Bay 12 Games Forum

Okay thanks for the replies guys but you're just confusing me now.

I should probably leave the dining room standing for extra creepy factor.

Funny, I've actually put the coffins of important dwarves in the dining room. Or in little alcoves on either side, anyway. I do the same thing with the entrance hall, so everyone passing by can pay their respect to the great ones. Tucking the dead away out of sight like you're ashamed of them is a human idea. 

Come to think of it I'm honestly surprised we don't occasionally have horses giving birth to mules when donkey's are around - it seems exactly like one of those random details Toady would include.

This thread's kind of given me an idea though. I've been messing around with ideas to cram as many dwarves as possible into a fort before it becomes unplayable, and was seriously considering modding out all cats, cows, and dogs. I was going to leave pack animals alone because I wasn't sure how it would effect caravans, but now I realize I can just keep the mules and maintain perfect control over the population.

If the game requires you to have more fertilizer, then it should require you to have more than potash. There's a lot more to soil than just nitrogen; saying that you can grow mushrooms in potash is like saying that a person can live off of Vitamin C tablets. It just doesn't make any sense.


Allowing dwarves to fertilize fields by composting arbitrary organic matter is great, but the purpose of doing this is very, very distinct from the purpose of potash. They're not remotely the same thing. The only reason it seems that way right now is because potash is the only way to improve your farming output.

I get all that, but like I said in my original post, I was just listing a few simple balance ideas, not necessarily what I think of as ideal ones. Potash is already in the game, and if default crop yields can be scaled back enough to make it useful, why not use it? Forget the cloth and leather entirely, if that's the problem - it was just a random idea that I thought went along with being able to recycle other useless crap like old furniture.

Under the changes I proposed I imagine I would rarely use fertilizer anyway, I'd rather just plant bigger fields and recruit more farmers. With potash that doesn't necessarily waste trees and the extra seed output though, it'd be easily possible for people who don't care for more difficulty in farming to still have the same amount of food as before, with trivial extra effort. (burning stuff and cooking seeds)       

For the record, a few suggestions I like, or at least think are the most reasonable/simple to implement:

1.) Improved stacking - maybe the hardest to actually program, but would make for less headaches in lots of areas, not just farming - ginormous bone and shell pile, I'm looking at you.

2.) Dirt should have to be hauled to farm on stone. (Optional with an IRRIGATION tag: even dirt should be damp before you can build a plot on it, or maybe you can just haul mud where you want it.

3a.) Once improved stacking is implemented, significantly lower yields on crops, especially underground ones. One or two plants per seed should be the norm, even for skilled farmers, unless fertilizer is employed.

3b.) We should be able to turn narrow loincloths and subpar wooden furniture into potash - though this will probably be doable anyway with the moddable workshops in the next release.   
 
3c.) Plants should produce more seeds. This is realistic, let's you enlarge your fields even with the one plant per seed return, and provides an easy source of extra food for people who don't want to mess around with too much.
   
I was going to say take away winter farming for most plants too, but for people who want that it's so easy to do in the raws there's no point in making it official.

Give them a bedroom with a cabinet and a chest, they'll pick up all the socks.

I've never had much luck with that, though supposedly they'll be a little more aggressive about storing things in the new version.

Remember that you're getting problems when you have Legendary Growers.

The term 'Legendary' is kind of misleading when every dwarf gets to be that way just by doing their job for a few seasons. Maybe if skill gain was nerfed in a big way it would help solve a lot of imbalances, but that should probably go in another thread.

At risk of buzzwording, I want to play Dwarf Fortress, not Dwarf Farmtress. (It was recently 'alled something like, thanks to Stonesense only having farmdwarves at the time)

But feeding your soldiers is a big part of running a fortress? And again, talk about misleading terms - most dwarf 'fortresses' are more like dwarf villages, with the civilian population far outnumbering the military.   

Maybe you enjoy the combat more than anything, but some people like messing around with survival challenges, some like architecture and megaprojects, etc.   Boiling everything down to just fighting would get old just as fast as boiling it all down to farming would - but just like the combat is getting a huge overhaul with the new version that will make things much more interesting and yes, difficult, especially for those of us who aren't really interested in that aspect of the game, players that would enjoy a little more strategy in other areas (such as farming) ought to eventually get something they can play around with too.

And really, most of the people that are against any difficulty increase in farming seem to be ignoring the fact that every fortress possessed a trade depot, and you pretty much always wind up giving thousands of dorfbucks worth of excess crap to the caravans every year just to get rid of it all. Maybe buy food instead? Not to mention hunting, fishing, and the infinite source of meat that can be crammed in a single cage and forgotten about.   

Perhaps this is a negative, or perhaps it is just that those dwarves are free-thinkers.

Naked dwarves isn't a negative things at all, provided you can get past the mental image. (the beard covers everything, just keep telling yourself that...especially when the dungeon master's around)

I hate clothes and never make any - I've modded out everything but loincloths for the goblins already and am getting really close to doing the same thing for dwarves (robes instead of loincloths, not that it matters because the beard covers everything lalala no permanent mental scarrage here).

If we could just dump owned items, or if an item would become un-owned or rot after being left on the ground a certain amount of time, or if Urist McLazyslob could ever be bothered to pick his damn sock off of the dining room floor I wouldn't mind so much, but right now as far as I'm concerned clothier shops are for bags and quivers and rope only.