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[Urist Tilaturist]

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.

Except for hygiene, sewage borne diseases, ground fertility, better farming, especially underground farming, stopping forts from so easily staying shut in forever, and the possibility for a whole new range of horrible traps and tortures for the fort's enemies.

Waste disposal is a vital part of any civilisation. It doesn't have to be down to the smallest lump of scat, but just having the "filth" already in the game's code would add considerable features to the game. You want optimisation? Try turning all those "giant peach faced lovebird leather " items into just "leather" items. Masterwork did that and improved performance massively despite adding a load of new content. Sewage could fit in there.

[Graknorke]

Hygiene and diseases are something that sort of exist now but not particularly well, and trying to pile on more types of illness onto that system wouldn't make it any better. Farming can be done in many better ways, and there are already problems with farming that need fixing in ways more complex than "smear shit on it".

DF is a simulation, but that doesn't mean it's going to simulate... everything. I'm sure you've read plenty of books about fighting or having a legendary artefact created by some legend as a macguffin. But when's the last time where a toilet visit and/or waste disposal mattered? Not because of events around it, but as a thing in itself. It doesn't happen. DF is still more or less a fantasy story generator, the focus is still on that.

Quick edit: For an example of ignored irrelevant details in a simulator that isn't DF, flight sims focus solely on the flight. Takeoff, flight, navigation and so on. You don't see into the daily routine of the pilot.

[Deboche]

Hygiene and diseases are something that sort of exist now but not particularly well, and trying to pile on more types of illness onto that system wouldn't make it any better. Farming can be done in many better ways, and there are already problems with farming that need fixing in ways more complex than "smear shit on it".

DF is a simulation, but that doesn't mean it's going to simulate... everything. I'm sure you've read plenty of books about fighting or having a legendary artefact created by some legend as a macguffin. But when's the last time where a toilet visit and/or waste disposal mattered? Not because of events around it, but as a thing in itself. It doesn't happen. DF is still more or less a fantasy story generator, the focus is still on that.

Quick edit: For an example of ignored irrelevant details in a simulator that isn't DF, flight sims focus solely on the flight. Takeoff, flight, navigation and so on. You don't see into the daily routine of the pilot.

None of these arguments make any sense.

Hygiene and diseases will have to be better addressed at some point and suggestions for adding illness are frequent. Of course making more types of illness wouldn't improve it but you can say the same for the military. Military doesn't work perfectly now so why add more stuff to it like tactics, mounts and such? It would only make the problem worse, right?

Farming needs to be improved and using manure as fertilizer is the logical way to go.

Whether it matters or not in a fantasy simulation can be applied to pretty much everything. Why have elaborate meals with different ingredients and not just "food", for example? Why have soapy baths? Why allow for encrusting with different types of bone?

And your flight simulator example makes no sense either. If it was an airport simulator, it'd make more sense and you bet it would include the daily routine of the pilots and the rest of the staff.

[Urist McGoombaBrother]

DF is a simulation, but that doesn't mean it's going to simulate... everything. I'm sure you've read plenty of books about fighting or having a legendary artefact created by some legend as a macguffin. But when's the last time where a toilet visit and/or waste disposal mattered? Not because of events around it, but as a thing in itself. It doesn't happen. DF is still more or less a fantasy story generator, the focus is still on that.

Just take a look into history. During the peak of the pest plague in middle age in some areas nearly 90 % of the population died. Whole areas were exterminated. And the main reason for pest is lack of hygiene. And pest is not the only disease caused by that reason. So I would consider that as major factor for each settlement. Even when there is enough food, drink and no external threat, a fortress can go down when you don't take any measures to keep it clean. Various kind of plagues will spread and likely exterminate it completely unless you install a proper waste/sewer management, bath houses and things like that.

[Putnam]

Hygiene and diseases are something that sort of exist now but not particularly well, and trying to pile on more types of illness onto that system wouldn't make it any better. Farming can be done in many better ways, and there are already problems with farming that need fixing in ways more complex than "smear shit on it".

DF is a simulation, but that doesn't mean it's going to simulate... everything. I'm sure you've read plenty of books about fighting or having a legendary artefact created by some legend as a macguffin. But when's the last time where a toilet visit and/or waste disposal mattered? Not because of events around it, but as a thing in itself. It doesn't happen. DF is still more or less a fantasy story generator, the focus is still on that.

