Print

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

[praguepride]

I think the very basic of survival aspects of being a dwarf (food, drink, shelter) should be as simple as possible, at least initially.

You plant a seed, it grows, you harvest it and turn it into food & drink.

Now, some things need to be addressed:

Seed roasts made of seeds, seeds, and more seeds. Prepared meals need to have something of substance in them. A plant or meat or bread? needs to be the core component. No more seed/wine/seed/syrup dishes.

Perhaps breakdown food into these parts:
Core: Meat, fish, or plants.
Sauce: alcohol & other drinks
Season: extracts (syrup, sugar, etc.)
Garnish: seeds

So a simple meal is just a core + sauce, a medium meal is core + sauce + season, and a lavish meal is all 4 components.

Anyway...way off topic there.

The basics and what supports those basics needs to be as simple as possible. It's one thing to have Fun because you accidentally tapped a aquifer and the pressure shot your dwarves off a cliff. It's another thing to have Fun because your marksmen weren't nearly as effective against that giant skeletal whale as you thought they would.

It's another thing to have Fun because you can't figure out how the hell you're supposed to get food & drink to your dwarves. That isn't fun, Fun, or even FUN!!!!. It just sucks.

The key for making dwarf fort accessible is to make the very basics as simple as possible. Most of us who've been palying for awhile can make a functional fort in our sleep. It's the advanced stuff that is far challenging and fun (Fun). Magma work, water work, mega-projects, challenges, seige warfare etc. That stuff should be as complicated and challenging as possible. It will always be Fun as long as the basics are straightforward and simple before going convaluted & complicated.

As for irrigation: It rains (if you have weather turned on. If off, it's assumed it rains anyway ). In caves, moisture drips from the ceiling. Realism concerns done.

Now, I do agree that it should be harder to feed larger forts then it is. Perhaps reducing the number of outputs from a field by a fair amount. As is, it's very easy to break even...perhaps it shouldn't. You can (somehwat) always gather palnts/f for drink and fish/hunt for food. Perhaps farms should be easy to set up but hard to manage.

Or perhaps they should require more work to be successful. As is, you plant the seeds and leave for a season, coming back to harvest. Perhaps there should be irrigation tasks (just once per farm plot or maybe per 3x3 square), or 1-2 per season the farmer has to weed. The longer the weeds are in the farm plot, the lower the crop quantity will be.

The dwarves can take care of it themsevles, but a bit more managing might be required to make sure your dwarf isn't busy doing something else when he should be tending the fields...

[Draco18s]

Seed roasts made of seeds, seeds, and more seeds. Prepared meals need to have something of substance in them. A plant or meat or bread? needs to be the core component. No more seed/wine/seed/syrup dishes.

Now you're getting into cooking, which is an entirely different topic.

[profit]

Seed roasts made of seeds, seeds, and more seeds. Prepared meals need to have something of substance in them. A plant or meat or bread? needs to be the core component. No more seed/wine/seed/syrup dishes.

Now you're getting into cooking, which is an entirely different topic.

He mentioned it in his post that it was off topic.
I think he was trying to also point out that there are other aspects with the food chain that need ironing out.

Anyway...way off topic there.

[NW_Kohaku]

Regardless of however much labor it takes...

I've never seen seed hauling as a problem in farming.  Of course, I just put my food warehouse right next to my farms, and my seeds were right there, next to the farms.  (I mean, farms are one of the things you set up first, so why wouldn't your first warehouses be nearby, as well?)

Regardless, being able to carry seed stacks or wheelbarrows or whatever would be able to handle that fairly well.

The problem I have with farms as they stand isn't that "they require too little knowledge", or that "they are too easy to build", it's that they provide you with something for nothing.  (Especially compared to, say, the nuisance and danger of gathering wood, or worse, fishing.)

You simply designate a tile, drop a seed on the tile (which is, as you point out, virtually instantanious), and a month later, you have produced a stack of raw materials without ever being threatened with running out.

While Silverionmox may want a more technical/realistic/complex version, I don't think using a system of a small number of "soil nutrient" stats in a farm plot is rocket science.  A simple crop rotation system using only three or so soil stats would be managable, while preventing a "produce rope reeds forever" production order.

Barring that, virtually any kind of simulation of a farmland (including previous versions of DF) would at least require watering the plants in some fashion, and simply having some farmers bucket-brigade it would not be a terribly complex way of doing things.

