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[Granite26]

The seeds themselves are another approach, and fiddling with this could end up being quite deadly to dwarfs.  It is, of course, ridiculous that one seed can produce 5 plants.  It seems to me that these numbers can be increased.  Require a handful of 5 seeds to sow a particular square and, at best, that number of plants grow.  Each plant should similarly produce more seeds.

I think 1 seed really is an abstraction of 5 seeds... Don't plants only drop 1 seed when processed?

So seed really = seeds necessary to plant one square.  This gels well with being able to eat a seed as a (pisspoor) meal.

[LumenPlacidum]

The seeds themselves are another approach, and fiddling with this could end up being quite deadly to dwarfs.  It is, of course, ridiculous that one seed can produce 5 plants.  It seems to me that these numbers can be increased.  Require a handful of 5 seeds to sow a particular square and, at best, that number of plants grow.  Each plant should similarly produce more seeds.

I think 1 seed really is an abstraction of 5 seeds... Don't plants only drop 1 seed when processed?

So seed really = seeds necessary to plant one square.  This gels well with being able to eat a seed as a (pisspoor) meal.

Good point.  However, that doesn't prevent it from being a possible approach to tweaking the system.  If the numbers generically increase, then there's a finer degree of variability to be handled by skill.  If each plant stack requires 1 seed and generates stacksize seeds, then you get have units of 1 by which to modify the efficiency of stacks of plants.  If you require 2 seeds for each stacksize, then you can modify the stack's efficiency by units of 1/2 (i.e. 3 plants per 2 seeds differing from 4 plants per 2 seeds).

Of course, then you also would want to increase the number of seeds reclaimed by brewing/threshing.  The skill there could determine how many seeds one gets back (actually, it could be tied to the quality of the object produced... I wouldn't want lots of gritty strawberry seeds floating around in my drink, so the ones that do have them are lower quality).

It's a way of approaching the solution.  Changing numbers in different ways here will subtly alter the way planting and food production is done, and how easily it's sustainable.

In all honesty, I think if we had enforced spacing between plants, and each space had more seeds and could generate fewer, larger stacks of plants (which would require bigger plots also), then we could approach the food-is-too-easy problem and the oh-god-why-do-I-need-50-square-miles-of-plant/food/booze-storage problem.

[Draco18s]

Time:
Growth Time is the time where the plant is growing unrestricted. By default it is currently the time between the end of the plant task and the maturity of the plant. I, and others including Impaler, suggest this be periodically stopped for the grower to do some sort of auto-cued task.

I had that in my farming suggestion not too long ago.  I also made stack size dependant on soil quality (which had all of 5 values along each of 2 axis).

[Mephansteras]

One good side effect of a more difficult farming system would be the encouragement of farming settlements once the County/Kingdom arc stuff is done. You'd specifically make fortresses on non=mountain tiles simply to produce an excess of food to export to your mining colonies.

Which would actually make aquifers a desired feature, since soil that's only a few tiles above an aquifer would be automatically watered. Or, at worst you'd have a ready access of water for pumps/bucket filling.

Or, you could try to stay on good terms with the elves and humans, and rely on them to bring you a sufficient amount of food.

Hmm...that'd also be a good prompting for war. If a civ has a famine, they'd go to war with neighboring civs if necessary to loot enough food to survive. Maybe even focusing on capturing and enslaving food producing towns.

[Zombie]

Are you even reading my posts?  1600 is tiny compared to the rest of the fortress and theirs no more 'attention' being payed to farming as the mechanics aren't changed just the balance of how productive it is.  Changing the farm plot size doesn't have any effect on the managing of farms, you still lay they down in those UMHK designated groupings which are just proportionally larger now but which are functionally equivalent. Nothing about a 3x3 farm plot is more work for the player to manage then a 1x1 your argument doesn't hold together at all.

Yes, I am reading your posts. You, however don't seem to be reading mine. The player doesn't need to do more work to manage things. Dwarves do. We aren't harvesting plump helmets, the dwarves are. The point is that we shouldn't NEED 10 10-by-16 farms in order to balance feeding a 200 dwarf fortress. There should be a game mechanic in place that kicks in around the same time your "Expedition leader" changes to a "Mayor" that mitigates the horribly absurd amount of food two 6x5 farms with four dwarves can make. Or perhaps a persistent mechanic that doesn't affect us much early game, but affects us more mid-game (when we have more dwarves)...

