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[NW_Kohaku]

Well, when I get into the underground, I think an "exceptional" source of energy would probably be the best way to go - it would allow us to tie in an ecosystem that is based upon the magic system that will eventually be in the game to explain this stuff.

I mean, we already have mushroom trees, living inorganic material men, floating intestines, and supposedly, we're going to get an update for grass made of purple worms.  We're dealing with "exceptional or silly" already, but we can at least put some sort of mechanics to rationalize it all in.  If certain aspects of the environment generate the energy for these creatures to survive, then they are innately bound to areas that have those energy fields, or at least eating a diet that involves eating something that lets them generate some of that energy, themselves.

Making "plantlife" that has some sort of ability to convert or create magical energy for survival can then form the basis of an ecosystem based upon some exotic "xenosynthesis".

[NW_Kohaku]

Actually, let me go into a little more depth on the concept of a "horn of plenty"...

To reiterate, one of the most key aspects of an ecosystem, aside from merely being a place where matter is recycled, but energy passes through and must be replinished, is that, while these things are renewable, they are also *FINITE*.  Competition for finite resources is the fundamental aspect that drives all of life.

This concept can (and almost certainly should) be applied to the energy fields I am talking about building the "xenosynthetic" ecosystem upon.  Whatever energy fields are out there, they are finite, and creatures must compete for who gets to have the energy from whatever glowing rock or open rift to another world or whatever supplies this energy. 

This could mean that it works like the chemosynthetic environments in "Black Smoker" vents - this type of life can only exist in finite quantities that are very densely packed around the source of this life.  The entire ecosystem is based on bacteria that can perform chemosynthesis, and bigger creatures don't so much eat the bacteria as allow them to grow within them for the purposes of generating their energy, and the bigger things on the food chain eat the things that symbiotically live with the bacteria.

A green rocks ecosystem could produce only enough energy for a finite amount of "plants" that live very close to the green rocks, and anything that is based off this kind of energy must eat those plants regularly to get their particular brand of energy in their system.

[The Phoenixian]

I don't have much to say about caves that isn't built off of an overhaul of how they work so...

Back on the core topic:

Here's a question: (and I'm mainly asking because it's been nagging me for a while.) How should the information in the system be presented to the player? I don't mean where he finds it, I agree with the farm overseer for the most part, but rather how it looks to the player.

Take for example the Lumper potato from the last farming thread.

NAME: Waterlump Tuber (The Lumper potato)

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

notes: This is based upon the Lumper potato strain.  For those who aren't that big on American/English/Irish history, the Lumper was the potato strain that fell victim to the Potato Blight that caused the Irish Potato Famine that led to millions of Irishpeople fleeing their native land to places like the United States. (See: http://www1.american.edu/ted/potato.htm) Unlike most modern potato strains, the lumper was actually not a particularly tasty potato, instead being rather watery.  It also grew somewhat slower than modern potatos because, as a early strain of potato that shares more in common with wild potatos than domesticated potatos, and as such, was leafier and spent more time blooming flowers.  The key to understanding why this was the crop that caused the famine is that these potatos were much easier to grow than other breeds (soil fertility-wise), and that they had essentially all the nutrients you needed to survive, except for Vitamin A and Calcium, which you could get from milk or cheese, which most poor people relied on for their needs.  This is why it became virtually the only crop grown in Ireland, making the lumper such an unprecedentedly easy target for the potato blight, which in turn made a single disease's rapid spread (thanks to the incredible density of the lumper population for that disease to feed upon) capable of starving a million people, and forcing even more people to flee the nation. 

