Now I would very much support a product cycle that took animal waste -> fertilizer and water needs firmly into account! But then, in terms of resource management, that would be the lion's share of the challenge and screwing with soil chemistry would just be a bit of window dressing.
Yes, the more work gets done on this, the more it moves away from focusing on soil chemisty. That's not really a bad thing, though, since you can just consider some of the other ways in which this game is detailed/complicated - metals and stones (and wood and bone) now have attributes that make them more or less suited for certain tasks than others. This requires a slew of complex statistics (many of which don't seem to have any purpose yet), but which don't really matter to the player - all that really matters is that different materials are better or worse for different purposes.
If we are going to make fertility management (and fertilizer and water management) the focus, then we need ways of making fertilizers different from each other, and that requires having different stats for them all... (And keep in mind that real-life manure has different qualities, based upon the animal and its diet... rabbit and avian manure are more valuable than cow manure, and free-range grazing cattle have worse manure than dairy cattle that are fed grains... theoretically, we might even go the EXTRA extra mile and stat out the values of every creature's manure. How would THAT be for a tagline? "Dwarf Fortress - We optimize our bodily waste!")
Anyway, back on track, the purpose of soil chemistry was never to force micromanagement, but rather to force the player to have to balance the system out, so that things are not QUITE as simple as "designate farm, get food". We don't have to force the player to mess with specific phosphorus rates, we just need to give the player a mechanic whereby phosphorus, even if invisible, plays a part in how one has to pay upkeep on their fortress. You can see that in the differences of how the nutrients really play out:
Nitrogen: Runs out fast, but can be replinished easily. Nitrogen-fixation cover crops are easy ways to replace this, but are useless except for grazers. Nitrogen-fixation food crops (like beans or peanuts) are lower-producers, and restore less nitrogen, but you get some nitrogen back, anyway, and you're still getting more food out overall. Nitrogen comes in most fertilizers (so you can avoid serious crop rotation), but nitrogen-heavy fertilizers, especially Urea, can acidify soil, forcing even more dependance upon adding stuff to the soil. (In Real Life (IRL) - Nitrogen is technically the nutrient that encourages growth, especially leafy growth. Overmuch burns the leaves, and can cause the plant to focus more on growing leaves than fruit.)
Phosphorus: Depletes somewhat slowly, but is difficult to replace. Biological waste (manure) gives you a spread of all three of NPK, but only some kinds of manure are really high in Phosphorus. No crop rotation method really adds more P to the soil, either, so you pretty much have to add something to the soil as a fertilizer to replace P depletion. Bone Meal is higher in P than other types of biological fertilizer (but also contains N and K), and the only other ways of artificially adding P in any serious quantity is through mining out P-containing sediment (good ones are not common), and then breaking up the stone. (IRL - This is the nutrient you want in as high a quantity as you can get - it's what helps contribute to the size of fruits.)
Potassium: Common in soil, and slow to deplete, but also slow to raise. You probably shouldn't need to go out of your way to replenish K too often. Most manures have plenty K, even if composted first, so just keeping up a regular manure schedule should keep K from being a problem. This should only become a problem if you go for intensive nitrogen fertilization rather than crop rotations, letting K gradually decline. K is slow to deplete, but once depleted, takes years to replinish. Potash is pretty much the most refined form of Potassium dwarves can make, but it might be better to just compost the whole tree for a broader spread of nutrients than burn it down just to get the pure potassium unless you are desperate for rebuilding K in the soil. Keep in mind that now, we can grow trees on our farms. It's kind of silly to chop down and burn trees for the ability to grow more trees. Especially if regular soil has nutrient depletion, and repeatedly chopping down trees can lead to eventually causing the untilled soil to deplete, as well, and you run out of wild trees to cut down. (IRL - You need as much if not more of it in the soil as nitrogen, but it tends to bind to the soil instead of being as freely water-soluble as nitrogen is, so it depleates at 1/10th the rate of Nitrogen. This element is critical in root growth, and disease prevention.)
pH: Like Potassium, this shouldn't move around too much. It's mainly a problem when first starting a farm, when trying to change from one set of crops to another, or if you use acidifying fertilizers for a fair period of time. This should be slow to change in general, taking a full year to change + or - 1 pH. Most real life crops grow around 6.0 to 6.8 pH. Alkaline (7.0 to 8.0) crops tend to be "desert" crops that prefer low-water environments. Alkaline soil prevents some nutrients from being available to crops. Highly acidic soil (4.5 to 6.0 pH) are the sorts of things you see in extremely rainy areas. Acidic soils tend to hurt crops, but can wind up being better suited for some crops, because the weeds that would choke them out are less tolerant of the acid (and the higher content of iron and other elements) than the crops are. Soil acidity is changed by liming the soil (with limestone or chalk) or by using elemental sulfur (brimstone).
