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Author Topic: Slash and Burn, enrich the soil  (Read 748 times)

DoubleG

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Slash and Burn, enrich the soil
« on: April 29, 2021, 03:26:22 pm »

I've embarked on a biome with mostly dead plants, was hoping to find some Sliverbarb but its pretty rare.

I had an unrelated magma accident, and the entire surface got burned, not covered in magma, just a spreading fire engulfed most of the map. Would this affect the fertility, once the plants start growing back? Places that have been burned get an explosion of new life in RL. Wondered if it was modelled someway in DF.
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PatrikLundell

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Re: Slash and Burn, enrich the soil
« Reply #1 on: April 29, 2021, 06:02:11 pm »

No, not currently. Some time in an unspecified future (beyond Myth & Magic I, and probably beyond embark scenarios as well, and not unlikely to appear after boats and trade) there will be an agriculture push that should adjust things significantly both in terms of yields, seasons, and nutrients requirements. Natural fertilization from ash may or may not appear then.

A problem with the current evil spreading is that when death is involved all the vegetation is dead, while "natural" evil biomes often have a percentage of the plants being dead.
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Thisfox

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Re: Slash and Burn, enrich the soil
« Reply #2 on: April 29, 2021, 06:50:52 pm »

There's the "where did all these trees come from?" phenomenon. Embarked a few times on "sparse" maps, with perhaps three trees on the map. Five years later, having rarely gone to the surface for anything, my dorfs suddenly emerge in a forest, and the wagons even have trouble making it to my trade depot through the trees. But, that said, that happens in places where the plants were living, just not arboreal in nature. It's not really relevant here.
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PatrikLundell

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Re: Slash and Burn, enrich the soil
« Reply #3 on: April 30, 2021, 02:03:21 am »

There's the "where did all these trees come from?" phenomenon. Embarked a few times on "sparse" maps, with perhaps three trees on the map. Five years later, having rarely gone to the surface for anything, my dorfs suddenly emerge in a forest, and the wagons even have trouble making it to my trade depot through the trees. But, that said, that happens in places where the plants were living, just not arboreal in nature. It's not really relevant here.
The cause of that phenomenon is known, I believe. Saplings shaded by other trees and structures (not including bridges) wither and die with a 100% probability (and this is disabled for shroom trees, naturally, which is why the underground situation is even worse). Saplings that are not shaded have some probability to die, but that probability isn't tied to tree density (I don't know if it's constant or fixed to the biome parameters, but the end result is the same: eventually every single tile that can be covered by a tree canopy will be, with only the time to get there differing between biomes [or biome parameters]). The rate at which saplings are spawned seems to be dependent on the biome or the parameters that govern biomes, but that only controls the speed of the junglification, not the end result.
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