Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Footkerchief]

Toady's said a few times he's fairly sure he doesn't want to put shit and piss into the game.

I can't find the quote at the moment, but I think what he said was that he'd only want to add it if it was fun.  He's certainly not outright hostile to it.

4.  Manure, as a fertilizer.

4. They just drop it everywhere?  Everyone will might be doing it after a while... night soil, and so on.  But it's a dangerous door to open, especially if the room on the other side is full.  If a god turns you into a horse in adventure mode, would you suddenly start dropping the bomb?

[ArkDelgato]

If dwarves only eat once a season, they should only defecate once a year.

BUT IT WOULD LEAD TO ABSOLUTELY WACKY HAMMERER STORIES.

[Hungry]

note to fertalizer farms....i mean dwarves....farm aid?

[chucks]

Actually, I was reading some entries in the devlogs about fat layers in the new organ and tissue composition system for creatures.  If you burn fat as you walk and do tasks, you eventually have to replenish with more food.  Your total stamina would represent the rate at which you burn, with a higher attribute representing slower fat burning.  However, to offset this, the higher your strength or your agility, the bigger tasks you can complete at a faster rate.  I know Toady has aims in mind for updating dwarf attributes, but I'm pretty sure some analog of those will remain.

Now, here's something interesting:  the dwarves should have to poop for every meal they eat.  The more you eat, the more you have to poop.  The more you drink, the more you have to pee.  Have these two tied in with some form of hunger and dehydration system for the dwarf metabolism.

Hell, you could enough tie fatigue into some formula of physical attributes, and that would determine when dwarves have to sleep.  You could have some period of being tired where they begin to perform their tasks slower until they eventually go somewhere to fall asleep.  You have a low water mark for when they begin to feel tired, a medium watermark for when they begin to get anxious to seek out a place to rest if they're not in mortal danger, and then a high watermark for when they could pass out at any second even in the heat of a pitched battle.  Then, whenever any dwarves are over the high watermark threshold, there's a random probably of them falling asleep on the spot.

All of these consume, store, utilize, begin to run out, dangerous low resources left, emergency state cycles would just entirely make a semi-closed system of production vs. consumption of food and waste and hygeine and tiredness creating an entirely different cycle of dwarven behaviors and interactions.

Later on, if there are proper day/night cycles in the game, you could set hours for certain groups or squads or burrows.  It would be an interesting balancing act of keeping your dwarves healthy and happy with enough sleep and food and bathrooms and tasks, and not having your fortress descend into a tireless march of haggard and weathered dwarves just barely surviving in the wilderness.

This could also most certainly be an interesting ballet to watch during seiges...

[Craftling]

Well, in medieval europe (which DF most mimics) there was really feces everywhere with only the most developed urban centers getting any sort of sewage system...

The roman cities had sewers. and it wouldnt be hard to hook up the latrines up to a cesspit would it?
Dwarves have the ability to set up masterwork marble sewer anyway.

[Enzo]

chucks : very interesting...

craftling : true. The romans (even the ancient greeks) were doing a lot of things better than we were around 1400, actually. We regressed a fair bit in those dark and feudal times. I can't remember the details or cite sources or any of that rubbish ( ) but I remember being told in highschool that peasants in England would essential shit in a bucket and toss it into gutters dug into the side of the road. For hundreds of years. England was pretty damn gross for a long time actually after Italy, France, Spain, etc were getting with the program (renaissance). Anyway, I just like the idea of sewers being a major undertaking instead of something DF handles mostly automatically. Maybe most people would rather not spend so long dealing with feces but maybe not, based on this topic.

Additionally, to keep down the odds of 50 dwarves defecating at the same time down, just make them inhumanly quick about it.

[RavingManiac]

Why has this come up again?

Because people like to suggest ideas without reading or searching.

Toady's said a few times he's fairly sure he doesn't want to put shit and piss into the game.

I know that the topic has come up many times. I am simply proposing another way to implement it.

[Caffienatedjedi]

I support this simply for the fact of contaminating the river when a Elven retreat is downriver from you . Plenty of Dwarfly things can be done with sewage.

[alfie275]

What happens when sewage meets lava? Crapsidian?

[Dakira]

Some thoughts:

1) We can already make a fortress out of soap blocks, Let us NOT make a fortress out of "poop-blocks".

2) I can only imagine the stories that come from tantrums about dwarves being brutally murdered while taking a crap, or dwarves throwing chamberpots. I'd find it really funny that they would throw feces just to calm down and receive a bad thought from having previously handled poop.

3) I like the sewage water idea a lot, but I'm concerned about the limits of how much poop can be dumped into one space of 7/7 water. I'd really hate to divert an entire river just to manage clean water for every latrine in the fortress. There's also concern for having sewage 'water' even here. I remember something about Toady having some issues with blood as a flow when in contact with water. For a quick fix 'sewage water' could probably act as blood does currently when in contact with water.

4) What of the potential for letting sewage water flow onto crops for irrigation and fertilization? Would that poison everything in the field from potentially high acidity/toxicity levels or would that actually be useful?

[Hungry]

I get the sudden thaught of exploding dwarves due to extreme constapation....and mass elven infection deaths due to sewaged traps...

[Byakugan01]

Better yet, liquid fire trap-elves BURNING. Anyway, I do believe that burning the sewage to turn it into a ash might be the way to go-if it's an aboveground thing though, you probably could apply it raw-but if you've just had a disease outbreak, BURN IT BEFORE APPLYING! As we should know after the relatively recent scares from contaminated food, disease causing microbes can persist in soil (some anyway, not viruses though) and contaminate plants. If you cook or brew it (the resulting vegetables) though, it should cease to be contaminated.

[Craftling]

Normal faeces would be fertile but im not sure about dwarven ones.
If the faeces flowed like blood would we have brown and yellow waves everywhere, seeing as dwarves have to relieve themselves more than they have to bleed?

[Pilsu]

Apartment owners should probably empty their own chamber pot. Otherwise you'll see dwarves barge in while they're sleeping to steal their poop

[Mechanoid]

An interesting thought occurs:
As a source of water is shut off, the water will inevitably create a "high spot" somewhere between the source and the drain, which will cause the water to dance back and forth. This means that if your water well and sewage hole is on the same Z level, and relies on the flow of water to keep the water well uncontaminated, the moment the flow is shut off, you're screwed. (backflow)