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[GoblinCookie]

Not really, you can get rid of poop in magma or just shoot it out the walls into a river or moat.

As for underground farming there's a thread about what exactly makes plants grow underground. Is it magic, geothermal energy or some other factor we don't know? Anyway, we can assume having animals graze over a field would refertilize it and that underground there's the equivalent of the plants that make soil recover its fertility.

For me the interesting thing about poop is not so much fertilizing fields but rather having to deal with a very real variable in a simulation game of this sort. Garbage was one of the biggest challenges in Sim City games and in a fortress of hundreds of individuals living in tight spaces sewage would be crucial.

I'm also a sucker for providing rooms, entertainment, decoration and such for dwarves. Toilets would add to that.

It would make the game much more interesting even without considering the interesting things you can do to goblins and nobles.

I am not against having sewage in the game per se, I am thinking more in terms of efficiency.  That is out of the total number of feutures in the game how do we add feutures in such a manner that they immediately add the maximum value to the game as soon as they appear. 

At the moment poop would simply add to a basic game problem, that is clutter.  The solutions you propose are not going to be an option for most people at the start of the game, who have no river, moat or magma pipe.  It does however as a concept have a vital role as part of a system of nutriants and biodegrading which eliminates the clutter problem because the other biodegradable things will break down into nutriants.

What makes plants grow underground?  Nothing at all because normal plants do not grow underground and the plants that do are obviously funguses of some kind, hence why they will not grow above ground because the light kills them. 

[Urist Tilaturist]

I thought that the underground crops were mushrooms; I think plump helmet is explicitly described as such.

Sewage is an important problem, but it should be balanced with the benefits of fertilisation.

[Badger Storm]

Cave wheat is pretty explicitly planty, as are leaved quarry bushes and grassy pig tails.  Pretty sure dimple cups are also mushrooms.  Sweet pods could go either way.

[Deboche]

Yes but not all underground stuff is fungus. And even if they were, fungi still need to get energy from somewhere. If it's not sunlight, it needs to be something. You can't just wet a rock and grow stuff on it or keep using the same soil forever.

However, you don't need to introduce poop to make fertilizer. Having the animals graze over fallow fields - like I said a few pages ago - would work the same way without poop ever making an appearance.

I agree that clutter is a big problem but I'm sure some sort of recycling will be put into place sooner or later. Metal stuff can be melted already, corpses rot and you can use the bones and skulls.

Maybe one day we'll be able to build out of bone like some chapels, tattered clothes can become rags for hospitals and wooden stuff can be used to make fires everywhere if dwarves being cold in the winter ever becomes a thing.

Other than that, you can have an incinerator where you burn everything you don't need.

And really a moat is the easiest thing in the world to make, just channel out a few tiles outside somewhere and designate as pooping grounds. Later on, when you can build pipes, toilets and pumps you can have the sewer system dump it there.

EDIT: Oh and pooping outside = bad thoughts. Pee pots are better which they then empty in appropriate places. Holes in the floor in a bathroom are one step above. Toilets are the decadent luxury.

[Urist Tilaturist]

They should all be mushrooms or some other sort of fungi. Plants need photosynthesis, not really possible underground. I would like for underground farming to be made less easy so above ground farming can provide a wider range of better crops; for example, the sugar needed for brewing would have to come from overground sources.

[mineforce]

I want this to be a thing. I'm serious, think of the possibilities, elves struck in a cage for a eternity surrounded by their shit? I need this to be a thing.

[Urist Tilaturist]

I want this to be a thing. I'm serious, think of the possibilities, elves struck in a cage for a eternity surrounded by their shit? I need this to be a thing.

They should eventually die of septic shock or some other sort of infection. Such a torture was known as the "Spanish barrel" or something similar and inevitably ended in death if carried on indefinitely.

[GoblinCookie]

They should all be mushrooms or some other sort of fungi. Plants need photosynthesis, not really possible underground. I would like for underground farming to be made less easy so above ground farming can provide a wider range of better crops; for example, the sugar needed for brewing would have to come from overground sources.

Above ground farming is not something that AI dwarves actually do, if you do it in the game then you are actually innovating.  I think that underground farming should be enough to sustain a dwarf population and above ground farming should not be needed at all.

Sugar is not needed for brewing.  Yeast is needed for brewing and the yeast feeds on the sugar that exists in the plants or fruit you are brewing.  Normal mushrooms are digestible into sugar, but not easily enough for the likes of yeast to feed on.  There are three possible ways out for this problem.

1. Dwarf underground plants are actually fungal fruit, something that does not exist in reality but could have existed theoretically.  The fungal growths that the dwarves grow are meant to be eaten, releasing the spores within.  To this end they, like surface plants have easily accessible sugar in them.

Actually real-life mushrooms with sugar in them actually exist.
http://www.ajofai.info/Abstract/Evaluation%20of%20rare%20sugar%20content%20from%20edible%20mushroom.pdf

2. Dwarves have access to some kind of mushroom eating yeast, something that does not exist in reality but could have existed theoretically.  This yeast digests the mushrooms down into sugar but will also grow quite happily in normal sugary environments as well.

