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[Rekov]

The idea is to have an activity zone where you can specify which types of plants should be actively suppressed in this zone. The following settings would be available:

1) Suppress saplings
2) Suppress all plants

I'm not sure when the second option would be used, other than for aesthetic reasons, but being able to designate areas where trees aren't going to spring up and cause problems has obvious utility, and making this an activity zone makes it a lot less tedious for the player.

[FantasticDorf]

Rolling through the site search engine, landscaping, gardens and anything regarding the ordered placement of saplings was the most popular singular suggestion of 2007 to 2011. And in all cases, i agree anyway since its immensely frustrating to have controlled lumber industries and non-gathering aesthetic additions still be inaccessible more than 10 years later.

Though i guess this suggestion kind of subverts the idea of adding plants to it rather than simply pulling up and discarding anything you find there, but thats what a freshly maintained lawn is for. Can you even aesthetically 'Smoothen' dense grass to make it fluffy soft and appealing to lie & sleep on?

• Could your controls extend to supressing animals & citizens as to enforce "do not step on the grass" controls for trampling?

Though a dwarf gardener/landscaper may be a odd sort, i can definitely imagine them taking a obsessive attitude to their craft for perfectionism in trimming cave moss, grass, shrubs, mushrooms & plants tidily.

[towerator]

Grifting on, maybe you could then use the location menu to create a "garden". Gardens are places where dwarves occasionally go to enjoy the artfully placed plants, granting a happy thought depending on the value of the garden. A gardener can be assigned to it to maintain it, and, if their skill level in farming is high enough, allows for growth of plants within the gardens outside of their normal environements (i.e. trees underground, good/evil plants outside their normal biome, off-season shrubs...), with the caveat that they do not produce anything when cut down.

[Starver]

(Seems more like a "Weeding" zone. It's not exactly using the full powers of Capability Brown.)

I think it sounds like an expansion to agriculture, once "constructed" farm-plots are changed to Zone-style operation.

You should have farmer-assigned jobs of systemaically tilling and seeding of any actively cultivatable crops, but also have option to either remove or nurture anything that self-seeds (including grasses, perhaps to bring in the Pasture functionality, or to feed by proxy with sileage). Farming is very very easy, as is, with only very understaffed fields (vs productuon capacity) suffering from crop-rot after harvest or suboptimal seeding beforehand. I don't even bother to use fertiliser, it just works (unless I neglect setting it up, due to other workl.

Adding in a sensible default, that you can dial up or down, of various tending tasks such as ground preparation (between harvests, as well as in setup), seeding, weeding, tending, harvesting and perhaps digging hack in. Fertiliser and other additional substances, like straw under strawberries or certain plant extracts to reduce pest damage, fit in there.

Possibly, with 'ground memory' you can suffer from over-farming into an eventual dustbowl or use crop rotation to improve the main harvest crop. Though this may mean a huge glut of extra tile data unless you accept a basic clay<->loam<->sand transition chance given the treatment of a tile, and keep it mostly within current tile-defining data structures (or restrict the 'memory' to just all tiles in a zone, but that begs for easy resetting by unzone/rezone).


On the crux of your idea, yes, this would support the interventions needed to prevent saplings, or to stop other plants popping up (maybe you'd select to allow wild carrots but not other things, if that's something you want - though you still couldn't get off-biome/tile-incompatible spontaneous crops just by 'allowing' them). I imagine(?) you want this feature as a better way of keeping wagon avenues open and/or preventing awkward and unnecessary vegetation on/above other current and future groundworks, rather than the road/stockpile methods. Just riffing on this a bit more, I hope you don't mind.

(@FD, you ninja you: I had considered "Get off my laaarnd!" enforcement, also, especially when subsuming pastures to be used only by allocated creatures, but you put it better than the thing I cut. )

(@towerator, a further ninja: Yeah, hadn't gone onto that, yet, but logical. Assuming a dwarf can appreciate an outdoors park/it can be done with underground plant-zones. A biological statue-park.)

[NW_Kohaku]

As a note for "don't step on the trees" controls, you can use the pathing weights controls to make saplings you don't want to see trampled into low-traffic zones, while sculpting out the dirt paths as high-traffic zones.  If you have an indoor area you want to purposefully grow trees within (especially if you want trees in very specific locations), setting up a few high-traffic zones providing pathways around some low-traffic zones is a good way to cause that to eventually take shape.

Possibly, with 'ground memory' you can suffer from over-farming into an eventual dustbowl or use crop rotation to improve the main harvest crop. Though this may mean a huge glut of extra tile data unless you accept a basic clay<->loam<->sand transition chance given the treatment of a tile, and keep it mostly within current tile-defining data structures (or restrict the 'memory' to just all tiles in a zone, but that begs for easy resetting by unzone/rezone).

This, in particular, touches on the overarching farming thread arguments we had back around 10 years ago.  Way more discussion than you ever wanted on the nature of how to systemize farming and soil fertility can be found in the original Improved Farming thread, and I wound up putting together a reformatted, hopefully more easily readable list of direct suggestions in the Improved Farming: Revisited thread.

[Orange-of-Cthulhu]

I love this idea, and I think it can be combined with my suggestion here http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=177342.msg8196860#msg8196860

I wanted woodcutting to be done by zones, so that dwarves automatically cut down trees that grow in the zone.

But it's even better to expand the "plant management zone" to have options to either remove trees immediately as sapling or to let them grow and log them, plus what to do with all the other plants there.

It should also be possible to just remove ALL growth in the zone