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[LordBaal]

Underground plants could be just fungus + unique biolog, thats it, fictional and probably not real life working biology but with a biology with some defined rules and be it.

[GoblinCookie]

Well, I don't use terms like "underground energy", to start with, but rather that different spheres have their own forms of energy.  This is meant to replace the "evil" or "good" or "savage" biomes as they exist now, as well as the caverns, although different depths can have different sphere influences.  (Such as the surface having a "Law" sphere influence, the first cavern having a "Darkness" sphere influence, the second cavern having no sphere influence at all, and being a barren cave, and the third cavern having a "Fire" sphere influence.)  Similar to how biomes (and the layer stones) have boundaries now, the X and Y coordinate boundaries are just tied to the biomes, and then if there are differences in sphere influence by depth, then they'd be within certain bands of depth from the caverns.  (So the soil layer and first half dozen Z-levels of layer stone will likely be whatever sphere is on the surface.)

Also keep in mind that part of the whole point is that you can also build up xenoenergia (xenosynthesis energy) through different player actions, such as building temples to specific sphere-aligned deities, or as a side-effect of actions taken for other reasons (leaving lots of unburied dead may raise an "undeath" sphere that can eventually lead to an undead problem), or through growing xenoenergia-generating plants or raising animals that exude similar magic.  (The last of which would consume from one energy source - which could possibly just be sunlight or decomposing organics - to produce xenoenergia in another.)  Xenosynthetic plants and animals drain their particular flavor of xenoenergia by existing, and will die if there is insufficient xenoenergia of their particular type.  (Again, these are all sphere-related.)  This can also tie in directly with magic, making magic require building up xenoenergia.  (So necromancers generate the undeath energy they need by being around lots of dead bodies that generate undeath xenoenergia.)

In particular, megabeasts and forgotten beasts are a major source of xenoenergia.  In the current game, the eras are based off of the number of remaining megabeasts, and eras generally start off with the mythical/magical eras, and then gradually decay into the more mundane.  Following that concept, those creatures are inherently extremely exomagical, and having some around can greatly increase the xenoenergia, for better or for worse.

Xenoenergia inherently attracts creatures that feed off of it, and in extreme levels of xenoenergia, can start manifesting itself directly, or "mutating" creatures.  To go back an example, leaving lots of unburied dead around can generate enough death xenoenergia to eventually create an undeath field that causes the dead to rise on their own, similar to some current evil biomes.  Even before that, it would attract necromancers, or the occasional skeleton or zombie that would instinctually go where the energy that sustains it can be found.  Burning many things can start creating fireproof and spontaneously combusting creatures.  Holding many, many song and dance parties in your tavern can start to attract or generate singing animals. etc.

So far as the initial embark goes, I have suggested that the likes of plump helmets just be ordinary mushrooms that require decaying matter to feed. This could generally mean that you throw down a log (or any dead animal bodies you might happen to accrue) and dump water on it to start a plump helmet plot.  Something like dimple cups and quarry bushes might be explicitly magical, and require xenoenergia from being around cavern depth, however.   Xenosynthesis would generally demand there be a lot more xenoenergia-dependent plants so that there should be at least a dozen plants unique to each sphere major enough to be worth making into biomes. 

I think that the dwarves would gather up the fallen leaves in the autumn en-masse for their underground gardens too.  If dwarves did poop they would also recycle it into fertilizer for said gardens too, but presently they don't  .

How about procedurally generating magical versions of both surface and underground plants, using the mundane plants as the base; as opposed to having to raw-define individual magical plants for every single random magical biome.  Like a lot of these things we need to have defined active words, so instead of us getting fiery plump helmet, we have plump fires or fiery helmets for instance.  The magical biome itself feeds an energy to the magical plants, which will die if removed from that biome, but compete with other plants over the biome leading to a maximum density of said plants making room of the mildly magical biomes for regular plants to grow.

I agree however with LordBaal that the magical requirement should be an additional requirement on top of the normal mundane requirement because we need some challenge for the player in maintaining nutrient levels AND while possible it is far too much work for the poor devs to make unique rules for the energy in the other biomes that provides equivalent challenge, by which I mean something other than the environment itself feeding things energy.  Another thing to consider is the situation in regard to caverns or lands *of* fertility, in that case I would imagine the 'magical' plants would simply be super nutrient hungry (and nutritious) but live in an environment where nutrients simply get magiked in. 

