commands. (I narrowly escaped the encounter.)

Stage 2)

I began practicing willing fire to exist myself. I am embolded by my experience watching the fire imp. I WILL master fire!

Stage 3)

I conjured a flame today! Now I KNOW I can produce fire as well! I won't stop until I can best that imp!

Stage 4)

(New student)
I have seen the fire wizard today. I am not the first student to come seeking how to master fire. I know it can be done, because I have seen him produce fire from nothing. I will learn to master fire as well!

From then on, the knowledge of fire becomes real. Further, the practice may take on regional color, as techniques to help overcome personal disbelief are incorporated, such as gestures. The art slowly moves away from the pureness of "I simply will it to be, and it is.", to "I know that if I gester just so, I can make a wall of flames."  Fundementally, it is the same thing; belief given form, but the manifestation changes as a result of instruction, and improper knowledge, even if that improper knowledge has real effects, such as more precise control over the magic. (Eg, "Oh no, you can only make the volcano explode by doing the hokey pokey naked, with 2 squirrels strapped to your nipples, and covered in chicken grease while gargling river spirits. When you spit into the fireplace, and the flames rise up into the air, THEN the volcano will erupt!"... because the practitioner believes this is the correct way to perform the magic, for THEM, it is!)

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution
Post by: wierd on February 01, 2013, 10:36:11 pm

Dont' misunderstand;

Science does not give us knowledge of what is.  It gives us knowledge of what things are not. The process provides us with more refined ideas, not pure ideas.  The scientist is not immune from ignorance, only less beholden.  This is very important to accept as true, if you want to avoid falling victim to hubris and observation biases.

As such, until the villagers test the bezoars on somebody that doesn't believe they work, in a double blind experiment, they wouldn't be able to determine that the bezoar is not really what is causing the poison immunity magic. (The belief in the bezoar is!)

As such, it is still ignorance, in the real sense, but they are unable to determine that their belief is physically untrue, bcause their beleif has real, measurable effects, which reinforce the beleif.

Eg, see this feedback cycle:

Stage 1)

I asked a fire imp how it makes fire. It says it simply wills the fire into being. I believe this, because I see it produce fire from is bare hands. As a spirit of fire, it wears no clothes, and carries no tinder. Fire simply appears where it commands. (I narrowly escaped the encounter.)

Stage 2)

I began practicing willing fire to exist myself. I am embolded by my experience watching the fire imp. I WILL master fire!

Stage 3)

I conjured a flame today! Now I KNOW I can produce fire as well! I won't stop until I can best that imp!

Stage 4)

(New student)
I have seen the fire wizard today. I am not the first student to come seeking how to master fire. I know it can be done, because I have seen him produce fire from nothing. I will learn to master fire as well!

From then on, the knowledge of fire becomes real. Further, the practice may take on regional color, as techniques to help overcome personal disbelief are incorporated, such as gestures. The art slowly moves away from the pureness of "I simply will it to be, and it is.", to "I know that if I gester just so, I can make a wall of flames."  Fundementally, it is the same thing; belief given form, but the manifestation changes as a result of instruction, and improper knowledge, even if that improper knowledge has real effects, such as more precise control over the magic. (Eg, "Oh no, you can only make the volcano explode by doing the hokey pokey naked, with 2 squirrels strapped to your nipples, and covered in chicken grease while gargling river spirits. When you spit into the fireplace, and the flames rise up into the air, THEN the volcano will erupt!"... because the practitioner believes this is the correct way to perform the magic, for THEM, it is!)


Likewise with the bezoar. Really, there isn't much special about the bezoar, other than the fact that it is crystalized bile. (Blach!) Bile DOES serve a function in protecting the stomach from corrosive and irritating substances. This is why goats that eat a lot of irritating plantlife are likely to develop one. Eating the bezoar may well help protect your stomach from getting damaged by a nasty, irritating plant substance.  But, this fosters a belief in magical protection, which quickly outshines any physical protection.

Take for instance, picts, and their belief that painting themselves in woad pigment before battle magically shielded them from injury.  In a magical universe, this could well become true! One person believes the blueness is responsible after seeing a blue colored cobaltite titan take relentless punishment, for instance. Honestly thinks it is the blueness that conferred that resistance, paints himself blue, and truely believes himself invulnerable, like the titan. Others see him resist getting hit with axes, hammers, crossbows, and catapult rounds, and ask how he does it. He says it's the blueness. They believe it.

BOOYA.  Blue bodypaint suddenly is magically more effective than a candyfloss bikini is.

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution
Post by: winner on February 01, 2013, 11:01:27 pm

Could you talk about the nature of magic in a non farm thread.  It's very interesting, but will make it harder for future people to completely read this thread.

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution
Post by: wierd on February 01, 2013, 11:20:22 pm

Sorry. :(  it got OT from a discussion about magic interracting with a biosphere. Specifically, its role in cavern ecosystem, and the impact that would have on agriculture.

I am personally opposed to magic being involved in agriculture, because it would mundanify magic, and or, totally break agriculture. (Most likely the latter.)

I would prefer to keep magic as an extraordinary thing that doesn't manifest frequently, rather than something as common as green grass. The world is more... sensible.. that way, and better suited to a computer simulation, instead of a literary fantasy.

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution
Post by: NW_Kohaku on February 02, 2013, 12:30:25 am

Well, to keep the response on magic (relatively) succinct...

I'm saying it's not magic by ignorance, it's an innate magic property of different materials, and they are scientifically testable.  There's something in that goat liver that's magic, and you can extract and use it:
Objective reality with magic forces you don't understand, but which do have predictable effects for a certain set of controlled causes.

Magic also is already mundane.  Goblins are immortal and don't eat but get their wool by shearing trolls and have access to caverns full of magic mushrooms.  Elves talk to animals and speak with a magic forest spirit that tells them how to live their lives.  Dwarves are magic creatures that exhibit magical properties, even if not all the time.  You might choose not to believe this what with most magic not yet implemented and things like the nature of a feather tree not being completely obvious that when Toady says "Feather tree" he literally means "tree made of feathers", but it's true.  The quarry bushes we already have are gray bushes with leaves that make no sense underground with oils just like an aboveground plant that grow from rock-like nuts.  Cave wheat is like regular wheat, but white, and not any sort of mushroom.

All underground crops simply are magic.  Underground farming is magic farming.  There's no way around that, the only way forward is to embrace it.  It's simply a matter of incorporating mundane magic into the rational framework of objective reality (where belief shapes nothing outside your own mind) that this game clearly also has.

What I'm suggesting is more rules so that magic isn't as rampant and able to be taken for granted as it already is - an amethyst man can only operate within the magical fields that support it, and will be rendered inert if removed from its necessary magic.  Quarry bushes are magic plants that rely upon magic from the caverns to grow.  Without that magic, they die as a plant without sun would.

Hence, "energy source" - like the sun is the energy source for a regular plant, a magic plant needs magic.  Sun berries can't grow without good magic, outside of good magic biomes, they die.  (No more just plain importing the seeds and growing them willy-nilly.) 

---

If I can use this to lead back to the non-magic aspects of the thread...

One of the other things a multi-variable system does is include the concepts of what biomes and soils are suitable for plants.  Orange orchards die in frost - you wouldn't be able to grow them anywhere but Warm or Tropical biomes. 

Soil acidity would also be something fairly biome-dependent.  Evergreen forest biomes having highly acidic soil, for example, would dictate very different soil acidity, and hence, viable crops, than a desert even if you were capable of supplying fresh water.  Drainage would also be something slightly more out of the control of the dwarves to easily change (although with work, you could alter it), making for some crops far easier to grow in some areas than others.

These differentiate forts by biome and region.  This both makes trade more useful, especially if you start getting to growing some types of items, such as cotton/flax/rope reed only really heavily in warmer or more tropical regions, so that colder regions have to import cloth, as well as making the game more varied as not every fort will be capable of growing everything of use every time.

I also stand by the assertion that multiple "nutrient" variables that are easier to change and more short-term are crucial to providing a challenging experience.

Water is also a key variable that needs to be addressed even more obviously than just soil fertility and energy source - the water management section (http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=76007.msg1920007#msg1920007) covers how introducing a need to keep water flowing, as well as keep water finite (rather than having infinitely flooding sources of water) makes for a far more challenging irrigation problem (especially underground, where you can't just rely on rain). Engineering is obviously key in providing for safe and controlled irrigation, and it ties the strengths of the rest of the game's emergent behaviors into the need for agriculture. 

Likewise, if we have more complex composting needs (especially if those require using sewers to collect extra compostable materials from animals and dwarf alike) there's a logistical challenge in moving around all the various sources of compost to composting sites, and then moving the finished fertilizers and biomass to the farms.  For added challenge, remember that compost-to-be creates miasma, and that miasma might soon spread disease.

As opposed to merely having beans replenish the soil once a cycle, these two activities are actually spacial problems that involve moving things throughout the fort, and involve player skill in preparing their space-management and logistics.  Everything else in the fort can trip over a poorly designed water management system.  (Especially if you flood your fort...) A cycle of beans, fallow, corn, meanwhile, is wholly intrinsic to the fields itself, with no real possibility of emergent growth in gameplay.

The pests/weeds/diseases, likewise, invites use of specific predator animals or else companion planting of pest-repelling plants.  If a disease strikes certain crops, it can stay in the soil and strike again if you plant more of the same crop, forcing you to avoid some crops until the disease has died.

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution
Post by: wierd on February 02, 2013, 03:13:30 am

My simplified suggestion was meant to include water availability as a variable. I admit that soil type would also place additional constraints on gameplay, but it needn't get into such detail as the parts potasium to parts sodium in the soil. If that were the case, the only real solution is to import clays from different regions, and radically overhaul the clay types. (Some clays are volcanic, others are sedimentary, for example. They have very different soil properties, but both are usually just fine for pottery. If the local clay is deficient, which is why parts potasium is low, you would need a way to import a buttload of a different clay, and till it in, thus changing the soil tile type. As is, this would be rife for abuse, because you could simply import a bunch of fire clay, and keep tilling it into a 1x1 tile farm, until it is basically pure fireclay, unbuild the farm, designate it as a clay source, and totally break imports as the means of getting more. Same with sand, etc.)

I could see alkaline<->acid as a variable, because that would influence weather or not you grow wheat (prefers alkaline) or strawberries (prefers acid), but going too far is a problem.

The idea I had in mind, was that areas that are dry, can't sustain biomass, and naturally just deplete to naked clay or sand. This means the hot and dry biome would require compost to even attempt getting started, in addition to irrigation, which is true of the real world too. You could pour all the fresh water you wanted on the sahara, very little if anything would grow, or could grow, even with miles and miles of wet sand. Plants require the chemical exchange capacities of the biomass in the soil to get nutrients. Without it, they just can't grow. (Hydroponics actively dissolves the ideal nutrient concentrations into the water artificially, to get around this. Distilled water will always kill plants, without soil being present. Even "air plants" need an inert biomass filler to live, like cuir.)

Rather than be "soil building" directly,  was more implying that it was soil building, *if* you did not harvest the crop, tilled it under, and left the plot fallow for one full year, because that is really what you have to do with soil building crops to re-establish biomass.

Instead, the desired protocol I had in mind, was to make agriculture expensive, because it is. The system I proposed (or thought I proposed anyway...) would have required soil neutral plants that have a low nutritional yeild be the primary route to soil building, via a very inefficient composting process on the side.

Eg, you grow a boat load of ratweeds, because it is all your rotten marginal embark can grow to start with. You use some of it to make alcohol, so you don't get the game over screen, and rely on imported food and possibly poultry to survive starvation.  The rest of it, you directly shove into the composter. 

Compost loses anyplace from 50% to 90% of its mass through the composting process. So, you feed 500 units of ratweeds in, and you get maybe 50 to 250 units of compost out.  This is noplace near enough to fertilize your farm plots you used to grow 500 units of ratweeds on.  The soil buildup process is thus painfully slow, as it really, actually is IRL when dealing with marginal and pathetic soils. (You don't wanna know how hard it would be to build up on an undead biome that can only grow sliver barbs)

The idea was to link quantity of compost, with quality of input material, so that a nutrient rich input would lose less biomass during composting, and balance that by having higher density crops just have lower yeilds. This means that you could jumpstart your crappy soil, by either I.porting compost directly (whoo! Expensive!), or sinking lots of urists into buying high value crop goods, just to compost them, and crying bitter tears as your dwarves go bonkers at the sight of fresh veggies and pig out on them instead. :D

On top of that, tieing it all in with weather, and seasonal variations based on the biome, further making some crops simply unreasonable to grow depending on the embark.

All you have to do is set up the numbers the same way a casino does, so that developing a winning strategy is FIERCELY dependent upon the location, and specifically THAT location.

For instance, if you embark on that evil biome, you might literally be forced to have hunter and soldier dwarfs killing abominations, and composting the putrid corpses, just to keep enough biomass in the soil to barely survive, because there just isn't enough sunlight in the area, due to ut being on the north pole, and the constant dust storms and rains of putrid filth that come down, preventing the soil from being able to be built up enough to do more than just barely be fertile enough to make a pitiful amount of the worst alcohols in the game, and still stay homeostatic.

Compare wit the idyllic life of a temperate zone berry picker farm, that has lovely fine weather, and naturally fertile soil.

The gamplay requirements will be radically different, despite the exact same gameplay system being in effect.

As far s I could tell, that was the desired outcome. *shrug

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution
Post by: zwei on February 02, 2013, 03:36:29 am

Quote from: NW_Kohaku on February 01, 2013, 01:26:48 pm

Part of the problem, though, is that making a Lead Farmer that's worth listening to would be extremely complicated to program, as it would require making assessments of farming as a math problem when I've specifically set up farming not to be a simple math problem.

Having a mechanic where you can see, at the "I'm choosing what to plant" screen what crops the soil will currently support, what crops will take what amount of fertilizer before being able to be supported, and what crops are just not fit for the current soil or environment, no matter how you try to dink with it, is both easier to accomplish and also perhaps a bit more informative to the player for understanding how the whole thing works. 

(That is, rather than just telling you what to do, you know what you can do easily, and what is more difficult to do, and why it's more difficult.)

There are two things:

Lead Farmer should not be the best advice giver, so he can have reasonably inaccurate advice, he just should not give outright harmful advice. That is why skills and personality matters (and likes - if your agriculturist loves fisher berries, he will tend to suggest them when possible) - they are there to not improve, but rather to degrade his advice.

HE is there not for you, but for people intimidated by complexity - that screen you linked is very scary!

Also, he is not supposed to plan out entire cycle, just next season.

He can basically use same heuristics like that screen: Order plants by how well current soil would support them, fudge lit a bit by fertilizer requirements and tell player to use one of top three.

If it is supposed to be educational, then simple list of reason why it is better than current plan can be given (comsumes x which is abundant, restores y which is depleted).

In the end, you can just add +ses and -ses together with some weights, order plants and pick top one.

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution
Post by: winner on February 02, 2013, 03:55:49 am

I was really moved by your vision of finite resources in (semi) closed cycle, and by difficulty scaled along multiple dimensions.  As I program a prototype of this to see how it might feel to play I'm going to focus on the dynamics of it and disregard many of the details of your proposal.

here is what I understand as the important game play dynamics involved.

Mining Fertility from the land: Just as smelting steel involves your whole map because you have to collect the materials.  Farming is more interesting when you go out and collect the fertility, whether it is by collecting cow pies, composting logs, or depositing fertile silt from the river. 

Diseases and Pests: Even if you have no way of fighting them, they make you try new crops and farming styles, as a consequence there is no such thing as the perfect crop.  Similarly when you run out of Hematite ore you start smelting the Galina that wasn't worth bothering with before.

Crowding neighboring plants: When plants compete with their neighbors for light you can become very creative with the spacial layout of your crops.  We have countless threads on how to place your workshops and stockpiles for just a little bit more efficiency.  If weeding is an issue people will come up with things like planting prickle berry and valley herbs together because by the time the herbs are harvested the prickle berries will have grown large enough to suppress weeds on their own.  Little fisher berries might be planted among the apple trees because the berries use the little space left over after the trees have used most of it.

I'm going to see how it feels to play with just these 3 features and then slowly add in the fancier stuff.

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution
Post by: wierd on February 02, 2013, 05:06:54 am

(LONG post. Probably ninja... Yep, Ninja'd)

Ok, so basically, the idea I had was this:

Water availability:
A tile that is unable to retain moisture (desert biome, without irrigation) will lose biomass per growing season (NOT YEAR!) at a rate consistent with its lack of moisture, with an upper bound of 25% per season. Thus, if not irrigated, dumping compost on it will result in all the compost vanishing without a trace in 1 year. Distance from a water source determines how moist it is, in desert biomes. Exact rate of falloff needs to be determined carefully to avoid game breaking consequences.

Tiles that are too wet (Swamp!) will have a similar problem, even though this isnt exactly RL accurate. (Instead, swamps accumulate biomass, but prevent crop growth, due to toxicity, and lack of aeration for soil microbes, leading to plants literally rotting in the ground, and becoming peat.) Instead, dryness will be dependent upon proximity to dried tiles. (May require a magma source below to force-dry the tiles, or extensive tilling to keep the tiles aerated.)

Rainfall on a tile adds moisture, and on all tiles except swamp biome ones, tiles naturally revert to being parched. Parched tiles lose biomass like on desert tiles.

Weather:
Weather affects the amount of sunlight, and the amount of rainfall a region has. In addition, "Abnormal" weather, like deadly dust, and deadly rain, block out 100% of sun when they are in effect, and in the case of deadly rain, do NOT moisturize soil.

Region:
The latitude of the embark region will determine the amount of sunlight per growing season, and variance between seasons. An equitorial region embark will receive maximum sunlight per season, on all seasons, year round. A temperate zone embark will receive maximum sunlight only in summer, 50% sunlight in spring and autumn, and 25% sunlight in the winter.  A polar region embark will receive 25% sunlight in summer, and 0% sunlight in winter.

In addition to geographical factors, effects like "Goodness" and "Evilness" will impact the natural homeostasis of the soil, making it trend more toward fertile, in the case of good biomes, or dead, in the case of evil ones. The degree of this impact needs to be carefully implemented, and needs to be (very) subtle. Little things like this can be used to keep sunberries ONLY in good biomes, and sliver barb ONLY in evil ones, for instance.

The amount of rockiness of the area should also play an important factor, just by being there, since there is no way to remove rocks from a field efficiently without simply flooding the surface, and using mud.

Biomass casino roulette, and plant growth:

Plant requirements are static. A strawberry always requires the exact same amount of energy to grow. As such, there cant be any cheating by starting a strawberry on a tile that doesnt have enough biomass in it to theoretically supply 100% of its needs, should the sun fail to shine for some reason. (Like, it being the winter at the north pole, maybe?)

This means that a tile with 0 biomass will NEVER support life, unless it is fertilized first, and then only support what could theoretically be 100% supplied by that biomass, even if the sun is shining brightly overhead.

Composting is VERY inefficient! It is this way BY DESIGN. At LEAST 50% of the biomass of the source material will be lost, and up to 99% at the top end, based on the crop.  here is a tentative list of made up values that look good without being tested:

Sliver barb (Loses 99%)
ratweed (loses 90%)
hideroot (loses 80%)
bladeweed (loses 80%)
ropereed (loses 70%)
Fisher berry (loses 60%)
Prickle berry (loses 60%)
Strawberry (loses 60%)
Sunberry (Loses 50%)
Whipvine (Loses 50%)

Going the other way, different crops produce less biomass than others, as they gain in potency for composting.

Whipvine (yeild: 5 per tile end of season)
Sunberry (yeild: 3 per tile end of season)
Strawberry (yeild: 5 per tile end of season)
Prickleberry (Yeild: 8 per tile, end of season)
Fisher berry (Yeild: 8 per tile, end of season)
Ropereed (Yield: 12 per season)
Bladeweed (15 per season)
Hideroot (20 per season)
Ratweed (20 per season)
Sliverbarb (30 per season)

note how the edible crops are lower yeild: This is intentional.

In addition to this, the consumption rate to produce alcohol closely parallels the costs for composting coupled to yeild and crop size.

1 barrel curor == 500 sliver barb (barbs are low nutrition, AND small.)
1 barrel sewer brew == 30 rat weed
1 barrel river spirits ==  20 ropereed
prickleberry and fisher wine == 100 berries (Small)
strawberry wine == 120 berries (small)
sunshine == 120 berries (small)
whip wine == 50 whips

naturally, you should be seeing how it is going to be very difficult to survive now, without MASSIVE agricultural allotments. This is more realistic than most players are used to. Welcome to hell children.

Each soil tile has a fertility ranging from 5000, to 0. Depending on the biome, regional effects, and moisture balance, this will either naturally hold steady, or fall like a gold brick through the atmosphere of jupiter.

Let's play a sample.

Evil biome, North pole. (the infamous "Haunted Glacier" embark!)

Natural vegetation: NONE
Tree cover: NONE
Temperature: FREEZING
Surroundings: TERRIFYING

Site prospect says:
NO SOIL
AQUIFER
DEEP METALS
DEEP STONE

Neighbors: Goblins, Tower, Dwarves, Humans

embark window asks if you REAAAAAAALY want to embark there.

We say yes...

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

We arrive, and first thing, we dig down into the ice, and hit the aquifer. We have to breach it, so we double slit. We hit stone. In order to get surface crops started, we have to wait several years, and we also have to get magma just below the surface to keep our irrigation system from freezing solid. This means we have to get to the magma sea.

We murder our migrants, and compost the bodies, because we can't make any alcohol yet, and have VERY limited reserves. We make boatloads of stone crafts to sell. 

The dwarven caravan for the first year arrives. We sell our crafts, and buy food and booze. Gods, do we buy food and booze.  We continue our digging, and then the yetis arrive. Thankfully, we have built a drawbridge with stone mechanisms, and deep stone we got through breaching the aquifer. Then the deadly weather arrives, killing the yetis.  We think this is a blessing, but no! NO! the yetis rise from the dead as HUSKS.  We cleverly devise a freezing cannon with pumped water from the aquifer to murder them, so they stay dead. The necromancer arrives shortly afterwards. We succeed in destroying his undead army with the water cannon, but he escapes off the map. 

The humans show up. We sell them more of our useless stone goods, and buy wood, and surface crop seeds. With the leftovers, we buy more food and booze. With the wood, we make SORELY needed beds, averting that tantrum spiral that is imminent from always drinking the same booze, sleeping on cold stone floors, and seeing the undead, and witnessing death (Murdered migrants, remember?). 

We have now reached the magma sea, and constructed a minecart dipping system to transport it to the surface... but need wood for powered rollers. Our embark doesn't have a cavern layer. 

Dwarves arrive, and we buy the wood we need. We buy more food, and more booze.  Shortly after they arrive, the goblins spring from ambush, killing some of the dwarven merchants. We compost the bodies. (both dwarven and goblin) Shortly after, we channel the surface, and start dumping magma in.  Combo attack of evil weather, Tower attack, and Kobolds. It isnt pretty. (thank the gods we used a bridge!)  By the end of it, we have several new ice sculptures, a magma cart that has been derailed, job cancellations of doom, and monsters that refuse to get in range of the ice cannon. 

Summer rolls around, and the humans show up. More deaths-- but they break the seige for us. We compost the bodies, re-rail the magma cart, and put a stone block floor over the magma pool, along with a privacy wall around the crop yard. We FINALLY pour water on the constructed floor over the magma pool. MUD! HOORAY!.. but wait.... it has ZERO fert! OH NOES!  Well, we have about 10 units of compost from all those bodies... so, we put it on.  Ok, our 1x5 plot now has a whopping 2 fert! (10/5=2) whee......... Ok, we can grow... NOTHING. Great.  (Humans dont have sliver barb seeds. Ratweed needs at least 10 fert. We should have made a 1x1 plot, fertilized to 10, and planted ratweeds... but we didnt.)

The season comes and goes and... whats that? the fert dropped to 1?! ARHG! 

Now we get serious. We ask the trade liason for turkeys, because CLEARLY we arent gonna be growing any damned plants any time soon, and it is ALREADY year 3, and by then, the plot has returned to being 0 fert.

The turkeys arrive next year, after we buy out food and drink from the human caravan again. Stone is getting a little more scarce now, so we build an obsidian machine.  We have been dutifully murdering our migrants by blocking them outside until they die of thirst and starvation, and then composting thier little fat dwarven bodies this whole time. We are now officially a death trap. We put out nest boxes, and hope for the best. 

Another year.. Another round of sieges.. More migrants we euthanize.... our dwarves have DARED to get married and start producing babies. (HOW DARE THEY!?)  We now have a steady supply of turkey poults being pooped out! We butcher their asses, and compost some of the turkey skins. We thankfully have had only metal and stone moods so far, and none have needed any bones or other cloth... Cloth.... our clothing is looking rather tattered. We will probably have to order some. 

Year two after ordering turkeys. We are now swimming in adult turkeys. We enable egg collection, and start composting the SHIT out of turkey eggs... watch painfully as it requires absurd numbers of them to produce 1 unit of compost.....  But... progress is progress..... We buy cloth, make clothes, and watch the old ones fly off like at a frat party.

Milestone! We now have 100 units of compost from dead yeti, dwarf, human, and zombie bodies and turkey eggs! HOORAY! YAY! We fertilize our 1x5 plot, and get 50 fert! YAY! We plant that bitch into ratweeds.  The month passes, and we get 100 ratweeds! YAY! we think.......  We compost it and get... 20 compost!? ARE YOU SHITTING ME!? ARMOK TAKE YOUR SOUL YOU EVIL THING!

Next season rolls around, and the farm plot is down to 20 fert.  I could have SWORN that the wiki said that it... oh... right.... 0% sunlight...... SHIT. (-20 fert for evil biome, and dry. -10 fert for ratweed, no sun) We can plant ratweed again, so we do.  Another 100 units of ratweed. Composted... 20 compost added. Now at 40 compost.

