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[Kurouma]

Like some people have been talking about, a balanced soil nutrient system could be good for making the farming system more Fun - i.e, if players have to manage the industries for producing different fertilisers. One of the things I've come to love about DF is that the rock/soil type is geologically accurate. In real life, too, though, different soils have different compositions. Each rock/soil type is chemically different and so we get lots of variation in base fertility. Maybe a way to do this is by introducing a new parameter for each tile: each open tile layer (so not just open air but cavern floor as well) has a number score for how fertile it is, calculated based on its soil type (clay, silty clay, sand, etc) as well as the rock it's sitting on (schist, dolomite, orthoclase, etc). Say we have three main types of fertiliser; like bonemeal from carcasses, potash from wood, and compost from refuse. Each year, depending on your soil/substrate combo, you will need to apply fertiliser in different combinations. Maybe each tile of "loam on dolorite" will need 1 unit bonemeal and 2 units compost per year. Or "sand on karst" will need 3 units compost per year.
Also, the CATsplosion becomes useful if you need a lot of compost because your dwarfs are starving!

[azmodean]

Re: farming on rock
I can't recall where, but Toady mentioned that the ability to muddy rock and grow stuff on it is a bug, and will be fixed at some point.
Since reading that I've avoided using the exploit, which changes things a bit (particularly for more extreme maps.)

Even with that I still think the farming is majorly out of whack, I have a few farmers and two tiny (5x5) plots (in the caverns) outproducing my ability to even use everything I grow with over 50 dwarves.  Really I'd be happy with having that level of investment resulting in subsistence living (I agree that increasing field size isn't a very good balancer, though I'd prefer larger fields just for better believability), but the reality is that I have 100+ (and growing) of each type of underground plant, and I'm making more booze, thread, and other plant products than I know what to do with.  Oh, and my farmers are sitting around idle all the time.

I think the people saying that the NPK and related suggestions would make the initial fort too difficult are missing the point.  At embark you should be able to get subsistence farming out of whatever soil you have available.  The soil depletion shouldn't really start to have an effect for at least a year, and probably longer than that, at which point you're getting caravans, and industry is getting set up.  Even then it's only a problem if you do, "flood one 5x5 plot and expect it to feed the fort for the rest of it's lifespan".  Even if you just abandoned that plot and moved to another one, you could probably keep doing that and have good results from farming for many, many years.  Another point is that the subsistence crops would likely not be all that picky about their soil conditions, so again survival isn't really threatened.  Unless perhaps the "I'm sick of plump helmets" penalty were adjusted to the point where you couldn't get away with permanent subsistence farming anymore.  Even then it'd be a while before it would really be a problem.  So again, the scenario is that perhaps cave wheat (good/varied booze) and dimple cups (dye for cloth industry) would require fertilization to grow properly on bad soil, like clay or sand.  On the other hand, perhaps you luck out and get rich loam at embark, which means you can grow whatever you want with high yields for several years without having to worry about it.  That's another issue, for farming, pretty much the only variable is, "is there accessible water?".  Fixing the farming on rock bug would add, "is there soil?".  Adding some kind of soil quality system would change this to "is there good soil OR the means to fertilize the bad soil?".  In my mind, the more significantly different situations you can be presented with at embark, the better

A potential problem with this though, is destroying/rebuilding plots.  If the soil depletion isn't persistent, then it would make the whole thing pretty trivial, just requiring you to tear down and rebuild your plots once a year or so. 

On my first successful fort I made much larger fields (25x25 underground, 24x24 aboveground) and assigned a significant number of farmers under the assumption that it would be necessary, only to be flooded with foodstuffs, most of which I ended up just selling because I had nowhere to put it.  I have to say that was one of the biggest disappointments I've run into in the game so far.

Something I think people aren't super clear on is that there are two issues here, one is balance, and the other is breaking immersion.  The first isn't all THAT important to me personally, with the system as it is I'll just modify the raws to scale back production, avoid using the farming on rock exploit, and only produce as much food as I need.  (this does mean though that making a "breadbasket" fortress is pretty much pointless since it's so trivial to do).  I'd rather not have to do all of this stuff though, and I think the game would be better for having some of these things incorporated in the default game.  The real issue for me though is the loss of immersion when I have to scale back my farm plot to a single 5x5 plot OR LESS in order to avoid being swamped with food.  My image of this world is a tooth-and-nail struggle for survival, yet it's absolutely trivial to not only survive, but flourish through farming.

[Draco18s]

Re: farming on rock
I can't recall where, but Toady mentioned that the ability to muddy rock and grow stuff on it is a bug, and will be fixed at some point.
Since reading that I've avoided using the exploit, which changes things a bit (particularly for more extreme maps.)

Its not a bug, in that it is unintended, but that he'd like to remove it and replace it with something better in the future.  In the 2D version "muddied rock floor" was the only way to grow food.

[NW_Kohaku]

Well, one of the things I want to do is make farming on rock a long-term development project.  You need to use special "rock-breaker" plants and fungi to develop a soil so that you can do serious farming upon it, so that you gradually build up a layer of soil to do serious farming. 

If players were not just given a default soil that is perfect for all farming right off the bat, but had to build up the soil, then we wouldn't even need persistant tracking of soil quality as a means of preventing players from just unbuilding farm plots and rebuilding them, they would be losing out on any benefits of using hard work to build up the soil.  (Especially if they start with acidic or alkaline soils, and have to lime or acidify the soil to make them farmable.)

(Of course, flooding with muddy water can bring in sediment that effectively just transplants a thin layer of soil on top of stone...)

But the problem with rock-breaking is that if we want to be really serious about it, we need to have some kind of extra variable above and beyond what we're already using to track how much the stone has been broken into soil.  (Unless rock floors are simply soils that have essentially no nutrients, and we make "rock breaker" crops into things that can limitlessly produce nutrients from nothing as a shorthand for breaking apart stone.)

I'm also going to try to make a mock-up set of crops to demonstrate what I envision for a crop rotation system... but that depends on how distracted and/or lazy I get, as well as how ambitious I try to get with stating these things.

[Draco18s]

I'm also going to try to make a mock-up set of crops to demonstrate what I envision for a crop rotation system... but that depends on how distracted and/or lazy I get, as well as how ambitious I try to get with stating these things.

Try to be realistic with it, that is, model cave wheat after real wheat, etc.

[NW_Kohaku]

I'm also going to try to make a mock-up set of crops to demonstrate what I envision for a crop rotation system... but that depends on how distracted and/or lazy I get, as well as how ambitious I try to get with stating these things.

Try to be realistic with it, that is, model cave wheat after real wheat, etc.

Of course!

That's what's taking so long, all the research.

After all the research and detail I've done so far, why would I skimp out now?

I.E.  Cucumbers are an alkaline soil-tolerant crop (6.0-7.5 pH, although some of my sources argue), they are part of the squash family, so they are "heavy feeders" in terms of soil nutrients, require significant watering (but not outright marshy conditions), are Spring-Summer crops, and have a growing period of around 70 days (GROWDUR:840).

Actually, we might want to start changing this from a "seasonal" crop-growing cycle into being a temperature-based cycle.  I.E. you can't grow anything (aboveground, anyway) during freezing periods of the year, while, instead of just being in "the right season", we can have soil (ambient) temperature run when crops are capable of being planted.  (Cucumbers start germinating at around 65 degrees Farenheight.)

