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[Neoskel]

I suggest one solution to all this:
Lighting

That should solve all the easy mining problems. Now your dwarves will have to carry a torch, candle or lantern to start mining and build indoor stuff, and you'll be busy making fuel, which'll hinder underground living and exploratory mining.

It's planned anyway, and will hurt the frame rate and annoy people less than adding pollution.

Be cool to make firefly and fairy lanterns for permanent, smokeless light. And pretty much a guaranteed glowing fungus.

[Duke 2.0]

I suggest one solution to all this:
Lighting

That should solve all the easy mining problems. Now your dwarves will have to carry a torch, candle or lantern to start mining and build indoor stuff, and you'll be busy making fuel, which'll hinder underground living and exploratory mining.

It's planned anyway, and will hurt the frame rate and annoy people less than adding pollution.

Be cool to make firefly and fairy lanterns for permanent, smokeless light. And pretty much a guaranteed glowing fungus.

 Don't forget, glowing crystals.

[Dwarfaholic]

Or, lacking those, just weird glowing smog that lights the way for any non- dwarven adventurers.

Anyways, about the suggestion.

To me the mining times seem kinda okay, seeing as, at least with more inexperienced miners, mining out a square might take multiple ingame days.
At higher levels, though, they're probably a bit too fast, I agree.

[Silverionmox]

Yes, the crazy attention to detail is nice sometimes, but not when it comes to item tracking.  If a dwarf has to pick it up and carry it somewhere it should have a USE (as I said, the only two items that can't be used for SOMETHING are soap and chunks).  I do not want to see gravel/rock slag, sawdust, wood rounds, or bio waste.

You mean like clothes, crafts, pig iron, large gems, venom and salves? Soap is relatively useful; at least you can build with it.

Gravel should be eternally in demand for road building and upkeep on a world level; if not, there are chasms and volcanoes. Sawdust and scrap wood can be burned, sawdust can be used in the stables as well, turning it into manure=fertilizer. There is no such thing as bio waste, it's just not being tracked yet.

The whole problem with the excess stone is that miners mine faster than haulers haul. Hauling needs to be improved (plenty of possibilities), or at least balanced with mining speed.

[Tormy]

Moria was not built Overnight!
Realistic mining would change one of the fundamental principles of Dwarf Fortress ; that you're eating through solid rock like a mole!
At the moment, smoothing stone is a lot slower than actually mining out the space to be smoothed!


Code for cave ins and supports for different kinds of material is requested. A tunnel through sand should be very hard (if not impossible) to maintain. Creating supports could be made similar to smoothing, but would require wood.

1. Well IMHO skilled dwarves are mining out everything way too fast. This should be balanced out a bit.
2. I would like to see random cave-ins while digging through loose materials, like sand for example.
3. Supports should be needed, the old 7x7 rule was quite good actually, however like youve said this should be based on the type of materials. [IE, if you are digging through rock for example, 10x10 area should be ok without any supports. However if you are digging out a cave from sand, any "room" that is bigger than 3x3 should require to have supports.. or else -> cave-ins] This would make the game a bit more realistic.

[Draco18s]

Getting gravel out of the mine shaft should be on par with the usefulness of weeding the field.

Weeds when weeded are tossed aside, forgotten, and do not exist as an item in the game.

You mean like clothes, crafts, pig iron, large gems, venom and salves? Soap is relatively useful; at least you can build with it.

Gravel should be eternally in demand for road building and upkeep on a world level; if not, there are chasms and volcanoes. Sawdust and scrap wood can be burned, sawdust can be used in the stables as well, turning it into manure=fertilizer.

Clothes: they do have a use, the cloth rot is just a problem that no one wants to deal with currently because a dwarf just layers more clothes on (it does provide a minimal amount of [DAMBLOCk] too).
Crafts: trade fuel, way to get rid of excess stone, happy thoughts, unfinished development
Pig Iron: I'm ambivalent on this one.  Sure steel could have been reactioned differently, but it's been like this forever (i.e. before reactions.txt).
large gems: never had one, no idea
salve/venom/soap: unfinished development.  All of these items have intended uses that haven't been coded yet, you can't include them as "waste products."

