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[Percival]

As a general topic, this idea has been discussed many times. The process of harvesting and using most resources, as things are now, yields unrealistic results. For example: the same amount of stone will produce a single amulet and an entire brick wall; the same amount of wood produces 3 mugs, a barrel, a bed, a floor, a piece of charcoal; and so on. You get the idea.

So even though it has been discussed before, I want to express my opinion as a player that I feel this added complexity will add a lot to the game. I think managing jobs and resources and workshops and such is one of the finest parts of dwarf fortress, and the more complex it gets, the better.

I also want to express my frustration at the current inefficiency of fuel harvesting . I understand that a lot of the challenge is managing without them, but I think that because of the way resources appear in the game, it's a little too widespread. Every map is a desert when it comes to the amount of wood you need for all the various tasks. Coal is very, very scarce, even when present. I think it's reasonable to expect that if you decide to embark on an arctic glacier with no coal underneath, then you've got no resources, so have at it, hoss, but if you embark in a forested mountain, you should not have to worry about fuel or lumber. Yes there's magma, but magma should be a nice benefit, a nice surprise that you earn, not something you absolutely need in order to not be waiting around for your metal industry to kick off. Fuel is too essential.

My ideas about this are tempered by these two ideas:

1. To a certain extent it will never be perfect.
2. Toady knows. Improvements will come bit by bit as he gets to them.

That being said, I want to outline a couple of the key problems which cause an unnatural shortage of wood to use, paired with ideas for solutions. I'm not saying these are original. Just pointing out my thought process.

1. Problem: Dwarves are limited to an unrealistically small sphere of activity. Solution: Offsite lumber. This could mean A) Caravans provide more. B) Offsite expeditions to other forests. B is the more realistic option. I live in the American desert, where many forts were actually built with wood. Loggers would go up into the mountains and bring wood back down to the barren sites they had chosen to fortify.

I'm positive caravan loads have been discussed before, and I know for a fact that Toady has mentioned that offsite expeditions for resources are on the table, what with his goal of having your fortress exert influence on the rest of the map. So, next:

2. Problem: Dwarves like mountainy things, like ores and gems and magma, but mountain biomes in the game are excessively bare. Solution: Trees grow in huge forests on most mountains. Consider that statement both a suggestion and a citation to the natural state of things to back it up. Don't know if anyone has suggested this before, but I didn't check. Seems like a simple idea, though.

3. Problem: The yield of wood per tree is kind of arbitrary, and use of logs seems bizarrely inefficient. Solution: Have trees produce more wood, have sawmill workshops that produce a certain amount of planks, etc, etc. These ideas, or systems of ideas, have been discussed a billion times, so I won't dwell on this aspect of the issue.

4. Problem: When wood is present in a biome, it occurs in unrealistically sparse quantities. I think this is a key issue that rarely gets discussed or dealt with. I feel that this is just an important a point as logs not producing a realistic amount of wood: real forests have more trees in them than is represented in Dwarf Fortress. Efficiency is a real issue, but on top of that: there simply aren't enough trees. This has also bugged me about similar resource management games like Warcraft II and Settlers II: if you're using an axe, and you're building on such a small scale, you can't just mow down entire forests. Forests, in the right climate, are pretty large and can provide a lot of logs. More than dwarves need, even if using the wood is as inefficient as it is now.

Tree farms, as helpful as they are in real life, don't seem like a real solution for a 10 year fortress. It can take decades for trees to grow.

So here is my solution, one that I haven't seen anywhere else: instead of having only individual tree tiles on maps, have forest or grove tiles containing a certain amount of trees.

And rather than cluttering the map with more tree tiles, why not have forest, grove or thicket tiles that contain more trees? I imagine these tiles would behave similar to the game's existing water tiles. You would have a grove tile with 7/7 trees, or 3/7 trees. Trees as they are now would be 1/7 trees. You could make it more complex, with slimmer trees, like Aspens, making up 20/20 tiles, and bigger trees like Oaks being 1/2, or maybe needing to be solitary trees. But I don't need to get into that.

So if there's a tile with multiple trees on it, a woodcutter would go up, chop away for however long he needs to, and produce a wood unit on the tile he stands on or nearby, with the forest tile remaining where it is.