[CapnMikey]

Well, one of the things I want to do is make farming on rock a long-term development project.  You need to use special "rock-breaker" plants and fungi to develop a soil so that you can do serious farming upon it, so that you gradually build up a layer of soil to do serious farming.

This is an awesome idea!  I had a similar one, where you'd use a "pulverize" designation to break the floor up into gravel, then water it, but I really like your idea of using special fungi.  Especially if that fungi couldn't be eaten/brewed/etc., it would make farming more of a commitment.

It's probably been mentioned (I've only skimmed this thread), but I would also like to see different classes of plants.  Like wheat, you have to plant and harvest each year, and the "wheat" IS the seed.  Other plants (berry bushes, etc.) you would just pick the fruit each season, and not need to replant.  Any discussion along those lines earlier in this thread?

[NW_Kohaku]

Oh, hey, since I'm not talking much about fertilizers in my next post, I'll just post this link here, since I found it while researching other stuff:

http://www.extension.umn.edu/distribution/horticulture/M1191.html

It's got a chart of fertilizer values for different common fertilizers, so it would be useful in charting out various values of fertilizers.

Oh, right, and...

Soil acidification occurs because of the fertilizers used, especially when adding Nitrogen (especially manure-type fertilizer).  Nitrogen-fixating legume crops also cause soil acidification (drops pH).  Potash, alongside raising K, also raises soil pH.  Certain types of Peat can be used to raise pH in organic gardens, as well.  I'll include this as a crop for the special purpose of being a fertilizer for other farm tiles.

[NW_Kohaku]

Today, I'm going to start making up some sample crops, a little suggestion of how to build this in psuedo-code to illustrate the point...

(I am spoiling some things because I'm a sesquipedalianly loquacious SOB.)

Spoiler: Caveats and Assumptions (click to show/hide)

First, I'm going by the assumption that the current seasonality of crops will be reversed - underground crops realistically suffer from virtually no distinction of season, while aboveground crops do.

I'm also using the "biomass" stat for carbohydrates, which means that, while aboveground crops have tricky seasons to worry about, underground crops do require some starter biomass, such as simple sawdust or the like. 

I also want to start off using the previously mentioned suggestion of having all farm plots be something like a 3x3 plot because that gives me more room to manuever with crop yields.  Currently, all crops produce between 0 and 4 (very rarely 5) crops per harvest, but this could be made up into a production of 0 and 20 or 30 or even 40, depending on the crop.  This would mean that some crops just plain produce more food than others (but have more finicky requirements or longer growing times).  Of course, this all gets swept aside if we just have Volume and Mass tracking of objects, as we could simply track specific kilogram values of crop harvests.

On that note, Process To Bag and Process To Barrel (quarry bushes and sweet pods) need to stop making five times as much food as you put crops in.  That's just plain rediculous and unfair.  No crop can compete with something that produces five times as much food as it.

Of note, however, is that not all crops have the same nutritional value.  The an arbitrary mass of onions do not feed the same amount of people as the same mass of rice will feed.  Onions are not particularly nutritious crops (and notably, do not consume nearly as many nutrients as rice will), so may need to have its harvests kept artificially lower than they would really yield as a means of kludging the larger number of onions you would need to eat to get the same nutrition of eating more nutritious foods.

Also, not many of these crops actually do anything with soil acidification, as far as I can tell.  I might be wrong about some of these, but generally, soil acidification occurs because of the fertilizers used, especially when adding Nitrogen (especially manure-type fertilizer).  Nitrogen-fixating legume crops also cause soil acidification (drops pH).  Potash, alongside raising K, also raises soil pH.  Certain types of Peat can be used to raise pH in organic gardens, as well.  I'll include this as a crop for the special purpose of being a fertilizer for other farm tiles.

Other properties for these plants should also exist, like having a specific type of pest, such as a fungus or insect, that is a particular menace to that specific crop.  (These, in turn, might actually have some kind of fungal or insect nemesis that dwarves could cultivate or purchase that would combat specific pests.  Growing, for example, a fungus like a cordyceps fungus that specifically targets a specific crop's known pests as a biological insecticide.)

I'll even try to turn this into a sort of mockup raw-code, although I won't put it all into raw form, as that is too much copy-paste drudgery.

Spoiler: Long section on format (click to show/hide)

The format I will use:  (Assume that nutrients are an unsigned byte, with values from 0 to 255)

[NUTRIENT_N: Preferred minimum: Tolerated Minimum: Adjustment]
[NUTRIENT_P: Preferred minimum: Tolerated Minimum: Adjustment]
[NUTRIENT_K: Preferred minimum: Tolerated Minimum: Adjustment]
[SOIL_PH: Preferred minimum: Preferred maximum: Tolerated Minimum: Tolerated Maximum:  Adjustment] 
[WATER_REQUIREMENT: Preferred minimum: Preferred maximum: Tolerated Minimum: Tolerated Maximum: Adjustment]
[BIOMASS: Preferred minimum: Preferred maximum: Tolerated Minimum: Tolerated Maximum: Adjustment]
[FULL_HARVEST: stack size]
[PEST: creature]
[SEED_TYPE: category]

This is assuming there is no overfeeding mechanism where you can burn plants with overabundant Nitrogen.  This could be easily added in, considering how SOIL_PH works, but it's not going in right now. 

It should be fairly obvious, but "Preferred" is the ideal range, and "tolerated" is the minimum-before-it-stops-growing range.  The range between those two is where the warning signals of poor leaf quality and the like show up, as a percentage between the two numbers.

"Adjustment" is either a positive or negative integer value that pushes the value for that nutrient up or down, depending on whether that plant depletes or replinishes that specific nutrient.  Note that Nitrogen depletion (and replinishment) should be MUCH faster than anything else, triple your Phosphorus consumption and ten times your Potassium consumption.  Likewise, fertilizers that replenish Phosphorus and Potassium should be slower-working.  Nitrogen is the most volatile nutrient in the soil, and crop rotation largley focuses on keeping nitrogen levels high, while potassium is a matter of building up a good base, and maintaining it with periodical supplimentation.

EDIT:  Actually, I'll just start using +3, ++, +, 0, -, --, -3, -4 etc. to talk about these things from now on, as it's easier to just talk about these in relative terms rather than try to punch out calculations on an abstract without really knowing how well this would work out when I actually simulate them.

For soil pH, assume 127 is a value of 7.0 pH.  For roundness of number, assume 20 is the difference between 1 pH and another.  Hence, 117 is 6.5 pH.

BIOMASS is a measure of how many usable carbohydrates and other organic compounds that can be broken apart for energy by non-photosynthetic crops, like fungi.  It's actually useful in some parts, as this can not only give you a usable crop, but also break apart cover crops or leftover husks of other crops to provide you with more nutrients of the NPK variety.  I can also use this as a shorthand for "Humus", which is basically the soil bacteria, fungus and the like that help break down dead stuff for the plants.

FULL_HARVEST is the maximum size of the stack of crops you can grow with this type of crop. This is a necessary balancer, as crops that are edible and replinish soil nutrients (like legumes) would be amazingly attractive compared to other, soil-depleting crops (like wheat) if they simply produced the same amount of crops as the ones that are supposed to be more valuable.  (The way that sweet pods and quarry bushes are basically the ultimate crops in the current version because they can be turned into 5 times as many food items as any other crop, and Dwarven Syrup is one of the most valuable crop-derivatives, to boot!)