We quickly realize that in order to sustain our 1x5 plot of farmland, we are going to have to CONTINUOUSLY subsidize it with dead turkeys and eggs.  We completely forget about building the soil above 50 every 2 years, and produce sewer brew as the main alcohol, and live on turkey meat almost exclusively.  We BUY all of our cloth, by selling turkey leather, and stone crafts. we savagely prune our population to survive.

Now-- see how that works now? :D

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution
Post by: winner on February 02, 2013, 06:23:12 am

I like the idea that dry soil will lose organic matter but the specific mechanism you proposed causes a problem. If the soil is so dry that it loses organic matter faster than it gains it then it will end up with no organic matter.  if it gains organic matter slightly faster than is loses it then it will end up with loads and loads of organic matter.

Cold and wet are two conditions that lead to the accumulation of loads of organic matter because nothing can grow to eat it up. 
In the polar regions maintaining soil fertility shouldn't be a problem. Your problem would be lack of light and cold temperatures preventing plants from growing.  Fertility doesn't just vanish, it is either converted into food or washed away.

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution
Post by: 10ebbor10 on February 02, 2013, 07:07:33 am

Quote from: wierd on February 02, 2013, 05:06:54 am

(LONG post. Probably ninja... Yep, Ninja'd)

Ok, so basically, the idea I had was this:

Water availability:
A tile that is unable to retain moisture (desert biome, without irrigation) will lose biomass per growing season (NOT YEAR!) at a rate consistent with its lack of moisture, with an upper bound of 25% per season. Thus, if not irrigated, dumping compost on it will result in all the compost vanishing without a trace in 1 year. Distance from a water source determines how moist it is, in desert biomes. Exact rate of falloff needs to be determined carefully to avoid game breaking consequences.

Tiles that are too wet (Swamp!) will have a similar problem, even though this isnt exactly RL accurate. (Instead, swamps accumulate biomass, but prevent crop growth, due to toxicity, and lack of aeration for soil microbes, leading to plants literally rotting in the ground, and becoming peat.) Instead, dryness will be dependent upon proximity to dried tiles. (May require a magma source below to force-dry the tiles, or extensive tilling to keep the tiles aerated.)

Rainfall on a tile adds moisture, and on all tiles except swamp biome ones, tiles naturally revert to being parched. Parched tiles lose biomass like on desert tiles.

Weather:
Weather affects the amount of sunlight, and the amount of rainfall a region has. In addition, "Abnormal" weather, like deadly dust, and deadly rain, block out 100% of sun when they are in effect, and in the case of deadly rain, do NOT moisturize soil.

Region:
The latitude of the embark region will determine the amount of sunlight per growing season, and variance between seasons. An equitorial region embark will receive maximum sunlight per season, on all seasons, year round. A temperate zone embark will receive maximum sunlight only in summer, 50% sunlight in spring and autumn, and 25% sunlight in the winter.  A polar region embark will receive 25% sunlight in summer, and 0% sunlight in winter.

In addition to geographical factors, effects like "Goodness" and "Evilness" will impact the natural homeostasis of the soil, making it trend more toward fertile, in the case of good biomes, or dead, in the case of evil ones. The degree of this impact needs to be carefully implemented, and needs to be (very) subtle. Little things like this can be used to keep sunberries ONLY in good biomes, and sliver barb ONLY in evil ones, for instance.

The amount of rockiness of the area should also play an important factor, just by being there, since there is no way to remove rocks from a field efficiently without simply flooding the surface, and using mud.

Biomass casino roulette, and plant growth:

Plant requirements are static. A strawberry always requires the exact same amount of energy to grow. As such, there cant be any cheating by starting a strawberry on a tile that doesnt have enough biomass in it to theoretically supply 100% of its needs, should the sun fail to shine for some reason. (Like, it being the winter at the north pole, maybe?)

This means that a tile with 0 biomass will NEVER support life, unless it is fertilized first, and then only support what could theoretically be 100% supplied by that biomass, even if the sun is shining brightly overhead.

Composting is VERY inefficient! It is this way BY DESIGN. At LEAST 50% of the biomass of the source material will be lost, and up to 99% at the top end, based on the crop.  here is a tentative list of made up values that look good without being tested:

Sliver barb (Loses 99%)
ratweed (loses 90%)
hideroot (loses 80%)
bladeweed (loses 80%)
ropereed (loses 70%)
Fisher berry (loses 60%)
Prickle berry (loses 60%)
Strawberry (loses 60%)
Sunberry (Loses 50%)
Whipvine (Loses 50%)

Going the other way, different crops produce less biomass than others, as they gain in potency for composting.

Whipvine (yeild: 5 per tile end of season)
Sunberry (yeild: 3 per tile end of season)
Strawberry (yeild: 5 per tile end of season)
Prickleberry (Yeild: 8 per tile, end of season)
Fisher berry (Yeild: 8 per tile, end of season)
Ropereed (Yield: 12 per season)
Bladeweed (15 per season)
Hideroot (20 per season)
Ratweed (20 per season)
Sliverbarb (30 per season)

note how the edible crops are lower yeild: This is intentional.

In addition to this, the consumption rate to produce alcohol closely parallels the costs for composting coupled to yeild and crop size.

1 barrel curor == 500 sliver barb (barbs are low nutrition, AND small.)
1 barrel sewer brew == 30 rat weed
1 barrel river spirits ==  20 ropereed
prickleberry and fisher wine == 100 berries (Small)
strawberry wine == 120 berries (small)
sunshine == 120 berries (small)
whip wine == 50 whips

naturally, you should be seeing how it is going to be very difficult to survive now, without MASSIVE agricultural allotments. This is more realistic than most players are used to. Welcome to hell children.

Each soil tile has a fertility ranging from 5000, to 0. Depending on the biome, regional effects, and moisture balance, this will either naturally hold steady, or fall like a gold brick through the atmosphere of jupiter.

Let's play a sample.

Evil biome, North pole. (the infamous "Haunted Glacier" embark!)

Natural vegetation: NONE
Tree cover: NONE
Temperature: FREEZING
Surroundings: TERRIFYING

Site prospect says:
NO SOIL
AQUIFER
DEEP METALS
DEEP STONE

Neighbors: Goblins, Tower, Dwarves, Humans

embark window asks if you REAAAAAAALY want to embark there.

We say yes...

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

We arrive, and first thing, we dig down into the ice, and hit the aquifer. We have to breach it, so we double slit. We hit stone. In order to get surface crops started, we have to wait several years, and we also have to get magma just below the surface to keep our irrigation system from freezing solid. This means we have to get to the magma sea.

We murder our migrants, and compost the bodies, because we can't make any alcohol yet, and have VERY limited reserves. We make boatloads of stone crafts to sell. 

The dwarven caravan for the first year arrives. We sell our crafts, and buy food and booze. Gods, do we buy food and booze.  We continue our digging, and then the yetis arrive. Thankfully, we have built a drawbridge with stone mechanisms, and deep stone we got through breaching the aquifer. Then the deadly weather arrives, killing the yetis.  We think this is a blessing, but no! NO! the yetis rise from the dead as HUSKS.  We cleverly devise a freezing cannon with pumped water from the aquifer to murder them, so they stay dead. The necromancer arrives shortly afterwards. We succeed in destroying his undead army with the water cannon, but he escapes off the map. 

The humans show up. We sell them more of our useless stone goods, and buy wood, and surface crop seeds. With the leftovers, we buy more food and booze. With the wood, we make SORELY needed beds, averting that tantrum spiral that is imminent from always drinking the same booze, sleeping on cold stone floors, and seeing the undead, and witnessing death (Murdered migrants, remember?). 

We have now reached the magma sea, and constructed a minecart dipping system to transport it to the surface... but need wood for powered rollers. Our embark doesn't have a cavern layer. 

Dwarves arrive, and we buy the wood we need. We buy more food, and more booze.  Shortly after they arrive, the goblins spring from ambush, killing some of the dwarven merchants. We compost the bodies. (both dwarven and goblin) Shortly after, we channel the surface, and start dumping magma in.  Combo attack of evil weather, Tower attack, and Kobolds. It isnt pretty. (thank the gods we used a bridge!)  By the end of it, we have several new ice sculptures, a magma cart that has been derailed, job cancellations of doom, and monsters that refuse to get in range of the ice cannon. 

Summer rolls around, and the humans show up. More deaths-- but they break the seige for us. We compost the bodies, re-rail the magma cart, and put a stone block floor over the magma pool, along with a privacy wall around the crop yard. We FINALLY pour water on the constructed floor over the magma pool. MUD! HOORAY!.. but wait.... it has ZERO fert! OH NOES!  Well, we have about 10 units of compost from all those bodies... so, we put it on.  Ok, our 1x5 plot now has a whopping 2 fert! (10/5=2) whee......... Ok, we can grow... NOTHING. Great.  (Humans dont have sliver barb seeds. Ratweed needs at least 10 fert. We should have made a 1x1 plot, fertilized to 10, and planted ratweeds... but we didnt.)

The season comes and goes and... whats that? the fert dropped to 1?! ARHG! 

Now we get serious. We ask the trade liason for turkeys, because CLEARLY we arent gonna be growing any damned plants any time soon, and it is ALREADY year 3, and by then, the plot has returned to being 0 fert.

The turkeys arrive next year, after we buy out food and drink from the human caravan again. Stone is getting a little more scarce now, so we build an obsidian machine.  We have been dutifully murdering our migrants by blocking them outside until they die of thirst and starvation, and then composting thier little fat dwarven bodies this whole time. We are now officially a death trap. We put out nest boxes, and hope for the best. 

Another year.. Another round of sieges.. More migrants we euthanize.... our dwarves have DARED to get married and start producing babies. (HOW DARE THEY!?)  We now have a steady supply of turkey poults being pooped out! We butcher their asses, and compost some of the turkey skins. We thankfully have had only metal and stone moods so far, and none have needed any bones or other cloth... Cloth.... our clothing is looking rather tattered. We will probably have to order some. 

Year two after ordering turkeys. We are now swimming in adult turkeys. We enable egg collection, and start composting the SHIT out of turkey eggs... watch painfully as it requires absurd numbers of them to produce 1 unit of compost.....  But... progress is progress..... We buy cloth, make clothes, and watch the old ones fly off like at a frat party.

Milestone! We now have 100 units of compost from dead yeti, dwarf, human, and zombie bodies and turkey eggs! HOORAY! YAY! We fertilize our 1x5 plot, and get 50 fert! YAY! We plant that bitch into ratweeds.  The month passes, and we get 100 ratweeds! YAY! we think.......  We compost it and get... 20 compost!? ARE YOU SHITTING ME!? ARMOK TAKE YOUR SOUL YOU EVIL THING!

Next season rolls around, and the farm plot is down to 20 fert.  I could have SWORN that the wiki said that it... oh... right.... 0% sunlight...... SHIT. (-20 fert for evil biome, and dry. -10 fert for ratweed, no sun) We can plant ratweed again, so we do.  Another 100 units of ratweed. Composted... 20 compost added. Now at 40 compost.

We quickly realize that in order to sustain our 1x5 plot of farmland, we are going to have to CONTINUOUSLY subsidize it with dead turkeys and eggs.  We completely forget about building the soil above 50 every 2 years, and produce sewer brew as the main alcohol, and live on turkey meat almost exclusively.  We BUY all of our cloth, by selling turkey leather, and stone crafts. we savagely prune our population to survive.

Now-- see how that works now? :D

It doesn't. It makes little sense. For example, deserts are actually quite fertile, as water availabilty doesn't interfere with ground nutrients. Polar embarks should recieve like 200% sun in winter/summer (Midnight sun*), and 0% in winter. Equatorial areas should still see changes in solar influx. Furthermore, the tremendously decreased yields, as well as giant problems with soil fertility (Since composting is hard and also your only option for increasing fertility) will completely nerf farming into oblivion.

Also, this once again reduces farming to a simple optimalzation exercise. All the so called challenges that the system caused are 100% foreseeable/ preventable by simply looking at the wiki. You haven't created a game system, but a puzzle. (Which is FUN the first time, but boring ever after)




*Actually they don't due to the angle in which the sun falls in, but it certainly should be a lot more than just 25%.

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution
Post by: wierd on February 02, 2013, 12:01:11 pm

You are not listening to me. REAL FARMING **IS** an optimization exercise.

The issue, is that the optimization that is optimal for the site, is only optimal FOR THAT SITE. That is how nature WORKS. It establishes and maintains local maxima, based on the available nutrients, and set physics.

The example was specifically for one that *WOULD* narf farming into oblivion. The exact same setup, on a different embark, will have radically different results. That is the whole point. The wiki cant tell you "Plant strawberries, Ok, Now plant ratweeds, Ok now do X... Now do Y.. Repeat."  It can only give you helpful advice.

What you are wanting is an inconsistent play experience, and or, you dont know what you want.

Or, do I need to make an example of what embarking on a temperate biome would be like, to show you how you are wrong?

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution
Post by: 10ebbor10 on February 02, 2013, 12:05:14 pm

Quote from: wierd on February 02, 2013, 12:01:11 pm

You are not listening to me. REAL FARMING **IS** an optimization exercise.

The issue, is that the optimization that is optimal for the site, is only optimal FOR THAT SITE. That is how nature WORKS. It establishes and maintains local maxima, based on the available nutrients, and set physics.

What you are wanting is an inconsistent play experience.

Not completely. I don't think you got the point of most of the thread.

The fun in most games is that you have a choice between risk and reward, forcing you into risk management and such. With your thing, that is mostly impossible, as everything is predefined, and you can't really take risks. ((The weather system is about the only thing that has a little bit of variation, and even then not really, as the soil always contains enough of you can't plant.))

What you accomplished is creating a system that is neither fun, nor realistic. A system where there's always one set option that's the best for that site, and then added a lot of annoying stuff to get to it.

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution
Post by: wierd on February 02, 2013, 12:08:07 pm

That is only true of that particular embark, which happened to have been at the freaking north pole.  You cant grow crops at the north pole IRL either.

Try running the numbers with a temperate embark, and see what happens.


As for "Always the best for that site"--- Again, the only way for that to NOT be true, is to have an inconsistent experience. The real world is surprisingly consistent. The minerals in the soil dont magically transmute themselves, just to make it hard on farmers, the sun doesnt radically change its degree of output on a whim, and plants dont vary terribly on their nutritional needs, barring excessive human interventions. The major variable with agriculture *IS* the weather, and your location. Agriculture has a history of being boring, because once you know your crop and your plot of land, its easy peasy.


Always has been.


As for "Not getting the point of this thread"-- I was under the impression that the short list was:

"I dont want it to be a simple case of "Plant this, then this, then this", and I want it to at least partially represent the actual complexity/difficulty of soil management"

Mine does that. Both cases.  What's the problem, other than that it isnt an inconsistent and crazy fickle random pile?

On to the "You cant take risks"-- again, look at the embark! It's THE NORTH POLE. See? NORTH POLE. BIG capital, flashing, NEON letters! There *ISNT* a viable strategy for risk/reward there, because it is not viable for agriculture. EVER!

If you try the numbers someplace less insane, you will see that the soil has a LOT of "Buffer" to it, allowing for a VERY wide range of play styles. Soil range is 5000 (Yes, 5 THOUSAND) to 0.  You can rape and pillage the soil a WHOLE LOT before it croaks on a more sensible embark with this simplified system.  The sample I gave was extreme FOR A REASON.


(as for the quip about my absolute values on solar intensity, I suggest you re-aquaint yourself with the differences between direct rays, and indirect rays.  There really is a reason why the north pole is cold. The angle of incident at a polar region on earth is less than 20 degrees, the light traverses MUCH more atmosphere as it travels to reach the surface, and when it gets there, it has considerably less energy. That is why I fixed it at 25% for summer, and 0% for winter. The length of day does not offset the lower intensity by any noteworthy amount.)

For completeness, I will give you a more sensible embark, and several possible play strategies, just to drive the point home. This could take awhile though.

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution
Post by: 10ebbor10 on February 02, 2013, 12:44:06 pm

The world tends to vary itself a lot actually. Pests, invasive species and the lot. It isn't 100% predictable like you make it out to be. There's the risk of crop failure, and a variety of irrigation and compost techniques that each have drawbacks and advantages. (Your system doesn't have that. Something either increases biomass(Good) or lowers it(Bad)).

Quote

As for "Not getting the point of this thread"-- I was under the impression that the short list was:

"I dont want it to be a simple case of "Plant this, then this, then this", and I want it to at least partially represent the actual complexity/difficulty of soil management"

Nope, the point of this thread is how to make farming a fun and hopefully quasi realistic experience rather than turning it into a simple optimalization thing, as you just did.

Quote

On to the "You cant take risks"-- again, look at the embark! It's THE NORTH POLE. See? NORTH POLE. BIG capital, flashing, NEON letters! There *ISNT* a viable strategy for risk/reward there, because it is not viable for agriculture. EVER!

If you try the numbers someplace less insane, you will see that the soil has a LOT of "Buffer" to it, allowing for a VERY wide range of play styles. Soil range is 5000 (Yes, 5 THOUSAND) to 0.  You can rape and pillage the soil a WHOLE LOT before it croaks on a more sensible embark with this simplified system.  The sample I gave was extreme FOR A REASON.

You know what risk means, right? It means that you don't know if something will work or not. For the North pole, it doesn't work, simply. It doesn't mean that you know that your system will work perfectly fine for exactly X years(give or take a few) before failing. That isn't a risk, that's just a perfectly stable resource with a limited supply.

((Oh, and the North pole could work quite fine for agriculture actually, with a decent heating system and if you farm only in it's summer (Constant daylight is nice).
Besides, an actual example of your system being fun rather than an exercise in futility might have been a better idea.))

Quote

(as for the quip about my absolute values on solar intensity, I suggest you re-aquaint yourself with the differences between direct rays, and indirect rays.  There really is a reason why the north pole is cold. The angle of incident at a polar region on earth is less than 20 degrees, the light traverses MUCH more atmosphere as it travels to reach the surface, and when it gets there, it has considerably less energy. That is why I fixed it at 25% for summer, and 0% for winter. The length of day does not offset the lower intensity by any noteworthy amount.)

While the angle is quite low, I remain by my point that your system doesn't make much any sense. The length of the day has a significant effect on plans that normally live in shadowy situations (provided you can heat them), and would be seriously beneficial to them. Sadly, that's another thing that your system can't do.

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution
Post by: NW_Kohaku on February 02, 2013, 01:05:11 pm

Quote from: wierd on February 02, 2013, 03:13:30 am

My simplified suggestion was meant to include water availability as a variable. I admit that soil type would also place additional constraints on gameplay, but it needn't get into such detail as the parts potasium to parts sodium in the soil. If that were the case, the only real solution is to import clays from different regions, and radically overhaul the clay types. (Some clays are volcanic, others are sedimentary, for example. They have very different soil properties, but both are usually just fine for pottery. If the local clay is deficient, which is why parts potasium is low, you would need a way to import a buttload of a different clay, and till it in, thus changing the soil tile type. As is, this would be rife for abuse, because you could simply import a bunch of fire clay, and keep tilling it into a 1x1 tile farm, until it is basically pure fireclay, unbuild the farm, designate it as a clay source, and totally break imports as the means of getting more. Same with sand, etc.)

Well, I don't think I've ever suggested that we actually change a soil layer type.

Soil in this suggestion is more like the contaminant of mud that's on the floor of caverns (in fact, I even suggested just making it a contaminant at one point), where the sandy silt soil merely directs a starting point for drainage.  In fact, since there is a biome variable for drainage, I think it better to use the fact that one soil layer may be sand or clay as merely a modifier of biome drainage.  (Sand in a swamp will offer less drainage than sand in a hill biome.  In fact, if proximity to a slope could be factored into starting drainage, it would be even more ideal.)

Hence, importing a lot of clay would only affect what sort of plants could grow there.

Of course, there could be something abusable about making your soil very acidic in a desert or significantly reducing drainage in that, since part of the idea is to make weeds just sprout naturally like grass, but make grass and the like play by the same rules as crops, if you make your soil significantly different from what the nearby grasses like, you can keep out the most likely weeds.

(Because it is a complex topic, the notion of tracking in seeds of invasive species - or young of pests - is kind of sketchy, and just based on invisible off-board population models, with possibly a division into different population counts based upon layer.)

Quote from: wierd on February 02, 2013, 03:13:30 am

I could see alkaline<->acid as a variable, because that would influence weather or not you grow wheat (prefers alkaline) or strawberries (prefers acid), but going too far is a problem.

I can agree with this - aside from soil nutrients and pollutants, it's just drainage and acidity for the long-term biome-based variables. 

Soil nutrients are short-term things based upon composting, as I already said (and honestly, if we want to play up carbon more, then H₂0, C, N, P would be fine instead of H₂O, C, N, P, K and just fudge K into P, although that eliminates potash, but where it might be somewhat easier for players to understand) and have a value for its complexity I've already argued for.

Beyond that, the pollutants exist as penalties for specific types of actions. Biological pollution is basically the penalty for hot fertilizer - "nuking the soil", as you put it earlier, with uncomposted chicken manure as opposed to allowing it to lose a good portion of its N and taking up time, space, and labor composting it.  Heavy Metal is for composting certain creature types, especially apex predators and sentients, in excess, and also for magma-irrigation, which can boost fertility tremendously, but render many plants incapable of dealing with heavy metals. 

Salinity is something that borders a pollutant and a biome trait, however, but it can be used for penalizing brackish/salt water irrigation as well as reducing some lands to salt rushes until you can seep enough salt from the soil.

Quote from: wierd on February 02, 2013, 03:13:30 am

Rather than be "soil building" directly,  was more implying that it was soil building, *if* you did not harvest the crop, tilled it under, and left the plot fallow for one full year, because that is really what you have to do with soil building crops to re-establish biomass.

Instead, the desired protocol I had in mind, was to make agriculture expensive, because it is. The system I proposed (or thought I proposed anyway...) would have required soil neutral plants that have a low nutritional yeild be the primary route to soil building, via a very inefficient composting process on the side.

That's largely consistent with what I suggested, as well - only tiny few plants do well without biomass, and there are some "starter grasses/molds" that exist just for building up the soil and functionally converting the biome from a desert to a marginal grassland. 

Plain dumping compost and working on getting some grasses going with water before you work on getting real crops going is the idea for turning a patch of desert into a garden.  (Short of tundra/glacier, deserts would be agricultural hard mode for good reason.) 

Quote from: wierd on February 02, 2013, 03:13:30 am

Eg, you grow a boat load of ratweeds, because it is all your rotten marginal embark can grow to start with. You use some of it to make alcohol, so you don't get the game over screen, and rely on imported food and possibly poultry to survive starvation.  The rest of it, you directly shove into the composter. 

That's actually what I was suggesting plump helmets do.  They're basically an edible composter, capable of being grown anywhere dark with nothing more than a log and water, and where the end result is (partial?) compost and a mushroom.  You'd have to keep supplying logs to keep growing plump helmets, though, so it's not long-term sustainable, but it's how you can jump-start composting.

Of course, that's just a suggestion of a specific means of implementing the broader idea I was already talking about, especially with regards to making an easy start-up.

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution
Post by: NW_Kohaku on February 02, 2013, 01:20:28 pm

Quote from: zwei on February 02, 2013, 03:36:29 am

There are two things:

Lead Farmer should not be the best advice giver, so he can have reasonably inaccurate advice, he just should not give outright harmful advice. That is why skills and personality matters (and likes - if your agriculturist loves fisher berries, he will tend to suggest them when possible) - they are there to not improve, but rather to degrade his advice.

HE is there not for you, but for people intimidated by complexity - that screen you linked is very scary!

Also, he is not supposed to plan out entire cycle, just next season.

He can basically use same heuristics like that screen: Order plants by how well current soil would support them, fudge lit a bit by fertilizer requirements and tell player to use one of top three.

If it is supposed to be educational, then simple list of reason why it is better than current plan can be given (comsumes x which is abundant, restores y which is depleted).

In the end, you can just add +ses and -ses together with some weights, order plants and pick top one.

Well, the idea is that the game should already sort the crops by what is most capable of being planted in that predicted state.  (Although maybe the sorting alone could be done by the Lead Farmer?) Hence, (s)he'd just be picking the top name on the list unless they're bad at their job, at which point they'd be picking the second or third.  (Unless they weren't sorting based on yield, in which case you could multiply yield by suitability...)

I mean, it could be done, but I don't think it would actually help players understand the interface that much.

That said, being able to create at least some basic crop rotation pattern is something Toady would have to code, regardless, for the NPC farms, so having a list of crop rotation cycles that you could just copy-paste onto your own farm from a civilization knowledge screen would be the easy way to incorporate how-to instructions in the game. Especially if a straight-up "import" function were available, you could just tell a dwarf farm foreman to just do what the humans were doing.

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution
Post by: wierd on February 02, 2013, 01:31:20 pm

you have to be careful with mushrooms as composters.  Mushrooms will take additional energy away from the substrate to grow, leaving depleted compost.  Mushroom compost is about as fertile as shredded cuir, only finer.  About on par with perlite or vermiculite. It helps keep soil from being cleachy, and helps it retain moisture and acts as a cation exchange medium buffer-- but that's about it. For a fertilizer, it is pretty dead. The mushrooms suck all that out to make mushroom :D

(Also, you might want to research growing mushroom on wood. Even fast growing ones take at least a year to establish a log before flushing, and only flush in the spring, after being sprayed with water. Japanese mushroom growers CHEAT like little whores by using sawdust instead of logs, and by repeatedly spraying the spawn innoculated sawdust with water to trigger fruiting. To help frame that with Shiitake:  Log: Innoculation time 12 months. Sawdust: Innoculation time 12 WEEKS. I suspect you were thinking more along the lines of straw or dung mushrooms, like morels, crimini, and the like--- those can culture quickly if growing conditions are held right, and can flush every 30 days until the compost is depleted. requires getting the compost wet and disturbing the surface of the compost to initiate flushing.)

