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Author Topic: Where are my seeds? Where are my plants??  (Read 1399 times)

Phenixmirage

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Where are my seeds? Where are my plants??
« on: May 10, 2009, 09:42:17 am »
I've modded in a bunch of new plants for my game (mostly picked & chosen from various mods by other people. I hope the creators aren't offended, but it's only intended for personal use.)  And after a while, I've noticed that 80-90% of my plants seem to be unavailable.  I can get most of the underground plants just fine, but almost all of the surface plants seem to be gone.  Humans don't have any cloth or seeds for trading, and the only plants they have are bloated tubers, muck roots, plums, and peaches.  The elves have yet to bring any sunberries (after 5-6 years in my current fort) but have an abundance of bananas and coconuts.  (And while their coconuts are lovely, I want my sunshine damnit.)

I'm using a few other mods (Avari, Hobgoblins, and a few monsteres plucked from Legendary Lands, the unblock/uncut reactions and economic stone mod).  I don't know if those could be causing some sort of peculiarness... I'm very much a newbie modder and there's quite a bit I don't fully understand.

Here's my plant files, if it helps (warning, they're long).  I hope someone can figure this out... I was planning this fort to be mainly surface farming but lack of surface seeds has put a crimp in those plans.

Surface Plants
Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Herbalism-only Plants
Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Underground Plants
Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Edit:  I've also noticed that the downside to not having all-year growth seasons for surface plants is that your map gets clogged with dead bushes that never go away.
« Last Edit: May 10, 2009, 09:52:17 am by Phenixmirage »
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sunshaker

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Re: Where are my seeds? Where are my plants??
« Reply #1 on: May 10, 2009, 02:47:10 pm »
1. Do your entries have spaces between them?
2. Did you regen the world after adding your new plants?
3. did you delete your \data\objects folder?
4. Your frequency on those plants is very low (frequency is the chance that a herbalist will successfully pick a plant, not how often a plant shows up on the map. I suspect, bt can not not confirmed, that if you have 100 shrubs on the map and 20 potential plant types you will get 5 of each plant (with a 1% chance of harvesting you would need 20 years to actually pick one).
5. Some of your plants have very specific Biomes and you may be generating a map that has few plant options.
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Phenixmirage

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Re: Where are my seeds? Where are my plants??
« Reply #2 on: May 10, 2009, 04:40:08 pm »
Quote from: sunshaker on May 10, 2009, 02:47:10 pm
1. Do your entries have spaces between them?
2. Did you regen the world after adding your new plants?
3. did you delete your \data\objects folder?
4. Your frequency on those plants is very low (frequency is the chance that a herbalist will successfully pick a plant, not how often a plant shows up on the map. I suspect, bt can not not confirmed, that if you have 100 shrubs on the map and 20 potential plant types you will get 5 of each plant (with a 1% chance of harvesting you would need 20 years to actually pick one).
5. Some of your plants have very specific Biomes and you may be generating a map that has few plant options.

1. What do you mean by spaces?  Entries are separated by returns, as you can see in the files, but I don't have a space bar entry between them.  Is that important?
2. Yes
3. Yes
4. I meant for some of the plants to be rarer. I didn't realize frequency affected chances of gathering rather than chances of growing though.
5. Some plants are meant to be more "specialty" items, yes, but that doesn't explain the extreme lack of surface plants. The humans have no seeds whatsoever, not even from the vanilla-game plants.  I'm not so worried about what I can gather (although that has been pretty sparse too) but my trading partners should have more to offer me.

Edit:  It seems like the problem is definitely in the plant files. When I drop the 3 modded plant files in a never-used clean install of DF (erasing the old matgloss_plant first) the same problem occurs.  I modded humans to be playable in fortress mode, and the only plants they have on embark are muck roots, bloated tubers, plums, peaches and (for tropical civs) bananas and coconuts.

I tried combining the 3 files into one matgloss_plant file but it caused DF to consistently error while finalizing world creation.
« Last Edit: May 10, 2009, 11:01:12 pm by Phenixmirage »
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sunshaker

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Re: Where are my seeds? Where are my plants??
« Reply #3 on: May 10, 2009, 11:10:29 pm »
1. I know I had issues with plants before and one of the problems may have been a lack of a blank line between entries (also when I wrote the previous reply I was using a different computer and it was not showing the blank lines like they are now, very weird).

Another thing to check might be if you have double entries for the plants (this happened to me, I moved plants to biome specific files and then copied into an existing DF directory and forgot to remove the matgloss_plants.txt file).

Also try making new files (copy the plants to a new file, make sure the first line and the file name match exactly and that .txt is on the end of the file when you save it (some OS's don't bother with the extension, something about flagging the file in the properties so it knows what it is, but other programs which look for specific file extensions will not always see it). Why yes this did happen to me as well, fun times.

Also traders should only be bringing you the plants the civilization they are from have access to (so if the elves are coming from a non-good area they will have no sunberries, same with humans). Also if the human civ comes from a captured/abandoned dwarf city in the mountains they may not have no surface plants and because they can not start with subterranean plants won't be able to trade them. It will be a pain but you might want to see if they are coming from usable biomes.
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Phenixmirage

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Re: Where are my seeds? Where are my plants??
« Reply #4 on: May 11, 2009, 10:11:54 am »
Quote from: sunshaker on May 10, 2009, 11:10:29 pm
Another thing to check might be if you have double entries for the plants (this happened to me, I moved plants to biome specific files and then copied into an existing DF directory and forgot to remove the matgloss_plants.txt file).

I double checked, and the matgloss_plant.txt file was deleted, the only plant files are my 3 custom ones.

