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[PatrikLundell]

Nope. Trying to haul useless seeds to the trade depot results in empty bags arriving. I think the seeds are poured on the ground, generating a fair amount of work to pick them up again. Some seeds can be sold, but not the useless ones.

[Pink Photon]

I set my seed number low (20), then dump peach pits etc. Once there are 20 sitting forbidden in my refuse pile, peaches stop producing useless seeds. (Obviously this still works with the default number of 200, it just takes longer.)

Other possibilities are to mod the raws to eliminate peach pits and other unwanted seeds, or make them cookable (both very simple to do).

Given that my dwarves love to waste my bags on collecting these useless seeds, I consider the behavior bugged and thus any modding/hacking to fix the problem is completely justified.

Seeds can contain poisons but it's usually in trace amounts, so not enough to kill you. Appleseeds contain cyanide for example, but I've never heard of anyone dying due to chowing down on apple cores.

http://www.drgourmet.com/askdrgourmet/peachpits.shtml#.VMt2yS6WlnI

A 10 gram peach pits would contains ~9 milligrams of the cyanide compound found in fruit. But they use the same compound in anti-cancer treatments and administer up to 1500 milligrams/day without any problem. So you'd have to eat 1.66 kilos of raw peach pits to get 1 days worth of normal medical dosage of cyanide compounds (the compound failed to treat the cancer but that's not the point here ).

Boiling actually removes cyanide from foods, making even highly cyanide toxic cassava completely edible (if not boiled, you die), and you'd have to boil the pits a lot to make them into jelly, so I'd say peach pit jelly is probably perfectly safe considering how much you'd have to eat even before it's cooked to be dangerous.

The 1500 mg/day appears to be for the drug derived from peach pits, not cyanide. The LD₅₀ for cyanide is in the range of mg/kg of body mass, so chomping down on even 10 raw peach pits would be dangerous. Sufficient cooking will still make it safe.

[Eldin00]

...

Seeds can contain poisons but it's usually in trace amounts, so not enough to kill you. Appleseeds contain cyanide for example, but I've never heard of anyone dying due to chowing down on apple cores.

http://www.drgourmet.com/askdrgourmet/peachpits.shtml#.VMt2yS6WlnI

A 10 gram peach pits would contains ~9 milligrams of the cyanide compound found in fruit. But they use the same compound in anti-cancer treatments and administer up to 1500 milligrams/day without any problem. So you'd have to eat 1.66 kilos of raw peach pits to get 1 days worth of normal medical dosage of cyanide compounds (the compound failed to treat the cancer but that's not the point here ).

Boiling actually removes cyanide from foods, making even highly cyanide toxic cassava completely edible (if not boiled, you die), and you'd have to boil the pits a lot to make them into jelly, so I'd say peach pit jelly is probably perfectly safe considering how much you'd have to eat even before it's cooked to be dangerous.

The 1500 mg/day appears to be for the drug derived from peach pits, not cyanide. The LD₅₀ for cyanide is in the range of mg/kg of body mass, so chomping down on even 10 raw peach pits would be dangerous. Sufficient cooking will still make it safe.

Many stone fruit pits contain amygdalin, which can produce hydrogen cyanide during digestion. 1g of amygdalin produces at most 68mg of hydrogen cyanide. Peach pits will typically be 3-5% amygdalin by dry weight when the fruit is ripe. the LD₅₀ for ingested hydrogen cyanide is 1-3mg/kg body mass. Hydrochloric acid (the main acid in the human stomach) breaks down amygdalin without producing cyanide. Several other digestive enzymes also break down amygdalin either without cyanide production, or with less than the theoretic maximum cyanide production. It also decomposes safely in the range of temperatures commonly used to cook food, and decomposes safely (but takes months to drop to undetectable levels in stone fruit pits) if sufficiently dried. I've read (but don't recall the source) that a typical healthy adult can ingest up to 5mg/day of hydrogen cyanide with no ill effects whatsoever, and up to 10mg/day with no ill effects beyond extra stress on the liver that day. Unlike amygdalin, free hydrogen cyanide can not be rendered safe by cooking. Fortunately, very few plants contain free hydrogen cyanide in significant amounts.

Given those figures, a 10g (assuming dry weight) peach pit would likely average around 300mg of amygdalin, which could theoretically metabolize into 20.4mg of hydrogen cyanide, but would probably produce much less. So eating a few raw peach pits on occasion probably won't cause any real harm (unless we're talking someone under 20 kilos, like a child), but making them a significant part of your diet or using them as animal feed is a really bad idea. Sufficiently cooked, they could reasonably be a food source.

If anyone cares, I found out most of the above information a few years ago while researching the historic use of the bark of the chokecherry tree as a flavoring agent.

As to the topic of what to do with your surplus worthless seeds? caravans will buy some that I can't find any other use for, others they won't. Atom smashing, tossing in magma is the only way to get rid of the ones that can't be traded. If you go the route of letting them sit around until they hit the cap for individual seed types, I'd recommend turning up the global seed cap, since you could end up with several different useless seed types sitting around at the per-type cap pretty quickly.

[Aslandus]

I would only consider atom smashing garbage to be an exploit if you use DfHacks autodump commands.

Use the stocks screen instead

[Detros]

What about feeding those seeds into your mintcart shotguns?

[YAHG]

Adding [EDIBLE_COOKED] to the seed template (material_template_default.txt) should work fine. This MAY even work without regening your world.

[Thisfox]

I don't have an atomsmasher either. I just sell bags and bags of peach pits to the merchants who come through. And apple and pear seeds. I like to think that if I sell them to the Elves, they will replant them like Johnny Appleseed. I have a good leather industry, so making replacement bags is thankfully not difficult this time, but sometimes I try to get them put in pots, then sell them bagless in pots. Takes a lot more management to do that though, so if I've got leather bags to spare, I'll sell off the treeseeds in bags.

[Rafe]

Dump them right next to/on top of the trade depot and sell them to the elves. Not sure if you can sell seeds though.

Or put them into a coinstar, but that's even more exploity.

Yeah. After 2 years of harvest I had the traders come in the 7th month after the 2nd summer harvest and a sold a barrel full of worthless seeds for a value of  about 308. Tons of Lime, Carambola (star shaped fruits), and Papaya seeds. I just had to subject mself to the torture of the stockpile menu for seeds which is a nightmare, nothing is in alphabetical order - god i wish it was. It is critical to separate your viable seeds like plump helmet spawn , rock nuts from the bad worthless seeds so they dont' mix in bags. It seems once seeds mix within bags dwarfs won't remove them automatically

Anyway problem solved, fretting over a few single papaya seeds doesn't make sense and i can probably dump those and reclaim them in theory where they will end up back in the annual tree seed barrel.