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution
Post by: NW_Kohaku on February 02, 2013, 01:53:57 pm

Quote from: winner on February 02, 2013, 03:55:49 am

Diseases and Pests: Even if you have no way of fighting them, they make you try new crops and farming styles, as a consequence there is no such thing as the perfect crop.  Similarly when you run out of Hematite ore you start smelting the Galina that wasn't worth bothering with before.

On how this plays out:

I was thinking this would happen like this:  All creatures have a sort of trophic level stored in them, so that they know what order they are supposed to act in.  Every "pest tick" occurs very rarely (like once a month) with the results of a pest tick being stored and played out gradually over that month so as not to seem abrupt in-game.

The steps would then go like this:

1.  Population is temporarily multiplied by some vermin breeding multiplier.  I.E. every cricket lays 20 eggs or something, so you multiply current population by 20.

2.  Population numbers are compared with a general regional population number - low populations relative to regional populations has some pests move in.  (Migratory pests would be a special case.)

3.  Going up the trophic levels, area of influence is determined.  This means the bugs spread out over where they will try to eat food in a very rough manner.  (This is partly why whole farms are tracked as zones and wild surface is chopped up into local tiles instead of tracking individual tiles, to keep some of these calculations easier.) Bugs will converge on things that attract them and avoid things that repel them (consider each farm and wild zone to have a certain number of shares of the total population, and a favored plant adds to the shares they get, and hated plants like fragrant herbs will subtract from the total) and then each area will have a rough idea of what bugs are there.  (Extremely high shares could flag a whole area for a migratory pest invasion, like a locust swarm. Extremely low shares may trigger pests to leave an area - a maximum insects-per-share concept could be employed.)

4. When you get up to predator trophic levels, predators are attracted to their prey, but will also mostly stick to a nest if they have them in the cases of insectivorous birds or bats.  (This encourages placing bird/bat nests in/near farms.) They get divided up, as well.

5. Going from highest trophic level down, predators eat all the prey until they get their fill.  If there aren't enough bugs, they starve.  If it's close, a portion of the insects still survive because of hunting inefficiencies, and many of the birds/bats will starve because they weren't as good hunters or couldn't find the last straggler insects. 

6. Plant-eaters go last, and inflict damage upon plants by eating plants with their remaining numbers.  If there are no plants in the area they like, they starve, too. 

7.  Plants tally up the damage inflicted upon them, and their growth rates are impaired based upon the damage, possibly killing off a good chunk of the crop entirely.  Damage becomes apparent only gradually, over crop growth ticks (which only occur every 100 game frames).

---

Part of the idea is that pests will have more than one type of prey, as will the predators.  If you have a ton of crops that attracts a type of insect, they might swarm in, explode in numbers, and every time you try to plant that crop, they'll devour it before it has time to really get established. Only starving them out would stop them at that point, which means not allowing any plant they see as food to exist.

If you want to keep your bat/bird/spider/wasp/whatever predator populations artificially high, you could purposefully "feed" them some prey that is relatively harmless to keep their populations high for when a locust swarm comes, or something.

Rather than loading this entire algorithm into a single frame, (that would probably stop everything to calculate, although DF isn't really shy about doing things like that...) it's also possible to split the different calculations up, and divide them out across frames to be calculated, since we don't need to be exact, and invisible pest populations won't be directly impacted by anything else.  Hence, as soon as a pest tick is complete, the next pest tick can get started, where each step will be divided out across frames to keep the load relatively less noticeable. (This would mean that if a player changes a farm, the pest data wouldn't react for another pest tick, but that's an acceptable fudging of the simulation, since, again, players aren't going to be able to look directly at what's going on, and only really understand what's happening by result.)

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution
Post by: NW_Kohaku on February 02, 2013, 01:58:54 pm

Quote from: wierd on February 02, 2013, 01:31:20 pm

you have to be careful with mushrooms as composters.  Mushrooms will take additional energy away from the substrate to grow, leaving depleted compost.  Mushroom compost is about as fertile as shredded cuir, only finer.  About on par with perlite or vermiculite. It helps keep soil from being cleachy, and helps it retain moisture and acts as a cation exchange medium buffer-- but that's about it. For a fertilizer, it is pretty dead. The mushrooms suck all that out to make mushroom :D

(Also, you might want to research growing mushroom on wood. Even fast growing ones take at least a year to establish a log before flushing, and only flush in the spring, after being sprayed with water. Japanese mushroom growers CHEAT like little whores by using sawdust instead of logs, and by repeatedly spraying the spawn innoculated sawdust with water to trigger fruiting. To help frame that with Shiitake:  Log: Innoculation time 12 months. Sawdust: Innoculation time 12 WEEKS. I suspect you were thinking more along the lines of straw or dung mushrooms, like morels, crimini, and the like--- those can culture quickly if growing conditions are held right, and can flush every 30 days until the compost is depleted. requires getting the compost wet and disturbing the surface of the compost to initiate flushing.)

I would say "sawdust" and make it like Japanese "cheaters" (I know American mushroom farmers do similar things), but that would mean introducing sawdust as an item and purposefully adding another job to a start-up crop that is made to make the game easier at the start.  (At the cost of a potentially ever-more-rare resource of wood.)

Realism can take some minor hits if it furthers the overarching goals. 

Tilling the plump helmets back into the soil, or just plain growing some sort of grasses instead of an edible crop would be a better way of starting up agriculture, but this is a way of creating some basic biomass that you can at least start out with growing crops on if we're dealing with completely barren soil, like in a desert or a cavern floor.

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution
Post by: wierd on February 02, 2013, 02:18:56 pm

Ok, The silly forum ate the first submission terribly, and times out on subsequent edits with what I want to put...

Bascially, HERE is a calculator to calculate solar intensity at arbitrary locations on the earth. (http://www.nrel.gov/midc/solpos/solpos.html)

Compare the north pole, to the equator.  Be dazzled.

apparently the forum's HTTP POST routine just cant handle a full year's simulated data. :D

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution
Post by: NW_Kohaku on February 02, 2013, 02:21:40 pm

Quote from: wierd on February 02, 2013, 05:06:54 am

Water availability:
A tile that is unable to retain moisture (desert biome, without irrigation) will lose biomass per growing season (NOT YEAR!) at a rate consistent with its lack of moisture, with an upper bound of 25% per season. Thus, if not irrigated, dumping compost on it will result in all the compost vanishing without a trace in 1 year. Distance from a water source determines how moist it is, in desert biomes. Exact rate of falloff needs to be determined carefully to avoid game breaking consequences.

If you read the water management (http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=76007.msg1920007#msg1920007) section, part of what I was talking about was that you don't have a broad, slowly-moving water meter, you have constantly depleting water.

This means that either dwarves are hoping for rain aboveground, and having to bucket-brigade water to plants (as unrealistic as that is, I know) as a labor-intensive method of pushing water, or else to use irrigation techniques that also consume water.

Small pipes that fit within a tile that don't involve a 3-meter-deep trench with 7/7 water are how that is calculated.

Biomass, drainage, and a ground cover plant can certainly alter water consumption, but it's basically a matter of making dwarves responsible for watering the crops as one of the farmer's primary duties.  (And farmer skill determines how well they understand how much water a plant needs - possibly under/overwatering.)

Keep in mind that underground regions have no rain.  Dwarf-moved water only.

Flooding is also something that has to be taken into account - players can easily drown a field.

Quote from: wierd on February 02, 2013, 05:06:54 am

Composting is VERY inefficient! It is this way BY DESIGN. At LEAST 50% of the biomass of the source material will be lost, and up to 99% at the top end, based on the crop.  here is a tentative list of made up values that look good without being tested:

I really wish you'd be willing to consider and speak in the terms of the model already proposed, as it makes things much easier.

We're not using the same crops, we're using different variables, and parts of the model I'm talking about have very different consequences for what it means to have a plant not reaching its full potential, especially as a consequence of dwarven ineptitude as well as drastic player-based disruptions of a field.  (I.E. flooding or a horse being pastured in a field that is growing corn or something else very disruptive.)

This isn't either reality or some bare-bones simulation, there has to be consequences for the stupid crap you'd never do in reality, or else there's no reason not to do it in the game.  (I.E. leave a chicken to drop manure directly into your fields - because hey, chickens don't eat yet, anyway, and that adds more fertilizer directly to your field!)

That's why you need pollution variables.

Another thing the system I proposed also does is include possibilities of flood-based fertilization, like the old versions of the game.  That is, water from a particularly silty source can add fertility to a land it covers (when it leaves behind mud as a contaminant on the soil). 

Magma, also, is a possible tool for periodic flooding for fertility.  But it needs a consequence, and that means pollution.

(I'd also say your concept of how long it takes to get to the magma sea is pretty off - I set up magma forges in the spring of my first year if I'm not pump-stacking them to the surface.  It's only the pump stacks that take forever, and there's no reason you wouldn't start with underground farming in such an obviously hostile surface biome.)

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution
Post by: wierd on February 02, 2013, 02:30:03 pm

Part of my problem is that the model you provided is unnecessarily complicated. It's rather intensive, for little gameplay benefit.  I purposefully toned everything down absurdly, because most of the same results can be derived from it, if you put conservative enough values in.

As for growing mushrooms "The japanese way"-- that way was only RECENTLY (in the past century!) discovered! :D Research "Mushroom millionaires"

[wow.. sounding so argumentative.. I apologize in advance...]

As for breaching magma sea in the fake simulation taking forever: 7 dwarves. :D

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution
Post by: NW_Kohaku on February 02, 2013, 02:36:30 pm

Quote from: wierd on February 02, 2013, 02:30:03 pm

Part of my problem is that the model you provided is unnecessarily complicated. It's rather intensive, for little gameplay benefit.  I purposefully toned everything down absurdly, because most of the same results can be derived from it, if you put conservative enough values in.

One of the really critical aspects of this proposal that you seem not to have read is that players aren't calculating out for themselves any of the soil fertility.

Players aren't manually micromanaging fields by directly ordering fertilizers placed on them.

The farmer dwarves decide on this.  Farmer dwarves watch soil fertility, and add fertilizers to the best of their ability to understand the soil (meaning they over/under apply fertilizers when low-leveled) on their own.  They irrigate the fields on their own.

This is how you cut down on the micromanagement - you aren't in charge of constantly punching an "add more compost" button.  The only thing you are in charge of is giving the farmers permission to use certain types of fertilizers.

This is why having different types of fertilizers to manage is important - your job isn't bookeeping each type of fertilizer, your job is simply making sure that what you are "ordering" from the soil doesn't "cost" more of your multiple fertilizer "resources" than you can sustain.  (Similar, in effect, to the way that an RTS game has multiple resources for you to manage.)

Doing it this way actually results in significantly less complexity and tedium for the player than even what you are proposing, while still giving the soil fertility elements much more depth than what you are proposing.  Once set up once, so long as you keep the fertilizer resources balanced, it is self-perpetuating, providing no major outside disturbance comes along.

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution
Post by: wierd on February 02, 2013, 02:44:36 pm

Quote from: NW_Kohaku on February 02, 2013, 02:36:30 pm

Quote from: wierd on February 02, 2013, 02:30:03 pm

Part of my problem is that the model you provided is unnecessarily complicated. It's rather intensive, for little gameplay benefit.  I purposefully toned everything down absurdly, because most of the same results can be derived from it, if you put conservative enough values in.

One of the really critical aspects of this proposal that you seem not to have read is that players aren't calculating out for themselves any of the soil fertility.

Players aren't manually micromanaging fields by directly ordering fertilizers placed on them.

The farmer dwarves decide on this.  Farmer dwarves watch soil fertility, and add fertilizers to the best of their ability to understand the soil (meaning they over/under apply fertilizers when low-leveled) on their own.  They irrigate the fields on their own.

This is how you cut down on the micromanagement - you aren't in charge of constantly punching an "add more compost" button.  The only thing you are in charge of is giving the farmers permission to use certain types of fertilizers.

This is why having different types of fertilizers to manage is important - your job isn't bookeeping each type of fertilizer, your job is simply making sure that what you are "ordering" from the soil doesn't "cost" more of your multiple fertilizer "resources" than you can sustain.  (Similar, in effect, to the way that an RTS game has multiple resources for you to manage.)

Doing it this way actually results in significantly less complexity and tedium for the player than even what you are proposing, while still giving the soil fertility elements much more depth than what you are proposing.  Once set up once, so long as you keep the fertilizer resources balanced, it is self-perpetuating, providing no major outside disturbance comes along.

It also results in a system that is counter-intuitive to one of your starting axioms:

Quote

Here's why this problem needs to be solved from the perspective of "Improved Farming":  At first, the suggestion was to take up more space, time, and dwarves per unit of food that you need to put into generating food.  Early on in the Improved Farming thread (referred to from here on as IF), Footkerchief hit on the core of the problem with this solution, when he said that the real problem was that farming was a "free stuff button".  You see, as long as farming was nothing more than zoning land, and designating dwarves to throw seeds at the zone and eventually pick up all the stuff that grew out of that land, then we aren't really changing anything by requiring more dwarves or more time to do the work.  If you require more land to produce the same amount of food, the player just zones more land (and eventually adds more dwarves to the farming labor to manage the sheer acreage).  If you require more labor activities for dwarves, then you just wind up throwing more dwarves at the problem.  If you require a longer growing time, you just double the  farmland for every time you double the growing time, and wind up with the same amount of food per unit time.  Either way, all this really changes is what percentage of your fortress's population is going to be farming at any given time, and doesn't do much to actually change gameplay or make it more interesting.

All this method does is increase the front end, by making players have to learn that they cant pasture animals on the farm, cant put raw poo down, etc--- and increase the labor costs and sizes of the farm plots, because statistically, it will level out with a large enough area operated, and enough dwarves working fields.

Example:

If bugs are a distribution pest, I just need to increase the size of my plantation an appropriate variable according to the distribution of pest losses, and increase the labor pool. The inclusion of the pest is just a frontloaded obstacle, that raw planting increases can overcome. Variances over time are just noise on the distribution, and can be further eliminated with larger plantings, which increase the SNR.

Losses in soil fertility can be offset by adding more farming labor, and adding non-food producing farm plots, that do NOTHING but produce compostable materials. Increasing the size of the cleanup crew, and penning a bunch of animals to get poop is just offsetting the freestuff button to a different location, rather than removing it. 

Ipso facto-- The model does not do what it wants to do, and cant do what it wants to do, because the goal is unachievable using the model, nor with any self-consistent model.  That is the argument I was trying to get across to 10ebor10, without success. The model would have to introduce game breaking levels of randomness in order to push the SNR over the point where simply adding more crop plots, and adding more labor would (be able to) silence it.

This is ironically what natural biospheres do: They create a local maxima based on statistical scattering over a large enough plot, which incorporates rather than tries to overcome inefficiencies.

While the solution is inefficient, it is still a valid solution. Thus it runs afoul of the axiom.

One could argue that you run into a physical realestate limit by what your embark can hold, but this neglects megaproject growing operations, exploiting multi-zlevels.  Again, running head first into the "Front loaded", and "Not solvable by throwing more dwarves and land at it" axioms.

So, in order to overcome this, you have to produce an infinite resource sink, to overcome the easy buttons, which I did. (soil conservation is a money pit.)

You have to make the site sufficiently variable that a "Throw dwarves at it on autopilot" solution wont work, and make the system sufficiently dynamic that it breaks that as well. I did. The polar embark illustrates that quite well. Autopilot isnt an option there at all!

You will also need to limit the total number of plants that can be planted at once, at an arbitrary cap, to avoid "Nature's solution" to complex systems: Brute force and over abundance. The game already does this by limiting seed reserves. (though a clever player could overcome this by leaving crops unprocessed, and micromanaging seed production to handle more crop plots than normal.)

Other than feeling artificial, and being overly simplistic, I don't see the problem.


The argument you just made, boils down to a contradiction.

"I dont want it to be an easy button"

"Your solution is just micromanagment, and mine has automation."

Automation is an easy button. :D  Removing the easy button makes it require micromanagement by default. :D

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution
Post by: 10ebbor10 on February 02, 2013, 03:07:37 pm

Quote from: wierd on February 02, 2013, 02:44:36 pm

All this method does is increase the front end, by making players have to learn that they cant pasture animals on the farm, cant put raw poo down, etc--- and increase the labor costs and sizes of the farm plots, because statistically, it will level out with a large enough area operated, and enough dwarves working fields.

Actuallym you can pasture animals on the farm, and can put poo down. It reduces in a certain negative effect, but with the right growing sheme and correct fertilizer use it might in some way be viableish. There's no sense in putting in an option that is always useless.

Quote

If bugs are a distribution pest, I just need to increase the size of my plantation an appropriate variable according to the distribution of pest losses, and increase the labor pool. The inclusion of the pest is just a frontloaded obstacle, that raw planting increases can overcome. Variances over time are just noise on the distribution, and can be further eliminated with larger plantings, which increase the SNR.

Not really. First, it isn't that front loaded, as your small scale farms won't suffer from it that much. Secondly, doubling your plantation size will work for a month, but then the pest population will explode to match, once again destroying your crops. Just adding more won't help, as the pests will just eat it all, once they are numerous enough.

Quote

Losses in soil fertility can be offset by adding more farming labor, and adding non-food producing farm plots, that do NOTHING but produce compostable materials. Increasing the size of the cleanup crew, and penning a bunch of animals to get poop is just offsetting the freestuff button to a different location, rather than removing it. 

At one point you're going to reach a pollution build up of some kind of another, that makes the original fields untenable. The point of this suggestion is not to prevent the useage of adding more dwarf power to be a viablish solution, but just to give other options that will often work better, because they require less farmers. It's the same with the current hauling system, you can use dwarf power solely, which works well in the short term, but eventually you will need to switch to wheelbarrows, better organisation or maybe even a minecart system.

Quote

Ipso facto-- The model does not do what it wants to do, and cant do what it wants to do, because the goal is unachievable using the model, nor with any self-consistent model.  That is the argument I was trying to get across to 10ebbor10, without success. The model would have to introduce game breaking levels of randomness in order to push the SNR over the point where simply adding more crop plots, and adding more labor would silence it.

What's the problem with adding more dwarf power being a viablish solution. After all, dwarf power is only one of the resources you have to manage.However, the point is that adding dwarf power won't often be the best solution. However, if a player doesn't want to mess with the farming system, he can, as adding enough dwarf power works(kinda).

A hundred unarmed recruits can kill a bronze Collossus, but it might not be the easiest way to approach the problem.

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution
Post by: wierd on February 02, 2013, 03:13:11 pm

10ebbor10:

The simple fact that it runs headfirst into the established rules and scope of the project being undertaken to begin with, as cited.

Also, directly pasturing animals on farm plots, with the exception of slow growing winter crops, destroys said crops, negating the purpose for planting in the first place. Also, raw manure is deadly to most plants, meaning penning chickens or dogs on that farm plot will destroy it from hot nutrition, per Kohaku's solution.

Again, about pests-- Kohaku's solution has pests as a distribution. Since the distribution does not reach 100% density, it cannot reach a point where simply throwing more plants in wont effectively silence their impact.  Further, purposefully leaving areas of cropland wasted/dead would further mess with their spawning calculations, because of the coarseness of the calculation, as a consequence of CPU overhead. You could cheat by leaving dead feilds lying around.

On the scope of Contaminant buildup, there is little if anything preventing the player from using the "Screwpump filtration" system with locally topped up irrigation systems and windmills to effectively destroy contaminants, making it into a "Front loaded" problem.

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution
Post by: NW_Kohaku on February 02, 2013, 03:22:35 pm

Let me try explaining this in a different way...

The way that you're talking about the system, where players will sit there manually calculating out even a single variable "for simplicity", but where they do they work themselves will always be micromanagement.

It's like how the farms first operated in 2d, where farming was simply a matter of remembering to turn on the pumps at the start of the year to flood the fields again.

What I'm proposing is that, since we are the overseer of the whole fortress, we do not manually order every single worker to do every single menial task.  We are more like the legislature of a city counsel. 

We set the budget. 

We assign a set number of people to completing a certain job.  We ask someone who tracks the data for us what tasks we can accomplish (crops can be grown), and what costs are associated with that. (See what Zwei and I were discussing.)  We then say what we are tasking the workers with accomplishing, and what they are budgeted to accomplish that task.

You tell them, "You are allowed to use this much of this type of fertilizers," and if they need more, maybe they come back and say they can't accomplish their job with the current resources because of something unforseen, and you need to spend more, and you may spend more or say no, but that's a managerial decision for you to make based upon what resources you can budget.

We then may inquire into their progress and possibly intervene, but, fundamentally, the actual task of knowing when it's time to water the crops or apply fertilizers is not our job.  Doing the math is not our job.  Only setting up the routine for collecting compostable materials and the "workshop" to produce it, assigning farmers, zoning land for farming, and telling the farmers what their goal is would be our job.

The point of having multiple soil variables is just to make it so that, like a RTS game where you have more than one resource, sometimes one of your resources is very abundant, and sometimes one of your resources is very scarce, and you might make choices as to what crops you plant based upon whether that unit costs more minerals or vespene gas to produce because of your resource limitations.

That's what it means to be making top-level managerial decisions, rather than low-level optimization decisions.

---

As for what you said about pests...

Quote from: wierd on February 02, 2013, 02:44:36 pm

If bugs are a distribution pest, I just need to increase the size of my plantation an appropriate variable according to the distribution of pest losses, and increase the labor pool. The inclusion of the pest is just a frontloaded obstacle, that raw planting increases can overcome. Variances over time are just noise on the distribution, and can be further eliminated with larger plantings, which increase the SNR.

You seem to be mistaken in how pests work.  Pest populations grow geometrically, and are not tracked in just one farm, but across the whole map. 

Hence, growing potatoes in one field one season, and then in another field the next, as it seems like you're proposing, in a bid to wait enough seasons for the pests in the first field die out would fail because pests redistribute themselves across every field every tick. 

One of the ways in which I simplified what I said to winner was that some pests have longer life cycles or dormant periods than others.  This would mean not all creatures will starve as quickly as others.  (And not all would explode in population size every month, and would have more annual mating cycles.)

Quote from: wierd on February 02, 2013, 02:44:36 pm

Losses in soil fertility can be offset by adding more farming labor, and adding non-food producing farm plots, that do NOTHING but produce compostable materials. Increasing the size of the cleanup crew, and penning a bunch of animals to get poop is just offsetting the freestuff button to a different location, rather than removing it.

Actually, I do think that's something of a cost, especially if you're trading huge amounts of land and inefficient use of labor for the ability to do a simpler style of farming.

There's only so much a system can do, of course, but if you want to farm with huge amounts of land and labor to reduce on the complexity of how you set up your farm (avoiding better irrigation techniques or more complex cycles of crops) then that's an option as the basic "foot of the learning hill". 

The difference here between what I'm proposing and just a simple "take up more land and labor" solution is that there's an actual reward for doing things more creatively, and that's what makes the whole exercise interesting.

Further, it's not really "free stuff" if you're giving up your chance to eat those crops you're tilling back into the soil, now are you?  Especially if it takes adding a bit more compost than just that set of techniques alone will allow you - you're paying something back to the soil, and it's therefore not just plain free.

Besides which, what you're proposing actually isn't any different from what I'm proposing in that key regard - you're still just proposing adding compost and having to farm more plants to put back in the soil.  The difference is that I'm trying to shift the focus of the player more into abstract ways of looking at the problem (building a sustainable system) as opposed to simply focusing upon a details-oriented approach (keeping a watch on exact fertility levels and manually ordering their renewal).

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution
Post by: wierd on February 02, 2013, 03:30:50 pm

The micromanagement portion can be effectively eliminated, with a simple "Composting" section to the stocks screen, like the kitchen, where you can turn on/off autocomposting.

After that, you just set crop prefs on farm plots, and let sit.

No more micromanagment, but with the possibility of HILARITY ENSUES!, when you get lots of bad weather, or pests destroy produce faster than you compost, etc.

As for the pest mitigation issue, I was thinking more like this:

Code: [Select]


#####
#P#P#
#####

where ## are farm plots you have PURPOSEFULLY depleted, and P is a plot you keep up, and retain.  By interspersing enough barren plots, you throw off the granularity calculation of the pet distribution function, so you have fewer pests than you should. (each plot is a 1x1 farm plot, well below the efficiency threshold for your distribution function, because it would result in singularities if you tried to fix it!)

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution
Post by: 10ebbor10 on February 02, 2013, 03:38:08 pm

That's just an implementation problem though, which can be fixed quite easily by redividing the pests over the places with support plants they can eat (and optimally adding more pests to those plots whose plants they like more).

With the above thing fallow plots won't noticable affect anything, and making bait plots to lure pests away might have an adverse effect, as these cause the population to increase.

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution
Post by: wierd on February 02, 2013, 03:41:07 pm

You are also forggeting about creative use of Verminators.

Penning a bunch of naughty kitties in the bait plot will result in active destruction of pests, and the generation of compostable remains as a fresh, new exploit. The spontaneous generation of pests suddenly becomes an item generator.

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution
Post by: 10ebbor10 on February 02, 2013, 03:48:20 pm

So you're placing a crop that attracts a certain type of bug near one of it's natural predators. Seems like a perfectly legit idea, both realistically and gameplay. It won't be perfectly efficient/realistic and needs to be balanced to prevent a free energy exploit, but why not?

Seems like a plus to the system rather than a minus.

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution
Post by: wierd on February 02, 2013, 03:55:00 pm

it runs into a problem with unrealistic energy generation.

