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[AngleWyrm]

Have the caravans pay in diminishing returns for the stuff they buy. Then big amounts of stuff will not be free. Also, the player will have a valid reason to diversify.

This solution has the advantage of applying to all things dwarves create and sell. No longer will the mechanic be able to churn out masterwork mechanisms in bulk, because only the first few sell for a good price to each caravan. How few is a design decision.

[NW_Kohaku]

Have the caravans pay in diminishing returns for the stuff they buy. Then big amounts of stuff will not be free. Also, the player will have a valid reason to diversify.

This is, frankly, the Caravan Arc and an economics thread.  I don't even want to start on Supply and Demand (and how people so often ignore the "demand" part of supply and demand) in this thread.

While there are certainly plenty of arguments (that have and are still) to be made about this, it really isn't relevant to how farming should work.  Frankly, people don't even farm for things to trade now, (serrated disks are much more valuable, and stone is something you want to get rid of, anyway) and they don't trade for food now, either.

[AngleWyrm]

Yes, economic problems should be resolved in the economics module, not farming.

[Andeerz]

Agreed.  Also, check out Guns, Germs, and Steel!  It's got some really awesome chapters about farming and its development for what it's worth.  But, again, that might be better for an economics of farming thread.  :/  However, the information in that book details the relationship between geographic location, the advent of farming, what crops were where and why, and stuff.  :B

[NW_Kohaku]

Heh, yeah, I've heard plenty of good things about Guns, Germs, and Steel, although I only read Collapse, myself.

Anyway, this is the relevant stuff from the latest FoTF:

Any plans to make farming more difficult?

How difficult do you want farming (and feeding a fortress in general) to be, both for an experienced player trying to get everything working and for a new player learning the ropes?  Will trading be able to wholly replace a dwarven fortress food industry at home?

Will the new villages result in greater amounts of farmland required to feed individuals? If so, will there be "farmers caravans" that come to the fortress with food you can buy?

Nothing specific beyond the new dev page has been settled.  I think having dwarves outside the fortress yet associated to the fortress might end up being the focus of food production for established forts, so it might often come down to surviving the first years, and you shouldn't just be able to blast out the necessary food with a random plot you plunk down somewhere.  In a more isolated fort (settled on a glacier in the middle of nowhere, say), with no outside dwarves, it should be more work to support 100 dwarves.  The new balance in adventure mode would require, say, 60 or so of them to be fairly dedicated underground food-workers, though the ratio hasn't been established for underground agriculture yet.  A large dwarven fortress-city with expansive aboveground and underground offscreen settlements probably won't have a lot of food production onscreen, and you'd be engaged with near-constant trade/taxes/etc. with your offscreen buddies.  There would need to be conversions between edible offscreen/onscreen resources, because in adventure mode you'd got people eating hundreds of items a year and in dwarf mode it is 8 or whoever.  I don't like the feel of dwarf taking a barrel full of plump helmets to eat per sitting, or even referring to the food in those terms, but there's weirdness any way you do it, I think.

How important will farming be, both for a NPC settlement and for a fortress?  Will it be a flat-out necessity for large cities/fortresses, or can hunting and/or fishing in a reasonably wildlife-heavy place be sufficient?

I think it'll be necessary for large cities that are inhabited by people that need to eat a normal amount or else starve in some weeks.  Goblins might not fall in that category.  A human capital would likely only be supportable with farming, though I'd consider any real world counter-examples from the right period.  What were the biggest fishing/hunting-fed settlements back then (that didn't also get a lot food from crops and livestock -- theirs or otherwise)?  Does the answer change much if livestock is included but not crops?

[when] crops can actually be differentiated significantly, how many crops would you start allowing?  Instead of having a dozen plants everywhere (and one for each of Good, Evil, and Savage), can we get tropical-jungle-on-silty-loam-specific fruits where it's possible for one fort to see an entirely different set of crops for its whole existence than another fort?

Sure, I'd prefer to have more.  I'm not sure what the underground distinctions are going to be though.

So will there be a way to harvest crops from these new fields? Will taking from them make the owners hostile if you are caught?

I see that the new farms look like shrubs. Will we be able to gather[p] those shrubs? Because that seems a little overkill, because it can feed 200 dwarves each year if they regrow.

You likely won't be able to found a dwarf fortress in the human villages, but yeah, they are just plants.  Once you can grab plants in adv mode, they will be available, although whatever farming changes go in will likely make them not as useful a lot of the time.

Judging by the shear amount of farmland for those villages posted in the screenshots does this imply any farming changes like making things take longer to grow?

I'll most likely be matching plants up roughly with whatever real-world analogs there are for the humans when I get to the actual farming updates.  I'm not sure about dwarven crops.

