Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[IndigoFenix]

The ALCOHOL_DEPENDENT tag is pretty gamey though.  What, every dwarf at every age needs alcohol to not be depressed?  I'd support a decision to remove it, but give dwarves a personality that encourages drinking for most dwarves (like a higher propensity for insanity due to bad moods along with a resistance to the harmful effects of alcohol) without it being straight up hard-coded in their biology.

Dwarves being heavy drinkers is really a post-Tolkein thing anyway (yes they liked to drink in Tolkein, but no more than everyone else).  They picked up that attribute in popular culture right around the time they picked up the...Scottish accents.

Wait a second...

[SixOfSpades]

Although it's not implemented in the game because there are no poisonous plants,

     Interesting tangent. I'm not advocating for who whole truckload of poisonous plants, of course, but it does seem odd that seemingly every single plant in DF is useful. If we've got obscure (and even somewhat controversial) plants like fonio & durian, then why not also have a few of the more well-known nuisances, such as stinging nettles, kudzu, poison oak, monkey puzzle, and jumping cactus? It would certainly make for a more gradual transition to things like staring eyeballs & wormy tendrils.
     On a similar note, there are also no weeds. Sure, we have rat weed & blade weed, but they always stay nicely in their farm plots and only grow when planted in season. Currently, Planters have nothing to occupy their time between planting & harvesting--regular weedings would be a realistic requirement to maintain high yield, and would incidentally give children something useful to do.

in real life there was a strong link between herbalists and foragers.

     Yes and no, albeit admittedly mostly yes. Foragers mainly had to know which berries, roots, and mushrooms NOT to eat. (Or which parts, in cases like rhubarb.) But the important difference is, even legitimately medicinal plants are frequently toxic if you eat them in meal-sized quantities, so where the herbologist goes the extra mile is in knowing which of the bad plants can actually be good when used correctly. And not only do they have to tell the difference between yarrow and hemlock, they also have to know what yarrow is good for, and how to use it. Also, both professions would be useful for keeping poisonous plants out of animal pastures, particularly if your livestock is not native to the area and thus wouldn't know which plants to avoid.

in post-farming societies pretty much the only reason a person would be gathering wild plants is for finding herbs that are not usually farmed

     Um, and poverty. That's a pretty big reason.

. . . since Tea is made from water it wouldn't make sense for Dwarves to drink it unless there's no alcohol

Except for the fact that all booze (except when of very high proof) is also primarily composed of water. Tea also has the advantage of a near-instantaneous prep time, unlike alcohol, which would realistically require a fermentation & aging period of months, if not years.

why would dwarves waste the scarce energy in their underground environment on yeast?

1. Because beer,
2. Because yeast is a fungus,
3. Because the dwarven environment isn't limited to the underground, and
4. Because you're not turning this thread into another "caverns can't support life" debate.

The ALCOHOL_DEPENDENT tag is pretty gamey though.  What, every dwarf at every age needs alcohol to not be depressed?  I'd support a decision to remove it, but give dwarves a personality that encourages drinking for most dwarves (like a higher propensity for insanity due to bad moods along with a resistance to the harmful effects of alcohol) without it being straight up hard-coded in their biology.

Agreed. It would be far more realistic to say that either booze makes them happy, or (harsher) they can't be happy without booze to flip the endorphin switch.

[Egan_BW]

Or make them weird non-standard dwarves who need the alcohol to survive, like how the elves are non-standard because they eat people and react violently to harming plants. DF isn't completely generic fantasy.

[FantasticDorf]

For the purposes of making dwarves motivated, happy and satiated, alcohol dependency is nessecary for standard fortress mode and Toady hasn't really expanded (though they will be by next version as humans will gain more structure & also landowner nobility) other races, still being fortress centric in order to make players make stills & alcohol stockpiles to keep dwarves working.

You can offer water (which may be closer to what) but at the end of the day its either water or [DRINK] no matter how you try to reskin it or change its effects.

Tea and other drinks able to be drunk casually to fufill thirst would be pretty much the same as water but you'd have to poke dwarves to consider anything else unless you forcefully served the drink.

[ALCOHOL_REPLELLED] to always opt to steer away from alcohol and get negative thoughts if you ingest it?

[Rataldo]

Hallucinagenic herbal drinks that can encourage strange moods (or cause insanity) anyone?

[Starver]

ObRealLife

[GoblinCookie]

Hallucinagenic herbal drinks that can encourage strange moods (or cause insanity) anyone?

Extracted from plants or fungi.  I reckon that extracts make more sense than alchohol, the problem with alcohol being that you are basically throwing away scarce energy to feed all that yeast so you have beer.  Extracting intoxicants is far 'cheaper' in energy terms, especially if you eat the plants or part of them as well. 

It's interesting though that on the same basis beer is also very valuable to dwarves.  You might imagine that humans could get the impression that dwarves guzzled lots of beer because when dwarves went to visit the surface they reliable took advantage of the ability to drink all that beer which to them is very valuable.

[Dozebôm Lolumzalìs]

Beer is not rare. It simply isn’t. You can set up an entire fortress with permanent beer using only a small room with a muddy floor.

You can argue that this is unrealistic, but I don’t think that’s a very relevant complaint when there are dwarves and dragons and demons. The question is - does it improve the game? For detailed farm improvements, see NW_Kohaku’s masterpost I can’t currently find because I’m on mobile.

Personally, I think the plants eat magic. The magic varies by the season, which explains why crops can only be grown in certain seasons.

[KittyTac]

The magic explanation will make no sense with the myth release. I guess it's just another placeholder like so many things in DF, slated to be eventually replaced with a better system.

