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[NW_Kohaku]

And since you already need an outside source to increase those resources, it's not a huge deal if your planting isn't very optimal in terms of soil conditions, it just means you'll have to produce and use a bit more of one fertilizer or another.  In fact, if you have a large supply of materials you can use for some fertilizer, you may not want to try to optimize for minimal soil depletion.  You could just use a couple types of crops that produce a large amount of food, but are very resource intensive, and produce a large amount of fertilizer to offset that.

This is one thing that I've been thinking about, but haven't actually had a chance to really talk about:

I think that it might be best to have some kind of limit on fertilizer somehow.  We either need a maximum limit on the amount of Nitrogen plants can survive (which is what Draco18s had said before, and is realistic), or else make pretty much all fertilizers add to the biomass score, and make fertilizers lose all effect after hitting maximum biomass, so that you can't simply dump a large enough quantity of fertilizer to cover over any and all mistakes.  Leeway is of course a good thing, but it shouldn't be a no-brainer that you can just produce insane enough amounts of fertilizer that you don't need to worry about crop rotation at all, and just focus on the high-producing heavy-feeder crops.

(Raw manure provides more nitrogen, but can "burn" crops, and introduce pests in real life, which is why it is often composted first.  This means over half the nitrogen is lost, but it is much safer to put on your soil.  Raw manure would generate massive amounts of biomass in this game (perfect for raising mushrooms that are supposed to just be decomposers, anyway), while composted manure would be better for more delicate surface crops.)

Edit: Oh, and a arbitrary limit on the amount of liming or sulfur you can add per year for the purposes of pH, which wouldn't add biomass, but there is still a limit to what you can do in a given year.

[Jiri Petru]

Thanks for your answers, guys. One last question:

What is the benefit of the NPK+Ph+Biomass+Water system in comparison to a more general system like this:

You have one abstract fertility variable. Most crops decrease it over time. Some crops are fallow crops and increase it slowly. Fertilisers increase it slowly. Result = the player needs to replenish the nutrients by crop rotation and/or fertilising. Tweak the numbers so that combination of both is required.

Events like plagues and grasshoppers can damage crops directly (short-term effect) or decrease the fertility of soil (long-term effect).

On top of this, have 10-15 soil categories dependent on geology, like eg. acidity, salinity, percentage of sand, etc. These are tracked in worldgen but don't change in Dwarf Mode (= no need to track and communicate more variables). Some rare events like pests, diseases or sieges could change the general category of the soil (one time event that doesn't require continual tracking of information).

Both NPK+Ph+Biomass+Water system and the system above:

• Encourage crop rotation
• Allow for events like pests, diseases, etc.
• Allow for a lot of variety in biomes/soil types and crops that grow on them

I've already mentioned a lot of cons of the more complex system, all of them related to controls, UI, micromanagement or ease of learning. What are its pros?

[NW_Kohaku]

As opposed to a single "fertility" value backed up with over a dozen variables that you have no control over?

Simply put, with enough work, you should be able to build your own soil.  If nothing else, unless you are building on top of a toxic waste dump, if you drop enough dead matter in a place where it won't wash away, you can create an ideal form of soil if you are dedicated to the prospect.

This means you can build a farm on any stone layer if you work at breaking the rock, or just dumping enough soil-building biological matter onto the mud, as opposed to being forever locked out of any layer but loam.

One single "fertility" value does not create the right kind of environment for crop rotation.  That just means that you constantly switch back and forth between legumes and heavy feeders like cereal grain crops. 

The reason why you can't just throw any old fertilizer down willy-nilly in a garden and expect the best results is that different plants do take up different amounts of nutrients.  As Draco said earlier, you can pretty much throw as much Phosphorus at the soil as it can hold, but Potassium matters differently, depending on what kind of root structure a crop has.

Even if you are paying attention to Nitrogen with a swap between legumes and cereal grains, you need to replinish Potassium eventually, or the soil depletes, even if not as rapidly as Nitrogen depletes.  I actually rather like that notion - Nitrogen is used ten times faster than Potassium (actually, it can be used at the same relative rates, but the soil needs to contain much more Potassium), and it becomes a longer-term project to build Potassium or soil pH up than the far more rapidly changing variables, like Nitrogen, Water, and Biomass.

