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[groo]

Don't know what the chance of this getting read are, but could we please have the resources available in an embark site be mostly renewable?

I'm currently six or seven years into a new fortress. All the critters in my underground river, chasm and magma pipe are dead. Every river and lake has been fished out. The wildlife are all extinct, even the vermin seem to be extinct. Half the dwarf labours in the game are now useless because the resources they depend on are gone, the megabeasts died out in worldgen, and the only challenge I have left is infinite goblin attacks, which aren't especially worrying because it's just the same old thing over and over again; they never bring tougher units (trolls) with them, like they did in prior versions.

Things like rock and ore being naturally finite are fine, but in a game without a true end, the resources you're dealt with your site shouldn't be as restricted as they are. You shouldn't be able to fish out the entire damn ocean, chasms should repopulate, new sources of strife should swim down into your rivers, etc. We have endless goblin hordes to give us a challenge, why are the animals and monsters so limited? One fisherdwarf being able to fish out an entire region is ludicrous, and one hunter culling wildlife to the extent that they no longer migrate into the region equally so. I understand that there's more of a focus on simulation than game at the moment, but right now it feels like a sandbox world with very little sand in any given place.

(Can goblins be made more interesting again, too? I do wish they'd bring trolls and maybe other things with them again, and right now it's rare enough for them to even siege instead of just sending irritating ambushes and trivial babysnatchers; I don't care if they don't have direct access to the proper biomes, they're a civilised race and should be able to travel for their mounts/siege units.)

[silhouette]

indeed.

Things cut off from other things shouldnt be renewable...
e.g. underground pools should stay emptied once theyre gone
same with murky pools and such
Magma pools aswell

Mamga pipes should be renewable and have creatures spawn at the bottom/edges of the map.
same with bottomless pit and chasm.
rivers should spawn aquatic and amphibious creatures from the flowing direction and never run out of fish to catch...

[Footkerchief]

Underground features have been completely rewritten in the upcoming release, which should be out in a month or so.  Repopulation was one of the major goals, and creatures will now arrive from the edges of the map underground.  You can get more information in the dev log and the next version's List of Remaining Items (check the "Map Features" section).  Forums person SirPenguin also collected a bunch of information into one document (scroll down to "The Underground").

[zwei]

Generally, yes, this is the issue: Recourse are not renewable at all or they are renewable way too easily and you end up with map devoid of animals, but still with infinite amount of sand (and trees/crops which are righ on the opposite side of spectrum of being way too easy to renew).

[groo]

Underground features have been completely rewritten in the upcoming release, which should be out in a month or so.  Repopulation was one of the major goals, and creatures will now arrive from the edges of the map underground.

That is good to hear (I think... from reading those logs I'm crossing my fingers we don't also lose a bunch of the game's cooler features in the next version as well), but it's not just the underground stuff - I'm kind of worried at the direction things seem to be going with animals and vermin being a limited resource generally. Like zwei said, the ultimate conclusion you reach with your site is that it becomes empty of resources except for trees, crops and sand (and maybe obsidian). I'm looking especially towards the finite amounts of vermin, fish and huntable animals. Why kill off the usefulness of so many labours? Especially since it doesn't make any sense for a tiny band of dwarves to be able to cull the wildlife to that extent.

[Grendus]

It's not that hard to overhunt an area, though DF takes it to an extreme. The main advantage that dwarves have over rl hunters is omniscience, their prey has to outrun them. Real hunters have to track or trap their prey, which takes a lot of time and is a lot less effective than what we do. Combine that with animal populations that are not migratory and you end up with one hunter overhunting an area.

Future solutions will solve a lot of these problems, so I'm not worried too much for now.

[Footkerchief]

That is good to hear (I think... from reading those logs I'm crossing my fingers we don't also lose a bunch of the game's cooler features in the next version as well), but it's not just the underground stuff - I'm kind of worried at the direction things seem to be going with animals and vermin being a limited resource generally. Like zwei said, the ultimate conclusion you reach with your site is that it becomes empty of resources except for trees, crops and sand (and maybe obsidian). I'm looking especially towards the finite amounts of vermin, fish and huntable animals. Why kill off the usefulness of so many labours? Especially since it doesn't make any sense for a tiny band of dwarves to be able to cull the wildlife to that extent.

Something else I should have posted:

# Core78, WILDERNESS POPULATION TRACKING, (Future): Wilderness population is quite limited, and worse in a few ways than it was back before the Z coordinate. This should be fixed in world gen and in regular play in all modes for all categories of wilderness or subterranean creature.

This item is up on dev_next (meaning it's slated for near-future development) as "Wilderness population/megabeast reproduction and improved population tracking."

[groo]

Ah, that's great news, thanks.

(Animals in Dwarf Fortress actually are migratory as far as I understand it; they migrate in and out of the site continually. It's just that their breeding isn't modelled unless they're in your site, which means they're probably being hunted, which is a completely unfair way of restricting their use as a resource. And I don't think vermin breeding is modelled at all.)