PEST is just a name for a creature that is a specific form of pest for this kind of plant, which would need to have stats of its own.  Obviously, much more detail than just a name would be needed.

SEED_TYPE is a nod to Capn_Mikey's statement: potatos bloated tubers currently are a plant that apparently goes extinct outside the wild, although humans seem capable of growing them just fine.  There should be alternate ways to obtain seeds, whether by the STANDARD method of just dropping seeds when they are consumed, or by DESTROY CROP, which means you have to turn one of the crops into another seed, so that you have to use the actual wheat grain or potato crop to create the next batch of seeds.  This should probably be done as a farmer's workshop task to turn a stack of crops into their seeds, which will "preserve" them for the later seasons.  There are also ON HARVEST type seeds, for the plants that don't actually have useful crops, like growing clover as a means of letting the land fallow.  Basically, the harvest IS the seed.

I will also use some existing terms, like GROWDUR, so if you are unfamiliar with them, visit the Plant Token wiki page as a guide.

Plus, I'm adding in "grazer" as a EDIBLE type, signifying that this makes for a crop that can feed grazing livestock, once that becomes part of the game.

Yeah, I'm editing in more crap as a header.

Spoiler: Trees, orchard trees, and flowers (click to show/hide)

OK, growing a tree is one of those things that have been on the backburner for quite a while.

Being serious about growing trees essentially requires the Volume and Mass suggestion to be involved, so that trees can produce more than one just one set "log" size of 50 liters of volume, and better tree gardening can produce larger planks of wood for your lumber industry.  That is, however, a different argument.  What this really requires is the code that makes growing a "crop" across a timespan of more than a single year, so that we can have a GROWDUR of roughly 6048 for the "average" tree, as it stands with current tree code.

Orchard trees are a different matter. (Although perhaps they can be chopped down for wood as well, 50 liters is not a terribly huge tree, but their growth would need to be slow enough that it would not make cutting down orchard trees preferable to cutting down forests planted specifically for lumber.)  Orchard trees should probably have two different sets of data - a growing cycle that has high nutrient costs for a long period of time before they are of any value, followed by an annual upkeep data.  Orchard trees should have a set date or period that they bear their fruit, and are harvestable.  The amount of fruit they bear is based upon the care they recieved in the previous year since the last harvesting (hence, the point where they bear fruit is the time when all their data gets reset for the next year, not at an arbitrary "new year" date).  Becuase they have a harvesting date that is a set period, planting dates should be based upon trying to hit this harvesting date, so a tree that bears fruit in fall, and takes exactly 6 seasons to bear fruit should only be allowed to be planted in Spring. 

There should be some sort of function (such as a "pruning" period) at a point during the start of a growing season that would function to give one farmer the "skill rank" input for that following year's harvest.  Soil conditions, meanwhile, just need to be kept within their preferred regions to keep crops growing at their preferred state.  Pests will become a much larger issue for orchards, though, as you aren't using crop rotations to prevent the buildup of specific pests.  As long as you do not plant overmuch orchards (and make the greater concentration of a specific species a greater lure to specific pests), it should still be generally easier to just maintain an orchard than to harvest seasonal crops, although perhaps producing less fruit overall.

"Flowers" are generally "they look pretty" garden plants.  (I put "flowers" in quotes, because I expect dwarves will spend more time growing particularly interesting mushroom formations, possibly even mushroom formations that create small crystal growth, rather than real flowers.  Flowers are hippy elf things.) I would presume they would be used to either raise room value, or to be admired the way that a fine door tends to get admired right now (meaning they have to have value for still being in the ground, treated effectively like furniture).  Rather than having a set number of crops that "bloom", they can instead simply have a quality rating like most products in this game have quality ratings.  Alternately, they can be picked and put into some kind of urn or vase pottery item as decorative furniture.

As a decorative garden, they would have most of the same properties as gardening plants, but they would be more valuable as a crop that stays in bloom and is never picked.  "Perennial flowers" should be treated in much the same way as orchard trees - blooming at a set period of the year, and requiring some upkeep between bloomings. 

Flowers, especially if we are going by the "each plot has a 3x3 space" method of farming plots, might actually need to be sewn with multiple seedlings/spawns at the same time, so that as one wilts, the already-planted next set of "flowers" will be coming into bloom, and a plot can potentially have some "flowers" in bloom at any given point in time of the year.

Spoiler: Implimentation ideas (click to show/hide)

Now I want to talk a little about how this can actually be coded...

I'm talking about having a "maximum harvest" value, but not specifying how, to hit that number. 

I propose that the various factors in a plants growth be multiplied together.  That way, a period where a crop had too little water will have the functional equivalent of halving or even stoping a crop's growth for that specific period. 

This needs to be split up into "checking periods", where the game does the heavy mechanics of checking for proper soil quality levels (and recording them for the crop's overall harvest), and subsequently trying to adjust soil quality levels.  That the adjustment comes after is important, as it means that if soil quality drops because of a check into a non-ideal state, it gives your farmers the period of time between checks to address the problem. 

Checking periods, however, cause a problem.  They can't really go on every single 100 steps that pass, that would be a bit too frequent, especially since, if we have 12 checks every day, and crops are now going to have periods between harvests of as much as a full (336 day) year in the case of orchard trees, we start talking about having 4032 individual checks adding up to the growth of a single crop, which, when you are multiplying 6 different factors together, you start having fairly huge numbers. 

It also causes problems because different soil nutrients are going to fluctuate at wildly different rates.  Water may fluctuate with every given day.  Potassium content of the soil, however, should only notably fluctuate on a year-to-year basis.  Potassium, thanks to the general difficulty it poses to plants to actually reach them, will be depleted at roughly 1/3rd the rate of Phosphorus, and 1/10th the rate of Nitrogen, which is water-soluble, and hence can flow freely through the soil, so plants can reach it, consume it, and deplete it far more readily.  (This is the problem with using 255 as a maximum value - potassium goes down so slowly that it should only experience a single-digit change over the course of an entire crop cycle, while water needs to fluctuate wildly, so you can't break that small number of -4 soil potassium down into anything less than four -1 incidents.) Water is even more volatile a number than that, and realistically requires nearly daily maintainance  (of course, we need less than daily checks on watering if dwarves are to be expected to be able to actually do anything about it - they can easily spend days off simply on sleeping). 

This means we may need to have counters in the GROWDUR that make only every 12th tick on the GROWDUR check nitrogen, while every 120th tick on the GROWDUR checks Potassium, while the values for the Potassium check are carried over in every check for other nutrients between the actual checks on Potassium. 

THIS, however, creates the problem of making either the problem of low nitrogen occur at very small intervals (12 ticks of growdur is one game day, and water should probably be checked and adjusted more frequently than nitrogen if we really want to be serious), or making checks on potassium so extremely infrequent that they are only checked a couple times during the growth of a whole plant, since some crops will mature in roughly 40 days, while this would make potassium checked only once every 10 days.

The ultimate tally for a patch of land, however would go like this: each checking period gets a score, which gets added to a running tally for all the checking periods.  This gets multiplied by the original farmer's preperation and planting skill check.  The game then figures out what the maximum possible score could have been for these checking periods times the maximum score for the farmer's skill check, and let's call this the MAX_SCORE.  You then multiply the score that you got for upkeeping the plants by the Maximum Harvest value, and then divide by the MAX_SCORE value to find the number of crops you actually get.  (You actually wouldn't need to store a MAX_SCORE variable, of course, you could find that value on the spot, but this is for explanation purposes.)