3. Dwarf 'alcohol' is actually Psilocybin. 

Yes but not all underground stuff is fungus. And even if they were, fungi still need to get energy from somewhere. If it's not sunlight, it needs to be something. You can't just wet a rock and grow stuff on it or keep using the same soil forever.

However, you don't need to introduce poop to make fertilizer. Having the animals graze over fallow fields - like I said a few pages ago - would work the same way without poop ever making an appearance.

I agree that clutter is a big problem but I'm sure some sort of recycling will be put into place sooner or later. Metal stuff can be melted already, corpses rot and you can use the bones and skulls.

Maybe one day we'll be able to build out of bone like some chapels, tattered clothes can become rags for hospitals and wooden stuff can be used to make fires everywhere if dwarves being cold in the winter ever becomes a thing.

Other than that, you can have an incinerator where you burn everything you don't need.

And really a moat is the easiest thing in the world to make, just channel out a few tiles outside somewhere and designate as pooping grounds. Later on, when you can build pipes, toilets and pumps you can have the sewer system dump it there.

EDIT: Oh and pooping outside = bad thoughts. Pee pots are better which they then empty in appropriate places. Holes in the floor in a bathroom are one step above. Toilets are the decadent luxury.

It would not work because animals cannot graze over your underground farms since there is nothing there to graze on.  Additionally there is no new energy content into the system to solve your problem, the animals eat the fungi that is there and they recycle only the energy that they have consumed in the first place.

Clutter is a major problem in the game and yes recycling is needed in general; your various ideas for dealing with clutter are not a denial of the problem.  Adding sewage without soil nutrients and fertilisation to go with it is adding to the lack of recycling/clutter problem, adding it alongside soil nutrients however allows us to introduce both the problem and the solution to the problem at the same time.

The problem you are describing actually is generally however not a real one if we are talking about the surface layers.  That is because nutrients from the surface are constantly dripping down into your farming area.  The amount this happens would actually be decided by the rainfall of the area.  In an area that gets constant rainfall, your plots will be constantly replenished by nutrients dripping into your plots from the surface level.

[That Wolf]

When ever a fruit is eaten why is a seed left behind? Im sure its not spat out, like birds people eat and digest the seeds to germinate it and its ready to plant, why do you think every seed planted grows.

[Urist Tilaturist]

How do the fungi get their sugar when they cannot photosynthesise? It seems like mushrooms with sugar can exist, but how do they get it?

[Reelya]

How do the fungi get their sugar when they cannot photosynthesise? It seems like mushrooms with sugar can exist, but how do they get it?

Mushrooms get nutrients from the soil.

There is mushroom brewing in real life, but in those cases, the fungi are the active fermenting agent instead of yeast, not the sugar source. There was some discussion about this in another thread about whether they were brewable by themselves or it was just a gimmick: "mushroom flavored" regular (yeast-based) wine. Neither are the case. There are publically available scientific papers from Japan about the efficiacy of the mushroom-based brewing process, and it gets to decent levels of alcohol concentration. Japan and Korea produce this stuff.

[GoblinCookie]

How do the fungi get their sugar when they cannot photosynthesise? It seems like mushrooms with sugar can exist, but how do they get it?

They get it from other things that have rotted away.  Those things ultimately got it from photosynthesis. 

[Urist Tilaturist]

Hence the need for rotting materials, waste, and so on to maintain fertility.

[Deboche]

It would not work because animals cannot graze over your underground farms since there is nothing there to graze on.  Additionally there is no new energy content into the system to solve your problem, the animals eat the fungi that is there and they recycle only the energy that they have consumed in the first place.

Clutter is a major problem in the game and yes recycling is needed in general; your various ideas for dealing with clutter are not a denial of the problem.  Adding sewage without soil nutrients and fertilisation to go with it is adding to the lack of recycling/clutter problem, adding it alongside soil nutrients however allows us to introduce both the problem and the solution to the problem at the same time.

The problem you are describing actually is generally however not a real one if we are talking about the surface layers.  That is because nutrients from the surface are constantly dripping down into your farming area.  The amount this happens would actually be decided by the rainfall of the area.  In an area that gets constant rainfall, your plots will be constantly replenished by nutrients dripping into your plots from the surface level.

No, I think you misunderstood. The energy would have to come from somewhere - we don't know where from yet - and make plants grow underground. Then you'd have cattle graze over it when the soil was depleted. The energy source would still be there but the soil would need nutrients, just like in any farm.

And I don't think that the fact that something will make the clutter problem worse is a good argument against new features otherwise a lot of new features would have to be scrapped or never considered. And poop decomposes just like corpses so you just have to come up with a way to store it.

And not all surface layers have soil yet dwarves still have to farm somehow.

[Graknorke]

It is a good reason to not have it. The same reason Toady has talked about how he wishes he hadn't made the hugely complicated weather system (simulates warm and cold bodies, fronts etc) when it could have been much, much simpler and still given basically the same results.
The waste thing would require a whole bunch of dwarf labours added in order to deal with the problems created, constant checking about it (woo framerate problems some more), and yet at the same time add somewhere around fuck and all to the game in the end.