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Author Topic: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution  (Read 136346 times)

NW_Kohaku

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Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution
« Reply #465 on: August 08, 2016, 07:39:27 pm »

Adventurer Mode Concerns
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« Last Edit: August 09, 2016, 09:01:23 pm by NW_Kohaku »
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Arthropleura

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Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution
« Reply #466 on: August 09, 2016, 06:38:07 am »

This idea is predicated upon farming being done only on adventurer sites or areas tracked like it, which could restrain the bounds of the interface in the same way that Fortress Mode is restrained to the embark boundaries.  I.E. you have to "own" a defined piece of real estate to start ordering it farmed, and have to be standing in it to open the menus.

I'm a little unclear on this part. Would this include hamlets that the player has gained proprietorship of?

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NW_Kohaku

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Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution
« Reply #467 on: August 09, 2016, 08:54:23 pm »

I'm a little unclear on this part. Would this include hamlets that the player has gained proprietorship of?

I'm actually a little surprised to see someone comment to a change made to this thread in relative real time. Thanks for that.

But anyways, yes, I was coming back to edit that to make that part more clear...

Basically, the idea is that any orders given to farm a piece of land, Fortress or Adventurer Mode, would go through the same farming interface.  If you were a mayor or other authority figure, presumably, some farming would be done by the individual initiative of land-owning farmers, but if the player has the authority to give orders on how the land is farmed, that means they use the same interface, including setting up a "farm overseer" to bring the interface up. 

Or put another way, creating a system where you just sort of point at a field and order followers to do stuff would be too vague and micromanage-y a system, so the idea is to turn every order for a different character to farm into nails so that the same hammer can be used upon them.

This would include if your adventurer just claimed a plot of wilderness, and left a follower behind to farm, alone.  Even, hypothetically, setting up a spouse as a farm overseer to keep the lands in order, whether there are hired laborers to help or not. 

Basically, because I'm trying to get both modes to share the same space, that means they both need to play with the same "boundaries", since you don't want to turn into a half-fortress mode where the adventurer can just roam the screen across the world with the power to see through walls.  So if an adventurer claimed a site, then you only get to see to the limits of that adventurer site while in this mode, just like how Fortress Mode doesn't let you designate or even scroll outside your fortress.

A hamlet, as well as fortresses and adventurer sites, use defined areas.  Hence, in a hamlet, the extent of your reach of an order to farm would be the boundaries of the hamlet.  (Of course, thinking of it now, it probably would need to be sub-divided further, just for memory's sake, since a hamlet can be quite large.)

One thing that may cause problems is that hamlets are not necessarily tracked as fully as adventurer sites and fortresses.  (Both have every part of their map saved, entirely.  Hamlets are procedurally generated every time they are loaded, and only changes are saved.  There may need to be a choice if there is enough changes caused by farming controls to simply make a player-controlled hamlet worth turning into a site like a fortress just because enough changes to the fundamental data are expected to make it like a fortress...)
« Last Edit: August 09, 2016, 09:32:57 pm by NW_Kohaku »
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Personally, I like [DF] because after climbing the damned learning cliff, I'm too elitist to consider not liking it.
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Wyrdean

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Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution
« Reply #468 on: August 10, 2016, 08:30:48 pm »

Well I read the entire thread I must admit you keeping with a thread for 5 years (plus a little) is very impressive if only the rest forums were as active.....

(the walls are great too I happen to love reading however I read very fast so nothing lasts any amount of time however this lasted for a while thanks!)
I sincerely hope all of your ideas (the fesable ones atleast) are added to the game, would be very cool!
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NW_Kohaku

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Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution
« Reply #469 on: August 11, 2016, 12:28:19 am »

Well I read the entire thread I must admit you keeping with a thread for 5 years (plus a little) is very impressive if only the rest forums were as active.....

