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[smjjames]

Some of the crops are actually rootcrops or are tubers, carrot being one example, there are potatoes, and beets are a rootcrop as well. The seeds just aren't in the edible portion itself.

There is a good deal of uncompleted raws, for example, he has all of the new wood types the same color as that hasn't been researched

[wierd]

In the same vein, "polishing" grain for things like sake' should some day make an appearance. The polishing process is not optional for clear, pure sake. It removes many undesirable sheath proteins and fatty acids from the outer skin of the rice grain, which improves the flavor and clarity of the finished sake.

That is definately a job for a miller.

[LordBaal]

Darn now I hunger for warm sake and sushi, thanks a lot wierd.

[KillerClowns]

Two questions.

With the sheer number of new mundane crops overcrowding them, alignment-related plants (sun berries, sliver barbs, glumprongs, feather trees) threaten to become obscenely rare. Are there any plans to give alignment crops priority and/or expand the number of alignment crops that exist to increase the odds of getting something fantastic while embarking in such unusual areas?

To what extent will odors respect obstacles? Can you smell a creature that has a wall between you and it, provided there is open air above? And conversely, will it be possible to smell a creature on the other side of a solid wall with no gap for the odor to flow through? (I ask because dwarves panicking due to smelling creatures on the other side of a solid seal seems like a Day 1 bug waiting to happen.)

[Manveru Taurënér]

Two questions.

With the sheer number of new mundane crops overcrowding them, alignment-related plants (sun berries, sliver barbs, glumprongs, feather trees) threaten to become obscenely rare. Are there any plans to give alignment crops priority and/or expand the number of alignment crops that exist to increase the odds of getting something fantastic while embarking in such unusual areas?
...

This was answered to some extent in the last FotF reply. At first glance the answer might be mistakenly assumed to not include the non-alignment plants, but the bolded part makes it quite clear.

Now that we have real world fruits, etc, what will happen to the other ones (aside from the underground crops) which were basically analogs to real world crops? Like will bloated tubers become potatoes or something?

That's an open question.  My thought was to scrap them, since the real-world ones are more interesting and I want to use that stronger diverse base of mechanics and potential mechanics as a place to generate random ones from eventually.  Generated plants can have more intricate ties to generated mythology than the made-up plants without constraining the game, I think, and it allows for more possibilities (and our made-up plants are crappy enough that they could all have easily been generated without decreasing the quality at all...).

All the same, they could end up dying a slow lingering death instead, and some might survive indefinitely.'

Since we'll be getting sphere biomes instead of the current evil/good ones at some point, I'm assuming we'll then see a random assortment of sphere+plant with magical effects corresponding to the sphere. I agree we wouldn't really lose anything by removing the current premade ones, and some of them could end up being replicated to the letter with a procedural. You just might have to settle for sun fruit/nuts/bulbs/tubers/wines/leaves/etc in some worlds over the current berries (and it could easily be set so that sun plants always produce sunshine liquor as well)

As for the rarity, I don't see how they'd be overcrowded in the places they actually grow. It's not like all crops will grow wild in every biome, some of them might not even grow wild at all. Outside the magical places they grow though they obviously should be rare, to give an incentive to actually settle the place.

[Footkerchief]

^^^ That also addresses this question:

Toady, you implied that the new realistic plants will replace the old ones in the upcoming version. Will that include unusual plants like sun berries and silver barbs, that don't really have a real life equivalent? 

[catenate]

E.g. a filter to only show plants which you have seeds of, or only plants that are capable of growing in that biome/season.

I think that the list of plants for outside plots already filters by biome.  My current fort is half one biome and half another (I forget which ones at the moment), and I can only plant whip vine seeds (or, actually, any outdoor plants at all) in surface farm plots in what looks like one of the biomes.  There could of course be another cause I'm missing.

[Snaake]

E.g. a filter to only show plants which you have seeds of, or only plants that are capable of growing in that biome/season.

I think that the list of plants for outside plots already filters by biome.  My current fort is half one biome and half another (I forget which ones at the moment), and I can only plant whip vine seeds (or, actually, any outdoor plants at all) in surface farm plots in what looks like one of the biomes.  There could of course be another cause I'm missing.

