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[flabort]

whoof--- Durian wine? Yeowza.

I guess that's one way to keep the elven diplomats away... The smell would be horrendous!

I have long wondered, for the purposes of making a novelty drink, what the market for such items as wine brewed from durians, jalepenoes, and/or green coffee would be like.

I have one friend at work who said they'd try the durian wine, but asked what a durian was after. The mention of the jalepeno wine brought on a story of when he distilled some sugar water in chem class (Because anything sweetened can be fermented or distilled) and shared it with his friends, and it apparently didn't end well. I haven't mentioned the coffee wine yet.

[zwei]

I dont know whether it was answered and asked before, but

I did not find preexisting "fantasy" plants in new raw - for example longland grass or rope reed. Where they phased out in favor of real species?

[Manveru Taurënér]

I dont know whether it was answered and asked before, but

I did not find preexisting "fantasy" plants in new raw - for example longland grass or rope reed. Where they phased out in favor of real species?

This was asked and answered in the last set of Q&A. They aren't gone yet, but will likely disappear eventually to be replaced by randomly generated plants.

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.

[wierd]

The fictional plants just need a little love, IMHO.

The above quote is mostly about the "McNugget" like feel they have, which is mostly caused by their not having been refined and purified as ideas.

Natural plants have this refinement built in-- Things like the mythological silliness behind mandrake roots, et al.

Toady is busy bashing his brains in on logic problems, loop execution optimisations, bug hunting, etc. All too often, this precludes taking time to sit and daydream about fantastical components of his game.

I suspect that it is this time constraint issue in regard to spending the time to refine the fantastical elements into beautifully complex abstractions on which "cultural" things can hang that is the real motivator for him to scrap them.

Personally, I think things like plump helmets, sunberries, and such already HAVE cultural significance--- They have significance here in our forum community. We have each tried to envision these plants as best we could from the limited information available, and a wealth of community stories have been crafted, (of various levels of quality, which I wont elaborate on) which when taken together, could be used to flesh out these crops, if one were to take the time to do so.

At the end of the day though, it is toady at the wheel. If toady decides to axe sunberries and pals, I fully expect the mod community to do the fleshing, just because of this community cultural growth those crops have produced.

There aren't that many of these "original plants", after all.  The new raw structure has been (mostly) finalized for herbaceous plants. Some real-world biome evaluation for plant morphology and some inventiveness, and we can have a new-raws compliant "original plants" mod. Probably a great many to pick from.

Who knows, if the community distilled versions are of good enough quality, toady might decide to incorporate them.  Again, I think the real issue is the time and energy needed for that distillation and refinement.

[Knight Otu]

I dont know whether it was answered and asked before, but

I did not find preexisting "fantasy" plants in new raw - for example longland grass or rope reed. Where they phased out in favor of real species?

Also note that those raws are new files. The old plants would continue to reside in their old files, plant_standard and plant_grasses.

[Manveru Taurënér]

The fictional plants just need a little love, IMHO.

The above quote is mostly about the "McNugget" like feel they have, which is mostly caused by their not having been refined and purified as ideas.

Natural plants have this refinement built in-- Things like the mythological silliness behind mandrake roots, et al.

Toady is busy bashing his brains in on logic problems, loop execution optimisations, bug hunting, etc. All too often, this precludes taking time to sit and daydream about fantastical components of his game.

I suspect that it is this time constraint issue in regard to spending the time to refine the fantastical elements into beautifully complex abstractions on which "cultural" things can hang that is the real motivator for him to scrap them.

Personally, I think things like plump helmets, sunberries, and such already HAVE cultural significance--- They have significance here in our forum community. We have each tried to envision these plants as best we could from the limited information available, and a wealth of community stories have been crafted, (of various levels of quality, which I wont elaborate on) which when taken together, could be used to flesh out these crops, if one were to take the time to do so.

At the end of the day though, it is toady at the wheel. If toady decides to axe sunberries and pals, I fully expect the mod community to do the fleshing, just because of this community cultural growth those crops have produced.

There aren't that many of these "original plants", after all.  The new raw structure has been (mostly) finalized for herbaceous plants. Some real-world biome evaluation for plant morphology and some inventiveness, and we can have a new-raws compliant "original plants" mod. Probably a great many to pick from.

Who knows, if the community distilled versions are of good enough quality, toady might decide to incorporate them.  Again, I think the real issue is the time and energy needed for that distillation and refinement.

I don't think time constraints have much to do with it really. It's fairly obvious looking at Toady's approach to much of the game as well as his answers in the DFtalks etc that he has a really big thing for procedurally generated content and much prefer that over premade stock fantasy. While there has to be some stock features to help ground the whole thing and not make it all a big confusing random mess I'd say a good balance has been struck so far at least.