Quote from: sunshaker on May 10, 2009, 11:10:29 pm
Also try making new files (copy the plants to a new file, make sure the first line and the file name match exactly and that .txt is on the end of the file when you save it (some OS's don't bother with the extension, something about flagging the file in the properties so it knows what it is, but other programs which look for specific file extensions will not always see it). Why yes this did happen to me as well, fun times.

I use XP 64bit at home and for DF, and I always make sure that I turn "show extensions" on because I hate not being able to see them.  I remember that used to trip me up on Macs though. :) 
Edit: Double checked, and the first line of all three files is letter for letter (minus the extension) the same as their file name.

Quote from: sunshaker on May 10, 2009, 11:10:29 pm
Also traders should only be bringing you the plants the civilization they are from have access to (so if the elves are coming from a non-good area they will have no sunberries, same with humans). Also if the human civ comes from a captured/abandoned dwarf city in the mountains they may not have no surface plants and because they can not start with subterranean plants won't be able to trade them. It will be a pain but you might want to see if they are coming from usable biomes.

I've set humans as a playable fortress race (because I see no other way of quickly and easily checking to see which surface plants are working).  Embarking from a normal, temperate human civilization with a large amount of cities (for more access to resources) they still only have gather-able plants, absolutely no farmable ones.  I have plenty of plants whose only biome restrictions are "non-freezing" so there should be at least a few available.  :-\

The problem seems to be in the farmable surface plants file (the first one, matgloss_plant_farm).  Dwarves can start out with a full compliment of underground plants and seeds, and I'm able to find herbalism-only plants with no problem (indeed, these are the only plants the traders have been offering). There's nothing in the errorlog.txt except "Impoverished Word Selector" (which I've been told is nothing to worry about) and a bunch of pathing errors, so no clues there.   :-\
« Last Edit: May 11, 2009, 10:16:15 am by Phenixmirage »
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sunshaker

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Re: Where are my seeds? Where are my plants??
« Reply #5 on: May 11, 2009, 01:57:54 pm »
Ok sounds like the same naming problem I had, I'm not sure what was going on (maybe a disk error, maybe a random space at the end of the line or something), but it cleared up once I recreated the file (just make a new file, copy the plant entries over, set the name to matgloss_plant_crop or something, copy and paste for the file name and see if it works (it happened to about 4 of my files).
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Phenixmirage

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Re: Where are my seeds? Where are my plants??
« Reply #6 on: May 11, 2009, 09:31:37 pm »
Yes! It worked!  Huzzah and hallelujah!   :D  I don't know if it was making a new file or taking out a few stray spaces, but my surface farm plants are finally showing up. :)

The downside is that I have to gen a new world, since I guess the tags for the surface plants were never recognized for my old one. (As a test, I tried embarking with a human civ... they're still plantless). Pretty frustrating, since it took ages to find a site I was happy with and my fort was going on six years.   :-\

I'm glad to have things working though, thanks for your help sunshaker. :)
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sunshaker

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Re: Where are my seeds? Where are my plants??
« Reply #7 on: May 12, 2009, 08:13:20 am »
No problem.

I know the feeling. My first sttempt to survive on Dwarf Heaven I could only grow Tower Caps underground; rice, waterlilies, fruit and walnut trees above ground. It was an interesting challenge (if you can call a starving sober fortress interesting, but it was FUN!).
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Phenixmirage

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Re: Where are my seeds? Where are my plants??
« Reply #8 on: May 12, 2009, 08:48:48 am »
Yeah, sounds "Fun". :D  But how did you get Dwarf Heaven with modded plants? As I understood it any new objects/races/etc alters how the world gen so that you can't get the same world.

Edit: And new plant entries should require a new world gen to be recognized, right?
« Last Edit: May 12, 2009, 08:53:33 am by Phenixmirage »
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i2amroy

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Re: Where are my seeds? Where are my plants??
« Reply #9 on: May 12, 2009, 12:52:34 pm »
They will change the civs and that stuff, but unless you add new minerals,  then the terrain of the world should be generally the same, allowing you to embark in the same place, even if the plants and entities are different.
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sunshaker

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Re: Where are my seeds? Where are my plants??
« Reply #10 on: May 12, 2009, 04:57:50 pm »
Quote from: i2amroy on May 12, 2009, 12:52:34 pm
They will change the civs and that stuff, but unless you add new minerals,  then the terrain of the world should be generally the same, allowing you to embark in the same place, even if the plants and entities are different.

Even adding minerals doesn't change the map all that much (less obsidian, more other types of igneous/volcanic rocks, slightly different soil conditions (less soil in some parts of the map, different color sand), but same layout, same river, same canons, same chasm). I think if I was to gen it a few times I could get more obsidian if I wanted to.
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Phenixmirage

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Re: Where are my seeds? Where are my plants??
« Reply #11 on: May 12, 2009, 08:57:47 pm »
So I could (theoretically) have Dwarf Heaven plus orcs (or other mods) if I wanted?  That's good to know.  :)
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Blakmane

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Re: Where are my seeds? Where are my plants??
« Reply #12 on: May 12, 2009, 09:09:57 pm »
can people confirm extra raw files don't influence that though? I know extra entries generally don't, but I don't know about whole new files
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sunshaker

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Re: Where are my seeds? Where are my plants??
« Reply #13 on: May 13, 2009, 06:49:47 am »
Quote from: Blakmane on May 12, 2009, 09:09:57 pm
can people confirm extra raw files don't influence that though? I know extra entries generally don't, but I don't know about whole new files

I have new reaction, metal, plant, weapon/item, entity and creature files and I can still gen Dwarf Heaven. I do NOT have new soil, wood, mineral or stone files. So this is I guess half an answer.
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