Bay 12 Games Forum
Dwarf Fortress => DF Dwarf Mode Discussion => Topic started by: Hans Lemurson on September 12, 2021, 11:01:43 pm
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Not pointless restrictions to make it frustrating.
Farming is currently very easy in Dwarf Fortress, to the point of having to ACTIVELY AVOID growing excessive surplusses of food.
Does anybody have any good ideas on ways make Agriculture require more dwarven resources so that it's actually a meaningful consideration in your fortress?
Here's what I'm trying right now:
-All crops must be grown on the surface
-Farms cannot be sealed off from world (sieges cut you off from food).
-Only one farming season
-Farm Plots must be 1xN strips that cannot touch each other
This should in theory increase my agricultural land by 8x, and require me to have large stockpiles of food to withstand sieges, but I worry that it's still going to be too easy.
Does anybody have any other ideas for reasonable farming restrictions that won't be a pain in the butt to actually implement?
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Are you planning to do this partly via mods? With a mod, you could complicate the production of seeds. You could mod in a greenhouse workshop, and require all seeds to pass through there to convert them into a viable seed form. For example, the plants would produce something like "ungerminated seed" that you'd have to process with a germinate reaction at the greenhouse. You could then make that as expensive and difficult as you wish, requiring potash, or water, or managing a bunch of buckets or whathaveyou.
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I'm not trying to complicate the management of farms (DF is already complicated enough to manage as is), just make them more "expensive" in terms of land, labor, and security.
My motivation is that I'm dissatisfied with being able to feed a whole city from a small mushroom patch under a hill. I want growing food to be more work for the Dwarves, not for me.
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How about farms must be watered on occasion? This wouldn't make fields bigger, but it would have your farmers run around with buckets, meaning more work to keep that mushroom patch alive.
For making fields bigger, sowing (and the suggested watering) would have to become more efficient. Something of the scale of human towns would easily require the whole fort population to cultivate. Perhaps a difference between a carefully tended "garden" where every crop yields, and a mass-producing "field" where a few individual plants fail?
As for spacing fields out and far away from each other, a parasite or blight of any kind could encourage that. Its spread to other plants must take time according to the distance, jumping open 1-tile gaps with relative ease but struggling to reach the other side of the cavern.
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This isn't the modding section, I'm not trying to reinvent the DF farming system.
I'm asking about ideas for easy ways of changing how the player uses farms to make them less efficient in dwarven time and labor.
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Migrants could arrive hungry - like a swarm of locusts that wipe out your stockpiled food.
I expect food is meant to rot more often, considering how much you get. Basically it only rots in the workshops now, but stockpiles - even sun-exposed surface stockpiles - basically preserve food forever.
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Use gathering zones instead of farming.
Above ground:
- Find an area with fruit bearing trees and set zones around each tree that you want to gather from. Small (3x3) zones centered around the tree work well.
- If you want to use ladders, remove them from your stockpiles, so your dwarves won't waste time moving them around. They will just leave them near the trees when they are done with the job.
- Instead of walling the area off, train your herbalists in combat and have them double as scouts against incoming enemies.
Below ground:
- If there are soil layers, you could dig a couple of rooms and set gathering zones in them once you breach the caverns and fungi start spawning around. Unless you go way overboard, they won't produce any large quantities of mushrroms but they will add some variety.
- Do it in the caverns.
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This isn't the modding section, I'm not trying to reinvent the DF farming system.
I'm asking about ideas for easy ways of changing how the player uses farms to make them less efficient in dwarven time and labor.
You could decrease efficiency by increasing the hauling distance of grown food and seeds, but dwarfs will still gain Grower skill, causing increased work speed and greater food output. Consider a "Spring has arrived!" overseer task, where you reassign all skilled Growers to non-farming work and assign new ones. Using low-skilled Growers will cut production significantly.
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only farm 4 tiles per dedicated farmer.. nerf yourself and your labor.
mod plants to only grow in certain seasons (you can't ask a question like this without considering modding, as it's fairly easy)
don't farm at all is also an option. gathering and butchering only.
