This is something I'm working on at the moment. The fruit-bearing plants are the most challenging of the lot, since the growing times from the beginning of each planting season (usually autumn or winter) to the end needed to be synchronised with the end of flowering and suchlike, which is usually in the summer. This probably might lead to too long growth times in gameplay terms, especially for things like cloudberries, and it did need quite a bit of compromise. In the end, I just decided to just make the fruit-growths invisible and make a reaction for collecting fruit, which doubles as a workaround to gathered shrubs being useless most of the time.
Long growing times do make the game a lot harder, and while it does go a long way to simulating real-life scarcity, I understand that it's too daunting for some players. A way to balance this would be to generate multiple units of grain/fruit in threshing/collecting reactions (I do this by way of additional random drops).
Another idea I'm working on is a farming tech-tree involving cultivating wild plants. Things like especially grain plants in the current DF should only exist in cultivated form, as should things like tomato (this is easy enough to do: just set [FREQUENCY:0] and it won't appear in the wild, but caravans will bring it). Obviously this would require some handwaving for the ultra-fast plant domestication (which took generations upon generations in real life, but animal training is a little fast too, so) - possibly trade-mats from elves.
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Topic: Realistic Crop seasons/GROWDUR? (Read 472 times)