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[Azrael]

Irrigation is, for the brand new player with no experience, a pain. Currently the options are either to set up a complex system with floodgates, or to have a bucket brigade with a pond zone. What I'd suggest is that as an alternative to the pond zone, simply add an option to the farm's menu to tell dwarves to muddy it directly with buckets of water. This would be a lot less time consuming and a lot easier to understand for new players, if a bit less Fun.

[Lord Darkstar]

This is an excellent suggestion.

[NW_Kohaku]

That makes sense...

Actually, my "lazy dwarf's fix" for irrigation was just to build a manual pump, an irrigation ditch, and only pump up enough water for a 1 tile deep flood, no floodgates required.

It's kind of silly to have to use a ledge and a "pond" command to irrigate a farm when you could just as easily just dump those buckets straight on the ground you want wet.  Being forced to build a ledge to dump water down on your fields is one of those silly and overly obtuse workarounds for what really is just a lack of a feature in the interface that really should be there, which is quite a bit of what the learning curve is about in DF.  (Such as, say, dwarves standing in odd places when they do construction.)

[Kilo24]

Good idea.  It still wouldn't be better than a good irrigation system, since it would require dwarf time, but it would stop newbies from being forced to learn the water system before being able to feed their fortress.

It still could be a problem to embark without buckets though, so an embark warning should probably be put up for embarking without any.

[smjjames]

Or the whole bug issue with farms could just be fixed, you know....

[Lord Darkstar]

Even if farms "get fixed" for underground soil types, farms are just going to get more complicated in the future. That's something we can count on. And that could require us to rewet our farmland from time to time (due to mud "naturally" drying if it doesn't have a water source--- something no one would be surprised if Toady did, if you look at what other detailed simming he's added to DF).

Designating dwarves to directly wet a farm patch to make it muddy would be a very good feature to add.

[Footkerchief]

This is an excellent suggestion.

One that was posted twice in April:

http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=54388.0
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=53875.0

[FuzzyDoom]

Irrigation is, for the brand new player with no experience, a pain. Currently the options are either to set up a complex system with floodgates, or to have a bucket brigade with a pond zone. What I'd suggest is that as an alternative to the pond zone, simply add an option to the farm's menu to tell dwarves to muddy it directly with buckets of water. This would be a lot less time consuming and a lot easier to understand for new players, if a bit less Fun.

Not really. How is it a pain to mine out a space next to a murky pool, and then remove a tile or two to allow the pool to spill into the soon-to-be farm. There is NOTHING wrong with farming from my point-of-view. Then again, this type of farming is the only type I've ever known.

[HebaruSan]

Irrigation is, for the brand new player with no experience, a pain. Currently the options are either to set up a complex system with floodgates, or to have a bucket brigade with a pond zone. What I'd suggest is that as an alternative to the pond zone, simply add an option to the farm's menu to tell dwarves to muddy it directly with buckets of water. This would be a lot less time consuming and a lot easier to understand for new players, if a bit less Fun.

Not really. How is it a pain to mine out a space next to a murky pool, and then remove a tile or two to allow the pool to spill into the soon-to-be farm.

I can't speak for Azrael, but the "pain" may have something to do with "brand new player with no experience". Sure, it's trivial to breach a pool's wall or set up a pond for farming, if you know how water or pond zones work and you know you need to do it. But if you don't, the game gives virtually no cues as to the what, why, or how.

Why shouldn't a bucket brigade be integrated into the construction of every farm plot automatically? Player designates a farm plot, then dwarves automatically muddy it, plow it, and start planting. From a resource-management challenge perspective, nothing is changed; you still need a bucket and a water source and a live dwarf, and the outcome is the same. The only difference would be the elimination of the arbitrary obscurity of the action. What is the benefit of the current arrangement by comparison?

[Warlord255]

What is the benefit of the current arrangement by comparison?

Theoretically, the Fun™ of engineering irrigation systems. However, this is trivialized by the fact that you only ever have to do it once.

If, as mentioned above, irrigation could be done manually, but needed repeat watering, then mechanical irrigation would be remain a beneficial project, while day-one-month-one farming wouldn't be unnecessarily convoluted.

[culwin]

This makes sense.
But I think the reasoning behind requiring mud (if it isn't a bug) is to make it more "challenging".
Perhaps there should be "irrigation" zones that require 1 water dumped on them every X days (and would make sure any haulers kept it irrigated if possible), or the mud turns back to soil.
That would keep the challenge of maintaining farms, and still keep some realism.

[Azrael]

What is the benefit of the current arrangement by comparison?

Theoretically, the Fun™ of engineering irrigation systems. However, this is trivialized by the fact that you only ever have to do it once.

If, as mentioned above, irrigation could be done manually, but needed repeat watering, then mechanical irrigation would be remain a beneficial project, while day-one-month-one farming wouldn't be unnecessarily convoluted.

I can't see any extra perceived Fun™ to the current system, as it's possible to just muddy them from a pond zone a level up. Which is, as has been mentioned, essentially a workaround for this feature not existing.

[Mir]

The Fun comes in when you have different plants requiring different amounts of water... and all plants needing periodic re-watering, etc. Then, while a bucket brigade will work to get things going, it will conceivably require far too much work to be left that way for large farming operations.

You get fun from the design process, and Fun from the failed design flooding your fortress!

If you don't get fun from the design process... well... that's unfortunate. It's my favorite part!

I recently designed an irrigation system that involves all the water cascading down the center of my central stairwell as a waterfall, and then irrigating the farms on the lower levels. It also eventually flows out to fill the moat around my entrance. It needs some tweaking (i.e. I need to restart the fortress probably), but it's pretty awesome.

[Azrael]

In that case the Fun comes in from changes to the farming system, and added complexity. Being able to directly bucket brigade instead of having a pond level on the layer above and bucketing that doesn't subtract any Fun whatsoever.

[Sfon]

Are you serious!?
You want them to drop cold water all over themselves while standing in mud!? Needing to drop it from a level above is in no way unrealistic, sir

But really, the requirement for bucketing is rather silly. Sometimes direct bucket use would be nice. Water sources are not always convenient. Could be used for other things, too, like extinguishing something/someone.

Or the whole bug issue with farms could just be fixed, you know....

I thought it was a new feature. Seen it mentioned as a bug before, but didn't find anything more enlightening than "Farms require mud now, please fix kthx".