During these checks, there are different values for each soil type.  In the most simple, we can say that if the crop is in the "preferred" range for that soil nutrient, it gives a value of 2, and the "tolerated" range gives a value of 1, while values outside those ranges will give a 0, and prevent all growth.  This could be altered, of course, the values could be 4, 3, and 0, so as to make the penalties for falling into the "tolerated" range less damaging, and we could make more ranges than just the "preferred" and "tolerated" ones, with a halfway-tolerated value, so that growth could be 4, 3, 2, and 0.  Each of these values are multiplied by one another, so that if we are having a 2, 1, and 0 spread, and the six nutrient values I list, each check could have a maximum value of 64 points to be added to the tally.  With a daily check, and a growth period of 65 days, that means 4160 nutrient tally points are possible.

Pests can also be included with this running tally.  Pests would be able to eat away at that tally, literally and figuratively.  As pests eat crops, they can give birth to more of themselves (spreading especially rapidly if the pest is a disease or a fungal infection), and hence eat more every check.  If the pests manage to reduce that tally to or below 0, the crop is completely destroyed.  Pests should also be able to starve if no crop suitable for them to attack exist, however, reducing their numbers down to nearly nothing (probably best if this is done by geometric growth/decay modeling) if you avoid giving them any crops they can attack for an extended period of time. 

Pests should also be attracted by a concentration of their favored crop - the more of a given crop you have in a fortress, the exponentially more they attract pests that will attack them, and the longer that you go planting the same crop, the more chances that pests have to attack.

With ALLLL that out of the way, I can actually start posting some crap:

Since I already had that one out there:

NAME: Kappa Gourds (Cucumbers)

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

notes: These are gourd-type crops (obviously), so they are heavy feeders on nutrients, but aren't particularly good for feeding large numbers of people, so these are more for being quality crops, good for their nutritional value, while other gourds (like melons) are just plain tastier than most other vegetables.  As such, they are higher value crops.  Plus you can use them to bribe Kappa into not eating you!

PREFSTRING: crisp snap when broken

EDIBLE: Vermin, raw, cooked, grazer
TILE: 161
COLOR: 2 0 1

NUTRIENT_N: 180: 110: -40 (Heavy feeder)
NUTRIENT_P: 110: 70: -7 (P is relatively low)
NUTRIENT_K: 200: 130: -8 (K consumption is unusually high)
SOIL_PH: 107: 137: 87: 151: 0
WATER_REQUIREMENT: 160: 205: 130: 225: -140
BIOMASS: 20: 160: 0: 220: +16

FULL_HARVEST: 30
VALUE: 4

PEST: Gourd Beetle (Cucumber Beetle), Downy Mildew

BIOME: aboveground, temperate or warmer
SEASON: Spring, Summer
GROWDUR: 780

SEED TYPE: consumes crop

DRINK: Cucumber Ice Pepsi Kappa's Beer  (what can I say, I'm a Touhou fan)  Value: 2
PROCESS TO BARREL: pickle Value: 20

NAME: Cross Brassica (Broccoli)

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

notes:  These are relatively fast growing, and can grow in cold seasons (although I still believe a winter freeze should automatically kill all exposed crops) that normally do not offer many crops, so they aren't as valuable/productive as some other crops.  They are moderate nutrient consumers, though, so can work well in crop rotations.

PREFSTRING: miniature-tree-like appearance

EDIBLE: Vermin, Raw, Cooked, Grazer
TILE: 5
COLOR: 2 0 0

NUTRIENT_N: 160: 120: -28
NUTRIENT_P: 140: 105: -12
NUTRIENT_K: 140: 105: -4
SOIL_PH: 99: 127: 79: 147: 0
WATER_REQUIREMENT: 130: 180: 100: 215: -90
BIOMASS: 100: 190: 60: 240: 0

FULL_HARVEST:30
VALUE: 2

PEST: Cross Maggots

BIOME: Non-freezing, non-scorching, doesn't like hot, either.
SEASON:  Fall, Winter
GROWDUR:  528  (Would take about 20 days/240 growdur longer if you planted in Summer or Spring, but this is for a fall/winter-only crop)

SEED TYPE: Consumes crop

NAME: Rust Grass (ryegrass)

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

notes: This is a "rock breaker" crop, I guess you could say.  It's purpose is largely to add more potassium into the soil by breaking apart clay or even stone to access its Potassium.  For flavor, I decided to make it a bright rusty-colored grass along its seed pod.   Technically, the ryegrass I modeled this on can also be considered a weed!  But it's also used for lawn grass, and for soil cover, especially since it grows well in Winter.

PREFSTRING: rusty red tips

EDIBLE: vermin, grazer
TILE: ","
COLOR: 4 0 1

NUTRIENT_N: 120: 70: -8 (light, especially because it is meant to be plowed back in)
NUTRIENT_P: 40: 20: -3
NUTRIENT_K: 60: 20: +9
SOIL_PH: 103: 221: 83: 241: 0
WATER_REQUIREMENT: 100: 180: 70: 230: -100
BIOMASS: 10: 160: 0: 210: +24

FULL_HARVEST: 8 (seeds)
VALUE: 1

PEST: none

BIOME: Any nonfreezing, it's a grass!
SEASON: all
GROWDUR: 336

SEED TYPE: ON HARVEST

NAME: Gracile Goober (peanuts!)

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

notes: A nitrogen-fixation crop that is also a useful and tasty crop, instead of mere green manure!  This should be a part of any serious crop rotation system meant to avoid excessive use of Nitrogen fertilizers, although some nitrogen fixation crops that ARE just green manure would be more effective.

PREFSTRING: delicate yellow flower; delicious paste

EDIBLE: vermin, raw, cooked
TILE: 232
COLOR: 6 0 1

NUTRIENT_N: 40: 10: +90  (The money shot.)
NUTRIENT_P: 120: 90: -8
NUTRIENT_K: 160: 100: -11 (surprisingly high, but apparently, they do)
SOIL_PH: 107: 119: 77: 135: -4
WATER_REQUIREMENT: 170: 230: 130: 250: -400 (remember, it has a long growing season, and needs plenty of watering during this time.  Supposed to take 20-40 inches of rainfall, or equivalent to grow.)
BIOMASS: 130: 220: 80: 255: -30 (benefits from high humus and decaying biomatter concentrations)

FULL_HARVEST: 30 (low for its growing season, but it has other values)
VALUE: 1

PEST: rootworm

BIOME: warm or warmer aboveground, needs plenty of rain
SEASON:Spring, Summer, Fall
GROWDUR: 1500 (125 days, out of a 28-day month, means nearly 5 months (or the better part of two whole seasons) to grow)

SEED TYPE: CONSUMES CROP

DRINK: Earthen Spirits (George Washington Carver apparently made several kinds of "peanut punch", and even peanut ice cream, but "goober punch" doesn't quite sound right)- Value: 1

PROCESS TO BARREL: Goober paste (peanut butter) - Value: 15

MILL: Goober flour - Value 10

In a nod to George Washington Carver, though, peanuts should be capable of making a rediculous slew of products, including: Soap, Rubbing Alcohol, Quinine, Laxatives, Medicines for Venereal Diseases, Glycerine, various forms of makeups, ointments, shampoos, dyes, paper, insecticides, glue, plastic, polish, diesel fuel, coke, and rubber.  At the very least, dyes are practical for DF.