I mean, I agree that farming is needlessly easy, but I also tend to find the 'feed the fortress' gameplay tedious after a point, when there are more interesting things about.
only farm on the surface. Only farm in tiles that are adjacent to a water channel (irrigation).
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You could dig a long and twisting passage to some far off room and put your farms there, it wouldn't be outside but if you constrain all of your civilians to a burrow that doesn't include it during a siege (which you probably should do anyway if you don't already) it will be equivalent to those pesky invaders not allowing you to reach our outdoor fields. Also by being further away it requires more walking.
Think -> main stair down to magma forge -> new stair up to shallow area with soil -> very far away farms
Add zigging and zagging to your heart's content
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Food decay has been my go-to solution. A large part of the farming's ease also comes from the yield relative to skill, so decreasing that would also make farming more challenging without complexity.
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Hmm...I suppose excessively long paths to the farms does mimic the increased labor I want, but it still feels wrong somehow.
I wonder why I have a problem with wasting dwarven time, but not with using farms sub-optimally by only letting them be active once a season.
Food decay has been my go-to solution. A large part of the farming's ease also comes from the yield relative to skill, so decreasing that would also make farming more challenging without complexity.
What setup do you use to induce food decay? Is it just as simple as a stockpile with no barrels?
I've been thinking about ways to reduce farming yields, but I keep running into the hard limit that you can't really go below 1 plant per tile per season, and 1 plant = 1 food.
I'm now considering modding ideas, and one thought I had was to perhaps just increase the dwarven appetite. If a dwarf eats 10 food in a sitting, maybe that would demand the large farms I seem to desire.
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If you go into modding, you might consider extending the growth time of your crops such that you'd only get a single harvest per "season" by setting the growth time to 90 or even 180 days (to follow the most common pattern of sowing in the spring and harvest in the autumn, although there are places with crops that get multiple harvests in a year). Since the harvesting would happen in a season where they wouldn't be eligible for planting (assuming you implement such a strategy), they wouldn't be able to plant a second round.
Note that I don't know if DF really supports growth times longer than a season for crops, and I've got bad memories of some bugger who made mod with realistic growth times that was promised to be supported for a long time, but the buggy mess was abandoned after a month or so...
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What setup do you use to induce food decay? Is it just as simple as a stockpile with no barrels?
There are a few mods which make food poof away after a set amount of time. I'll see if I can dig them up.
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Does anybody have any good ideas on ways make Agriculture require more dwarven resources so that it's actually a meaningful consideration in your fortress?
You could introduce blights, like in RimWorld. That could cause famine, if you do not manage it properly. You could base probability of infection on distance to already infected crops; track what crops were planted in a specific plot (real life blights are usually species-specific), so they have to differentiate; make bigger plots more susceptible.
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Does anybody have any good ideas on ways make Agriculture require more dwarven resources so that it's actually a meaningful consideration in your fortress?
You could introduce blights, like in RimWorld. That could cause famine, if you do not manage it properly. You could base probability of infection on distance to already infected crops; track what crops were planted in a specific plot (real life blights are usually species-specific), so they have to differentiate; make bigger plots more susceptible.
How would that work? Roll a die every season and then delete a farm plot? That sounds pretty annoying.
Now if you were suggesting that I implement (through modding or dfhack scripts) an entirely new crop disease system...well that also sounds like a ton of work. I'm not trying to add work for ME.
My goal is to think of ideas that work within the existing systems as much as possible.
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If you WERE to modify the game, I believe blights could be implemented by a script that removed the crops on farm plot tiles based on as much logic as you'd like plus random factors. Or just hack the yield (which I assume is stored somewhere, as it's determined by the planter's skill level).
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Set the seed cap to like...15.
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I expect food is meant to rot more often, considering how much you get. Basically it only rots in the workshops now, but stockpiles - even sun-exposed surface stockpiles - basically preserve food forever.