[rknewell]

Just my two cents long winded rambling, but I'm of the opinion that requiring more post-farm food processing (milling, cooking, threshing, ect) and more diversity would be a better approach, possibly with the caveat that as food becomes more processed it reduces in quantity. Probably something like the social caste system discussed elsewhere, where dwarves get more demanding for higher quality food as time goes on. Essentially, in year one, your dwarves are content with gnawing on plump helmets. Year two and they're going to start wanting some variety, year three will see demands for meals, ect. Possibly incorporate crops that are strictly for flavoring.

Obviously some dwarf busy work would probably be a good idea as well to prevent a single farmer from maintaining 100+ crops simultaneously. Perhaps once multiple object carrying gets implemented <chorus of angels> a farmer picks up as many seeds as he believes he can tend to during a season, plants them at the beginning of the season and spends the remainder of the season tending them until they mature at somewhat the same time. Effectively a dwarf of a given skill level can grow about a given number of plants per season, which gives us a solid controllable way to manage the food output of farms.

As mentioned earlier, anything that just slows down production or increases the required size just means that we as players will simply scale up as needed. I think having dwarves steadily demand (at threat of being at the brink of tantrums) more and more variety and complexity to their meals is a good way to encourage players to make better use of cooking, hunting, fishing and trading for foods and flavors not available locally, as well as encourage a natural expansion into different types of food. Sure, a farm cuts it for a bit, but soon you're going to want a hunter bringing in some meat, another small garden topside for variety, a couple fishermen in the caves hauling in...whatever it is that lives in that water. Your trading can supplement this as well, I've noticed in a lot of my fortresses that the humans tend to bring a lot of ocean food that I'll never see. Who knows, that legendary cheese maker on stone hauling duty just might get his chance to shine even.

This is the approach I tend to take, where I've got a couple of hunters, a butcher, a couple of fisherdwarfs, a fish cleaner, a farmer, a miller, a thresher, a couple of cooks (I could probably use more). If/When standing orders for milking and cheese making become available I'll probably implement those as well, although with the hassle of re-queuing and milking bugs at the moment I don't bother. Not counting the indirect effects of my craftsmen via trade, who bring in exotic far off food and drink, I have eleven dwarves as a part of my food production. Cut farming production somewhat and toss in the dairy industry (should we have/do eggs?) and I could easily have 13-15 dwarves for food production. At the moment this is hardly required, it's simply an old habit from the RTS Stronghold where having more food types made a happier more taxable populous. I think tweaking dwarfish psychology to desire diversity and quality is the way to go though.

In short, cut production and encourage diversity.

[loose nut]

My two cents is that a lot of the stuff suggested introduces a lot of baseline complexity. Farming and food could probably be a little more complex. But what would make it a consideration for later forts is reliability. You'd want to trade with outlying villages for crops as a failsafe because it should be entirely possible, even quite likely, that your crops might fail due to weather, plague, blight, any number of things that are orthogonal to soil chemistry which seems to be the focus of most of this thread as well as the most boring possible determinant of whether your dwarves get food. Come on: pH - or LOCUSTS? I ask you.

Having crop failures kick in after the first couple of years would get you part of the way to making food acquirement exciting as your fort matures. Another large part would be introducing some unreliability to food stores - and mature forts should probably have large underground grain silos which could fall victim to fungus or vermin. Introducing some sort of decent fertilizer/ soil chemistry mechanic should be the third tier. Have those three things going on, so that farming becomes a more dicey proposition, and your dwarf fortresses will be glad to get their foodstuffs from outlying villages and focus on the stonecrafting.

On the other hand I think it should be possible to build an agrarian, food-exporting fortress if that's what you really feel like doing. You'd just need a lot of fields and a lot of redundant, well-monitored food stores to pull it off - you'd have to focus on it.

[AngleWyrm]

My two cents is start with a 200-dwarf fortress:

• How much farmland will it take to support it?
• How many farmers/workers will be required to maintain it?

With just those two questions answered, a lot of the "free stuff button" chanting and "make it more difficult" gibbering will be satisfactorily answered, as far as farming goes. Then the details of farming can be there to be fun and entertaining, rather than to burden the player.

Just for example, maybe it's decided that a 200-dwarf fortress requires 1000 tiles of farmland, and 50 dwarves working the fields, kitchens, and breweries. It's easy to answer the questions, and then heap detail on top. For instance, maybe those estimates are for skill-10 dwarves growing plump helments, and other skill levels would require more/less dwarves/fields.

Also, answering those questions leads to an answer to how much food & drink dwarves consume on an annual basis, based on typical crop yields instead of the other way around. Note that for a full picture of dwarven nutritional needs, it's probably best to factor in the output of a fisherman, a hunter, and the meat of butchering several large animals annually. Then a player can choose to tip the meat/veggie scale according to preference.