EXTRACT: Goober Oil (value 5, also usable in prepared meals, making this oil will also produce a minor fertilizer as a side-product): MILL: goober dye base (should be a base in the production of dyes) - Value: 15

SOAPMAKER: turn goober oil + lye into vegetable oil soap.

I'm going to cut this off here, because this post is already pretty darn long, and because I've already spent the better part of the day researching crap, and I need to go to sleep.

[Dante]

NW_Kohaku, let me just say that this is seriously fantastic. I hope ToadyOne consults you personally when he comes to do farming improvements.

[NW_Kohaku]

At least this gets easier as I go along... It was rediculously difficult to come up with the original few NPK values from soil testing, but after I have a few baseline values, I can pretty much just go off of "should be about 2/3s of that last one".

I'm going to try to put out a few more dozen of these, then try to give some example underground crops, as well.  (Which will be entirely out of my butt, because I'm not going to be making cave wheat be actual wheat, but a fungus, since it has to be non-photosynthetic.

Oh, and something else: Since I'm doing so many drinks, I think it's a good time to start referencing this idea here: http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=61345.msg1395034#msg1395034 Along with doing more for farming in general, we can do more for stills and alcohol production, as well.

NAME: Bacchus Berries (grapes, which technically are berries) (I thought that "Bacchus" came from some alternate word for grape, but I can't find a link proving that now... maybe some derivation of "Vitis Berries" or Vine berries would be more apporpriate?)

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

notes: Peanuts and now grapes... I started really craving PBJ sandwiches typing all this.  Anyway, I put plenty of other notes around this entry, so no need to put more here.

PREFSTRING: symbolic dignity

EDIBLE: pest, raw, cooked
TILE: 163
COLOR: 5 0 1

NUTRIENT_N: 150: 110: -40 (Light feeder, but it's also a very long growdur)
NUTRIENT_P: 150: 110: -21
NUTRIENT_K: 120: 90: -4
SOIL_PH: 107: 127: 87: 147: 0
WATER_REQUIREMENT: (Requires an inch of rain (or equivalent) per week of growing in the early seasons, less after that.  Loooong effin' growing season means plenty of water goes to these crops.)
BIOMASS: 130: 220: 80: 255: -30  (also requires high biomass, like peanuts.  I'm actually just going to copy-paste the same numbers, since it would tend to make it easier on the player if they just need to remember "high biomass", rather than a specific value for every individual plant... the fact that it also makes it easier on those who produce these numbers is just a total side-benefit, I swear!)

FULL_HARVEST: 60
VALUE: 2

PEST: Vine Mealybug, Powdery Mildew

BIOME: warm or warmer with at least moderate rainfall.  High drainage, and prefers loamy soil.
SEASON: Spring, Summer, Fall
GROWDUR: 2016 (Plant in April, harvest in September.  Literally half the year for one crop (hence the large amount of crops you gain). Since vines can continue to give fruit over multiple years, however, this can be turned into a "orchard tree", which requires pruning and pest control, but less soil maintainance.  This would require it to be a "tree" that produces no wood, however, requiring a seperation from the code that produces an orchard tree from the code that produces a lumber tree.  If this is an orchard tree, the growth period should be 6 months, with a harvesting period in the fall.)

SEED TYPE: standard

DRINK: Human Wine (Hey, if it's "dwarven wine", there has to be its counterpart, right?) Value: 4  (This would be a good place for having more variety in alcohol-production difficulty.)

NAME: Shadevine Heartfruit (tomato, a member of the nightshade family)

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

notes: This is a large variety of tomato for the making of sauces or the like.  It's a bit demanding in terms of water and potassium, but still not quite a heavy feeder, and

PREFSTRING

EDIBLE: pest, raw, cooked, grazer
TILE: 03
COLOR: 4 0 1

NUTRIENT_N: 160: 120: -40 (--)
NUTRIENT_P: 110: 70: -7 (-)
NUTRIENT_K: 200: 160: -6 (---)
SOIL_PH: 97: 117: 77: 127: 0
WATER_REQUIREMENT: 180: 240: 120: 255: -255(-4)
BIOMASS: 40: 180: 0: 225: +43

FULL_HARVEST: 40
VALUE: 2

PEST: Curly Top, Pipeweed Mosaic Virus

BIOME:Temperate and warmer.  Prefers fairly high rain areas with good drainage
SEASON: Spring, Summer, Fall
GROWDUR: 1020

SEED TYPE: standard

PROCESS TO BARREL: Shadevine sauce (I.E. tomato sauce, marinara, ketchup, etc.) Value: 20

NAME: Glacier Shadevine (A tomato variety called the Glacier Tomato)

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

notes:  A much smaller tomato (the vine only grows 4 inches tall) that has golfball-sized fruits, these grow in much colder climates than the typical tomato variety.  These are a cold-weather, lower-feeding alternative to the more commonly farmed Shadevine varieties.

PREFSTRING: tiny round fruits

EDIBLE: vermin, raw, cooked, grazer
TILE: 148
COLOR: 5 0 1

NUTRIENT_N: 130: 90: -30 (--)
NUTRIENT_P: 110: 70: -5 (-)
NUTRIENT_K: 160: 130: -4 (--)
SOIL_PH: 97: 117: 77: 127: 0
WATER_REQUIREMENT: 180: 240: 120: 255: -90(---)
BIOMASS: 40: 130: 0: 185: +40

FULL_HARVEST: 24
VALUE: 2

PEST: Curly Top

BIOME: Cold, Temperate.  Moderate to high rainfall and high drainage.  Prefers loamy clay or silt.
SEASON: Spring, Summer, Fall
GROWDUR: 660

SEED TYPE: standard

PROCESS TO BARREL: Shadevine sauce (The same as the variety above produces) Value: 20

NAME: Waterlump Tuber (The Lumper potato)

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

notes: This is based upon the Lumper potato strain.  For those who aren't that big on American/English/Irish history, the Lumper was the potato strain that fell victim to the Potato Blight that caused the Irish Potato Famine that led to millions of Irishpeople fleeing their native land to places like the United States. (See: http://www1.american.edu/ted/potato.htm) Unlike most modern potato strains, the lumper was actually not a particularly tasty potato, instead being rather watery.  It also grew somewhat slower than modern potatos because, as a early strain of potato that shares more in common with wild potatos than domesticated potatos, and as such, was leafier and spent more time blooming flowers.  The key to understanding why this was the crop that caused the famine is that these potatos were much easier to grow than other breeds (soil fertility-wise), and that they had essentially all the nutrients you needed to survive, except for Vitamin A and Calcium, which you could get from milk or cheese, which most poor people relied on for their needs.  This is why it became virtually the only crop grown in Ireland, making the lumper such an unprecedentedly easy target for the potato blight, which in turn made a single disease's rapid spread (thanks to the incredible density of the lumper population for that disease to feed upon) capable of starving a million people, and forcing even more people to flee the nation. 

PREFSTRING: lumps and knobs

EDIBLE: pest, cooked, grazer
TILE: 232
COLOR: 6 0 0

NUTRIENT_N: 130: 80: -22 (--)
NUTRIENT_P: 90: 50: -5 (-)
NUTRIENT_K: 90: 50: -2 (-)
SOIL_PH: 107: 127: 87: 147: 0
WATER_REQUIREMENT: -80 (--)
BIOMASS: 60: 130: 20: 190: 0

FULL_HARVEST: 33
VALUE: 1  (Actually, since this is a "for sustainance only" crop, I do think perhaps reducing the advantage for having a crappy crop (1 value basically means you get twice as many crops as a 2 value crop), so that we still count a 1 value crop as a 1.5 value crop for the purposes of balancing the equations.  This would make this plant only produce a FULL_HARVEST of 22.)

