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[nomad]

In an environment where nothing will grow but you have more than one layer of soil (eg badlands), if you channel out the top layer of soil, grass and trees will start to grow.

I accidently discovered this while digging a pit for my refuse pile.
i don't know if this is common knowledge, i think it's interesting.

[Girlinhat]

Assuming you have soil.  Most places with no vegetation also have no soil.

[Courtesy Arloban]

Which begs the question, why are badlands green?  I have a tileset that has a greyscale icon of badlands in it, and it looks like grass and trees.

[Girlinhat]

Because it's a tileset and has limits to what it can do.  In ASCII badlands look properly hostile.

[Valdrax]

In an environment where nothing will grow but you have more than one layer of soil (eg badlands), if you channel out the top layer of soil, grass and trees will start to grow.

Yep!  Works great in sand deserts too.  I used to use it all the time to make pasture space on desert/volcano maps.

Now, I prefer to breach the first cavern and hollow out the top soil level across the entire map and rely on mosses for grazing and fungiwood for beds.  It works great if you only have one soil layer.  That's another reason that I tend to select my embark sites heavily for a large area with little slope, so that I can easily survey my tree farm.

Another great place to exploit this is if you've got a good, tall, sheer cliff face with a soil column for multi-level pasturage.

[nomad]

My main problem was that the only grass and trees grow in the terrifying biome at the border of the embark, complete with raining goo and zombies and so on.
i have aquifier almost all over the place (i used reveal to find a dry place to dig down, seriously 7 levels of aquifier).

Also: i have baby toes succulent groing in my joyous wilds badlands now...sounds more like something for the terrifying part to me though.
the sheep eat it just the same anyways.

[Girlinhat]

Toady should have added ingested syndromes to the different grasses...

[astianax]

he'd mentioned wanting to do something like that, with grazers eating the evil grasses getting some sort of nastiness. but, it possibly being ok for the carnivores to eat

also, baby toe succulents are a regular plant found in certain deserts, so no meat to them. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fenestraria