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Of course not. Freedom is great.

82 (31.4%)

Heavens no! I would never deny others.

10 (3.8%)

People should be free to enjoy what they like. I'd never oppose it.

29 (11.1%)

I love denying others basic rights so I can be lazy and not edit my .init file.

55 (21.1%)

What kind of rigged poll is this? MSNBC has fairer. Also, I am pro-filth.

85 (32.6%)

Total Members Voted: 260

[TheSummoner]

I for one welcome anything that will add a new layer of complexity and danger to fortress design.

I can see it now... On the surface, a castle. Below it, a Dwarven city. Further down, an intricate sewer system. In the deepest bowels of the earth, a cavern area I carve out to replicate that one boss arena from Conker's Bad Fur Day... You know the one I'm talking about. With a bit of luck I'll be able to capture a specific type of forgotten beast down there to complete the design...

The forgotten beast Saramekurzikath has come! An enormous blob composed of filth with a wonderful singing voice. Beware its noxious secretions!

Yeah... I want to make that happen. Translate the name if you like =P

[Scruga]

I'd just like to chime in and say that I would approve of more liquids, sewage being one. Oil would be another. Hell, mercury might even be fun.

It would be nice to have a sewage system just as somewhere to put all the damn vomit, pus, and blood.

And also, then pour it on your enemies. Then pour oil on them. And then lava. And then water.

Achievement unlocked: Master Necromancer

[Nikov]

Well, it's a new release and threads discussing sewage are back on the Suggestions board. Time to dust this one off, fire it up for a month with some fresh blood, and see what wonderful new ground we'll be covering.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Using screw presses to extract seeds from filth?

No. Let's not.

Let's not ever.

Jugs of distilled urea for tanning and fertilizer, anyone?

[Buttery_Mess]

It's tricky enough to find places to store water, let alone sewage. But, finding something to do with sewage would add a fun and interesting level of depth to the game.

Dump it into the river? Pump it up to the surface and spread it out until it dries? (It should still create miasma ) Mix it with magma to make dirty obsidian? Keep digging larger and larger cisterns to store it all in, and hope the problem will just go away?

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Hell?

The possibilities are endless!

[NW_Kohaku]

Making gunpowder (specifically, saltpetre), making Lant (functionally ammonia distilled from urine, used in cleaning floors and laundry, dyeing fabrics, a general-purpose acid for most chemistry, and it was also used in ale and as a glaze for hard pastries.  Yes, they put it on food.  That's recycling, sucker.), and most importantly as Fertilizer.

Urea, the prime component of urine, is the world's most used fertilizer.

I've talked about this extensively in the farming threads, and oddly enough, it's never really drawn any ire.  I've had people who were very upset or heated about different parts of the proposal, but never the fertilizer sections.  This implies that either a very odd distribution is going on in the playerbase, or that the sort of people who get into a rage over things like putting urine into the game are the sort of people who will never read a long suggetsion thread, excepting possibly one titled "add sewage already", although I sort of think they only read a couple pages of that.

[Nikov]

I recall Toady is interested in taking some of those farming suggestions and working them into the game. Hauling buckets of filth to farm plots seems like a perfectly good means of fertilizing.

[Askot Bokbondeler]

I recall Toady is interested in taking some of those farming suggestions and working them into the game. Hauling buckets of filth to farm plots seems like a perfectly good means of fertilizing.

i'd love to see a quote supporting that. and if this sounded like sarcasm, it's not.

[NW_Kohaku]

i'd love to see a quote supporting that. and if this sounded like sarcasm, it's not.

From a Reddit article:

I like fertilizer, animal tracking and sewers. I dislike potty breaks. This is an example of realism that I think has a lot of potential for trouble. Potty breaks in adventure mode might be realistic, but there are immersion issues there. He he he, I mean in the sense of the player being kicked out of their groove. The other kind of immersion wouldn't be so bad, because sewers are common adventure environments. In dwarf mode, dwarves already take a lot of time out for self-maintenance, and this would be a more senseless kind, compared to something like eating.

Against which, Silverionmox and I have been proposing making dual-purpose breaks to streamline the process a little.  That is, I've said the dwarves go to relieve themselves after downing a full keg of dwarven ale, as part of the routine for going on a drinking break, instead of having a totally separate timer.  Alternately, Silverionmox has said they can just go before they take their sleeping breaks.

The difference being that you simply put your latrines near the booze supply and dining halls versus putting the latrines in the residential districts.

Either way, it gets around the Fortress Mode problems of breaks. 

