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[Reign on your Parade]

This thread is first and foremost, a discussion of what we want added to agriculture in dwarf fortress.
If you simply want to say I agree/disagree, without a well thought out response of reasoning, please shut up in this thread.

This first post will keep track of decisions we've made and what we're working on at the moment.

RECENT DECISIONS:

CURRENT WORK:
plant lifespans

[ September 06, 2007: Message edited by: Reign on your Parade ]

[Reign on your Parade]

plants should live longer, IF their plants that do (fruit trees, grape vines (what sparked me to start this discussion to begin with  ), berry bushes, that stuff)
1. Alternate watering methods
1.1 -Buckets?
1.2 -Rain?
1.3 -channel irrigation? (A use for channels in future versions!!! ZOMG!)
1.4 -whatever else we can think of
2. Weeds (maybe be a bit useful?)
3. More food variety and balance
4. Soil Fertility
4.1 Compost
5. Cooking variety
6. Farm plots that don't dissapear (Needs no discussion)

My thoughts on the matter are this. I dislike the way agriculture currently works. For one thing, it doesn't work at all for plants that last from year to yeat, you have to replant things every year. For another, I dislike how the skill of the planter determines the size of the stack.

[ September 06, 2007: Message edited by: Reign on your Parade ]

[ September 07, 2007: Message edited by: Reign on your Parade ]

[Goran]

1. I want outdoor farming as well and ability to plant and harvest outdoor cultures.

2. Current farming/food production is too productive, mostly because of ability to cook alcohol. Its not that hard to come to a point where a single dwarf can feed 200 and not even bother to plant every season or even year.

3. The whole fertilizing thing is currently redundant and waste of a critical(if not the most critical) resource.

4. Plump helmets rule, there is currently no good reason to bother planting anything else as food source.

5. Ability to plant trees.

[ September 06, 2007: Message edited by: Goran ]

[mickel]

I agree on the perennial plants comment.

I'd also love to see some alternatives to flood farming. Farming outdoors for example, with ordinary irrigation, as well as self watered fields.

For those things that still need replanting every year, a schedule would be fine.

In fact, that fields disappear between years needs to be reworked. It makes sense for flood farming on bare rock as we do now, but in other environments it doesn't necessarily do that. Of course, ordinary fields need replowing, for example.

Plants spread by themselves in real life, and it would be interesting if they did so in Dwarf Fortress too.

On the topic of plants spreading themselves we have weeds. Totally useless plants that spread to the fields and take up space useful plants could have. Countered by automatic "weeding" jobs generated for the farmers. (Keeps 'em on their toes, the lazy bastards!)

Fallow fields. If you plant the same crop over and over and over in a field, it'll go fallow. With enforced crop rotation we'll help the Plump Helmet issue mentioned in an above post.

[Lightning4]

quote:Originally posted by Goran:
<STRONG>
4. Plump helmets rule, there is currently no good reason to bother planting anything else as food source.
[ September 06, 2007: Message edited by: Goran ]</STRONG>

Maybe so, though I think Quarry Bushes are also quite balanced. Longer grow time, but triple the food yield per bush than brewing and cooking alcohol. Just requires an ample supply of bags and an idle farmhand.

And with what Toady has mentioned about booze and seeds unable to make full fledged meals, Quarry Bushes might be considered a crop of equal importance compared to plump helmets. Those purple mushrooms aren't going to be king for long!

I would like to see the remaining crops gain more usefulness as well. Cave wheat and sweet pods are pretty useless to plant since you can just get more yield and faster results with the aforementioned two.

And I don't think anyone actually grows pig tails instead of just gathering them from an underground forest.

[Tamren]

Booze and seed would be better off as a spice or flavour addition. Like cumin seeds and cooking sherry.

[Felix the Cat]

...which brings me to another thing I'd like to see, additional cooking items. There's all sorts of possibilities here. Spices (which would be a great trade item), extracts, honey (via Apiaries and beekeepers), salt, oils, other processed things, even exotic stuff like certain flowers and tree bark and roots.

These would:
-Make the Farmer's Workshop more than a curiosity
-Add to trade goods
-Add to the variety of meals (no more Plump helmet roasts made whose ingredients are Plump helmet, Plump helmet, and Plump helmet!)
-Give those of us who like to spoil our dwarves yet one more thing to obsess about!

[Grek]

Farm plots that don't disapear and retain their seasonal designations in winter but still need watered.
An "irragate" designation that makes dwarfs take a bucket of water and make tile muddy when it gets dry. Much more newbie friendly than mucking around with floodgates.
A "reserve bags" option.

[Reign on your Parade]

Glad to see people are listining to my First post, this are all pretty well thought out. Except for Tamren, and KIND of Grek, no offense but I don't want one sentanse posts. I want this to be a discussion, not just a long list of comments. Not trying to be mena or anything, but try and include more meat in your next post.

