I just recently found this thread, so sorry if I'm bringing up things that have mostly been concluded.
At the moment I am inclined to agree that adding poop into dwarf fortress does not add anything other than more clutter on top of the existing clutter.
The proper time to add it into the fortress would be when Toady One adds a more detailed agriculture and soil mechanics than at present. At the moment we have no distinction between topsoil and substrate and no measurement of soil nutrients. We cannot have poop in the game until we have these things since we have nowhere for the poop to go, so it just adds to the endlessly increasing clutter than already infests the game.
The same mechanism also works for the rest of the biodegradable clutter, such as bodies. Bodies could also biodegrade into topsoil, adding nutrients as could things like fruit and dead plants.
I mostly agree with this. Until we have proper tracking of soil nutrients, I don't think waste adds enough to be worth all the additional engineering required to handle it (even a mere well & cistern can give me significant trouble).
As for underground farming there's a thread about what exactly makes plants grow underground. Is it magic, geothermal energy or some other factor we don't know? Anyway, we can assume having animals graze over a field would refertilize it and that underground there's the equivalent of the plants that make soil recover its fertility.
(start of a somewhat lengthy discussion on the subject)
That thread would be
"Xenosynthesis and Magic Fields", which for some reason wound up on the General board, not the Suggestions board. My contribution to the thread starts
on page 6, and does feature a debate with GavJ on this topic. Summary:
1. The following energy sources were suggested for the cavern ecosystem: nutrients from the surface, chemosynthesis, thermosynthesis, and magic (the "xenosynthesis" in the thread title).
2. For nutrients from the surface, see
"bank filtration." At least for minecart purposes, one z-level is 3 meters (tile is 2x2x3), and 3 meters of dirt is a good filter for most things (good, but not necessarily perfect, or even excellent). Nutrients carried down from the surface by water seeping through the soil are dubious at best for a farm plot dug out by dwarves, and completely out of the question for even the first cavern layer, never mind the second and third.
3. Chemosynthesis uses various inorganic molecules for energy, most of which would be obtained from the magma sea. This is okay as far as it goes, and might be adequate for cavern layer 3. For the shallower layers, the bank filtration problem from earlier comes up again, reinforced by the fact that now gravity is fighting, not helping.
4. Thermosynthesis uses a heat gradient (more precisely, heat flow along that gradient) for energy. The relevant physics is a thing, known in real life as
"the thermoelectric effect". My problem is that I have absolutely no idea how a plant would go about building such a thing.
5. That leaves magic as the most reasonable energy source. I liked the idea of pulling a few other things into the same system (undead, the various inorganic "element men," and the various "magically altered wildlife" including but not necessarily limited to the current giant animals and animal people of Savage areas), but I don't think I managed to gather much support for that idea.
Plump helmets and dimple cups are described as mushrooms in their raw entries (the latter being inedible but a source of
mushroom dye), but the other four "dwarven crops" will not work as described without a magical energy source. Grazers on pastures would recycle nutrients normally, but the ultimate energy source for an underground pasture would need to be magical.
What makes plants grow underground? Nothing at all because normal plants do not grow underground and the plants that do are obviously funguses of some kind, hence why they will not grow above ground because the light kills them.
That bit about the light killing them was covered later in the Xenosynthesis thread:
Part 5: Basic Magical Ecology
(snip)
5. Caverns have near-constant temperature and humidity. The surface has significant daily and yearly cycles for both. Xeno plants, adapted to the gentler conditions underground, might find the surface overly hostile and fail to thrive. Maximum efficiency of gathering mana may also lead to reduced efficiency when gathering light.
Then there are things like wind gusts, raindrop impacts, snow, frost, and hail. Caves do not have any of these, so magic-using plants might be damaged or killed by surface conditions. That's not "the light kills them" that's "other things
that come with the light kill them." I suppose it should be tied to "outside" rather than "above ground," but whatever.
When it comes to fictional media, my general preference is towards social realism and history rather than fantasy. The Song of Ice and Fire reference was only one summoned at short notice; it is the only "high" fantasy book series I have read besides Tolkien, and I do not intend on reading many others. Why do I play DF in that case? Because it is a fun game, though I honestly see it as more "civilisation building" like Civ or Rise of Nations than anything else, and it is possible to enjoy something outside your general preferences. However, it also means that any contributions I want to make to DF more likely concern daily life activities like farming, fighting disease, the economy, and, yes, sewage rather than anything especially heroic. I treat the game more as a construction and management simulation, like SimCity with more magma, than as a heroic story telling fantasy.
This is also how I play DF. My main reference is actually the Sierra City Builder series, especially Zeus. I have not personally played SimCity. I have played Civilization 2, but not gotten very far in it. I wouldn't have seen much similarity anyway, since Civ is an "empire builder" rather than a "city builder."
Stale air and smoke are both are produced by fires, creatures on the other hand produce only stale air. Stale air does not represent C02, instead it represents the relative lack of oxygen. Stale air and smoke emitted by fires start off as a high temperature, which causes it to rise upwards if at all possible, unlike the stale air emitted by creatures.
(also part of a longer discussion)
I'm going to have to disagree with some of this. As any proper space nerd knows, spacecraft crews run into "too much CO2" before they run into "not enough oxygen." The most direct reference I could find quickly was
for the Apollo 13 mission (a few paragraphs down from that page bookmark). There was also some less direct reference in
a more general article.
I'm not sure how you'd display the lack of proper ventilation to the player; Miasma like smoke makes sense, but it's more complex for creatures using up air / creating stale air as that shouldn't be visible as clouds.
Apparently,
at least some animals can directly sense low oxygen/high CO2 atmospheres. Depending on how "close to human" dwarves are supposed to be, they might also be able to sense "stale air," permitting it to be displayed to the player as a cloud even if it isn't technically something that would be visually obvious. I understand that the miasma that is already implemented is similarly "invisible" but still relevant to other senses, and only displayed visually to make the interface usable.
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Topic: Nobody Poops (Read 43655 times)