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[nerdpride]

I usually farm for food almost exclusively, so I was really curious how much benefit the potash could really provide to farms.  There wasn't sufficient info around, so I experimented a little.  Feel free to look at my results, though they might be spoily.  Feel free to compare notes or add to my thoughts.  I have a couple of images too, but they're not too interesting.  Maybe I'll host them later.

It does require a little micromanagement, but it is a lot less than what's involved with a full-scale magma forging operation, so don't let that pull you away from fertilizing.  The main cost to be concerned over is the toll fertilizing takes on your wood supply.  It used to be frustrating how growers would only slowly gain skill, but not when fertilization is occurring.  

Here's my setup: (high forest map needed)
1 battle axe
1 pick
100 plump helmet spawn
misc food
2 dogs (dunno why really, instinct?)
4 proficient growers
1 proficient miner, proficient cook, and proficient potash maker
1 proficient woodcutter
1 proficient wood burner
The wood burner could use cooking instead of the miner, now that I know more about the skills, but it doesn't really matter.  Mason, mechanic, carpenter, etc. can be done without wasting 5 points making a novice out of them.

The idea was to mine minimally and get water from the outside river.  I knew how to save the miner even when a channel connecting was being built--make it 10 squares long and suspend and unsuspend it until the construction spot is far away.  For consistency in my measurements, I always used a single 6x10 farm plot.

I read somewhere that fields should be created with 15 squares or of a multiple of 15.  I'm inclined to think that they're right, though I didn't bother experimenting too much to find out exactly how "ft (0/#)" fertilization points are assigned.

I also didn't experiment with values of fertilization under the maximum or with growers of less than proficient skill, mostly because it wasn't interesting to me.  I now plan to go back and find out how quickly skill in growing increases for a peasant or otherwise unskilled grower.

After a brief test with potash making, I decided that the skill itself only increases the speed of production, much like wood burning, digging channels, or cutting trees.  There was precious little difference, if any, when someone other than my professional potash maker made the sweet stuff.

I didn't get things set up quite in time for year one: spring, but nonetheless, I had more than 1000 helmets by the end of year one.  This isn't really impressive, I think, these statistics are difficult to compare with normal games.  Plus, since I had so much extra food, I didn't want to bother making barrels for them all to keep them from rotting.  Since the game is just for testing, I brewed them into wine and cooked that.

Fertilization, for some reason, greatly increases the speed that the growing skill was trained at for my four proficient growers.  Increased skill was the main benefit--my growers were all legendary by the end of year 3.  When I noticed that some dwarves were becoming novice growers when they were aiding in harvesting, I changed options to "only farmers harvest".  Only farmers with the "farming(fields)" job harvested from then on.

I'm pretty sure that the skill gained from harvesting crops is dependent on the number of crops harvested.  For example, with regular proficient growers, I tended to get maybe 1 to 4 units of plump helmet at each square from a single seed.  When the ft points were increased up to 16, the crops produced from each square/seed jumped up to 2 to 7 units.  More on this increase in yield in a second.  

I also think that the act of fertilizing the field itself trained the growers' skill.  Sticking potash in the field used the same skill as planting, meaning that it would be a pain to split up farming between fertilization and planting to train new growers with the fertilizer, and the manager does not allow specifying the workers for a particular field.  As far as I can tell, the "ber" guild representative doesn't give any bonuses to my actual farming ability.

Back to increase in growth.  I have a theory, completely unprovable of course, that there's a "base yield" of farming that's something like 0-2.  I think that skill in growing adds a flat number to both the minimum and maximum value of this base, as a proficient grower always seems to give at least one plump helmet spawn regardless of other conditions.  My legendary growers can also increase yield up to 6 without fertilizer.  I think that fertilizer multiplies the base yield by a percentage from 100% at 0 ft to 200% at ft max (ft 16/16 in my case).  This is because I have yet to see a single square/seed produce more than 9 helmets, even with fertilizer and legendary skill.

This also means that once growers reach legendary skill level, fertilizer is of less use than before.  Fertilization only seems to give 1-2 extra plants per seed/square, which isn't too much when I'm already producing 2-7.  They certainly plant those things very quickly (a second per seed) and there's seeds to spare for an extra farm or two to make up for any loss in production.  The loss of wood just isn't worth it, especially because I have increased carpentry and smithing needs now (yikes!).

