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Author Topic: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution  (Read 136355 times)

NW_Kohaku

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Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Violate the Earth!
« Reply #45 on: January 30, 2011, 12:34:16 pm »

Actually, it seems like a neat and interesting way to make elves have some flavor, now that I think about it...

Elves can grow crops without tilling the soil, they just manipulate fertility in wild soil or harvest fruits from trees like wild fig trees.  They might have some sort of psuedo-magical techniques for doing this, involving either manipulating weather (more showers) or generating fertilizers from proprietary techniques that make them unique as a race in a way that doesn't involve idiocy and hypocritical ethics.
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The Phoenixian

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Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Violate the Earth!
« Reply #46 on: January 30, 2011, 02:07:47 pm »

I have to say, I like this idea: the choice between a simple but ultimately limited system that can only sustain your fortress so long, and the possibility of making a large and complex system with possible crops for many industries (like the sapphire growers you detailed in the previous thread) is one that in intrigues me.

Depending on the embark, I can't help but think, a system like this would provide a nice incentive and reward for those who build their own underground rivers (such as in Walledwar).



Turning away from idle thoughts and onto the caverns side discussion, I think an interesting way to both explain life in the caverns and have manipulative power over it would be a combination of magma, water, and air currents: water flowing from the surface brings in nutrients shapes some of the caves while Magma features, both existing vertical pipes and possibly new ones as well, provide both nutrients to certain plants and, in larger caverns, heat to power underground air currents and miniature weather systems. (Allowing dwarf made magma vents, rivers, and piping to alter those air currents and nutrient supplies.)

Of course, That's probably ridiculously complicated in practice and might be better put in a thread for overarching changes to caverns in general, but I wanted to see what impact it has here.
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NW_Kohaku

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Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Violate the Earth!
« Reply #47 on: January 30, 2011, 03:49:43 pm »

Having read that Silverionmox post, and then reading an article today in Scientific American about "Learning to Live" with invasive species, I'm suddenly much more excited to start talking about pests again.  Just think: dwarves introducing invasive species into their habitat, with aboslutely no clue whether they will have beneficial or Fun consequences down the road.

The more I move to thinking in broad "manipulating ecologies" terms, the more excited I get about it, since it moves the game more into the dimension of being a balancing act between the desire to exploit all the mineral and biological riches dwarves can get their grubby hands upon, and the consequences of overtaxing the ecology and leading their fortress to become an uninhabitable toxic waste dump.  I think most players will probably very precariously straddle that line.

It is, after all, the ultimate aesop behind the whole "Digging too Deep" thing in the first place: Greed versus the odds of spectacular backfire.

Also, I think you can sell this game on being able to be a "Fantasy World Simulator" by doing something like this to a broader range of people who never played the game before just a teensy bit better than by talking about beating the entire elven race to death one by one with the dismembered leg of their queen.  Just a hunch.
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Vince7403

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Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Violate the Earth!
« Reply #48 on: January 30, 2011, 04:14:55 pm »

The cane toad shredded the ecology of northeast Australia and it's native to savage wilderness at worst, imagine what kinds of horrors we could inflict on the world if we could foolishly introduce bio-terminators from terrifying biomes for pest control purposes.
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NW_Kohaku

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Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Violate the Earth!
« Reply #49 on: January 30, 2011, 05:19:03 pm »

The cane toad shredded the ecology of northeast Australia...

Something like that, yes.

I'm going to have to write a new section for the "arugment for" portion of the start of the thread to cover how I'm now expanding my thought on the whole system.

water flowing from the surface brings in nutrients shapes some of the caves while Magma features, both existing vertical pipes and possibly new ones as well, provide both nutrients to certain plants and, in larger caverns, heat to power underground air currents and miniature weather systems.

The Dwarf Fortress of five years from now laughs in the face of your pitiful concept of what a complex game is! Sorry, serious answer, serious answer...

I suppose that something like that is possible, although I'm not sure how, exactly, magma vents that maybe only touch the third cavern layer can create such uniform diversity throughout the entire cavern system. 

If energy for the ecosystem were coming from above and below, with a middle that had no energy source but to steal from higher or lower caverns (with very limited access between them), then you would expect something like the biodensities of the oceans: Abundant life at the surface or in shallow waters, where light can power the cycle of life, while deeper waters consist almost entirely of scavengers that pick off the detritus that sinks from the more abundant surface life, until you finally hit deep sea "black smoker" life forms that feed on the chemical energy of volcanic activity, but which have to stay clustered very close around those vents to survive.