EG, lets say I have decided I want to BRUTE FORCE the problem to begin with. My farms are holding steady. I have a catsplosion.

I decide that I want to pen the naughty kitties outside, so I pen them all in micromanaged, individual 1x1 pen/pasture zones, that checkerboard the growing feilds. Even with their deleterious effect of the kitty poop, their vermination activity boosts crop yeilds to astronomical levels, which triggers more bugs to form... kitties kill even MOAR bugs. Eventually, the whole top surface is a swarming pile of bugs and bug corpses, with all the dwarves dutifully scooping them up, and dumping them into the composter, generating VERY valuable compost through the infinite item generator mechanism. I put some of that output back into the system to keep it purpetuated...  My networth explodes, and my FPS tanks.

Improved farming thoroughly broken.

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution
Post by: 10ebbor10 on February 02, 2013, 03:58:22 pm

You're assuming that the generated biomass would be larger than the biomass provided, which shouldn't be the case in proper balance. At best, you will probably loose about 80% of the biomass/nutritients and such. (Because, the vermin replicates based on the crop eaten, not the crop produced. The vermin thingies you see on the field would be a visual representive of those, and killing them should lower the parameter with X amount, so that all remains balanced.)

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution
Post by: wierd on February 02, 2013, 04:00:30 pm

Not necessarily.  By introducing predators like that, either the bugs are spontaneously generated (like they currently are), or they follow a fixed progression curve, and penning verminators allows greater biomass retention, and still results in positive feedback.

Remember, homeostasis was achieved with BRUTE FORCE to begin with. Any improvement in efficiency will result in a log efficiency effect over time. (assuming you reinvest the surplus, and impact of soil improvement remains linear.)

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution
Post by: NW_Kohaku on February 02, 2013, 04:02:23 pm

Alright, I think, upon reflection, the problem here is that what was meant by "free stuff" wasn't entirely conveyed.

The problem with the current model, and why it's "free stuff", is that you don't have to pay anything back to the soil.  That is, mud can produce crops forever without anything being returned.  It's creation of infinite matter ex nihilo.  What any sort of soil fertility model (yours or mine) creates is a finite ceiling on how much material can be removed from the soil without giving something back.

That is, it's an explanation as to why you need to have soil fertility at all instead of just making farming take more space or labor.  (Some of the people in the older thread said that the only problem was basically that farms weren't big enough and that it only took one or two farmers to feed a fortress.)  I'm not saying that space and labor can't be part of the solution, but that they, alone, aren't going to solve the problems of current farming.

By having to put something back through composting to get something out in return, you have a (fairly soft, but at least extant) finite cap on the quantity of material that can be in the fort at any period of time - something has to be decomposed and put back into the soil to get more out of the soil.

---

Quote from: wierd on February 02, 2013, 03:30:50 pm

The micromanagement portion can be effectively eliminated, with a simple "Composting" section to the stocks screen, like the kitchen, where you can turn on/off autocomposting.

After that, you just set crop prefs on farm plots, and let sit.

No more micromanagment, but with the possibility of HILARITY ENSUES!, when you get lots of bad weather, or pests destroy produce faster than you compost, etc.

... Which is exactly what I'm proposing, but with more than one kind of fertilizer available, and multiple variables for those differences in fertilizers and crops to be more distinct.

Quote from: wierd on February 02, 2013, 03:30:50 pm

As for the pest mitigation issue, I was thinking more like this:

Code: [Select]


#####
#P#P#
#####

where ## are farm plots you have PURPOSEFULLY depleted, and P is a plot you keep up, and retain.  By interspersing enough barren plots, you throw off the granularity calculation of the pet distribution function, so you have fewer pests than you should. (each plot is a 1x1 farm plot, well below the efficiency threshold for your distribution function, because it would result in singularities if you tried to fix it!)

Well, then, a solution to trying to exploit the game like that would be to set a limit on the number of farms you can declare, so as to stop people from doing something crazy like that.  (It would be micromanagement hell, anyway, to set up that many farms.)

Besides that, there's not actually going to be much barren soil in the game, since the game already tracks multiple grasses in a single tile of open wild land, and part of what this suggestion does is make farms not actual "buildings" but just zones - grasses would be growing even in lands you don't tell dwarves to do anything in unless you're purposefully going to keep weeding them.  Pests would then eat the grasses if they would care for them, or skip them if they didn't.

Beyond that, even if you did have a set of productive and then barren tiles, it still wouldn't actually stop pests, since there would be no reason for most bugs to concentrate around the barren soil.  I'm dividing up where the pests go by shares, and shares are determined by how attractive any given farm plot is.

Hence, the barren tile might get 1 share, and the juicy crop might get 51 shares or something.  If there were 1150 insects to divide up across the shares (just to pick a number that makes things round...) then each barren tile would get 10 insects, and the crop tiles would get 510 insects. 

The whole point is that the crops attract the insect type they are vulnerable to. (And putting in some repellant plants drops that attraction.) 

The major result of trying to do that would actually just be to bypass an FPS-saving trick I was proposing.  So you're really only pointlessly hurting your own FPS for no gain.

---

Quote from: wierd on February 02, 2013, 03:41:07 pm

You are also forggeting about creative use of Verminators.

Penning a bunch of naughty kitties in the bait plot will result in active destruction of pests, and the generation of compostable remains as a fresh, new exploit. The spontaneous generation of pests suddenly becomes an item generator.

Crop pests are tracked invisibly off-map with the exception of maybe a few that could appear to help give a graphic understanding of when you have a real problem on your hands.  Killing off the few visible vermin wouldn't do any good - the game is invisibly tracking 800 caterpillars on your tomatoes, so killing off the 16 you actually saw isn't going to make a big dent in the overall population.  There are a few pests that appear visibly for cats to take down, especially for going after food supplies, but these pests would be far more numerous, and not actually appear on-map.

Besides, cats currently hunt every vermin.  The whole point is that predators will only hunt their own specialized types of vermin, meaning just having a cat is not protection against caterpillars.

---

EDIT:

Seriously, guys, slow down a bit and let me have time to respond...  It's not a race to making this thread have the most posts in the forum.

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution
Post by: 10ebbor10 on February 02, 2013, 04:07:34 pm

Quote from: wierd on February 02, 2013, 04:00:30 pm

Not necessarily.  By introducing predators like that, either the bugs are spontaneously generated (like they currently are), or they follow a fixed progression curve, and penning verminators allows greater biomass retention, and still results in positive feedback.

Remember, homeostasis was achieved with BRUTE FORCE to begin with. Any improvement in efficiency will result in a log efficiency effect over time. (assuming you reinvest the surplus, and impact of soil improvement remains linear.)

That's not a problem related to this suggestion, or to the model, but an exploit that's the result of a possible implementation of this system. (A possible implementation that might or might not be used).

Besides, argueing that a system is broken because it can be implemented in a way that will cause it to be broken is kinda bad/circular reasoning.

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution
Post by: wierd on February 02, 2013, 04:08:08 pm

LOL, Sorry.


Still, even a tiny impact by penning rotten kitties would result in a tiny but significant log curve, if you dont cap the benefit of fertilization over time. (Compound interest on a penny over enough time will bankrupt the planet.)

10ebor10:

You misunderstand. I point these out, so that they WONT be implemented that way. :D (not because I like being an argumentative douche. LOL)

Kohaku: Are you intending to implement pesticides? There *ARE* very potent organic pesticides you can use, especially against soft bodied caterpillars. (A jug of warm milk, and some mooshed caterpillar juice, shake it all up, set in the sun, strain out the clumps, and you have yourself concentrated, all natural BT bug killer!)

Others that are useful:

Against fruitiverous birds and some beetles, use a tincture of capcasin from hot pepper seeds and fruit bodies. Some birds are immune, like sparrows and finches, but the major offenders like pigeons and doves dont like the hot at all. Beetles avoid it because it causes chemical irritation of their antennae. Encouraging predators, like snakes or cats, deals with the finch problem.

Moles, gophers:
Sideplanting castor beans. All that ricin! Kills em dead! Castor beans themselves make effective mouse and rat poison, when pressed as a seed cake. The oil is a useful product in and of itself. Castor beans dont have many natural predators, owing to their toxicity.

Nematodes:
Side planting marigolds is frequenly suggested. Others include the capcasin tincture. Nematodes are soft bodied, and strongly irritated by the capcasin. Same with grub and tubeworms, which are also vulnerable to the BT milk juice.

Just some suggestions. :D

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution
Post by: winner on February 02, 2013, 05:50:43 pm

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Quote from: 10ebbor10 on February 02, 2013, 04:07:34 pm

Besides, argueing that a system is broken because it can be implemented in a way that will cause it to be broken is kinda bad/circular reasoning.

that's what always pissed me off about Isaac Asimov stories.

Quote from: wierd on February 02, 2013, 04:08:08 pm

Still, even a tiny impact by penning rotten kitties would result in a tiny but significant log curve, if you don't cap the benefit of fertilization over time. (Compound interest on a penny over enough time will bankrupt the planet.)

The pests don't have to contain any nutrients or be compostable.  They can return any nutrients they steal from the plant back to the soil immediately.  There don't have to be any violations of conservation of matter.

You seem to be using a fertility modal that I'm not familiar with.
The official fertility modal as I understand it is

• Green manure and other raw biological material: poisonous to plants if there is more than a certain amount. Gets converted to organic matter over several months.  When you plow a crop in, this is what is added.
• Organic matter: keeps nutrients from washing away in the water (not necessary for growth)
• Nitrogen: necessary for growth, washes away easily, can be created by growing legumes
• Phosphorus: necessary for growth.  Closed on map nutrient cycle
• Potassium:  just like phosphorus

None of the composts or other supplements are pure biological material or organic matter, they all contain plenty of nutrients to do the fertilizing for them.

I think NW_Kohaku is arguing that we don't need to bother modeling organic matter because different soil textures already have different amounts of nutrient leaching so organic matter would be redundant.
I want to include organic matter because I'm really attracted to the idea of allowing a badly maintained forest to erode into a sterile wasteland that can no longer hold any nutrients. 

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution
Post by: NW_Kohaku on February 02, 2013, 06:13:33 pm

Quote from: wierd on February 02, 2013, 04:08:08 pm

Still, even a tiny impact by penning rotten kitties would result in a tiny but significant log curve, if you dont cap the benefit of fertilization over time. (Compound interest on a penny over enough time will bankrupt the planet.)

That's what inflation is for.

For an extreme example, current annual interest on a U.S. Treasury Bond minus the annual inflation of a dollar is currently at around -0.5% interest.  Debtors are functionally paying us money for the privilege of loaning us money. 

Anyway, for penning kitties, that's part of the reason I'm including the notion that directly dumping a corpse on a farm adds to bio-pollution that kills plants (the same way that adding manure directly to plants adds bio-pollution) - over time, that causes an abstracted build-up in either dangerous bacteria or their toxic by-products (which is tracked as a single integer that goes down over time) that will harm or kill plants that aren't particularly resistant or are decomposers that just love the stuff.

Also, on the topic of invisible vermin, I'd like to point out that tracking vermin counts invisibly is already implemented in the game.  For example, telling dwarves to fish from a stream means that they deplete fish that aren't actually rendered on the game map that are tracked as nebulously being in a stream zone and are just tracked as a counter of how many trout or turtles or whatever are in those waterways, and occasionally bumped up invisibly.  (You can run out of fishable vermin, especially if it's just turtles from a murky pool.)

The difference here is making this vermin counter much more active and actually respond to predator-prey population growth models, rather than just occasionally making more fish.

Vermin that appear on the map can appear basically anywhere they're allowed (they get segregated by biomes, so fairies won't always appear in the half of the map that isn't part of a good biome) but they only downtick vermin levels by one when they are killed, meaning that kitties can stop vermin that appear on the map, but that's a tiny fraction of the vermin that actually exist in the game. That's why you keep seeing knuckle worms appearing in your food stores, and can't just let a single verminator loose to finish off all your vermin once and for all - they're only killing off the ones that actually appear on-map, and the game invisibly has a counter that says tens of thousands more rats still exist where that one came from.  (And yes, if you open up the memory hacks, they will say you have tens or even hundreds of thousands of insects or the like in a map.)

Hence, the idea is to have vermin-eating-vermin that are working pseudo-invisibly.  Bats, spiders, insectivorous birds, wasps, ladybugs, ants, etc. can be added to the game as vermin-predators where you can take a macro-level step to build up vermin-predators (setting up bird/bat nesting/colony boxes, transplanting ant colonies, planting a crop that has a scent that attracts more wasps) that don't involve actually keeping exact count of the thousands of individual creatures being spawned and killed in a war of attrition.

Quote from: wierd on February 02, 2013, 04:08:08 pm

You misunderstand. I point these out, so that they WONT be implemented that way. :D (not because I like being an argumentative douche. LOL)

And that's valuable, especially if it makes me change something because it's something I didn't consider.  I appreciate dissent when it's based upon the argument (rather than just name-calling) although it is sometimes frustrating when it feels like the counter-argument comes because my original argument wasn't understood.

Quote from: wierd on February 02, 2013, 04:08:08 pm

Kohaku: Are you intending to implement pesticides? There *ARE* very potent organic pesticides you can use, especially against soft bodied caterpillars. (A jug of warm milk, and some mooshed caterpillar juice, shake it all up, set in the sun, strain out the clumps, and you have yourself concentrated, all natural BT bug killer!)

Not particularly, since I don't know of terribly many of these techniques that would actually be available in that era. Hence, I'm more relying on planting insect-repellent herbs alongside crops or else vermin hunters.  (I.E. the side-planting marigolds.)

Putting in real-life examples for examples is good for context, but since I'm guessing we'll be having fictional plants (and probably fictional insects like "sweet pod borer" or something) all over the place, it's more a matter of generating the formula for them actually being used in-game.

Having something like an herb or just using captured vermin or something in a reaction to get some sort of organic insecticide and then letting the farmer dwarves deploy them if you give them permission to use certain amounts of it seems a reasonable way to fit it into the game, provided we are at a point already in game development where you can have standing orders so you don't have to micromanage the development of each and every one.

---

Responding to winner in next post

---

Incidentally, this thread is already 7th in most posts (432) in the entire suggestions forum when the most posts spot is held by the original Improved Farming thread at 721 posts. (I created this thread to make a more concise version of the conclusions of the original thread because nobody was willing to read the 45+ pages that had already gone into the first thread to get us to the position where I was proposing what I was proposing at the start of this thread.)

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution
Post by: wierd on February 02, 2013, 07:13:17 pm

It is a common misconception that biomass in the soil is not essential for growth, but that is simply untrue. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soil_carbon)

Soil carbon is literally a combination of a soil conditioner (keeps soils together, keeps wind from blowing soil, keeps clays from forming thick crusty flakes, etc) as well a medium through which organic acids produced by microbes, soil fungi, and even plant roots, are able to slowly attack, break down, and dissolve inorganic nutrient supplies found in clays and crushed rock mineral sources.  Without the biomass, the plant is significantly impacted in its ability to absorb these nutrients, and any dissolved nutrients are EASILY washed out. Only very simple "plant like" species, like mosses and lichens, can live without an existing biomass component to their substrate. Soil building over the aeons requires first going through this "lichen" period, so that dead and dried out lichens slowly accumulate in the environment, and act like sponges while decomposers saturate them with organic acids, and liberate mineral sources for actual plants. After that, the process slows down, and depending on the climate, a specific biome will take root, which ultimately determines what the character of the soil will be like.

This is why pouring water on the carbon-less sahara desert will not magically transform it into a lush paradise. It will just wash out all the dried out mineral precipitates between the sand grains, and make the desert even less hospitable to life. The sahara used to be a fertile grassland, before climactic shifts caused it to dry out, and natural aerobic decay of the biomass by microbes depleted the blowing topsoil, slowly transforming it into little more than blowing sands.

Excessive qualtities of carbon sponge in the soil cause serious problems for most ecosystems, because it holds excessive water, and becomes swampy, and anaerobic decay processes take over. Root systems need oxygen to thrive, so the anaerobic conditions actively suffocate plants, making the area into a disgusting bog of slowly rotting vegetation. The biomass holds on to the acids produced by this decay, making the soil very inhospitable, even after being drained.

The process of composting (for a garden), takes a nitrogen rich source, like kitchen scraps, bird or animal dung, fish emulsion, etc--- and blends it with a carbon rich source, like dry leaves, grass straw, or bast fiber heavy plant stalks. A good deal of this nitrogen gets blown off as nitrogen gas as microbial activity uses it to break down the cellulose and lignins in the plant matter, but enough of it stays as free nitrate ions, that it chemically binds to the compost's matrix, and fixates it against being washed away. This process is very similar to mordanting (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mordant) cellulose fibers, before dying them. The nitrogen becomes chemically bound to the compost, and also buffered by all the inorganic cations it soaks up while being made.  Compost is the perfect fertilizer, because it contains literally everything the plant needs, and releases it only as the plant requires.

Raw animal dungs, on the other hand, deliver a whole lot of nitrogen all at once in a soluble form. This is why they are "hot"-- Urea is very reactive biologically, and it basically causes chemical burns to the plant's leaves, stems, and roots--- Without biomass in the soil to catch the urea, and hold on to it for slow re-release, the nitrogen then just washes out the next time it rains. One solution to this problem, is to produce  "Manure tea".  (http://www.gardeningknowhow.com/composting/manures/manure-tea.htm) This is basically just pouring water through scooped up poop, and letting all the nitrates leech into the solution, then conspicuously applying it as a nitrogen booster through irrigation. Over application will nuke the plants though.  Once the dookie has been used to make manure tea, and stops colorizing the water, it is safe to apply as a mulch.  This is frequently done by people who want to use manure fertilizers, but dont want to go through the effort of composting it first.  One of the benefits of manure tea over other methods is that more of the nitrogen ends up in plants, as opposed to composting.  The leeched poop left over from the manure tea will naturally turn into compost over time, as new manure tea is added.

Kohaku mentioned using mushroom compost as a possible fertilizer.  Mushroom compost is just ordinary compost, that has had mushrooms grown on it until the spawn died out from starvation.  Mushroom compost therefore, has all the cations and nitrogen compounds normally found in healthy fresh compost stripped out of it, by the biologicial activities of the mushroom. The positive side of mushroom compost, is that it often is mixed with casing clay, due to the reproductive cycle of crimini (white button) mushrooms; The mushrooms are light induced. That is to say, they start producing mushroom caps, instead of threadlike mycelial fibrils, after those fibrils are exposed to light and air. To ensure good colonization of the compost for the mushroom crop, the mushroom farmer 'cases' the compost in a layer of organic free clay, which keeps light and air out. When the mycelial fibrils have fully permeated the compost, the farmer will purposefully disturb the surface of the casing clay, which exposes the mycelium to air and light--initiating fruiting. This will be repeated as often as needed, until the compost gives out, and the mycelium can no longer fruit. After this point, the compost is heated to sterilize it, and tumbled together.  The admixture of this clay, coupled with the enzymes present in the mycelium, causes partial decomposition of the clay on a chemical level, making it receptive to breakdown by the microorganisms found in healthy soil and the acids produced by plant roots.  Mushroom compost is therefore more nutritious to soil than raw organic material, like coir (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coir) or dry straw, but only marginally so. Mushroom compost, like coir, suffers a profound nitrogen deficit, and will rob nitrogen compounds from the soil it is mixed into through osmosis. Mushroom compost and coir, must therefor be used with manure tea, or with commercial fertilizers, or they will actually inhibit plant growth. This is a common problem with novice gardeners who mulch with dry leaves, or bales of dry wheat straw. They forget to supply a nitrogen source with the watering can, and the mulch literally robs the soil blind, making their plants grow poorly.

As for the issue with limits on how much a plant can take from the soil per season, you clearly have no concept of how ravenous some cash crops are, like corn or cotton. You can take a rich field from productive to barren in just 10 years growing intensive cotton on it, with just one crop per year!

Cotton is a "Only once in a while" crop. Not an 'All the time!' crop. Many economists are unable to comprehend this fact, along with many urban dwellers. (Not to sound offensive.) It and corn are notoriously deleterious to soil, which is why corn ethanol is not a viable alternative energy source. :D This deleterious behavior toward soil is WHY it is a cash crop to begin with-- It has natural scarcity built right in, because it is so damned abusive to soil, that you just cant grow lots and lots of it.

The basic rule of thumb, is that the more you have to till and preen the soil while the crop is on it, the more destructive to the soil it is.  This is why corn is so destructive. It isnt necessarily that the corn plant is hungry, (though cotton most assuredly is!) so much as it is that exposure of the soil to sunlight and air causes aerobic decomposition of the soil's biomass, and the heavy water requirements of the crop itself cause excessive soil mineral leeching. Combined, the soil is left abused after a corn planting, and in serious need of replenishment.

Some mitigating approaches to crop cultivation is to plant 2 or more crops simultaneously, with one being the primary food crop, and the others being used as a ground cover, and after harvest, as a green manure; (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_manure) (Such as clover planted beside beets, turnips, or potatoes)  Another is to grow the cover plant and the food crop, then after harvesting the food crop, use the cover crop as a graze for animal pasturage. You dont really care if the cover crop gets harmed by the hot animal manure-- it's just a cover crop.

Examples of this include growing a root vegetable next to a lowlying ground cover, like clover-- or growing clover next to a short season grain crop, like buckwheat, in the spring and fall.

These approaches keep the soil shaded, and covered, which prevents aerobic destruction of the biomass in the soil, and retaining soil vitality.

Other practices are things like crop rotation, where you will grow a high maintenance crop, like corn or cotton one year, grow a soil cover and vegetable crop the next with a winter green manure, then allow the field to lie fallow with tall grass before tilling it under in fall of the third year, before returning to the high maintenance crop on the fourth year.

If you have 3 plots, you can have each one of them offset on the stage of the rotation cycle, and have concurrent crops every year, at lower but sustainable yeilds.


Essentially, retaining soil carbon, and keeping it loaded with inorganic cations like calcium, phosphorus, potassium and pals, is the quintessential purpose of soil management, which makes carbon the fundamental variable in soil culture. That's why I used it as the simplified nutrient in the simplified model I demoed.  :D Most of the others can actually be implied to be present, if you use compost as the primary fertilizer.

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution
Post by: winner on February 02, 2013, 07:22:19 pm

are there any points that we disagree about?

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution
Post by: NW_Kohaku on February 02, 2013, 07:44:03 pm

Quote from: winner on February 02, 2013, 05:50:43 pm

You seem to be using a fertility modal that I'm not familiar with.
The official fertility modal as I understand it is

• Green manure and other raw biological material: poisonous to plants if there is more than a certain amount. Gets converted to organic matter over several months.  When you plow a crop in, this is what is added.
• Organic matter: keeps nutrients from washing away in the water (not necessary for growth)
• Nitrogen: necessary for growth, washes away easily, can be created by growing legumes
• Phosphorus: necessary for growth.  Closed on map nutrient cycle
• Potassium:  just like phosphorus

None of the composts or other supplements are pure biological material or organic matter, they all contain plenty of nutrients to do the fertilizing for them.

I think NW_Kohaku is arguing that we don't need to bother modeling organic matter because different soil textures already have different amounts of nutrient leaching so organic matter would be redundant.
I want to include organic matter because I'm really attracted to the idea of allowing a badly maintained forest to erode into a sterile wasteland that can no longer hold any nutrients.

That's not actually the model...

The specific post is here (http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=76007.msg2010576#msg2010576).

But basically, the model goes like this:

Water, Biomass, Nitrogen, Phosphorus, and Potassium are all soil nutrients that get tracked as part of the soil and changed in the soil constantly.

Acidity and CEC/Drainage are also tracked in the soil as basic soil stats that aren't likely to change much.  (Putting humus depth here as a separate variable is also floated as an idea if keeping biomass for decomposers is desirable, but it's possible to consolidate it with biomass in general.)

Biological toxicity (this means things like hot fertilizer or leaving corpses on a plant to decompose), Heavy Metal toxicity (magma or other problem materials), and Salinity (irrigating with ocean water or adding ammonia to irrigation) are tracked as pollutants which are basically like bad nutrients.

Beyond that, there's a few stats that are also important, but not actually part of the soil, including energy source (I.E. sunlight available, but could also be if there is the right kind of magic field if we're talking the xenosynthesis stuff, ilke needing to be in a good biome if you're raising sun berries), temperature/climate, pest populations, plant crowding/weeds, and possibly also air quality.  (Air quality being part of an even more advanced concept where caverns need oxygen replenishment so you can't completely seal them off unless you have (magic) oxygen-producing plants underground to scrub your air.)

---

All of the nutrient-type variables are needed within certain bounds for growth.  (Plants don't grow without water or nitrogen or biomass, but there's an upper bound where you can over-water it, and that hurts growth, too.  There's an inner bound with ideal growth, and an outer bound with growth slowed, and outside those bounds, growth stunts.)

Some plants don't need much biomass/humus depth, but those are mostly grasses that aren't going to produce anything edible to a humanoid.  Most need at least some, and it's treated like a nutrient. 

Of them, specifically, water is obvious - keep throwing more in, but ground covers, low drainage, and deep humus/biomass levels slow its rate of decline. Biomass needs some sort of compost added to it to keep up or else have plants tilled back in or soil-building plants. Nitrogen can have nitrogen fixators help build up levels, or compost, or lant/ammonia.  P and K both just need something externally added, like bonemeal or potash.

Drainage and acidity don't change much unless you do very intensive work on it, like replacing the soil or stirring ground sulfur into the soil. 

Pollutants shouldn't go up much besides maybe bio-toxicity unless you're doing something wrong, and salinity because you're adding in urea/ammonia when irrigating it as additional nitrogen (that's the "manure tea" part wierd was talking about), and they go down slowly as plants can leech things out.  Salty soil needs things like saltgrasses (which are cattle fodder) to leech salinity out, for example.