Not every map has a chasm or a volcano.  I actually go out of my way to get one or the other so I don't have to deal with the piles and piles of existing refuse, I don't need another.

There is no such thing as bio waste, it's just not being tracked yet.

THAT'S EXACTLY MY POINT!
It isn't tracked, shouldn't be tracked, and Toady has stated it will never be tracked.  In my opinion, gravel is just as much unfun as biowaste.

[Impaler[WrG]]

If Gravel is piled into game space filling units then its actually very trivial to take care of, you just have a tailings pile outside the front of your fort, you can even use it as a foundation to build surface buildings on top of.  Many people are already converting their heaps of stone into large surface fortresses and a tailings pile is an even simpler solution as you can just keep expanding it indefinably.  I'd imagine it would work something like a zone, I'd place its edge along a slope and project it hanging out into empty space, the dwarfs come to the accessible edge and throw the gravel down the slope, once it piles up you walk further out and keep extending the pile, they can dump and fill hundreds of units of gravel before its filled and when it is I can just plop down more zone.

[Pilsu]

(although some, such as lye are mostly dead ends due to the non-implementation of a feature)

Lye? I use it all the time, it works perfectly fine for soap making. Pour it into a barrel to make use of it

[Draco18s]

(although some, such as lye are mostly dead ends due to the non-implementation of a feature)

Lye? I use it all the time, it works perfectly fine for soap making. Pour it into a barrel to make use of it

My point was that lye has one use: soap.  And soap does nothing (dead end) therefore lye itself is a dead end (as per "DEAD END: NO OUTLET" signs).

[Mephansteras]

Thought on rubble, once sand square depletion is in effect.

A mined out square produces a 'rubble' floor, much like a sand floor. Building roads and possibly large walls could require rubble. At which point, a dwarf would go find the nearest rubble square/pile, put it in a container (cart/wheelbarrow would be best), and move it over to the construction site. Otherwise, it acts like a normal square. If that floor is smoothed, the rubble is assumed to be disposed of somehow.

If people want it more realistic, we could have stockpiles for Sand and Rubble, which would be able to hold large amounts of them. A 'Clean' order on a square with sand or rubble would cause a dwarf to go over with a bucket/cart/whatever, and cart the stuff off to the pile. This would be most useful near large road-building projects to cut down on hauling time later.

This solution give us that extra edge of reality, without REALLY having to deal with it. The extended idea is a little more of a pain, but once hauling is improved I think it'll be ok.

As far as wood scrap goes, I think we can abstract that out to being automatically used in the workshops that require small fires, like the kitchen. I don't want to have to track all this stuff myself either, but it would be nice to at least have an explanation of what happens with all of it.

[Draco18s]

Mmmmmmmm....
I might be able to tolerate that.  No voice-able objections at the moment.

[Mephansteras]

Additional thought: Gravel roads, made of nothing but rubble (which is pretty much what gravel is). A step in between dirt roads and actual paved roads. They last a longer then dirt roads, but still eventually disappear. And, of course, aren't considered particularly fine quality roads.

[Dwaref]

Just want to chime in that bio-waste(aka night soil), and untreated waste water is put to good use in developing nations. Which is kind of just what DF is.
While we're on the jubject of improving the farming experience, night soil would be an abundant natural fertilizer.
It doesn't need to be any harder to keep track of than critter carcasses.
It should really have to wait a while until DF incorporates proper hygiene, washing of self and clothes, and cleaning of the fortress. They'll have to hold themselves until then.

I can't wait for diseases like dysentery gained from drinking the stagnant poolwater that dwarves perform their needs in.


Also, peasants aren't IMO low enough, i think we need untouchables as well!