In addition, these tiles, rather than popping up alone like trees do now, could appear just like ores, stones and gems: in small and large clusters, in variously shaped "veins," or even a large "layer" in forest biomes. This would add another realistic challenge: needing your woodcutting industry to be up and running and dead serious in order to cut a path to the edge of the map, if you're in a forest or swamp biome.

To balance this out, trees would need to grow much more slowly.

As a final note, of course this could be applied to ores and stone as well, with your miners pulling out a single chunk of, say, magnetite, leaving 6/7 chunks left in the wall. And coal could appear as a layer, or in larger clusters. But that's for another thread.

All of the numbered problems/solutions I posted are relevant to the issue. Just wanted to add the fourth one there. And of course spark discussion on how relevant this issue is in the first place. That is, do others agree that complexity of the industry tree is a more satisfying challenge than dealing with scarcity and sitting on your ass(which, to be fair, has its moments, too)? Or do others feel that the frustration in not having the right resources is in all or most cases due to carelessness, and you just need to deal with it and/or choose a different biome if you're not up to the challenge?

[lucusLoC]

1 through 3 sound good, and yes they have been discussed at length before.

i have a real issue with number 4, as it actually moves us further away from multi-tile trees. we really need milti-tile trees for the elves, and while there could easily be a "gather twigs" job from a tree r branch tile when a woodcutter cuts a wood tile it should remove the wood tile and produce x amount of wood.

multi-tile trees would also solve your "forests are not dense enough" problem because it would give some real scale to the trees, and you would feel more like you are walking between and under them, rather than around them. not to mention there would be a tone of wood per tree, and you  you would be able to harvest some of it without killing the whole tree. wood would be replenished slowly as the tree added new wood tiles as it grows.

remember, a fort is not supposed to be covering a vast tract of land, it is really only a local city, so it wold not encompass a huge forest. it is quite easy to deforest a village to small city amount of land.

i do think individual coal tile should yield more coal. maybe 10-20 units per tile? the same can be said with a gem tile. and i love the idea of a coal layer. that seems far more true to life, and would make coal a valuable export.

[silhouette]

Tree farms, as helpful as they are in real life, don't seem like a real solution for a 10 year fortress. It can take decades for trees to grow.

Depends on the tree/ mushroom type it is.
Trees in dwarf fortress are special in that they are influenced by the elves to grow faster.

Also i like the grove idea, but not for ALL types of trees.
Some trees will inhabit a tile by themselves (maybe in future versions where things can go in more than 1 tile other than wagons, they may grow to occupy more aswell) and some fairly small trees that can grow in the same tile.

Also dwarfs waste rescources as they cut it out of the rock instead of chipping off a peice and carving it out of that.
Think of it as making a statue, but instead of the end product being a statue its a (whatever you ordered to be done here).
Basically meaning they chip parts off till they get the shape they want, dito with wood.,

[jfs]

Re. 2:
Does the game yet simulate rainfall limits on mountains and otherwise tree-lines?
The further up a mountain you get, the less rainfall there has been during history, and the thinner the soil layers should be, but there should still be some soil layers as long as there aren't steep cliffs. (A simple solution might be, for each aboveground tile, determine by its elevation how much rain it receives and produce soil layers below it based on that.)


As for the rest, yes chopping down trees should produce huge logs that need to be processed into stacks of planks, or chunks for crafting, as well as a stack of branches usable for other stuff, like firewood/charcoal production. Digging out rock should produce stacks of rock and minerals.
Digging out a rock should always produce the same amount of material, unlike now where the skill of the miner determines how likely it is that a rock items is produced, but rather the quality of the rock/mineral/gem stack should be determined by the miner's skill. Like, a poor miner might produce some gravel that isn't useful for much beyond perhaps cement production, if that ever gets in, while better miners could produce larger rocks useful for crafting and blocks.
(I guess all of this has been discussed before.)

[Derakon]

JFS: currently, anything about 300 elevation is mountainous and completely devoid of plant life; anything below 300 and above 100 (?) elevation can have any non-ocean biome, and anything below 100 (?) is ocean. At least, that's my observations. I tend to create a lot of worlds where the entire world's elevation is in the 290-305 range; realistically speaking, that should be identical to a world where the entire world's elevation is in the 200-215 range, or the 000-015 range.