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution
Post by: winner on February 02, 2013, 07:54:29 pm

what is biomass as separate from humus? If there are thoughts of combining them there must be details that differ?

So when you add material to be decomposed in your model, it is immediately turned into humus/biomass, but at the same time some biological toxicity is added? And then fairly quickly (like over a season) that biological toxicity goes away?

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution
Post by: wierd on February 02, 2013, 07:58:41 pm

Technically, "Biomass" is what is above the ground, and "humus" is what is below the ground.

The conversion of one to the other is very inefficient, even in nature. A considerable portion of it is converted into various gasses that escape.

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution
Post by: NW_Kohaku on February 02, 2013, 07:58:41 pm

Quote from: winner on February 02, 2013, 07:54:29 pm

what is biomass as separate from humus?

As part of the model, biomass was originally there to represent undecomposed material, like throwing a log or sawdust down as food for decomposers like mushrooms, while humus is fully decomposed and part of the soil. 

To streamline the process a bit, you can consolidate humus into biomass, and just make very high biomass quantities represent undecomposed matter that gets in the way of some plants (sort of like mulch) and very low biomass representing depleted soil that can be washed away.

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution
Post by: winner on February 02, 2013, 08:13:03 pm

so you have biomass which is the organic material pre composting and you have humus which is it post composting and as it rots it releases some portion of toxins into the soil.

are you planning on modeling the nitrogen that is temporarily used by composting material?

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution
Post by: wierd on February 02, 2013, 08:16:48 pm

how do you intend to deal with Peat?

Peat is basically just raw humus, from a peat bog. It is often highly acidic, from being saturated in tannins and other organic acids, but is likewise VERY rich in many vital plant nutrients.  Treating it with lime as a chellating agent to bring down the pH into a more sane range, would make it a drop in replacement for compost!

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution
Post by: NW_Kohaku on February 02, 2013, 08:28:59 pm

Quote from: winner on February 02, 2013, 08:13:03 pm

so you have biomass which is the organic material pre composting and you have humus which is it post composting and as it rots it releases some portion of toxins into the soil.

are you planning on modeling the nitrogen that is temporarily used by composting material?

Well, proper composting wouldn't be done on a farm plot, but in some sort of composting building/workshop such as a worm farm or something.  (Unless you were putting it in as feed for a decomposer that you would till into the soil.)

However, the idea is that the nitrogen content of an uncomposted fertilizer (like raw manure) would be higher, but add to the toxicity as well as biomass, while adding compost would have less nitrogen and but not add toxicity.

If you do have a decomposer on a farm plot you are adding biomass to (like mushrooms), then it eats through your biomass as it grows, and you could either eat the mushroom (as something you grow basically directly from biomass and water and few, if any, other nutrients) or till it into the soil to build up the soil nutrients like NPK and add a little biomass back.

If biomass and humus are separate things, as biomass decomposes and is eliminated, it adds to humus.  Adding compost just adds to humus, not biomass in this event.  Tilling mushrooms back into the soil would add to both biomass and humus.

It's kind of simpler to think about with them as separate things, but I was also just trying to keep the number of total soil variables down, which is why Drainage and CEC are also just the same linear variable.

---

Quote from: wierd on February 02, 2013, 08:16:48 pm

how do you intend to deal with Peat?

Peat is basically just raw humus, from a peat bog. It is often highly acidic, from being saturated in tannins and other organic acids, but is likewise VERY rich in many vital plant nutrients.  Treating it with lime as a chellating agent to bring down the pH into a more sane range, would make it a drop in replacement for compost!

I think that may have been included as one of the externally-available fertilizers (like mining for fertilizers, something non-renewable), but yes, I remember peat as being one of the things you could use as an acidity-altering substance, like sulfur and lime.

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution
Post by: winner on February 02, 2013, 08:45:01 pm

(I think it would be simplest to have a "dig compost" job that turns humus from a stat into an item, when it gets set back down it turns back into a stat.  That way there would  be no fundamental difference between composting on your fields and composting in a pile, just efficiency differences)


In real life the biomass from the previous crop continues to decompose during this years growth.  Because the micro-organisms that decompose this material temporarily lock away nitrogen, adding too much delicious carbon containing material can cause your crop to starve for nitrogen because the decomposers have a population boom.  This nitrogen is released again when the micro organisms die.  As you know this is why the carbon to nitrogen ratio of your raw biological material is so important.

I think your intent is for biological toxicity to modal both this nitrogen starvation and the decomposing organisms acting as facilitative plant pests?

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution
Post by: NW_Kohaku on February 02, 2013, 09:45:37 pm

Quote from: winner on February 02, 2013, 08:45:01 pm

(I think it would be simplest to have a "dig compost" job that turns humus from a stat into an item, when it gets set back down it turns back into a stat.  That way there would  be no fundamental difference between composting on your fields and composting in a pile, just efficiency differences)

Sure, it's one way to model it if you want to make compost/humus on a "farm plot" you only use for making compost and then dig it up and move it to a farm plot you actually grow crops on, that's one way of doing it.  I was probably thinking of working it so that you could transfer dirt from one plot to another, but never actually explicitly said it. 

Making compost just explicitly a bag of dirt you can take from one plot and dump on another may potentially help make it possible for different composted items to have different nutrient values for the same amount of humus/biomass you are shoving (which is a positive), but also lead to something of a proliferation of item data (a possibly prohibitive negative).

Quote from: winner on February 02, 2013, 08:45:01 pm

I think your intent is for biological toxicity to modal both this nitrogen starvation and the decomposing organisms acting as facilitative plant pests?

Nitrogen starvation comes mostly through dropping nitrogen itself.  (The decomposition of biomass would result in less nitrogen from a compost than directly adding hot manure would add before turning into compost.) Biological toxicity comes from bacteria or fungi in the soil (or harmful biological chemicals like directly-applied urea) that are harmful to the growth of the plant, and are usually a result of "hot" manure. 

Or basically, if you think of it in terms of what you add to the soil, hot manure adds more nitrogen but also more biological toxicity, while compost doesn't add as much nitrogen, but neutralizes the toxicity.

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution
Post by: winner on February 02, 2013, 10:07:50 pm

I'm a little more comfortable with rotting material creating localized infestations of a saprophytic pest that causes incidental damage to living plants, rather than calling it biological toxicity.  The game play effect is about the same, but I enjoy the thought of goblin corpse causing problems because the blood maggots damage plants that grow right next to it rather than thinking it is because as it putrefies it leaks temporary toxins into the soil.  They wouldn't be able to reproduce by eating living plant matter and shouldn't spread but if an infestation of a pest or disease can vary in density I would prefer that they be the reason for biological toxicity.

High levels of nitrogen cause salt toxicity which is why manure tea is one way of using raw manure without as many problems.

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution
Post by: Draco18s on February 03, 2013, 12:31:57 pm

Quote from: wierd on February 02, 2013, 12:01:11 pm

The issue, is that the optimization that is optimal for the site, is only optimal FOR THAT SITE. That is how nature WORKS. It establishes and maintains local maxima, based on the available nutrients, and set physics.

/me phases out of the conversation

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution
Post by: Tsuchigumo550 on February 03, 2013, 03:46:11 pm

I feel it's better to post here rather than on the fourm itself because it's probably been discussed before, and it's a subset of this farming expansion.

Crossbreeding and Variation In Plants:
A system where plants can be cross-bred and cross-pollinated as well as have differences between plant.
For instance, a Plump Helmet Spawn may wind up producing two Plump Helmets, none at all, low-quality ones, etc.

Though, the meat of this post, and the one I thought out:
Cross Pollenation would have it's own workshop: taking two types of seeds or spawns available and then adding time (a dwarf will be laboring, so not a full growth cycle) to produce a new type of seed. Currently impossible, i believe, due to the way plants work along with the game in general, but if we get to a point of random-generated plants, and creation of a workshop that would take and blend raw tags together, new plants could be created.

Let's say two of these new plants, Silverwheat and Sky Grain.

Sky Grain is a plant that, by lore, grows 12 feet tall. It's a part of the Wheat family.
Silverwheat is a wheat that is somewhat valuable, and makes good beer.
Both are brewable, and make mid-high class booze
Both are edible ingredients, of mid-high quality
Sky Grain grows 2-3 tiles tall, Silverwheat 1.
Sky Grain is lightblue, Silverwheat is Silver.

The plants can be crossbred 3:1, 2:1, 1:1, 1:2, or 1:3.
For instance:
Sky Grain 3:1 Silverwheat
Results in something like "Sky Wheat" where most properties of Sky Grain are retained, but some are slightly altered, such as color, growth height.

Sky Grain 1:2 Silverwheat.
This one is weighted to Silverwheat, but not as sharply. Most of the properties will be closer to Silverwheat, but the influence of Sky Grain is evident.
Midnight Berries: A poisonous (nervous necrosis,paralysis) edible plant. Grows mostly on 1-2 tile long vines. Low quality for everything, can make dye.
Suzu Flower: A yellow flower that's edible, brewable, and can be made into dye. Fair quality, and causes slight nausea if eaten (not brewed.)

Mixing them 1:1 could result in something like this: A flowering, berry-producing plant where the berries grow from the flowers. The flowers grow on vines, and they are a mixed yellow-purple pattern. The berries are a dark purple, and if eaten, cause nausea and paralysis, and can cause necrosis. They can be brewed and made into a dye (light purple), the beer is of mid-low quality, and the plant itself is a 1-2 tile vine.

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution
Post by: NW_Kohaku on February 03, 2013, 05:03:32 pm

Quote from: Tsuchigumo550 on February 03, 2013, 03:46:11 pm

Crossbreeding and Variation In Plants:

Crossbreeding was actually mentioned a couple pages back, and Wierd popped in then with something relevant to how you are setting this up...

Basically, if you allow for straight-up crossbreeding like this, it opens up the door to nigh-infinite permutations of every crop in the game.  Each new crossbred seed would need its own data or else it would have to be algorithmically constructed every time the game needed to access information about it.  This can, again, lead to a cascade of item data.

You might want to look at the Alchemic Property Tokens thread (http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=102403.0) I wrote for one way I proposed getting around this for all reactions in general where you combine materials.  It relies upon the notion that you build passable tokens that are modifiers of a simple default material, and reactions are simply ways to create new shapes for materials or combine properties from different materials.  (It's like crossbreeding for everything.)  The idea there is that it makes things easier to combine algorithmically by simply having tokens that may or may not be passed.

Doing this makes data on all materials being produced algorithmically more possible, and also more generally requires all materials having their data algorithmically constructed.

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution
Post by: SirHoneyBadger on February 06, 2013, 07:30:08 am

I hope you're happy, NW_Kohaku. I didn't manage to read more than a third of the first page of this damned thread, before I realized that I'm going to have to mod all of it into the game. There go 2 years of my life I haven't lived yet, and I'm not even going to get to miss them.

I'll read the rest of it later, and doom myself gleefully by taking lots of notes.

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution
Post by: jseah on February 06, 2013, 11:13:21 am

I propose a change (for later) with respect to xenosynthesis and magical biomes. 

The standard nutrients and pollutants are no longer differentiated into well, nutrients and pollutants.  They're just stats.  Some plants like certain combinations, and some dislike them.  Who knows, a magic plant might find nitrogen poisonous and want exactly zero of it. 

Anyway, sunlight is special, but the other energy sources from magical biomes can be tracked as a nutrient/stat/pollutant.  Assuming you're trying to grow sunberries, they use the 'good'ness in the soil and (presumably) make 'good'ness by making the area around them a bit more 'good'.  Or perhaps events are required to restore magical energy levels or a keystone artifact/natural formation. 

In any case, it is obvious that 'evil'ness levels in the soil will act as pollutants for sunberries and as nutrients for silver barbs. 

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution
Post by: d_V on May 15, 2013, 12:00:48 am

I read part of the opening post for this thread, and then the tl;dr version of your layout, and I had wanted to say, "I think making a section of Dwarf Fortress intuitive and easy to pick up for newbs would be sort of outside the scope of DF and against its grain. Like intuitive, non-esoteric quantum physics or the electoral college: bullshirt."

Then I read the post.

Good show! It's complex and automatable enough to be awesome and interesting, but so far beyond what anyone is expecting to EVER have to go through (i.e. just like the rest of DF) that if a newb thought they could pick it up, they may as well start drinking liquor right after breakfast.

You have my vote. I was actually thinking farming was a little too stupid simple and could be way epicer.

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution
Post by: Morrigi on May 15, 2013, 02:40:41 pm

I think this is all excellent, well thought through, and would be a good addition to the game. +1 Support.

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution
Post by: sonerohi on May 28, 2013, 11:04:36 am

You have my support for this idea. I would like to see potential improvements in how we can farm though. Importing a seed drill for a hefty price, for example.

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution
Post by: Epigene on October 28, 2013, 06:11:02 pm

Farming in DF is far too easy, no question. It should be made harder by using two methods - one, decreasing farming-product yields in a straightforward numeric way and two, introducing farming-related variables to scale up complexity while at the same time providing more options for success. While the OP has a much grander vision for DF's ultimate simulation of ecosystems and weather, I believe it's a bit too much for just the purpose of making farming more challenging (and rewarding) with minimal development requirements.

Here are OP's suggestions I am thoroughly behind (from the TL;DR version):

Quote from: NW_Kohaku on January 27, 2011, 03:34:36 am

The goal should be to make something simple to start with, so any random new player survives their first year, but progressively more difficult as time goes on, challenging those who have mastered the basics.
It should be possible for players to get by without knowing terribly many tricks, but with rewards for the player who truly masters the system, in much the same way as dwarfputing.

• Solution 1: Multiple soil quality variables
  
  • Multiple variables for soil quality (instead of just a simple "fertility"). Several of these soil variables, especially the nearly impossible to change ones, may add variables to the game, but not terribly much complexity, as players will have few reasons to actually worry about soil acidity or salinity once you have already picked a plant suited for your soil.
• Solution 3: Different methods of obtaining Fertilizers
  
  • Decomposing organic waste (including corpses, grinding down bones, and manure) into fertilizer is the most sustainable and reliable method.
  • Some fertilizers can be mined or traded for, but they are of finite or unreliable supply. Minable Sulfur can be used to change soil acidity, and make some soil suitable for different crops long-term, however.
  • Exotic fertilizers, like magma, can be used, but require more elaborate engineering, and may cause soil pollution that limit what crops are viable
• Solution 6: More farmable materials
  
  • If you can farm trees for wood, plants for cloth, flammable oils, medicinal herbs, and many other resources besides just food (basically, anything that isn't mined can be farmed), then there is a reason to constantly upgrade farms - you want more than just basic survival on food, you want more stuff.  This lets the complexity of a farm for food become easy, but having to sustain more farms for more crops for more uses means that you are encouraged to farm more complex methods to gain greater yields for non-essential products.

Why so few and in such a limited scope.?
Warning, theoretical rambling inside!

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

I see DF as a simulator. IRL farming depends on three things: water, nitrogen (and other plant micronutrients) and carbon dioxide (and light, but for underground plants in DF this consideration is redundant). In fact, for every kilo of plant matter, 40% of the mass (as carbon) comes from the air and 60% from the water. The nitrogen i.e. fertilizer part may be miniscule (below 1%) but without it no plants can grow. Out of these three things so far DF simulates two - air, which is practically a given and water (mechanics of which work fantastic, but wetness and mud-producing properties could be improved). So if DF were to live up to simulating farming down to the fine grain it would have to start tracking the nitrogen i.e. fertility levels of not only the soil, but dwarves. Basically DF would have to start simulating the whole nitrogen cycle. And there is a problem with that - excrement. For non-plant life nitrogen is toxic and while a necessary part of proteins and plant fibers, nitrogen is inside animal (human and dwarven) bodies only passingly before it is excreted either in liquid or (semi)solid form. So if a nitrogen cycle were to be implemented to track soil fertility, an inevitable side-product of this would be dwarves having potty breaks to return the nitrogen to the soil. I am not saying this can not or shouldn't be done in DF version 1.01, but for the next, below 0.5

So here is what I would like to see done with farming in DF in the next couple of versions:

• Less ease. Feeding 200 dwarves under goblin siege should be a nerve-wrecking ordeal. Present crop growing time must be increased by 30%, some crop failure due to failure to germinate must be introduced. For agrarian science!
• Farm tools! (non-mandatory, increase yield modestly);
• Tree and cap farming with concomitant natural non-cave cap growth reduced (for now it is easy to reach wood sustainability by simply digging out a whole 2x2 embark size soil z-layer and felling the naturally growing caps. One should be able to farm caps, but have them grow reasonably slowly (50% reach maturity withing two years, some fail due to pests?));
• Further crop and animal product recipes - poisons, medicine, drugs.
• Somewhat modified fertilization mechanism:

• Expanded fertilizer (ash) sources: any wood object (as suggested here http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=132318.0 (http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=132318.0)), corpses and refuse (since bodies and bones won't burn on their own, how about a reaction where two logs and three bodies give four ash?), nitrogen-rich minerals (a new type of economic stone).
• Fertility modifies crop growth time in an exponential manner: 0 fertility severely penalizes (+50% growth time on top of the 30% mandate?) while the maximum (7?) grants a minimal boost of 20%, the whole range being, say: F0(-50%); F1(-25%); F2(-10%); F3(0%); F4(+8%); F5(+14%); F6(+18%); F7(+20%).
• To counter the previous, all (most?) soil starts out at fertility level two.

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution
Post by: Draco18s on February 10, 2014, 07:51:38 pm

Rez this thread, as this is relevant.

I have NPR on in the car and on You Bet Your Garden this last week, Mike McGrath briefly mentioned a topic on water harvesting / water conservation that I think is highly appropriate for DF.

The segment can be located at about 35 minutes in (http://whyy.org/cms/youbetyourgarden/valentines-gifts-for-your-special-gardener/) (there's a tall bar that stands out that is right at the beginning of the caller's segment, takes a few minutes for Mike to get around to the question) during which he talks about a chapter of this book (http://www.amazon.com/Save-Three-Lives-Famine-Prevention/dp/0871566214).

He talks about using large, otherwise empty areas of land and stamping down the dirt to make it impenetrable and using it as a giant collection basin for a single tree, out in areas that don't get a whole lot of rain.  Which reminded me of when I was out in Israel and visited Masada (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masada).  They had a similar water collection system along the cliffs and hills:

(http://www.netours.com/images/stories/Rift_Valley/masada/masada-cisterns3.jpg)

This should definitely be something that can happen in Dwarf Fortress.  Right now we tap surface lakes and use them as basins of water collection due to how rain works, rather than being able to construct our own.

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution
Post by: LeFourbe on January 29, 2015, 03:51:00 am

WoW that's amazing ! :O I was diging in the forum, reading old topics and then ... THAT ! The most amazing suggestion I have ever read !

Is Toady realy working on the suggestions (http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/eternal_voting.php) ? I hope Toady is working on this one (even just a little :D)  Because it MUST be implemented !

You did an awesome work everybody !

Long live the DF community and long live DF  ;)

(PS : i'm a little frenchy, sorry for the eventual mistakes...)
(PPS : sory for digging accideltaly into this ≡«☼old thread☼»≡  :P)

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution
Post by: Urist Tilaturist on January 29, 2015, 04:28:36 am

This looks like a superb suggestion, albeit a very old one. Farming needs to be made into something that resembles actual farming. It is too easy now.

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution
Post by: Waparius on January 29, 2015, 10:27:16 am

Quote from: LeFourbe on January 29, 2015, 03:51:00 am

Is Toady realy working on the suggestions (http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/eternal_voting.php) ? I hope Toady is working on this one (even just a little :D)  Because it MUST be implemented !

Apparently after he and ThreeToe went through at least the first page or two of the whole suggestions forum they've settled into a pattern of regularly going over new posts once they reach page 4 or so of the forum (to make it easier to read through without the thread constantly updating itself.

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution
Post by: Draco18s on January 29, 2015, 10:50:05 am

I love seeing this thread pop up every once in a while.
And there is a farming improvement item on the eternal voting thing, it's #9.  The thread linked there is actually the old thread, this being a reboot.  But farming is still top-10.

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution
Post by: LeFourbe on February 03, 2015, 10:44:35 am

Waparius : Okay, thanks. That's nice, we have a chance of seeing some improvements soon ... *dreaming* :p

Draco18s : Yeah, I've voted for farming improvement on the voting php script. Let's hope for a brighter future in DF agriculture ^^

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution
Post by: NW_Kohaku on May 04, 2015, 04:13:31 pm

OK, it's been a year or so since I've been here last... (A whole version jump with plantable crops! Wow! If only there were some sorts of differences between all these plants!) 

In any event, I updated a couple of segments, mostly the Water Management segment near the start, in light of talk about the California droughts that have been continuing into this year.  I also put reference to some of Winner's ideas in there.

I'll try to modify to react to the new crops, but I'll have to play with it a little before I make up my mind for myself...

And thanks, glad you liked it, LeFourbe.  I've been mashing this idea up against others for over half a decade, now.  :P  I sure hope it's been refined by now.

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution
Post by: Pencil_Art on May 05, 2015, 08:21:18 pm

Looks like a really good idea, and well thought out.

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution
Post by: NW_Kohaku on March 28, 2016, 02:12:43 pm

I made a few updates in terms of water management and farming water, mostly relating to some more things I've read regarding algal blooms and how drip feeding works.

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution
Post by: NW_Kohaku on March 29, 2016, 10:56:48 am

Importing an argument from another thread:

Quote from: Bromus on March 23, 2016, 04:40:18 pm

Spoiler: Original Post (click to show/hide)

Hey guys! New here, but huge fan of the game. Always wanted to do an ecology/permaculture farming sim, (still haven't found a good one), and from the very beginning thought DF is a perfect start. I am irl a former-computer engineering student-turned-professional horticulturist and practical ecologist. I know agriculture is something on the development horizon, so hopefully I'm not too late here.  There is already so much care that goes into world formation geology, it seems natural to continue that into dynamic game-play.

In one sense, I'm bumping this http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=76007.0 (http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=76007.0) pretty exhaustive thread, but also wanted to bring my own spin, which will probably include some points already made, but may also offer a good marriage of intuitive simplicity and fun/challenging complexity.

I think a big part of the crux of soil and ecology and its translation into human understandable/programmable language is the overwhelming complexity that unfolds when you approach the subject from a reductive/scientific pov.  Here, I think it would help to focus on the basic foundational, modular/symbolic concepts upon which all living processes (plant and dwarf alike) are modeled.

There are four ingredients to living processes: mineral, air, water, and carbon (the old Greeks called it fire, a simple model of synergetic carbon reduction/oxidation; combustion and respiration are ecologically very similar). Balance is an important concept (in fertile soil: 25% air, 25% water, 45% mineral, 5-10% carbon). Mineral is heavy/slow and air is insubstantial/fleeting, but water and carbon cycle endlessly through atmospheric and terrestrial phases, and in transition, they are extremely manipulable.

DF already does pretty well with the mechanics of water and its seasonal flux, though there are some tweaks that could be implemented with how it soaks into and is held in soil.

I think carbon would be a good place to start with adding a new mechanic around soil fertility modifiers to soil tiles (similar to the 1-7 depth-scale of water?). The roots of plants are really the primary builders of soil carbon; as they grow and die and regrow through the seasons, they leave behind carbon-rich air/water channels in the soil. In this way, disturbance associated with annual cropping systems depletes soil-carbon, while long-term/stable perennial cropping systems build soil-carbon. This type of soil-carbon would probably be part of world-generation. I would love to see an agricultural option that allows perennial guild/community style planting zones that could be built up around pre-existing fruit/nut trees, though I understand the current system of annual cropping has an attractive mechanizable aspect for many (hence our modern reliance on industrial fertilizers and machinery).

And then of course there are the possible fun sub-mechanics surrounding the translation/cycling of "waste" (refuse, corpses…) into "resource". Some waste is rich in carbon (wood and other dry/brown vegetation), while some waste is rich in nitrogen (green vegetation and especially animal products). Carbon and nitrogen have a kind of twin-sibling relationship.  Too much nitrogen causes carbon to be quickly respirated (depleted) from the soil, and leads to collapse of soil-life when the artificially-applied nitrogen is eaten up and washed out of the soil (think like the binge-crash of sugar or hard-drugs), while too much carbon ties up plant-available nitrogen and/or leads to water-saturation/anaerobic conditions. In this way, there should be an appropriate sense of time and place regarding the manipulation of these resources.

Ideally, we "complex" these valuable resources by 1) facilitating interaction, and simultaneously 2) slowing/buffering the flow through the system. Terracing linked up to a drainage/water-source is a perfect example of complexing water.  Planting nurse-logs/corpses in the ground, "chop-and-drop"/chip/leaf mulches are examples of complexing carbon into the soil system.

Mostly, the focus should be on the interactions of water and carbon, as these really lie at the heart of healthy soil and plants.

Gotta run,
Thanks again for a really fun game.

-B

And then responding to this:

Quote from: Bromus on March 29, 2016, 08:56:41 am

Quote

For that mater, the core of what I am asking of you remains unanswered: How would players actually interact with any of this data?

Building latrines, stables, stockpiles, activity-zones, and hauling water, manure, mulch, and querying farm tiles and farmers' workshops. I don't think the average player wants to have to deal with more greater quantities/qualities of soil amendments than that. Am I understanding your question correctly? I don't think I can get more detailed, as I am not into modding the RAWs or whatever.

No, I don't think you're understanding the distinction I'm making.

You are talking about items in the chain of production for the simulation, I'm talking about interface.  This thread is both about having a simulation, yes, but more importantly about the interface that allows the player to understand and interact with it.

See the images in the TL;DR post (http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=76007.msg1920009#msg1920009) (or the whole post if you haven't read it yet), and then the Interface post (http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=76007.msg1920010#msg1920010), which explains in depth how the player would actually interact with this system.