(the walls are great too I happen to love reading however I read very fast so nothing lasts any amount of time however this lasted for a while thanks!)
I sincerely hope all of your ideas (the fesable ones atleast) are added to the game, would be very cool!

Technically, this is a rewrite of the original thread, which started in 2008, practically at the start of the suggestions forum, although I wasn't involved until 2010.

Also, Toady had previously expressed a desire to try to do most of the basics, but was unsure of how to be able to meaningfully present it to players. Hence, I tried to make the thread have a focus (inasmuch as this thread HAS any focus) on how to set up the interface, and giving it a balance between simulationism for its own sake and strategic gameplay value. The exact details get a bit unwieldy, as I've waffled between a few ideas on specifics mid-writing, but the overarching concept is totally feasible in broad strokes, and I think there's good reason for optimism that a majority of the important stuff will be there. 

I also spent a pretty huge amount of time researching for this thread, and from knowing nearly nothing on the topics, I've come to start gardening a bit just because this thread spurred my interest.  The simple fact that it can drive people to gain an interest in something like this which they never otherwise would have paid attention to will always be what I find Dwarf Fortress's greatest unsung feature.
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Personally, I like [DF] because after climbing the damned learning cliff, I'm too elitist to consider not liking it.
"And no Frankenstein-esque body part stitching?"
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LordBaal

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Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution
« Reply #470 on: August 11, 2016, 04:54:50 am »

Ptw
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90908

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Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution
« Reply #471 on: August 12, 2016, 08:15:57 am »

Watching to post.
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Urist Tilaturist

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Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution
« Reply #472 on: September 05, 2016, 03:38:44 pm »

What is most interesting about this thread is that it has been going for years with no actual visible mod release.
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expwnent

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Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution
« Reply #473 on: September 06, 2016, 12:35:12 am »

It would require very advanced DFHack support.
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Qyubey

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Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution
« Reply #474 on: September 07, 2016, 12:40:14 am »

This is such a cool thread~

Two big things I saw when reading and had to mention though:
  • Very much in favor of the 'Scheduler' for checking variables and counters. Should be its own thread, honestly. Means that Tarn could do something about the 'Every Frame Refresh' problem, and have the ability to alter when counters refresh fairly easily (maybe even a raw with frame timers for each type of counter).
  • I laughed when I saw 'drinking and potty at the same time', but I do believe the game should handle 'the business', because then you'd have to design sewers as a long term goal (which creates choice since they can be an easy way in).
  • On the issue of combined breaks, here's a better suggestion: just use Rimworld's Restrict menu. It's perfect. Have a roster where you can assign periods of 'Work', 'Break', and 'Free' to your dwarves per season (or categorize them by Jobs, Social Status, Burrow Location, Civ/Militia, etc). Free would be like how dwarves currently work, but setting a 'Break' period would force them to go satisfy their hunger/thirst/sleep/'relief' during the time allotted - no working allowed (only personal hauling). Wiki says dwarves need to eat roughly twice a season, so you'd really only need two definite break periods assigned, but the better idea is to stagger schedules so not everyone does it as the same time. Dwarves that are angry or stressed or in a mood would obviously ignore the orders, and maybe you also need a Manager to access the panel itself - like with job assigning and stocks needing certain roles to be actively filled. There's already precedence for code like this in the game with the Militia menu anyway, so its not even a big ask.

As for the people against waste being in the game for dragging it down; Ark Survival Instinct has poop all over the place and no-one raises any eyebrows (hell, you can even eat it), so I don't see what the fuss is here. It's a valuable resource.

Oh, and regarding turning Brooks into 2/7 water: this issue was brought up in one of my threads, but it means you can't have any fish in those rivers since they'd air-drown. Might be able to fix this by just editing that Vermin Fish can spawn and survive in 2/7 water though.


Given that some of this stuff would require you to go to different points on the world map to grab resources (guano mining, for example), you'll definitely need more of the game's framework in place to support some things. It DOES, however, heavily suggest a direction that the overall metagame beyond Fortress should go in:

Controlling an entire entity through Sites and Groups.