[Draco18s]

With just those two questions answered, a lot of the "free stuff button" chanting and "make it more difficult" gibbering will be satisfactorily answered, as far as farming goes. Then the details of farming can be there to be fun and entertaining, rather than to burden the player.

Just for example, maybe it's decided that a 200-dwarf fortress requires 1000 tiles of farmland, and 50 dwarves working the fields, kitchens, and breweries.

Except that we can't get a single answer from the forums.  There are in fact people who think that the number of dwarves required now is too many.

[NW_Kohaku]

I don't know why soil pH is the preferred whipping boy of those who oppose added complexity, but it's really the easiest variable to deal with, at least, unless you run out of lime.

Anyway, I'll continue to defend added complexity in the model by referring back to the "free stuff button" problem.

Currently, stone is effectively free stuff - you almost always have far more of it than you can store in stockpiles or get rid of, and therefore, you will use it without even considering it a cost - it's free!  Anything you can make from stone, you make it from stone, because stone is free - free rock mugs, free statues, free tables, free chairs, free doors!

Currently, wood is limited in supply, but still fairly cheap - you can make a huge variety of things out of wood, but really, you tend to stick to barrels and bins and beds, and maybe some charcoal, but not too much.  Wood is something you can't just consume completely without any care in the world.  You have to put at least some thought into conserving it for the things you really do need, because you only have so much of it in any given year.

Currently, however, steel and to a lesser extent, bronze are relatively difficult to make.  You need fuel, metal that you have to find and are in somewhat limited (although still fairly abundant) quantities, and you're prone to supply shortages.  You can't just build steel chairs for all your dwarves, you have to really consider what your priorities are for steel. (And also note that steel and wood are both inifinite, they're just limited by the amount you can harvest per unit time.)

Frankly, these are the ONLY concerns about resources/materials that you really have in Dwarf Fortress.

So yes, you can add a few more jobs onto the processing part, or a little more land onto the farming part, but it doesn't change the fact that it's still basically like glass when you have magma and sand or like stone - it's free stuff, you'll never run out of it, so there's no reason to ever consider it.  Food is a default, automatic, easy gimmie, and will continue to be even if you have to up the number of dwarves working - most players just wind up killing off dwarves that they wind up have idling because they can't find any jobs for them, anyway, so simply assigning a larger proportion of their labor to farming is no difficulty, and if their entire supply chain is automatic and thought-free, then the problem will always remain.

This is why we need "additional complexity".  It's because we need SOME complexity in the mechanic whatsoever, so that it isn't just a "push button, get food" mechanic. 

I've frequently seen arguments against the farming thread based upon "this isn't a Farming Simulator", and that they don't want to have to care about generating resources or, really, anything besides seiges... Which frankly, seems like it's selling the game very short.  DF's not JUST a Warhammer Simulator, either.  We have to care about something in our fortress, and since, at the moment, we have nothing to really care about except whether or fortress continues to exist or not, food is as good a place as any to make the player actually have to care about resource management.  Heck, this isn't even more dramatic a claim than what every RTS since the days of Dune 2 has done, or every city-building strategy game has ever done.  Currently, almost everything you do is free and limitless and as such, there is nothing stopping you from ordering massive mining or construction or industrial projects without ever having to consider costs.  There are hardly even opportunity costs associated with anything - all the defenses and food production you'll ever need can be set up in a single season's time, and even making more processing only means you have to wait for more dwarves to show up to do more of the jobs to make the ratio of foodworking dwarves still sufficient.  It just means the fortresses have more dwarves, and the FPS goes lower.

The only way we really solve the problem DF faces is by making the player recognize that farming is not free, and that you can't just scale production forever, or demand things made completely without thinking about them.

Crop rotations (where sets of crops have to be chosen to accomidate one another), pests and pest control, and supporting fertilizer industries, all of which must similarly change in focus every time you want to produce more of one form of food over another.  These make players stop and consider what they are going to need in the future, and build accordingly.  They make players no longer simply respond to a shortage of one product by simply adding more dwarves to that production line.  It means you have to consider either conserving on some resources or take the time to accomidate the solution to the problem.

This is what DF needs more of - a need to stop and think about your problems - rather than simply making all your problems a matter of oversight and not paying attention when your supplies started running low.

You want to know what the problem/facepalm moment/way I killed my fort I see most frequently coming up about farms is right now?  "I forgot to start a farm."  Farming is currently so mindless and so assured that people just plain forget the entire mechanic is even there.  "Wait, you mean there were parts to this game that weren't the military or possibly mining?!"

DF is supposed to be better than this.