Water: It's water. Plants need it, obviously. They need lots of it. Plants that are suited for dryer soils have to make do with a lower amount of sugars, and tend to be either less nutritious or just plain slower growing than plants that guzzle water. This means that your water supply can determine whether you are tilling a broad area to make use of slower-growing or less-nutritious crops that take less water (and labor per tile) or concentrated farmland that take plenty of water.
Biomass: This is undecomposed stuff mainly for underground fungi to grow off of. Aboveground, this goes up and down pretty freely, depending on how much of the plant gets tilled back into the soil. While fallow, it depletes naturally as soil bacteria decompose it into nutrients, and plants can become vulnerable to diseases if this gets too high, while others prefer a thicker layer of humus. Underground, however, this is more important, and represents the need to constantly supply underground farms with more energy in the absence of photosynthesis. This requires plenty of dead stuff being added to underground farms. For fully subterranean civs, it might force that magma farming I mentioned earlier as a way of growing some chemosynthetic life to use to decompose for biomass.
There's also the things I talked about with needing to potentially clean air or generate light underground being solved with farmable underground molds that generate oxygen or can glow... these would also require access to the same watering and soil chemistry needs as other plants, forcing a choice as to where to put your resources.
Again, simply making the numbers the right numbers for one field for one crop isn't supposed to be the game. It's making players take a look at what they can use as resources to fertilize their fields, and trying to work out what combination of crops and systems for irrigation or fertilization or other aspects they can use to make the most of whatever resources they have in shortest supply.
Deserts and glaciers should definitely be very hard to get a fort established in. (Though a small ice-fort should be able to survive by hunting and fishing... sort of.) On the other hand dwarves should not be morons and seek to mass-emigrate to fortresses in inhospitable areas. You'd have to go the extra mile to get dwarves to come over, I'd think.
Yes, I've long supported a throttle on immigration, just a percentage multiplier, so that you can cut immigration to 10% normal or 5% normal or something like that.
Dwarven waste could probably be discreetly added to a stockpile with the animal waste, without having them do the potty-break thing. Could go either way on implementing loos tho.
Heh, teleporting the waste to the stockpiles or sewers seems to break some of the core realisms of the game, although it might be a nice way of not dealing with the grittier details.
I for one hope that he is thinking exactly that. Resolve the food overabundance by reducing the per-tile farm productivity until an acceptable ratio of farmers & land-to-others is achieved. Having 137 farmers/brewers/cooks in a 200-dwarf fortress, all struggling at skill-10 to just barely produce enough food for everyone. It might involve reducing the output of the individual farmer, so that a pleasing plot size can be selected. And it could be done fairly simply by increasing the time it takes to plant and reducing the crop yield bonuses of farming.
Like I've said before, expanding farm size and labor requirements isn't really a solution to making farming a better, more interesting system, it just means that more of your map needs to be cleared away for farming, and that you need more farmers. That isn't to say that we shouldn't make it a more land and labor intensive process, but that land and labor alone aren't a solution, as the problem is a lack of complexity and hence, diversity and a need to plan in farming.
I like the idea of additional detail, that would ramp up crop yeilds based on some player interaction/knowledge. But I'de like it to be additional fun stuff, rather than a necessary slog. Maybe by spending time applying pH adjusters and additional nutrients, the number of farmers needed is effectively reduced because of an abundance of crops. So the skilled player gets more mileage out of his staff, whereas the beginner can get by wastefully.
Actually, this is supposed to be part of the system... If we force farming to be more dependant upon either adding something to the soil or by careful crop rotation and resource management so that you can get by on just the manure, then we can make the entire need to feed your people be a scalable difficulty.
Your starting seven can waste as much as they want to - just chop down trees, and grow plump helmets on the logs after you muddy some dirt! Easy! You just have to take some external resources that are finite in amount.
As your fortress gets larger, however, if you have to depend upon cutting down trees to feed your mushrooms, then you're going to run out of trees. You have to work with less fertilizer, and have to stretch your resources out more just because it's finite. You need to rely more and more on the manure you can get in a scalable amount from your dwarves and your livestock.
If water has a more meaningful finite nature, as cavern water supplies and brooks and the like are less useful supplies of water, then you can waste as much water as you want early on... but as your farms get bigger, you need to take the same finite supply of water, and feed more crops with it.
If you rely upon just using readily-built-up soils from soil layers, then as you expand, you have to start using less and less desirable stone types, and break them and build the soil on them to make them useful as you expand your farms, increasing the overall amount of work it takes to set up any given farm. (And as you have to expand it, your aquaducts have to move more water further through the fortress... plus you'll have the sewers to build around, as well.)
Then there's the problem of pests. They're meant to be a way of forcing crop diversity, by making crops more vulnerable to pests the more that you rely upon them. This forces the player to reach out to perhaps less desirable crops than they would at first reach for as their fortress starts up.
Basically, the longer you go on, the larger the farm, the harder and more complex it gets. This is the scalable, end-game-is-harder-than-setting-up mechanic that was discussed back around page 31 that set this whole thing in motion... and you just can't do this without some sort of complex background mechanic in place.
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Topic: Improved Farming (Read 142387 times)