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[Silverionmox]

I always advocate the maximum anal realism possible in games especially DF so I would like to see farming become rediculously difficult and complicated. Thankyou everyone for the complicated suggestions on here I love almost all of them.

If you want it realistic, you don't need to make it difficult, but just make the soil deplete. Quality and quantity dwindle precipitously when the soil becomes exhausted, giving you an easy start but making it a lot harder later on by requiring much more surface and therefore labour for the same yield.. Unless you have other means of fertilization: regular flooding (which is not the same as irrigation), certain ground-up minerals, bat guano, corpses (Historically, battlefields were always blessed with great crops the years afterwards because of the extra nutrients.), imported stuff, or whatever. It would serve to make the underground more interesting as well.

[Draco18s]

I always advocate the maximum anal realism possible in games especially DF so I would like to see farming become rediculously difficult and complicated. Thankyou everyone for the complicated suggestions on here I love almost all of them.

If you want it realistic, you don't need to make it difficult, but just make the soil deplete.

I made that suggestion at some point.  Or similar.

I think it was P and N as my variables (Phosphorous and Nitrogen) as a 5 point scale each (P = 5, N = 1 being high phosohorous and low Nitrogen).

Plump Helmets would grow well in high P and deplete P.

I made up a theoretical list, attempting to stay close to real life plants (corn, for instance, increases the nitrogen content of the soil), though I had to make up some.  Each pant had a "grows well in" and "moves the soil in" values (so for example Plump Helmet could be P5,N0,-P,-N saying that it depletes both P and N, but grows well at high P and neutral N).

The idea was that the closer the soil (measured per farm plot) was to the crop grown the higher the yeild.  At the end of the season, the soil would change as per the crop's soil depletion, and then your farmers would plant whatever was next.

To this we add three new ways to fertilize (+P, -P, +N, -N total) which would boost the value of the farm.  Though, beneficialness would be relative to what's being grown.

[Royal Surveyor]

Soil depletion would certainly be a big help, as would increased demand.

I may have missed it, but I think that increasing the amount of plants required per drink would be useful, as well.  As you may know, a good, thick beer requires at least 8 pounds of malt, and that is derived from a larger amount of roasted wheat.  Wine is even more intensive, and as such, I think that a number of plump helmets, cave wheat, etc., would be far more realistic and ratchet up the demand moreso than the current system.  Having five drinks made from each plump helmet seems a little over the top, as well as having five syrup units made from each sweet pod.  The reciprocal seems more realistic and would certainly make farming more difficult.

Of course, this would require a change of a lot of code, since a brewer using 1 plump helmet wouldn't even make one drink, so there would need to be code inserted to have him seek more plump helmets before brewing actually began.  He might go ahead and gather up 125 to make a full barrel of 25, for instance.  It would also slow down the whole process, which would further increase the difficulty, since as far as I know, brewers also tend to be planters in the early fortresses.

[Mephansteras]

Well, I'm not sure that 1 plump helmet is really 1 mushroom. I think it represents one "unit" of plump helmets. One bushel or bucketfull or whatnot.

Now, I agree that it would make more sense to reduce down the amount of alcohol gotten from brewing, but I'm not sure 5-1 makes all that much sense. Maybe 1-1?

[Pilsu]

200 dwarves times 8 means you need 1600 plots with a large fortress

40x40 is hardly hard to maintain with a population of 200. Irrigating it would be a massive pain in the ass though and the way the dwarves work now they'd take more than the season to just plant the seeds. Only thing making it "hard" are the game mechanics themselves

And 56 squares just for your starting seven.

8x7, not really that bad. Would need surface seeds available at embark though

[Impaler[WrG]]

I've found that by moding a range of food/drink prices from super cheap to super expensive into the game its now much easier to start as you can buy enough food/drink to last a lot longer, no more starving/dieing of thirst that first winter.  Also allowing $500 Bronze anvils helps a lot too.

[pavlov]

Honestly above ground farming mechanics are fine except for the overproductiveness of plots. Plots should be able to feed 1/3 to 1/5 of the dwarves they can now.

It's underground farming that needs a huge overhaul.

Plump helmets etc and their products should be:
1) disgusting, giving unhappy thoughts,
2) difficult/impossible to grow without mud (WATER) or organic matter (logs?) to grow on. Highly nutritious mushroom like things that grow on bare rock? Come on.