Quick edit: For an example of ignored irrelevant details in a simulator that isn't DF, flight sims focus solely on the flight. Takeoff, flight, navigation and so on. You don't see into the daily routine of the pilot.

Farming needs to be improved and using manure as fertilizer is the logical way to go.

Not when potash is already a fertilizer in-game...

[Orange Wizard]

This thread, in summary:

Person 1: I believe poop should be added to the game!
Person 2: I believe poop should not be added to the game!
Person 1: You're wrong! This game would benefit from the presence of poop!
Person 2: Yeah, but Toady doesn't want to add it.
Person 1: I believe poop should be added to the game!

[Vattic]

Except Toady has never said clearly either way. I may be mistaken, but I did some digging to try and find a definitive answer and that resulted in my first post in this thread.

Even if Toady had said either way a discussion wouldn't be unreasonable. Admittedly this debate has happened a number of times. I'd be surprised if there are any, but new points should be added to one of those threads.

[GoblinCookie]

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.

At the moment there is a clutter problem in the game in that junk just keeps piling up.  At present time adding poop will make the clutter problem worse, which *is* an argument against introducing it.  However if introduced alongside a system of soil nutrients then not only we do we not add to the clutter problem but our new feuture does something useful.

No new energy is being added by having your by cattle grazing over your underground fields because the cattle 'emit' less energy than they take in from the fungi they are eating.  An underground ecosystem is a closed system, no new energy is constantly being added so there is merely competition between your cattle and your underground plants.  That is because the scarce resource is energy, which can only come from the energy actually in the soil. 

On the surface the cattle consume the energy from the plants but the plants do not get their energy from the soil but rather from the sun; what they get from the soil are various nutriants, generally nitrates.  They leave the extracting of the energy that is in the soil to the surface fungi, say mushrooms so the cattle fertilise the soil because they excrete the useless nutriants that they consume from nitrogen fixing plants (such as clover) which add new nutrients to the system. 

If we wanted to do this realistically we would have to distinguish between soil nutriants and soil energy.  Surface plants consume solely the former and themselves when they rot away add to energy.  Fungi/underground plants consume energy and nutriants both.  When the level of energy in the soil is high, surface fungi would naturally grow and use up that energy so it does not all end up catching fire. 

Underground there is no sun and so there is no new energy input in the system.  This means that all energy has to come from outside, meaning that without some inflow of energy from outside everything ends up starving to death.  This reality is not presently represented in the game and makes realistically suicidal strategies such as entombing yourself underground viable when they should not be.

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.

I like the sophisticated weather system myself because it means we end up with consistant weather patterns that are not completely predictable just from the embark screen.  For instance my fortress's river always floods ever winter which has required me to set up a whole system of burrows and flood defenses to avoid tragedy from someting that I did not intially anticipate.

Nobody said anything about the system having to be immensely complicated, so there is no objection on that basis.  All I said is that there should be a system of sewage that biodegrades down into nutriants for use in farming or into soil if there is no soil already. 

[Deboche]

At the moment there is a clutter problem in the game in that junk just keeps piling up.  At present time adding poop will make the clutter problem worse, which *is* an argument against introducing it.  However if introduced alongside a system of soil nutrients then not only we do we not add to the clutter problem but our new feuture does something useful.

No new energy is being added by having your by cattle grazing over your underground fields because the cattle 'emit' less energy than they take in from the fungi they are eating.  An underground ecosystem is a closed system, no new energy is constantly being added so there is merely competition between your cattle and your underground plants.  That is because the scarce resource is energy, which can only come from the energy actually in the soil. 

You still don't understand what I wrote. The energy for underground plants comes from somewhere, otherwise how would anything grow in the caves? And the source of the energy has been discussed in another thread.

Separate from that, the cattle would graze to replenish nutrients, not energy.

As for clutter, maybe someday we'll have smoke coming from furnaces as well, then we'll have to deal with that. Hopefully by then clutter will be easier to get rid of by incinerating all the garbage.

[GoblinCookie]

You still don't understand what I wrote. The energy for underground plants comes from somewhere, otherwise how would anything grow in the caves? And the source of the energy has been discussed in another thread.