Dalits include leather-workers (called chamar), carcass handlers (called mahar), poor farmers and landless labourers, night soil scavengers (called bhangi), street handcrafting people, folk artists, street cleaners, sweepers (chura), washermen (dhobi), etc.

There, now just apply unhappy thought when having to meet one of these guys!
I realize that a good deal of the professions are already ingame.

[Silverionmox]

Clothes: they do have a use, the cloth rot is just a problem that no one wants to deal with currently because a dwarf just layers more clothes on (it does provide a minimal amount of [DAMBLOCk] too).

They aren't useful at the moment, dwarves are just as happy naked. So just trading fodder.

Crafts: trade fuel, way to get rid of excess stone, happy thoughts, unfinished development

The same can be said for any item: trade fuel, way to get rid of extra resources, and I agree: unfinished development. I don't see actually what's different about the unfinished development of crafts and clothes vs. the unfinished development of the nutrient cycle or other byproducts.

Pig Iron: I'm ambivalent on this one.  Sure steel could have been reactioned differently, but it's been like this forever (i.e. before reactions.txt).

No reason to keep it, if it's bad; but it's good, because it gives flavor to the process of steel-making.

large gems: never had one, no ideasalve/venom/soap: unfinished development.  All of these items have intended uses that haven't been coded yet, you can't include them as "waste products."

(If you cut gems, you get large gems sometimes.) Uncoded is uncoded, whether originally intended or added a minute ago; The goals and bloats of the game are frequently added to and reorganized.

Not every map has a chasm or a volcano.  I actually go out of my way to get one or the other so I don't have to deal with the piles and piles of existing refuse, I don't need another.

As soon as goblins raiding parties aren't conjured up out of thin air anymore, the refuse stream will noticeably diminish.

There is no such thing as bio waste, it's just not being tracked yet.

THAT'S EXACTLY MY POINT!
It isn't tracked, shouldn't be tracked, and Toady has stated it will never be tracked.  In my opinion, gravel is just as much unfun as biowaste.

Tracking every twig, leaf and dog turd was never implied. Keeping track of the nutrients going in and out of the farmed soil for example can add the necessary challenge to farming. A few localized sources can already provide enough variation and flexibility to give the player different  options (eg. ash (already in), river deposits (already in), stable manure (could fit),..).

I'm usually having trouble selling all clothes, crafts, totems etc. Does that mean all trade goods are useless and shouldn't be tracked? No; it just means that resources and consumption aren't balanced yet, in this case craft production and trade.
The infamous excess stone problem is the same: transport is by far not as efficient as production. I think the time required to mine a cube of rock should be roughly the same as the time required to take the resultant pile of rock and cart it away to whatever destination it has, be it the local chasm, the mason's stockpile or the steadily growing pile of excess rock outside. Slowing down mining will not be popular - so mostly hauling has to go faster. Luckily there are many good suggestions already, mostly variations on the theme of carry-more-than-one-item. A higher capacity for stockpiles might help also in shortening the distances.

The whole point being that the game will change many times, and if something doesn't fit right now, doesn't mean it never will. I do completely agree that it would not be opportune to add dead ends in the resource chain. (Refuse, however, will always be with us and we'd better start thinking of fun/useful ways to dispose of it.. Realism as well as easy disposal requirements would be satified with a growing pile of slag and gravel somewhere at the bottom of a cliff.)

[Draco18s]

I want to start off by saying, "Thank you for supporting my position."
Second, "unfinished development objects" and "refuse items" aren't one and the same.

(Refuse, however, will always be with us and we'd better start thinking of fun/useful ways to dispose of it.. Realism as well as easy disposal requirements would be satified with a growing pile of slag and gravel somewhere at the bottom of a cliff.)

If someone can find a fun way to dispose of 14 million dwarfpounds of gravel, I'd be all for it.  Requiring it be hauled to an ever-growing mountain of debris is not fun (though less fun than dumping it in a pit or in magma, neither of which are all that entertaining).  Same applies to night soil, giving it a use (fertilizer) isn't really enough.