To the matter at hand:

We're saying that: plants should live longer, IF their plants that do (fruit trees, grape vines (what sparked me to start this discussion to begin with  :p ), berry bushes, that stuff)
Alternate watering methods
-Buckets?
-Rain?
-channel irrigation? (A use for channels in future versions!!! ZOMG!)
-whatever else we can think of
Weeds (maybe be a bit useful?)
More food variety and balance
Overuse of land
Cooking variety
Farm plots that don't dissapear (Needs no discussion)

Let's tackle these things one at a time, I'll make a list.
Let's start at the top, with plant lifespans.

For one thing, there are things that extend a plants output and lifespan, such as pruneing. Many plants go goodyear-badyear. What do we want about this? Let's get the itty bitty details worked out, so that if Toady implements it, he has to do as little thinking as possible, thus saving time for other things.

[RPB]

When/if outside farming gets implemented, it would be interesting if soil fertility were more involved than it currently is. Right now there's just a baseline fertility which gets temporarily improved by the addition of potash, but no matter how intensively you farm a field it never uses up the soil's fertility--over-farming is completely impossible. This makes some degree of sense for Nile farming where you're planting in fresh soil every season, but if you're farming outside you'd expect the soil's nutrients to get depleted if you farmed it continuously. Same thing even in a floodgate farm which is used for half a dozen or so crops per year without mud replenishment, or for that matter floodgate farms in general. While a flooding river can be expected to deposit mud from its banks onto a floodplain, it's kind of hard to imagine water being pumped through a canal carrying as much soil to deposit.

If you had to actually worry about soil degradation it would help make land allocation a bit more interesting. Instead of just making one rather tiny farm room that can supply your food needs forever and ever, you'd have to either expand to new fields and rotate crops through them (the actual crop rotation would not really cause any more micromanagement than at present, so that's not a problem) or else put serious effort into fertilization.

(EDIT: Whoops, just saw that "overuse of land" was already on the list. My bad.)

[ September 06, 2007: Message edited by: RPB ]

[Reign on your Parade]

No problem. Infact, your post, while not helpful right now, will be included when we reach that, and is causing me to switch Overuse of land with soil fertility, a better term.

[Tamren]

Plants should also grow in different fashions.

A blackberry bush for example will die back in the winder months, but come spring and summer it will put out new growth and shape clusters of berries all over again. Presumably if you planted a field of blackberry bushes you would not have to replant them unless some disaster killed off the entire field.

Farmed mushrooms are very different from wild mushrooms. In most cases they grow on this carefully formulated bed of compost. The mushroom spawn is mixed into it and grows into this sort of "web" that spreads throughout the entire pile. The mushrooms appear on the surface of the compost growing every which way. But when you pick a mushroom that is not the end of the story, if you picked a mushroom properly and the inner "web" is undamaged another mushroom will grow back in its place. All the while new mushrooms are appearing, generated by the web.

However it works, harvest time in general looks like it will become WAY more complicated in the future.

[Havlock]

There's also another thing that could be added to agriculture in DF: composting! Composting would offer another way to make fertilizer, while also presenting a new way to dispose of fortress refuse. Compost could be used to improve the general soil quality, or put in mushroom beds to even greater effect. And any organic refuse could be used in the composter, from spoiled food and rotten hides, to the (de-boned) corpses of your slain enemies.  

In fact, a simple way to improve soil quality that could be used is to just spread organic refuse over a plot, but it would be kinda hard to control the smell, especially indoors. Setting up dedicated composters would make it easier to keep the miasma/smell isolated, and produce a better product to boot.

[Reign on your Parade]

Of course, animal tissue is a very bad thing to compost. It'll work eventually, but will cause all sorts of things you don't want in your compost heap to y'know... be in it.

-added compost to list.

[The Menacer]

Really more than a reworked farmable plants, I'd like to see a better form of cattle.  It seems a bit nonsensical to have herds of cows and horses wandering about the fortress as these are animals known for their reliance on open areas and  a given fortress is apparently deep and enclosed enough for dwarves to vomit if they so much as venture outside.  At a minimum I'd like to see cows and horses given a marked preference for milling about outside, but what I'd really love is some form of cave-dwelling animal that the dwarves can domesticate.  Part of what I think gives the game some of its flavor (no pun intended) is that the dwarves cultivate a number of fungi and plants that can survive in a lightless environment rather than the cheap cop-out of taking a normal plant that we'd find in real life and slapping "cave" onto the front of its name (cave wheat is an exception of course, but what're you gonna do?).  In some respects there already is a candidate in the humble (and awesome) purring maggot, but considering that cats will go far, far out of their way to murder the poor things they're really not worth the trouble at the moment.  Maybe this can be fixed in a future update, or we/Toady can come up with something else that's really cool and unique.  My personal suggestion is some kind of docile, cave-dwelling beetle, because it seems to be something of a running theme that everything the dwarves eat is in some way vaguely horrifying.