Back in the old 2D versions, meat and fish would slowly decay even in stockpiles, going from "meat" to "xmeatx", then "XmeatX", then "XXmeatXX" (and automatically becoming Refuse), then flat-out vanishing. I don't know when Toady removed that behavior, or why it never happened with plants (though it's pretty clear why he never did that with prepared meals - if he did, all skilled cooks would go insane), but in theory this could be reintroduced using a fairly simple DFHack plugin.
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Use fertilizer
As you said, farming will yield loads of food. So there is not that much use of fertilizer.
Its main advantage is having larger plant stacks, which will make brewing more efficient.
I guess few actually use it.
So if you want to complicate farming, fertilize all fields.
This might not sit well with the elves though. You will need a lot of ash.
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So if you want to complicate farming, fertilize all fields.
You misunderstand. I don't want to complicate it. Why do so many of these suggestions try to make the system harder to use? It's like I'm talking to a bunch of Dwarf Fortress players or something.
What I do want is for the overproduction of food to be less severe, so that a hobby gardener can't feed a whole city from his backyard in his spare time.
I'm trying to think of easy to implement schemes or restrictions to make farming less OP.
So far I've got:
-Single-season surface farms
-Farm density restrictions
-Deliberately long paths to the farm
The trouble is there seems to be a hard lower limit of 1 plant per tile per season, and dwarves eating 12 plants per year. But default growth times are fast enough you usually get 2 harvests per season and more than 1 plant per plot, meaning that in practice you'd need just 4-5 tiles per dwarf, even with these restrictions in place.
Are there any crops with a long enough growth time that you can't get more than 1 harvest per season?
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-Deliberately long paths to the farm
I would suggest against this one. Long panths would just limit your dwarves leisure time (so less socializing, praying etc) without fixing the problem.
Are there any crops with a long enough growth time that you can't get more than 1 harvest per season?
According to the wiki, there isn't any such plant. Modding the existing ones, should be a fairly easy job though.
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I just had an idea for decreasing farming yields: Eat only seeds! That gives you an easy -1 food per tile, so you'll only ever "gain" food from tiles with multiple harvests. In fact, wiki says you'll only ever get 1-2 seeds per harvest. Perfect!
Hmm...but how to easily get seeds? I can't just rely on alcohol production, since that would create WAY more booze than my dwarves drink, especially since most of those seeds will need to be replanted.
I also remember the troubled I had trying to create an oil export business by pressing rock-nuts, and how big a pain it was to have constantly overflowing Spice Barrels and a shortage of Bags.
It's gotta be a crop that can be easily processed into a non-food product. Maybe the textile crops? Pig Tails, Hemp, Flax, Cotton. Maybe I could feed a fortress on Hempseed Press Cakes? I think I like the sound of press cakes. It turns the seed into a non-seed food item, which can be kept track of and stored separately. And then...I guess I turn the excess oil into soap?
-Deliberately long paths to the farm
I would suggest against this one. Long panths would just limit your dwarves leisure time (so less socializing, praying etc) without fixing the problem.
Well, what it would do is make food production require more dwarven time and labor. It does it by making the dwarves waste their time, but it does simulate the effects of planting/harvesting work being a more time-consuming activity without requiring a lot more work from the player. Decreased leisure time is a natural consequence of having your work take longer.
Now, I don't want this to kill the FPS, so maybe I'd just build the farms far away from the fort rather than constructing a maze. Or maybe the mere fact of doing surface-farming on a subterranean fort would be enough.
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Just putting your farms far away on the surface will definitely get a few planters in trouble now and then, if there are raids or wild animal attacks.
I think after hearing all the ideas and comparing them with what you’re after, I’d strongly encourage you to consider some light modding. You would just need to pick a crop, find it in the raws, and tune it to the exact productivity you think is interesting. Of course it would take a while to tune the whole lot, but you can just modify the ones you are already using, by modifying the raws in your save folder. (Sometimes that doesn’t work but I suspect it would work here.)
