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[JustOnePixel]

How about putting those byproducts of combat and butchery to good use?  In particular, I was thinking that they could be used for fertilizer.  After all... "What makes the grass grow?  BLOOD BLOOD BLOOD!"

[Captain Failmore]

Personally, I think furnaces should use more than just wood to produce ashes. Any and all organic waste in addition to plant material should be usable in a furnace.

Got chunks? Toss 'em in. Wilted plants? Nuke 'em. Tattered rags, trash, rotten food, torch it. At least it means you're not destroying precious wood, and you're getting rid of otherwise useless waste that would just pile up in your refuse pile and produce miasma.

[Quift]

that furnace idea is great. Would really help and smoothen things up.

[Anti-Paragon]

Dwarf environmentalism at it's best! I'm not quite sure the if the elves would be pleased, though.

[Magus]

Great idea on the furnaces.  For that matter, shouldn't other workshops which require fuel leave ash behind?  I'd think one should be able to round that up occasionally and send it off to the ashery for refinement.  It might be less efficient in terms of how much ash you get (maybe one ash per 10 charcoal/coke burned?), but it would be yet another way to make efficient use of waste product.

Or is there something special about the way an ashery works that it has to start with raw wood?  I thought they used actual waste ash from forges for these things, but I don't know.

[Draco18s]

Pfft, ash refinement, just make walls out of it!

[Morbo]

What if most forms of waste can be used in furnaces but take longer than charcoal and produce miasma (imagine burning a dirty loincloth).

not to mention nasty smelly chunks could attract some carnivorous creatures to a cage trap. You can have the carn in a cage taken to a slaughterhouse were a drunken axedwarf  and a one eyed crossbowdwarf will eliminate the creature at which point befuddled peasants hack the corpse into useful parts and more chunks so that the cycle can continue.

The fertilizer idea for waste will help a lot of people a lot.

[Freddybear]

How about using chunks for bait in animal traps?

[Captain Failmore]

Chunks as bait and animal feed could be useful. Failing the whole furnace bit, there should also be an option to have a compost bin where the stuff is just allowed to rot for a couple seasons before being sprinkled over the fields.

[Aquillion]

quote:Originally posted by Captain Failmore:
<STRONG>Personally, I think furnaces should use more than just wood to produce ashes. Any and all organic waste in addition to plant material should be usable in a furnace.</STRONG>

The problem with this (and all other suggestions for alternate ash sources) is that in Dwarf Fortress, all the real uses for ash involve using it as a source of potassium.  Potassium is found in large amounts in wood ashes (used in the lye/potash/pearlash chain), but isn't there in ash from, say, chunks.  Technically, you even need a specific kind of wood, but Dwarf Fortress is forgiving on this point...

A distinction could be made between types of ash, but what's the point?  There's no use for ash except creating lye/potash/pearlash, and that requires wood ash specifically.

Using it as bait for traps or composting it is a neat idea.  (I think we'd need a general 'compost' stockpile where all sorts of organic things can be brought to rot into fertilizer.  The refuse stockpile already sort of works this way, except that it doesn't produce fertilizer...)

Another idea:  A 'sausage' option at the butcher's shop, where they take chunks of meat (as well as slightly damaged, worn, or spoiled meat, plus dead vermin corpses) and turn it into edible sausage.  Not something every race could eat, but hey, dwarves are tough.

[ December 25, 2007: Message edited by: Aquillion ]

[Captain Failmore]

quote:Originally posted by Aquillion:
<STRONG>The problem with this (and all other suggestions for alternate ash sources) is that in Dwarf Fortress, all the real uses for ash involve using it as a source of potassium.  Potassium is found in large amounts in wood ashes (used in the lye/potash/pearlash chain), but isn't there in ash from, say, chunks.  Technically, you even need a specific kind of wood, but Dwarf Fortress is forgiving on this point...
[ December 25, 2007: Message edited by: Aquillion ]</STRONG>

Yeah, I went on to research the whole potash and lye bit a little bit more closely. Hardwood is typically used to produce potash industrially, because as you said, the ashes are rich in potassium and all that other goodness. Most other materials simply aren't. Ashes in general can be used as fertilizer and what have you, but there'd have to be a distinction made between wood ash and generic ash, which sounds silly until you think of the extra things that might have to be coded in to make compost possible.

Still, in light of that, the compost idea seems more suitable for turning waste into generic fertilizer, while a waste furnace would only exist to just get rid of the waste. If it were possible to commit a bin or barrel to a refuse stockpile, wastes that can rot should rot after spending some time in a container and become compost. (Personally, I think this sort of process should be necessary to make cheese, and alcohol should change over time and appreciate in value. Say you make a barrel of curd - which is already edible in any case but not nearly as valuable as the finished product - which could and should take months or even entire seasons to transform into cheese. That, or you brew a barrel of wine or something, and can drink it as it is or wait a couple years for it to gain quality through aging.)

Sausage or haggis or something made from chunks might be a good way to go, but should require spices to produce. (Things like this will probably come into play when recipes are in the game.) Assuming that 'chunk' could represent anything from organs to inedible cartilage, I don't see why this wouldn't work.

[ December 25, 2007: Message edited by: Captain Failmore ]

[ December 25, 2007: Message edited by: Captain Failmore ]

[Pyro93735]

quote:Originally posted by Aquillion:
<STRONG>The problem with this (and all other suggestions for alternate ash sources) is that in Dwarf Fortress, all the real uses for ash involve using it as a source of potassium.  Potassium is found in large amounts in wood ashes (used in the lye/potash/pearlash chain), but isn't there in ash from, say, chunks.  Technically, you even need a specific kind of wood, but Dwarf Fortress is forgiving on this point...

A distinction could be made between types of ash, but what's the point?  There's no use for ash except creating lye/potash/pearlash, and that requires wood ash specifically.

Using it as bait for traps or composting it is a neat idea.  (I think we'd need a general 'compost' stockpile where all sorts of organic things can be brought to rot into fertilizer.  The refuse stockpile already sort of works this way, except that it doesn't produce fertilizer...)

Another idea:  A 'sausage' option at the butcher's shop, where they take chunks of meat (as well as slightly damaged, worn, or spoiled meat, plus dead vermin corpses) and turn it into edible sausage.  Not something every race could eat, but hey, dwarves are tough.

[ December 25, 2007: Message edited by: Aquillion ]</STRONG>

I like the sound of this... imagine a dwarf getting a macabre mood, pulling his fellow dwarf into a butcher shop and making sausage out of him. Although I don't know about using spoiled meat in sausage. Anything rotten to the point of causing miasma doesn't really sound edible, even considering dwarven fortitude.

[ December 26, 2007: Message edited by: Pyro93735 ]

[Pyro93735]

EDIT: Double post, sorry

[ December 26, 2007: Message edited by: Pyro93735 ]

[Aquillion]

Well, I didn't mean using 'rotten to the point of producing miasma' meat... more like XmeatX that has been slightly frozen or damaged in some other way, but will still be perfectly edible if ground up with spices and put into a sausage.

[Pyro93735]

I see, I figured when you said spoiled meat, you meant maggoty greenish meat or meat cut off a zombie cougar or something. Impaired/mangled meat, sure, sausage, yes.