[NW_Kohaku]

Well, actually, what we really need is for Toady to be very careful in tweaking the way we get material for fertilizer.

If we have mostly ways to deplete the soil (with a few barely-sufficient ways to add a bit of nutrients back into the soil) through the raising of crops, then the amount of fertilizer we can provide will be the primary determinant of how fertile the soil will be, although I still think there needs to be some kind of limit to how much you can put on a single tile in a given year.

(If biomass gets extremely high, letting the land fallow lets soil bacteria and fungi to break down the biomass into more nutrients - dropping biomass by a certain percentage and raising nutrients.  Land that goes fallow while full of nutrients will probably grow weeds, however.)

Creatures create manure, but this manure production should be balanced out by the fact that you have to feed those animals, as well, and more poop machines means more mouths to feed.

Manure alone should be less than ideal for making enough fertilizer to completely sustain a field of cereal crops, although combined with careful crop rotation, it should be sufficient to just barely break even, provided you are careful. 

Adding dead things (or inorganic fertilizer) should be what puts you over the top, if anything at all does.  (This means there's one more present in Goblin Christmas - goblin meat makes good compost.)  Bonemeal as a source of Phosphorus should be fairly lucrative to the point of making players decide how to balance bonemeal against the other uses one has for bones.  (The ability to compost most wood or cloth items for additional farm productivity the way that metal can be melted may also be nice.)

This means that a good way to quickly kick-start your farm in the first season is to simply drop logs into the muddied soil for growing your first few plump helmets - they add plenty of biomass without too much trouble, and Plump Helmets pretty much run on just biomass and water.  This also means that it's not scalable, however, as you can feed a few dwarves fairly easily on a handful of trees, but larger numbers of dwarves are going to require more trees than are likely to be available for you to cut down - especially if you are going to be making other things, like beds.

Provided animal populations are kept in check by your capacity to feed said animals (and animals should probably require a "stop feeding this animal" toggle so that they don't eat you out of house and home beforehand, or at least on cages), then even slaughtering animals to use some of their parts as compost should be relatively limited in supply, as well. 

It may also provide for having a handful of farms that are made to subsist on a limited amount of manure fertilizer, mainly relying on careful crop rotation to stay afloat.  (Possibly including occasionally making tree farms whose trees can be cut down for use as either lumber or charcoal, but also as fertilizer for other farms.) Meanwhile, some farms are given the special treatment to a greater amount of fertilizer to make the real specialty crops or highly decorative flower gardens or the like.

After all, modern farming was revolutionized by the ability to synthesize nitrogen in quantities limited largely only by the amount of electricity that could be produced.  P and K tend to come from mining dried out lakebeds, which are non-renewable in practical terms.  In ancient/organic farming, you tend to have to be much more careful with your nutrients, as they tend to slip away if you don't fight to add more nutrients back in.

[Sunken]

How viable is the ol' Egyptian method in practice? That is, having the river flood your land once a year or so? It's already being done in DF, of course, but is it realistic? (Provided it's repeated)

[NW_Kohaku]

How viable is the ol' Egyptian method in practice? That is, having the river flood your land once a year or so? It's already being done in DF, of course, but is it realistic? (Provided it's repeated)

The ancient Egyptians obviously used it.  It works... provided you watch a few key things.

First off, the Nile is/was fed by the entire Continent of Africa.  All the soils in the continent get washed along in the fairly slow-moving Nile, and so the Nile brings with it the silt of all the erosion of the continent.  This means that it adds nutrients to the soil that were eroded from upriver...

This also means that any nutrients in the soil when the flood comes also tend to get eroded away. 

If anything, this should be modeled by having either a static level of nutrients in a body of water, or a mechanism for tracking how nutrient-rich the water is (not bloody likely for the forseeable future), and basically averaging out your soil nutrients with the nutrients that the mud the water bears.  If you had previously rich soil, the rich soil may just wash away.  If you had crappy soil, or bare rock, then the mud you get left over from the flood is an improvement.

