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[Draco18s]

With item 2 of the first group we would definitely want to have the numbers adjusted such that a dwarf isn't just walking about eating all the time.

Or we could, you know, assume that 1 plump helmet is a handful equivalent in nutritional value to 1/7th of a horse.

Basically you have to spend some time looking at the downstream abilities these changes create.

I understand the need for fruit bearing trees to be treated as, well, trees and not plants.  But if it doesn't happen and all edible plants need to be replanted every season, you know what?  Most people--myself included--wouldn't care all that much.  I don't care, for instance, that strawberries make new berries year in real life, but don't in the game.  Why?  Because I like to use one farm to grow everything I need, no reason to have four farms, one of which contains non-fruiting plants 3/4ers of the year.

Sure, it'd be neat, but it's not something that NEEDS to be done (unlike adding in maintainence tasks to keep farmers busy because I can over-produce by having 1 6x6 farm that grows sweet pods 1 season a year which is just absurd (grind it, brew it, eat it, extract it, cook it--have all my food needs covered).

(as a side note: 3a really only applies to the cooking part of 2a, and I think it's silly anyway given my argument about 2a above; better to wait until cooking recipes to be fully fleshed out before deciding if this is needed).

[Veroule]

Draco, I have a lot of respect for both your insight an your intelligence.  I know you have been a player of DF quite a bit longer then me, and that experience is very important to me.  I do not say this lightly, you need to look at the deeper implications.

Toady, has had a recipe thought planned since the 2D version.  I am very tempted to write out my entire concept for them in a .raw form.  What I would produce would be completely depenently on the concept put forth in my item '2a'.

The lack of that concept causes a need for abstraction.  That abstraction causes a need for arbitrary limits; either a barrel holds 10 plump helmets, 10 cave wheat, 10 prepared meals, or as many drinks as a brewer can make.

Any place there is an arbitrary limit should be viewed as something that is not right.  Perhaps it is a place holder for things to come, but it is still not right.

Barrels hold food stuffs, and eliminating the arbitrary limit brings them closer to reality.  The only way to do this is to have a calculatable size for things stored in barrels.

Does fixing barrel storage need to be done in order to fix the perceived overabundance of food?  No.  Does fixing barrel storage actually fix the perceived over abundace of food?  Again no.  Does fixing the perceived over abundance fix barrel storage?  Yet again no.

Are these 2 issue related? Yes.  Shoudl we consider them together? Yes.  If possible, should we try to fix them both at the same time? Again yes.

The only way to fix these things is to look at them as a whole.  Cooking is related to farming, barrels are related to all things food.  You must consider the entire depth of every item affected by a single small change.  I still don't think you are looking deep enough.

[Draco18s]

The lack of that concept causes a need for abstraction.  That abstraction causes a need for arbitrary limits; either a barrel holds 10 plump helmets, 10 cave wheat, 10 prepared meals, or as many drinks as a brewer can make.

Then it's an entirely new concept that has nothing to do with farming.  I've already suggested that every item be given a [SIZE] and a [VOLUME] tag to indicate it's relative size and if any objects of a smaller size can fit in the space it's not using (example a bookshelf, it's really really large, but has a vast amount of space devoted to air, when tossed in a pile of junk, smaller junk falls inside).

If it's a problem with you that plump helmets [1] is not a giant mushroom, nor a bucketfull of tiny ones, then that's what needs to be fixed.  Not farming or cooking (I've always thought they were rather large mushrooms--toadstools I could use as a stool sized).

[Othob Rithol]

I have to completely agree with Draco18s on this one.

Fixing farming is the topic of discussion here, and how much of what can fit in a barrel is not. I think that too needs to be addressed at some point, but not here.

You made a lot of good observations in your seven points, not all of which I agree with.

I'm listing them 1-7, since that makes a lot more sense than 1a-3a and then 1b-4.

1. Pretty much in agreement with discussion to date.

2. I'd much rather see a dwarf eat his fill on a semi-regular basis instead of running back to the dining hall each time his hunger gets too low. I also like the concept that 1 food=1 food, regardless of type. So yes, one unit of pump helmets is as filling as one unit of horse meat (of which Mr. Ed gives you 7 + tallow). I think you are stripping off a level of abstraction for minimal realism gain.

If we want to go with a dwarf eating more than one unit at a time (higher resolution, reduced effect per unit) that is a compromise I could deal with. If he eats 10 units per cycle, then he could eat a sandwich[5], some left-over roast [2], and three handfuls of plumps[3].

What I don't see is how any of this helps the food overabundance issue.

