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[Urist McDepravity]

Considering we got milking/cheese fixed, and butchering produces year-worth amount of meat, having farming a bit 'harder' is fair.

[MaDeR Levap]

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.

This does not work like that. Game must enforce some behaviour, otherwise it is meaningless.

[PhilbertFlange]

I'm split on whether or not I like the irrigation. I started in 2D when you HAD to irrigate. However, in 2D after you flooded a room, closing the floodgate made the water drain away, leaving the mud. Now I have to pump the water out of my farms before sending the farmers back in. It's a neat challenge, but I'm not sure if it should be mandatory for crops.

As it looks like excrement will never be implemented, fertilization is a bit extreme to bother making mandatory, so I propose a different method. As plump helmets are the staple food and are a mushroom, used to growing in soils underground, they should not require irrigation. All other crops should require irrigation in order to be planted. This will let new players get a simple plump helmet farm started to keep the dwarves from starving, while not getting the full benefits from farming. It'll also make it possible to get farming going in a desert with no water.

I also support growing seasons. I'd like to see the 2D inability to grow during winter brought back. It makes farming far more important to learn properly at the beginning so that your dwarves survive the first winter.

[Urist McDepravity]

Now I have to pump the water out of my farms before sending the farmers back in.

You dont need any pumps. Just link the floodgate to pressure plate on the other side of farm area, and it will shut it automatically.
1/7 is already farmable level, so if you are accurate with the flooding, you can go planting immediately.

[darkrider2]

weird... before you needed to have a magma pipe, now you need to have an above ground freshwater source. Even if its a bug... I'm amazed at how you only need to irrigate your farm once, ever. Does it never run out of water or minerals after that? What if you had to re-fertilize, re-irrigate your farms or they would stop producing plants (and you'd loose seeds).

And giving that mushrooms usually grow on dead things, I could now see plump helmet farms being fertilized with the corpses of goblin invaders (not to mention how dwarfy that would be)

[Hellfish]

I don't like it, because it makes farming more complex than it should be,IMO.
However (And I've said this before, in the thread with Baughn's reply), I wouldn't mind it staying IF... One could order one's dwarves to dump buckets of water directly on the ground.Not itself an unreasonable request,is it? I mean IRL you are not unable to empty a bucket unless you are one story above the ground,are you? A proper irrigation system would still have the advantage, that being deploy time, so everybody's happy!

[Ampoliros]

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.

This does not work like that. Game must enforce some behaviour, otherwise it is meaningless.

Pfeh. I express my disdain at your opinion, sir.

Dwarf Fortress has an incredibly variable difficulty level, and much of that difficulty level is dependent upon the individual player's choice and intentional self-handicaps and limitations; the myriad options mean you can make the game absurdly easy or impossibly hard on your own. If the ease of farming bothers you, mod it to make it harder or choose to irrigate before you lay down crops anyways. Forcing it via game mechanics is just silly, especially being as the current state of gameplay means that a single bucket of water can irrigate a 10x10 plot

[darkrider2]

Yeah that's true. I mod ranged weapons out of my games so that I can't just pown everything in existance because I have crossbows.

[vturtle]

My only real concern is that it makes a lot of maps far more difficult.  If you don't have an easy to tap water source or above ground plants to harvest life just got much more difficult.  One of my favorite locations happens to be just that though.  I like deserts with some mountains and an underground river as the only water source. 

I've only barely dug in on my first fort so I don't know what the underground looks like yet, but I read the world_gen file and it does look like we could make caverns with water more common if we want to.  That could be a viable way to make those maps work a little better.

[Forumsdwarf]

One could order one's dwarves to dump buckets of water directly on the ground.

I'll definitely grant you that one.  In fact I'll go one better: farmers should automatically water crops if empty buckets and a water source are available.

[Sensei]

I still say I liked in 2D when you had to flood a farm area, and the mushrooms grow on each year's fresh silt. It makes perfect sense.

Maybe a raw option for this sort of thing?

[Paul]

How farming should be IMO:

Require you to water once every growth cycle before planting. After harvest the mud dries up and must be watered again to plant on that tile. Fertilizing after watering could be done for larger harvests, but wouldn't be necessary for basic food production.

Watering could be done one of two ways:
Buckets, used by farmers and applied on a tile-by-tile basis. This would be a job similar to planting where they grab a bucket, fill it with water, and then go to the spot and start watering - taking a few seconds to water that farm tile.

Flooding. This would be the quick way to make the farming process faster - it would basically let you skip a step, immediately watering all the tiles and saving your dwarves the trouble. The farms would have a toggle as to whether farmers should do it themselves or wait for you to water them.

That way watering becomes a part of farming which can be done manually with buckets and a little dwarf power or could be automated if the player wanted to take the time to make the system to move the water. Irrigation systems could save a lot of time on large scale farms, but with buckets and some extra farmers you could ignore that aspect if you didn't feel like it.

[ArdentPenguin]

Perhaps it could just be made an option in the init.txt files, along with the options for economy, room rent, and temperature? Then people can set the init file to what they want, and play within their defined constraints.

Personally I like the challenge, but on the other hand I HATE how the economy handles room rents and always set rent to 0, so I can imagine how irrigation feels for people who don't enjoy it.

In practice,

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

I always just dig straight down to find an underground cavern and build a farm there, along with the rest of my fort. They're always muddied, so no irrigation necessary!

Although that maaaay create a few other challenges to deal with...

[pubby]

Just make stuff only grow if it is in 5 tiles proximity to water.

[BigD145]

I'm fine with it and kinda wish we had to do it every year. Egypt lasted quite awhile when they did it.