To make a long story short, I am suggesting a whole new interface not dissimilar to the military screen, where agricultural activity (including ranching and forestry among others) are all scheduled by the player, then automatically carried out by the dwarves so as to eliminate the need for micromanaging a constant "add more fertilizer" button press that players, simply, would not remember to press. 

To this end, I don't see why removing one or two resources from the game really makes the game simpler.  Either you're suggesting a workshop and manual job assignment scheme, which would be massively more micromanagement-heavy and complex, even with less "moving parts", or you're basically just saying you want to keep the overwhelming majority of what I talked about, you just want to make "carbon" be "more important" by removing some of the other variables.

From what you've said so far, I get the impression that you're not actually interested in a simpler system, you're trying to argue against "NPK" in favor of "CN" because of a political/philosophical opposition to modern fertilization practices.  If so, that's perfectly fair, I enjoy such an argument more than arguing complexity of interface, but I'm still not sure what it is you actually want players to see when they are operating in this system that would be different from what they see in the system currently outlined.

Quote from: Bromus on March 29, 2016, 08:56:41 am

Quote

I'm not sure why people are so hung up on sevenths...

Because as a player, the 1-7 water-scale is the most immediately available presentation of an already-implemented finer-gradation than the all-or-nothing that-which-needs-to-be-dug and that-which-has-been-dug. Really, the programmable bits and the UI scale really don't matter so much as long as there is some kind of non-zero-sum spectrum of soil characteristics.

The thing is, it does matter significantly. Sevenths of water are crude and have to be handled with random motion taking place dozens of ticks for optimization reasons, but have to be large because they occupy 'physical space' to the point that they block portions of the map and force connectivity redraws.  Plants already have growdurs that are only checked in hundreds of ticks because they're meant to be slow and not take up processor time too often, but they are also still measured in the hundreds.  Sevenths need to have random checks, and that can mean forcing a dwarf to re-water a tile before he's even gotten to the next row of crops because of some randomly "bad rolls".

However, you do bring up the major, recurring theme I do have to bring home - players generally don't recognize the things they don't see.  This is the core of my argument of why we can have complex systems without making it seem complex to a player: They just don't see the complex numbers, they only see the simple ones.

The objective shouldn't be to make a simple set of interactions, it should be to make complex interactions where the numbers the player doesn't directly need to interact with are hidden.

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution
Post by: Waparius on April 01, 2016, 05:38:01 pm

Ha, pretty sure Toady mentioned this specific thread in the latest interview. :p

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution
Post by: NW_Kohaku on August 08, 2016, 07:39:27 pm

Adventurer Mode Concerns

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

I didn't pay much attention to it at the time, since at the time of the formation of this thread, the Adventurer Mode was pretty abandoned, however, with recent work done making it clear that anything that happens in Fort Mode should happen in Adventurer Mode, I'll try to work out some of the problems that would be unique to Adventurer Mode.

Specifically, there are two main problems: One is that the farming interface I described would need to have an Adventurer Mode equivalent; The other is that soil quality needs to be visible to an adventurer.

For adventurers, it would be easier to break it down into two different "modes" of farming, with one being similar to Fortress Mode, and the other being a manual mode.

---

If the player wants to set up a farm or ranch where hired laborers work for them, or manage farmlands as a mayor or the like, then it would make the most sense to make it so the player has some method of delegating authority to a farm overseer.  A text option while on the Adventurer Site or wherever the farm is located could then be brought up that replicates as many of the scheduling-related functions as possible. In fact, it could just straight-up be the same UI that just exits out to Adventurer Mode instead of Fortress Mode, or at least reuse much of the same code, provided that could be accomplished smoothly. 

This idea is predicated upon farming being done only on adventurer sites or areas tracked like it, which could restrain the bounds of the interface in the same way that Fortress Mode is restrained to the embark boundaries.  I.E. you have to "own" a defined piece of real estate to start ordering it farmed, and have to be standing in it to open the menus.

The use of the same sets of interface should help keep things relatively easy to code, since it basically involves reuse of the same scheduling mechanics, although obviously, there would be the nature of the timescale to contend with.

Essentially, there would be no method of ordering farming of an underling (other than maybe a "go get that plant" order) other than using the farming interface, so designation of farm overseer would be a rather fast-and-loose designation.  A player might designate a professional overseer over a giant plantation, or simply designate their spouse to take care of the family garden on their own while they go off adventuring.  The idea being that there need be only one main farming-scheduling interface. (Or at least, two that share most of the same code and functions.)

---

For small-scale subsistence farming where only the player is farming, or for when the player just wants to pitch in, there also needs to be a way for the player to directly see the soil condition, and assess what can grow there, at least to a limited degree.

Manually growing plants, of course, throws away much of the attempts at automation I've spent a large amount of time explaining, but it's also mechanically simpler, so long as intelligible information can be sent to the player.

I think the best way to handle this situation is to let the player have a "look" function at the soil, which can add greater amounts of detail, given the adventurer's grower (farming) skill.  Although a numeric display wouldn't be used, in going with the game's style, a color-coded system for soil (I.E. red -> brown -> yellow -> green -> cyan) similar to previously mentioned in the Interface section of the thread could talk about specific elements of soil quality. 

Carbon could be described with a soil darkness, with carbon-heavy soil being a coal-like black soil, and depleted soils being pale.  Water is simple to describe simply through dampness of soil.  NPK macroelements could be represented by different elements of what plants exist in the soil.  (Barring total desolation or utterly eroded soil, there should be at least some grass and weeds even in a mostly empty patch of soil. For ease of player use, assume players are looking at a universal weed that reacts to the same nutrient levels everywhere.) The color, number or broadness of leaves, and the growths of fruit or flowers (https://www.planetnatural.com/fertilizer-numbers/) can indicate N, P, and K.  Even if players don't understand exactly what each one means on its own, keeping each in order and having them color-coded is a strong hint.

Each item related to farming, such as seeds, fertilizers, and the like, could all have additional information on their item status pages.  Players looking at a seed might see, again, color-coded ideal amounts of each nutrient for the current seed.  Each potential fertilizer could also have a "helps ___ much if you have ___ problem" with a given nutrient.  For example, rotting animal corpse might have a "helps MODERATELY if you have PALE SOIL" line of description.

Adventurers with a decent grower skill could also have a "is this seed good for this soil?" function in the info page on a seed, which could lead to comments on discrepancies between ideal seed conditions and current soil conditions, along with suggestions on what amendments would be ideal to a higher-ranking grower. 

A no-skill farmer might be able to distinguish topsoil color, but have no idea what conditions a plant might grow in, or how to distinguish when soil is healthy for a plant, except from what lives and what dies.  Each level up to a certain point could add a different layer of information, such as a direct gauge of when a plant needs more water on the first rank of skill, or needed nitrogen levels on the next rank of skill, and so on.

Toxins and environmental effects (including magic/xenosynthesis) add another layer to the mix.  Environmental factors, like whether the climate is appropriate should be visible through other means, although seed descriptions should indicate what climate they prefer.   Detecting local magical conditions should also be up to the senses of an adventurer more generally than specifically with farming, although again, a trained grower should be able to look at a seed and determine when it needs certain types of magic to grow, and a player can just look around for other things that rely upon that type of magic to assess for themselves.  (I.E. look for bubble grass before trying to plant a sun berry.)

Soil toxins may be visible through similar means, by simply adding weeds that enjoy certain toxins, and having other plants die off because of those toxins. For example, if nothing but salt marsh grasses are growing in an area, it should be easy for someone looking at the local plants to figure out that the soil is salty and marshy.

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution
Post by: Arthropleura on August 09, 2016, 06:38:07 am

Quote from: NW_Kohaku on August 08, 2016, 07:39:27 pm

This idea is predicated upon farming being done only on adventurer sites or areas tracked like it, which could restrain the bounds of the interface in the same way that Fortress Mode is restrained to the embark boundaries.  I.E. you have to "own" a defined piece of real estate to start ordering it farmed, and have to be standing in it to open the menus.

I'm a little unclear on this part. Would this include hamlets that the player has gained proprietorship of?

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution
Post by: NW_Kohaku on August 09, 2016, 08:54:23 pm

Quote from: Arthropleura on August 09, 2016, 06:38:07 am

I'm a little unclear on this part. Would this include hamlets that the player has gained proprietorship of?

I'm actually a little surprised to see someone comment to a change made to this thread in relative real time. Thanks for that.

But anyways, yes, I was coming back to edit that to make that part more clear...

Basically, the idea is that any orders given to farm a piece of land, Fortress or Adventurer Mode, would go through the same farming interface.  If you were a mayor or other authority figure, presumably, some farming would be done by the individual initiative of land-owning farmers, but if the player has the authority to give orders on how the land is farmed, that means they use the same interface, including setting up a "farm overseer" to bring the interface up. 

Or put another way, creating a system where you just sort of point at a field and order followers to do stuff would be too vague and micromanage-y a system, so the idea is to turn every order for a different character to farm into nails so that the same hammer can be used upon them.

This would include if your adventurer just claimed a plot of wilderness, and left a follower behind to farm, alone.  Even, hypothetically, setting up a spouse as a farm overseer to keep the lands in order, whether there are hired laborers to help or not. 

Basically, because I'm trying to get both modes to share the same space, that means they both need to play with the same "boundaries", since you don't want to turn into a half-fortress mode where the adventurer can just roam the screen across the world with the power to see through walls.  So if an adventurer claimed a site, then you only get to see to the limits of that adventurer site while in this mode, just like how Fortress Mode doesn't let you designate or even scroll outside your fortress.

A hamlet, as well as fortresses and adventurer sites, use defined areas.  Hence, in a hamlet, the extent of your reach of an order to farm would be the boundaries of the hamlet.  (Of course, thinking of it now, it probably would need to be sub-divided further, just for memory's sake, since a hamlet can be quite large.)

One thing that may cause problems is that hamlets are not necessarily tracked as fully as adventurer sites and fortresses.  (Both have every part of their map saved, entirely.  Hamlets are procedurally generated every time they are loaded, and only changes are saved.  There may need to be a choice if there is enough changes caused by farming controls to simply make a player-controlled hamlet worth turning into a site like a fortress just because enough changes to the fundamental data are expected to make it like a fortress...)

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution
Post by: Wyrdean on August 10, 2016, 08:30:48 pm

Well I read the entire thread I must admit you keeping with a thread for 5 years (plus a little) is very impressive if only the rest forums were as active.....

(the walls are great too I happen to love reading however I read very fast so nothing lasts any amount of time however this lasted for a while thanks!)
I sincerely hope all of your ideas (the fesable ones atleast) are added to the game, would be very cool!

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution
Post by: NW_Kohaku on August 11, 2016, 12:28:19 am

Quote from: Wyrdean on August 10, 2016, 08:30:48 pm

Well I read the entire thread I must admit you keeping with a thread for 5 years (plus a little) is very impressive if only the rest forums were as active.....

(the walls are great too I happen to love reading however I read very fast so nothing lasts any amount of time however this lasted for a while thanks!)
I sincerely hope all of your ideas (the fesable ones atleast) are added to the game, would be very cool!

Technically, this is a rewrite of the original thread, which started in 2008, practically at the start of the suggestions forum, although I wasn't involved until 2010.

Also, Toady had previously expressed a desire to try to do most of the basics, but was unsure of how to be able to meaningfully present it to players. Hence, I tried to make the thread have a focus (inasmuch as this thread HAS any focus) on how to set up the interface, and giving it a balance between simulationism for its own sake and strategic gameplay value. The exact details get a bit unwieldy, as I've waffled between a few ideas on specifics mid-writing, but the overarching concept is totally feasible in broad strokes, and I think there's good reason for optimism that a majority of the important stuff will be there. 

I also spent a pretty huge amount of time researching for this thread, and from knowing nearly nothing on the topics, I've come to start gardening a bit just because this thread spurred my interest.  The simple fact that it can drive people to gain an interest in something like this which they never otherwise would have paid attention to will always be what I find Dwarf Fortress's greatest unsung feature.

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution
Post by: LordBaal on August 11, 2016, 04:54:50 am

Ptw

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution
Post by: 90908 on August 12, 2016, 08:15:57 am

Watching to post.

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution
Post by: Urist Tilaturist on September 05, 2016, 03:38:44 pm

What is most interesting about this thread is that it has been going for years with no actual visible mod release.

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution
Post by: expwnent on September 06, 2016, 12:35:12 am

It would require very advanced DFHack support.

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution
Post by: Qyubey on September 07, 2016, 12:40:14 am

This is such a cool thread~

Two big things I saw when reading and had to mention though:

• Very much in favor of the 'Scheduler' for checking variables and counters. Should be its own thread, honestly. Means that Tarn could do something about the 'Every Frame Refresh' problem, and have the ability to alter when counters refresh fairly easily (maybe even a raw with frame timers for each type of counter).
• I laughed when I saw 'drinking and potty at the same time', but I do believe the game should handle 'the business', because then you'd have to design sewers as a long term goal (which creates choice since they can be an easy way in).
• On the issue of combined breaks, here's a better suggestion: just use Rimworld's Restrict menu. It's perfect. Have a roster where you can assign periods of 'Work', 'Break', and 'Free' to your dwarves per season (or categorize them by Jobs, Social Status, Burrow Location, Civ/Militia, etc). Free would be like how dwarves currently work, but setting a 'Break' period would force them to go satisfy their hunger/thirst/sleep/'relief' during the time allotted - no working allowed (only personal hauling). Wiki says dwarves need to eat roughly twice a season, so you'd really only need two definite break periods assigned, but the better idea is to stagger schedules so not everyone does it as the same time. Dwarves that are angry or stressed or in a mood would obviously ignore the orders, and maybe you also need a Manager to access the panel itself - like with job assigning and stocks needing certain roles to be actively filled. There's already precedence for code like this in the game with the Militia menu anyway, so its not even a big ask.

As for the people against waste being in the game for dragging it down; Ark Survival Instinct has poop all over the place and no-one raises any eyebrows (hell, you can even eat it), so I don't see what the fuss is here. It's a valuable resource.

Oh, and regarding turning Brooks into 2/7 water: this issue was brought up in one of my threads, but it means you can't have any fish in those rivers since they'd air-drown. Might be able to fix this by just editing that Vermin Fish can spawn and survive in 2/7 water though.

---

Given that some of this stuff would require you to go to different points on the world map to grab resources (guano mining, for example), you'll definitely need more of the game's framework in place to support some things. It DOES, however, heavily suggest a direction that the overall metagame beyond Fortress should go in:

Controlling an entire entity through Sites and Groups.

I know it's planned, but the whole 'mining island' concept gives it a much clearer concept IMO. You have your base civ, with various Sites you could control (either from the world map, or in Fortress mode), and you'd assemble Groups to go to specific points on the map, from a site, using resources from that site, comprised of citizens of that site. They could be Armies that go fight and raid; Explorers that go just to collect rare resources and bring them back; Traders to ferry resources between both your sites and other entity sites; and finally Settlers which are the exact thing the game gives you currently to create a Fortress.

So, you assemble a new Group on the Map menu by selecting a Site you own and adding things in the handy-dandy Embark menu, however this one is expanded to let you set a type of Group (A/E/T/S). You only need a specific run for resources, so you set it to Explorers. Assign a few citizens from the site; give them tools, weapons, food, and a fancy new caravan to carry all of it, then select the tile on the map to go to. They travel there over time (you could run Fortress mode in the meantime and get an alert upon arrival), and once they arrive, you can assume control with an Explorer UI (more direct control over dwarves, but more limited construction than Fortress). Using some orders, you direct your guys to go mine out some guano rock and dump it in the caravan. Maybe grab some seeds, plants, fight off a carp or two and have one of your guys die (dump his body in the caravan). Then you dis-embark back to the Map menu and order them back to a Site. Once they arrive, everything belongs to that Site again, including the new stuff you brought in.

Sorry for going off-topic, but it hit my mind and I didn't want to make a new thread or something.

EDIT:

Quote

Fungal arrangements, made of faintly glowing mushrooms of different colors, arranged and carefully cultured by the most tasteful fungalists in the kingdom create "flowerbeds" underground and illuminate towering statues commemorating the greatest deeds in dwarven history.

...You could use the same code for statues on a hedge to create Hedge Sculptures. Carve a tree that looks like a crying elf.

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution
Post by: Qyubey on September 18, 2016, 05:34:27 am

Had some adventures in coding of my own. Do coroutines exist for C? (What I assume DF is coded in). If so, you could manage that 'scheduler' idea really easily.

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution
Post by: Draco18s on September 18, 2016, 10:22:09 am

Quote from: Qyubey on September 18, 2016, 05:34:27 am

Had some adventures in coding of my own. Do coroutines exist for C? (What I assume DF is coded in). If so, you could manage that 'scheduler' idea really easily.

Absolutely. The problem isn't "do threads exist?" but rather "can I use threads here and not horribly mangle the data?"
Multithreading isn't something you can just bolt on when you need it, because every bit of memory it interacts with is now also multithreaded.  And once that happens, your entire program is multithreaded and large portions aren't set up for it.

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution
Post by: Qyubey on September 18, 2016, 05:07:09 pm

Quote from: Draco18s on September 18, 2016, 10:22:09 am

Quote from: Qyubey on September 18, 2016, 05:34:27 am

Had some adventures in coding of my own. Do coroutines exist for C? (What I assume DF is coded in). If so, you could manage that 'scheduler' idea really easily.

Absolutely. The problem isn't "do threads exist?" but rather "can I use threads here and not horribly mangle the data?"
Multithreading isn't something you can just bolt on when you need it, because every bit of memory it interacts with is now also multithreaded.  And once that happens, your entire program is multithreaded and large portions aren't set up for it.

I... wasn't talking about multithreading persay - more than you could schedule the game to only update certain things less often than a tick. Nevermind though; talked to a programmer friend and he said you can achieve the same with updating functions anyway.

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution
Post by: Draco18s on September 18, 2016, 06:10:44 pm

Oh yeah, you don't need anything special for that.

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution
Post by: NW_Kohaku on June 11, 2017, 12:10:57 am

Not exactly an update, but I've been playing Rune Factory 4, and it actually implements soil nutrient data in a simplistic manner, although it does so in a way that generally requires you deal with it, manually.  Still, it makes for interesting material to look at and see in practice, since this sort of thing isn't commonly in games.

First, arable soil is divided into 2x2 plots of actually tillable tiles, presumably to reduce the amount of data that needs storing by one fourth.  (Or just to reduce the number of fertilizer items you need to carry around.)  These soil tiles contain several data points that have a far more blunt purpose than the simulationist NPK model I have outlined, here. 

The following data is tracked per plot:
"Overall" (not sure if this is a real stat, or an amalgamated stat... it doesn't have any actual effect I can perceive)

"Speed" - Affects crop growth speed as a multiplier.  Harvesting crops tends to knock speed down by about 0.1 per harvest, but different crops are "easy on the soil" and have much less impact than others.

"Quality" - Affects whether sacrificing a crop for seeds will yield a seed with increased quality.  (Level 1 seeds make level 1 crops, but you can thresh it for seeds for a level 2 seed, which makes level 2 crops, which sell for 10% more and have 10% better effects - cooked food is a healing/MP-restoring item and temporary stat buff in this game.  Level 10 is the best, and doubles prices and effects. Once you have shipped crops of a certain level, seeds will be sold at that level for the same price as a level 1 seed, but will create products that sell for more, so you want to have one crop you're willing to sacrifice for higher-level seeds.  The "quality" soil stat needs to be a certain minimum level for advancement to the next seed level to be possible, but it's not readily apparent how much you need except by seeing whether you get a better seed or you just wasted several game days of growth.)

"Number" (actually, "No.") - Multiplies how many crops you will harvest.  Some crops are more productive than others.  A single tile of corn produces only one corn, but a single tile of cucumber produces 5 cucumbers, plus cucumbers will continue producing more crops from the same vine until destroyed, it changes to a bad season and the crop dies, or the soil quality drops to the point you get no more harvests.  Multiple-harvest crops like cucumbers abuse the soil more heavily, and drop this faster.

"Size" - You need this to be high to get "giant crops", which are special... well, giant versions of normal crops.  Giant crops are used for special crafting, or just selling for godawful amounts of money, but they abuse the soil heavily and take special fertilizers to make happen.

"Health" (or "HP") - This is more like the biomass/carbon level of the soil.  HP is abused when harvesting, especially multi-harvest crops, and if it hits 0, nothing grows or can be harvested until it rises again.  Incidentally, stats only drop when you harvest a crop, so threshing crops for seeds or destroying crops before they can be harvested keeps the soil quality high.

"Defense" - Reduces HP loss when you harvest. 

---

There are multiple fertilizers that help restore the soil. 

First, there is a "fertilizer bin".  Dumping unwanted plants (like weeds from your field, or wild grasses you can find in the outside world) into the fertilizer bin gives it more "charges".  The fertilizer bin passively regenerates soil stats so long as it has "charges" left in it every day.  If you get more than one, they interestingly share the same storage, so you can choose to just dump everything into one bin while leaving plenty of others elsewhere, but at the same time, I think the one bin actually fertilizes all your fields even if you expand your farm to multiple screens, so I'm not sure that's necessary.  I think that the fertilizer bin adds less or possibly even nothing to your soil stats if they go above the default values.  (I.E. it restores more Speed soil stat if it's below x1.0, and less if it's above x1.0.)

Second, letting a tile fallow sends its stats back towards the default state, so if you really abuse soil and can't be bothered to tend to it, you can just leave it untilled and let the weeds grow for a bit. 

Third, you can till certain crops back into the soil.  Corn grows any season but Winter, and clover grows any season but Summer, and both can be plowed back in, which instantly sets HP back up to 255 (max), and can raise other stats to a lesser degree if they are low.  (This is really handy when you're growing multi-harvest crops that abuse HP heavily.  In a 2x2 plot, grow 3 multi-harvest crops like strawberries for tons of produce, and the fourth tile is for corn you grow solely to plow back into the soil.) 

Finally, you have a "Chemistry" crafting skill and crafting station that relates to both healing items/medicines for status ailments, as well as various fertilizers for your fields.  You can make, for example, a "Greenifier" with a withered weed (surprisingly rare), a wild grass that grows in certain areas in the overworld/dungeons, and a flower. (You have to plant flowers to harvest as crafting supplies to make fertilizers that let you grow more plants like flowers you can harvest to be crafting supplies, and WHAT DO YOU MEAN THAT SOUNDS INEFFICIENT?!) Greenifier raises the "quality" soil stat, making it possible to grow higher-level crops.  "Formula A" directly adds +0.5 to the "Speed" soil stat, so dumping two on default-quality soil instantly doubles crop growth speed.  (This means you have an insatiable appetite for the withered weeds and wild grasses you need to make it, in spite of them supposedly being cheap and worthless ingredients.) Greenifier+ and Formula B are a better versions of the same items, but take actual produce to... produce, and take slow-growing flowers to prevent players from abusing this.  (Unless of course they dump tons of Formula B on the fields that produce the ingredients for Formula B...)  There are also Giantizer (needed for making giant crops), and Minimizer (undoes the giantizer, and also improves other soil stats).

---

The game features classic Harvest Moon farming mechanics otherwise, which means you plow, throw seeds at dirt, then water every day until harvest time.  You can get upgraded watering cans and such that let you water whole fields in a single power swing.

Like other Rune Factory games, you can also get tamed monsters to water your crops for you.  (Unlike previous games, any monster will do all chores, so you don't have to look for water mages just to do the watering and trolls just to smash rocks for you.) Monsters will water fields until some point in the afternoon when it's time to head in, at which point, they will instantly harvest and put into the shipping bin any crops left over.  If told to do so, they will even buy new seeds and plant new crops entirely on their own, resulting in an automated farm (if you don't mind that you're doing nothing but harvesting and shipping raw crops, when you really want to use crops as crafting materials, even if only because crafting cucumbers into pickles before selling them nets you more cash).  They don't really watch out for soil quality, however, and I haven't just left a field entirely to a monster's own volition, so I'm not sure how sustainable that is. 

Also, monsters left to work fields on their own lose HP as they work, resulting in them requiring healing after a few days (they don't restore HP overnight if they were working) so you need to interact with them at least a little.  If they drop below half HP, they stop working and have angry scribble signs over their heads.  You can either let them rest for a few days and have a work rotation, feed them healing potions/food until better, or order them into your party so you can cast a healing spell before letting them go and ordering them back to work (which is the most cost-effective, but manually-intensive way to remove manual labor from the game...).

---

All this said, in spite of there being a bunch of numbers being tracked, I generally find I only have to do a few simple things, like plant one corn to plow back in every couple weeks to restore soil HP and spread my heavy feeders out with light feeders to keep things relatively balanced.  I also want to keep a few heavily fertilized super-fast-growth fields for things like fruit trees or rare flowers that normally take half a year to grow. 

This is a game made for "the casuals", and when you see it work in practice, it's really not as complex as having a whole bunch of numbers makes it seem.  You even need to equip a special item just to see the numbers, at that...  Although they're important, and you're just left guessing without it...  (I say this to argue back against the nay-sayers that existed several years back saying more than one or two tracked stats would be too complicated.) 

Using something like a schedule system and automated fertilizer usage, again, would make this easy on Dwarf Fortress players, who would generally only need to keep an eye on necessary fertilizer and fertilizer components that need to be used to keep farms at maximum efficiency without requiring the player to actually get involved in manually targeting individual tiles for fertilization. 

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution
Post by: Draco18s on June 12, 2017, 07:51:05 am

Quote from: NW_Kohaku on June 11, 2017, 12:10:57 am

Not exactly an update, but I've been playing Rune Factory 4, and it actually implements soil nutrient data in a simplistic manner, although it does so in a way that generally requires you deal with it, manually.  Still, it makes for interesting material to look at and see in practice, since this sort of thing isn't commonly in games.