Also, from a 'fantasy' perspective, dwarven mountainhomes are supposed to be highly dependent on trade for food. Otherwise what is the point of trading? What could those useless elves and humans have that dwarves could possibly want? (note: it is already like this. I stop trading after 3-4 years because there's nothing I need or want from the worthless caravans. they can inhale magma for all I care)

[axus]

These all sound like busy-work.  I think they would add flavor to the game, but so do the demands of nobles, and I don't like that either.  My biggest problem with these is they increase the number of items floating around the game.  It's good in the adventure mode sense, bad for fortress mode.

Quick solution is to have a chance for crops to fail.  The failure rate vs. skill for plant gathering is about right.  Now, the dwarves need to have big plots, work harder, and get less food.

Longer term, I think food and drinks can have a nutritional value, calorie value, and taste value.  Meats would be pretty high on these scales, it will be funny to set some creature raws to taste bad and others to taste good ;p  Recipes would try to balance these, of course they would suffer under poor cooks.

There are two ways of "nerfing" farming.  While everyone seem to be talking about decreasing supply, I have another idea.  Increasing demand.

1) All the Tame animals and pets could now require food to eat, and unless you lock you your stockpiles against pets, they'll just help themselves.

2) Beds should require cloth and straw (gotten from processing cave wheat and longland grass) in order to make a mattress.  Again, more stuff you have to grow.  Nobles could require feather mattresses, which comes from birds you raise, which would need feeding.

3) Dwarves should demand lots of clothes, and demand them often (fashions change after all).  The more elaborate party dresses should requite multiple blots of dyed cloth.  Perhaps some of them (nobles) would demand silk, which need to be collected from domesticated silk producing animals, which would have to be fed.  All this increases a demand for farm produced products.

4) In order to heal injured Dwarves, bandages made of cloth and medicinal ointment made of herbs would need to be used, both requiring more growing.

5) Some Dwarves would required Pipeweed as well as Alchohol, which would again have to be grown.


The benefit of this is, you don't HAVE to have all this in the beginning.  You can not have any pets, have everyone sleep on the floor, give each Dwarf one change of clothes, let injured Dwarves remain injured, and have pipeweed addicts be very very unhappy.  This allows someone to quickly provide enough food to survive, but a long time to farm enough so that everyone's happy.

This solution is both interesting and effective.

[Steely Glint]

A lot of what I think has already been said, but I feel the need to comment anyway. I'd like to see food production per farmer reduced to 20% to 30% of current levels.

1) All Crops
All crops should have one or two tending/watering tasks added during the grow period, depending on the crop. These tasks would require a bucket full of water and would significantly reduce the yield if left uncompleted, allowing farmers to eke out a living underground in deserts or tundras but be much more productive if water is present. Crop size would depend both on how skillfully the initial planting was performed and how skillfully the tending was performed (if at all).

As has been mentioned, efficient crop production would now require water close to the fields. This is exactly as it should be.

2) Underground Crops
All underground crops should be able to grow in all seasons. Their productivity should be reduced by increasing maturation time approximately fourfold in addition to the tending tasks described above.

Fields growing fungal crops such as plump helmets should have the option of being automatically fertilized with otherwise useless rotting stuff (rotten chunks, rotten hides, withered crops, etc). This would increase the yield or decrease the grow time.

3) Surface Crops
Surface crops should be planted in spring or summer, and mature in the summer or fall. Generally, valuable surface crops should produce one harvest per year each. The yield should be high to make up for the intermittent availability, and there should be a couple low value plants (e.g. prickle berry) that can get in several crops per year.

A single field could be set to grow a spring->summer crop and a summer->fall crop, with the second crop being planted as the first is harvested. One season crops like this would be moderately valuable. Two season crops (spring->fall) would be either high yield (processed like quarry bush into bags) or very high value.

For surface crops, rain could take the place of a tending task. The growing season could be extended in tropical climates, though I'm not sure exactly how that would work.

4) Auto-Processing
Not directly related to farming, but also important. Options to automatically process certain types of food would be great, just like auto-loom and auto-tan. It would also be nice to automatically butcher animals when you have more than a certain amount of them (especially cats), and then automatically render their fat. Eventually, I'd like to have meals cooked automatically whenever the raw materials are available, and drinks brewed automatically when stockpiles are low.