I don't think these are extreme suggestions, here.

[G-Flex]

I think the very basic of survival aspects of being a dwarf (food, drink, shelter) should be as simple as possible, at least initially.

There's a way to do this without making (or keeping) farming itself hypersimplistic, because there are other ways to get food. That's the beauty of it.

With a small population, after all, it makes sense for small animal herds, hunting, plant-gathering, and fishing to serve as your primary food sources. Fishing in particular should continue to be quite viable over time. Trade could also help, although trading food has its own issues.

So basically, it's perfectly sensible for fortresses to slowly ease into farming as their populations grow, which is a boon if farming gets more complex. Of course, population control needs to be better as well, but Toady knows that quite well at this point.


Regarding what you said about irrigation, irrigation is about more than just water, especially if you're talking about river flooding and that sort of thing. It's also about nutrients. Also, you can't assume that all caves have a huge amount of water gushing through them (water dripping would be very, very slow in most caves), and rainfall is highly variable between regions.

[CobaltKobold]

Regardless of however much labor it takes...

I've never seen seed hauling as a problem in farming.

Yeah, for any crop I use I make ≈≈≈≈≈≈== and that's that.
Though, the need to do the two-square stockpile per seed type to get them to bag properly is another farming-related problem.

On the off-topic, I humbly submit "oatmeal".

[NW_Kohaku]

I never had problems simply having a stockpile in the room next door (or the floor below for my aboveground farm) to the farm being the stockpiles.  The seeds go in a barrel right next to the door.  All the seeds.  As far as I can tell, all 200 seeds for all my different crop types somehow manage to fit into a single barrel.  (I guess they ARE small, though...)

Anyway, I'm not saying we have to be absolutely true to life, but we can stand to make farming a LITTLE more complex than "designate a farm" and "plant seeds". 

Like I said, even far simpler games than DF have at least required you supply water to your crops occasionally.  One of the main reasons that farms take so little labor is that there is absolutely no actual labor except for the planting of a seed and what effectively amounts to a hauling job taking the resulting crop stack to the warehouse.  Plants grow on autopilot completely without need for water, nutrients, sunlight, or even fresh air. 

Now, the answer to this, again, is not that we need to give a level of detail to agriculture the way that geology has been given detail, and force players to learn all this...  We can just, say, make dwarves carry buckets of water to the farm plots occasionally.  That would be labor, and it wouldn't be THAT complex for the player - you just have to have enough dwarves (and enough buckets) set to "water crops". 

Having a simplified soil nutrient system would also make farming a little more involved, without straining much of anyone's brain.  Certain crops deplete soil on one parameter, but replenish soil in another parameter.  If you don't want to deplete the soil, you simply avoid planting the same crop over and over again.  Letting land go fallow occasionally would also replinish the soil. 

This still isn't realistic (I mean, realistically, you need an energy source for underground crops) or terribly detailed, but it at least keeps crops from being supplied by absolute game-breaking, food-generating MAGIC that creates food from nothing, rendering all other food industries obsolete.

I know that we want to keep this game from being more complex than it is now fairly well... but the "learning cliff" comes because there is, well, no ramp at all.  You don't just start out by making a farm in this game.  You start out making a defensible perimeter, a farm, a masonry workshop, a warehouse, a carpentry workshop, a wood furnace, a smelter, a forge, a dining room, bedrooms, a bookkeeper's office, a kitchen, a still, etc.  There are no tech tiers, you have to throw them all out there at the same time.

[profit]

I thought about this and decided underground plants can capture cosmic rays.

They normally penetrate the earth but each one has way more energy than visible sunlight.  Somehow dwarfs plants have adapted to capture these rays.

But as for your "Never having a problem"  It was not my point to say placing of seeds and stockpiles could not be worked around, just that they are one more "Gotcha!" that is not explained and is not intuitive, and is a stumbling block to new players.

I do agree farmers should spend more time at the farm, but it should be a generic tending or something... Not resource intensive or require fertilizers.  As that is one more forced thing to learn.  Now... if there were bonuses for fertilizing properly I could more than go for that.  But a basic farming economy should always be simple even if extremely labor intensive.

As for the rest... I agree..  There needs to be a way that is not scalable that would allow for your starting 7 dwarves to have access to all those things quickly with minimal fuss...  But have it be worthless later in the game... 