The only problem I have with a system like that is that there's no inherent mechanic that encourages crop rotation. Seems to me that every crop depletes one or more aspects of the soil and the only way to raise it again is to use fertilizer.

Now, don't get me wrong, I think fertilizer is a great thing to have and use, but I like the "gamey" feel that crop rotation gives to things.

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution
Post by: LordBaal on June 12, 2017, 08:04:50 am

Well, I think we should have both options and let people use what they want.

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution
Post by: Draco18s on June 12, 2017, 10:34:31 am

Quote from: LordBaal on June 12, 2017, 08:04:50 am

Well, I think we should have both options and let people use what they want.

Considering that the NPK method is already both...
That is, it supports both the mechanisms of "use fertilizer, get bigger harvests" and "use crop rotation, get bigger harvests."

Supporting two different incompatible data types doesn't seem like a thing Toady plans on doing.

The only thing about the method NW_Kohaku posted that is beneficial is splitting up the data storage across several tiles. That's actually a really clever thing to do. No arguments.

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution
Post by: LordBaal on June 12, 2017, 01:02:34 pm

NPK?
North Popular Korea?

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution
Post by: Draco18s on June 12, 2017, 02:33:56 pm

Nitrogen, Phosphorus, and Potassium.
Potassium's elemental symbol is K (Kalium).

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution
Post by: LordBaal on June 12, 2017, 05:05:44 pm

I though it was a mod or something already on the game.

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution
Post by: Draco18s on June 13, 2017, 09:27:52 pm

Good job on you not reading back a page or two to see that NW_Kohaku has used the abbreviation at least twice.

"simulationist NPK model"
"...you're trying to argue against "NPK" in favor of "CN" because..."

I get it, it's a 33 page long thread and you didn't read all of it, but that was the bit that jumped out and demanded questioning?

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution
Post by: LordBaal on June 14, 2017, 04:22:23 am

(http://new2.fjcdn.com/thumbnails/comments/Yes+i+would+kent+_a75961257ba48463517d91c99e3bbac9.jpg)
Yes I would Draco.

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution
Post by: NW_Kohaku on June 15, 2017, 12:00:53 am

Quote from: LordBaal on June 12, 2017, 01:02:34 pm

NPK?
North Popular Korea?

The NPK model is covered in this post (http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=76007.msg1920007#msg1920007).

Also, super-concise TL;DR version is found here (http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=76007.msg1920009#msg1920009).

On the first page, I tried to create a set of hypertext links as a "Table of Contents" to keep things as easy to read as anything of this size can be.

---

Quote from: Draco18s on June 12, 2017, 07:51:05 am

The only problem I have with a system like that is that there's no inherent mechanic that encourages crop rotation. Seems to me that every crop depletes one or more aspects of the soil and the only way to raise it again is to use fertilizer.

Now, don't get me wrong, I think fertilizer is a great thing to have and use, but I like the "gamey" feel that crop rotation gives to things.

Well, it's not that I am proposing copying Rune Factory 4's model, I'm just saying it's a model that actually exists in a game, and one made mostly for "casual gamers", which directly goes at the heart of one of the most significant arguments against the NPK model I've been pushing from the start of this thread.  People have been saying that anything more than two or three soil variables would be too much complexity, but in Rune Factory, you have a 7-variable soil quality system that is only a moderate impediment on players planting whatever they want.  Seeing an actual example of a similar system in action is a valuable thing, since it gives you some concrete feedback as to how the player will respond to the impact of certain design choices.

It's not something that I have to go really far out of my way to micromanage (at least, no more than I already was in a game where I plant and harvest all the crops, myself), but it does have at least some impact on my choices, since I've had situations where I slammed head-first into 0 soil HP after planting a lot of strawberries in a single patch, and had to fallow that square for a few days before I could even grow corn I could plow in to recover the soil completely, and put back into service.

In fact, outside of trying to get the giant crops (which requires planting four of the same crops in that 2x2 area at the same time so that they "merge" into a multi-tile crop) it means that you pretty much just have one tile for corn/clover, one tile for heavy-feed a repeat harvest crop like strawberries or pumpkins, and two tiles for single-harvest crops (at least one of which you might want to make a light feeder).  It's not exactly a "crop rotation", but it does encourage the player to at least spread out their use of the soil unless they're capable and willing to carpet-bomb the soil with fertilizers.

A huge difference between what I've been arguing for here, and what's in Rune Factory 4, however, is that the soil variables in Rune Factory 4 are far more segregated and distinct.  A Formula A will add 0.5 to the growth speed multiplier, and nothing else.  The "size" variable does absolutely nothing if you aren't going for a giant vegetable.  You can have crops hypothetically capable of growing at quintuple speed, but nothing grows because soil is at 0 HP.  My proposed system has fertilizers that impact multiple variables, and variables that are more inter-dependent.  If things work as I want them to, that means that the player will have a less concrete idea of what is going on in the soil (especially since Toady isn't going to just put overtly gamey things like "the soil has 105/255 HP left", and instead have something like a "the soil is chalky and pale" to denote levels of biomass) but at the same time, won't necessarily need such a concrete idea in their day-to-day operation of farms.  (Especially since farm overseers apply the fertilizers, themselves, meaning that players are mostly concerned with not running out of fertilizers or ordering crop schedules that consume inordinate amounts of fertilizers.)

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution
Post by: Bumber on June 15, 2017, 01:16:07 am

Quote from: NW_Kohaku on June 11, 2017, 12:10:57 am

"Health" (or "HP") - This is more like the biomass/carbon level of the soil.  HP is abused when harvesting, especially multi-harvest crops, and if it hits 0, nothing grows or can be harvested until it rises again.  Incidentally, stats only drop when you harvest a crop, so threshing crops for seeds or destroying crops before they can be harvested keeps the soil quality high.

"Defense" - Reduces HP loss when you harvest.

Also used by hurricane damage.

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution
Post by: GoblinCookie on June 22, 2017, 01:16:19 pm

It is actually rather important given our subterranean lifestyle as dwarves the nutrient factors that control the growth of fungi, as opposed to the growth of surface plants.

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution
Post by: NW_Kohaku on June 22, 2017, 05:32:13 pm

Quote from: GoblinCookie on June 22, 2017, 01:16:19 pm

It is actually rather important given our subterranean lifestyle as dwarves the nutrient factors that control the growth of fungi, as opposed to the growth of surface plants.

Subterranean life is a major component of the discussions, especially in the spin-off "Xenosynthesis" threads.

As a basic assumption, either subterranean "plants" are decomposers (which means that they consume the biomass stat, which takes constant composting of fresh dead biologicals), or they are magical plants that draw their energy from a magical energy source other than the sun, (http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=76007.msg2019450#msg2019450) yet still take the same basic elements of Nitrogen, Phosphorous, and Potassium that surface plants do.  (They hypothetically could feed on other elements, but you wouldn't be able to eat a silicon-based lifeform built on incompatible compounds instead of proteins, so they'd be unsuitable for farming, anyway.)

Beyond that, it's a discussion of how to make magic biomes function in a way that makes sense and preserves the game's intended fantasy feel (http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=76578.0), which has been one of the longer-running discussions of this concept, since it's also the one that's obviously untethered from reality and also implicitly becomes an argument about how "magical" Dwarf Fortress should be.

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution
Post by: GoblinCookie on June 25, 2017, 01:40:43 pm

Quote from: NW_Kohaku on June 22, 2017, 05:32:13 pm

Quote from: GoblinCookie on June 22, 2017, 01:16:19 pm

It is actually rather important given our subterranean lifestyle as dwarves the nutrient factors that control the growth of fungi, as opposed to the growth of surface plants.

Subterranean life is a major component of the discussions, especially in the spin-off "Xenosynthesis" threads.

As a basic assumption, either subterranean "plants" are decomposers (which means that they consume the biomass stat, which takes constant composting of fresh dead biologicals), or they are magical plants that draw their energy from a magical energy source other than the sun, (http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=76007.msg2019450#msg2019450) yet still take the same basic elements of Nitrogen, Phosphorous, and Potassium that surface plants do.  (They hypothetically could feed on other elements, but you wouldn't be able to eat a silicon-based lifeform built on incompatible compounds instead of proteins, so they'd be unsuitable for farming, anyway.)

Beyond that, it's a discussion of how to make magic biomes function in a way that makes sense and preserves the game's intended fantasy feel (http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=76578.0), which has been one of the longer-running discussions of this concept, since it's also the one that's obviously untethered from reality and also implicitly becomes an argument about how "magical" Dwarf Fortress should be.

Having them use some mysterious energy source completely messes up the whole ecosystem.  As in, the underground plants will take over the surface since the underground energy source is more plentiful than the sun.

So I favor the decomposer approach to underground plants.

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution
Post by: Bumber on June 27, 2017, 01:24:10 am

Quote from: GoblinCookie on June 25, 2017, 01:40:43 pm

Having them use some mysterious energy source completely messes up the whole ecosystem.  As in, the underground plants will take over the surface since the underground energy source is more plentiful than the sun.

How are they going to take over the surface when the energy source is underground? They might even be completely unfit for surface survival.

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution
Post by: GoblinCookie on June 28, 2017, 10:50:28 am

Quote from: Bumber on June 27, 2017, 01:24:10 am

How are they going to take over the surface when the energy source is underground? They might even be completely unfit for surface survival.

Because surface plants are already partly underground, as in the roots; since the roots are underground they themselves 'collect' mysterious underground energy.  As for the completely unfit for surface survival, the question is rather backwards.  Why would surface plants remain surface plants when there is all that underground energy to collect, remember that symbiosis (as in lichen) with underground organisms is a possibility in the event they lack the native ability to exploit such energy.

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution
Post by: NW_Kohaku on June 28, 2017, 02:56:57 pm

Quote from: GoblinCookie on June 25, 2017, 01:40:43 pm

Having them use some mysterious energy source completely messes up the whole ecosystem.  As in, the underground plants will take over the surface since the underground energy source is more plentiful than the sun.

So I favor the decomposer approach to underground plants.

Quote from: GoblinCookie on June 28, 2017, 10:50:28 am

Because surface plants are already partly underground, as in the roots; since the roots are underground they themselves 'collect' mysterious underground energy.  As for the completely unfit for surface survival, the question is rather backwards.  Why would surface plants remain surface plants when there is all that underground energy to collect, remember that symbiosis (as in lichen) with underground organisms is a possibility in the event they lack the native ability to exploit such energy.

It messes up the ecosystem composed of living amethyst creatures, giant mushrooms that completely subvert the laws of thermodynamics and conservation of energy, sentient mushrooms with legs, crabs that live in magma and spit molten rock, evil human heads with wings, and whatever floating guts are supposed to be?

As discussed at length in the Xenosynthesis thread, this is a game with magic in it, and the caverns in particular run on magic, get over it.  There is room for simple decomposer mushrooms, but basically everything that goes on in the caverns is clearly, blatantly magical, and trying to cling onto the notion that DF is somehow without magic at this point is just denialism.   Xenosynthesis is a discussion about how to make this concept actually behave in a rational and bounded manner because, just as you tried to point out, yourself, tons of things in DF are magical and live in impossible cavern biomes, but also need rules to make them have some kinds of limits and behave in a manner that creates some sense of verisimilitude even when we're talking about farming magical mushrooms in underground caverns filled with monsters.

I wish you'd actually glanced at the Xenosynthesis thread rather than making wild assumptions about what I'd said to argue against, instead (which would be faster to read than making me answer the same question again), because you'd see how we'd spent nearly all of it talking about how to make the system have rational boundaries the player can interact with such that it doesn't overwhelm the whole world.  It's entirely about how magic "comes from" somewhere and "is consumed" by other things, very much like the sun and based upon a semblance of Conservation of Energy.  It also allows for "environmental effects" of what dwarves do in a magical sense, allowing for dwarves to commit, essentially, magical pollution for all those pollution allegories people want to have and also the ability to create a blasted hellscape with mutant monstrosities created from the excesses of dwarven industrialism if players so choose to push the envelope with the concept. 

Beyond that, saying that plants would clearly get "underground energy" because "they have roots" is like saying that clearly humans are plants because they have melatonin to convert sunlight into energy for making vitamin D, and therefore, that's totally the same thing as photosynthesis.  The point of Xenosynthesis is that different organisms require different energy sources to live, and creatures need to be specially adapted to various different sources of energy.  (Much like how deep sea volcanic vent bacteria that chemosynthesize are unsuited to life on the surface, and so are all the creatures that feed off of them.)  Xenosynthesis also, incidentally, doesn't focus upon a single "underground energy" so that not all caverns would be the same, anymore, and could have different sphere-related energy types, so that some caverns might be "war" caverns or "fire" caverns or "song" caverns, so you have creatures that are affected by changes that cause them to march in regimented formations against intruders or spit fireballs or be creatures that literally live on song, respectively.  While there would be some adaptable creatures, there would also be quite a few specialized species (in particular, the "producers" that xenosynthesize, themselves) that have evolved to exploit one particular energy source. 

In particular, with Toady's (reletively) recent attempts at the mythology arc, where he wanted there to be the old placeholder "Good", "Evil", and "Savage" biome replaced with new sphere-related biomes, this is meant to mesh into that concept.  A god of song might create a "Song" magic field, and certain plants and creatures live off this energy, becoming song-related creatures, and interact with it.  Maybe the area of the song field can be expanded by holding religious events filled with songs to empower the magic field, and maybe silence and lack of prayer for the song god will cause it to shrink, as would anything that taps more song magic than is being produced.  This gives the player some ability to interact with these legends, rather than just having them be some assumed immutable feature of different creatures or areas, as they are, now.  Particularly when it comes to non-dwarven playable creatures from high-magic worlds from the Mythology Arc, which can have innate magical abilities, having those abilities (or even the survival of the species) tied to certain holy sites or rituals continuing to exist adds a lot of mythologic flavor, as well as a good rational reason for creatures to pursue goals that would otherwise be irrational.  Elves right now are just nuts who love trees, but spending some time reading through what Toady talks about with the nature spirits they worship, and it's pretty clear that they venerate trees because it is the basis of the magical power that underpins their whole society, as well as several species (possibly including elves, themselves). The nature spirit creates all the "savage" biome giant creatures and creature-man creatures for its own purposes, and the elves are dedicated to appeasing and feeding this spirit through what best serves the spirit: Preventing the destruction of forests.  It's not too much of a leap to then say that destroying forests is an attack upon this nature spirit, and that clear-cutting and destroying forests could eventually weaken the spirit (and drive the elves berserk) to the point it has a real impact upon the savage biomes and their giant and creature-man creatures.  (Including the spirit sending those creatures at the player in a desperate attempt to save itself.)

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution
Post by: Bumber on June 30, 2017, 08:35:04 am

Quote from: GoblinCookie on June 28, 2017, 10:50:28 am

Quote from: Bumber on June 27, 2017, 01:24:10 am

How are they going to take over the surface when the energy source is underground? They might even be completely unfit for surface survival.

Because surface plants are already partly underground, as in the roots; since the roots are underground they themselves 'collect' mysterious underground energy.  As for the completely unfit for surface survival, the question is rather backwards.  Why would surface plants remain surface plants when there is all that underground energy to collect, remember that symbiosis (as in lichen) with underground organisms is a possibility in the event they lack the native ability to exploit such energy.

Ignoring the fact that you've switched which plants are doing the invading between your two posts...
If surface plants could utilize underground energy and spread underground, then they'd just be called underground plants, wouldn't they?
Instead, ecology dictates that the surface plants fill a unique niche, because they can't compete with the underground plants at their own game.
Underground plants, likewise, can't compete with surface plants at photosynthesis (which may or may not be in addition to underground energy from roots.)

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution
Post by: GoblinCookie on July 02, 2017, 07:44:59 am

Quote from: Bumber on June 30, 2017, 08:35:04 am

Ignoring the fact that you've switched which plants are doing the invading between your two posts...
If surface plants could utilize underground energy and spread underground, then they'd just be called underground plants, wouldn't they?
Instead, ecology dictates that the surface plants fill a unique niche, because they can't compete with the underground plants at their own game.
Underground plants, likewise, can't compete with surface plants at photosynthesis (which may or may not be in addition to underground energy from roots.)

Surface plants are already around 50% underground Bumber.  If as a rule the underground is full of energy that can be extracted by plants just by virtue of it being underground, then the balance is going to favour the underground energy both because it is presumably available day+night rather than only in the day and because it's collection is over a 3D rather than 2D area.  In any case mysterious underground energy is far superior to the sun.

Here is the problem, just because you live on underground energy does not mean that you do not have an interest in the surface world for 'other reasons'.  For instance mushrooms, the actual mushroom energy source is entirely in the 'roots' of them mushroom, the mushroom itself on the other hand is simply there to reproduce more mushrooms; so basically it is akin to a flower rather than a leaf.  Given that underground energy is inherently better than solar energy, what we see is that the whole surface is covered in huge forests of potentially enormous mushrooms, rather than the familiar grass and trees we expect to see. 

The thing is that these mushroom trees compete with the normal plants and they will win since they have a far better energy source than the normal plants.  This means the only photosynthesizing  plants we will end up seeing is going to be found atop the mushroom trees, similar to the plants that grow atop rainforest trees in RL.

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution
Post by: NW_Kohaku on July 02, 2017, 01:04:14 pm

Quote from: GoblinCookie on July 02, 2017, 07:44:59 am

Quote from: Bumber on June 30, 2017, 08:35:04 am

Ignoring the fact that you've switched which plants are doing the invading between your two posts...
If surface plants could utilize underground energy and spread underground, then they'd just be called underground plants, wouldn't they?
Instead, ecology dictates that the surface plants fill a unique niche, because they can't compete with the underground plants at their own game.
Underground plants, likewise, can't compete with surface plants at photosynthesis (which may or may not be in addition to underground energy from roots.)

Surface plants are already around 50% underground Bumber.  If as a rule the underground is full of energy that can be extracted by plants just by virtue of it being underground, then the balance is going to favour the underground energy both because it is presumably available day+night rather than only in the day and because it's collection is over a 3D rather than 2D area.  In any case mysterious underground energy is far superior to the sun.

Here is the problem, just because you live on underground energy does not mean that you do not have an interest in the surface world for 'other reasons'.  For instance mushrooms, the actual mushroom energy source is entirely in the 'roots' of them mushroom, the mushroom itself on the other hand is simply there to reproduce more mushrooms; so basically it is akin to a flower rather than a leaf.  Given that underground energy is inherently better than solar energy, what we see is that the whole surface is covered in huge forests of potentially enormous mushrooms, rather than the familiar grass and trees we expect to see. 

The thing is that these mushroom trees compete with the normal plants and they will win since they have a far better energy source than the normal plants.  This means the only photosynthesizing  plants we will end up seeing is going to be found atop the mushroom trees, similar to the plants that grow atop rainforest trees in RL.

[Citation Required]

You're throwing around a lot of extremist claims based upon assumptions that no only have no supporting argument, but really need them because nobody else believes those assumptions. 

For example, you're assuming that literally any sort of energy source besides photosynthesis, even without giving any regard to what sort of energy source that is or what its limitations are at all, would automatically so vastly outstrip photosynthesis in efficacy that photosynthetic plants would all instantly go extinct... and use mundane mushrooms as an example.  Because clearly, mundane mushrooms have driven plants to the brink of extinction with their capacity to out-compete photosynthetic plants for resources... 

Why, for starters, should we assume that "underground energy" is omnipresent (even aboveground, belying the name), as or even more concentrated, is as inexhaustible, and more efficiently converted into biological energy than solar energy?  That's a massive set of assumptions you have no basis to claim.

Mundane mushrooms don't take over the world because they depend upon a resource that is exhaustible, and requires functionally feeding off the scraps of other living organisms that are in the food chain based upon photosynthesis... just like the xenoenergeia of the xenosynthesis argument.

Once again, xenosynthesis is entirely about limitations that bound the behavior of these sorts of magical fields.  It's meant to be a replacement for the current good/savage/evil/cavern biomes... none of which have been argued to be covering the whole world.  Even evil biomes, where the most dire changes occur and most mundane plants and animals are likely to be killed by the evil-powered creatures that live in such areas, don't actually constantly spread because the powers of the evil biomes are restrained to within those evil biomes, themselves.  The point of the system is talking about how and why those areas are restrained to specific areas, and under what rules they might expand or contract. 

I again urge you to actually read the argument I made before making arguments against non-existent strawman arguments that have nothing to do with the topic at hand.  Your argument is essentially that an infinite, omnipresent, unlimited-efficiency energy source would be an infinite, omnipresent, unlimited-efficiency energy source, and that's why you stand opposed to a finite, geographically restricted, potentially inefficient energy source, and that's just ridiculous.

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution
Post by: GoblinCookie on July 03, 2017, 12:30:48 pm

Quote from: NW_Kohaku on July 02, 2017, 01:04:14 pm

[Citation Required]

You're throwing around a lot of extremist claims based upon assumptions that no only have no supporting argument, but really need them because nobody else believes those assumptions. 

For example, you're assuming that literally any sort of energy source besides photosynthesis, even without giving any regard to what sort of energy source that is or what its limitations are at all, would automatically so vastly outstrip photosynthesis in efficacy that photosynthetic plants would all instantly go extinct... and use mundane mushrooms as an example.  Because clearly, mundane mushrooms have driven plants to the brink of extinction with their capacity to out-compete photosynthetic plants for resources... 

Why, for starters, should we assume that "underground energy" is omnipresent (even aboveground, belying the name), as or even more concentrated, is as inexhaustible, and more efficiently converted into biological energy than solar energy?  That's a massive set of assumptions you have no basis to claim.

Mundane mushrooms don't take over the world because they depend upon a resource that is exhaustible, and requires functionally feeding off the scraps of other living organisms that are in the food chain based upon photosynthesis... just like the xenoenergeia of the xenosynthesis argument.

Once again, xenosynthesis is entirely about limitations that bound the behavior of these sorts of magical fields.  It's meant to be a replacement for the current good/savage/evil/cavern biomes... none of which have been argued to be covering the whole world.  Even evil biomes, where the most dire changes occur and most mundane plants and animals are likely to be killed by the evil-powered creatures that live in such areas, don't actually constantly spread because the powers of the evil biomes are restrained to within those evil biomes, themselves.  The point of the system is talking about how and why those areas are restrained to specific areas, and under what rules they might expand or contract. 

I again urge you to actually read the argument I made before making arguments against non-existent strawman arguments that have nothing to do with the topic at hand.  Your argument is essentially that an infinite, omnipresent, unlimited-efficiency energy source would be an infinite, omnipresent, unlimited-efficiency energy source, and that's why you stand opposed to a finite, geographically restricted, potentially inefficient energy source, and that's just ridiculous.

Not so, aggressive one.  You can make up whatever rules you wish when we are talking about an imaginary physical principle, the premise was that underground plants (in general) are fed by some mysterious underground energy, the conclusions that follow is that underground energy based plants will take over the surface world based upon the fact that the underground is everywhere.  If we are talking about a localised thing then it is indeed otherwise, but is what we call an exception rather than the rule; nobody other than you however said it was a localized thing but how said plants in general are fed. 

Mundane mushrooms do not take over the world because the underground energy source does not exist in real life.  If it did then since the mushrooms themselves are mostly underground but also take up space on the surface they very much would take everything over, which is what I was saying. 

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution
Post by: Draco18s on July 04, 2017, 05:39:44 pm

Quote from: GoblinCookie on July 03, 2017, 12:30:48 pm

nobody other than you however said it was a localized thing but how said plants in general are fed.

Dude. Xenosynthesis is her¹ thread.
It's her suggestion that underground plants operate that way.

You're trying to discount her suggested idea of underground crops by dismissing the limitations she built into the idea on the grounds that "it's only limited because you said so" and "if it's unlimited, there's no reason why underground plants wouldn't outcompete above ground plants."

Seriously.  Stop.

¹Gender assumption totally made blind.

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution
Post by: Bumber on July 05, 2017, 03:19:55 am

Quote from: GoblinCookie on July 03, 2017, 12:30:48 pm

... the conclusions that follow is that underground energy based plants will take over the surface world based upon the fact that the underground is everywhere.

The underground is everywhere? Then what is even the surface? The infinitesimal layer that separates ground from air? How would you classify a surface plant? Photosynthesis? You say surface plants are already around 50% below ground, but then how can an underground plant compete with a surface/photosynthetic plant for the other 50% and take over? The likely outcome would be surface plants that parasitise on underground plants for nutrients, or blur the definition further by using both sources of energy.

Additional vagueness: What if we transplant soil to the top of a tower? Does it still contain underground energy, or does the soil merely act like a conductor for the energy? You're running with your own specific interpretation and laws of how it works, which can't really prove anything about the concept as a whole. Most I can do is point out that a surface invasion is still fundamentally flawed. An organism can't invade where it can't derive benefit.

My interpretation is that the energy would get weaker closer to the surface, given that the underground sphere would be opposed to sun and sky. That's even assuming that we're talking about underground-derived power, and not just coincidental proximity to the HFS, Armok's Blood, or Cosmic Eggshell. Sunlight could be harmful to underground plants, via sunburn or dehydration. Underground energy could be weaker than the sun. I'm sure there are plenty of other workable ideas, rather than the single one proposed which might not.

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution
Post by: GoblinCookie on July 06, 2017, 07:09:31 am

Quote from: Draco18s on July 04, 2017, 05:39:44 pm

Quote from: GoblinCookie on July 03, 2017, 12:30:48 pm

nobody other than you however said it was a localized thing but how said plants in general are fed.

Dude. Xenosynthesis is her¹ thread.
It's her suggestion that underground plants operate that way.