3. Desirable, but unnecessary for the solution.

4. Increased in size of farm plots is a valid method, as mentioned in several posts. I rather like your idea of the plant-row-plant-row lay out.

5. Mandatory Irrigation is one of my rally cries. Tracking multiple plants per plot isn't really necessary, however, since you can just as easily have the tile track "% of required care given", with that adjusting the yield on harvest.

6. A good take on fertilizer. In my universe, I'd keep it simple and have fertilizing reduce the impact on %care from failed checks, missed waterings, trampling, and vermin.

7. Like Draco18s, I really don't want recurring plants in my farm plots. A good compromise would be to have fruit-bearing plants handled differently. Having them "built" (but on a different menu) makes more sense. You could do the same for non-fruit bearing trees and decorative shrubs as well.

The problem I see with your seven points is that kind of skirt around the issue with many good suggestions for details, but they really don't help at all in keeping a 6x6 plot from feeding a fort. Nice window dressing, but we still need to build the window.

There is a big trend in these forums to suggest MASSIVE overhauls to otherwise functioning systems. The current food system works, has good diversity, and has a decent level of realism and logic. I really don't see a reason to scrap it all and rebuild it from scratch. It just needs balancing is all. I'm looking for the fix that takes us from A to B, not from A to #.

[LordBucket]

Increasing the plot size will not make farming more difficult, nor food less pletiful. It was just make plots bigger. Sure, that's not a bad thing. But it's not enough.

For those who say that 1600 farm plots are insanely too big...keep in mind that's only 40x40. The default screen is 53x23, which is 1219. 1600 is only a little bit larger than one screen. Maybe that's too big, yes...but not terribly so. One screen full of farm plot for a full fortress seems perfectly reasonable to me.

Irrigation should be made meaningful again. Soil layers should not be so plentiful. As it is, pretty much every fortress has instant access to at least one (and sometimes three or four) full z-levels full of soil that requires no maintenance. I say we get rid of soil layers, and make perma-irrigated soil only appear near water sources.

Vary crops a bit more. Easy to grow plants should produce less usable food, and generally have less utility. A crop that can only grow in a single season should be more "useful" than a crop that can grow year round. Crops that require sunlight should be more useful than crops that can be defended at the bottom of your fortress. Crops that require additional processing after harvest should be more useful than crops that can be eaten unprepared.

It might be nice for crops to be less flexible. As it is, for almost any season there's always half a dozen choices of what to grow. It might be nice to go back to nothing growing during winter.

Apply meaningful penalties for single-crop fortresses. If a dwarf eats nothing but mushrooms for a year, he's going to be suffering from serious nutritional deficiency. This should at least slow down his work.

GET RID OF THE ABILITY TO COOK ALCOHOL.

Eliminate the ability for cooks to stack multiple groups of identical ingredients. No more dwarven syrup, dwarven syrup, dwarven syrup, dwarven syrup roasts.

[Draco18s]

+1 to Bucket and Othob.

1600 is large IMO.  Personally I'd be happy with a single 10x10 that needs to be grow year round as being sufficient for my forts (max pop 100).  But that's my opinion.  OTOH I should probably need to start with 1 plot, and expand to 2, to 4 as I get more dwarves.  I'll raise my expectation to 200 tiles by 4 seasons per 100 dwarves (that would be 400x4 for 200, which would be the same as your 1600 tiles though grown during 1 season a year, I don't know what your time frame was).

[Align]

At which skill and fertilization level?

[Draco18s]

At which skill and fertilization level?

Average farmer experience of Adept or Expert, and no fertilization (as it currently works).

I also expect to need to have more than 2 farmers (besides the ones pulling the grown plants up by their roots) busy at all times doing something with already-planted-plants.

[pavlov]

Irrigation should be made meaningful again. Soil layers should not be so plentiful. As it is, pretty much every fortress has instant access to at least one (and sometimes three or four) full z-levels full of soil that requires no maintenance. I say we get rid of soil layers, and make perma-irrigated soil only appear near water sources.

I disagree that soil should be less plentiful - look around you, soil is everywhere! Of course, whether or not it's usable for farming is a different story. I agree that irrigation should play a much larger role. Currently, 'muddy' status never goes away, right? It's a simple matter of tying that in with the current evaporation code (which I believe depends on temperature/surface exposure) - mud should dry out and become unfarmable (sand/soil/whatever). Once-per-year irrigation is a reasonable level of annoyance IMO.

1) Rock should not be farmable, period. You cannot pour water on solid rock and then plant whatever. (not even fungus - fungus requires organic matter - wood for example).

