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[GavJ]

No way. This is Dwarf Fortress, not Silly Human Fortress.

You can't make photosynthesis suddenly not be a thing, or nutrients come out of thin air, by sheer force of will of how much cooler than humans you are.

Mushrooms exist, but they need bio energy provided in the first place. So basically, my plan was that either you assume there's a little bit of muddy sediment down there that can grow some meager, very slow mushrooms on its own, OR you can recycle biomass like bodies and rotten food and stuff into little mushroom nutrient cakes that you combine with spores and can grow underground at normal crop speeds, but they always need that outside source of energy.

The reason to dig underground is safety and the fact that you can do it far far faster as a dwarf than building constructed walls. And hopefully, in the future, if Toady makes walls appropriately flammable if made out of wood, then for that reason too.

(No cavern grazing grass either, btw)


Might you starve cut off from the surface when you run out of stocks? yes... That's called a proper SIEGE! Sieges wouldn't be the harrowing things they actually were in real life if they just had infinite food supplies... part of the challenge mode.

[Meph]

Just my two cents: In MDF I made surface crops take 1 season to grow, and wither in winter. That way people can plant in spring/summer, and harvest in summer/autumn, but if planted in autumn the plants will never fully grow, until winter kills them.

All underground crops take a full year to grow, because of lack of sunlight/rain.

People generally like the change, they dont think its too unreasonable or hard.

A personal gripe I have with this is that even a cold region would support summer crops, and a tropical region with no freezing temperatures in winter would still destroy crops in winter. There are no elegant solutions for this, except to make some special tropical-only crops (by biome) that grow aboveground all year. OR you find a way to make planted seeds take extremely slow cold damage, but allow them to be planted all year. But I am not sure how feasable that is.

[GavJ]

Yes I was planning on a combination of biome specificity, but also indeed seeds taking temperature damage, rather than having restricted planting seasons via raws. As a means of truly restricting summer crops to summery areas.

It doesn't have to necessarily be slow. Something like a frost can kill some kinds of plants basically overnight. Or especially in dwarf fortress, we all know and love the risks of other types of state changes, like melting as a reasonable sudden death scenario.  Slow would be nice, but it sounds like that's been changed to be more difficult. I dunno, would need testing.

But basically, the idea was it's your responsibility to read the signs of the land to gauge and learn seasonal weather, and plant based on that, IF you're in a borderline area. Things like grass turning dry, muddy pool activity, water freezing, etc. combined with an average guidelines "almanac" packaged along with the mod that gives players a bit more insight into science done on this in general like they would have been taught as pioneers from the mountainhomes.

Possibly even alchemical reactions provided that could allow you to craft "thermometer" boulders made of materials with specific, known boiling points that you can use to gauge climate patterns, if you decide you want to know what that much precision. Much like the drooping cones they sell for determining kiln temperatures.

[Meph]

Temperature readout can be done with dfhack, if you are not averse to using it. Overall that sounds very nice, and an ambitious project. I am still tempted to include that meat-rots-from-temperature (actually wears away, but still) as a harder optional setting for MDF.

Say, did you find any solution for the extreme inbalances when it comes to fishing?

[GavJ]

No, my best plan was to resort to very small fish populations so that they simply get overfished in a season or so, sort of a nice bonus boost to help you get started or saved for when you're in a pinch, then nothing.

[Urist McVoyager]

Populations can grow, so those populations can be fished down a bit then left alone to rebuild.

[GavJ]

Populations can grow, so those populations can be fished down a bit then left alone to rebuild.

I'm unable to find any solid information on vermin spawning, actually. They don't breed normally, they spawn out of thin air in clusters. It isn't clear whether these replenish or can be sustainably farmed.  One of the many things that would require testing. Still gonna try out the geology thing first though.

[Zarathustra30]

I also vote for option #1, though I was under the impression something like that would go in with taverns (getHYPE!), in order to make them SLIGHTLY balaced.

I thought option #2 was going to go in with 3d ore veins, but that may be wishful thinking.

Option #3 would be the silliest, and I shall be very disappointed when nobody wants to buy my green glass serrated disks.