We could, I suppose, reformat the caverns and their biodiversity around being stratified between scavengers of leftover biomaterial from the surface and a few things that only grow really down deep, but I honestly think some kind of magic that obeys at least some kind of rational, predictable law would be the best answer... especially since we're going to have to have magic, anyway, since we already have forgotten beasts, amethyst men, fire imps and of course the HFS down there to begin with.  You're just not explaining that stuff away without magic. 

We're a player base that likes its rationality and science, but we can't do that by blithely ignoring the magic when we see it and demanding everything else be totally uanffected by magic.  What we have to do is turn magic into science.  Inexplicable science that simply works because the game says so, but a science you can learn, understand, and possibly manipulate and even master. 

Ultimately, that's what the best of Sci-Fi is - "magic" made rational.  You start with something that breaks physics or what you know of physics with some psuedo-science rationalization, but then you work out the consequences, build the ground rules, and eventually turn it from a "what if <insert random thing here>" question into a fully formed exploration of the consequences of whatever it was you changed.
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Waparius

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Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Violate the Earth!
« Reply #50 on: January 30, 2011, 07:17:51 pm »

Loving this thread. Especially reversing the difficulty curve of farming.

I have to admit though, sensible as a magical deep-down ecosystem is (I mean, come on, nether-caps are already a magic fungus), I am partial to the old, "The Cave River is Flooding" messages that came up every year in 2D. Some kind of combination of that might work best for the ecosystem down deep, with appropriate consequences to farming - Cavern Level 1 is mostly mundane, with plants growing around underground pools/rivers and piles of bat guano unless you actively fertilise the place, and few nasties. Level 2 is more magical, and thus more hazardous. Level 3 is all magic all the time.

This could also affect the kind of plants you can grow in particular regions as well - make a more valuable crop only grow deep-down, or on deep soil, in much the same way that sun-berries only grow on the surface. It gives even more of an incentive to open the caverns and live down there.

Another thing that could go in - or be used instead of magic - is "Mineral water", which allows certain things to grow but is not really very good for anything from the surface, what with all the electrolytes.
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NW_Kohaku

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Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Violate the Earth!
« Reply #51 on: January 30, 2011, 07:59:32 pm »

Glad you're enjoying it.

Perhaps you (and the others in the thread) could extrapolate more on what, exactly, you'd like to see as the differences between cavern levels.  I know that I pretty much think the second layer of the caverns should just be removed, since it just takes up FPS and pretty much has nothing the other two layers don't have.

If we're talking about the cavern ecosystem anyway, though, we might as well keep changing the ecosystem on the table instead of just discussing ways to justify keeping what we have right now.

The thing about having a "magical energy field" that explains the reason why certain things can grow or live in certain environments reminds me a little of a suggestion thread from before I took my most recent DF hiatus.   Specifically, this one on the HFS, and also continued in another one I started on making physical gods.  Basically, if we have "energy fields" generated by the power spheres that have influence over an area, and that can act as a sort of source of static energy for various magical creatures, then we can start adding in guidelines over how these energy fields are created, tapped into, depleted, and renewed.

This is where I get into thinking about having underground climates... just as a Sunberry needs a Good sphere influence to grow in the wild, we could start having energy fields that create the necessary conditions for certain plants and animals to thrive.  When an energy field of a certain sphere is present, it allows creatures of that sphere to live there, and if it is repelled, then those creatures migrate or die.  Creatures that depend upon magic to survive, however, may be more versitile, being capable of survivng on multiple types of energy fields, or any type of energy field, so long as it has a sufficient power level.

Underground Climates, then, could change from one cavern layer to another, the way that surface biomes are Good or Evil and Savage or Benign, there could be different energy fields in the cavern layers that change what grows down there by supplying different energy sources.  Different levels of the caverns could even have different climates, so that more energy radiates in the deepest levels, causing more rare and valuable things to live down there, but also much more dangerous, magical things that can fall upon unwary dwarves, as well.

If you want to grow a crop that requires a certain energy field to supply its magical power to live, you better grow it at the right underground layer, giving you what Waparius was talking about.

In fact, if we are going the route of letting dwarves manipulate their environments, then we could also let them manipulate the energy fields, as well.  But on the surface, you screw up your environment, you created a desert.  In the deep caverns or even if you are colonizing the HFS, where the energies you are toying with are wild and powerful, if you mess with the energy fields and ruin "the environment", then you start creating conditions for utterly horrifying things to take place.  (The air becomes poison, dwarves turn into clowns, all kinds of Fun!)

