Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Iä! RIAKTOR!]

I know - farming will be improved. But I have some suggestions for this improving.

Do you know about Three Sisters? If corn, beans and pumpkins are planted together, they will boost each other. So, I thinks, DF needs this and more good combinations. Dwarves do hand jobs in garden, don't use horses for burrowing dirt, so they can plant the plants together.

Also wheat and other plants produce hay, when hay may be fertilizer for mushrooms.

Not only porash and bonemeal may be used as fertilizers. Game currently contain two types of filth, but dawrves don;t produce it.

Sorry for bad English, I'm not native speaker and also need to sleep. 

[SixOfSpades]

Also wheat and other plants produce hay, when hay may be fertilizer for mushrooms.

Technically, that's straw. Hay is the leaves of long-bladed grass varieties, dried. Straw is the stems of grain crops. Just a little English factoid for you.

[betaking]

Honestly I'd like to see some basic "mixing up" of fortress agriculture to be less reliable and/or more of a "problem" than it is currently.

I mean if my fortress is exporting food when I have less than 11x11 sq. urists of farmland (supplemented by hunting, fishing, gathering, and buying barrels of milk to turn into cheese), there's clearly something wonky with balance.

Systems like the whole "sphere" system might make a significant difference, particularly for underground-crops but there's going to need to be some serious changes to the crops in general.

then again a lot of those difficulties are the result of the economy and lack of economic or historical sense-making.

like: food should spoil if not properly stored or prepared, and this should require extra "space" and "structures" that shouldn't be abstracted away. (like you should have to build or designate spaces for drying stuff out, cauldrons should have a use creating brines and broths to boil down into bullion or pickle food for long term preservation, (by this same measure "Cauldrons" should be the anvils or buckets of Kitchens, along with other equipment).

Salt should be an actually valuable commodity that is in hot demand constantly,

seeds should be able to be just dumped into barrels rather than involving bags at all,

wicker baskets now that I think of it should also be involved somehow).

there should be crops that require multiple seasons to mature, with the key thing being that these crops should be the "staples" of at the very least human-civ diets. (or human or etc. civ's should be given a strong "nudge" to have their staples be a multi-season growth crop that must be planted in spring, maintained through summer, and harvested in winter).

was going to go into a rant about random settlement generation and it's flaws.. but Instead "Plowing".

Plots should be split into two or three "types".

"Tilled Rows" and "Garden Beds".

Tilled Rows are Directional, they have a direction that is set (either NS or EW), garden beds aren't-as much.

There should be some kind of third-ish option for tilled Rows that involve using hand tools instead of a plow, but that should have it's own ups and downs and depend heavily on particular culture.

the reason you need to set direction is because you're going to have to have a plow get towed. keep in mind I'm envisioning a "tilled row" to be like at least 11Urists long, with perhaps a full 11x11 necessary just feed 4-7 dwarves for a year (even then you'd want fish and other stuff to spice it up a bit).

this means hillocks and hamlets start to be very necessary if you're going to be having populations of any substantial size working in your fortress.

[Leonidas]

Farming can't be too difficult, or it'll scare off the noobs.

It would be nice, though, if the surface crops were seasonal and the underground crops were not. That little piece of nonsense hurts my brain every time.

[Maximum Spin]

Farming can't be too difficult, or it'll scare off the noobs.

That's always a terrible argument. It's okay for a game to be difficult. Frustrating, even. People who aren't in your niche aren't typically worth chasing.

[Starver]

I could imagine a bonus for proper crop-rotation (or Three Sisters, but phases being separated by time means you have to put the continued effort in to get the extra production out[1]).

I don't think it should be necessary to micromanage things that way, but it should add something. Perhaps something more esoteric ('fortress reputation', to draw more interesting visitors?) if you do things that mean you go above 'normal' rates of production.


[1] Though, once set up properly, it currently isn't too difficult to get perpetual 'sufficiency', assuming nothing disturbs your bountiful farming.

[Maximum Spin]

[1] Though, once set up properly, it currently isn't too difficult to get perpetual 'sufficiency', assuming nothing disturbs your bountiful farming.

This is, honestly, pretty accurate. cf the colonisation of North America. Subsistence agriculture is hard work on an individual level, but in a difficult-to-define social way, it's easy.

For example, crop rotation is not actually necessary, nor are most other forms of agricultural planning. They help, of course, and become necessary as a society transitions to feeding a larger population on the same amount of land, but not at a subsistence level.

[Cathar]

like: food should spoil if not properly stored or prepared, and this should require extra "space" and "structures" that shouldn't be abstracted away.

It already does if it's not conditionned. I know meat does that's for sure.It's assumed that cooking preserves food - like it's salted. With that said, food preservation should be improved upon. Cooks should be able to preserve meals using salt or honey, which would give beekeeping an actual utility in game.

seeds should be able to be just dumped into barrels rather than involving bags at all,

Only if you prefer birds and rats over feeding yourself

wicker baskets now that I think of it should also be involved somehow).

For real though, we put seeds in bags in real life farming for a reason.

I'm not against complexifying the farming system, but actual planting and gathering seasons for different crops are a way above in priority. As for using plants as a fertilizer for crops, it is a bad idea, unless you want to have a wild mess during gathering season or you have access endless manual labour to deherb your field twice a month

[betaking]

I'm not against complexifying the farming system, but actual planting and gathering seasons for different crops are a way above in priority. As for using plants as a fertilizer for crops, it is a bad idea, unless you want to have a wild mess during gathering season or you have access endless manual labour to deherb your field twice a month

the main point is that if you had multi-season crops you'd have labor focused on maintaining those fields and weeding.
Deherbing twice a month is what we've got now essentially since underground plants are so fast growing that, assuming you're producing everything from food to cloth and dye you get multiple harvest a season.

