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[Zaerosz]

So now that we have the raws for the new version's massive number of crops, and discounting plants that are only available in good or evil biomes, we have a total of 96 aboveground crops. Now, as I'm sure you're most likely aware, Dwarf Fortress players like to do things Big, and one such Big Thing would be farming every single crop at once. But how to go about it? Just having all the farms on one level would be an unorganized mess, right?

Thus, the Farming Towers. Two square towers with 10*10 floor space on each floor, and two pump stacks oriented in opposite directions between the two towers, powered by windmills atop the structure, drawing from a cistern underneath - if I remember my fluid mechanics correctly, that should mean that once the top floors are filled, the pumps will start being able to fill the next level down, until all the levels have been flooded, at which point you simply drain the towers back into the cistern however you choose. Twelve floors will get you enough floor space for a 5x5 plot of every single surface crop in the game.

[Zaerosz]

...I just realized a bunch of said new crops are (iirc) tree crops, and thus can't be farmed in plots. Buggery.

[MDFification]

But wait! Crop Rotation has yet to be applied!
Essentially, you need a plot for each season a specific crop can be farmed to avoid wasting plants when your farmers just throw them out (ugh) to make room for planting more seedlings. If a crop is only farmed in one season, you can double up the plot with something else. Just make sure there's a gap season where nothing is planted.
I'm pretty sure some of these crops will actually be picked from trees. Optimal orchard design will have to wait until the new version- we still need to figure that out. I'm pretty sure you still won't be able to plant trees, although if you could that would be great.

Add in automated processing/milling, fertilization and dumping unused materials (a big fps drain) into a modded furnace which burns them into ashes for making fertilizer would be a useful addition. I recommend you got 3X3 instead of 5X5 and scale it down; making it pointlessly big is dwarfy, but most of what you harvest won't be used ever and will have to be destroyed or become an FPS drain. It'll also require such fine tuning that it'll still be a megaproject enough without adding more insane scale to the already present insane scale.
You might want two more connected towers, merging the 2 towers into a single tower with a central pump stack. The other two towers can be used as living quarters for farmers (to cut down on travel time) and seed storage. I'd attach a minecart system to automatically bring down harvested materials to a large organics processing facilitity as well.

If this project is completed and automated, you'll never have to worry about feeding or clothing your dwarves again. Happiness will receive a big boost, as the large variety and high quality of foods will go over well, and with a little tweaking your textile industry can pump out great clothing. Now all you have to do is hang elfin prisoners off the sides of the tower to tell the world nature has been conquered.

[Snaake]

Or you can just do what I did for a furnace in my last fort, i.e. have a setup similar to a minecart QSP, but instead of dumping onto a stockpile, it dumps into a pit of magma. 2 deep is enough, so you can haul it there by minecart. Of course modding in a plant material -> ash thing would be nice, but I'd be more likely to use the ash to make clear glass or soap than fertilizing, since I don't think food will be that much harder to get in the new version either.

Regarding crop rotation, GROWDUR seems to be gone and I don't think there's any hard knowledge yet on how the new GROWTH_TIMING tags work or how fast things grow from time of planting to the first growth, and thus little idea how long crops will actually take to grow. I'm hoping Toady has balanced this and made the growth times something about 2-3 seasons in length; this would also explain why all the crops are still [SPRING][SUMMER][AUTUMN][WINTER], because those tags would be necessary to stop the plants from abruptly dying in the middle of a growth cycle.

Pressing pastes into vegetable oil can already be automated by adding [AUTOMATIC] to the reaction in reaction_other, as can some other stuff. And the workflow plugin helps with the rest.


Also, I counted in the FotF thread IIRC 23 of the crops.txt stuff was growable in tropical savanna+shrubland, 16 in any temperate biome. And only 4 were NOT_FREEZING, so could be planted in both. And then there were a few oddballs like papyrus (some tropical wetlands) and buckwheat (dry broadleaf forests only), so it would be practically impossible to get ALL the biomes and thus all the plants in one embark anyway.