Bay 12 Games Forum

I'm working on a game for the 7 day roguelike competition.
In it you are a wizard who powers his spells by draining the life out of the terrain.
This adds an interesting tactical and strategic level because magic becomes a spatially distributed non-renewable resource.

You can play the current working version here. (You deal damage equal to 1/4th of your current mana. The green leafy patches are where you can find mana.)

I'm interested in any ideas or feedback.

I am very interested in anything called a "plant sim" can I have a look at the code for the old project?

I once accidentally shot myself in the crotch with pepper spray.  (I thought "pepper blaster" mean it was a strange kind of pepper grinder). I can report that capsaicin is quite effective incapacitating me for several hours.

does this thread exist on the eternal suggestion voting list?

(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?

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?

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. 

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.