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DF Suggestions / Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution
« 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.
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.