The most controversial benefit I've had is population growth.  With more than 3000 units of food, maybe 1000 of which is a lavish meal, all at any given time, the worth of my fortress is immense (can't see it yet sorry).  In my 3rd year I have  70 dwarves.  All of them except 5 nobles are bunking in a tiny 3x3 barracks.  The roasted wine is exceptional, however, and tends to keep my population very happy.  Thieves seem to show up every month, though.

Now some simple math.  My farm had 60 squares, and each square always produced 4-9 helmets with legendary growers and fertilizer.  that's an average of 6.5 per square, or 390 helmets for 60 seeds.  Not all that impressive, again, because nobody wants to have that many useless plants lying around.  

These numbers are all really too big:  with a farm half the size, two legendary growers, some quarry bushes and other useful plants, some other fun sources of food (tamed elephants anyone?) and 16 units of wood a year, a 200 population dwarf fortress could be sustained easily.  Of course, four proficient growers could do just as well with more farms and no fertilizer, but those 70 extra points could easily be worked off with five years of micromanaging the fertilizer out and keeping population relatively low, for an interesting game IMHO.

Okay, that was a lot.  I've run out of things to talk about.  Maybe more useless stuff later.

Conclusion:  Potash is required to train growing and otherwise of limited use.  It can foster extreme population growth, however, if a player is capable of handling it.

[Asehujiko]

Interesting read. Too bad it requires wood, which isn't realy easy to come baby.

[Shades]

quote:Originally posted by nerdpride:
<STRONG>Conclusion:  Potash is required to train growing and otherwise of limited use.  It can foster extreme population growth, however, if a player is capable of handling it.</STRONG>

An interesting analysis, however although I agree that postash is only useful for training the Grower skill I disagree that it can foster extreme population growth any faster than other methods.

I am going to be generous here, my memory says a 6 by 6 block needs 7 units and your numbers say 6 by 10 needs 16 which is 3.75 per block so erroring to the more generous point as I am trying to state the opposite.

Firstly it takes about one unit of fertiliser to cover 5 squares, see generous, which means even assuming your 200% increase you need to be able to:
* Cut down a tree
* Haul wood to Wood Furnace and make ash
* Haul ash to Ashery and make potash
* Haul potash to field and fertialise
In the same amount of time that it takes to plant 5 more squares, on top of this it requires four skills (or 3 if ash is wood burning and not furnace operator) rather than one (ignoring the fact you'd probably want multiple dwarves too)

As I'm fairly sure a decent Grower could plant 5 seeds before the wood was hauled let alone the other steps I don't see how this could grant you more food.

Secondly regardless of the above immigration seems to mostly be effected by generated wealth, so turning the food into prepared meals (via brewing) is the most likely way to increase this value.

However having said all this I did see somewhere someone was talking about an Imp-ash farm which, if you got it working, would take the whole wood/haul/ash out of the cycle and probably change the whole equation.

[Dreamer]

Wood won't be so much of an issue once we can import it.

Either way, thanks for the research: I've been wondering whether or not to go fertilization, but looking at my fortress of mostly farmers producing enough food for years to come, I don't really need that much more food.  Fertilization may become more useful if farms were limited to how large they were and how many you could have (One of each plant type?), but I don't see that happenening; it just doesn't make sense.

I suppose if you wanted your dwarves to be specialized in other areas and wanted a minimal number of growers, though, fertilization would work well.  I smell a challenge game coming...  Maybe.

But that's just me.

[Veroule]

Actually the wood to potash stages might not be that bad.  Just do it during the winter when there is nothing better for your farmers to do.

Knowing that ferttilizing allows the stack size to go over 5 is actually useful.  I still suggest using the smallest plots possible because of the seasonal change overs.  So if 1 potash does 5 tiles of fields then a 5 tile plot would be best.

So my suggestion would be to put the wood furnace and ashery near the farm.  Start with 1 dwarf that is your farmer, asher, and potasher.  The first year you set it so only farmers harvest, and build a small supply of potash while digging out the farm area.

Having 3 different skills being developed will actually help that dwarf gain stats.  This is because the planting and harvesting tends to have significant delays in between.

Once the dwarf reaches legendary in farming then you should turn the all dwarves harvest back on.  There is quite a bit of evidence that shows that the skill of the planter is what determines the size of the stacks harvested.  Harvesting also takes no time even for completely unskilled dwarves.  So this helps to allow you to have a much larger farming area.