Keep in mind that a huge amount of environmental damage is caused by drainage of fertilizer into major waterways.  The Mississippi Delta of Louisiana (even before the BP fiasco) would frequently have "dead zones" of pink, sulfuric water where no life could survive in the Summer of every year because of the amount of fertilizer that drained into the Mississippi created surface life that choked out all undersea life, cutting off their oxygen, and killing even the decomposers that could rot the corpses, creating almost totally sterilized sections of Earth.

[Threlicus]

Maybe this has been said before, though I've read this whole thread, but... It occurs to me that one of the key things to making improved farming a valuable part of gameplay is improved *cooking*, and rewards from that cooking.

I'm sure it's been discussed before in improved cooking threads, but a prepared meal should have a few (one to three) 'substrate' ingredients that provide the bulk of the nutrition, and then other things added to enhance the flavor (read value) but don't increase the number of dwarves it can feed. Doing something basic to make that possible and useful is essential for much of the food variety being discussed here to become useful and interesting.

Once food items can usefully be used as garnishes, spices, sauces, or whatnot -- it becomes valuable to cultivate crops which have minuscule nutritional value but add tremendously to meals' value -- maybe pepper, cinnamon, and saffron are incredibly valuable imports the humans and elves can sell you but won't grow except in certain conditions. Anyway, that would mean that it could be tuned to a difficulty where while yes, you can relatively easily feed your fort on a diet of raw plump helmet and dwarven wine, being able to serve cave wheat pancakes between quarry bush leaves, with dwarven syrup and dwarven butter, will be a challenge to make your kitchens able to produce and rewarding in terms of happy and efficient dwarven populations.

[Draco18s]

Maybe this has been said before, though I've read this whole thread, but... It occurs to me that one of the key things to making improved farming a valuable part of gameplay is improved *cooking*, and rewards from that cooking.

Please see any one of the numerous Cooking Threads.

[Threlicus]

Please see any one of the numerous Cooking Threads.

Er... I said:

I'm sure it's been discussed before in improved cooking threads,

demonstrating that I knew such threads existed.

My real point, which I had not seen in this thread at least, is that some form of improved cooking is an important prerequisite to making much of this particular thread be interesting and useful for gameplay. Maybe a whole overhaul is not necessary, but the current state of cooking does not allow for many of the improvements discussed in this thread to be useful.

[sweitx]

How viable is the ol' Egyptian method in practice? That is, having the river flood your land once a year or so? It's already being done in DF, of course, but is it realistic? (Provided it's repeated)

The ancient Egyptians obviously used it.  It works... provided you watch a few key things.

First off, the Nile is/was fed by the entire Continent of Africa.  All the soils in the continent get washed along in the fairly slow-moving Nile, and so the Nile brings with it the silt of all the erosion of the continent.  This means that it adds nutrients to the soil that were eroded from upriver...

This also means that any nutrients in the soil when the flood comes also tend to get eroded away. 

The fastest way to say that, is that thanks to Nile, the Egyptian farmland is "reset" each and every time it floods (unless the flood failed, which means no new soil, which means less food).

One way this can be modelled is that since DF "gen" the river, it can track what kind of land exist before any given section.  Everytime it "floods", it can just reset all the soil nutrient in the flooded region with a pre-computed (at world gen) average of the soil nutrient up-stream.

[NW_Kohaku]

The fastest way to say that, is that thanks to Nile, the Egyptian farmland is "reset" each and every time it floods (unless the flood failed, which means no new soil, which means less food).

One way this can be modelled is that since DF "gen" the river, it can track what kind of land exist before any given section.  Everytime it "floods", it can just reset all the soil nutrient in the flooded region with a pre-computed (at world gen) average of the soil nutrient up-stream.