You're trying to discount her suggested idea of underground crops by dismissing the limitations she built into the idea on the grounds that "it's only limited because you said so" and "if it's unlimited, there's no reason why underground plants wouldn't outcompete above ground plants."

Seriously.  Stop.

¹Gender assumption totally made blind.

Seriously, shut up.  >:( >:(

Quote from: Bumber on July 05, 2017, 03:19:55 am

The underground is everywhere? Then what is even the surface? The infinitesimal layer that separates ground from air? How would you classify a surface plant? Photosynthesis? You say surface plants are already around 50% below ground, but then how can an underground plant compete with a surface/photosynthetic plant for the other 50% and take over? The likely outcome would be surface plants that parasitise on underground plants for nutrients, or blur the definition further by using both sources of energy.

Yes a surface plant is being defined as a plant that is sustained by photosynthesis and in a wide sense plants along the lines we are familiar (trees, grass, flowers).  Having the surface taken over by parasitic plants that live on the underground energy plants belong them is an just one example of underground energy based plants taking over the surface. 

Another problem with the underground energy idea is that yes the underground is everywhere.  There is simply no clear point at which the underground ends and the surface begins, if we have a cave and we fill it with underground life sustained by an underground energy and then we make a whole in it, do all the underground plants die off because it now counts as being part of the surface? If not the case then what stops the whole surface world from counting as an extension of said magical cave, resulting in takeover of the world by underground plants? 

Quote from: Bumber on July 05, 2017, 03:19:55 am

Additional vagueness: What if we transplant soil to the top of a tower? Does it still contain underground energy, or does the soil merely act like a conductor for the energy? You're running with your own specific interpretation and laws of how it works, which can't really prove anything about the concept as a whole. Most I can do is point out that a surface invasion is still fundamentally flawed. An organism can't invade where it can't derive benefit.

The answer to the tower question does not really matter, unless it is the actual soil that is the source of the underground energy, magic soil is one possible option I guess.  I actually prefer the idea that the soil contains the energy myself, since it fits well with how fungi grow in the real-life, the only difference being in this case the source of the nutrients in the soil would be magical rather than mundane. 

Yes an organism that is based upon underground energy sources (mushrooms) does takeover the surface world in the real-life.  If a mushroom grows somewhere, that physically prevents say a blade of grass from growing in the same location.  Even though the mushrooms do not gain any energy benefit from invading the surface, they still take over the surface whenever enough 'underground energy' is present in the real-life soil, competing with surface plants. 

Quote from: Bumber on July 05, 2017, 03:19:55 am

My interpretation is that the energy would get weaker closer to the surface, given that the underground sphere would be opposed to sun and sky. That's even assuming that we're talking about underground-derived power, and not just coincidental proximity to the HFS, Armok's Blood, or Cosmic Eggshell. Sunlight could be harmful to underground plants, via sunburn or dehydration. Underground energy could be weaker than the sun. I'm sure there are plenty of other workable ideas, rather than the single one proposed which might not.

The problem is not that there are innumerable possible ideas, it is isolating the ideas that result in a situation that is not completely alien to reality.  This is the logical problem that all fantasy fiction has inherently, it is not easily possible to add in 'cool new things' without logically altering the world to the extent that it is no longer relatible to the world we know. 

This results in a situation where we must 'bracket' in the magic.  Yes you can magically create a fireball but all the fires started by your fireball have to themselves be nonmagical in nature and follow the normal physical laws; the alternative is to have a binary situation where we end up with two competing realities following different rules.  This means that instead of the devs making the plants work by 'magical underground energy', it is better that they factor in the energy value in soil and have magical things then alter the energy level of the soil.

That way underground we end up with an abundance of underground plants and the lifeforms supported by them, as opposed to in normal mundane caverns where they are generally sparse because only mundane means of energy transfer exist.  However if there is (or we did) a deep valley that brings said underground energy source closer to the surface then we will see an abundance of surface fungi, maybe even giant mushrooms like those in Morrowind.  This is what I mean when I say I prefer that the underground plants be sustained like real-life fungi do, rather than being directly fed by some magical force; it is not that I am opposed to them being ultimately sustained by magic in some circumstances.

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution
Post by: Bumber on July 06, 2017, 04:52:01 pm

Quote from: GoblinCookie on July 06, 2017, 07:09:31 am

Yes a surface plant is being defined as a plant that is sustained by photosynthesis and in a wide sense plants along the lines we are familiar (trees, grass, flowers).  Having the surface taken over by parasitic plants that live on the underground energy plants belong them is an just one example of underground energy based plants taking over the surface.

They don't have to be special parasitic plants. Regular plants can parasitise merely by having their roots grow through and steal nutrients. They also benefit from decomposers, which is analogous to processing underground energy.

Quote

Another problem with the underground energy idea is that yes the underground is everywhere.  There is simply no clear point at which the underground ends and the surface begins, if we have a cave and we fill it with underground life sustained by an underground energy and then we make a whole in it, do all the underground plants die off because it now counts as being part of the surface? If not the case then what stops the whole surface world from counting as an extension of said magical cave, resulting in takeover of the world by underground plants?

I would assume either it's dependent on sunlight, in which case the ones directly under the opening die, or it's based on soil content / z-level, in which case no immediate effect. Current DF is closer to the former, with quirks.

Quote

Yes an organism that is based upon underground energy sources (mushrooms) does takeover the surface world in the real-life.  If a mushroom grows somewhere, that physically prevents say a blade of grass from growing in the same location.  Even though the mushrooms do not gain any energy benefit from invading the surface, they still take over the surface whenever enough 'underground energy' is present in the real-life soil, competing with surface plants.

Notice the greener grass near the mushrooms. (http://cowgarage.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/DSC_0094-Fungi-Fairy-Ring-Small-Close-Up-Mid-Ohio-625x625.jpg) The grass actually benefits in the long run, despite the loss of a few blades. The mushroom only surfaces to reproduce, and then the exposed parts of the fungus eventually wither in the sun.

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution
Post by: GoblinCookie on July 08, 2017, 05:07:21 am

Quote from: Bumber on July 06, 2017, 04:52:01 pm

]They don't have to be special parasitic plants. Regular plants can parasitise merely by having their roots grow through and steal nutrients. They also benefit from decomposers, which is analogous to processing underground energy.

In real-life the fungi need the plants in order that they decompose and transfer energy from the sun to them.  In this situation we are talking about the exact opposite situation, the surface plants are behaving like the mushrooms do, the energy transfer is going in the opposite direction instead.

Problem is that fungi on the surface can parasite on other fungi growing underground, so the ability of plants on the surface to steal nutrients from those underground simply drives the fungi take over the surface problem.  Again it does not rule out regular plants, it just makes them look different. 

Quote from: Bumber on July 06, 2017, 04:52:01 pm

I would assume either it's dependent on sunlight, in which case the ones directly under the opening die, or it's based on soil content / z-level, in which case no immediate effect. Current DF is closer to the former, with quirks.

Sunlight can easily be avoided by retreating into the earth during the daytime and coming out at night.  Since my energy is in the ground I do not have to be on the surface during the daytime, but I still take up space. 

Quote from: Bumber on July 06, 2017, 04:52:01 pm

Notice the greener grass near the mushrooms.[/url] The grass actually benefits in the long run, despite the loss of a few blades. The mushroom only surfaces to reproduce, and then the exposed parts of the fungus eventually wither in the sun.

Is the situation the result of the mushrooms fertilizing the soil or is it instead the same factor that is making the grass green and the mushrooms grow? 

Assuming that you are correct what we are seeing is that the mushrooms are breaking down the organic matter in the soil into a form that is more 'digestible' to the plants, while at the same time using up the energy which the soil needs.  In the end the mushrooms run out energy and die off, which makes space for the plants to grow to use the fertilized soil.

In this situation the dying off does not happen, because the mushrooms have an unending source of energy.  That means they can indeed simply get bigger and bigger, or more and more densely packed until everything is covered in them.  This means they end up smothering every form of plant-life that tries to grow in the soil.  They can also grow faster because they have an energy source that form 24hrs a day and can be exploited immediately without needing to expend energy to first grow leaves, which reduces the cost of reproducing.

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution
Post by: NW_Kohaku on July 08, 2017, 06:05:26 pm

OK, could you stop? 

This is arguing something you're openly admitting has absolutely nothing to do with the actual suggestion for... I don't even know what you're trying to prove.

I don't want to call Toady in for thread derailment, here.

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution
Post by: GoblinCookie on July 09, 2017, 09:34:56 am

Quote from: NW_Kohaku on July 08, 2017, 06:05:26 pm

OK, could you stop? 

This is arguing something you're openly admitting has absolutely nothing to do with the actual suggestion for... I don't even know what you're trying to prove.

I don't want to call Toady in for thread derailment, here.

So the nature of how plants in the DF world are fed has nothing to do with the topic of agriculture?

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution
Post by: SixOfSpades on July 12, 2017, 11:41:03 pm

At the risk of re-railing the thread, what does the Xenosynthesis theory have to say about artificial caverns? If I dig a hole in bedrock & sprinkle some water in it, I assume I'll be able to grow basic crops (a whole lot of young forts are going to get absolutely shafted otherwise), but will there be enough "underground energy" to support the same kind of mushroom forests found in a bona fide cavern?

Also, suppose I dig this cavern high up in the mountains, and tunnel down so far that I avoid Caverns 1 & 2, and instead breach nothing but Cavern 3. Could I have nether-caps growing at ridiculously high altitudes?

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution
Post by: Bumber on July 13, 2017, 05:15:10 pm

I would assume you'd have to fertilize them like you will surface plants.

I think also the releasing spores mechanic might get removed once Toady adds plantable tree saplings, etc.

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution
Post by: NW_Kohaku on July 14, 2017, 03:20:09 am

Quote from: SixOfSpades on July 12, 2017, 11:41:03 pm

At the risk of re-railing the thread, what does the Xenosynthesis theory have to say about artificial caverns? If I dig a hole in bedrock & sprinkle some water in it, I assume I'll be able to grow basic crops (a whole lot of young forts are going to get absolutely shafted otherwise), but will there be enough "underground energy" to support the same kind of mushroom forests found in a bona fide cavern?

Also, suppose I dig this cavern high up in the mountains, and tunnel down so far that I avoid Caverns 1 & 2, and instead breach nothing but Cavern 3. Could I have nether-caps growing at ridiculously high altitudes?

Well, I don't use terms like "underground energy", to start with, but rather that different spheres have their own forms of energy.  This is meant to replace the "evil" or "good" or "savage" biomes as they exist now, as well as the caverns, although different depths can have different sphere influences.  (Such as the surface having a "Law" sphere influence, the first cavern having a "Darkness" sphere influence, the second cavern having no sphere influence at all, and being a barren cave, and the third cavern having a "Fire" sphere influence.)  Similar to how biomes (and the layer stones) have boundaries now, the X and Y coordinate boundaries are just tied to the biomes, and then if there are differences in sphere influence by depth, then they'd be within certain bands of depth from the caverns.  (So the soil layer and first half dozen Z-levels of layer stone will likely be whatever sphere is on the surface.) 

Also keep in mind that part of the whole point is that you can also build up xenoenergia (xenosynthesis energy) through different player actions, such as building temples to specific sphere-aligned deities, or as a side-effect of actions taken for other reasons (leaving lots of unburied dead may raise an "undeath" sphere that can eventually lead to an undead problem), or through growing xenoenergia-generating plants or raising animals that exude similar magic.  (The last of which would consume from one energy source - which could possibly just be sunlight or decomposing organics - to produce xenoenergia in another.)  Xenosynthetic plants and animals drain their particular flavor of xenoenergia by existing, and will die if there is insufficient xenoenergia of their particular type.  (Again, these are all sphere-related.)  This can also tie in directly with magic, making magic require building up xenoenergia.  (So necromancers generate the undeath energy they need by being around lots of dead bodies that generate undeath xenoenergia.) 

In particular, megabeasts and forgotten beasts are a major source of xenoenergia.  In the current game, the eras are based off of the number of remaining megabeasts, and eras generally start off with the mythical/magical eras, and then gradually decay into the more mundane.  Following that concept, those creatures are inherently extremely exomagical, and having some around can greatly increase the xenoenergia, for better or for worse.

Xenoenergia inherently attracts creatures that feed off of it, and in extreme levels of xenoenergia, can start manifesting itself directly, or "mutating" creatures.  To go back an example, leaving lots of unburied dead around can generate enough death xenoenergia to eventually create an undeath field that causes the dead to rise on their own, similar to some current evil biomes.  Even before that, it would attract necromancers, or the occasional skeleton or zombie that would instinctually go where the energy that sustains it can be found.  Burning many things can start creating fireproof and spontaneously combusting creatures.  Holding many, many song and dance parties in your tavern can start to attract or generate singing animals. etc.

So far as the initial embark goes, I have suggested that the likes of plump helmets just be ordinary mushrooms that require decaying matter to feed. This could generally mean that you throw down a log (or any dead animal bodies you might happen to accrue) and dump water on it to start a plump helmet plot.  Something like dimple cups and quarry bushes might be explicitly magical, and require xenoenergia from being around cavern depth, however.   Xenosynthesis would generally demand there be a lot more xenoenergia-dependent plants so that there should be at least a dozen plants unique to each sphere major enough to be worth making into biomes. 

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution
Post by: LordBaal on July 16, 2017, 03:08:40 pm

Underground plants could be just fungus + unique biolog, thats it, fictional and probably not real life working biology but with a biology with some defined rules and be it.

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution
Post by: GoblinCookie on July 21, 2017, 07:40:07 am

Quote from: NW_Kohaku on July 14, 2017, 03:20:09 am

Well, I don't use terms like "underground energy", to start with, but rather that different spheres have their own forms of energy.  This is meant to replace the "evil" or "good" or "savage" biomes as they exist now, as well as the caverns, although different depths can have different sphere influences.  (Such as the surface having a "Law" sphere influence, the first cavern having a "Darkness" sphere influence, the second cavern having no sphere influence at all, and being a barren cave, and the third cavern having a "Fire" sphere influence.)  Similar to how biomes (and the layer stones) have boundaries now, the X and Y coordinate boundaries are just tied to the biomes, and then if there are differences in sphere influence by depth, then they'd be within certain bands of depth from the caverns.  (So the soil layer and first half dozen Z-levels of layer stone will likely be whatever sphere is on the surface.)

Also keep in mind that part of the whole point is that you can also build up xenoenergia (xenosynthesis energy) through different player actions, such as building temples to specific sphere-aligned deities, or as a side-effect of actions taken for other reasons (leaving lots of unburied dead may raise an "undeath" sphere that can eventually lead to an undead problem), or through growing xenoenergia-generating plants or raising animals that exude similar magic.  (The last of which would consume from one energy source - which could possibly just be sunlight or decomposing organics - to produce xenoenergia in another.)  Xenosynthetic plants and animals drain their particular flavor of xenoenergia by existing, and will die if there is insufficient xenoenergia of their particular type.  (Again, these are all sphere-related.)  This can also tie in directly with magic, making magic require building up xenoenergia.  (So necromancers generate the undeath energy they need by being around lots of dead bodies that generate undeath xenoenergia.)

In particular, megabeasts and forgotten beasts are a major source of xenoenergia.  In the current game, the eras are based off of the number of remaining megabeasts, and eras generally start off with the mythical/magical eras, and then gradually decay into the more mundane.  Following that concept, those creatures are inherently extremely exomagical, and having some around can greatly increase the xenoenergia, for better or for worse.

Xenoenergia inherently attracts creatures that feed off of it, and in extreme levels of xenoenergia, can start manifesting itself directly, or "mutating" creatures.  To go back an example, leaving lots of unburied dead around can generate enough death xenoenergia to eventually create an undeath field that causes the dead to rise on their own, similar to some current evil biomes.  Even before that, it would attract necromancers, or the occasional skeleton or zombie that would instinctually go where the energy that sustains it can be found.  Burning many things can start creating fireproof and spontaneously combusting creatures.  Holding many, many song and dance parties in your tavern can start to attract or generate singing animals. etc.

So far as the initial embark goes, I have suggested that the likes of plump helmets just be ordinary mushrooms that require decaying matter to feed. This could generally mean that you throw down a log (or any dead animal bodies you might happen to accrue) and dump water on it to start a plump helmet plot.  Something like dimple cups and quarry bushes might be explicitly magical, and require xenoenergia from being around cavern depth, however.   Xenosynthesis would generally demand there be a lot more xenoenergia-dependent plants so that there should be at least a dozen plants unique to each sphere major enough to be worth making into biomes. 

I think that the dwarves would gather up the fallen leaves in the autumn en-masse for their underground gardens too.  If dwarves did poop they would also recycle it into fertilizer for said gardens too, but presently they don't  ;).

How about procedurally generating magical versions of both surface and underground plants, using the mundane plants as the base; as opposed to having to raw-define individual magical plants for every single random magical biome.  Like a lot of these things we need to have defined active words, so instead of us getting fiery plump helmet, we have plump fires or fiery helmets for instance.  The magical biome itself feeds an energy to the magical plants, which will die if removed from that biome, but compete with other plants over the biome leading to a maximum density of said plants making room of the mildly magical biomes for regular plants to grow.

I agree however with LordBaal that the magical requirement should be an additional requirement on top of the normal mundane requirement because we need some challenge for the player in maintaining nutrient levels AND while possible it is far too much work for the poor devs to make unique rules for the energy in the other biomes that provides equivalent challenge, by which I mean something other than the environment itself feeding things energy.  Another thing to consider is the situation in regard to caverns or lands *of* fertility, in that case I would imagine the 'magical' plants would simply be super nutrient hungry (and nutritious) but live in an environment where nutrients simply get magiked in. 

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution
Post by: NW_Kohaku on July 29, 2017, 09:22:56 pm

Sorry for not checking in a week or two...

Quote from: LordBaal on July 16, 2017, 03:08:40 pm

Underground plants could be just fungus + unique biolog, thats it, fictional and probably not real life working biology but with a biology with some defined rules and be it.

Thing is, there are also magical above-ground plants, such as that eyestalk grass in evil biomes, as well as feather trees in good biomes, or whip vines in savage biomes.  The point of the system is to unify it all into something extensible, so that the cavern biomes run by the same sort of rules as the magical surface biomes. 

It's just that a magic-less surface is a mundane plant and animal surface, while a magic-less cavern is almost certainly barren except for a small amount of possible mushroom farming that depends upon pulling down nutrients from living creatures that would have to either come from the surface or a magical area. 

Again, it might not be strictly necessary, but especially with the system of a sliding scale of magical-ness, as well as the procedural magical fields, a more modular and comprehensive system for magical environments and how they interact with individual populations makes for a more believable magic world.

Quote from: GoblinCookie on July 21, 2017, 07:40:07 am

I think that the dwarves would gather up the fallen leaves in the autumn en-masse for their underground gardens too.  If dwarves did poop they would also recycle it into fertilizer for said gardens too, but presently they don't  ;).

How about procedurally generating magical versions of both surface and underground plants, using the mundane plants as the base; as opposed to having to raw-define individual magical plants for every single random magical biome.  Like a lot of these things we need to have defined active words, so instead of us getting fiery plump helmet, we have plump fires or fiery helmets for instance.  The magical biome itself feeds an energy to the magical plants, which will die if removed from that biome, but compete with other plants over the biome leading to a maximum density of said plants making room of the mildly magical biomes for regular plants to grow.

I agree however with LordBaal that the magical requirement should be an additional requirement on top of the normal mundane requirement because we need some challenge for the player in maintaining nutrient levels AND while possible it is far too much work for the poor devs to make unique rules for the energy in the other biomes that provides equivalent challenge, by which I mean something other than the environment itself feeding things energy.  Another thing to consider is the situation in regard to caverns or lands *of* fertility, in that case I would imagine the 'magical' plants would simply be super nutrient hungry (and nutritious) but live in an environment where nutrients simply get magiked in. 

Yes, I have a list of potential fertilizer sources (http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=76007.msg1920008#msg1920008) (second section), including dead leaves and even things that can be mined (although such things would be quite finite) and discuss the use of sewage as fertilizer ("night soil").

And as mentioned in my response directly to LordBaal, the idea is certainly that of a mundane set of reactions, plus, whereever there is the option for magic, those magical plants and creatures exist, as well.  Especially if we're building this around the notion of five different settings in a "magicalness spectrum" from mundane to full-on wacky everyone's-from-a-procedural-species-which-spits-water-streams-and-can-turn-their-hands-into-hammers where magic is presumably overwhelmingly omnipresent.  In the latter case, there would probably need to be some sort of mechanic for outcompetition, where either everything becomes mutated into magical versions of mundane things or mundane species go extinct if magic simply IS so omnipresent that magic out-competes the sun as an energy source in those areas.  (That said, even in the max-magic worlds, it seems like magic will be localized, so it would be like a barren ocean floor suddenly becoming a brilliant coral reef when you get to the shallows near a lagoon.)

Using some sort of modular system where any sort of living creature (or even some inanimate ones) suddenly becomes a sphere-aligned variant is definitely the sort of thing I advocate.  You can just look at how all the giant critters work, and you can see how there are so many things that individually statting them out is silly, and Toady just made a pseudo-procedural method of creating giant creatures.  (Although there had been some bugs with even that, due to unforseen consequences of things like giant mosquito swarms when a giant-ification was placed on vermin...)  Undead basically work as a decent example of purely procedural creature modification.

The thing is, you need to come up with sane ways for all the different spheres to work.  They're not just plain-and-boring Greek elements like water where you can just add some sort of elemental attack and passive elemental resist like a paint-by-numbers RPG does, you have spheres for things like Music, Dreams, War, Honor, or Wealth.  Making mechanics for musical creatures or honor creatures would presumably take more care and creativity than that.  (I spend a good deal of time on the topic, also trying to get people to suggest some in the Xenosynthesis thread proper (http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=76578.0).)

Of course, if you want to have creatures made of what should biologically be inanimate objects, like amethyst men or the like, then you probably need to have special instances, unless you want to make it like Titans/Forgotten Beasts where you can have whole species of things made of (paper) sheet music or steam or something that shatter at a funny look in some locations, and have whole fields of solid steel critters in others.  Granted, we don't need to worry about "competitive balance" in Dwarf Fortress, but things shouldn't be completely ludicrously broken where the first simple magic bunny rabbit is a fortress-ending threat on par with a titan in some zones, while making other zones utterly defanged.  (Especially since the xenosynthesis mechanics pretty much directly invite players to deliberately screw with the magical balance to suit their whims.)

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution
Post by: NW_Kohaku on August 02, 2017, 02:59:34 am

To switch tracks back to mundane farming for a moment...

Another thing I've seen during the intervening time between now and making this thread is watching nature documentaries showing agriculture in the Third World.  They showed, for example, children in hilly regions of Africa (the Ethiopian Highlands) having to defend their family's food supply from gelada monkeys, which used diversion tactics to preoccupy the guard while the main force attacked from behind (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SMya0eKDPlE). 

I initially mentioned things like bowl weevils as vermin pests and rabbits or deer as larger pests, but outright large and semi-organized pests with a plan would actually make for a far more interesting impediment to farming.  Especially if you included it in the underground caverns, where gremlin-like stealthy creatures could attack your crops in coordinated swarms, requiring the player to actually mobilize their military against grain thieves or raiders of their booze stockpiles, it would make for definite interesting gameplay moments.

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution
Post by: dragdeler on August 02, 2017, 04:29:55 pm

I know it's kind of a long shot and this would require a few otherwise pretty useless game mechanics (in the start, later it could morph into something quite realistic and versatile)

Let's not waste any more words, did you ever hear about THIS (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_Beer_Flood) ?


is sweet pod rum flammable?

Title: Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution
Post by: easykiln on November 16, 2022, 02:07:55 pm

I'm being a bit selfish here, because I didn't properly look through the overwhelming comments or even play DF recently before adding my own input, but please forgive me because I get really mentally constipated if I don't share these kinds of thoughts.

Farming. You can make entire games based on that industry alone. I don't want to go that far, but I do think there are some changes that are worth making.

The main thing is: respect the farmer's almanac. Perish the thought that research and astrology are matters removed from the common dwarf. Rather than locking farming to specific seasons and biomes, make them depend more on the actual conditions, which vary over time and can result in especially good or bad yields for a given crop. Allow planting a wide variety of crops, but give no or very limited yield for crops grown outside their preferred biomes without use of an experienced and knowledgeable farmer and/or infrastructure like greenhouses.

Fungi grown underground is cool, but it should need organic waste to function at scale: they can't make their own food from water and light, what they're good at is digesting pretty much anything and turning it into dwarf-edible food. That's a pretty significant change, but one I think is worth making. Make rotten bits of whatever into a resource and give us a plausible excuse for what's happening to dwarven nightsoil out of sight of the player.

Hydroponics. If it was a different game, I would think of it as overkill. DF is a game where engineering takes a central role, and more reasons to mess with water and accidentally drown your fort are appreciated, so I think it's worth it here. Probably most applicable to forts specialized for the deep?

Soil conditions. Although you can go really deep into it, the most important parts are sunlight/organic material, water levels, and nitrogen. Rather than fertilizer giving a fixed bonus, I'd rather see it actually functioning as supplementing the soil. Secondary factors that can be tracked if you want but are less essential are particulate size(the categorization by soil type that already exists is probably enough, but it could also be used for tracking drainage and flooding,) ph levels, salt levels (this in particular seems an interesting challenge, trying to prevent buildup over time,) and probably a broad contaminant category of substances that are harmful for growth that might get mixed in. The divide between plant and fungi based agriculture could also be highlighted by having microbe/insect activity in the soil tracked. Throw too many supplements at the soil and your plants will instead struggle to grow in a bog without rotting.

Overall, fewer things based on broad and inflexible rules and more things based on the underlying reasons for those general rules. Even if the result appears similar, aside from greater diversity of circumstance, only the latter allows for ingenuity and engineering to shine.