[NW_Kohaku]

Sorry for not checking in a week or two...

Underground plants could be just fungus + unique biolog, thats it, fictional and probably not real life working biology but with a biology with some defined rules and be it.

Thing is, there are also magical above-ground plants, such as that eyestalk grass in evil biomes, as well as feather trees in good biomes, or whip vines in savage biomes.  The point of the system is to unify it all into something extensible, so that the cavern biomes run by the same sort of rules as the magical surface biomes. 

It's just that a magic-less surface is a mundane plant and animal surface, while a magic-less cavern is almost certainly barren except for a small amount of possible mushroom farming that depends upon pulling down nutrients from living creatures that would have to either come from the surface or a magical area. 

Again, it might not be strictly necessary, but especially with the system of a sliding scale of magical-ness, as well as the procedural magical fields, a more modular and comprehensive system for magical environments and how they interact with individual populations makes for a more believable magic world.

I think that the dwarves would gather up the fallen leaves in the autumn en-masse for their underground gardens too.  If dwarves did poop they would also recycle it into fertilizer for said gardens too, but presently they don't  .

How about procedurally generating magical versions of both surface and underground plants, using the mundane plants as the base; as opposed to having to raw-define individual magical plants for every single random magical biome.  Like a lot of these things we need to have defined active words, so instead of us getting fiery plump helmet, we have plump fires or fiery helmets for instance.  The magical biome itself feeds an energy to the magical plants, which will die if removed from that biome, but compete with other plants over the biome leading to a maximum density of said plants making room of the mildly magical biomes for regular plants to grow.

I agree however with LordBaal that the magical requirement should be an additional requirement on top of the normal mundane requirement because we need some challenge for the player in maintaining nutrient levels AND while possible it is far too much work for the poor devs to make unique rules for the energy in the other biomes that provides equivalent challenge, by which I mean something other than the environment itself feeding things energy.  Another thing to consider is the situation in regard to caverns or lands *of* fertility, in that case I would imagine the 'magical' plants would simply be super nutrient hungry (and nutritious) but live in an environment where nutrients simply get magiked in. 

Yes, I have a list of potential fertilizer sources (second section), including dead leaves and even things that can be mined (although such things would be quite finite) and discuss the use of sewage as fertilizer ("night soil").

And as mentioned in my response directly to LordBaal, the idea is certainly that of a mundane set of reactions, plus, whereever there is the option for magic, those magical plants and creatures exist, as well.  Especially if we're building this around the notion of five different settings in a "magicalness spectrum" from mundane to full-on wacky everyone's-from-a-procedural-species-which-spits-water-streams-and-can-turn-their-hands-into-hammers where magic is presumably overwhelmingly omnipresent.  In the latter case, there would probably need to be some sort of mechanic for outcompetition, where either everything becomes mutated into magical versions of mundane things or mundane species go extinct if magic simply IS so omnipresent that magic out-competes the sun as an energy source in those areas.  (That said, even in the max-magic worlds, it seems like magic will be localized, so it would be like a barren ocean floor suddenly becoming a brilliant coral reef when you get to the shallows near a lagoon.)

Using some sort of modular system where any sort of living creature (or even some inanimate ones) suddenly becomes a sphere-aligned variant is definitely the sort of thing I advocate.  You can just look at how all the giant critters work, and you can see how there are so many things that individually statting them out is silly, and Toady just made a pseudo-procedural method of creating giant creatures.  (Although there had been some bugs with even that, due to unforseen consequences of things like giant mosquito swarms when a giant-ification was placed on vermin...)  Undead basically work as a decent example of purely procedural creature modification.

The thing is, you need to come up with sane ways for all the different spheres to work.  They're not just plain-and-boring Greek elements like water where you can just add some sort of elemental attack and passive elemental resist like a paint-by-numbers RPG does, you have spheres for things like Music, Dreams, War, Honor, or Wealth.  Making mechanics for musical creatures or honor creatures would presumably take more care and creativity than that.  (I spend a good deal of time on the topic, also trying to get people to suggest some in the Xenosynthesis thread proper.)