Separate from that, the cattle would graze to replenish nutrients, not energy.

As for clutter, maybe someday we'll have smoke coming from furnaces as well, then we'll have to deal with that. Hopefully by then clutter will be easier to get rid of by incinerating all the garbage.

I also hope that someday we will have Global Warming in Dwarf Fortress to punish pyromaniacs like you.   

The source of the energy is the same source that real-world underground 'plants' use.  It seeps into the caverns from the surface ecosystem, along with the nutrients.  When I said nutriants earlier I included energy along with the other substances for simplicity, however I realise now that we need to divide up energy and nutrients.  I think the right balance between complexity and simplicity would be achieved by dividing things up into nutriants, carbon and energy. 

[Urist Tilaturist]

Hygiene and diseases are something that sort of exist now but not particularly well, and trying to pile on more types of illness onto that system wouldn't make it any better. Farming can be done in many better ways, and there are already problems with farming that need fixing in ways more complex than "smear shit on it".

DF is a simulation, but that doesn't mean it's going to simulate... everything. I'm sure you've read plenty of books about fighting or having a legendary artefact created by some legend as a macguffin. But when's the last time where a toilet visit and/or waste disposal mattered? Not because of events around it, but as a thing in itself. It doesn't happen. DF is still more or less a fantasy story generator, the focus is still on that.

Quick edit: For an example of ignored irrelevant details in a simulator that isn't DF, flight sims focus solely on the flight. Takeoff, flight, navigation and so on. You don't see into the daily routine of the pilot.

In a Song of Ice and Fire, toilets and sewage are a normal part of daily life. Some characters also soil themselves in fear. It is probably the biggest fantasy story in the world right now. Sewage is of course not the centrepiece. Dwarf Fortress will not become Sewage Fortress because of the addition of sewage. It is just a small addition which adds more threats to the fort's health and helps improve farming.

We already have illnesses in the form of syndromes and infections. What we need is more transmission vectors. Sewage is one of these. Pestilences had a massive, massive impact on past civilisations, as they should have a massive impact on dwarves. Many of these pestilences spread because of waste.

The clutter problem can be solved by having the waste disappear into the soil eventually, and doing the Masterwork fix of making all "___ leather" items into just "leather" items and so on. That would be an easy optimisation which would more than make up the additional clutter from sewage.

[GoblinCookie]

In a Song of Ice and Fire, toilets and sewage are a normal part of daily life. Some characters also soil themselves in fear. It is probably the biggest fantasy story in the world right now. Sewage is of course not the centrepiece. Dwarf Fortress will not become Sewage Fortress because of the addition of sewage. It is just a small addition which adds more threats to the fort's health and helps improve farming.

We already have illnesses in the form of syndromes and infections. What we need is more transmission vectors. Sewage is one of these. Pestilences had a massive, massive impact on past civilisations, as they should have a massive impact on dwarves. Many of these pestilences spread because of waste.

The clutter problem can be solved by having the waste disappear into the soil eventually, and doing the Masterwork fix of making all "___ leather" items into just "leather" items and so on. That would be an easy optimisation which would more than make up the additional clutter from sewage.

I like knowing where the leather that the items I am using came from, it makes the game seem less generic.  The clutter problem is not mostly items at the moment, it is actually mostly the ever-increasing numbers of bodies. 

I cannot recall ASOIF dealing with sewage in any depth.  Actually ASIOF fails to deal with very much concerning real economics or problems at all, in this regard it actually resembles most fantasy novels which do not deal with these things because they are mundane.  Maybe some characters do soil themselves, but dwarf fortress creatures vomit instead. 

Like any playable computer game or readable book a lot of details are abstracted away in both Dwarf Fortress and ASOIF alike.  Yes the main reason for adding sewage rather than abstracting it away is it's importance for both disease and agriculture which presently are highly unrealistic.  Otherwise the case would be rather weaker.

[Graknorke]

None of these arguments make any sense.

Alright, we're off to a good start.

Hygiene and diseases will have to be better addressed at some point and suggestions for adding illness are frequent. Of course making more types of illness wouldn't improve it but you can say the same for the military. Military doesn't work perfectly now so why add more stuff to it like tactics, mounts and such? It would only make the problem worse, right?