PREFSTRING: lumps and knobs

EDIBLE: pest, cooked, grazer
TILE: 232
COLOR: 6 0 0

NUTRIENT_N: 130: 80: -22 (--)
NUTRIENT_P: 90: 50: -5 (-)
NUTRIENT_K: 90: 50: -2 (-)
SOIL_PH: 107: 127: 87: 147: 0
WATER_REQUIREMENT: -80 (--)
BIOMASS: 60: 130: 20: 190: 0

FULL_HARVEST: 33
VALUE: 1  (Actually, since this is a "for sustainance only" crop, I do think perhaps reducing the advantage for having a crappy crop (1 value basically means you get twice as many crops as a 2 value crop), so that we still count a 1 value crop as a 1.5 value crop for the purposes of balancing the equations.  This would make this plant only produce a FULL_HARVEST of 22.)

PEST:  Waterlump Blight, tuber weevil, wireworm

BIOME: Cold to warm, wet, marginal lands
SEASON: All year, aside from freezing
GROWDUR: 660

SEED TYPE: Destroys crop

Taking a look, The growth requirements are in eight bits, and I think that works well for the programming, However, I'm wondering if that's the best way for it to appear to the player in the game itself. Why can't they be divided in half or quartered in appearance for what the player sees?

For example, Acidity is between 0 and 255 but wouldn't it be better for the player to see a only between 0 and 140 (or more accurately 0.0 to 14.0)?

(and speaking of acid, part of me is wondering why you can't simply plow the fields with vitriol or lye to change acidity but somehow I think there's a rather more obvious answer to that one.)

Sorry if I missed an answer to this being said elsewhere but like I said, The question's been nagging me for a while.

[NW_Kohaku]

Well, you didn't miss it, because I haven't re-written that part, yet.  (And it's about fourth on my list, right now...)

I was putting that into psuedo-raw format, so that it could be seen similar to the way that the computer or modders would see it.  The sort of knowledge that lets players see what kind of nutrient levels a plant needs, or what percentage of a soil nutrient level each nutrient has, or even the names of the nutrients themselves, should all be obscured from the player in play.

In order to present the information to the player, however, it will be put into the same sort of text-based gradients that we get with, say, "decent quarters" versus a "great bedroom".  When looking at the soil itself, you would see something like what I detailed in this post, while you would be able to see when you are looking at the menu to choose what to plant a ranking of the crops based upon which crops you have are most suited to the soil you are cursoring over.  (For example, sorting the list by best matches first, and color-coding cutoff points, so that green crops are the "at least 90% match" crops, and yellow, brown, red, and dark grey all indicate worse suitability.)

If you were to look in the Farming Overseer for a guide on what you know about those waterlumps in particular, it would say it was something like a moderate feeder (no particular distinction of any one NPK nutrient from another, except when it is a nitrogen-fixer or somehow otherwise replinishes one of those), a crop that prefers cold but not freezing climates, prefers slightly acidic soil, and needs moderate amounts of water.

----
EDIT: Ah, and one more thing with regards to information presented to the player - the game should also give a "to make this field ideal..." interface that would tell you what steps the AI would take to prepare the field for planting a specific crop.  That is, if the field is not suitable for a crop because it lacks some kind of mineral, and some kind of fertilizer or combination of treatments to the farm would have to be performed by the farmers before planting a crop, the game should display that for you.  (That is, the exact calculations of how much fertilizer should be used is on the game, not the player, to calculate, and it just tells you how much the farmer dwarves will want to grab out of the stockpile to prepare the soil, should you want to plant that crop.)

[NW_Kohaku]

I have completed the pests section.  See this post to find it.

Well, I still feel like I'm forgetting something I wanted to say, but it's not as bad as the feeling I had with the NPK one, and I'm basically going to have to do an "advanced NPK" in order to clear all that out.

It was about 10k characters, that time, so I had to start a new post to fit it in.  I'm worried I won't have enough characters, having only reserved about 200,000 of them

[NW_Kohaku]

Made another update, adding some further exposition on the Pests section.

[Andeerz]

This thread is frikkin' rad.

[jseah]

Nice. XD

Just a nitpick: it's "nematode".  Also, they should really be classified as a microorganism, not a worm. 

