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[GavJ]

Though it doesn't stop players from stocking up canned food instead.

No such thing in the 14th century... also even if there were, that should require metal.

There are various preservation methods that are realistic, but they all use resources. You would naturally choose the one(s) best suited to the things available at your location:
* Salting (would need to add the ability to evaporate out salt to the game, not just rock salt)
* Smoking (fuel)
* Pickling (vinegar, made from alcohol at a workshop)
* Candying (dwarven sugar)
* Potting (using solidified fat as an airtight lid, might be too complicated to balance in game)
* Lye-ing (lye, obviously. Such as lutefisk)

[Chimerat]

Though it doesn't stop players from stocking up canned food instead.

No such thing in the 14th century...

Also no Hydras, Dragons or Elves... At least that have survived the historical record.
(See? Anyone can take a single line from a post and start to pick at nits...)

Back to preserved (aka "canned") food:
Salting (with evaporation) would make ocean embarks more tempting, I'd think.
I have never heard of Lye-ing... Wouldn't Lye+food be...poisonous?

[GavJ]

I gave an example in parentheses of lyr food: lutefisk. You will have to google it as I am on a phone and a link is too difficult

[Dirst]

Implementing some sort of nutrition based on ingredient quality/value would actually be a separate tweak.

And volume. Dwarf has only one stomach.

* tap tap tap *
* Save body_default.txt *
"Oh really?"

I tease, it's a good point but abstracting this to a nebulous nutritional value is probably a better way to go than volume.  At present, DF meat is always lean and boneless and skinless.  In fact, the only food waste anywhere is the seeds from raw foods and those are economically useful in their own right.

From a gameplay perspective, even nutrition should be a bonus rather than a penalty.

[Waparius]

Chalk up another who wants farming to be something you either focus your fort on because you're doing an agro-fort, or something that you have to outsource to your hilldwarves in late game. But that needs hilldwarf, farming and trading improvements, so. Plus general improvements to food storage and dining so dwarves are eating actual hot meals, eating, drinking and socialising at dinner time and so forth, and have to worry about keeping their crops (a big incentive to swap to things like Dwarven Wheat, since flour keeps a lot longer than vegetables - seasonal crops are another great one).

 Ideally food would come in preserved and fresh forms; preserving food would be easier or harder depending on what you were preserving - you might need to be constantly producing vinegar to make pickled Plump Helmet, but to make dwarven flour all you need is a millstone and a bag. Dwarves should get a syndrome (scurvy) if they're only eating preserved food, but it should be hard to produce and store enough fresh food to feed a large population. So you need to have both a large grain store and a reasonable number of kitchen gardens etc.

Another one I'm in favour of is needing to either be constantly fertilising your underground fields or planting the cavern layers. Something that makes it easiest to do the sort of boom-and-bust farming cycle that would incentivise food preservation without arbitrarily insisting on growing seasons for underground crops.


But yeah. Upping what dwarves eat seems like a good stopgap. Maybe having idle dwarves eat at a lower hunger threshold, because they have time to snack, while they have to get hungrier to stop work.

[GoblinCookie]

Okay fair enough, sorry for misinterpreting. However, in that case it's not insulting, but it IS just odd, because this is the suggestions forum, so not wanting to have things the way they are now is sort of the idea of posting threads here...

Yes, currently farming doesn't take any effort in DF. The whole point of this post is that that's an issue we should address, because it's not even accurate for modern farming, and is nearly 100x off of accuracy for the middle ages.

At the moment only Carpenters, Miners, Fishers and Masons actually should be specialized in my opinion, everyone else is generally better off doing their special thing as a hobby on the side of whatever more general tasks need doing.   

But in order for farming to be more than just plant seeds and some back in three months we would need weeding, pest control and fertilizing to be implemented into the game.  Combined with a need to cultivate more land (it is not something in short supply!) that would mean farmers would be constantly at work. 

Ideally dwarves and other animals would need to 'defecate' and then we could process the resulting sewage in order to make fertilizer. We could also put plant waste into vats and have it decay into compost and grind bones down into powder to make fertilizer as well.

[Isdar]

I have never heard of Lye-ing... Wouldn't Lye+food be...poisonous?