I'm all for needing more farms or slightly larger farms to yield good results, but not just because we set an absurdly high "space needed" value. We should need more farms or more dwarves that farm for a legitimate, mechanics-based reason. Like crop death, failure to plant, farm upkeeps...

I think 1 seed = 1 plant would be a good idea. Possibly with masterwork planted plants resulting in more "fruit" or "leaves"... I think a differentiation between x seeds = y plants = z food output would help a lot in balancing food generation. But yes, we'd need to see about how to set the "seed return" for plants... Although if we had a way to set the x/y/z then that would likely be easy to discern and do properly.

For instance, if your settings were 1 seed = 2 plants = 5 food output (stack size) then it could easily look at your settings and say, "This is a stack of 5 food, which was two plants, so you get one seed."

In this way we can see a way to realistically tweak farm output, which would naturally require us to increase farm size. If 1 seed = 1 plant = 2 food output, then we'd need 100 planted plots to get 200 food. Of course, this would even work initially because we'd only need about 10 plots to get 20 food, which should go a little way toward feeding 7 dwarves. Once you start cooking food, though, every 2, 3, or 4 (depending on the meal) will result in one prepared meal. So 1 seed = 1 plant = 2 food = 1 meal...

Hence we have a basic and easily scalable way to mitigate the "ease" of farming.

[Draco18s]

Once you start cooking food, though, every 2, 3, or 4 (depending on the meal) will result in one prepared meal. So 1 seed = 1 plant = 2 food = 1 meal...

Then why would anyone cook?  Just leave it as raw food, it feeds two dwarves.

[Impaler[WrG]]

The point is that we shouldn't NEED 10 10-by-16 farms in order to balance feeding a 200 dwarf fortress. There should be a game mechanic in place that kicks in around the same time your "Expedition leader" changes to a "Mayor" that mitigates the horribly absurd amount of food two 6x5 farms with four dwarves can make. Or perhaps a persistent mechanic that doesn't affect us much early game, but affects us more mid-game (when we have more dwarves)...

WHY "shouldn't" it be needed, I need considerable space for everything else in the game? Your just asserting your position without any actual argument.  As for making some some 'new mechanics' pops up mid to late game I could see things like drought, locusts, crop blights etc etc afflicting the Fort but their random not something that just happens because the population is larger.  Thats called changing the rules during play and will throw off the player.  Farm output should be consistent and based on properties of the soil/water/weather and the Planter.  Early game we get Plant gathering, abundant hunting and most importantly a wagon full of food to start with (I could certainly see more food being in that start wagon and the first years trade wagon just giving you a big load of food for free) so we are running a food deficit until farming ramps up.

[Zombie]

Once you start cooking food, though, every 2, 3, or 4 (depending on the meal) will result in one prepared meal. So 1 seed = 1 plant = 2 food = 1 meal...

Then why would anyone cook?  Just leave it as raw food, it feeds two dwarves.

Well why does anyone cook now? You can leave your food as raw food and it feeds two dwarves anyway. The 2, 3, and 4 food items per meal is in the game now, it isn't anything new that's being suggested. Personally, I never cook plump helmets as I like having a large backlog of seeds in case of emergency. I think, though, that dwarves should prefer cooked meals and, after a certain point, should get unhappy if they aren't available. Of course, this would compound with the "no seeds from cooking" thing...

Perhaps it would be nice if we could use Process Plants to extract seeds from plants like Plump helmets, letting them be cooked while we get to keep the seeds? :3 Novice or dabbling processors would fail more often than not, though, with legendary possibly being able to retrieve two or three seeds.

WHY "shouldn't" it be needed, I need considerable space for everything else in the game? Your just asserting your position without any actual argument.  As for making some some 'new mechanics' pops up mid to late game I could see things like drought, locusts, crop blights etc etc afflicting the Fort but their random not something that just happens because the population is larger.  Thats called changing the rules during play and will throw off the player.  Farm output should be consistent and based on properties of the soil/water/weather and the Planter.  Early game we get Plant gathering, abundant hunting and most importantly a wagon full of food to start with (I could certainly see more food being in that start wagon and the first years trade wagon just giving you a big load of food for free) so we are running a food deficit until farming ramps up.

It shouldn't be needed as a fix itself. Larger farm size or more farms should be an effect of the solution, NOT the solution itself. I asserted my position while making an argument, I suppose I just failed in properly linking the argument to be a reason as to why my position is valid.