Of course, if you want to have creatures made of what should biologically be inanimate objects, like amethyst men or the like, then you probably need to have special instances, unless you want to make it like Titans/Forgotten Beasts where you can have whole species of things made of (paper) sheet music or steam or something that shatter at a funny look in some locations, and have whole fields of solid steel critters in others.  Granted, we don't need to worry about "competitive balance" in Dwarf Fortress, but things shouldn't be completely ludicrously broken where the first simple magic bunny rabbit is a fortress-ending threat on par with a titan in some zones, while making other zones utterly defanged.  (Especially since the xenosynthesis mechanics pretty much directly invite players to deliberately screw with the magical balance to suit their whims.)

[NW_Kohaku]

To switch tracks back to mundane farming for a moment...

Another thing I've seen during the intervening time between now and making this thread is watching nature documentaries showing agriculture in the Third World.  They showed, for example, children in hilly regions of Africa (the Ethiopian Highlands) having to defend their family's food supply from gelada monkeys, which used diversion tactics to preoccupy the guard while the main force attacked from behind. 

I initially mentioned things like bowl weevils as vermin pests and rabbits or deer as larger pests, but outright large and semi-organized pests with a plan would actually make for a far more interesting impediment to farming.  Especially if you included it in the underground caverns, where gremlin-like stealthy creatures could attack your crops in coordinated swarms, requiring the player to actually mobilize their military against grain thieves or raiders of their booze stockpiles, it would make for definite interesting gameplay moments.

[dragdeler]

I know it's kind of a long shot and this would require a few otherwise pretty useless game mechanics (in the start, later it could morph into something quite realistic and versatile)

Let's not waste any more words, did you ever hear about THIS ?


is sweet pod rum flammable?

[easykiln]

I'm being a bit selfish here, because I didn't properly look through the overwhelming comments or even play DF recently before adding my own input, but please forgive me because I get really mentally constipated if I don't share these kinds of thoughts.

Farming. You can make entire games based on that industry alone. I don't want to go that far, but I do think there are some changes that are worth making.

The main thing is: respect the farmer's almanac. Perish the thought that research and astrology are matters removed from the common dwarf. Rather than locking farming to specific seasons and biomes, make them depend more on the actual conditions, which vary over time and can result in especially good or bad yields for a given crop. Allow planting a wide variety of crops, but give no or very limited yield for crops grown outside their preferred biomes without use of an experienced and knowledgeable farmer and/or infrastructure like greenhouses.

Fungi grown underground is cool, but it should need organic waste to function at scale: they can't make their own food from water and light, what they're good at is digesting pretty much anything and turning it into dwarf-edible food. That's a pretty significant change, but one I think is worth making. Make rotten bits of whatever into a resource and give us a plausible excuse for what's happening to dwarven nightsoil out of sight of the player.

Hydroponics. If it was a different game, I would think of it as overkill. DF is a game where engineering takes a central role, and more reasons to mess with water and accidentally drown your fort are appreciated, so I think it's worth it here. Probably most applicable to forts specialized for the deep?

Soil conditions. Although you can go really deep into it, the most important parts are sunlight/organic material, water levels, and nitrogen. Rather than fertilizer giving a fixed bonus, I'd rather see it actually functioning as supplementing the soil. Secondary factors that can be tracked if you want but are less essential are particulate size(the categorization by soil type that already exists is probably enough, but it could also be used for tracking drainage and flooding,) ph levels, salt levels (this in particular seems an interesting challenge, trying to prevent buildup over time,) and probably a broad contaminant category of substances that are harmful for growth that might get mixed in. The divide between plant and fungi based agriculture could also be highlighted by having microbe/insect activity in the soil tracked. Throw too many supplements at the soil and your plants will instead struggle to grow in a bog without rotting.

Overall, fewer things based on broad and inflexible rules and more things based on the underlying reasons for those general rules. Even if the result appears similar, aside from greater diversity of circumstance, only the latter allows for ingenuity and engineering to shine.