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[NW_Kohaku]

What I'm assuming is that they are independent variables, not mutually exclusive. That is to say, it is possible to have 1% in one variable and 99% in another variable, and furthermore that there isn't a dependency that says if one measurement is at 50% another will never be at 5%. The assertion that "Chances are if some of the variables are right, then others will be too" has only now been stated. If there are rules of dependency, they will need considerably more clarity before they can be programmed and analysed.

You still seem to be assuming that there should be plants that grow with absolutely no water, however, which shouldn't be the case.  The point isn't to make a system where plants grow in every condition, the point is to make a system where plants have different required amounts of work to reset the conditions back to an initial growing point. 

You don't grow a new plant to add water to the soil, you just water the soil to add water to the soil.  Barring some freaky magic plant, all plants drain water from the soil and require soil moisture to be within some acceptable range of values to grow properly.

The NPK values should be relatively close to one another, since anything that adds to one generally has an effect on the other, although they could generally be considered "independent" of one another.

Pollution variables are all "bad stuff", and things that you want to keep low, just as you generally want to keep NPK and water high.

Crop rotation works to make some variables, like Nitrogen, get rebuilt or at least less thoroughly used while fertilizers are added to the soil. 

Potassium shouldn't be added to the soil through any means besides fertilizers.

The difference between plants is in how much of what nutrients they use, what tolerances they have for lacks of or abundances of certain variables, but not so that plants can knock the soil potassium content around like a ping pong ball fully up and down the scale with alternating plantings.

Anyway, the section I just posted addresses much of this, and the next section I tackle should have the rest of the detailed information on this, so it should hopefully all be made crystal clear by tommorow or the day after at the latest.

[NW_Kohaku]

Advanced NPK, Crop Rotation, and Polycultures

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

In the previous NPK section, I talked in general terms about how this system of variables would work to give a framework for thinking about the system before going on to make sections regarding sets of variables in specifics.  Now, this section is about bringing these ideas together to make the more detailed mechanics of the system work.

I'll just do a grand list of the variables now, although most don't need any more introduction than I have already given them.

• Soil Nutrients: These are generally the "good" things, which you want plenty of, although some plants can overdose on water or nutrients like nitrogen.
• Energy Source: This means "sunlight" for aboveground crops, but for magic crops, it means how much access it has to a magic field. (Obviously not from the "soil", and not a variable recorded "as part of the soil", but a necessary thing to check.)
• Air quality: If we are working with air quality, some "crops" may need air of proper quality to grow properly. (Also not a soil variable, but required for checking.)
• Water: See the Water Management section
• Nitrogen: For this and the next four, see the previous NPK sections and the Fertilizer sections
• Phosphorous
• Potassium
• Biomass
• Soil Consistency: These are the things where plants are genuinely divided, some liking different soil types than others.
• Soil pH: A factor of your starting soil, and the amount of decomposition that occurs.  Decomposition makes soil acidic, so forests have acidic soils, while deserts tend to have basic soils.  Plants generally segregate themselves by how acidic the soil they can stand
• CEC-D: A factor mainly of what type of soil you are farming upon, CEC-D is a combination of Cation Exchange Capacity and Drainage into a single stat.  Low CEC-D represents very high drainage values in the soil, and is found in sandy soils, while clays or peat will have very low drainage and high CEC, and as such, will have a high CEC-D value.  Some plants demand more drainage than others.  CEC-D is impacted by Humus, as Humus has relatively low drainage and the highest CEC values, so the more humus that develops, the higher CEC-D functionally becomes, even if the CEC-D variable itself is unchanging.  This functional CEC-D determines the maximum amount of water and potassium that the soil can carry before it is spilled out of the soil.  Note that in conjunction with the soil erosion factors discussed in the Water Management section, this means sandy soil is in more danger of eroding.
• Humus Depth: A factor of how much the soil has been built up.  This should gradually rise, barring unusual actions or soil erosion, and this should also impact on the functional CEC-D rating.  Whenever "functional CEC-D" is checked, a fraction of humus depth can be added to the hard CEC-D rating (like 1/5th) to find the functional CEC-D rating.  Humus depth of certain minimum amounts are required for different plants, although some shallow humus tolerant plants may have much more trouble with weeds with deeper humus.
• Crowding: A measure of how much the roots and leaves of other plants already impact the soil.  May not be a soil variable recorded in the soil itself.
• Temperature: Again, obviously not a "soil" variable, and not recorded in the soil itself, but plants are most heavily divided on how much cold or heat they tolerate.  This should be broad enough that players will know just by what temperature reading there is on the embark what sort of plants they can expect to plant.
• Soil Pollution: Pollution is generally "bad stuff", and plants usually want as little of it as possible.  To make coding of this a little easier, however, it might make sense to make this an "inverse number", so that high values mean little pollution, and that way it is easier to make the color-coded indicators in the Interface section will say that "red" means "too much pollution" and not "too little pollution".
• Salinity: See the Water Management section
• Biological Toxins: See Pollutants section
• Heavy Metal Toxins: See Pollutants section
• Pests: Again, not a soil variable, but here for completeness

Now then, the purpose of having all these different variables is to not only give a chance to simulate a very wide variety of situations which require a wide variety of solutions, but also to give you a reason to use crop rotations and other polyculture methods to increase the overall productivity of your farms.