You can basically go with that, but it raises some problems - DF can't keep track of where water comes from very well.  That's why you can "desalinate" water by pushing it through a pump.  DF can't tell whether water comes from a murky pool, a brook, an aquifer, an ocean, or subterranean lakes or seas once you start moving it around, which is why I think, at least in the forseeable future, we are talking about all water basically having some default hardcoded nutrient levels.

The other thing is that I wouldn't make it an instant change - make it a 5% change towards the nutrient levels of the water every 100 frames (1 growdur), or something where a single splash of water doesn't instantly reset everything, but requires a constant washing away. 

Of course, ideally, we could have this, where terraced rice paddies have water that collect nutrients from the top tiers gradually cascades down, and the nutrients are used in the next terrace because the water becomes saturated in nutrients.  We could even take whatever runoff water we have back up to the top of the terrace and make it go through the cycle again (although we'd need a mechanic for water to eventually deplete, of course).

[NW_Kohaku]

It's apropos of nothing, but I'd like to share this:

I do like lighting issues, but honestly, I'd like to see air quality issues come into play before light comes into play.  I want oxygen-producing molds and lichens (especially ones that grow on magma vents... using noxious vapors like carbon monoxide that come off of magma vents to generate oxygen is just so dwarfy I get shivers) as well as ventilation systems and fans (possibly large enough for spies to crawl through the ventilation system)...

As for light, I'd like to see some sort of photoluminescent lichens come into play.  Even better if they have some interplay with oxygen levels in the caves.  Even better STILL if you have to keep both of those oxygen-producing and light-producing molds fed with minerals and fertilizer as per the Improved Farming upgrades.

The idea of organic cultivated fungus machines that rely upon beams of light as points of data for the inner workings of a megaproject makes me giggle like a child with a new toy.

This, and those herbs that can be used in medicine (like Aloe), as well as potentially using the farming upgrades as a means of supplying magical components, as well as generating wood farms, and gardens to create room quality and wealth, I think, really show how, if you really want to try to do it, you can tie the farming system into almost anything, and make the game better for it.  (Thinking specifically of Kilo24 here and here.)

One of the things that I think people who are afraid of making farming more difficult/complex/labor and land intensive don't realize is that once we make farming no longer a "get free stuff button", as Footkerchief described it, we can use farming (or ranching animals that eat material grazed from a farm...) for almost anything we really want to, without it just plain being cheating.

I'd really think that, if "farming" becomes a critical part of what it takes to keep dwarves breathing or seeing what they are doing, we can really create the sense in the player that we aren't just pushing around little happy face tokens and collecting junk, we are managing a full self-contained ecosystem, where dwarves have to supply not just their own food, but their own light and oxygen supply if they want to live fully sealed off from the world.

(To that effect, I really do like the idea of having "magma farms" that involve building some sort of magma forge-like building that allows you to farm magma for chemosynthetic life that you can use as biomass for your subterranean farms, or else use standing water "fed" obsidian to grow such creatures... it would give us some plausable way to have a self-sustained underground ecology.)

[AngleWyrm]

One of the things that I think people who are afraid of making farming more difficult/complex/labor and land intensive don't realize is that once we make farming no longer a "get free stuff button", as Footkerchief described it, we can use farming (or ranching animals that eat material grazed from a farm...) for almost anything we really want to, without it just plain being cheating.

The crops of the fields within this game are the genuine coin of the land. They are produced and consumed; they are traded, and wrought into better goods. They are the base of the dwarven economic structure. The reason I bring this to the forefront is to point to the one thing that makes farming feel like a cheat: Much more is produced than is consumed. It might seem a small and simple point -- just tweaking productivity -- but it currently gives successful farming an underwhelming aftertaste.

The situation could also be mitigated by having the caravans purchase products with diminishing returns. The first is full price, but as the quantity goes up, the per unit paid goes down. This would help diversify player holdings.

I'de also like to touch on another point, which is farm development. It is far simpler to drain a lake into one big area than it is to add plots as population grows. What I end up doing is watering one large zone, and then planting only some of it, fleshing it out as I get more farmers and mouths to feed. A system that would allow players to persue a build as you grow philosophy would be to designate a zone as irrigated, and then it generates orders to have dwarves splash buckets of water on it every so often. How often would be a submenu choice of how much water saturation the crop is going to need. Such a bucket watering system would then allow players to do expansions, so farming could grow.