The underground plants at least seems to sit fairly safe, as they should, and they're really the ones with most of any cultural value so far. Sun berries might be attributed some sure, but the rest? They really don't add much more than an unfamiliar name. Setting up a simple system to throw in a reasonable amount of random plants to take their place, possibly with a few minor magical effects to spice them up definitely sounds like a better idea to me.

[smjjames]

Sun berries at least have their association with the elves and being the best brew around. They also have a hint of magical properties that could be expanded on later.

Probably the only made up surface plant that would stay (aside from the trees) are sun berries.

Maybe late on when we have light sources, sun berry oil could be an ingredient in some sort of light producing substance. Though bioluminescent fungi would be more likely.

[wierd]

For 100% procedural generation plants, making/defining a small set of parameters to apply for the biome type, based on statistical distributions of realworld plant morphologies could work-- (EG, "70% of realworld desert plants are of X morphology, 10% of Y, 5% of Z, 5% of A, 2% of B, and 3% of C"-- then have the computer pick a classification for basic morphology type based on target biome, then based on this initial decision, pick some other features, again based on statistical spreads-- EG, Some percentage of type Y morphology has Q type flowers, which would define # of seeds produced, etc.)

Applying that to the "original plants" would make a good trial and testcase for the procedural generator's quality.

Total scrapping of those crops just seems kinda wasteful; they could be useful as testbeds for a procedural generator.

[Manveru Taurënér]

Sun berries at least have their association with the elves and being the best brew around. They also have a hint of magical properties that could be expanded on later.

Probably the only made up surface plant that would stay (aside from the trees) are sun berries.

Maybe late on when we have light sources, sun berry oil could be an ingredient in some sort of light producing substance. Though bioluminescent fungi would be more likely.

Yeah, but one could just as well have the game create a suitable random replacement to grow in the type of biomes elves like to settle. If one necessarily wanted to preserve the light aspect to it one could just have it create a sun/moon/glow/etc berry/fruit/root/etc equivalent

[smjjames]

True. Another way to make them more 'real' is to give them latinized names, but it's really difficult for a RNG to give a beliveable latin name and I doubt Toady One has the time or desire to teach DF how to properly use latin.

Then again, the latin names aren't going to show up ingame.

[Inarius]

I'm not sure of that.

Look at the way "Game of Species" produce name of species.
There are two genders for the name of plants, and the adjective follows the gender of the name.

with some luck, you should even give regional names to your plants


Cassida Carnosa should be the best name for Plump Helmet.

[CaptainArchmage]

Sun berries at least have their association with the elves and being the best brew around. They also have a hint of magical properties that could be expanded on later.

Probably the only made up surface plant that would stay (aside from the trees) are sun berries.

Maybe late on when we have light sources, sun berry oil could be an ingredient in some sort of light producing substance. Though bioluminescent fungi would be more likely.

Looking through the list, all the current surface plants have some kind of strong community association; I don’t really see any need for them to go. Kobold bulbs, for example, produce gnomeblight and that’s something which may be useful in the future. Muck roots produce swamp whisky, which Major Failure liked in Boatmurdered.

A lot of the “new" plants were included by modders, though this time they are more complex since Toady has added plant anatomy. That they are now official means pretty much everyone will have them if they play DF2014, unless of course players mod them out.

Also, few days, no devlog update.

Has the dictionary been updated at all for the coming release?

If it has, we’ll need a new mod to restore the words removed since DF2012.

[smjjames]

I'm not sure of that.

Look at the way "Game of Species" produce name of species.
There are two genders for the name of plants, and the adjective follows the gender of the name.

with some luck, you should even give regional names to your plants


Cassida Carnosa should be the best name for Plump Helmet.

You mean this place right? http://www.speciesgame.com/ The thing is that the latin name isn't likely to be shown ingame.

Also, two genders for the species name of plants? I'm confused here and suspect a slight language barrier in getting what you're trying to say accross. That and I'm not familiar with the latin naming procedure for plants.

[wierd]

Latin has gendered nouns and gendered verbs, similar to spanish (which inherited them from latin).

EG, "Latino" vs "Latina", where former is masculine, and latter is feminine.

Proper combinatorics for the gender of the names is important to conserve.

[DeKaFu]

It should be noted, in the real world, "latin" names (actually binomial names) are actually a hodgepodge of latin, greek, star wars references and stuff that doesn't actually correctly translate to anything because the person who named it wasn't very good at any of the above.