EDIT: Ultimately, after having slaughtered the denizens of the HFS, the dwarves somehow manage to make everything worse, and then the Gods, in their infinite wisdom, push the last of the dwarves into the HFS, and seal it back up with a new metal, one even dwarves cannot dig through.  And then they turn into even more horrid things than that which they once slew, all the while waiting for someone or something foolish enough to unseal them once again.
« Last Edit: January 30, 2011, 08:28:50 pm by NW_Kohaku »
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sockless

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Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Violate the Earth!
« Reply #52 on: January 30, 2011, 11:15:33 pm »

The consumption of food could be implemented as a combination of calories and of mass/volume. That way, a dead boar could yield 120 kg of meat and a dead elephant would make >1 metric ton. As compared to the current way.
The inclusion of calories (Kilojoules to be more correct) would largely form the basis of nutrition, and if dwarves has less calories than they need, then they will work slower, and if they have too many, they get fat. If dwarves were iron deficient, they would also work slower, and other deficiencies would have other effects. Like vitamin C deficiency would result in them getting ill more (if random illnesses get implemented). Vitamins would also go the other way, so if you eat too much dog liver, you'd get vitamin A poisoning, which is really not good.
You wouldn't need to keep track of iron levels in soil though, as that just adds another level of complexity to the farming system and takes more space. Especially since iron is hard to get into soil, as you have to soak iron in acid, and then you have to put the resulting salt on the ground.
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NW_Kohaku

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Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Violate the Earth!
« Reply #53 on: January 31, 2011, 01:36:01 am »

... I'm probably going to have to make a new spin-off thread about this whole thing, aren't I, because this just moves beyond what I can justify as being about "farming" anymore...

Anyway, thinking about how magic energy fields with vaguely scientific principles can work to provide power to plants and animals, I have to start thinking of this in terms slightly similar to that of a Tesla Coil that is wirelessly transmitting electricity.

Basically, certain events or objects in the world generate the energy fields.  To make a few simple, concrete examples, let's say these are things like "stone" or "magma" or "evil biome" that we all already understand. Magma generates a "magma sphere energy field", which spreads some arbitrary number of tiles away from every magma-filled tile on the map.  Fire Imps and Magma Men, being magma creatures, depend upon magma sphere energy, and cannot survive without magma sphere energy.  It's like water or food for them (especially since I doubt magma men need to drink any water), and if they can't get it regularly, they starve to death as they lose their basic access to what powers their not-quite-biologies.  (Fire Imps may be capable of living on similar spheres, like fire, but magma men may be forced to rely solely upon magma sphere, which means having to spend almost all of their lives within that arbitrary distance that a magma sphere can spread.)

Part of the underlying myth that DF seems to work on, in step with Lord of the Rings, is the concept that The Magic Goes Away, as TV Tropes uncreatively terms it.  Magic, apparently, has a really bad rate of entropic decay, and it's possible to break magic, but be unable to ever repair it.  Currently, killing all the megabeasts and fanciful creatures means you have just killed magic.  This implies, then, that magic could be a reciprocal concept - unicorns are in good forests not just because they need a good forest to survive in, but because they help create and spread good forests by their very presence.  Evil biomes and undead may work the same way - ghosts spread evil biomes, which infect corpses with zombieism that spread evil energies, as well.

This can lead back to part of what I talked about in the "deadlier HFS" topic, where elves need to ensure that their trees are not chopped down and live long lives because that is what powers their spirit deity, and knocking down trees weakens their spirit overall.  By chopping down trees, you are depleting the energy field of their deity, and functionally making gradual steps towards killing the nature spirits that elves revere as their god. 

We can also think in terms of actions - childbirth is a type of sphere, which would obviously be influenced by giving birth to children.  Children themselves are a sphere, but the act itself could potentially just have an energy field-generating effect that simply lingers in the area for a while.

If we think of spheres in terms of energy fields that are generated by concrete, observable objects and actions, we can then start thinking of ways in which we can manipulate these sphere-based energy fields, as well.  If plants only grow in evil areas, then we can perform desecrations of corpses in the area of the fields we want to plant our silver barbs to ensure that "evil"-type energies are available for the silver barbs to grow. Conversely, efforts to appease the dead may close off the "evil" energies that cause undead, and will drive away evil biome creatures, as well.

Temples, prayer, actions or items of sphere-related significance can be used to manipulate these energy fields, and if so, we could start controlling which forms of magic are prevalent in different areas of the map, and hence, control what flora and fauna are capable of spawning there.

