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[DoubleG]

I recently restarted my fortress in order to incorporate a orchard. I previously thought that nothing would grow as all the trees were dead when I arrived, but my previous go had them growing fine, so I decided to restart, with a few design changes. This time, however, not only are no trees growing but no grass is growing either. It is exactly the same save, just the save I made when I first started out. I'm not sure why it isn't working now, and has put a crimp in my plans. Any ideas from anyone? Or a way to change it so stuff will grow again? I'm happy to DFHack to achieve my perfect fortress.

[anewaname]

When you say you "restarted" the fort, do you mean you abandoned the fort and then reclaimed it?

[DoubleG]

No, I had a backup save from when I first started. I always have a backup. Halfway through building my fort I realised the trees were growing, and I was a little excited as I could try and do an underground orchard. Wanted to start again to get the soil on the right level, without all the stuff I'd already dug getting in the way. Plus there were a few little improvements I wanted to make to the design.

So I reloaded the backup save, same people as last time, same fort etc, just this time the grass and the trees are refusing to grow. Not as much time has passed as in my previous save, do you think if I wait it will start growing? Can plant dying rate change over time or due to world events? I've got both the saves, and one is about ten years further on. I've been more efficient this time building.

[PatrikLundell]

I can think of one in-game effect than MIGHT explain it, but if that's the case it's exciting, as I didn't think it would work that way.

If the embark world tile or the world tile "providing" the biome for the embark is under the influence of a site spreading evil that also spreads death, all the trees and all the vegetation in that biome will be dead (doesn't count subsurface trees/vegetation, and I'm not sure if surface farming works, but guess it would).
If something kills off the source of the spread of evil, the area affected can contract (it somehow doesn't seem to happen in all instances even though it ought to, but it does sometimes, at least). I didn't think such a contraction (or, for that matter, spread) would affect an active fortress, but if it does it ought to have the effect that things start to grow again.

Using DFHack you ought to be able to change the Evilness value of the world tile controlling the biome (embark world tile or a neighbor) to be below the threshold of Evil. This definitely ought to work pre embark, but if spread and contraction affects active fortresses it ought to work even on an existing fortress (I'd hack the value, save and reload, using a copy of the backup to allow you to revert to your original backup). Also note that if the "new" game doesn't have the evil dethroned as it was in the original game, evil may sweep over the embark again as the Evilness value has increased back over the Evil threshold (all of this assuming this is what's happened to the game).

If you do try it, and it works (and it wouldn't hurt with a report if it fails as well), please report back, as this is something that hasn't been researched much, as far as I know.

[DoubleG]

Hmmmm, in my first game I was pretty lava happy when it came to invaders or FB or animals that looked at me funny or dwarfs that irritated me,  I do remember an early necromancer siege (repeated, almost identically) in both instances) that I killed with Lava the first time but didn't the second time. Would they have been the source of the tree death?

The second time there was a named corrupted ghoul that hung around for ages killing visitors (the necromancer left early). As I left him alive this time he came back again later, with more undead and another necromancer. Perhaps if I attacked the Towers near me and killed him it might start things growing again?

I'm not sure how to do what you suggested in your post. I don't want to get rid of the evilness, I want to grow Sliverbarb for black clothes. This is my dream. I would like trees to grow in this new fortress. Is Tree death a separate value than evilness?

[Salmeuk]

Patrik might be on to something, but honestly I bet you just need to wait a few years. How long have you waited so far? I seem to recall a similar experience in an evil biome, which originally spawned full of dead trees but after a few years new trees sprang to life. However this is distant memory at this point and hardly sufficient evidence of this kind of thing.

[PatrikLundell]

The necro tower the invaders came from can very well be the (or one of the) source of the spreading evil. Stopping the spread (and reversing it) would, if so, require the destruction of the government of that tower, which can be done by razing it, conquering it, or waiting until neighbors do it for you (necro towers are horrible at relations: they get into wars with all their neighbors simultaneously, and thus often are wiped out fairly quickly).

Vegetation death is partially separate from Evilness. If a non evil region is affected by a death spreading source, the vegetation death percentage is set at 100%, while regions that are "inherently" evil can have this value set to any value in the range 0 - 100. Thus, it may or may not work to hack that value to something lower than 100 (I'd probably go for something like 50, to get the embark to be affected by sickness, but not completely overcome by it).
To change this field, you'd first have to identify which world tile your embark's biome comes from (the tile the embark lies within or one of the 8 neighbors, or more than one of these 9 tiles if your embark has multiple biomes). Once you've found the world tile, you'd need to find the region that world tile refers to (which isn't very easy, because of how Lua interacts with the 2 dimensional array the world tiles are arranged in), which is defined in a field in that structure. Then you'd have to go to the region that's referenced (the field contains the index of the region) and change the death_percentage value (I don't remember exactly what the field is named, but it's something like that).
All of that can be done using gui/gm-editor from the DFHack console, or you can write a Lua script that does it.