I know it's planned, but the whole 'mining island' concept gives it a much clearer concept IMO. You have your base civ, with various Sites you could control (either from the world map, or in Fortress mode), and you'd assemble Groups to go to specific points on the map, from a site, using resources from that site, comprised of citizens of that site. They could be Armies that go fight and raid; Explorers that go just to collect rare resources and bring them back; Traders to ferry resources between both your sites and other entity sites; and finally Settlers which are the exact thing the game gives you currently to create a Fortress.

So, you assemble a new Group on the Map menu by selecting a Site you own and adding things in the handy-dandy Embark menu, however this one is expanded to let you set a type of Group (A/E/T/S). You only need a specific run for resources, so you set it to Explorers. Assign a few citizens from the site; give them tools, weapons, food, and a fancy new caravan to carry all of it, then select the tile on the map to go to. They travel there over time (you could run Fortress mode in the meantime and get an alert upon arrival), and once they arrive, you can assume control with an Explorer UI (more direct control over dwarves, but more limited construction than Fortress). Using some orders, you direct your guys to go mine out some guano rock and dump it in the caravan. Maybe grab some seeds, plants, fight off a carp or two and have one of your guys die (dump his body in the caravan). Then you dis-embark back to the Map menu and order them back to a Site. Once they arrive, everything belongs to that Site again, including the new stuff you brought in.

Sorry for going off-topic, but it hit my mind and I didn't want to make a new thread or something.

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Fungal arrangements, made of faintly glowing mushrooms of different colors, arranged and carefully cultured by the most tasteful fungalists in the kingdom create "flowerbeds" underground and illuminate towering statues commemorating the greatest deeds in dwarven history.
...You could use the same code for statues on a hedge to create Hedge Sculptures. Carve a tree that looks like a crying elf.
« Last Edit: September 07, 2016, 01:28:59 am by Qyubey »
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Qyubey

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Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution
« Reply #475 on: September 18, 2016, 05:34:27 am »

Had some adventures in coding of my own. Do coroutines exist for C? (What I assume DF is coded in). If so, you could manage that 'scheduler' idea really easily.
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Draco18s

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Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution
« Reply #476 on: September 18, 2016, 10:22:09 am »

Had some adventures in coding of my own. Do coroutines exist for C? (What I assume DF is coded in). If so, you could manage that 'scheduler' idea really easily.

Absolutely. The problem isn't "do threads exist?" but rather "can I use threads here and not horribly mangle the data?"
Multithreading isn't something you can just bolt on when you need it, because every bit of memory it interacts with is now also multithreaded.  And once that happens, your entire program is multithreaded and large portions aren't set up for it.
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Qyubey

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Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution
« Reply #477 on: September 18, 2016, 05:07:09 pm »

Had some adventures in coding of my own. Do coroutines exist for C? (What I assume DF is coded in). If so, you could manage that 'scheduler' idea really easily.

Absolutely. The problem isn't "do threads exist?" but rather "can I use threads here and not horribly mangle the data?"
Multithreading isn't something you can just bolt on when you need it, because every bit of memory it interacts with is now also multithreaded.  And once that happens, your entire program is multithreaded and large portions aren't set up for it.

I... wasn't talking about multithreading persay - more than you could schedule the game to only update certain things less often than a tick. Nevermind though; talked to a programmer friend and he said you can achieve the same with updating functions anyway.
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Draco18s

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Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution
« Reply #478 on: September 18, 2016, 06:10:44 pm »

Oh yeah, you don't need anything special for that.
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NW_Kohaku

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Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution
« Reply #479 on: June 11, 2017, 12:10:57 am »

Not exactly an update, but I've been playing Rune Factory 4, and it actually implements soil nutrient data in a simplistic manner, although it does so in a way that generally requires you deal with it, manually.  Still, it makes for interesting material to look at and see in practice, since this sort of thing isn't commonly in games.