I was thinking maybe the wagon converting into "Temporary HQ" upon arrival, which produced a meager dining room, meager beds, meager office and maybe a still or something, that had a checklist inside of it notifying the player when the need has been covered elsewhere giving some feedback to the game...Hopefully making it easier on new players... But this obviously fodder for another topic.

[NW_Kohaku]

I thought about this and decided underground plants can capture cosmic rays.

They normally penetrate the earth but each one has way more energy than visible sunlight.  Somehow dwarfs plants have adapted to capture these rays.

Cosmic rays?  heh...

You know we're playing something more Lord of the Rings than Star Trek, right?

When there's something you want that you can't explain, you don't have to technobabble us about reversing the polarity of our flux capacitors, it's OK to say "A wizard did it".

====

Really, I am coming to agree more and more with the idea that we might just need to have split levels of complexity in the game, such as through raws for everything, and maybe a "beginners", "advanced", "brutal", and "masochism" mode DF proper.

What you REALLY need to have a realistic farm (which is to say, an artificial semi-contained ecosystem) is a source of energy, and for matter to return to the source.  This means that soil doesn't need to be just plain depleted in terms of mineral content, but in the actual volume of soil you have remaining, unless you add more soil back, in the form of composted "solid waste" from dwarves, or rotting corpses, or dead tree, or better yet, magma.  (Magma irrigation: The DWARVEN way to farm!)

In above-ground crops, you have things like nitrogen fixation that will actually put nutrients back into the ground from the air.  In subterranean crops, you aren't dealing with anything like photosynthesis, what you are doing is maybe chemosynthesis, if you do said magma irrigation, but most likely you're just decomposing the remains of a plant that did photosynthesis, or an animal that ate the animal that... You might actually need to tend mushrooms much more closely than an above-ground crop, because if the fungus starts to die, then another fungus will start eating the fungus that is dying, and you're going to be losing even more energy to entropy.

That is, of course, unless we open up "magisynthesis", because let's face it, magic gremlins getting into the food barrels is a problem in this game, and we assume our "magic mushrooms" are feeding on the "laylines" of the land or some such.

But as for your "Never having a problem"  It was not my point to say placing of seeds and stockpiles could not be worked around, just that they are one more "Gotcha!" that is not explained and is not intuitive, and is a stumbling block to new players.

I do agree farmers should spend more time at the farm, but it should be a generic tending or something... Not resource intensive or require fertilizers.  As that is one more forced thing to learn.  Now... if there were bonuses for fertilizing properly I could more than go for that.  But a basic farming economy should always be simple even if extremely labor intensive.

I never said anything about fertilization in what I was suggesting in that last post.  In fact, I very specifically avoided talking about fertilization.  I said crop rotation and watering crops. 

Watering would be automated, and as such, require almost nothing to learn, and would be that "tending the crops" you ask about.

Crop rotation would be little more than picking different crops for different seasons or perhaps years, and the effects of soil depletion would take a couple years to manifest, regardless.  Maybe a starting player would suffer a little loss of farm productivity until he understood that, a few seasons down the road (and if he gets that far, he probably has time to read up on it), or he could just expand his farm size.  Letting fields fallow until they replinish isn't so hard.

[Draco18s]

[G-Flex]

I thought about this and decided underground plants can capture cosmic rays.

If you're actually being serious here, this doesn't make any sense. There is no form of cosmic radiation that penetrates the Earth's atmosphere (or an Earth-like atmosphere) with greater power than visible light. If this were true, we'd all have cancer and die in pretty short order, or at the very least, our radios wouldn't work very well. This is to say nothing of how much they penetrate rock.


As far as underground plants are concerned, I find reasonable in-universe explanations (not necessarily realistic ones for our world, mind you, but I doubt a whole lot of magic goes into something as mundane as growing mushrooms, although that's not up to me) a lot more interesting, and generally better, than handwaving it, and that seems to be the direction DF is moving towards anyway; after all, pretty soon we'll be able to exactly quantify how and why a dragon is hard to kill, and that sort of thing.

[NW_Kohaku]

As far as underground plants are concerned, I find reasonable in-universe explanations (not necessarily realistic ones for our world, mind you, but I doubt a whole lot of magic goes into something as mundane as growing mushrooms, although that's not up to me) a lot more interesting, and generally better, than handwaving it, and that seems to be the direction DF is moving towards anyway; after all, pretty soon we'll be able to exactly quantify how and why a dragon is hard to kill, and that sort of thing.