This could tie in to the guildmaster idea mentioned elsewhere on these boards, as you could have a master of foodstuffs appointed to deal with managing the food supply.

[Granite26]

the fungus fert suggestion made me think we might need a compost pile.  Stuff already 'decomposes' over time.  Maybe a well designed one (either as a building, or just an engineering task) could produce fertilizer too.  Should also produce heat.  Imagine melting through ice with your pile

[codezero]

I know this thread is dated but it's the link from the eternal suggestions voting board.

My 2 cents.
I like the fertility idea, give all sand tiles a fertility value and decrease it as it gets used or increase it if fertilised. Plants range from 1-5 yield depending on current fertility/maxfertility(of best sand/peat?).

Combine this with the watering task and farming is more modest, realistic and isn't really any harder to manage. You'd only have to move farms if you don't want to waste wood.

Also I think underground crops, aside from mushrooms, should be cut out until lighting is implemented.

[Othob Rithol]

I'm pretty sure the intended implementation of indoor crops is that they are all fungi of some (fantastical) sort.

Plump Helmets are just plump and tasty.
Pig Tails are long and fibrous.
Cave Wheat is hard, but grinds well.
etc...

The surface crops are the actual photosynthetic plants.

[Veroule]

I have had a lot of thoughts about the entire food system for a long time.  I believe a really correct fix has to combine many of the aspects mentioned in this topic as well as some mentioned in the topic about the price of prepared meals.

I would like to start by listing out some of the current problems.
1. Plants are not properly using the weather conditions to determine plantability and growth.
2. Food is highly abstract where a biscuit is an equal meal to 1/7th of a horse.
3. Stacks can not be combined.

The way to fix these first 3 problems is:
1. Plants need a combination of season and biome conditions in the raws.  This affects above ground plants such that they only grow when it is warm enough for them.  Underground plants need to all be all seasons, and the winter can plant affect needs to be removed.  This set of fixes makes below ground farming easier, and above ground a little more realistic without too much effort.

To further correct this we have to recognize that some plants mature a little faster.  A few plants should be harvestable before all the plants in a plot are harvestable.  These plants produce little stacks of 1 as the grow duration approaches complete for that plot.  In order to actually do this when the seed is planted the farmers skill is used to determine how many plants appear in that plot.  Using T to examine the plot should display a certain number of plants and the seed should already be destroyed.  I can see this number ranging as high as 20 for a lengendary farmer, and should have little to no randomness.  Again this is affecting above ground farming more because a cave does not have weather.

2. All edible things need to have a food value attached.  This makes it so that a hunk of meat will keep a dwarf fed for 3 weeks, while a plump helmet will only satisfy them for a few days.  This needs to be cohesively done through the entire cooking system.  Cooking needs to have recipes made much like the smelter reactions, and the produced items have a real food value.  For example 3 flour and 1 tallow might make 20 biscuits, and the value of a biscuit would only cover a dwarf for a day.  Another recipe might be 10 biscuit, 2 meat, 1 cheese = 10 sandwich; and each sandwich would cover the dwarfs hunger for 4 days.  This seems an easier way to adjust the demand as a hunger number is already tracked.

3. Full on stack combining isn't actually needed, although it is desirable.  The minimum that is needed is that the dwarf combines or breaks apart the items when they grab them.  Say a dwarf is going to grab 10 biscuits, but the stacks in barrels are 3 and 8.  The dwarf would go to the barrel with 8, grab all of them, then go over to the barrel with 3 and get 2 of them.  At that point he is carrying a stack of 10.

So far only item 2 has actually done anything to make food production harder.  That is because it removes the abstraction on the demand and makes a real difference in the value of things.  Now some things to really make farming harder.
1. Plots needs to have a minimum size of 2x1.  These should be set up so that 1 tile is walkable and the other is not.  The plants actually grow in the nonwalkable tile.  The nonwalkable has to be done through pathing and not be a hard blockage.  Dwarves would see is as a do not step here, but animals, invaders, and traders wouldn't care.  If they walk through it then some plants get trampled.
2. Watering has to be required.  Since dwarves don't have hoses, buckets are needed.  Each plot should hold the information about its wetness level.  Outdoor farms would be moistened when it rains, and would have more evaporation and drainage.  They would be more likely to not require special care.

