I'm surprised there was only
one post on GROWDUR missing completely, so far. I've been modding all my crops to have 3-season growdurs (for game balance, since food production is so easy) and all 4 season tags to simulate winter wheat etc. The idea is to plant each field only once per year and that the growth time is longer (3 seasons so there's 1 season to harvest/plant in). With all these new varieties, it would be better to organize winter varieties as a new crops too, though, if/when seasonality data is incorporated.
I was wondering about how will seeds, e.g. the new grains work? Does milling still produce a seed, or do you actually (realistically) mill the seeds for flour, and have to keep some to be able to plant the next crop? ... but then I noticed the comments in the raws:
*** ear is threshed to spikelets, milled down to flour
So apparently threshing will get more use. I guess it's still open whether it's the threshing or milling phase that will "produce" the seed stock for the next crop cycle. The first would be more realistic IMO (the most realistic being that there wouldn't be separate "seeds" and "grains"), but it's still an improvement regardless.
Another observation related to seeds/the new plants is that most new trees have GROWTH_HAS_SEED in the fruit growth; the exceptions have [GROWTH:SEED] or [GROWTH:NUT] sections, i.e. the final growth is just the seed or nut without any separate fruit around it. No crops have growths referring to seed production, so I guess they still produce seeds in the traditional manner, i.e. when eaten raw(?!), brewing or threshing (see above). An acceptable abstractions that dwarves never use up all the grains, I guess... unless they're cooking. However, many garden plants, e.g. artichokes, beets and cabbages are still missing any indication (that I can see) about where their seeds will appear from. Possibly if the last GROWTH is FLOWERS, then after the GROWTH_TIMING on the flower ends (120k unnamed units it'll automatically produce a seed. I'd guess the units are ticks, since that would mean a fairly reasonable 0.3 years, with some extra time (until 200k) to harvest FRUITs, PODs etc., which apparently usually drop off after their GROWTH_TIMING ends. And presumably they rot or potentially freeze after that. Apparently tubers are not growths, but instead are the structural plant part, much like all crops are now.
Edit: This post originally (when first writing/before this edit) had 2 greened questions, but I reread Toady's update and he mentions he's still missing some variables, so I'm going to assume that either that's what's going on in the garden/crop files, or that my speculation regarding crop seed and garden plants' flowers is close to the truth . So I did a bit of a fairly extensive rewrite to the post so it's more about my observations on the raws.P.S. I also just realized that I hope there will be some improvement to the planting interface on farm plots, or that list is going to be loooong especially with crops, potentially also with gardens (assuming they'll have a different "building", but be otherwise similar). 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.
P.P.S. Hemp with raw+cooked -edible seeds, seed paste, press cakes, oil, flour (TIL this), and thread-processable leaves! One-stop shopping for all your (non-booze) farming needs.