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[taptap]

Is there any chance that water will be required to produce booze at one time. Small change in the code, huge change in gameplay. As is lack of water is merely an inconvenience - potentially killing your more injured military dwarves, but if you use traps etc. instead water isn't so necessary at all.

[Cobbler89]

I think this has been discussed before somewhere -- the gist is that in real life water is used for some brewing and not others, and you'd be surprised how much is done with little to no water. Done realistically it'd probably add something, but not so much a flat out restriction (which would be just plain annoying anyway) as a nuance to which types of alcohol you can brew/distill in your circumstances. (That may have been where it came up before, discussion of distilling.)

[Descan]

I think the better question is, will we ever need water for farms? I mean, now we need them to make farming on stone possible, but otherwise we can just farm on soil and not have a caaaare in the world!

[Cobbler89]

I think that should depend on the frequency of rain -- like, soil/mud tiles have a dryness factor and beyond a certain limit their crop yield starts reducing till eventually it can't grow a thing (and, if mud, flakes up and disappears without deliberate cleaning!), but so much as one rainstorm will keep outdoor soil from crossing that threshold for a season; then droughts would have an effect, too (and without needing to have droughts deliberately modeled -- they are, as in real life, simply lack of rain).

ETA: I do think that for lack of rain any form of irrigation, including labor-intensive bucket-dumping (not currently possible without dumping into an empty space above), should also be able to slow/reduce the dryness factor. It's the necessity of irrigation for farming that would depend on the natural watering going on.

ETA #2: Marsh biomes would have some kind of automatic immunity to non-cavern soil dryness.

[Telgin]

I think the better question is, will we ever need water for farms? I mean, now we need them to make farming on stone possible, but otherwise we can just farm on soil and not have a caaaare in the world!

This is the relevant part I think.  Effectively what's happening is that the water is coming from the plants being brewed.  Of course... they need to get the water from somewhere.

Improved farming mechanics in general are something I approve of.  I'm a bit worried that Toady is going to leave them pretty abstract, for the sake of playability.  I wouldn't mind having to keep track of arid conditions or the need for crop rotations and fallow seasons, but it might be too much for some.  Really though, it shouldn't be possible for a 6x6 plot of plump helmets to keep 200 dwarves fed and boozed.

[Manveru Taurënér]

I think the better question is, will we ever need water for farms? I mean, now we need them to make farming on stone possible, but otherwise we can just farm on soil and not have a caaaare in the world!

This is the relevant part I think.  Effectively what's happening is that the water is coming from the plants being brewed.  Of course... they need to get the water from somewhere.

Improved farming mechanics in general are something I approve of.  I'm a bit worried that Toady is going to leave them pretty abstract, for the sake of playability.  I wouldn't mind having to keep track of arid conditions or the need for crop rotations and fallow seasons, but it might be too much for some.  Really though, it shouldn't be possible for a 6x6 plot of plump helmets to keep 200 dwarves fed and boozed.

I think it's a fairly safe bet that water is coming back as a req for farming sooner or later. We're even likely to get much more than that looking at the dev goals:

"Bloat335, IMPROVED FARMING, (Future): Improved outdoor farming. I've already copied down a ton of NPK tables. We'll see what's inflicted upon you. A skilled farmer should make any fertilizer requirements very straightforward and easy to deal with."

"Bloat339, RIVER OVERFLOWS, (Future): River overflows and the return of the associated farming techniques."

As for the water for booze, I think I recall it being mentioned at some point, possibly in a df talk, but my guess and hope is this would be sort of planned already :>

[C27]

Without more and better ways to collect water, I think this would just result in vast swaths of the world being uninhabitable for dwarves - and that's not very fun.

[Manveru Taurënér]

Without more and better ways to collect water, I think this would just result in vast swaths of the world being uninhabitable for dwarves - and that's not very fun.

"Bloat360, OTHER WATER SOURCES, (Future): There should be various additional ways to obtain water. Rain, filling barrels from streams, simple desalination, etc."

^^

[Quantumtroll]

Taptap, I'm with you entirely. Water should be a requirement for beer, ale, and mead. Wine and other fermented juices don't require water, leaving early fortresses and desert fortresses with just a few less options.

