As a general topic, this idea has been discussed many times. The process of harvesting and using most resources, as things are now, yields unrealistic results. For example: the same amount of stone will produce a single amulet and an entire brick wall; the same amount of wood produces 3 mugs, a barrel, a bed, a floor, a piece of charcoal; and so on. You get the idea.
So even though it has been discussed before, I want to express my opinion as a player that I feel this added complexity will add a lot to the game. I think managing jobs and resources and workshops and such is one of the finest parts of dwarf fortress, and the more complex it gets, the better.
I also want to express my frustration at the current inefficiency of fuel harvesting . I understand that a lot of the challenge is managing without them, but I think that because of the way resources appear in the game, it's a little too widespread. Every map is a desert when it comes to the amount of wood you need for all the various tasks. Coal is very, very scarce, even when present. I think it's reasonable to expect that if you decide to embark on an arctic glacier with no coal underneath, then you've got no resources, so have at it, hoss, but if you embark in a forested mountain, you should not have to worry about fuel or lumber. Yes there's magma, but magma should be a nice benefit, a nice surprise that you earn, not something you absolutely need in order to not be waiting around for your metal industry to kick off. Fuel is too essential.
My ideas about this are tempered by these two ideas:
1. To a certain extent it will never be perfect.
2. Toady knows. Improvements will come bit by bit as he gets to them.
That being said, I want to outline a couple of the key problems which cause an unnatural shortage of wood to use, paired with ideas for solutions. I'm not saying these are original. Just pointing out my thought process.
1. Problem: Dwarves are limited to an unrealistically small sphere of activity. Solution: Offsite lumber. This could mean A) Caravans provide more. B) Offsite expeditions to other forests. B is the more realistic option. I live in the American desert, where many forts were actually built with wood. Loggers would go up into the mountains and bring wood back down to the barren sites they had chosen to fortify.
I'm positive caravan loads have been discussed before, and I know for a fact that Toady has mentioned that offsite expeditions for resources are on the table, what with his goal of having your fortress exert influence on the rest of the map. So, next:
2. Problem: Dwarves like mountainy things, like ores and gems and magma, but mountain biomes in the game are excessively bare. Solution: Trees grow in huge forests on most mountains. Consider that statement both a suggestion and a citation to the natural state of things to back it up. Don't know if anyone has suggested this before, but I didn't check. Seems like a simple idea, though.
3. Problem: The yield of wood per tree is kind of arbitrary, and use of logs seems bizarrely inefficient. Solution: Have trees produce more wood, have sawmill workshops that produce a certain amount of planks, etc, etc. These ideas, or systems of ideas, have been discussed a billion times, so I won't dwell on this aspect of the issue.
4. Problem: When wood is present in a biome, it occurs in unrealistically sparse quantities. I think this is a key issue that rarely gets discussed or dealt with. I feel that this is just an important a point as logs not producing a realistic amount of wood: real forests have more trees in them than is represented in Dwarf Fortress. Efficiency is a real issue, but on top of that: there simply aren't enough trees. This has also bugged me about similar resource management games like Warcraft II and Settlers II: if you're using an axe, and you're building on such a small scale, you can't just mow down entire forests. Forests, in the right climate, are pretty large and can provide a lot of logs. More than dwarves need, even if using the wood is as inefficient as it is now.
Tree farms, as helpful as they are in real life, don't seem like a real solution for a 10 year fortress. It can take decades for trees to grow.
So here is my solution, one that I haven't seen anywhere else: instead of having only individual tree tiles on maps, have forest or grove tiles containing a certain amount of trees.
And rather than cluttering the map with more tree tiles, why not have forest, grove or thicket tiles that contain more trees? I imagine these tiles would behave similar to the game's existing water tiles. You would have a grove tile with 7/7 trees, or 3/7 trees. Trees as they are now would be 1/7 trees. You could make it more complex, with slimmer trees, like Aspens, making up 20/20 tiles, and bigger trees like Oaks being 1/2, or maybe needing to be solitary trees. But I don't need to get into that.
So if there's a tile with multiple trees on it, a woodcutter would go up, chop away for however long he needs to, and produce a wood unit on the tile he stands on or nearby, with the forest tile remaining where it is.
In addition, these tiles, rather than popping up alone like trees do now, could appear just like ores, stones and gems: in small and large clusters, in variously shaped "veins," or even a large "layer" in forest biomes. This would add another realistic challenge: needing your woodcutting industry to be up and running and dead serious in order to cut a path to the edge of the map, if you're in a forest or swamp biome.
To balance this out, trees would need to grow much more slowly.
As a final note, of course this could be applied to ores and stone as well, with your miners pulling out a single chunk of, say, magnetite, leaving 6/7 chunks left in the wall. And coal could appear as a layer, or in larger clusters. But that's for another thread.
All of the numbered problems/solutions I posted are relevant to the issue. Just wanted to add the fourth one there. And of course spark discussion on how relevant this issue is in the first place. That is, do others agree that complexity of the industry tree is a more satisfying challenge than dealing with scarcity and sitting on your ass(which, to be fair, has its moments, too)? Or do others feel that the frustration in not having the right resources is in all or most cases due to carelessness, and you just need to deal with it and/or choose a different biome if you're not up to the challenge?