Yes, its all poison that will kill you and make you insane. Some people might tell you that you can make something called "lutefisk" out of it, and that it is edible, but they are not to be trusted. "Lutefisk" once nearly destroyed the very fabric of Norwegian society, but trough a rigerous education program(which some of these "lutefisk" supporters called "brainwashing", clearly lies in an attempt to kill us all) we managed to save our country and build up again.

So, yeah, I think we should be able to preserve food using lye.

[GavJ]

(it is conceptually the same thing as pickling, which simply uses acid instead of base. The point in both cases is merely to alter pH just outside of bacterially friendly parameters, just in different directions)

[Dyret]

It's kind of funny when they show you footage from lutefisk-factories and you see the people working there wearing full-on hazmat suits. Should be a hint to people not to go shove that stuff in their mouth.

[catten]

Shameless necro, motivated by two things:

1. Recent changes in 40.xx versions make plant gathering extraordinarily effective, so much so that you can almost feed and booze your entire fortress with a single herbalist in embarks having decent plant growth (he brings in 100+ units of food per trip, often brewable to 500+ units of booze). Result: the food situation is even more laughable than before.

2. Toady is apparently making a renewed effort to actually follow this forum and maybe didn't see this thread before.

[StagnantSoul]

Thank you! I was thinking of necro'ing this thread. The plant gathering from trees makes farms redundant, especially with them almost all being brewable.

[Niddhoger]

Yeah... I settled in a swamp (thick vegetation) and collected ~120 plants by the first day of mid spring... which is just 2 weeks.  From my linked post I don't think we can 100% replace farming without carving out giant underground "herb gardens" in soil layers, but for the first few years before sieges pick up you can easily build up a huge reserve with a couple full time plant-gatherers. 

You know what is even more disgusting? Trees.  Combine the two and you can probably set up enough food to last damn near indefinitely.  ~4 unskilled plant gatherers could already pick ~300 worth of fruit from just 4-5 trees.  So draft a few haulers into plant gatherers and give them ladders to strip trees.  Then leave 2-3 full time gatherers stripping the land bare and you are producing 1,000+ units of edible plants a year.  Now, plants regrow based on the biome settings, so for swamps (or other thick areas) they might regrow at a rate you can sustain a decent population over.  I haven't been playing much over the holidays due to lack of updates on dwarf therapist/graphics set.  Got a full-gathering fort starting up now.  Going to see how long I can last without butchering, fishing, growing, or importing food via caravans. 

[Urist Tilaturist]

I agree with food production being far too easy. My last fort was overflowing with so many plump helmets that 200 dwarves could not eat or drink them fast enough, and I only had 2 5*5 plots and some hunters killing elk birds to help.

The fix for this is a fairly big overhaul, and making dwarves eat more is only part of it.

Food preservation

Toady himself has said that no technology after 1400 will enter the game, and canning definitely counts as that - the mass metal production needed would make it uneconomical for a pre-industrial revolution society anyway. The preservation methods come down to what GavJ has said (yes, including lutefisk, do you think a species that eats *prepared troll lung roast* will care about that?). This would also need addition of salt gathering from the sea, but the sea in general needs a bit of an update anyway. Food which is not preserved in some way will go rotten even if it is in a stockpile.

Ground fertility

Growing crops should require water and nutrients in the soil. If there is an inadequate water supply, then plants will wither and die. They will also not grow well if they are not rotated, since nutrients will be depleted. Nutrients can be replenished by resting the field or by adding manure or potash. This will increase the demands of crop production and mean that it cannot go on constantly on any patch of ground.

The calendar

The time taken for crops to grow should be much longer, with their planting and harvesting times a certain length apart. This will reduce crop yields and force dwarves to use food preservation or have different food sources around the year. Animal breeding will also be affected by this.

The amount of food gained from a particular source can be tweaked in addition to this.

[Niddhoger]

Oh! About preservation.  I've always hated how bees are just a novelty industry.  As GavJ said, sugar can be a preservative... but so can honey.  Jars of honeyed fruit is a very old and effective food preservation technique.  Wax has also been used for thousands of years to seal up jars/barrels.  Greek's in particular used wax to seal up olive jars for storage and such.  Combine the two and bees become a supplementary food source/food preservation engine!

[pisskop]

NERF FARMING AND INCREASE FORTRESS MODE CONSUMPTION!!

Seriously.  Its fine that adventure mode is almost too fast, but fortress mode is too slow.