[ August 15, 2007: Message edited by: Veroule ]

[Shades]

quote:Originally posted by Veroule:
<STRONG>Actually the wood to potash stages might not be that bad.  Just do it during the winter when there is nothing better for your farmers to do.
</STRONG>

Heh didn't think of that.. good point.

quote:Originally posted by Veroule:
<STRONG>Knowing that ferttilizing allows the stack size to go over 5 is actually useful.  I still suggest using the smallest plots possible because of the seasonal change overs.  So if 1 potash does 5 tiles of fields then a 5 tile plot would be best.
</STRONG>

Hmm if you did get a stack of 8 or 9, well four stacks and they where Quarry bushes then you'd end up with four stacks of 40-45 of leaves which gives a very large stack of about 160-180 prepared food...

[nerdpride]

The only part that's really time consuming for the growers is to put the potash in the field, which they do one at a time--the immigrants which would otherwise be haulers took the creation of potash up in my case.  I forgot to mention, the results seem better if the fertilization occurs before planting.  

Beware:  Unskilled potash creation is really slow, but produces the same result, I've checked.  The proficient potash maker was useless. I wouldn't have had enough out for a whole year's worth of planting with peasants operating less than three asheries all winter long.

 

quote:Originally posted by Veroule:
<STRONG>Knowing that ferttilizing allows the stack size to go over 5 is actually useful.  I still suggest using the smallest plots possible because of the seasonal change overs.  So if 1 potash does 5 tiles of fields then a 5 tile plot would be best.

So my suggestion would be to put the wood furnace and ashery near the farm.  Start with 1 dwarf that is your farmer, asher, and potasher.  The first year you set it so only farmers harvest, and build a small supply of potash while digging out the farm area.

Having 3 different skills being developed will actually help that dwarf gain stats.  This is because the planting and harvesting tends to have significant delays in between.

Once the dwarf reaches legendary in farming then you should turn the all dwarves harvest back on.  There is quite a bit of evidence that shows that the skill of the planter is what determines the size of the stacks harvested.  Harvesting also takes no time even for completely unskilled dwarves.  So this helps to allow you to have a much larger farming area.

[ August 15, 2007: Message edited by: Veroule ]</STRONG>

I'm intrigued by the idea of having smaller farms with potash and extremely skilled growers.  Unfortunately, any plot larger than three squares requires at least 2 units of potash to fertilize, and five plots of three squares (5) would be less efficient than one 15 square plot (4), I just checked in-game.    I'm also concerned that the lack of farming activity would reduce the experience provided.  Helmets (and perhaps fast-growing pig tails) would certainly be best for training, though.

There's overwhelming evidence that production is based on the planter's skill:  if you use the "t" (view items) command and select a farm plot where plants haven't been harvested, you can see that it has already been determined before harvesting.  You could check the numbers again by looking at the dwarves' inventories and they seem to always match.

Also I noticed that sometimes the ft points would change in-between seasons, which I think you mentioned something about.  Not entirely sure what brings it about, or what can be done to change it.  I usually tried to keep my fields fertilized at all times, but with a little experimentation, I'm leaning toward the fertilizer placed in the field before planting influencing growth instead of fertilizing after planting.  I would like to hear some other opinions about this.

My stacks of prepared food only reached the mid hundreds, even though I used 4 units of 15-45 dwarven wine in making each of them.  I think that the cooking skill only combines the number of ingredients, like how you get two biscuits when you cook a single starting turtle with one mule meat.  So, 40-45 quarry brushes, which must be combined with at least one other stack of food would make 40-45 + (number of combined food) biscuits.

[ August 15, 2007: Message edited by: nerdpride ]

[Veroule]

Cooking is simply the sum of the number of pieces.  Two stacks of 45 leaves combined to make biscuits will make 90 bisquits.  4 stacks of 45 leaves combined to make roasts will make 180 roasts.  So that part is simple.

The real question, for efficiency, is plot size to fertilizer requirement.  As I say, having smaller plots is good because when the crop is changed the entire plot must be empty before any tile can be planted.  Perhaps Toady will fix that in the future.

So what is really needed is to understand fertilizer to tile ratio and then we can start to figure how many dwarves need to be involved in making potash for it to actually be helpful.

For example miners tend to level and gain stats the quickest currently.  If you never make a wood stockpile, have 2 miners, and 2 wood furnaces; then you might be able to have your 2 miners doing all the ash making and your lone farmer turning that into potash.  This is because the miners will be free for large periods of time.  Before it can be figured up though the amount of potash needed must be understood.

[ktrey]

If you can spare points at start up, Lye is available for 5 points a pop. It can be turned into Potash at an Ashery.

I usually buy as many units of lye with my starting build as I can afford in order to have the glass industry/fertilization up without wasting wood.

