Also, you seem to be our resident plant expert? Could please you help me out with understanding what PLANT and PLANT_GROWTH are? I've been able to texture everything else rather smoothly, but I'm still a little confused on these.
PLANTs are things like shrubs, grasses, and trees. They represent a full organism. When you pick rope reeds, you uproot the whole plant and carry it away. Contrast a blueberry bush, where you pick the fruits, and the bush continues to grow. PLANT_GROWTHs represent the things that can be picked from a plant without killing it - things like leaves, flowers or berries.
What you need to know for making graphics is that a blueberry bush will most of the time look like a plain shrub, but when there are blueberry growths present, it turns into a picture of a blueberry, or a picture of a shrub with little blue balls on it, or whatever. When the growth is picked or expires due to time, the shrub reverts to its usual appearance, and the picked growth changes into an item, often with a different tile.
All the growth appearance info is included in the GROWTH_PRINT tag. The first parameter is the tile defining what the growth looks like when it's still on the plant. The second parameter is the tile defining what the growth looks like when it's been picked and has become an item. If overrides are possible for plants, it's this item tile that you'll want to override. The next 3 parameters are a color, formatted in the usual way. Off the top of my head I can't remember if this color is used for both growing and picked varieties - the picked tile may use the DISPLAY_COLOR of the material it's made of.
Then there's 1-2 parameters saying what time of year this growth will be displayed for. The growth appears on the plant at the beginning of the range, and if it hasn't been picked yet, disappears at the end. "Display" is the key word, here - the growth can be logically present on the plant without showing its tile. For example, in vanilla DF, pine cones are present on the tree from 100000:300000 (roughly the whole of summer and autumn), but are never actually
displayed on the tree.
The last GROWTH_PRINT parameter is the priority. If there are multiple growths available to display on a tile at the same time, the one with the highest priority is the one that's actually shown to the player. So for example, banana leaves have a priority of 1, and bananas the fruits have a priority of 3. When bananas and leaves are present on the same tile, the banana tile is displayed, because the banana growth has a higher priority. If the bananas are picked, the growth with the next highest priority - leaves, in this case - will resume being displayed. If there were no other growths present, then when the bananas were picked, the trunk underneath would be displayed instead.
Specifically, I'm unsure on the distinctions between plant items, plant tiles and plant buildings.
A plant tile is used when the plant is growing, or dead in the ground. Once it is picked, it becomes a plant item. Overrides will not work for plant tiles, but may work for plant items.
Are plant buildings like elven tree homes? If so they use plant tiles.
I'm going to be making TWBT tiles for the following plants with the assumption they are all items:
ID:TYPE
(ORIGINAL TILE)
SUBTYPE
PLANT:PLANT
(3) DIMPLE CUPS
(5) QUARRY BUSHES,
(6) PLUMP HELMETS
(37) MISC. BERRIES
(58) STRAWBERRY, PRICKLE BERRY, FISHER BERRY, SUN BERRY, MISC. BERRIES
(111) WINTER MELON, WATERMELON
(152) VALLEY HERB
(159) ROPE REED
(231) PIG TAIL, CAVE WHEAT, LONGLAND GRASS, RAT WEED, HIDE ROOT, MUCK ROOT, BLADE WEED, SLIVER BARB
(232) SWEET POD, BLOATED TUBER, KOBOLD BULB
(250) PLANTS AT LOWER ELEVATION
PLANT_GROWTH:PLANT_GROWTH
(5) FLOWERS, SPATHES
(6) LEAVES, FEATHERS
(7) FRUIT, NUTS
(37) SEEDS, FRUIT, EGGS
(42) LEAVES, NUTS, SEEDS, POLLEN CATKINS, SEED CATKINS, SEED CONES, POLLEN CONES, BURRS,
0 LEAVES
1 FLOWERS
2 POD
3 HEART
4 FRUIT
5 BUDS
6 NUT
7 POLLEN_CATKINS
8 SEED_CATKINS
9 SEED
10 SEED_CONE
11 POLLEN_CONE
12 FEATHERS
13 EGGS
14 SPATHES
I'm not sure about the growth subtypes, though. Are there 15? Are they in the correct order? I found all of these scattered throughout the plant raws and marked them down in the order I found them.
The growths that share the same names aren't all the same - the FRUIT growths, for example, may be blueberries, apples, bananas, pineapples, or any number of other fruits. I don't really know how overrides work, but if picked growths can even be overridden, then if you wanted an
exhaustive set of graphics, you'd need a different override for almost every different kind of fruit. (You could probably use the same override for like, oranges and mangos.)
Some of the growths are never picked in fortress mode, and only picked in adventure mode for shits & giggles. For example, I don't think any kinds of flowers are picked in fortress mode in vanilla DF, so creating item overrides for them would probably be overkill. Unless you want to provide it just in case someone decides to go picking flowers in adventure mode.
For a rule of thumb, check each growth's material. If it contains [STOCKPILE_PLANT_GROWTH], that growth will be picked. If it doesn't, it won't. Full shrubs are a little trickier - check the STRUCTURAL material of the shrub, and if it has any [MATERIAL_REACTION_PRODUCT]s or is [EDIBLE_RAW] or [EDIBLE_COOKED], that's a shrub that is pickable whole.
Some shrubs are pickable whole
and have growths that will be picked, most notably lettuce, quarry bushes, and cabbage. The picked leaves and the picked whole shrubs are different items, and will need to have their graphics defined independently of each other.
One more thing you might want to check out is seeds. Not the growths labeled as seeds, which by the way
can't be picked in vanilla DF. The tags to define seeds include an item tile and color, so they might also be override-able.