PEST:  Waterlump Blight, tuber weevil, wireworm

BIOME: Cold to warm, wet, marginal lands
SEASON: All year, aside from freezing
GROWDUR: 660

SEED TYPE: Destroys crop

[NW_Kohaku]

I want to throw in some "desert crops" here, as well as other exotic location crops (like jungle plants) to try and talk about diverse environmental farming.

NAME: Agave (based on the... agave!  I think it's a rarely enough discussed plant that it could slide in under its own name.  It's also called Maguey.  If we have to use the two-word plant names that are standard, however, maybe Teal Fleshyleaf.)

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

notes:  Agave look alot like aloe vera, except it can grow a giant flowering stem.  In fact, they're in the same family, but aloe is its own genus.  They have thick, fleshy leaves, and store water in them like a cactus does.  Naturally, this means that, like a cactus, this sort of plant handles heat fairly well, and needs very, very little water.  It also means that it tends to grow slowly, however, so this sort of low-water farming isn't particularly productive.  Try using one of the "Egyptian-style" farms instead. 

Anyway, these are "orchard tree" type plants - they take 4 years to grow to the point they can be harvested.  Technically, they can only be harvested about 3 times before they get too weak to be able to regrow their stems, and you need to grow a new one.  Data here: http://www.ianchadwick.com/tequila/agave_growing.htm

PREFSTRING: sugary juices

EDIBLE: vermin, raw
TILE: 23
COLOR: 3 0 0

Growing time and fruiting seasons (per year):
NUTRIENT_N: 160: 110: -84 (-)
NUTRIENT_P: 160: 110: -28 (-)
NUTRIENT_K: 160: 110: -9 (-)
SOIL_PH: 127: 147: 107: 167: 0 (Alkaline soils, as most deserts are)
WATER_REQUIREMENT: 40: 140: 10: 160: -360 (-) (As a desert plant, it actually gets most of its water during a brief rainy season, and stores it like a cactus does for the entire year.)
BIOMASS: 20: 120: 4: 160: 0

FULL_HARVEST: 60
VALUE: 2

PEST: Fusarium fungus, black weevil

BIOME: Warm to scorching, dry biomes.
SEASON: Harvested in the spring.
GROWDUR: 2 years to start harvesting (Wild, these things actually take 5 years to start flowering, but there's no way people would grow these things if they took that long.)

SEED TYPE: standard

Can be harvested for wood.

DRINK: Tequila!  (no really, this is the tequila plant) value: 4

NAME: Aloe (Again, maybe this could be a "Spined Fleshyleaf" or something...)

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

notes:  These are basically aloe vera, or some similar species.  Perreneal succulent leaf plant that, like a cactus, can store up water and as such, don't need much of it.  They tend to live in slow motion, though, so while easy to grow, they are also slow to grow, and wind up taking plenty of land. I'm basically just copying the soil data from the Agave, but this isn't just because I'm lazy, it's also because they really do live in essentially the exact same environments.

PREFSTRING: soothing balms

EDIBLE: vermin
TILE: 157
COLOR: 2 0 0

Growing time and fruiting seasons (per year):
NUTRIENT_N: 160: 110: -84 (-)
NUTRIENT_P: 160: 110: -28 (-)
NUTRIENT_K: 160: 110: -9 (-)
SOIL_PH: 127: 147: 107: 167: 0
WATER_REQUIREMENT: 40: 140: 10: 160: -360 (-)
BIOMASS: 20: 120: 4: 160: 0

FULL_HARVEST: 12
VALUE: 10

PEST: Fusarium fungus

BIOME: Warm to scorching, dry biomes.
SEASON: Harvested in the Summer.
GROWDUR: 1 year to start harvesting (These actually take about 4 years to reach full maturity, but we're basically talking about tearing off a leaf for the resin it contains.)

SEED TYPE: standard

EXTRACT FROM PLANT: Can be processed by a special method that involves tearing away leaves to extract the resin of the plant.  This can have medicinal purposes, such as being used alongside (or in place of) soap in surgury to reduce chances for infection, speed up recovery, or just reduce pain and keep dwarves who are recovering from injury happy.  It might also be used medicinally.

NAME: Marsh Stalk (Celery)

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

notes: I was looking for crops that fit marshy soils, and came across celery... I'm really hoping to find something that's more fit for a rainforest a little later, though.

PREFSTRING: loud crunch when eaten

EDIBLE: vermin, raw, cooked, grazer
TILE: 154
COLOR: 2 0 1

NUTRIENT_N: 130: 90: -30 (-)
NUTRIENT_P: 90: 50: -12(-)
NUTRIENT_K: 160: 100: -7 (--)
SOIL_PH: 107: 123: 87: 143: 0
WATER_REQUIREMENT: 200: 255: 160: 255: 167 (--) (Note, Marsh Stalks can be grown in 255 water, which is what you get for having standing puddles of water - although all non-water crops (I.E. water lillies) should drown in water 3/7 or deeper - so you can partially flood marsh stalks.  You probably can't do this too much with real celery, even though it grows wild in marshes, but I wanted to have a few plants that were like this)
BIOMASS: 140: 210: 100: 250: -56

FULL_HARVEST: 35
VALUE: 2

PEST: marsh rot

BIOME: Swampy areas, temperate to hot. (wet)
SEASON: Spring, Summer, Fall
GROWDUR: 1344

SEED TYPE: destroys crop

NAME: Shortwater Grain (Rice)

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

notes: Staple cereal crop of a larger portion of the human population than any other.  In warm enough climates, you can actually get 3 harvests of rice in a single year.  As a primary grain crop, these are meant to take considerably more nutrients than other types of crops, but pay for it with being able to feed large numbers of people with relatively little land. If only DF farming could look THIS cool: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Banaue_Rice_Terrace_Close_Up_(2).JPG

PREFSTRING: drooping stalks; pure white grains

EDIBLE: vermin
TILE: 244
COLOR: 6 0 0

NUTRIENT_N: 160: 120: -80 (----)
NUTRIENT_P: 160: 120: -12 (--)
NUTRIENT_K: 200: 160: -5 (---)
SOIL_PH: 107: 127: 87: 147: 0
WATER_REQUIREMENT: 180: 255: 140: 255: 160 (---)
BIOMASS: 160: 230: 100: 255: -40

FULL_HARVEST: 90 (!!) (Actually, 96 by my calculations...)
VALUE: 2

PEST: paddy flies, marsh rot, leaf miner

BIOME: Marshes warm or warmer
SEASON: Spring, Summer, Fall
GROWDUR: 960

SEED TYPE: destroys crop

PROCESS TO BAG: whitegrain (needs to be removed from the stalk - can only be eaten cooked)

MILL: Whitegrain Paste (should be usable as glue, or in the production of paper, lacking better materials)

DRINK: whitegrain wine / sake.  Value: 3

NAME: Ducklily (Azolla)

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

notes: Azolla is a companion crop of Rice, used for thousands of years.  It covers the surface of the water, choking out any potential weeds.  (Technically, this would be grown while the rice was growing, but it could still work if planted adjacent to rice.) It also is a nitrogen fixation plant, and the leftovers are technically edible, but are more often used for feed for livestock.