I didn't know that it filters already, if it does, possibly since all farmable (have seeds) surface plants are just NOT_FREEZING and either DRY or WET, so it's rare to see the filter at work. Actually, it should only filter out whip vine/sliver barb/sun berry if you're not in a savage/evil/good biome, so it seems like you may have a mod that you've forgotten about? Since whip vine is [DRY][SAVAGE][BIOME:NOT_FREEZING], if you can plant whip vine, you should be able to plant all the other DRY plants too, since the lack of a SAVAGE tag is not the same as a NOT_SAVAGE tag AFAIK.

On another look, the new plant_crops.txt does improve things in that several plants are restricted to e.g. dry tropical savanna and/or grassland, and 1 each to dry tropical broadleaf forest and any tropical wetland (buckwheat and papyrus respectively). However, the majority still fall into either any_temperate, any_tropical, or not_freezing, and so as an extreme example, if you have a (fairly easy to find) embark with tropical savanna and tropical grassland, you'd have 23 possible crops by my count. Temperate climates get 14 crops, and non-tropical/temperate, NOT_FREEZING climates (taiga+tundra?) get 4: barley, alfalfa, rye and red spinach. Currently there are 8 farmable non-alignment surface crops. So most of the time there's going to be a significantly higher amount of crops.

I'm hopeful that at least garden plants will be in a separate list due to possibly being planted in garden plots instead of farm plots, but we'll see.

Interesting observations on garden plant biomes: caper bushes can grow in any desert or grassland; lentils and potatos in not_freezing; cranberries, bilberries and blueberries in any temperate, tundra and taiga.
Notes on tree biomes: the first 75% of the file are all tropical trees, with desert lime the only exception to any_tropical; the rest (from almonds) are any_temperate, with only bayberries as any_temperate+taiga. Another interesting fact is that they're only max trunk height 1, too, but might have heavy branches around them, so apparently they're a heavy, bushy sort of tree. For comparison, other max trunk heights range from 2-8, with 3, 2, 5 and 8 being fairly common (in that order).

[Orange Wizard]

Unless it's a mountain.

You can't plant ANY aboveground crops on a mountain.

[Snaake]

Unless it's a mountain.

You can't plant ANY aboveground crops on a mountain.

True, but at least if you're referring to the whip vine case, those shouldn't be possible on mountains either, so the filter still wouldn't be working properly, and/or he has modded plants.

[Zavvnao]

Maybe some original plants Toady made up should stay in the game?

[MrWiggles]

Maybe some original plants Toady made up should stay in the game?

zznone of the fictional plants ae leaving aytme soon. Not even DF soon.

[Graebeard]

Toady,

How do you feel about the increasingly significant role open source software is coming to play in the DF galaxy?  Have you considered making things easier for third party developers?

There's an interesting comparison here to Android.  Android is open source at its core, but more an more core functionality is migrating to closed source ancillary components.  The opposite seems true of DF: DF is closed source at its core (which decision is not the subject of this question) but ancillary components like DFHack, Stonesense, Overseer, Dwarf Therapist, Lazy Newb Paxen (OSS?), and more recent work I'm unfamiliar with are explicitly or defacto open source.

Is this a state of affairs you approve of?  Tolerate?  Wish were different?  Does this balance of closed and open source provide for optimal creative control and third party collaboration?  Have you given any thought to making third party interfaces with core DF easier?

[PeridexisErrant]

Lazy Newb Paxen (OSS?)

This one's kinda interesting - the LNP GUI is definitely FOSS (GPL3 iirc); all the configuration/collection that goes into the packs is similarly open; and we just sorta assume that for the bits that are unclear we can redistribute it. 

I'm pretty sure that the most potentially-problematic part is that DF can be redistributed if none of the accompanying files are modified, and the pack has different init settings and Phoebus graphics installed by default.  An argument can be made that this is not unusual or in the latter case replacing instead of changing the files... but it's potentially dodgy. 

Is this kind of change a problem?

[Footkerchief]

How do you feel about the increasingly significant role open source software is coming to play in the DF galaxy?  Have you considered making things easier for third party developers?

Toady has made several extensive posts on the topic.  They're some years old, but still very relevant:
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=21806.msg237594#msg237594
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=21806.msg238694#msg238694