So, I've been playing this mod a good bit to add a little variety to my DF games... After a tundra fortress that failed miserably due to Sand Raider ambusher spam (I was getting as many as 80-100 Sand Raiders visible on my map at a time! I couldn't leave the fort, and eventually some of their bowmen caught a half-dozen of my dwarves in a fortress courtyard open from above with their bows- setting off a tantrum spiral...), I started another fortress on a Tundra island further to the south of the map (a "Freezing" biome through and through- but no Sand Raiders! they shouldn't be able to survive in Tundras anyways...) But I was having trouble farming the Tundra crops- Rime/Lingon/Crowberries.
Rime Berries, Crowberries, and Lingon Berries were all present on my map as natural "shrubs"- so I collected a number of the plants, and their seeds after brewing/eating raw the plants...
The first problem I noticed was that the seeds didn't appear in the Kitchen Menu (through Z), so I couldn't cook them if I wanted. No big deal, I was going to try to farm them anyways...
However when I started some farming plots, channeled a Z-level down from the surface in some covered courtyards, I ran into some serious issues farming the plants. They would select just fine to plant, and my dwarves would even go and plant the seeds (I confirmed through 'T' that the seeds were actually planted) but the crops wouldn't seem to grow! So I started browsing the raws a bit... (raws for the CF plants can be found in "plant_cf" in the raws/objects folder)
Turns out that a major error was made in coding these plants (if they were meant to be farmable- if not they probably shouldn't have dropped uncookable seeds when eaten/brewed...) Their growth duration was set to 1200! That might not seem like a big deal- but a full season in Dwarf Fortress, from start to finish, is exactly 1008 growth duration 'units' (
http://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/Time#Plant_growth). And these plants only grow for one season each (Spring for Crowberries, Summer for Lingon Berries, and Autumn for Rime Berries)!
That means that the plants can never be farmed on Farm Plots! Instead of growing to maturity and being harvested at the end of each growth period, they get planted, at best, at the very beginning of the season, and then grow to close to full maturity before the season changes and they completely disappear- leaving no seeds or crops behind! This obviously is a balance issue, but it's not the only one- several other crops also had growth durations longer than a season. Most of the normal berries (blue/black/raspberries) also had growth durations of 1200 and only grew in one season, and sugar canes had a growth duration of 2000 and only grow in the Spring! Other crops with impossible [growdur]'s included Cinnamon and Black Pepper.
Obviously, this makes farming most, if not all, of the new above ground plants impossible- as most of them have growth durations longer than the full season they grow in! Obviously, these values need to be tweaked so it's at least possible to grow them to maturity. A good rule of thumb would probably be no growth durations longer than about 800- to give Dwarves enough time to plant a field at beginning of the season. Most 'vanilla' crops only have [Growdur] of between 300 and 600. So 1200 is a really long [GrowDur], and 2000 is frankly, insane. Without the ability to grow in multiple seasons and some way of cross-seasonal farming (read: built-in modding in the CivForge mod to allow growth across seasons- so it's not necessary to install separate, additional mods just to get CF farming to work properly); or [Growdur] values a good bit under 1008, these crops will NEVER be farmable. So, either they should be tweaked; or they shouldn't drop seeds- or at least the seeds should be cookable, and the Mod description should warn that these crops are un-farmable...
Poll
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