I think I didn't explain it correctly or there's some miscommunication going on here, but I''m not seeing how "plant wheat in spring and harvest it in fall" creates the need for deherbing a garden every month like you seem to be talking about.

I mean yeah, it's going to be a hell of a lot more chaotic and disruptive every autumn when your force of potash makers, wood burners, dyers, beekeepers, etc. has to instead by directed to work in harvests but I'm thinking that there'd be an advantage for planting to be a "row" based system where a farmer carrys a bag behind a plow and sows seeds as a field is tilled (or has a stick and pokes a depression in the soil and then buries the seed in a small thing of dirt or whatever).

[Cathar]

Yeah I think theres a miscommunication. I think I read somewhere that people wanted to separate crops and somewhat reuse them as fertilizer for other crops. This is a bad idea because there is probably grain left in the crops you will use as fertilizer, that will grow and compete for space and ground nutrient with the crops you are actually trying to grow. It's not a problem for a small garden, but for an exploitation ment to feed a village this is a whole other thing (and manually deherbing is extremely taxing physically). It wasn't meant directly at you, it's just something I read in the thread and felt compelled to give my two cents about (so my two years spent being a farmhand are useful at last).

For now the big problem with farming is, outdoor crops grow in every season in fortress mode (not in adventurer mode, strangely). This is the big oversight of the farming system and as someone who plays exclusively outdoor forts I would like to see it corrected

[Starver]

Straw (or, maybe intended, hay) was discussed as fungi-'fertiliser', like scrap paper can be.

If an aboveground cereal[1] stalk still has some seeds, then germination (and definitely full 'weed' growth) is probably curtailed in a fungi-growing circumstance. Although maybe malted grains could be beneficial to the mycobiological growing process.

The 'straw' used by strawberries (traditionally, IRL, and I think the recomendation is barley stalks) is partly there to help the fruit. In dry weather, helps the soil retain moisture, in wet it keeps the 'berries' (actually 'aggregate fruits' - bananas are berries, strawberries are not) from touching the soil. I'm not sure it has any significant fertilising action during growing season, nor do I recall Pick Your Own farms having any obvious "cereal weeds" when going up and down the rows. But that could have been due to off-season weeding. These days, they might use polythene or heavily processed (perhaps heat-treated) fibrous matting for the same purpose. (Although it's occured to me that I haven't seen a roadside PYO sign for many a year, so changing markets and processing all over.)


Restricting/tuning crop-seasons for aboveground plants (I can't recall if fruit trees are annual-only, they certainly have things like seasonal leaf-colour changing, but I do too little deliberate orcharding) is probably more obvious than for the ones that shun the surface conditions completely (dig channeled 'room' into multi-layer soil and then cover it with a roof or even a tower and the soil grows fine surface crops despite everything[2] and never again anything subterranean, even if the chamber did before you let open the roof). - The only explanation I have for this is something like a seasonal 'pulse' of trace elements (like radon, perhaps, but more so) that leaches throug the rocks but entirely dissipates given any slight contact with aboveground breezes (should therefore not be possible under a deliberately maintained overhang, or where sufficient access aboveground lets the wind breeze in one tunnel entrance, through the complex and out another, and full-on Turtling up the exposed place should protect against draughts as much as even the more exotically elemental FBs; thus showing that my 'explanation' is already a dead duck. )


Starting from scratch, I'm sure we could far more rationally reconstruct this fantasy ecosystem/agrieconomy. But some things would overturn much of the pre-existing Lore. I'm on tenterhooks to see what future changes might creep in, minor and major. Those that most satisfy the Realists might upset a lot of the Traditionalists, though.


[1] Not that of cave-wheat, because of whatever adaptation drives this as an underground crop. (In my head, it's just another fancy mushroom, anyway, that just has undergone convergent evolution into flour-grindable 'seed' heads/ears, rather than a cave-adapted 'grass'. But I probably have very little reason to justify that opinion.

[2] If this 'bug' functionality is ever fixed, I'm going to have a harder time with my own farming. Shouldn't complain, but likely will.

[betaking]

There needs to be additional uses for crops and stuff as well.

Foodstuff aside; rocknut oil, or linseed oil, should be an important commodity/substance that can be used as Varnish/Staining in a manner that is similar to Glazing (but for wood).

Greasing and oiling metal tools, weapons, armor should be a thing; (really tools in general should be a bigger thing, would make dwarven blacksmiths substantially more useful/believable if they could make stuff other than just armor, weapons, and "higher-value" baubles and furniture).

Oil and wax should be used on leather as part of maintenance(there's another thread somewhere suggesting maintenance/mending for clothes/fabric).


When we get "Workshop Zones" as a replacement for (w)orkshop (b)uildings, there should be oil-baths and quenching trays for blacksmiths, the oil of course being derived from crops, should be essential for certain pieces to be "functional".

As far as what I'm actually suggesting with this goes, take this like my suggestion for "Salt", whereby it's use is unabstracted away. (though how that would be commanded would be a different story, ideally something like "salt/pickle or smoke meat/fish/plants" would be under the (o)rders tab and act similar to Loom Orders. (though now that I'm thinking of it, I'm unsure if I'd want pickling/salting/smoking/drying to all occur in a kitchen, or if there might be yet another in a series of specialized equipment-related stations for some or all of these tasks..

[Azerty]

There needs to be additional uses for crops and stuff as well.

And adding plants is the solution: we should have vegetal wax and ivory, more ways to get oil and dyes, and both more sugar plants and uses for sugar.