[therahedwig]

Beer is not rare. It simply isn’t. You can set up an entire fortress with permanent beer using only a small room with a muddy floor.

You can argue that this is unrealistic, but I don’t think that’s a very relevant complaint when there are dwarves and dragons and demons. The question is - does it improve the game? For detailed farm improvements, see NW_Kohaku’s masterpost I can’t currently find because I’m on mobile.

Personally, I think the plants eat magic. The magic varies by the season, which explains why crops can only be grown in certain seasons.

FWIW, I think the current underground farming system still makes most sense in old 2D DF where the underground river overflowed seasonally, meaning the ground got, er,  renutriented. Perhaps if DF is going with the nutrients style farming, we'll see more of this kind of simulation, but by then it'll be softened by the huge amounts of other food sources that dwarves now have

I was going to say something about the topic, but I got distracted by researching medieval coughsyrup when trying to look up what it was again that caused herbal tea to not be as popular as a drink as alcoholic drinks in medieval europe, but then realised it wasn't all that relevant.

[Egan_BW]

It would be cool if there was a cavern-layer underground river again, which you'd need to set up by in order to do underground farming. Though needing to set up by a river would limit where you can put a fortress a lot more. On the other hand, it make a lot of sense.

How well something works for gameplay isn't the only thing that matters. What matters probably even more than gameplay for DF is immersion. That is, things should work in a way that's logical without copouts like "you can grow things underground without light because dwarves". That doesn't mean no magic, dragons, and dwarves. It means those magical things need to be explainable, have a specific way they work and a reason why they exist. And that's exactly what mythgen is supposed to address. An entire long-wait dev cycle is going towards satisfactorily solving the problem of combining dwarves with realism.

And none of that had anything to do with tea.

[Rufflikerex]

It would be cool if there was a cavern-layer underground river again, which you'd need to set up by in order to do underground farming. Though needing to set up by a river would limit where you can put a fortress a lot more. On the other hand, it make a lot of sense.

How well something works for gameplay isn't the only thing that matters. What matters probably even more than gameplay for DF is immersion. That is, things should work in a way that's logical without copouts like "you can grow things underground without light because dwarves". That doesn't mean no magic, dragons, and dwarves. It means those magical things need to be explainable, have a specific way they work and a reason why they exist. And that's exactly what mythgen is supposed to address. An entire long-wait dev cycle is going towards satisfactorily solving the problem of combining dwarves with realism.

And none of that had anything to do with tea.

It's funny how much we stray from the original topic at hand so much. Remember the "Round Earth" thread? Why do we do this so often?

EDIT: Back to the topic at hand, I say that perhaps tea, and other drinks, should have an option to put specific types of alcohol in them (such as rum) to better appeal to dwarves while still adding variety.

[GoblinCookie]

Beer is not rare. It simply isn’t. You can set up an entire fortress with permanent beer using only a small room with a muddy floor.

You can argue that this is unrealistic, but I don’t think that’s a very relevant complaint when there are dwarves and dragons and demons. The question is - does it improve the game? For detailed farm improvements, see NW_Kohaku’s masterpost I can’t currently find because I’m on mobile.

Personally, I think the plants eat magic. The magic varies by the season, which explains why crops can only be grown in certain seasons.

If the magic makes the plants grow that should appear in the legends.  Otherwise I will assume things work as they do in real-life and the game is just compensating for missing mechanics. 

[Rowanas]

Beer is not rare. It simply isn’t. You can set up an entire fortress with permanent beer using only a small room with a muddy floor.

You can argue that this is unrealistic, but I don’t think that’s a very relevant complaint when there are dwarves and dragons and demons. The question is - does it improve the game? For detailed farm improvements, see NW_Kohaku’s masterpost I can’t currently find because I’m on mobile.

Personally, I think the plants eat magic. The magic varies by the season, which explains why crops can only be grown in certain seasons.

If the magic makes the plants grow that should appear in the legends.  Otherwise I will assume things work as they do in real-life and the game is just compensating for missing mechanics.

Does the game also include airflow and water currents in legends? no, because they are simple facts of life, as is the magic plant power.

[SixOfSpades]

     If we're really going to chew on the optimization of everything tea-related, meaning all of agriculture, that's going to involve pretty much every major update Toady has planned: The caverns and magic are going to be heavily affected by the Mythgen release, making dwarves partly dependent on underground rivers will only become feasible if/when the Embark scenarios release allows us to embark underground, etc. The entire thread would be basically made of derails because we wouldn't be able to focus on any one thing. So I for one advocate dropping the entire agriculture angle and concentrating on alternative beverages.

     We can kill two birds with one stone: Dwarves are currently hypersensitive to stress, and we "need" a way to strongly link them to booze that doesn't involve them being somehow addicted to it from birth. So we completely do away with the gamey tags like [ALCOHOL_DEPENDENT], and instead assign all drinks varying values of Thirst_Quench, Alcohol_Content, and a bevy of Taste factors like Sweet, Bitter, Sour, Smooth, Fruity, etc., in order to appeal differently to dwarves with a varying range of preferred tastes. (A system which makes far more sense than having just 1 specific favorite food, especially when it's a food they've never had.) Then, make the alcoholic drinks lower stress (and perhaps make dwarves exceptionally sensitive to that stress-reducing effect), and maybe make certain other drinks (most likely the caffeinated ones) actually raise stress a bit. Finally, allow dwarves (at least) to be aware of this difference, so that they will know when they need a drink. Relatively happy dwarves will be more free to drink other beverages, but there's still no reason for them to avoid booze. So, all told, about 75% of the drinks consumed by dwarves will be alcoholic, as opposed to maybe 50% for non dwarves (assuming ample quantities of both, of course).