2) Soil should be transportable. We already have a system like this for sand, except it can't be dropped to make a sand tile. No soil layers? Import bags of soil. Or, as others have suggested - generate compost from decaying organic matter. The whole compost idea is awesome.

3) Different types of soil should differ in their usefulness - sand isn't the greatest farming substrate.

[Draco18s]

Currently, 'muddy' status never goes away, right?

Actually it does.  Been a while since I checked but last time I was forced to use a pool to irrigate a farm, the various tiles did dry out one by one very slowly.  Farm was still there, just couldn't plant on it.

Might have changed since Toady removed the "mud spreads when walked on" code.

[Shades]

Eliminate the ability for cooks to stack multiple groups of identical ingredients. No more dwarven syrup, dwarven syrup, dwarven syrup, dwarven syrup roasts.

Maybe we should require stew to have at least one fish/meat component and roasts to have at least two, with alcohol being no more than one of part of either and not allowed in biscuits (or alcohol adds food type/value but doesn't count as one of the items)

[Sareth]

We could just make dwarfs eat more often and slightly reducing the maximum stack size for plants.

[WingDing]

I see some people complaining that making farming difficult would make the game tedious and unfun, however I believe the troubles and difficulties of farming (enormous fields, irrigation, pest control, fertilization, weather conditions, and an otherwise useless caste of peasants to do it all) could be put in the game and make it no more tedious than it already is.

Now bear in mind I didn't bother to read most of the thread so sorry if any of this has already been said and that I am not talking about this as if it was something to work on now and implement soon but more as something that would be good to see in the distant future when we have wheelbarrows, a better interface, and lots of automation.

Now with this suggestion I think that a lot of people believe we would have to make enormous farms in every fortress (to prevent early starvation) and that it would be made square by square, farmer by farmer as it is now. However, I think how it should be is how it is in reality: instead of every fortress being an agrarian center, many sites dedicated to farming (and nothing else) would be created by civilizations in world-gen and by the time the player starts playing all the agricultural infrastructure would already exist in the world and the player would merely have to create a trade agreement that would send caravans of food to their fortress.

My idea is that the player wouldn't have to do any farming if they didn't want to, and if on the other hand you might find the idea of running an agricultural fortress an interesting challenge to try you could do it and deal with the many obstacles of farming. Also if you were a farming fortress caravans would come to trade goods for your food instead of vice-versa.

Another great thing in addition to making farming a choice rather than a necessity, is that it would add meaning and goals to the game as civilizations will have an actual reason to expand and claim large amounts of land, you would have trade routes that actually matter, sieges would become an actual danger, and the underground river would become a treasured resource.

And each civilization will farm differently: humans will make above ground fields, elves will probably have orchards, goblins will farm livestock, and dwarves will farm underground. Although, farming underground doesn't make much sense realistically as it combines all the problems of farming with all the troubles of mining but, it would probably be safer when it comes to war thus averting the need for a large warrior caste to defend it and making dwarves a post-feudal civilization.

Lastly, if the amount of land needed is too much despite the low population of the DF worlds (compared to reality where even a small country has hundreds of thousands of people in it) then the time crops need to grow could be kept lower than it really is to allow for a bigger harvest.

Also I would like to remind everyone who read this far that this is a suggestion for the distant future where transportation is improved, dwarves have lots of automation in their lives, fields can be designated as large as you want, caravans are better implemented, and the game is generally prepared for this sort of thing. I just wanted to show how this could work without making the game less fun, if it is to happen.

Sorry if I rambled too much, I have a tendency to lose my train of thought...

I hope that all made sense and explained what I was thinking.

[Draco18s]

Now with this suggestion I think that a lot of people believe we would have to make enormous farms in every fortress (to prevent early starvation) and that it would be made square by square, farmer by farmer as it is now.

Farm designating doesn't change, and never should IMO.

That's one of the main issues with Improved Mining and Improved Wood: both suggestions increase the work the PLAYER has to do in order to accomplish the same goal.  Improved Farming only introduces mental complexity and work dwarves have to do that they do automatically (within reason).  Wood/Stone waste products force the player to do something with them, whereas weeding farms takes no player interaction.

[WingDing]

Farm designating doesn't change, and never should IMO.

That's one of the main issues with Improved Mining and Improved Wood: both suggestions increase the work the PLAYER has to do in order to accomplish the same goal.  Improved Farming only introduces mental complexity and work dwarves have to do that they do automatically (within reason).  Wood/Stone waste products force the player to do something with them, whereas weeding farms takes no player interaction.

I never said anything about weeding.