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[Cerej]

Right now, wood is (almost) the most valuable resource for an enterprizing fortress lord.  So here are a couple of suggestions to make wood more common.

1:  Make tower-caps grow in 1 year or less.  This doesn't increase the wood you can harvest per year (unless older saplings prevent young saplings from sprouting) but it does make wood available sooner.  Considering that tower-caps are gigantic mushrooms, it would make some sense that they grow quickly.

2(a):  Make trees produce more logs.  If each tree that gets cut produces multiple logs, then wood would be less scarce.  If certain tree types produced more logs than others, this would be even better.

2(b):  Make trees produce a "felled tree" item.  This item could be hauled to a lumber yard and processed into multiple.  Very similar effect to suggestion 2(a), but it could be set so it requires about the same effort to get X logs under this system as it currently takes to get X logs.  The advantage is that more logs are available on a given map.  Again, if different tree types produced different log quantities, that would be a good thing.

3:  As often suggested, humans could bring logs in their caravans.  In addition, maybe as a reward for honoring their tree quota, the elves would bring logs that they shaped out of a tree.  (The story dealing elf who turned evil suggests similar things.)  This would make living under the tree quota more bearable.

[Zurai]

I like the general concept, but I think what I'd prefer is to have a lumber mill and require felled trees to be processed before they could be used for most things.

For example, it never made sense to me that 1 oak log could be made into one bed OR one bin OR one wooden sword hilt. I think it would be better if you could process trees into Logs, Planks, and Blocks, and use those for Carpenter's Workshop tasks.

It adds an extra layer of complexity, but it makes things make more sense and it extends the amount of use you get out of a single tree - no more using a giant oak tree to make one single sword handle.

[Aquillion]

Felled trees and lumber mills would also help solve another big problem--tons and tons of wood-hauling jobs from all the way outside or by the river.  This is the real issue that makes getting wood so painful, really...  there's usually a lot outside, but to get it your dwarves have to trudge five miles in the snow for one log, which then makes a single bucket or a piece of charcoal.

If one felled tree could be processed into a bunch of wood right next to the appropate workshops, it would help things a lot, even if felling trees was changed to take longer and trees were made slightly rarer to compensate.

[Mechanoid]

Hell yes to 2B. Also, the idea could be applied to any object creation method... like metal bars; how can just 1 metal bar go into a single bucket, but only 2 go into a barrel? must be an awfully thick, or a half-barrel sized bucket.

[Fenek]

Or just make sure that out of one tree log you get several barrels/buckets/whatever. But I love your sawmill idea, and I'd really like to see that implemented.

[ October 03, 2006: Message edited by: Fenek ]

[Toady One]

Having variable numbers of bars/wood/etc is on the list somewhere, but it's one of those things that isn't safe to jump in to without recombining item stacks.  Having lots of little bars and so on floating around leads to more items to take care of (if ore gives you 20 bars, and its 2 bars to a bucket, you end up with 18 bars and a bucket instead of just a bucket), although if they do things properly the fragmentation of the piles shouldn't happen too often.  It is important to break up the "bars" into individual bars though, so that you can chuck individual bars at people in adventure mode, and do various other things with single bars.  You should also be able to stack them and make a little play fort.

[Seryntas]

Dwarven children should play with bars of metal like human children play with Lincoln Logs.

[Ancient_Sleeping_Dude_Rei]

And in the meantime, the respawn rate of trees is tripled. 5 times. And they give 5 logs a tree! YAY!

[Solara]

quote:Originally posted by Zurai:
<STRONG>I like the general concept, but I think what I'd prefer is to have a lumber mill and require felled trees to be processed before they could be used for most things.

For example, it never made sense to me that 1 oak log could be made into one bed OR one bin OR one wooden sword hilt. I think it would be better if you could process trees into Logs, Planks, and Blocks, and use those for Carpenter's Workshop tasks.

It adds an extra layer of complexity, but it makes things make more sense and it extends the amount of use you get out of a single tree - no more using a giant oak tree to make one single sword handle.</STRONG>

Agreed. As valuable as wood is, I often find that except for the earliest stages of the game the carpenter spends a lot of time standing around twiddling his thumbs. It'd be nice to give him more things to do. (I was just coming here to suggest that, actually, though not in relation to the availablity of wood...)

[rylen]

Once trees provide multiple wood blocks, an option I'd like to see is harvesting trees.  This would take longer then regular felling and  only produce a fraction of the wood.  (Say 1 block after milling instead of 3).  But you can go back to that tree year after year.

Rylen

[Empirus]

I think that's a good idea, rylen, as long as it doesn't count towards the felled tree quota that elves set.  Actually, making it an elf-only power when human/elven fortresses are in is an awesome idea as well.  (I mean, they may be tree-huggers, but they still need to make beds from SOMETHING...

[Aquillion]

For some reason, I always imagined that elves had the ability to shape, craft, and seperate wood from trees without killing it.  The idea of an elf with an unnaturally sharp wooden sword that is as strong as steel and grows to recover any damage it that has been done to it seems cool.

I mean, as it is now elves would just use metal and stone.  That doesn't seem like them at all.

Maybe for structures they could plant trees and rapidly grow them into the structure that they want, whether it's a bed or some sort of elven workshop?

[Toady One]

This will all be complicated by the plans for the elf trees to go several Z stories in giant giant trees as well, so that the trees also form the ground they walk on in their rooms.  It's not fully planned out, but that's the idea.  The initial experiments will take place in the adventure mode elf settlements, and then we'll move on from their.  But yeah, they were supposed to be able to shape wood, at least according to the planning stories.  Not that we're going for a fixed universe with lots of little fixed intricacies, but the ability should be there.

[Maximus]

I can't help but find it confusing that they insist on not harming animals or trees, but they're happy to harvest, process, and trade every other kind of plant.

[Capntastic]

quote:Originally posted by Maximus:
<STRONG>I can't help but find it confusing that they insist on not harming animals or trees, but they're happy to harvest, process, and trade every other kind of plant.</STRONG>

Well, those plants aren't very old at all, and probably as majestic or wise as trees at all.