[sweitx]

It's apropos of nothing, but I'd like to share this:

I do like lighting issues, but honestly, I'd like to see air quality issues come into play before light comes into play.  I want oxygen-producing molds and lichens (especially ones that grow on magma vents... using noxious vapors like carbon monoxide that come off of magma vents to generate oxygen is just so dwarfy I get shivers) as well as ventilation systems and fans (possibly large enough for spies to crawl through the ventilation system)...

As for light, I'd like to see some sort of photoluminescent lichens come into play.  Even better if they have some interplay with oxygen levels in the caves.  Even better STILL if you have to keep both of those oxygen-producing and light-producing molds fed with minerals and fertilizer as per the Improved Farming upgrades.

The idea of organic cultivated fungus machines that rely upon beams of light as points of data for the inner workings of a megaproject makes me giggle like a child with a new toy.

This, and those herbs that can be used in medicine (like Aloe), as well as potentially using the farming upgrades as a means of supplying magical components, as well as generating wood farms, and gardens to create room quality and wealth, I think, really show how, if you really want to try to do it, you can tie the farming system into almost anything, and make the game better for it.  (Thinking specifically of Kilo24 here and here.)

One of the things that I think people who are afraid of making farming more difficult/complex/labor and land intensive don't realize is that once we make farming no longer a "get free stuff button", as Footkerchief described it, we can use farming (or ranching animals that eat material grazed from a farm...) for almost anything we really want to, without it just plain being cheating.

I'd really think that, if "farming" becomes a critical part of what it takes to keep dwarves breathing or seeing what they are doing, we can really create the sense in the player that we aren't just pushing around little happy face tokens and collecting junk, we are managing a full self-contained ecosystem, where dwarves have to supply not just their own food, but their own light and oxygen supply if they want to live fully sealed off from the world.

(To that effect, I really do like the idea of having "magma farms" that involve building some sort of magma forge-like building that allows you to farm magma for chemosynthetic life that you can use as biomass for your subterranean farms, or else use standing water "fed" obsidian to grow such creatures... it would give us some plausable way to have a self-sustained underground ecology.)

From what I remember, volcanic ash tend to create good soil.  So we can have magma forge that generate an, effectively, infinite source of fertilizer (thou for balancing issue, probably takes a while to do so or only supply a small amount).  In short, each application slowly reset the soil back to norm (natural erosion takes away old soil, new magma soil has the right balance of nutrient for most plant growth).

[NW_Kohaku]

From what I remember, volcanic ash tend to create good soil.  So we can have magma forge that generate an, effectively, infinite source of fertilizer (thou for balancing issue, probably takes a while to do so or only supply a small amount).  In short, each application slowly reset the soil back to norm (natural erosion takes away old soil, new magma soil has the right balance of nutrient for most plant growth).

It tends to create good soil... for surface crops.  Dropping volcanic ash into a farm is just like other forms of rock or gravel - it has nutrients that simply haven't been leeched out of it yet.  What depletes the soil is not replinishing those nutrients by replacing the minerals that are taken out of the soil to produce fruits and vegetables, leaving behind the minerals that are useless to a plant.

For underground crops, what you need is chemical energy.  This means either the carbohydrates of dead stuff or waste materials like manure generally, but vulcanism can provide us with chemosynthesis in the form of sulfur-based energy.  The problem becomes making sure this is not simply a "Get Free Stuff Button". 

I recently posted this as part of the ongoing forums-wide argument that seems to be going on about Improved Farming for weeks now, and I'm thinking I'm distilling this argument down to a final reduced form at this point:

The problem with farming isn't so much that there's "too much free stuff", it's that, as Footkerchief put it, it's "a free stuff button".  You get something for nothing.  All the food you ever need for free.  So long as it's free, the problem doesn't change, you're just kicking the can down the road a little.  Make dwarves eat twice as much?  Just build twice as many farms.  You're still getting everything for free, it doesn't really change the game in any meaningful way.

