Print

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

[project23]

As things stand right now in 0.31.01(DF2010), normal underground soil layers require being muddied before they can be used to farm on. This is quite a change from the underground farm mechanic in 40d. The information that is forming on the wiki (http://df.magma.wiki.com/index.php/DF2010_Talk:Farming and elsewhere has a lot of noise about this being some sort of bug.

Hrm... I would like a serious discussion on this new mechanic.

I personally LIKE it. Here is why.
1. It promotes the use of Plant Gathering and above ground farm use in the first year for a quick crop to support your quickly growing population. Or careful planning with supplies before embark.

2. In 40d, you would typically find soil layers in a lowland region of your map. The same place you would usually find small murky pools. It is pretty much the same situation in DF2010. Where there are good soil layers there are small murky pools. Go dig out a block beside the pool, with twice the number of tiles as the pool, and 'pop the pool'. No need for doors or complex floodgate systems, it will spread out and dry up quick enough on its own and poses no drowning risk.  Above ground farms can support you while you do this. Once the water is down to 1/7 you can build plots. Now you can run your underground farming without worry.
3. Its just dwarfier. Underground farms now take more design and planning, not just digging out a room anywhere.

So. The question is, is this a bug or a more interesting way of doing things? I like it, I would like to see it stay the way it is.

[Sir Finkus]

Personally, I like it.

[immibis]

I like it too, since it makes farming more complicated than "plop a farm down on some soil"

[Ultimarr]

I like it too. Toady had to make farming harder (In my opinion), and this is a great way of doing it. Its still easy, you can dig down until you find a underground lake/whatever and plant there.

[Spartan 117]

I think it should be optional, for those of us who suck at DF.

Like me.

[Paul]

I like it too. Being able to dig into soil and solve all your underground farming needs was just silly.

Right now you can surface farm if you really need food right now, or you can haul some buckets of water to irrigate your underground farm. Not really all that hard.

It doesn't require a super complex irrigation system, you can do it with nothing but buckets. Just set up a "pond" over your desired farming location and have your dwarves dump some buckets of water down. Then farm the resulting mud.

If you're too lazy for that you could always channel out the area above your soil plot to expose it to the rain and have your dwarves farm wild strawberries Mmm, strawberry wine.

[forsaken1111]

It was confirmed as a bug by Baughn here:

http://www.bay12games.com/forum/index.php?topic=51951.msg1123336#msg1123336

[Forumsdwarf]

I like it.  It adds another stage to the colony's evolution.

It's an insult to Dwarves to eat prickle berries all the time.  The development of proper underground crops is a minor but welcome achievement.  (In maps without surface water it would be more of a major achievement.)

[Demonic Spoon]

I like it too, it justifies my overly complex irrigation systems a bit.

[GetAssista]

I would love it to stay as it is.

Underground farming was obnoxiously easy in d40, which devalued outdoor activities like plant gathering, hunting and fishing

[Demonic Spoon]

My needlessly complex irrigation system

Fed with pump from the brook, because the murky pools just weren't enough for me to get my fix. I'm planning to add more floodgates for awesome.

[evileeyore]

I agree, it's a feature, not a bug.

[forsaken1111]

Regardless, it is considered a bug and apparently will be 'fixed'.

It doesn't actually add that much difficulty, especially considering one can reasonably expect to find already-muddied ground if one digs down/around enough.

[random51]

Riddle me this:

What is stopping those who prefer it this way from always muddying their farm tiles before laying down plots if it is fixed?

If you like it so much you can keep doing it after they fix the bug and everybody gets what they want.

[Jadael]

I do like the need for irrigation before underground farming, because farming was indeed far too easy.

However, this is sort of a bandage solution, it's just slapping on some arbitrary difficulty. This feature has no real basis in reality, or in the simulated world of DF.

What really needs to be done, farther down the line, is more complex farming where you have to actually worry about tilling the soil, planting seeds, watering them, fertilizing, and then more than that, food preservation. And far more space and dwarfhours need to be devoted to it. Feeding 200 people with a small patch in a back room somewhere and having surplus to be piled higher and higher in gigantic storerooms to last me years if for some reason I ever get cut off from the farm... It's a little silly.

My most recent fort is on top of a deposit of rock salt and it's sad that it's useless, when salt was called 'white gold' through a lot of history and was extremely important to civilizations *not dying*. Likewise with vinegar and sugar. Preserving food was a big deal.

Actually, maybe just making more plants only grow in one season would be a good quick fix. So you'd have cycles of quickly growing as much as you can in the 'summer' to hopefully last you through the 'winter'.