The entire watering process should be split into 2 tasks, check farm, and water plot.  This means a farmer has to actually walk around the field periodically and decide which plots need water.  Overwatering can lead to plant death as well, and should be something an inexperienced farmer does.  This is why the planting of a seed needs to create many plants at the start.  All errors in watering should slow the growth of the plants.  If it is bad enough then some die and they need to be pulled out.

3. Fertilizing should not affect how many you get directly.  It should speed up growth time, and should allow the plants to be more resilient.  This means we need a healthy factor for the plant.  A healthy plant grows faster and resists trampling better.  A plant that is growing rapidly uses more nutrients, and should choke out neighboring plants.  A plant that is not healthy may never actually grow to a harvestable level.

4. Annuals versus perenials needs to be recognized.  We also have to recognize what is usable in the plant.  Strawberries should be a perenial with a fruit product.  The fruit is the harvestable part, and the plant would still be there after harvesting.  This needs to apply to gathering as well as farming.  This means that some crops would only have to be planted once to produce a continuous stream of food.  The growth cycle controlled by biome and climate would determine what the plant is doing.  Some might die and require replanting, but the farmer should be taking care of that.

Wheat on the other hand produces only seeds, and is an annual.  The seeds are harvested and they are what is milled for flour.  The rest of the plant is worthless.  Here we suddenly see that seeds need to have a little less abstraction.

----
That is a total of 7 different points that should be adjusted to add more realism.  My thinking is that the net affect is that farmers are much busier working the fields.  The space requirement is increased slightly, but the change in how plants are handled actually increases production.  Dwarves eat more frequently, and because there is already a diversity of food in the code for a dwarf choosing what to eat cooks are necessary.

One of the main things that absolutely has to be done as part of this is the dwarves have to do the work.  The player should be establishing a layout and a set of specifications.  The dwarves should be planting, harvesting, slaughtering, brewing, and cooking automatically.

[Draco18s]

I agree conceptually with your points, but I don't think we should do some of them.

2a, 3a, 1b (you went to 3 and then started over), and 4 are ones that are ones that in my opinion could be omitted and things would still work just fine.

2a particularly: remember how long it takes a dwarf to walk from once place to another, if he eats plump helmets that last him a day, he'll stand up and walk to the kitchen, grab some more, sit down and eat again, and still slowly starve to death.

[Veroule]

The reason I started back over from 1 is because the first grouping of 3 can be done independently of the second grouping.  The first grouping covers a number of generalized problems that are part of how food is produced and used, but not entirely directed at only farming.

With item 2 of the first group we would definitely want to have the numbers adjusted such that a dwarf isn't just walking about eating all the time.  Cooked things should autmatically sum up the food value of thier components and divide by the number of finished things they produce.  This is the change that pushes demand up and by itself this change would have a major impact on how all players view the food supply.  It is also a lead in for more sophisticated dwarf behaviors such as grabbing a snack before bed and choosing to grab some food before starting a long hike into the bowels of the fortress.

Eating a full meal can further develop with a slight increase in dwarf choices, and a greater use of the personality traits.  For example a dwarf that frequently overindulges should grab 3 different foods before sitting at a table.  Sure they will be very full for a while, but then they might have a snack while still mostly ful.  Another personality trait may lead to a dwarf that eats very little and only when near starvation.  Yes anorexic dwarves should become possible by actually assigning values to how filling a food is and using personality traits for part of the decision on when and what to eat.

The second grouping is more directed specifically at farming, but still has some relations to plant gathering.

For my item 1 in that second grouping I really should be saying that the too late to plant needs to take into account the actual climate and season.  For example if you are trying to plant sun berries on a glacier in the arctic circle, it won't work even though it is summer.  Having dug out a nice cave it becomes reasonable that you could plant sweetpods even while blizzards rage outside.  This is actually a very key point and one I do not believe should be ignored.

Item 4 of that second group is a preperation step for things like trees and shrubs to actually grow in patches.  It is part of looking ahead to orchards and tree farming.  It is largely aimed at turning trees into actual plants with a real sort of growth somewhere in the future.  In the immediate it allows that your farmer can plant strawberries and not have to plant them again.  They just might not produce too many fruit if not properly tended.

Basically you have to spend some time looking at the downstream abilities these changes create.  When you think far enough ahead you should find that these changes when coupled with a good fertilizer solution (such as your own) nerfs farming, plant gathering, brewing, and cooking all at once.  They also open a much greater path for modding, and create numerous possibilities for greater dwarf behavior.