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[thriftshopmusketeer]

I love the gorgeous new forests formed by the """new""" multi-tile trees (which I now realize is likely 6 years old!), but there's an issue with the forest biodiversity. Like 80% of the trees detailed in game are fruit-bearing, and the distribution appears to be mostly random, meaning that every forested biome is effectively the Garden of Eden, a towering orchard of absurd plenty. With no effort you can feed a fort of arbitrary size simply by picking food that, quite literally, grows on trees.

There are some downsides to the system--namely the exposure to deadly nature, and also the tendency of dwarves to swipe ladders out from under their coworkers and strand them in trees to starve--but these are managed easily enough and pale in comparison to the upside of "limitless food". But I'm less bothered about the gameplay limitations as I am about verisimilitude--many of these trees are domestic, and even for those that are not, wild trees that bear human (or dwarf)-palatable food are not the majority in any biome.

Barring a classic Bay12 solution involving the wholesale implementation of modern dendrology, I'd like to tag specific trees as more or less common. Oaks, maples and pines should not be vastly outnumbered by apples, persimmons and pomegranates! It should take time and effort to cultivate a flourishing orchard. 

[voliol]

+1

The multi-tile trees came in 0.40.01, so >8 years ago, by the way.

[PetMudstone]

+1

The ability to adjust frequency for plants similar to how you can already do so for creatures and ores would be a good addition. Outside of making fruit trees less oddly common it would also let you make super valuable plants that are also appropriately rare.

[Tamren]

I figured this is something that will always be on the todo list. Like one day we'll wake up and find The Ant Update where instead of anthills and termite hills we suddenly have dozens of species. Trees in general are only halfway implemented and there are still a lot of bugs, tower caps for instance are supposed to have trunks five levels high and three tiles thick, very large and on the same scale as highwood trees. But in game they seem to be capped to just one level of trunk because of outstanding bugs despite growing for hundreds of years. Fruits trees in particular are missing some features, such as being able to plant them from seeds (or any other tree for that matter). Fruit seeds in particular are useless because they cannot even be cooked and only exist to clog up storage spaces.

What I figure is that tree distribution will become more realistic in a future update, and at the same time "Fruit Bearing Trees" will become an item on the embark screen, like "Flux Stone" and "Shallow Clay". This lets you know if fruit trees are present in that location and you can make an educated guess on the type based on the biome you picked.

The ability to plant trees of a specific type would let us farm specific types of wood for future megaprojects instead of just using whatever is available. Being able to plant your own orchard to grow specific fruits would also be very thematic, I've always wanted to make an farm fort based around apple cider.

[brewer bob]

+1

...But there's actually a surprising amount of trees in forests that have edible growth (not to speak of other plants), though much of it isn't probably so palatable for the modern person. (And some, like inner bark of Pinus sylvestris, have been used mainly as famine foods.)

It's a bigger problem in DF that the amount of fruit the trees bear is way too big, imo. Tree variety can be addressed with modding, but it'd be nice to see more in the vanilla version.

[Nordlicht]

I think a crude simulation of plant spread during world gen on top of the probability for certain plants to appear  would be nice - to have regions / islands with certain populations that don't exist in the same biome elsewhere.

I don't know how much of it is simulated currently, but the type of soil could also be factored in to have diversity in the same biome.

As far as I know early prospectors used plants for finding metals / minerals. Simulating that would be a nice addition for adventure mode to scout out new fortress locations.

Deforastication if really large creatures roam the area.

Change of soil quality over time - although I don't think at the current timescale it would not matter. Maybe if the game gets more SimEarth like early worldgen.

[jipehog]

There is a FREQUENCY tag. But as far as I can see it isn't used for trees, and I am not sure if can be used for specific biome settings i.e. making something more frequent in the Savana than in the Mountains.

[brewer bob]

There is a FREQUENCY tag. But as far as I can see it isn't used for trees, and I am not sure if can be used for specific biome settings i.e. making something more frequent in the Savana than in the Mountains.

Frequency can be used by trees, but yeah, it applies to all the plant's biomes, unfortunately.

[dirkdragonslayer]

I figured this is something that will always be on the todo list. Like one day we'll wake up and find The Ant Update where instead of anthills and termite hills we suddenly have dozens of species. Trees in general are only halfway implemented and there are still a lot of bugs, tower caps for instance are supposed to have trunks five levels high and three tiles thick, very large and on the same scale as highwood trees. But in game they seem to be capped to just one level of trunk because of outstanding bugs despite growing for hundreds of years. Fruits trees in particular are missing some features, such as being able to plant them from seeds (or any other tree for that matter). Fruit seeds in particular are useless because they cannot even be cooked and only exist to clog up storage spaces.

What I figure is that tree distribution will become more realistic in a future update, and at the same time "Fruit Bearing Trees" will become an item on the embark screen, like "Flux Stone" and "Shallow Clay". This lets you know if fruit trees are present in that location and you can make an educated guess on the type based on the biome you picked.

The ability to plant trees of a specific type would let us farm specific types of wood for future megaprojects instead of just using whatever is available. Being able to plant your own orchard to grow specific fruits would also be very thematic, I've always wanted to make an farm fort based around apple cider.

I really wish you could plant trees. It would help clear up the excessive amount of tree seeds you get, but it would also be cool to make cherry tree orchards and such.

It was a really simplified system, but I remember Masterwork mod had plantable tree farms for Kobolds and it was really cool. Since they couldn't dig you could embark in a desert or beach and had these sustainable above ground forts. With clay walls, glass weapons, tree farms, leather armor, shell crafts and decorations from fishing. Now that you can engrave constructed tiles, it sounds like it might be fun to try that again.