Somehow, I'm not surprised...

Anyway, not to open up a semantic argument, but pretty much definitionally, magic is any sort of law or process that occurs that isn't scientific or rational.  That is, if it happened, and it's not science, it must be magic.

Right now, underground plants (and aboveground plants grown underneath a roof made of stone simply because it is "above ground") recieve energy from an unlimited, omnipresent (or at least, present in any soil or stone that has been muddied) energy source that can apparently flow or replinish itself (if it is ever even depleted) through solid materials without any apparent physical effects.

Alternately, it may, indeed, have physical effects, for dwarves are capable of building stone structures which can apparently free-stand in spite of all logic, and turn materials like bars of soap into an unobtanium alloy capable of supporting the mass of entire mountains on a few inches of a material that, prior to the secret technique of "construction" was an easily malleable material. 

Furthermore, as anyone who has seen an underground river can attest, water in underground rivers appears to "fall" into existence from a completely unseen, unknown source.

Clearly, the world of Dwarf Fortress has the ability to let energy or even matter "slip" in and out of the perceptable reality in difficult-to-percieve ways.  Plants can draw energy from sunlight even without direct exposure to the sun, possibly by "slipping" sunlight to themselves from other locations.  Dwarven constructions can either divert gravitons from reaching their massive, ill-supported towers, or, possibly, are capable of "flipping" gravity around through clever use of these abilities to blur reality.  That is, they have small portals that send gravity in a different direction, making parts of the floors and walls and supports of those towers start "falling up", counteracting the force pulling the fortress down near-perfectly, allowing gravity to continue to apparently function, while having fortresses that apparently can levitate.

Just because something is magic doesn't mean it can't be "hard" magic.

[G-Flex]

If you're going to argue that magic already exists in DF to explain things as mundane as cave rivers, it helps to make sure that you don't give a list of examples consisting entirely of things that simply aren't currently implemented well. All of the things you mentioned are weird quirks about how the system works, and are nonideal. Those are not the way the game should be.

For instance, Toady has specifically mentioned that the starts of river features are rather strange and should work more realistically, but that it's difficult to represent this, and as far as cave rivers specifically are concerned, they don't even exist in the upcoming version.

You can't make arguments about what the world of DF is like based on the fact that some of its features are currently barely-implemented. Toady would pretty much tell you himself that none of what you're mentioning is the way things should be, and in some cases, he has.

[NW_Kohaku]

If you're going to argue that magic already exists in DF to explain things as mundane as cave rivers, it helps to make sure that you don't give a list of examples consisting entirely of things that simply aren't currently implemented well. All of the things you mentioned are weird quirks about how the system works, and are nonideal. Those are not the way the game should be.

For instance, Toady has specifically mentioned that the starts of river features are rather strange and should work more realistically, but that it's difficult to represent this, and as far as cave rivers specifically are concerned, they don't even exist in the upcoming version.

You can't make arguments about what the world of DF is like based on the fact that some of its features are currently barely-implemented. Toady would pretty much tell you himself that none of what you're mentioning is the way things should be, and in some cases, he has.

Dude, "Tongue-In-Cheek"

[profit]

I thought about this and decided underground plants can capture cosmic rays.

If you're actually being serious here, this doesn't make any sense. There is no form of cosmic radiation that penetrates the Earth's atmosphere (or an Earth-like atmosphere) with greater power than visible light. If this were true, we'd all have cancer and die in pretty short order, or at the very least, our radios wouldn't work very well. This is to say nothing of how much they penetrate rock.


As far as underground plants are concerned, I find reasonable in-universe explanations (not necessarily realistic ones for our world, mind you, but I doubt a whole lot of magic goes into something as mundane as growing mushrooms, although that's not up to me) a lot more interesting, and generally better, than handwaving it, and that seems to be the direction DF is moving towards anyway; after all, pretty soon we'll be able to exactly quantify how and why a dragon is hard to kill, and that sort of thing.

Opps I was thinking neutrino's

http://www.hep.upenn.edu/SNO/publicity/NYT-sci-neutrino-mass.html

That is supposedly a mile underground and is built for detecting them.