Adding tactics and mounts would be expanding the military framework rather than piling more content on top. Unless you're saying that as well as adding waste management, Toady should overhaul the entire infection/syndrome/disease system? Because that would be a big task in itself.

Farming needs to be improved and using manure as fertilizer is the logical way to go.

The problems are bigger than that (can just grow the same plants constantly on the same field with no ill effects, farm yields are too high for how much dwarves eat, and other problems but I won't go into them, there's a myriad of threads on the topic already) and the solution is not as simple as spreading dwarf muck all over it. And by the way, that would be a serious health risk given how little medical knowledge is around and how often they eat plants raw.
And as addressed by Putnam, there actually is fertiliser anyway, so that's really not the missing piece.

Whether it matters or not in a fantasy simulation can be applied to pretty much everything. Why have elaborate meals with different ingredients and not just "food", for example? Why have soapy baths? Why allow for encrusting with different types of bone?

Because there is a chance those details can matter. The ingredients reflect what's produced in the fort and maybe if you manage to butcher a FB or named creature you would end up having biscuits made of it eaten in the dining room. It tells you something and makes that item special, even if a lot of that time it's stuff you aren't interested in. But being a game there isn't exactly the luxury of picking and choosing what to show. However, I cannot think of any situation where sewage affairs are going to contribute to the story. It just becomes another resource your dwarves waste time hauling around, like money was. Remember how that got taken out for being busywork that didn't add much?

Oh and soapy baths actually do have a purpose, they reduce risk of infection when cleaning wounds.

And your flight simulator example makes no sense either. If it was an airport simulator, it'd make more sense and you bet it would include the daily routine of the pilots and the rest of the staff.

Would it though? At best I can imagine maybe a couple of non-working states like "eating" and "sleeping". All abstract though.

Just take a look into history. During the peak of the pest plague in middle age in some areas nearly 90 % of the population died. Whole areas were exterminated. And the main reason for pest is lack of hygiene. And pest is not the only disease caused by that reason. So I would consider that as major factor for each settlement. Even when there is enough food, drink and no external threat, a fortress can go down when you don't take any measures to keep it clean. Various kind of plagues will spread and likely exterminate it completely unless you install a proper waste/sewer management, bath houses and things like that.

But is having specifically dwarf leavings the only and best way to satisfy cleanliness threats? I would have to say no by a long shot. The only way it would become a problem would be if you were to end up eating or drinking it, and dwarves don't really drink water anyway most of the time, so something would need working out there to actually make it a problem.
If you want health concerns, you probably want the same disease overhaul that Deboche does, so that we get things like colds and the plague and whathaveyou that can spread between individuals rather than needing them to step in magical monster goo.

[Urist Tilaturist]

Since starting over seems sensible here, I shall make a confession.

When it comes to fictional media, my general preference is towards social realism and history rather than fantasy. The Song of Ice and Fire reference was only one summoned at short notice; it is the only "high" fantasy book series I have read besides Tolkien, and I do not intend on reading many others. Why do I play DF in that case? Because it is a fun game, though I honestly see it as more "civilisation building" like Civ or Rise of Nations than anything else, and it is possible to enjoy something outside your general preferences. However, it also means that any contributions I want to make to DF more likely concern daily life activities like farming, fighting disease, the economy, and, yes, sewage rather than anything especially heroic. I treat the game more as a construction and management simulation, like SimCity with more magma, than as a heroic story telling fantasy.

I do want to see a disease overhaul, and sewage would only be part of that. Spreading dwarf muck on plants is horribly unhygienic, but people still did and do such things (look up public defecation in India, for example, or Chinese use of "night soil".

[Deboche]

Not overhaul the entire syndrome system but since there's no proper disease right now, they might be a good addition. I think calling it "expanding the framework" as opposed to "piling more stuff on top of it" is a way to dodge the argument through semantics.

I'm not an expert on farming but manure seems to me to be a big part of it. It's not why I think poop should be in the game though.

Poop would have lots of purposes, number one would be to increase realism. For you the game might be about adventure and heroic deeds and stories but that's not what the game is about in general. That's what adventurer mode is for, dwarf mode is about a very realistic simulation of a fortress and poop adds to that big time.

And soapy baths just make dwarves happier. It's not the same as cleaning a wound.

In most sim games, there are periods where they rest, sleep, eat or do some recreational activities.