Playing masterwork recently I had an idea to reimagine the farming system.
I recall the reason being that we don't have huge sprawling farms as depicted in adventure mode is due to computational restraints. Too much work for dwarves to do leads to ridiculous calculations, so having a 100x100 farm plot would kill FPS with dwarves constantly checking which tile needs ferts/planted/harvested.
However, huge farms are cool looking. And the idea of space as a resource in the agriculture industries is really neglected in DF.
Possible solution: make gigantic workshops that represent farms. Huge footprints, possibly bigger than the garrison or fishpond. Make them need tons of logs to be built (in order to cultivate mushrooms off the logs) and have them use the farming labor. The farmer would go to the workshop and a reaction that consumes spores and produces mushrooms would take place. The reaction would take quite a while and result in relatively large outputs. This way, you could have huge farms with a fraction of the lag that farm plots produce. You could even have multiple reactions to cover things like irrigation (water buckets get used), fertilizing (sawdust gets used to feed the shrooms) and other crops.
Obviously, theres nothing wrong with the current farm system. I am just a big fan of expansive farms, and so this is my idea for a way to have them without running a supercomputer.