In adventure mode, it could be handled similarly - you just take the time to do your business before nap time, possibly even off-screen when it fades to black.  The only reason adventurer mode would need to track adventurers doing their business (unless Toady is sadistic enough to send bogeymen to attack you when you literally had your pants down in the outhouse) would be if you were in a player-generated site, and were doing something like making your own lant as part of the adventurer skills arc. 


EDIT:
And this is something that I had linked in from the FotF thread, which occured before the "new" Improved Farming thread.  Toady saying some of these things is what triggered me to start really pushing the thread along and eventually sort of become its leading spokesman, it wasn't said in response to the thread I made:

Any plans to make farming more difficult?

How difficult do you want farming (and feeding a fortress in general) to be, both for an experienced player trying to get everything working and for a new player learning the ropes?  Will trading be able to wholly replace a dwarven fortress food industry at home?

Will the new villages result in greater amounts of farmland required to feed individuals? If so, will there be "farmers caravans" that come to the fortress with food you can buy?

Nothing specific beyond the new dev page has been settled.  I think having dwarves outside the fortress yet associated to the fortress might end up being the focus of food production for established forts, so it might often come down to surviving the first years, and you shouldn't just be able to blast out the necessary food with a random plot you plunk down somewhere.  In a more isolated fort (settled on a glacier in the middle of nowhere, say), with no outside dwarves, it should be more work to support 100 dwarves.  The new balance in adventure mode would require, say, 60 or so of them to be fairly dedicated underground food-workers, though the ratio hasn't been established for underground agriculture yet.  A large dwarven fortress-city with expansive aboveground and underground offscreen settlements probably won't have a lot of food production onscreen, and you'd be engaged with near-constant trade/taxes/etc. with your offscreen buddies.  There would need to be conversions between edible offscreen/onscreen resources, because in adventure mode you'd got people eating hundreds of items a year and in dwarf mode it is 8 or whoever.  I don't like the feel of dwarf taking a barrel full of plump helmets to eat per sitting, or even referring to the food in those terms, but there's weirdness any way you do it, I think.

How important will farming be, both for a NPC settlement and for a fortress?  Will it be a flat-out necessity for large cities/fortresses, or can hunting and/or fishing in a reasonably wildlife-heavy place be sufficient?

I think it'll be necessary for large cities that are inhabited by people that need to eat a normal amount or else starve in some weeks.  Goblins might not fall in that category.  A human capital would likely only be supportable with farming, though I'd consider any real world counter-examples from the right period.  What were the biggest fishing/hunting-fed settlements back then (that didn't also get a lot food from crops and livestock -- theirs or otherwise)?  Does the answer change much if livestock is included but not crops?

[when] crops can actually be differentiated significantly, how many crops would you start allowing?  Instead of having a dozen plants everywhere (and one for each of Good, Evil, and Savage), can we get tropical-jungle-on-silty-loam-specific fruits where it's possible for one fort to see an entirely different set of crops for its whole existence than another fort?

Sure, I'd prefer to have more.  I'm not sure what the underground distinctions are going to be though.

So will there be a way to harvest crops from these new fields? Will taking from them make the owners hostile if you are caught?

I see that the new farms look like shrubs. Will we be able to gather[p] those shrubs? Because that seems a little overkill, because it can feed 200 dwarves each year if they regrow.

You likely won't be able to found a dwarf fortress in the human villages, but yeah, they are just plants.  Once you can grab plants in adv mode, they will be available, although whatever farming changes go in will likely make them not as useful a lot of the time.

Judging by the shear amount of farmland for those villages posted in the screenshots does this imply any farming changes like making things take longer to grow?

I'll most likely be matching plants up roughly with whatever real-world analogs there are for the humans when I get to the actual farming updates.  I'm not sure about dwarven crops.

Also, just look at the Devpage, down near the bottom.  Improved Farming was #10 on the ESV, so it's part of that, and Toady put up soil moisture, soil nutrients, flower and tree farming, weeds, and pests as something to work on.

That stuff on the devpage probably has more to do with the old Improved Farming thread before I really started pushing it to become more advanced after reading upon on those things and becoming excited about it.  As far as I know, Toady hasn't read the new thread I made to reformat the idea, yet. 

