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[carkaton]

I would like to see a world where embarking to an area would serve some purpose, where the resources/conditions warrant going.  As it is now, wherever you go, if you can dig down, you'll have access to (usually) at least bronze strength weaponry/armor, usually gold and lots of it and if you went to a sedimentary rock area steel is all but guaranteed.  I'm not even going to get into spoiler metal being everywhere.  Food is growable everywhere with freshwater, and in a tiny space.  This means every fort can be easily self sufficient, and caravans become meaningless past the first year unless you are intentionally challenging yourself with restrictions or need wood because of your biome. 

I'd like to see the opposite, where you embark to a location that has a couple metals/stones/fertile underground region, provided by some sort of prospecting data, and you export it in raw or refined fashion. 

-If a resource shows up on the prospecter, you can be assured that it is in abundance, that you can plan on exporting a lot of it, but everything not listed will be scarce to non-existent. 

-The value between raw and finished goods is way out of whack vs the amount of dwarf hours needed at each stage.  Lets say you are making a gold flask.  You have to find the gold, at which point you have to haul it to a stockpile, smelt it, and then finally forge it into the item you want.  The last step takes roughly the same amount of time as the smelting step, and usually much less time than finding and hauling it, yet it is the only step that adds value to the item. 

-I'd like to see some stones be worthless as far as crafting and furniture making go.  Let everything be able to be turned into blocks and constructions and be able to be thrown out of a catapult, but only certain rocks like jet or marble or whatever be valuable for trade goods.

-Farming is much more difficult, for example it needs to be done in soil(or if on rock a massive fertilization project would need to take place), the type of soil would affect yield, and that it would take much more land, if not labor, to get comparable yields. 

-Obviously this would apply to other industries as well, only particular spiders in particular areas lay industrial quality silk, certain weather/soil conditions permit plant cloth, certain forests give higher quality wood.

Obviously there are some reasons as to why this would suck, particularly concerning food.  If your fort is being sieged and you miss a couple caravans and are dependent on food because you can't grow anything worth a damn where you are at, you die.  Although I'd like to hear from anyone their thoughts on me trying to start a project like this that is more trade based, my main question here is....

Are the changes I'd like to mod even moddable?  I'll look into modding guides, but before I delve too far in, I just wanted to ask the community who has much more experience than I if these ideas are even possible to change.

[3]

I'm making similar changes to the game for something that I hope will come to fruition as a total conversion at some point in the future. I remember some large-scale 40d mods which set basic stones to value multiplier 0, stopping the player from just making tens of thousands of rock crafts every time they wanted to trade for something. The farming issue is... sort of diluted due to .31's "requires water everywhere" bug (of course, in 40d, the issue was a lot worse), but plant growth time in particular could do with some tweaking (and I'm certain a few large mods already do this). Nearly everything (trees, stone, creatures) can have the FREQUENCY tag applied to it, making for an easy way to tackle resource abundance.

Getting more in-depth... one might want to create a multi-stage reaction process for creating "trade good" items (say, alternatives to the standard crafts, which can be removed from the dwarf entity file) which appear made out of a valuble material which otherwise doesn't exist in the world (it could be called "well-crafted" or something, I don't know). This, combined with more resource scarcity, a nerfing of the base value of standard materials, and the aformentioned removal of other overused trade items, might lead to the right sort of thing. The issue with this approach is that the product essentially ignores dwarf skill levels... but if you make the process long enough, skill will still matter as it'll affect the time it takes for each stage to be completed (if I'm not mistaken).

Edit: Also, on the food issue: it's not necessary to rely on farming. The old (well, newer) Dark Dwarves mod (of which I was/am an avid fan) contained reactions which processed animal chunks into plants which could then be brewed. Hence, no need for farming. If butchery is also a bit too effective, then adjusting individual growth pace and rates can put an end to that. But that'd be a pretty big job to get perfectly right.

[existent]

In my LotR mod, the dwarven civilizations have no access to farming whatsoever. They're entirely dependent on butchery/hunting/trade.

[Captain Mayday]

In my Legendary Lands mod, this is one item on my agenda.

[Shaostoul]

Well, for starters, the whole stone/gem/metal thing is the way it is, because I believe Toady more or less maxed the frequency of everything, except for the most rare of gems, like star rubies. I typically change all the common, (layer and large chunk stones) to value zero. I felt it was cheating to be able to mine out large areas and be rich. A good start would be for someone to go through and mod all the inorganic frequencies.

About the making reactions to make items, I believe that items now get item levels from custom reactions. So it's a viable method, you would however rend a lot of hard coded shops useless. You also can not mod them out. So this could work if someone felt like spending the time.

The values I believe you can not mod. I think they are hard coded values.

.31 farming is a bit more difficult now. It seems everything needs to be muddied. This makes some sense and then doesn't make any. I would like to point out that actual farms and irrigation changed the amount of food people got when they started doing it... not just a little bit, but drastically. Too many underground plants can be a problem because it offers all kinds of alternative foods that can be grown any where. Underground temperature is 10015 always.

Above ground temperature and farming is what gets tricky. You could start getting really specific and adding values to plants which would out right kill them if you try to grow them up there. The seeds or the grown plant, I'm not sure which would be easier.

I believe silk is all the same strength, I could be wrong... but yeah. It will just be easier to farm from some things than others.

So in short...

FREQUENCIES - Lower the frequency of any non-layer stone, gems, metals.
TEMPERATURE - The values at which plants will die, so they just can't survive at certain areas. You would be dealing with very specific values and such and could be painstakingly hard to implement.
VALUES - You can mod near every stones value to zero. Lowering the rest to low values would probably be a good idea as well. Like not exceeding value 5 or 10 for example. You can mod values of trees to zero if you felt so inclined or you could make their value very high, so if you are some where without wood or with scarce wood, it would take a lot to be able to just buy one log.

It's all how much time you are willing to spend to mod all of this. I wouldn't call it a conversion mod, I wouldn't add stuff to it. I would make a version the just mods the present version of DF vanilla.

I just don't have the drive or time to work on something that extensive right now.