I'll have to extrapolate more later, though, this was one of those things I mashed out because I couldn't sleep until I got what was on my head out, so I'll just leave this here to get some sleep.
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Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Violate the Earth!
« Reply #54 on: January 31, 2011, 03:07:36 am »

Yeah, the whole energies thing could be expanded to an entirely new thread, it's a more advanced concept that should be brought in later after the NPK system has been implemented, if it does get implemented.

The three main reasons nothing grows in caves, I've figured, is that the mud lacks biomass, it's far too basic, and it lacks light. Since the game has cave animals, there could quite conceivably be biomass from dead animals. Also, since this is a game, we could just make up some fungi that can live in basic conditions, plus we could have land based algae that live in caves.

I think that the nutrients system should be broken down into more than just NPK, as that doesn't fully cover what plants need to grow. Sodium needs to be incorporated into the system too, as some plants can't live near the sea and some plants thrive.

The composition of the soil needs to be taken into account too, as you get clay rich soil, sand rich soil, flinty soil, and a lot of other types, which can't just be described as level of biomass. So these variables need to be taken into account.

I don't really think that memory is too much of a constraint, since most dedicated DF players have plenty of RAM and DF doesn't require that much RAM. So there really isn't that much to worry about memory wise.

More thought however, needs to be put into worldgen, and how it's going to make stable ecosystems, without using up too much space or taking too long.
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NW_Kohaku

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Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Violate the Earth!
« Reply #55 on: January 31, 2011, 01:39:53 pm »

I'm already talking about including several variables beyond NPK, including soil salinity, which I mentioned in the Water Management section I updated to the original string of posts.  If you didn't see it, it is in the second spoilered section of the third post.

As for clay or silty soils, we had discussions on this in the previous thread, and decided it was better to just have some sort of "default value" of nutrient variables assigned to each type of soil, without having to be so focused on grain size as to focus on whether sand is being broken down into finer silt.  (The difference between the two being grain size.)  See this wikipedia article on soil texture for more on it.

For right now, worldgen shouldn't be too much of a problem.  What I have been talking about is what occurs only when players are in control of a map.  Worldgen level modeling changes can come later, and represent civilizational impacts upon their environments, with things like dwarves clear-cutting nearby forests to fuel their metal industries, but that's not what I have discussed as of yet, and none of this impacts worldgen.
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Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Violate the Earth!
« Reply #56 on: January 31, 2011, 08:42:19 pm »

The soi types could be broken down into:
  • Humus
  • Sand
  • Clay
  • Silt
  • Peat
  • Rocks

This is because different plants require different amounts of different soil. One type could convert into different categories too, so humus could turn into peat.
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harborpirate

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Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Violate the Earth!
« Reply #57 on: February 01, 2011, 12:38:44 pm »

A few things.

•I really like many of the ideas in this thread, especially making starting farming simple and finding ways to make the later game farming more interesting.

•What about something like magical stone types that cave plants are getting energy from? We would probably think of them as magnetic or radioactive, but that doesn't need explaining since dwarves would never understand it in this time period anyway.

•I notice you're not a fan of my cooking thread. That's ok. I'm bummed that you didn't notice that I've been unifying all suggestions into a working big picture in that thread, but rather than walls of text I like to narrow items down to concise suggestions. I actually asked toady in the dev thread whether he likes megathreads, and he said he was ambivalent on them since he reads all suggestions anyway. So a goal of unifying all suggestions together into a working whole is probably the ideal thing to do with them.
« Last Edit: February 01, 2011, 12:40:15 pm by harborpirate »
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NW_Kohaku

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Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Violate the Earth!
« Reply #58 on: February 01, 2011, 02:12:24 pm »

•I notice you're not a fan of my cooking thread. That's ok. I'm bummed that you didn't notice that I've been unifying all suggestions into a working big picture in that thread, but rather than walls of text I like to narrow items down to concise suggestions. I actually asked toady in the dev thread whether he likes megathreads, and he said he was ambivalent on them since he reads all suggestions anyway. So a goal of unifying all suggestions together into a working whole is probably the ideal thing to do with them.

Well, to be honest, once I posted it, I thought I was being a bit harsh.  I still don't think "throw everything into one big pot, even if two ideas conflict" is a good way to go about things, but I have to admit that part of what made me a little more harsh was that you weren't trying to link back to the original threads you were taking some of the ideas from, and it was a momentary spike of annoyance that set the tone of that post.

I'm not so much opposed to what you are doing, or the whole concept, but I like to have a unifying goal to achieve, some sort of experience the player is supposed to have, to guide what I am working at.