[Askot Bokbondeler]

i think it could be abstracted in adventure mode, though
i don't think potty breaks should be a problem, in the current version dwarves no longer interrupt jobs to attend to their needs, and hopefully in the future dwarves will have some mechanisms to try and attend to all of their needs in one break, example: a dwarf gets thirsty and stops for a drink, and since he's taking a break, despite his hunger meter not being in the red yet, he stops by the food stockpile to grab a bite. similarly he can go for a breakfast and a morning drink after waking up, and possibly washing that kobold blood splatter from his beard and taking a leak in the communal latrine before going to work
this could lead to an interesting new mechanic: having dwarves take their breaks at similar times, modeling a day\night cycle(that would last several months) with lunch breaks at noon and sleeping time at night... dwarves could have a default schedule that you could edit for certain individuals or squads, and possibly even burrows, to address special needs, with the risk of bad thoughts for excess working hours etc...
having control of your dwarves schedules would open the doors for some interesting mechanics, like a more realistic cooking, where prepared food would cool and spoil if not eaten fast enough, so your cooks would have to cook on a daily basis for a specific number of dwarves (they'd do this automatically for every dwarves in their burrow\entire fort)
this seems material for a new suggestion, though, have you addressed this in any of your megathreads, kohaku? if not i may start a new one...

[Buttery_Mess]

You'd be able to drink the blood of your enemies and then piss on their corpse. Who doesn't want that?

[NW_Kohaku]

hopefully in the future dwarves will have some mechanisms to try and attend to all of their needs in one break, example: a dwarf gets thirsty and stops for a drink, and since he's taking a break, despite his hunger meter not being in the red yet, he stops by the food stockpile to grab a bite. similarly he can go for a breakfast and a morning drink after waking up, and possibly washing that kobold blood splatter from his beard and taking a leak in the communal latrine before going to work

Yeah, Silverionmox had a few suggestion threads to this effect where that was what Silverionmox and I went back and forth and pretty much settled on.  I have similar hopes, but Toady has not given any signal that he is considering or opposed to such things, so like so many things in the suggestion forums, *shrug* who knows?

this seems material for a new suggestion, though, have you addressed this in any of your megathreads, kohaku? if not i may start a new one...

I'm not sure I classify my own threads as "megathreads" per se, since I consider megathreads to be things like Jiri Petru's Interface thread, where multiple competing suggestions are put into the same thread as alternative options to one another.  My threads are all a single proposal that just have a lot of detail and text.

Anyway, there have been day and night schedule suggestions before, although I haven't been in support of that, particularly, since I've never been a big fan of that particular concept, and kind of like the idea of dwarves all having asynchronus schedules due to never seeing the sun, anyway. 

That said, I have talked in several threads about ways to work in different ways to either script dwarven behavior and priorities or to make dwarves more autonomous and their decision trees more complex in those regards. 

The I, Dwarfbot thread and the thread it spun off of, Class Warfare had the most on these sorts of concerns in threads that I started.

Here's a Silverionmox thread: Combined Breaks.  This was produced after another, which talked about time dialation regarding sieges, but I can't remember a good search term to find that one.

I'm having trouble finding some of the others... I must not be remembering good search terms.

There was also this thread which covered scriptable dwarf actions.

I'm annoyed by my inability to find more threads than this, however.  It's unfortunately much easier for me to remember the search terms to my own posts than other people's, since I remember the exact terms I use, but apparently can't remember the terms other people like to use for the same concepts.

You'd be able to drink the blood of your enemies and then piss on their corpse. Who doesn't want that?

Anyone familiar with the concepts of sanitation or who possesses taste buds?  Then again, we already can drink the blood, it's just peeing on the corpse that is new.  Frankly, it's the drinking the blood that creeps me out.

I'd hope there would be some way to discourage casually drinking blood or randomly desecrating bodies going into the game at some point, though.  Preferably through disease or developing a reputation for being a psychopathic freak, although having the ghost of the victim you killed be fine with just being murdered, but to then desecrate the body may get you haunted.

[Askot Bokbondeler]

eh, it seems you guys have that suggestion covered then, but

dwarves all having asynchronus schedules due to never seeing the sun, anyway.

yeah, livingi underground may justify asynchronous schedules, but humans all live outside on the sun, and apart from the sleeping schedules at night, most culture's schedules differ from each other despite striving for synchronism within, so i'd say the sun plays only a part and isn't the whole reason.

[forsaken1111]

but humans all live outside on the sun

That seems uncomfortable.

[Askot Bokbondeler]

yeah, they're a strange kind

[Nikov]

I don't see the need nor fun in adventurer mode bathroom breaks. I can see dwarves needing to swing by the shrub or latrine once every few drinks or meals, and as always, support init.txt or worldgen disabling. I've already spilled the details in the OP, but it bears some repetition after nigh a year.