PREFSTRING: patterns they form drifting upon the water

EDIBLE: grazer
TILE: 238
COLOR: 2 0 1

NUTRIENT_N: 80: 20: +39 (+++)
NUTRIENT_P: 100: 60: 0
NUTRIENT_K: 160: 120: -2 (-)
SOIL_PH:107: 127: 87: 147: 0
WATER_REQUIREMENT: 250: 255: 240: 255: -56 (--) (A water plant, can't survive being out of water)
BIOMASS: 130: 240: 100: 255: +56 (++)

FULL_HARVEST: 15
VALUE: 1

PEST: repells paddy flies

BIOME: Warm or warmer swamps and marshes (water plant)
SEASON: All year
GROWDUR: 672

SEED TYPE: standard

[NW_Kohaku]

I probably won't need THIS many, but just in case...  I'm thinking of maybe being more diversified in climates for talking specifically about seeds, though.  So you can't find every kind of seed wild in every non-freezing biome with the exception of the good or evil or savage seeds.  Some are specific to deserts or forests or swamps or the like.

I'm going to put underground crops here.  I figure there will be less of them in this version as well, especially since there will be only one underground climate, while we could differentiate crops by climate when talking about aboveground crops.

NAME: Plump Helmet

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

notes:  Because it's pretty much the iconic DF crop, I have to do this one pretty early.  When stating this out, however, the question becomes "What is the salient aspect of a plump helmet?"  (Besides being a purple mushroom.)  I settled on being "an early crop", which in this model means that it's a soil-building crop.  When setting up your underground farms, plump helmets should be one of the first food crops you start planting, so it needs to be something very fast and easy to grow.  To make this fit the current model, it is basically a decomposer, it feeds purely on biomass directly, meaning you can simply feed it by dumping a log, sawdust, corpse, or even offal directly onto a tile and start growing plump helmets without even waiting for them to decompose to their natural elements through the efforts of other decomposers.  (I'm going with a fairly strict "no photosynthesis underground" model here.)

PREFSTRING: plump helmetiness resemblence to those delicious Plump Helmet People - taste the sentience! rounded tops

EDIBLE: pest, raw, cooked
TILE: 6
COLOR: 5 0 0

NUTRIENT_N: 50: 0: +20
NUTRIENT_P: 50: 0: +4
NUTRIENT_K: 50: 0: 0
SOIL_PH: 87: 137: 57: 157: -2
WATER_REQUIREMENT: 80: 160: 40: 200: -30
BIOMASS: 210: 255: 170: 255: -75 (this is where it hurts... you need another dead thing per plump helmet you want to grow, so fertilize constantly.  Of course, if just plain wood or raw manure works, you shouldn't have trouble finding it even at the start of the game)

FULL_HARVEST: 12 (Small.  It's quick-growing, extremely easy-growing, and needs some way of making it not the ultimate be-all-end-all crop.  Plump helmets were previously replaced simply because of their lack of growing nearly as much food as quarry bushes or sweet pods did.)
VALUE:2

PEST: Helmet Blight (HORRORS! if plump helmets wind up too powerful anyway, fungal infections of your fungi can at least prevent overreliance upon a single crop, anyway), Crown Beetles, Plumper Maggots.

BIOME: Any underground
SEASON: Any
GROWDUR: 300

SEED TYPE: standard

DRINK: Dwarven Wine

NAME: Floral Mycotree

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

notes:  This "orchard tree" would look like a white vine that wraps around a pole stuck in the ground and a white carpet of fungus on the floor.  When they come into fruit, the mushroom caps start sprouting out of the vine and then bloom into a five-pointed star-shaped mushroom with brilliant colors.  These mycotrees can be either safe or poisonous depending on the soil content - acidic soils makes these fungi absorb heavy metals in dangerous quantities from the soil, and the mushrooms turn a bright, festive, red, orange, or yellow color.  They pretty much could look like "Mushroom christmas trees"... The red/orange/yellow variety would make a nice "perennial flower" type plant, as well, but be vulnerable to the same pests.

PREFSTRING: bright flower-like mushroom blooms

EDIBLE: pests, raw, cooked
Tree TILE: 198
Tree COLOR: 7 0 1

Fruit TILE: "*"
Fruit COLOR: 1 0 1

First season (tree growing time):
NUTRIENT_N: 210: 170: -105
NUTRIENT_P: 210: 170: -88
NUTRIENT_K: 150: 100: -48 (heavy hit here, develop the soil first)
SOIL_PH: 127: 157: 107: 177: -5 (needs alkaline soil)
WATER_REQUIREMENT: 140: 220: 100: 240: -1008 (3 water per day)
BIOMASS: 160: 255: 130: 255: -504   (FEED ME, SEYMOUR!)

Fruiting Seasons (per year):
NUTRIENT_N: 210: 170: -60
NUTRIENT_P: 210: 170: -44 (relatively high, needs bonemeal probably around 3 times per year)
NUTRIENT_K: 110: 60: -8
SOIL_PH: 127: 157: 107: 177: 0
WATER_REQUIREMENT: 140: 220: 100: 240: -336 (1 water per day, with a spread of 80 in the "green zone", that's watering once every 80 days)
BIOMASS: 160: 255: 130: 255: -84

FULL_HARVEST: 55
VALUE: 3

PEST: Carpet Flies (repelled by Weeping Mycotrees)

BIOME: Underground (cave 2 and 3)
SEASON: Winter harvest
GROWDUR: 4032 (one year between planting and it maturing... it should be harvestable exactly a year to the day after you first plant it, and every year on that day after that)

SEED TYPE: standard

DRINK: Caver's Sky Spirits (a blue drink with floating white bits of mushroom, like clouds) Value: 3

PROCESS TO BARREL: Sky Jelly, Value: 20

NAME: Weeping Mycotree

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

notes:  Not directly related to the Floral Mycotree, but the vine that grows looks similar to the floral mycotree, but the fruiting bodies are instead a colorful willow-like set of strands.  These strands actually catch insects from the air, and so this "tree" is both ornamental and a pest-repellant.  It does not have fruits that you can collect, but it can produce seeds, anyway.

PREFSTRING: delicate, sorrowful waving at the slightest wind

EDIBLE: no
TILE: 198
COLOR: 7 0 0

Bloom tile: 159
COLOR: 5 0 0

NUTRIENT_N: 210: 170: -99
NUTRIENT_P: 210: 170: -33
NUTRIENT_K: 110: 60: -8
SOIL_PH:117: 157: 87: 177: 0
WATER_REQUIREMENT: 140: 220: 100: 240: -1008
BIOMASS: 160: 255: 130: 255: -224

Fruiting Seasons (per year):
NUTRIENT_N: 210: 170: -33
NUTRIENT_P: 210: 170: +4 (feeds on flies like a venus flytrap, so it can replinish soil)
NUTRIENT_K: 110: 60: +2
SOIL_PH: 117: 157: 87: 177: 0
WATER_REQUIREMENT: 140: 220: 100: 240: -336
BIOMASS: 160: 255: 130: 255: -56

VALUE:  15 * quality (room value)

PEST: eats carpet flies, normal flies

BIOME: underground (2 to 3)
SEASON: blooms from Fall to Winter
GROWDUR: 4032

SEED TYPE: drops a seed at the end of the blooming

NAME: Blue Carpet

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

notes:  This is "underground grass".  It's basically a blueish moss/lichen adapted to live without sunlight by disolving the rock directly.  It is inedible directly, but is a grazable material.