First, arable soil is divided into 2x2 plots of actually tillable tiles, presumably to reduce the amount of data that needs storing by one fourth.  (Or just to reduce the number of fertilizer items you need to carry around.)  These soil tiles contain several data points that have a far more blunt purpose than the simulationist NPK model I have outlined, here. 

The following data is tracked per plot:
"Overall" (not sure if this is a real stat, or an amalgamated stat... it doesn't have any actual effect I can perceive)

"Speed" - Affects crop growth speed as a multiplier.  Harvesting crops tends to knock speed down by about 0.1 per harvest, but different crops are "easy on the soil" and have much less impact than others.

"Quality" - Affects whether sacrificing a crop for seeds will yield a seed with increased quality.  (Level 1 seeds make level 1 crops, but you can thresh it for seeds for a level 2 seed, which makes level 2 crops, which sell for 10% more and have 10% better effects - cooked food is a healing/MP-restoring item and temporary stat buff in this game.  Level 10 is the best, and doubles prices and effects. Once you have shipped crops of a certain level, seeds will be sold at that level for the same price as a level 1 seed, but will create products that sell for more, so you want to have one crop you're willing to sacrifice for higher-level seeds.  The "quality" soil stat needs to be a certain minimum level for advancement to the next seed level to be possible, but it's not readily apparent how much you need except by seeing whether you get a better seed or you just wasted several game days of growth.)

"Number" (actually, "No.") - Multiplies how many crops you will harvest.  Some crops are more productive than others.  A single tile of corn produces only one corn, but a single tile of cucumber produces 5 cucumbers, plus cucumbers will continue producing more crops from the same vine until destroyed, it changes to a bad season and the crop dies, or the soil quality drops to the point you get no more harvests.  Multiple-harvest crops like cucumbers abuse the soil more heavily, and drop this faster.

"Size" - You need this to be high to get "giant crops", which are special... well, giant versions of normal crops.  Giant crops are used for special crafting, or just selling for godawful amounts of money, but they abuse the soil heavily and take special fertilizers to make happen.

"Health" (or "HP") - This is more like the biomass/carbon level of the soil.  HP is abused when harvesting, especially multi-harvest crops, and if it hits 0, nothing grows or can be harvested until it rises again.  Incidentally, stats only drop when you harvest a crop, so threshing crops for seeds or destroying crops before they can be harvested keeps the soil quality high.

"Defense" - Reduces HP loss when you harvest. 



There are multiple fertilizers that help restore the soil. 

First, there is a "fertilizer bin".  Dumping unwanted plants (like weeds from your field, or wild grasses you can find in the outside world) into the fertilizer bin gives it more "charges".  The fertilizer bin passively regenerates soil stats so long as it has "charges" left in it every day.  If you get more than one, they interestingly share the same storage, so you can choose to just dump everything into one bin while leaving plenty of others elsewhere, but at the same time, I think the one bin actually fertilizes all your fields even if you expand your farm to multiple screens, so I'm not sure that's necessary.  I think that the fertilizer bin adds less or possibly even nothing to your soil stats if they go above the default values.  (I.E. it restores more Speed soil stat if it's below x1.0, and less if it's above x1.0.)

Second, letting a tile fallow sends its stats back towards the default state, so if you really abuse soil and can't be bothered to tend to it, you can just leave it untilled and let the weeds grow for a bit. 

Third, you can till certain crops back into the soil.  Corn grows any season but Winter, and clover grows any season but Summer, and both can be plowed back in, which instantly sets HP back up to 255 (max), and can raise other stats to a lesser degree if they are low.  (This is really handy when you're growing multi-harvest crops that abuse HP heavily.  In a 2x2 plot, grow 3 multi-harvest crops like strawberries for tons of produce, and the fourth tile is for corn you grow solely to plow back into the soil.) 

