Gzoker, I disagree with your thoughts on farming:
> A few of my thoughts after [...] three beers:
Not a good sign.
> salvage or junk ->(in an easily buildable workshop) = something useful (like cheap silk for moods);
> salvage or junk ->(specialized workshop) = better, higher value items;
Personally I'm fine with salvage yard sorting through all the salvage, then workbench and supply depot taking care of the chests. I'd rather not have trier 2 upgrades to those, with better chance of good stuff. Sorting things and opening crates are pretty low tech, with not much room for improvement anyway.
There is no way to reduce meat production from an animal; it is calculated automatically from it's size and body plan. For me, all the loose organs from butchering something are even worse.
> Back on food. Its place in the food chain is the most important aspect of a wasteland pony's life.
That may be, but we don't play as Wastelander civilisation and Stable Ponies have experience in underground sustainable food (apple?) production. Getting plants to produce seeds is not even that hard IRL. (Well, depending on the plant and if it was modified to not produce usable seeds to protect the interests of companies who patented life itself, but any such plants would extinct anyway.) There were some farms in the wasteland, just not as good as what Master Red Eye was building. I rely on caravans early on, but eventually SR ambushes start showing up, so I may be cut off from caravans for years. I don't also see a way of deciding who eats first that wouldn't involve lots of micro-management.
For me the farming nerf from increased growing times was enough. I had pretty big farms of synth reed in my stables and didn't drown in it.
I don't want my stable to starve; I prefer to focus on other areas. I would also rather have my ponies farm than rely heavily on fishing, eggs, butchering / hunting and plant gathering.
As for abundance of salvage and it regrowing: It is something of a problem, but I mostly just get low quality salvage for the scrap metal anyway. Regrowing is rather slow too, unless you make a big "underground tree farm", which is pretty much the only (and totally player-controlled) way of making salvage more abundant / overpowered than it has to be and "breaking the game".
An alternative to trees would be to have low quality salvage or scrap ore as ore veins in sedimentary layers, while medium and high quality salvage be gems in that ore. This would make them finite, but:
* Less reliable and more random: Does this set of "Shallow metals" contain salvage or just copper? Trees at least guarantee that you'll find salvage. You can see the amount of trees in embark screen and more always grow in the caverns.
* Exploratory mining is less !fun! than cutting down trees under a constant threat of an ambush.
> Water purifier and less alcohol.
There are already workshops that fill buckets with water. I don't even know if you can fill a barrel with water and have ponies drink from it. If purifiers worked by pretending that water is alcohol, we would just end up with more alcohol and absurdities, like converting purified water into biofuel. There is only so much modders can do with DF food and drink system and I think it is as good as it gets now. I didn't even manage to accumulate 5k drinks in Ponderplanned, like I usually do in DF.
> In every fallout game and the FOE novels the only resource is salvage.
False. Fallout has farms. Fallout 2 has a Uranium mine. FNV has a concrete factory at Quary Junction. Gun Runners produce guns and ammo. Humanity is building again. There is salvaging, but there is also production. In FoE novel New Appleloosa exports apples and apple products. Red Eye has factories. Enclave has cloud farming. I think this is enough examples.
> Red Eye doesn't count.
Why, because he contradicts your false theories?
Besides, I want my Stable to become a shining beacon of hope for the future. I want to pretend my Overmare is like Master Red Eye. Though on second thought, I keep all the good stuff to myself and don't export it.
Just a though: I'd like chemistry reactions to have one product only. That way I can decide if I want to convert biofuel into synthetic fibre, plastics, coal or explosives. This isn't very realistic, as chemical plants often have some by-products, but game-wise if we want mostly plastics or mostly fibre, we would end up with some stuff that we don't really want accumulating in our stockpiles.
One good use for plastic, apart from crafts, is plastic furniture. That way, if the plastic production is efficient enough, we won't have to waste so much stone on furniture and can use more for rock grinding.
I'm wondering if the plants for drugs should be farmable or just plant gatherable. Probably farmable.
If plants->ash won't work, then what about transmuting plants into wood by Unicorns, using Woodcrafting skill, as was in Nikodeng's pony mod via the "wood painting workshop"? It was pretty overpowered in that mod, but we get less harvest anyway.
If you'd like more variety from vegetable cans, here's what you can do:
Open "reaction_kitchen'txt" and in OPEN_CAN_VEGETABLE replace
[PRODUCT:100:3:PLANT:NONE:PLANT_MAT:CELERY:STRUCTURAL]
with
[PRODUCT:50:3:PLANT:NONE:PLANT_MAT:CELERY:STRUCTURAL]
[PRODUCT:50:3:PLANT:NONE:PLANT_MAT:ROOT_CARROT:STRUCTURAL]
[PRODUCT:50:3:PLANT:NONE:PLANT_MAT:ROOT_RADISH:STRUCTURAL]
On average this produces 4.5 plants per can (which I imagine as a crate of cans rather than a single one), is always less efficient than military ratios and has a chance to produce nothing at all (cans were spoiled).
The Linux 098c version is here:
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/71287918/FoE_linux_098c.7z I updated my post about it is here:
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=118893.msg3976877#msg3976877 This is the best I can do at this point.