Oftentimes, suggestions are just "this would be more realistic".  It's an obvious goal to go for, and one I obviously follow myself, but it has to be tempered by recognizing the impact on play the suggestions will have.  You need to ask yourself what sort of changes in playstyle will this likely get out of players.  Games are ultimately about forms of conditioned response - if you lose when you do one thing, and don't lose or maybe even win if you do a second thing, players naturally become conditioned to doing the second thing.  At the time of the last thread, I had a pretty large argument in a separate thread about what constituted "interesting choices" (see Extra Credits' clip on the subject), and it partially helped me whittle down how much of this system you actually see and control, and how much of it works on autopilot. 

Anything that is a calculation (anything where one solution is clearly always better than all others) should be automated or at least, automatable.  Anything that players can't interact with isn't much of a system.  You need something where you set up conflicting goals for players to actually feel weighed down by choice.  This is partly what I am building this whole suggestion up towards - making the player choose between the value of the resources they can extract from the land (in terms of farming nutrients and hunting wildlife, but similar in terms of mining veins of blue stuff), and the fear of the potential disaster they can create for themselves if they are too greedy (in terms of depleting the soil, killing their farms, inviting a blight that wipes out their crops, and similar in terms to unleashing the HFS and having your fort overrun).

Also, honestly, I only read the first page, as at the time, I was still just coming back to the forum, and wanted to focus my catch-up reading material on the parts most important to the game itself.  (I read that FotF response, as well.)  So I wasn't aware of attempts to make it more cohesive.  I know it's not quite fair to throw out a massive thread, then not actually read someone else's big thread, but I wanted to get as much as I could out while the initial burst of energy was still going, and then come back to read that thread in its entirity later.



•What about something like magical stone types that cave plants are getting energy from? We would probably think of them as magnetic or radioactive, but that doesn't need explaining since dwarves would never understand it in this time period anyway.

This is one of those things I'm thinking about.  "Green rocks" are kind of blah for a power source, but they could be a default or a supplement.  The advantage of green rocks is that they would be fairly obvious to see, understand, and manipulate.  The disadvantage is that they aren't particularly hard to manipulate, and that damages the dynamic I want to aim for.

I want player's actions to have consequences beyond their most immediate impact, so that there are long-range consequences that must be weighed against short-term consequences.  If all you are doing is moving a rock, you can just move the rock somewhere else when you're done with it, and you have no fear of long-term consequences.  If something like unicorns create the "Good" biome, then making unicorns really, really valuable, and letting dwarves slaughter them for their parts satisfies a short-term goal, but killing too many means they flee your fortress, never come back, and the "Good" biome dissapears. 

The point of most of this is to get players to experiment until they can find ways to make sustainable systems that balance competing natural forces in the game while generating the most of the resources the player wants to obtain.  Importantly, these competing forces you must balance are complex and dynamic enough that there isn't one single simple solution you can always apply to every situation, and can find easily on the wiki.  At the same time, total collapse of the system shouldn't be sudden and utterly irreverseable, it should have chances for the player to see warning signs, and make adjustments.  This means tempering the instinct to just "make more farms" whenever you want more biological material.  Things can't just scale perfectly, there has to be additional complexity as you scale.
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Silverionmox

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Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Violate the Earth!
« Reply #59 on: February 01, 2011, 04:12:21 pm »

There aren't that many energy sources to pick from without venturing to the exceptional or the silly. The most feasible for the underground would be heat instead of light. Heat normally increases gradually with depth, so the upper caves would have sparse vegetation; lower level cave systems would be gradually more lush, until you're past the goldilocks zone and it's too hot for the heat-loving plants to survive. At that point you'll likely have caves that are more volcanic in origin, or the normal eroded caves but seared into a wasteland.

I'd be careful with rocks that generate zones that grow plants, because essentially they're magical horns of plenty. It's artifact-quality stuff. Plants that don't need energy are essentially perpetual motion machines and should be balanced with very slow growth rates, if they're present at all.

Plants that get their energy from movement (wind or water currents) would be cool.

In all the above options, the energy is used to synthesize nutrients to tissue and energy, so you'll still need those nutrients.

I think it would be nice for modding the game would just check for energy, instead of light specifically; the normal plants would have the tag [photosynthetic]; others could have [thermosynthetic], [kinesynthetic], [magmasynthetic], [spheresynthetic:gems], etc. So when it's time for a plant to grow, the game would check for a condition to be present (light, heat, etc.) and then considers the energy requirement fulfilled.
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