Finally, you have a "Chemistry" crafting skill and crafting station that relates to both healing items/medicines for status ailments, as well as various fertilizers for your fields.  You can make, for example, a "Greenifier" with a withered weed (surprisingly rare), a wild grass that grows in certain areas in the overworld/dungeons, and a flower. (You have to plant flowers to harvest as crafting supplies to make fertilizers that let you grow more plants like flowers you can harvest to be crafting supplies, and WHAT DO YOU MEAN THAT SOUNDS INEFFICIENT?!) Greenifier raises the "quality" soil stat, making it possible to grow higher-level crops.  "Formula A" directly adds +0.5 to the "Speed" soil stat, so dumping two on default-quality soil instantly doubles crop growth speed.  (This means you have an insatiable appetite for the withered weeds and wild grasses you need to make it, in spite of them supposedly being cheap and worthless ingredients.) Greenifier+ and Formula B are a better versions of the same items, but take actual produce to... produce, and take slow-growing flowers to prevent players from abusing this.  (Unless of course they dump tons of Formula B on the fields that produce the ingredients for Formula B...)  There are also Giantizer (needed for making giant crops), and Minimizer (undoes the giantizer, and also improves other soil stats).



The game features classic Harvest Moon farming mechanics otherwise, which means you plow, throw seeds at dirt, then water every day until harvest time.  You can get upgraded watering cans and such that let you water whole fields in a single power swing.

Like other Rune Factory games, you can also get tamed monsters to water your crops for you.  (Unlike previous games, any monster will do all chores, so you don't have to look for water mages just to do the watering and trolls just to smash rocks for you.) Monsters will water fields until some point in the afternoon when it's time to head in, at which point, they will instantly harvest and put into the shipping bin any crops left over.  If told to do so, they will even buy new seeds and plant new crops entirely on their own, resulting in an automated farm (if you don't mind that you're doing nothing but harvesting and shipping raw crops, when you really want to use crops as crafting materials, even if only because crafting cucumbers into pickles before selling them nets you more cash).  They don't really watch out for soil quality, however, and I haven't just left a field entirely to a monster's own volition, so I'm not sure how sustainable that is. 

Also, monsters left to work fields on their own lose HP as they work, resulting in them requiring healing after a few days (they don't restore HP overnight if they were working) so you need to interact with them at least a little.  If they drop below half HP, they stop working and have angry scribble signs over their heads.  You can either let them rest for a few days and have a work rotation, feed them healing potions/food until better, or order them into your party so you can cast a healing spell before letting them go and ordering them back to work (which is the most cost-effective, but manually-intensive way to remove manual labor from the game...).



All this said, in spite of there being a bunch of numbers being tracked, I generally find I only have to do a few simple things, like plant one corn to plow back in every couple weeks to restore soil HP and spread my heavy feeders out with light feeders to keep things relatively balanced.  I also want to keep a few heavily fertilized super-fast-growth fields for things like fruit trees or rare flowers that normally take half a year to grow. 

This is a game made for "the casuals", and when you see it work in practice, it's really not as complex as having a whole bunch of numbers makes it seem.  You even need to equip a special item just to see the numbers, at that...  Although they're important, and you're just left guessing without it...  (I say this to argue back against the nay-sayers that existed several years back saying more than one or two tracked stats would be too complicated.) 

Using something like a schedule system and automated fertilizer usage, again, would make this easy on Dwarf Fortress players, who would generally only need to keep an eye on necessary fertilizer and fertilizer components that need to be used to keep farms at maximum efficiency without requiring the player to actually get involved in manually targeting individual tiles for fertilization. 
« Last Edit: June 11, 2017, 12:15:18 am by NW_Kohaku »
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Personally, I like [DF] because after climbing the damned learning cliff, I'm too elitist to consider not liking it.
"And no Frankenstein-esque body part stitching?"
"Not yet"

Improved Farming
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