See, I don't think the fix for farming should be "Just make us need larger fields" as that's a shaky fix at best. There should be hard mechanics in place that put the need in place to have larger fields. Forcing people to have 10x16 farms is all well and good, as long as there's some mechanic that is in place that makes that efficient. Although I think it's still an absurdly large farm size, so be it if a mechanic makes it efficient.

There should be some reason in the game as to why a larger field or more fields should be necessary. Just increasing the space needed per plant (or the base farm plot size) is like using your finger to plug the hole in the dam. It's a weak fix, at best. At least on its own... Of course, paired with upkeep and a few other things, you likely wouldn't even need to modify field size. It would just be a natural progression that players would need more or larger fields later on in the lives of their fortress.

Personally, I like the one seed for one crop idea. It has the most plausibility and would work the best early AND late fort. For 7 crops for 7 dwarves, you'd need 7 seeds and 7 tiles. For 200 crops for 200 dwarves, you'd need 200 seeds and 200 tiles. Makes sense to me. That's a 10x20 farm just to produce one plant per dwarf. Food produced would be based on base fruit return (which I think should be 1, possibly 2 or 3 for quarry bushes as a 1-leafed bush is kind of odd) minus any mishaps and multiplied by the skill of the dwarf. Legendary planters should be able to get up to three times the base food return and should be able to avoid most mishaps. Novice or dabbling should frequently return with nothing.

See, I think an idea that was suggested that is along the lines what I've been saying is the 3x3 farm plot base idea... A "plot" would be 3x3 and one bunch of seeds would be used to plant. Skill level and care given to plants would then result in 0 to 9 plants growing, the fruits of which would be consolidated into one stack. An alternative is having creatable stacks or whatnot, like making a "maximum stack size" that all of the stacks would get like-quality food added to them until they were "full"... So if the max stack size was 5 and you harvested one group of 4 plump helmets and one group of 6 plump helmets, you'd end up with two stacks of 5 plump helmets in the stockpile.

I really don't get how we can have such nonfluid stack numbers anyway. I look at a "stack" as being a "bundle" of something. Now, I don't know what you all think, but a bundle should be modifiable... If there are only four onions in the mesh bag at the grocery store and there are supposed to be five, you don't get that one. You get the one with five.

Sorry for any confusion.

[Draco18s]

Once you start cooking food, though, every 2, 3, or 4 (depending on the meal) will result in one prepared meal. So 1 seed = 1 plant = 2 food = 1 meal...

Then why would anyone cook?  Just leave it as raw food, it feeds two dwarves.

Well why does anyone cook now? You can leave your food as raw food and it feeds two dwarves anyway. The 2, 3, and 4 food items per meal is in the game now, it isn't anything new that's being suggested.

Yes, but it creates [2], [3], and [4] meals.

[Zombie]

Once you start cooking food, though, every 2, 3, or 4 (depending on the meal) will result in one prepared meal. So 1 seed = 1 plant = 2 food = 1 meal...

Then why would anyone cook?  Just leave it as raw food, it feeds two dwarves.

Well why does anyone cook now? You can leave your food as raw food and it feeds two dwarves anyway. The 2, 3, and 4 food items per meal is in the game now, it isn't anything new that's being suggested.

Yes, but it creates [2], [3], and [4] meals.

That is contrary to what I assumed! More research shows that I was mistaken. Sorry about that. My intent was not to alter the meal creating thing, so allow me to rectify my error. "So 1 seed = 1 plant = 2 food = 2 meal..."

Thank you for pointing that out to me. XD

[Mephansteras]

[snip]
Personally, I like the one seed for one crop idea. It has the most plausibility and would work the best early AND late fort. For 7 crops for 7 dwarves, you'd need 7 seeds and 7 tiles. For 200 crops for 200 dwarves, you'd need 200 seeds and 200 tiles. Makes sense to me. That's a 10x20 farm just to produce one plant per dwarf. Food produced would be based on base fruit return (which I think should be 1, possibly 2 or 3 for quarry bushes as a 1-leafed bush is kind of odd) minus any mishaps and multiplied by the skill of the dwarf. Legendary planters should be able to get up to three times the base food return and should be able to avoid most mishaps. Novice or dabbling should frequently return with nothing.
[snip]

I think it can be abstracted out to 1 plant = enough food for 1 meal. A single quarry bush may give you dozens of leaves, but they're small and only enough for a single meal. Plump helmets may actually be a handfull of mushrooms, cave wheat is probably a handful of ground flour out of a given plant, and whatnot.