[Shades]

quote:Originally posted by ktrey:
<STRONG>If you can spare points at start up, Lye is available for 5 points a pop. It can be turned into Potash at an Ashery.

I usually buy as many units of lye with my starting build as I can afford in order to have the glass industry/fertilization up without wasting wood.</STRONG>

Interesting tactic, how does lye get used in glass though? I thought it was ash -> perlash for glass and lye -> potash, or can you make perlash from lye too?

[nerdpride]

I have never, ever had any problems changing the crop planted in the middle of my farming operations.  Sure, they continued planting the old crop for a while, but if I had run out of seeds, then they would begin to do something new right away.  I think farmers are a little slow--even if you lock them in the room with a ton of growing tasks, there will be periods where they have "no job" on.  I usually did lock them in the farms because they would wander out to the front of the fortress and waste time running back to plant some more seeds.

The kiln bakes potash into pearlash, which is used for making clear glass, along with sand and a source of heat.

I've tried a bunch of combinations, and the 15 square or multiple of 15 farm has so far been the most efficient use of potash.  A farmer could produce 12 units of potash for a whole year of growing on one 15 square field, which I think will bring that farmer to legendary within three years if everything is timed right, since my farm, which was 4 times as big, produced four legendary growers over the same period.

36 units of lye would cost 180 starting points, though, so a legendary-status farmer is going to have to cost some trees.  Each tree would be worth five starting points, but I still consider the lye to be a good trade, until wood can be imported.  Thanks for giving me a good idea what to do with those extra points!  Now I think that making potash takes so long because its really a combination of two tasks.

[Shades]

So ideally we should be using 5 or 10 by 3, 6 or 9 farms, with farmers (growers) also skilled in wood burning and ashery operating (I'm assuming the wood will come by your normal axe wielding set), and you only set the various fertiliser jobs in winter or the 24 days of each season (you can't grow then anyway)

Hmm does this mean I have to start taking an axe too on my new forts?  

[nerdpride]

quote:Originally posted by Ben:
<STRONG>So ideally we should be using 5 or 10 by 3, 6 or 9 farms, with farmers (growers) also skilled in wood burning and ashery operating (I'm assuming the wood will come by your normal axe wielding set), and you only set the various fertiliser jobs in winter or the 24 days of each season (you can't grow then anyway)

Hmm does this mean I have to start taking an axe too on my new forts?   </STRONG>

I don't think that speed in wood burning or ashery operating will help much--don't waste points in those skills!  In the time you spend mining to the location of your first farm, perhaps beyond the cave river, you could have made the potash with a dwarf without a job.  

Usually there's two miners, a woodcutter, mason, carpenter, and maybe a herbalist (to find quarry bushes--the proficient grower does it in my games, starting with unskilled herbalism unless its a low-shrub map).  I would make the carpenter make some potash after the bare minimum furniture, with the 7th dwarf, who usually has a random job like fishing, burning wood.  After enough wood has been burned, the wood burner can make the potash and the carpenter can return to other work.  I love micromanagement early on.

It isn't worthwhile to fertilize a field for the second half of spring, so wait until summer to plant unless you just want a few crops in the ground next to the cave river.

If people really can't get enough wood on a high-wood map, then maybe a proficient woodcutter is worthwhile.  Those dwarves can chop the trees down fast, but they don't increase in skill as quickly as miners do.

It would be really nice if traders sold lye, then you wouldn't even need to cut any wood.  I don't know, do they?

[Shades]

quote:Originally posted by nerdpride:
<STRONG>
It would be really nice if traders sold lye, then you wouldn't even need to cut any wood.  I don't know, do they?</STRONG>

You can probably request it, I'll see how that goes today.

Edit: Doh, my current fort has no traders.. I forgot

[ August 16, 2007: Message edited by: Ben ]

[utunnels]

Nice topic. I love farming now, it provides plenty of food.

Now it is early autumn of the first year. My current fortress has 130x plump helmet and 120x dwarf wine. Some plump helmet was just rotten in farm plot. The carpenter is busy now making barrels. I decide to sell some wine to merchants, but seem their mules can't carry.    

I have 8 dwarves by now, and only one grower, a single farm plot(in max. size). Maybe I don't need fertilization at all?

I started with 2 proficient miners, 1 proficient grower, 1 carpenter, 1 mason, 1 brewer/cook, 1 peasant, 6 dogs, 2 cats, 2 mules, 2 horses, more than 40 plump helmet spawns, some wine, and some turtle meat(they were rotten away, so I sold them to merchants).

[ August 18, 2007: Message edited by: utunnels ]