[YAHG]

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

If you go with the food one, I found that 2->1 plants to booze and removing the ability to get seeds back from eating/processing/brewing really kicks farming in the nuts and makes potash/skilled labor much more important.

Part of the plan was actually to remove both potash and skilled labor. Potash removal is actually a little bit tricky, but I think possible. Labor can be locked at level 5 by just making natural skill level for everyone be 5, which means assigning points at embark is useless, and then also mod the learning rate for farm skills to zero, so nobody ever gets any better.

It makes it a helluva lot easier to balance everything.  The problem is, if my goal is 40% of the population needing to be farmers, then either it STARTS at that and then with potash + skill becomes like 2% later (yawn), or that's the maximum, which would mean you'd start with 400% needed, and always starve in the first season... Locking them at one place I think is the only way to have realistically huge but possible amounts of the population laboring by necessity.

It sounded like you wanted to put an intermediary stage between what comes out of the ground and brewing/cooking/processing/eating etc. , my experience with yields/balance was focused around drastically changing the drink yield.

The yields I experienced for various planter skill, fertilizer etc. for static population maintenance:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Wiki: Dwarf eats ~2 food and ~4 drink a season iir

Regular Farming: 2.8 plants a dwarf*season for food and drunkenness (all seeds are saved from this use for replanting)

W/2-1 Food to drink: 10 plants a dwarf*season for food and drunkenness (still only 2 plants not to starve but to keep em happy and productive you needed a lot of extra plants as brewing seeds were removed)

At 1.3 ish plant/seed yield (around what I was getting with dabblers planting without fertilizer):

Feeding requires 2/(1.3-1) or ~7 plots planted per dwarf*season as you need to keep up your seed stocks to replant  .
Feeding+drunkenness requires 10/(1.3-1) or ~33 plots planted per dwarf*season.

At 2.5 ish plant/seed yield (around what I was getting with proficient planting without fertilizer):

Feeding requires 2/(2.5-1) or ~1.3 plots planted per dwarf*season
Feeding+drunkenness requires 10/(2.5-1) or ~7 plots planted per dwarf*season.

At 5.5 ish plant/seed yield (around what I was getting with proficient planting with fertilizer):

Feeding requires 2/(5.5-1) or ~0.4 plots planted per dwarf*season
Feeding+drunkenness requires 10/(5.5-1) or ~2.2 plots planted per dwarf*season and ~.6 logs per dwarf*season for Potash.

It DOES get a lot easier with fertilizer as per sustainability of your seed stocks, but then again I was sucking down a TON of trees doing that trying to prep my seed stock for the year 2 migrant explosion in my test game with an all out fertilizer start.

I think everyone was a farmer (brought some threshers for replanting) and I had 2 proficient wood burners and 2 proficient potash makers and my seven (and the spares you get before winter), we were ~%80-%90 labor pool into farming (long stretches of 100% for harvest and planting time as well, then some break to try to get enough fertilizer for the next round and general work around the fortress )

What I got from all that is that fertilizer might be fine in larger forts as the sheer amount of it you need for larger populations. a 200 dwarf fortress if we take the .6 logs per dwarf*season is 120 logs sucked down each season. Its a LOT of hauling to do (maybe a reason for those silly wood return mine-cart setups I keep telling myself are just a waste ) besides you are gonna run outta wood in not TOO long now  .

I also found the 2 month plant grow times GROW_DUR:673 ish made it a fun challenge every year with the non year round crops, trying to process into seeds what I needed to replant just to try to get that second season in  (I used thresher skill here, I was very happy with it and having a skilled thresher migrant is fun in the way getting a skilled metalsmith is as it helps out a ton ).

I found taking away the ability to plant plumps (like it used to be iir) in the winter also made my experience more enjoyable...

  gotta go to work

[GavJ]

Update: I have begun on the geology project, and I am including a devblog of my efforts (interspersed among other projects) at my new website here, largely motivated by this project in the first place:

Cauliflower Laboratories

[Vattic]

Really interesting! Using RSS to follow your blog.