If it's "trivially easy" to designate 50 tiles of farm and make one dwarf have a farming labor enabled, how much more difficult is it to designate 100 tiles of farm, and enable farming labor for two dwarves?

If it's "trivially easy" to designate 100 tiles, and enable the farming labor of 2 dwarves, how much more difficult is it to designate 200 tiles, and enable farming for 4 dwarves?

This is exactly the problem with plenty of these "stopgap" solutions, like with making "time slow down" or "adjusting the value of quality modifiers" - when you start arguing over changing the arbitrary value of a hardcoded variable for "balance" purposes, nobody is going to ever agree on what random, arbitrary value you pull out of thin air - some people want it easier, others want it harder, and you're talking about a completley arbitrary value, so it's purely a matter of opinion, and nobody's right, so the winner is the one who shouts most stubbornly.

Just look at the real basic materials in this game: Food, wood, stone, glass, and metal. There's a few other raw materials, but these are the ones that really matter.  With sand on the map, and magma kilns, glass is free - make anything and everything you can out of it.  Stone is free - make anything and everything you can out of it.  Food (including pig tails, bone, and leather) is free - make anything you can out of it.  Wood is limited (if renewable) in supply, so you don't make anything out of wood you can make out of something you have for free, but you still make plenty of barrels and beds and bins of wood.  Metal is the only thing you really have to think about conserving on, especially steel or bluemetal.

Farming needs to become more complex because the problem will never be solved until farming becomes something more than just a "free stuff button".  If you have to WORK for your food, then it becomes something far more meaningful.  Even if wood is common, as long as its a finite resource that is difficult to scale, you have to at least use SOME care as to what you use it for.  That is, of course, unless you go the extra mile and create the (hard and complex to build) tree farm to specifically expand your wood production capabilities.

Keep in mind that in this game, there are no real challenges (aside from rare FBs that have broken breath attacks) to a fort beyond the first couple years.  (Although I certainly have my own arguments for how to fix THAT problem.)  Survival IS the only challenge in this game, and if the game currently makes survival too assured, too easy, then it's not a bad thing to suggest that we make it a little more difficult to just scratch out a homestead and defend it from the wilds.  (And that's ALSO not to say that I haven't thought exactly about how to present this to players in the most meaningful way possible, but rather that making the system complex, meaningful, interesting, and an important, attention-consuming part of a player's fortress design took a higher priority.)

If we are using magma for fertilizer, there has to be some meaningful reason why you can't obsidian cast magma infinitely to get past any and all problems, or farming becomes a get free stuff button again.

Using magma as a source of biomass in a scalable way only makes sense if we make it hard to set up and scale.  Just being magma, setup is already not terribly easy, but scalability is a problem.  There needs to be a reason you can't just make 100 of whatever workshops that send out infinite resources for the same prices as 1, and since magma itself is always infinite, this becomes problematic if it involves anything but making the process of turning the magma into something useful is difficult to scale.

The obvious first answer is just making it take plenty of labor, but then it just becomes the new glass - it's still free, it just happens to be a sinkhole to stick all your excess labor.

Another answer is the arbitrary limit on how much fertilizer can be applied - maybe magma-based fertilizer is sufficient, but not wonderful, and you can't just stick more and more and more rocks onto the soil, there is a finite number of additional stones you can place in the soil at any given point in time.  This, however, encourages players to just constantly be dumping more and more stones into every farm plot they have, which may be weird (but hey, at least it gets rid of stone!)  Using magma farms as a source for biomass in this way would also need some similar limit.

Ideally, magma farms might require some sort of complex balancing act, the way that farms are now being handled, so that they require player thought and work to set up and balance properly, although that's both unrealistic, and opening up a whole new argument I don't really need right now.

Or, you know, we could just make roving magma monsters pop up out of your magma farms, and make it so magma gets depleted, so you can't seal that magma flow off.  The more magme farms you have, the more likely Magma Forgotten Beasts become...