Same way you don't get just a single strawberry from a strawberry bush and a person eats more then one strawberry at a time. Calling it a basket of strawberries per farm plot would probably be fine.

[Techhead]

I proved Dwarven wine doesn't actually exist! In fact, it is anti-meal.
Proof:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

If you brewed the plump helmets, you could cook the spawn.
1 plump helmet = 1 meal
1 PH = 5 Dwarven wine + 2 PH spawn
2 PH spawn = 2 meals

Thus:
1 meal = 5 Dwarven wine + 2 meals
0 = 5 Dwarven wine + 1 meal

Brewing drinks and then cooking seeds creates more meals
And neither do other drinks made from edible plants.
Explanation and speculation: Dwarves become hungry because they drink alchohol. However, dwarves drinking water still hunger. Further research is required.

EDIT: Fixed.

[Draco18s]

I proved Dwarven wine doesn't actually exist!
Proof:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

If you brewed the plump helmets, you could cook the spawn.
1 plump helmet = 1 meal
1 PH = 5 Dwarven wine + 1 PH spawn
1 PH spawn = 1 meal

Thus:
1 meal = 5 Dwarven wine + 1 meal
0 = 5 Dwarven wine

And neither do other drinks made from edible plants.

You actually get 2 spawn when brewing.

[SocietalEclipse]

I'm in the camp that the best DF solution lies about 1/4 to 1/3 of the way towards realism from our current implementation.

I haven't seen it mentioned so far in this thread but I strongly believe that any adjustments have to be directly tied into and planned with immigration/emigration/world economy.  Why does a town struggling to get it's first farm going before the winter freeze get 22 useless immigrants looking for a place to hole down just because you made a stack of +obsidian drum+s?  Sure, I might buy a lot of food with that but what if the caravan already left or I had requested nothing but metal bars and charcoal?  On the other hand, why does another town only get 6 immigrants when it has tons of farming capacity in a warm environment just because it's wealth is relatively tiny?

When you're talking about a medieval culture you shouldn't have people packing up and moving into towns that can't support them, short of some plague or war that they are refugees from.  Until we get the world economy (caravan arc) and world migrations (real dwarves from worldgen as immigrants) that means for the most part a fortress should be self reliant.  Caravans can get ambushed and slaughtered after all. Right now the atom smash/flood room/magma room/spike trap solution to excess immigration is already too gamey for me to feel comfortable with as an end goal for DF.  Once you 'fix' the farming efficiency to make it require more land, time, and workers to feed the same population it just encourages the player to kill off that many more dwarves (somehow not bothering the people they just arrived with because they aren't friends or spouses yet).  1st generation immigrants should have a high likelihood of emigrating a fortress where they spend a good deal of a year with either a thirsty or hungry status.  Starting 7 dwarves and descendants should be almost guaranteed to stick it out and starve/dehydrate if necessary.  Everyone else is in between.  If all of these changes were implemented at the same relative time it would be easiest to get the proper balance of game playing fun versus watching 40 dwarves haul buckets back and forth just to feed themselves plus 10 others.

[Inindo]

There are two ways of "nerfing" farming.  While everyone seem to be talking about decreasing supply, I have another idea.  Increasing demand.

1) All the Tame animals and pets could now require food to eat, and unless you lock you your stockpiles against pets, they'll just help themselves.

2) Beds should require cloth and straw (gotten from processing cave wheat and longland grass) in order to make a mattress.  Again, more stuff you have to grow.  Nobles could require feather mattresses, which comes from birds you raise, which would need feeding.

3) Dwarves should demand lots of clothes, and demand them often (fashions change after all).  The more elaborate party dresses should requite multiple blots of dyed cloth.  Perhaps some of them (nobles) would demand silk, which need to be collected from domesticated silk producing animals, which would have to be fed.  All this increases a demand for farm produced products.

4) In order to heal injured Dwarves, bandages made of cloth and medicinal ointment made of herbs would need to be used, both requiring more growing.

5) Some Dwarves would required Pipeweed as well as Alchohol, which would again have to be grown.


The benefit of this is, you don't HAVE to have all this in the beginning.  You can not have any pets, have everyone sleep on the floor, give each Dwarf one change of clothes, let injured Dwarves remain injured, and have pipeweed addicts be very very unhappy.  This allows someone to quickly provide enough food to survive, but a long time to farm enough so that everyone's happy.