[NW_Kohaku]

Right, well, they should be "toads".  Anyway, I don't think I said anything that implied they were worms, so if you could point out whatever point I did, I'll change it, but I can't find it.

[sockless]

One thing that's been nagging me is the point that pH is a logarithmic scale, how is this going to be implemented into the system, since the rate of change of pH then can't be constant, since it'll take a lot more stuff to move the pH from 10 to 9 as it would from 9-8, 10 times as much in fact.

[The Phoenixian]

Side comment:

The section on pests makes me think that, with the right build, it could be easily repurposed for that biological warfare in the event your dwarves were looking for a way to destroy enemy food production.

[jseah]

"Earthworms, nematodes, and other beneficial vermin" implies that nematodes are vermin of some kind.  They're tiny and practically impossible to manipulate without a microscope.  Only way I can see dwarves doing anything with them is moving the soil itself. 

If you meant "Earthworms, Toads, and other beneficial vermin", then yeah, I can see that.  Not like I really expected nematodes to get in.  =P

[NW_Kohaku]

One thing that's been nagging me is the point that pH is a logarithmic scale, how is this going to be implemented into the system, since the rate of change of pH then can't be constant, since it'll take a lot more stuff to move the pH from 10 to 9 as it would from 9-8, 10 times as much in fact.

It won't really need to be the actual pH scale, as that wasn't around for dwarfy times.  It just needs to allow dwarves to recognize soil acidity, and how to combat it.  All we need is the scale that operates in the range that plants will tolerate or not tolerate, and in which actions like liming the soil will have consistant effects.

Of course, whenever I read up on liming the soil, it says that it alters soil acidity by "about 1 on the scale", which means that liming the soil may have logarithmic effects on soil acidity, itself.

[NW_Kohaku]

A thought, on xenobiology, though.

If we (well, OK, *I*) want to make ecologies dependent upon microorganisms that were capable of processing the energies found in magical energy fields, then it means that what we are doing is eerily similar to another well-known attempt to bridge magic and science...

The following word presents disturbing images and is not for viewing from all audiences.  We would like to warn pregnant mothers and fanboys not to read the following word.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

midichlorians

(Let me just wait for the chorus of "DO NOT WANT" to subside...)

But basically, this would mean that, for example, zombies and other similar creatures are not merely undead, but are the result of a virus of some sort that merely waits to attack organic life forms that have lost their ability to resist invasion, and allow the hivemind-driven microorganisms to take over. 

The specific sphere in question would obviously have radically different effects on the organisms it powers, though.  A Marriage sphere, for example, might be driven by places where people are married or in the vicinity of where married people live (perhaps causing specific types of flowers that only bloom in wedding chapels, or in the homes of happily married couples).  Such a flower might become obvious symbols for love and marriage, and be highly desirable because of it.

(EDIT: OR should I just make a new thread for this, because all but 3-5 people are too scared to read the first few tl;dr posts, and get on to the subsequent discussion?)

[Vince7403]

Toady One is, last I heard, philosophically opposed to making magic something which can be manipulated consistently, that is, magic would not be amenable to scientific inquiry. However, if we are going to go into tracking nutrients seriously, then the underground can't function like it does without adding an exotic source of energy, unless we allow for hugely increased activity of chemo-litho-trophic microbes or fantastical equivalent.

As far as exotic microbes go, I vastly prefer the Necromorph infection from Dead Space over the given example. For those who don't know,

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

 the Necromorph infection is capable of rapidly assimilating dead cells and reanimates them in new forms when in the presence of the psychic field emitted by, well, something on the planet.

Sadly, is is probably not useful in any way to the current discussion.

We may achieve more practical progress if we neglect the underground ecology at first and concentrate only on tended underground soil/mud plots and the surface. Just my opinion, but it seems like delaying the extra layers and concentrating on the core framework may be better. Of course, I'm not contributing much to the project so it's easy for me to say that, not being fully aware of all the ramifications.