The same caveat as before remains: I don't know if changing this info takes effect in an active fortress (although I'd backup before, and save the game and reload it after the hacking).

[DoubleG]

My map is 4x4 with 2 official evil biomes in it. One terrifying and one haunted, both had full necro trees when I arrived, both times. There is an extra bit of land included in my embark, from another biome just to the north. Two little areas pocking onto my map, less than 20x20 squares. This biome wasn't listed on the embark screen, has tree growth, plants and everything, plus evil mists. I am very lucky this biome is there as it is my source of Sliverbarb.

With so many biomes the DFHack route seems to be really complicated. I think it might be easier just ot give it another 7 years and see if the trees start growing then. I'll train my military up and consider trying to raze the towers. I do find the civ screen difficult to navigate and/or understand. I think I know how to use legends to find out where that Corrupted Ghouls came from and try destroying that.

EDIT: I'm at peace with one of the towers. Not sure if it's been conquored by the human civ or whether we were always at peace. Other Tower is fair game  I think. Noticing a few economically linked settlements with no contact from me.

The Civ screen is very dense and hard to extract info from. Does anyone have any guides for this?

[PatrikLundell]

If you've got a little bit of sliver barb that should be enough, as you only really need one to get seeds for a single tile farm plot to get the farming process going.

If you've got multiple biomes I'd definitely aim for a script if I wanted to change the parameters for more than one of them. Waiting is of course the low corruption risk option.

I tend to complement the Civ screen with Legends Viewer info from data taken from a discarded instance of the game (save, open legends mode, export, kill DF [as resuming after that corrupts the save], load the save). If a tower is marked as "peace" it shouldn't be that tower that's responsible for the attacks, but it may well be the one responsible for the spread of vegetation death anyway, but it's typically the closest one that's responsible for that (they don't tend to spread their evil very far, counted in world tiles)

[DoubleG]

I've let the new fortress run on to 11 years after embark. Suddenly everything has started to grow, or at least one of the formerly dead biomes. Guess it wasn't me killing invaders that caused the trees to start growing the first time. The very start of the eleventh year does seem a bit arbitrary. I haven't had any info from anyone about places being conquered so I'm thinking it may be something built in. Maybe ten years after fortress start you lose some flag or marker that, in this case, caused trees to stat growing.... Odd that it's only one of the biomes though.

I'll keep my eye out for anything interesting when the diplomat comes.

[Mobbstar]

I've let the new fortress run on to 11 years after embark. Suddenly everything has started to grow, or at least one of the formerly dead biomes. Guess it wasn't me killing invaders that caused the trees to start growing the first time. The very start of the eleventh year does seem a bit arbitrary. I haven't had any info from anyone about places being conquered so I'm thinking it may be something built in. Maybe ten years after fortress start you lose some flag or marker that, in this case, caused trees to stat growing.... Odd that it's only one of the biomes though.

I'll keep my eye out for anything interesting when the diplomat comes.

Perhaps the demon or necromancer responsible died of old age.

I can't think of any reason for the ten-year delay, pardon the joke. Armies shouldn't take that long, and megabeasts don't attack non-player sites after worldgen afaik. However, you mentioned one of the biomes wasn't listed as evil when embarking. Is that the same biome that now grows trees?

[DoubleG]

All my biomes are evil. One haunted, one terrifying and one unlisted on the embarking screen. According to the embark screen that biome should not be on my map, so I didn't write it down when I started. Pretty sure its evil as well, as it has Sliverbarb, reanimation, mists, Glumnprong etc.

The haunted one has started to grow stuff, the terrifying one still seems dead and the unlisted one always had trees but was tiny. I have a massive area of the growing biome in the middle of my underground orchard, so I'm pretty happy with it. Perhaps if I let it run on  a few more years the other biome will start sprouting.

[PatrikLundell]

@Mobbstar:
The whole purpose of becoming a necromancer is to stop aging, so they don't die of old age, and I don't think demons do either.

Armies don't take 10 years to reach a site, but it can very well take 10 years or more before a civ decides to raise an army to attack any particular enemy site. Once the decision is made a staging site is selected and the army starts marching, typically reaching their target in a few days.