I don't understand why this isn't a more popular suggestion. I've sent a question about it to Toady for the next Fortress Talk, we'll see if it comes up.

[taptap]

Without more and better ways to collect water, I think this would just result in vast swaths of the world being uninhabitable for dwarves - and that's not very fun.

You find aquifers almost everywhere.

[fractalman]

It would definitely require some changes if ALL dwarven brews required water...a change to how ice boulders are dealt with, the capacity to bring water on embark, etc.

hm...how about instead of requiring water, allow the otpion to include water in brewing, or not include water in brewing.  If you do not include water, your dwarves will get thirsty quite a bit more often-but they are dwarves; creative biology means they can survive off of booze alone.

[taptap]

It would definitely require some changes if ALL dwarven brews required water...a change to how ice boulders are dealt with, the capacity to bring water on embark, etc.

hm...how about instead of requiring water, allow the otpion to include water in brewing, or not include water in brewing.  if you do not include water, your dwarves will get thirsty quite a bit more often-but they are dwarves; creative biology means they can survive off of

Not necessarily all brews, those where it fits would be sufficient. And yes, having the agriculture requiring water input (either natural humidity according to biome and where natural humidity is insufficient watering by manual or mechanical works) would be great as well imho.

[NW_Kohaku]

You find aquifers almost everywhere.

Most players don't embark on them, however, so that's not a terribly good argument.

The fact that almost all caverns have infinite water so long as one of the cavern lakes touches a border is a better argument.

Beyond that, brooks are not hard to find, and easy to embark over.  Evil biomes exist specifically to make embarks harder, and people embark on glaciers for much the same reason - making a desert hard to survive in wouldn't be a bad thing in and of itself.

Taptap, I'm with you entirely. Water should be a requirement for beer, ale, and mead. Wine and other fermented juices don't require water, leaving early fortresses and desert fortresses with just a few less options.

I don't understand why this isn't a more popular suggestion. I've sent a question about it to Toady for the next Fortress Talk, we'll see if it comes up.

Farming requiring water is actually on the devpages, now, thanks to Improved Farming winning 10th place in the Eternal Suggestions poll.  (It's just been there since 2010, and no real progress has been made...)

Farming Improvements

• Soil moisture tracking and ability to moisten soil (buckets or other irrigation)
• Soil nutrient requirements for plants and nutrient tracking to the extent the farming interface can provide decent feedback for you, fertilizers can reflect this
• Harvestable flowers and fruit growing on plants, ability to plant trees
• Weeds
• More pests

In the revised thread, there's a large section on water usage, as well.

(To give the short of it, the thread's idea also includes making currently infinite water sources have finite amounts per year so that a brook isn't more water than you will ever need.)

If there's anything keeping the concept from being "popular", it's just the sheer size of the threads.  The original Improved Farming thread has the most posts of any thread in the Suggestions Forum.  After I finally went and wrote the revised thread to collate all the ideas in the original thread into a single, cohesive idea, it was so large, few people were willing to read it. 


As for the thread's original idea, realistically, wines made from fruit (or fruit-like magical things) would not require water to brew, while beers would.  The fruits just have enough water already in them (usually) to perform the brewing process on their own. 

This could be counter-balanced by simply making those fruits require more water to farm in the first place. 

Provided we have above-ground farming where rain can naturally keep the soil moist, that introduces more problems for underground farming in general, which should help be a bit more of a challenge. 

One thing I'd also like to see, however, is brewing that isn't instantaneous.  You don't stand in front of a keg of whiskey doing something for a full two years of that aging process.

[fractalman]

...and make traders not terribly interested in the sludge your dwarves brewed up out of pure cave wheat...maybe just giving it no quality multiplier at all would be sufficient. 

I suppose i can see strawberry wine going down well even without added water, as long as strawberries actually require irrigation and stop being year-round crops for dwarves. (It may make sense from a gameplay perspective, but it makes no sense from a realism perspective.)

[Tacyn]

What is also missing is any water requirement for animals.
Keeping and raising a sizable herd of pigs for example should require some amount of water.