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From what I can see, what you really are looking for here is some sort of food decay. This means that you can't end up with endless stockpiles of vegetables, greens, grains and fruits from a well situated farm. Making unnecessarily long walks to and from the farms just ruins the rest of the game, and the big wide farms you enjoy, which produce too much food, wouldn't affect your game play as much, as the food would decay before the dorfs could get around to making it into conserves, pickles, and fruit leather and other long-shelf-life food (lavish meals in pots).
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OP doesnt want to use fertilization, because that is too complex. Op is ok by changing the food chain into milling and pressing. This does not make any sense to me.
OP doesn't like how the current game is. None of the normal game mechanics are to his taste.
This post should go to suggestions or modding thread.
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To elaborate on this: the OP did not want to use self imposed rules.
So if you have a long walk to farms: use mine cart riding.
If you have fast deteriorating farm produce: build many many kitchens
Almost every self imposed rule can be circumvented by actions like these, so what is the point? Unless you also forbid yourself the use of that.
Getting food in DF is ridiculously easy. To change that you will have to change the game.
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I’d suggest upping the GROWDUR value in the raws, which defines how long a plant takes to grow. I think the maximum is 1008. Then change all the season data so every plant only grows in Summer not spring, winter or autumn. Then you should get one crop per year per farm square, I think.
If you want to reduce the haul from plant gathering;
Reducing the clustersize (to 1) will give you less material per harvest from gathering, and frequency will reduce how many of the plants are found.
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This post should go to suggestions or modding thread.
I agree with this much, lol I was confused to like, ??? to roleplay or to mod, that is the question here. whoever's in charge around should make the decision. I vote OP as boss..
I remember NW_Kohaku's crazy detailed post about IRL farming mechanics here. (http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=76007.0) I suggest a simple theory: all DF suggestions related to farming can be placed on a scale between, "Make farming harder plzz!!", and, well, Kohaku's above post, and I will term it the Kohaku Spectrum in their honor.
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To elaborate on this: the OP did not want to use self imposed rules.
So if you have a long walk to farms: use mine cart riding.
If you have fast deteriorating farm produce: build many many kitchens
Almost every self imposed rule can be circumvented by actions like these, so what is the point? Unless you also forbid yourself the use of that.
Getting food in DF is ridiculously easy. To change that you will have to change the game.
No, self-imposed rules are exactly what I'm trying to think of. They just have to be ones that are aren't a big hassle to implement, and preferably doesn't end up looking stupid.
"One big annual harvest" is relatively easy to do, (only set the crop for one season), and looks cool when you have a swarm of dwarves running out into the fields to gather potatoes.
"Above-ground only" is also easy, and looks nice with farm fields surrounding your fortress.
"Keep farm density low" is slightly harder, since I have to plan layouts more, and the rocky patches of the surface are annoying.
"Long walks to the farm" is fairly easy, but does start to look stupid since you clearly see everybody walking much longer than they need to.
OP doesnt want to use fertilization, because that is too complex. Op is ok by changing the food chain into milling and pressing. This does not make any sense to me.
OP doesn't like how the current game is. None of the normal game mechanics are to his taste.
This post should go to suggestions or modding thread.
Pressing and Milling can be automated by the Manager, so doesn't create much more work for me. As far as I know, Fertilization has to be done on a farm-by-farm basis, one at a time, so would be a hassle. Also it increases the yields (the opposite of what I want) and costs a different resource instead (although wood is also superabundant).
This post should go to suggestions or modding thread.
I agree with this much, lol I was confused to like, ??? to roleplay or to mod, that is the question here. whoever's in charge around should make the decision. I vote OP as boss..
I remember NW_Kohaku's crazy detailed post about IRL farming mechanics here. (http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=76007.0) I suggest a simple theory: all DF suggestions related to farming can be placed on a scale between, "Make farming harder plzz!!", and, well, Kohaku's above post, and I will term it the Kohaku Spectrum in their honor.
I think I could have done a better job of explaining what I was after. To explore ways you can change how you play and (and still have fun), without having to change the game itself.
Modding opens up a huge can of worms that I'll explore when I find it necessary.