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[AceSV]

I lament sometimes that the above-ground farming system is not as good as it could be.  Seasons are disregarded, crop lists are crazy long, food is just minced into random biscuits and stews.  But trying to revamp above-ground farming would be a herculean task. 

But what if, instead of basing it on real plants, you based it on the farming game Stardew Valley?  There's already a list of plants that correspond to specific seasons, there's not too many of them, and there are even recipes for specific foods that you could make with DF reactions.  There's even booze. 

https://stardewvalleywiki.com/Crops
https://stardewvalleywiki.com/Foraging
https://stardewvalleywiki.com/Cooking

There are a few things I would change.  You can buy rice in Stardew Valley, but you can't grow rice (allegedly because of the paddy thing).  You also can't grow textiles in Stardew Valley, so you would have to figure those out yourself. 

If you're not familiar with Stardew Valley, crops can be grown from tilled soil, and have to be purchased as seeds from the shop, they do not grow naturally.  Forage plants grow wild out in the valley and can be collected.  You cannot plant foraged plants exactly, but you can turn foraged plants into a wild seed bag, which will randomly grow forage plants in your tilled soil.  I'm not sure if this dynamic is worth trying to put into DF. 

But it's a suggestion, I'm not interested in overhauling above-ground farming myself anytime soon.  If people want to do it as a team effort, I could help out. 

[Baffler]

I've thought the same thing honestly. The overwhelming majority of crops not being properly implemented is my biggest gripe since seasons are easy enough to just self-impose, but it is all kind of unremarkable. Modding the farms like that shouldn't be too complicated either. I'll be happy to throw some effort in.

So anyway the plants are actually fairly easy. Most of Stardew Valley's plants are already in the game, and the ones that aren't can be fairly easily adapted from existing bits. Just go through and change the season tags on them and there you go. The problems are in the plants that can be harvested more than once (not possible to model in dwarf fortress) and the incompletely implemented growths making large numbers of crops unusable in their current form. There's nothing to be done about the first problem, but you might be able to sidestep the second one with some creativity and liberal use of the process to bag/barrel/flask jobs if you're not too picky about what ends up in what subcategory of food stockpile.

I don't see any real way to organically copy the wild seeds mechanic that gives you random plants, but access to them could be restricted by giving dwarves [OUTDOOR_FARMING] but not [OUTDOOR_GARDENS] and sticking all the forage crops in garden.txt, it's kind of an arbitrary distinction anyway. If you do it that way you'd have to also remove [OUTDOOR_GARDENS] from other entities, unless you want them to grow fields of the wild plants and bring them in trade. Otherwise you could have those plants be like valley herbs and not have seeds. Civs who live in biomes that support them (and with, I believe, the [OUTDOOR_GARDENS tag) would still bring them in trade, and I think fields of them would still appear around worldgen villages, but you couldn't plant them yourself - just gather or purchase.

The recipes would be janky, but doable. You can add jobs to the kitchen to make different specific foods with whatever ingredients just fine, but if I remember correctly they can't both require specific ingredients and be classified as "prepared meals," you'd have to make them cheese or something with a specific forced material set up for each of them. This paragraph is the part I have the least experience in, so that could be either outdated or completely wrong.

Edit: You'd also have to come up with some way to handle different biomes. These are, for the most part, temperate crops.

[AceSV]

Biomes are a head-scratcher, but I feel like you could breeze through it with some laziness.  Biomes like mountains, glaciers and deserts could just grow no plants, biomes like jungles, marshes, savanna could have the same plants that whatever the default biome of Stardew Valley is.  There are actually some desert plants in Stardew Valley, I think coconuts and cactus fruit.  Cold biomes like taiga could grow only fall crops and winter forage (like ice berry, winter yam), likewise warm biomes like jungles could grow only summer crops.  You could also just have different names, taiga turnip, jungle melon, etc.  (in real life tropical biomes, you only have wet season and dry season, not spring, summer, autumn winter, so a summer plant should be able to grow more often in a tropical biome, but I don't think DF would allow that.) 

I wouldn't worry about the multi-harvest crops, DF isn't the same sort of time management game as SDV is, so there's no reason to try to emulate its time management gameplay mechanics.  My intent is not to make a DF/SDV crossover, it's just to borrow SDV ideas to make DF more interesting.  So likewise, with the forage/crop mechanics, just giving civs the OUTDOOR_FARMING and not OUTDOOR_GARDENS sounds sufficiently interesting to me.  For dwarves, what I might do is keep them as only underground farmers to start with, and humans and elves get OUTDOOR_FARMING but not OUTDOOR_GARDENS, so crops and their seeds can be bought, but forage can only be grown locally.  Disallowing their seeds could be interesting, to force players to use Gather zones. 

[Baffler]

I was actually mistaken - lacking [OUTDOOR_GARDENS] means that they wouldn't bring plant growths like melons, soybeans, and starfruit, not that they're excluded from plants in garden.txt. That makes it more complicated. So unless you rework all the plants to fit into those categories it sadly will not work. That sounds like a sensible way to divide up the biomes though. Farming should be limited and difficult in marginal areas like taiga or deserts. I would call Stardew Valley as just 'temperate,' it has enough variation in the map to make being more specific than that kind of pointless.

One thing I did find though is that if you make a plant have [FREQUENCY:0] you can make it available only to civilized entities and never be found growing wild. You still define biomes as normal, but it's only to specify where they can be farmed.

[Hugo_The_Dwarf]

I had thought [FREQUENCY:0] would just have it return to its default which I think is 100?