PREFSTRING: fuzzy appearance

EDIBLE: pests, grazers
TILE: 177
COLOR: 1 0 0

NUTRIENT_N: 110: 60: +12
NUTRIENT_P: 60: 20: +12
NUTRIENT_K: 20: 0: +5
SOIL_PH: 107: 147: 87: 167: 0
WATER_REQUIREMENT: 160: 240: 100: 255: -50
BIOMASS: 110: 255: 60: 255: -36

FULL_HARVEST: The nutrient replinishment is the harvest.
VALUE: 1

PEST: carpet flies

BIOME: underground (cave 1:2)
SEASON: all
GROWDUR: 360

SEED TYPE: drops upon consumption or death

DRINK:

NAME: Pig Tail

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

notes: Here again, I have to come up with a new translation of this classic crop.  The salient points of this crop, however, are its use for fiber (and drink) rather than something about how it grows, which is relatively standard.  As such, I figured the best place to look would be at cellulose, which is the primary component of cotton, and from there, just look at what cotton needs, if this plant is primarily capable of producing something similar. http://extension.missouri.edu/publications/DisplayPub.aspx?P=G4256 Which says that K is a major draw in the making of the cotton fibers.  Cotton actually uses relatively little Nitrogen, as well, winding up with N and K consumption being close to one another.  In a mushroom, however, chitin is used instead of cellulose, and chitin does contain Nitrogen in its chemical composition, so I decided it would be a moderate Nitrogen consumer.  (Chitin is apparently used in surgical thread, so it isn't impossible for it to be a thread, although it would probably biodegrade faster than tough cellulose.)

PREFSTRING: twisting stalks

EDIBLE: pests
TILE: 231
COLOR: 7 0 0

NUTRIENT_N: 150: 110: -60 (--)
NUTRIENT_P: 90: 50: -13 (-)
NUTRIENT_K: 220: 180: -40 (----)
SOIL_PH: 107: 127: 87: 147: 0
WATER_REQUIREMENT: 80: 160: 40: 200: -140 (--)
BIOMASS: 190: 255: 150: 255: -140 (--)

FULL_HARVEST: 55
VALUE: 2

PEST: Swine Weevil

BIOME: All Underground
SEASON: All
GROWDUR: 1464  (roughly four and a half months, enough time for two harvests per year, plus some kind of cover crop to maintain sustainability... you'll need plenty of K suppliments, though.)

SEED TYPE: Standard

DRINK: Dwarven Ale, Value: 2

FABRIC: Pig Tail Thread, Value: 2

NAME: Sapphiric Rock Mold

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

notes: A fungus with a radical survival strategy - it grows in soils too alkaline for most other crops.  This fungus generates a small "bulb" of quartz and aluminum oxide from the heavy aluminum concentrations in alkaline soils while it breaks through the rock and clay.  With trace elements of iron and titanium, aluminum oxide can form blue sapphires.  Unfortunately, these are often impure, small, and few are worthy of harvest, and as such, are not as valuable as "true sapphires" which are mined.  The caustic chemical smell, however, prevents this from being a fully ornamental crystal formation.
 
PREFSTRING: beautiful crystals

EDIBLE: none
TILE: 15
COLOR: 1 0 0

NUTRIENT_N: 100: 50: -105
NUTRIENT_P: 160: 120: -75
NUTRIENT_K: 160: 120: -30
SOIL_PH: 147: 217: 127: 255: -90 (Boom.  It acidifies the soil tremendously, so this becomes a method of making alkaline soils more usable.  Of course, it also makes these fairly unsustainable without doing something to seriously alkaline the soil.)
WATER_REQUIREMENT: 80: 180: 30: 200: -480
BIOMASS: 100: 255: 60: 255: -252

FULL_HARVEST: 30
VALUE:

PEST:

BIOME: Underground (level 3)
SEASON: All
GROWDUR: 6048 (Year and a half... sapphires don't grow easy.)

SEED TYPE: standard

REACTION: Cutting the crystals can potentially bring Sapphires (30%), Star Sapphires (10%), and also produce Rock Crystal (50%), and Milk Quartz (50%), (This all adds up to a total chance of a payout of approximately 20 dbs value, to pay for its extreme growing conditions and length of growing season.)

NAME: Muck Yew

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

notes: ... Yeah, OK, this is kind of an inside joke. REGARDLESS! It's a for-wood tree, as well as a companion crop, so that you can plant it to ward away certain pests... just not thieves.

DESCRIPTION: A rare underground "plant" that grows deep in shadowy

PREFSTRING: frail, yet immovable nature; legends of samples that have not moved in hundreds of years; scent that invites reading beneath them

EDIBLE: vermin, grazer (as a sapling)
TILE: 5
COLOR: 5 0 1

(per year)
NUTRIENT_N: 120: 70: -112 (--)
NUTRIENT_P: 50: 10: -17 (-)
NUTRIENT_K: 50: 10: -5 (its curious growth habits seem to stim from a lack of nutrition)
SOIL_PH: 87: 117: 67: 137: 0
WATER_REQUIREMENT: 200: 255: 170: 255: -168 (-)
BIOMASS: 100: 255: 60: 255: -112

Can be cut down for wood

PEST: blackwhite mouse
REPELS PEST: Crown beetle

BIOME: Underground, Cave 3
SEASON: Any
GROWDUR: 6048

SEED TYPE: produced every winter

[Draco18s]

Of note, however, is that not all crops have the same nutritional value.  The an arbitrary mass of onions do not feed the same amount of people as the same mass of rice will feed.  Onions are not particularly nutritious crops (and notably, do not consume nearly as many nutrients as rice will), so may need to have its harvests kept artificially lower than they would really yield as a means of kludging the larger number of onions you would need to eat to get the same nutrition of eating more nutritious foods.

While true, would it be possible to measure 1 unit of food as a "nutritional unit."  E.g. you grow food and you get less onions per yeild, but each unit has the same nutritional value as 1 unit of rice.

[NW_Kohaku]

I know, that's what I have to do, barring a nutrition suggestion integration.

It's a little hard to balance all this stuff when I have to keep in mind how much longer some crops go between bloomings and others...

I'm also wondering how many crops I should allow per tile... what I'm coming down on will basically be giving players enough food to feed 1 dwarf per 2 tiles, even with crop rotation systems that mean land goes fallow occasionally.  Should I be cutting this even more?

edit: Oh, but what we really need, like I said in Volume and Mass, or in the Down With Prepared Meals threads, is for creatures to have food needs based upon their size.  Currently, you can get all the "water" you need to survive by licking the mud off your boots.  All creatures that eat will eat the same amount per year.  What needs to change is that larger creatures need to eat more food.

This isn't eat more than 8 times a year, this is eat more than one unit of food per meal.

As a baseline, the average human eats 200 kg of food a year, (and divided by 8, that gives us a nice, clean 25kg food per meal).  As the size of creatures goes up or down from there, we can say that they need to eat a greater or lesser amount of nutrition per meal based upon that.

This will become especially important when we start ranching animals that need to eat, themselves - why keep dogs around when elephants eat just as much, and produce 500 times as much meat?!  Elephants, meanwhlie, realistically eat 50 kg of food per day, so their 1/8th of the year meal should be around 2300 kg of food... plus they drink around 200 liters of water a day.  If they are just grazing, they need 109,500 kg of grazing grass per year.  Good luck feeding a herd of war elephants...