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[Mechanoid]

May have been mentioned before, but it's worth mentioning:

When a farmer wants to plant in a field, he should take the entire bag with him when he goes seeding. Granted, fewer farmers would be able to plant one type of plant in the begining, but i think this negative aspect would be outweighed by the ability of the farmer to plant more seeds at once. With drastically increased efficency by not traveling back and forth from farm to stockpile, planting the initial # of seeds would become a "BOOM! Done. Now go worry about those traps and river monsters"
... Which is generally what farming is. Plant everything you have in one go, all at once, and worry about something else while the crops mature.

[Captain Mayday]

What I like to do is to customise the seeds I use for planting out of the food stockpiles and give them their own stockpile right near the farm. With a door and a small room on the other side, you can flood the farm, leaving the seed pile nice and dry.

[axus]

Good idea, its more natural for a farmer to carry a bag than a single seed.  Very similar to how marksdwarves carry a pile of bone bolts when they practice.

[myd]

Great idea! It could be even more efficent if the first farmer would take the bag to the farming plot and put it down there, so that the others can get their seeds from the same bag.

[Devastator]

... why didn't someone think of it sooner?

[ December 19, 2006: Message edited by: Devastator ]

[Maximus]

There's a few problems with this, given current game mechanics:

-Only one grower per bag, as you mentioned
-Seed bags can hold hundreds of seeds, which could slow down the grower quite a bit
-All your crops will ripen at nearly the same instant, forcing a crash harvest
-Right now, growers can wander a good 30 paces or so with "No Job" before they realize they need to plant the next seed (hopefully this can be optimized at some point)

For this suggestion to really work, some or all of these issues would have to be addressed.

[Mechanoid]

quote:Originally posted by Mayday:
What I like to do is to customise the seeds I use for planting out of the food stockpiles and give them their own stockpile right near the farm.

Yes, it's a good tactic to use, but they still spend several squares worth of time going back and forth.

@ Maximus:
True, those issues need to be addressed. I think a few simple solutions to some of them are:
- Short intervals between planting and a lengthened crop durration outside of a stockpile would solve the issue of a crash harvest. Picking the oldest plant wouldn't hurt, either.

- If dwarves can pull things off of a container while that container is held by another dwarf, then technically multiple people can use the seeds in one bag -- it's just that the dwarves without the bag need to use the old plant-one-seed-at-a-time method.

- Reduce the amount of seeds per bag to something like 75 or 100, to create more bags for carrying to the farm with.

And a few longer (read: pain in the ass to code) solutions:
- Planting in a farm is consolidated to be one job, instead of one job per square. Thus, the amount of the job that's "completed" each time a seed is planted is a slow increase like a workshop, instead of a "OK, done the planting job on this square. *wanders off* Oh wait. There's another square that needed planting!" This way the farm becomes a 'workshop' in the way that other workshops can KEEP the dwarf tied to it, as long as there's a job to do (and stop the dwarf wandering off, unless all the jobs are done, or something takes precidence)

- Farmer dwarves with the intent to plant in the same farm (or maybe different farms?) could meet in the field, with all of them grabbing bags, and one of them grabbing the seed bag. The seed dwarf then divides the big bag into the smaller bags, and then they get to farming. If a dwarf has to go do something, they should first return the seeds in their bag to the seed dwarve's big bag -- If the seed dwarf has to go, he drops the bag and another dwarf in the farming group picks it up and consolidates the two into the new 'big bag' (leaving the other bag to be picked up by an item hauler)

[slMagnvox]

A 1x2 custom Seeds Only stockpile right beside your farm streamlines most farming work with the code the way it is.  Bags are enough of a nuissance without every farmer hauling one around, putting one seed in it, dropping it to drink, letting it wash away in the river, carrying it to dinner, dropping it randomly, ad naseum.  Let alone where they will end up putting all of dinner's Plump Helmet Spawn or when anyone will get the seeds out of the Brewery if farmers are carrying all the seed bags.