[Shades]

I don't see the problem with having 'complex' (they aren't really, just three values acting with one really simple rule) mechanics provided there is an option to plonk down farm and you get food.

Sure it has to be on muddy soil or something but that's not harder than now, and of course it's suboptimal, or even down right terrible but it works and one dwarf farming can easily feed your starting seven so that is good enough.

I don't see that these two points are in anyway counter and that seems to be what the main argument is about. Starting off should be easy, after a few migrant waves you start seeing the food problem. Sounds good enough to me as if your getting that many migrants your clearly dealing with the rest of the game fine.

[Threlicus]

Kohaku,

I think your post points to the single biggest imbalance of DF that needs balancing -- dwarves themselves are a 'free stuff' button. You get too many of them, feeding them is easy, and they do much of their work too fast and learn their trades too fast. Until that is fixed -- until the player goes 'yes, I got an master Miller in my migration wave! Now I can build a waterwheel-driven mill which will free two other dwarfs up and I can get my cloth industry started!' -- no farming complexity is going to matter very much.

The best boardgames are the ones where you never have enough of 'X' -- whatever 'X' is -- in order to do what you want to to win. As you point out, most of the resources in the game are close to unlimited. I think finding the balance point where labor is a serious constraint -- so you want labor, so you want to farm efficiently, so you want to interact with whatever farming happens -- is the key thing. Of course, you also don't want to make it impossible. But there may be places toady can give us good difficulty tweaks -- skill learning, base immigration rate, and 'base' task duration dials, that kind of thing, so that players can tune as desired. Some of these probably already exist in the RAWs...

Well, this has gone a bit off-topic. I think I'll go post in FoF.

[Draco18s]

The best boardgames are the ones where you never have enough of 'X' -- whatever 'X' is -- in order to do what you want to to win. As you point out, most of the resources in the game are close to unlimited.

Reminds me of a book my friend told me about where a colony ship was sent out to terraform a planet, earth forgot about it and never sent any colonists.  The terraforming robots (IIRC) eventually built their own society based on the following premise:

Everything was free.  Any object you wanted could be fabricated with a minimum of effort and energy due to the matter replicators* in the ship

Thus the measure of class wasn't about who had more wealth because everyone could just go "I'd like a gold dining room set" and get it.  But rather based on skill, that is, who could sing the best or who could draw the best art, who could compose the best songs, etc...

Curiously, our dwarven economy is almost based around this: legendary (and noble) dwarves get "free stuff" except that currency and rarity of goods is still assumed: everyone in your fort could have masterwork furniture, except that it increases their rent exorbitantly, as if it wasn't normal.

*Or whatever other high tech device would suffice, such as nanofactories.

[NW_Kohaku]

Kohaku,

I think your post points to the single biggest imbalance of DF that needs balancing -- dwarves themselves are a 'free stuff' button. You get too many of them, feeding them is easy, and they do much of their work too fast and learn their trades too fast. Until that is fixed -- until the player goes 'yes, I got an master Miller in my migration wave! Now I can build a waterwheel-driven mill which will free two other dwarfs up and I can get my cloth industry started!' -- no farming complexity is going to matter very much.

The best boardgames are the ones where you never have enough of 'X' -- whatever 'X' is -- in order to do what you want to to win. As you point out, most of the resources in the game are close to unlimited. I think finding the balance point where labor is a serious constraint -- so you want labor, so you want to farm efficiently, so you want to interact with whatever farming happens -- is the key thing. Of course, you also don't want to make it impossible. But there may be places toady can give us good difficulty tweaks -- skill learning, base immigration rate, and 'base' task duration dials, that kind of thing, so that players can tune as desired. Some of these probably already exist in the RAWs...

Well, this has gone a bit off-topic. I think I'll go post in FoF.

Yes, it is off-topic, but I do honestly think that we need to simply have a throttle on the immigrant waves. 

Players should be ecstatic to get plenty of dwarves to their fortress so they can complete projects faster, not killing them off because they don't want to have to deal with them, and they're an infinte resource, anyway.  If we got just 10% of the dwarves we have now per migrant wave, we'd definitely be happier with our immigrant waves.

The other part, dropping skill gain rate, is something I already do - I cut it to about a third (and I also cut down rust considerably, especially the amount of time before rust starts to kick in)

[Jiri Petru]

My two cents is start with a 200-dwarf fortress:
1. How much farmland will it take to support it?
2. How many farmers/workers will be required to maintain it?

If you read dev_now and the latest Toady's answers from FotF (linked above), you can see that he's already thought about the space/dwarfpower a fortress would require for farming. 2/3 of population need to be farmers. You can either import food from outside and thus have less farmers, or you can grow your food all by your own in which case you need to dedicate 2/3 of population to farming.

Sounds about right