Monocultures are tracts of land that are dedicated to growing only a single crop.  Monocultures are the "classic" way of thinking about how a farm works, as it means that they are dedicated solely to producing just one major cash crop, and then returning the soil to a state where that single cash crop can be produced again by applying fertilizer and fallowing the field.  These are preferred for their simplicity and ability to produce just one plant as much as possible.

In times when the major nutrients are depleted, fertilizers need to be added to the soil to reclaim it, although this adds biomass and biological toxins to the soil, depending on how aggressively you fertilize.  In times when there are large amounts of biomass and biological toxins on your soil, you need to spend time with decomposers on your soil to return the soil to a state tolerable to most plants.  This means cycles of productivity and a reclamation state (whether in a fallow state, or using a crop that will renew the soil). 

Monocultures are what most players will probably want to try first for as long as they can get away with it - just produce one crop as best they can.  This isn't particularly land or space or fertilizer efficient, but it should be enough to work for just food production, for reasonably small fortresses.  Between trade and some basic farming, small forts that are mostly military-based should be able to get by, so long as they have the trade goods to buy their constant food needs.

Polyculutres are more advanced methods of farming that involve growing multiple types of crops on the same farm plot.  This can be through crop rotations, where plants are grown in cycles, or through companion planting, where different plants are planted at the same time right next to each other. 

Crop rotations, scheduled through the Interface to repeat on a basis of once every one to five years, allow you to get your fields into a state of readiness to grow major cash crops, then spend time rebuilding the nutrients those cash crops deplete from the soil by fallowing the fields, applying fertilizer, giving the fertilizer time to be worked into the soil by decomposers, if necessary and working with alternating crops in a cycle.  Heavy feeding crops that deplete much of the soil are followed by light feeders that don't need as many nutrients, and then nitrogen fixation plants that can tolerate some of the heavy fertilizers can work the soil back up to being ready for the heavy feeders again.  This sort of farming is the traditional method of farming before heavy reliance upon fertilizers made plantation farming more attractive, and is still seeing considerable use today.  Most players who aren't afraid of the farming system will probably want to move to at least this method of farming, provided they have spent enough time to try to play with the systems, and learn how to control what they want to happen.

Companion planting is a more advanced method of farming.  Companion planting requires picking several plants that are capable of growing well with one another without competing for space or light, and growing them in the same plot.  Companion planting means that one plant's strengths can cover for another plant's weaknesses.  A plant that is vulnerable to a particular pest can be planted in the same field as a plant that repels those same pests, or that attracts the natural predator of the pests.  If certain plants crowd one another out, you can use plants that are less crowding to maximize the amount of land you are cultivating.  If some plants are heavy feeders, you can grow them right alongside the nitrogen fixators that replenish the soil for them, saving a step in the crop rotations.  Decomposer fungi can be grown right alongside the normal crops so as to keep the biological toxicity levels down if you add some of the more biologically toxic compost.  This sort of advanced farming method is what a good number of the players should be able to graduate to when they have experience with how the plants they are working with can be managed, spending less time in overt crop rotation cycles and more time letting a good portion of the field produce food year-round while other portions of the same field are spent keeping the soil conditions in good shape for the food producing plants.  This is much more difficult for players to plan for, however, as it means that they need to satisfy the growing conditions of multiple types of plants all at the same time, meaning that only a finite number of plants even can grow in conjunction with one another, even if they don't crowd or compete with one another. 

Many companion plantings involve a single heavy-feeding primary crop with other crops that help the primary crop grow or maximize yield of a given field.  Nitrogen fixators alongside nitrogen-hungry crops being an obvious example.  Ground covers that act as type of mulch that keeps in soil moisture as well as keeps out weeds and stops soil erosion are another common companion crop.  Having some form of tree or thick-stalked plant serve as both a crop in their own right as well as the "post" for crops that grow on vines are another.

For classic examples of companion crops, Native Americans planted the "Three Sisters", corn, beans, and squash, where corn was planted first as a primary crop, then beans were planted to serve as nitrogen fixators that grew around the roots of the corn.  Finally, once the other two were established, squash was planted, which served as ground cover, preventing any weeds from encroaching on the fields.

Rice paddies, meanwhile, would often use plants like azolla or other water lily-like plants to be both nitrogen fixator and ground cover at the same time.

Forest garden permacultures are the most advanced method of farming.  This is the "elven farming" method I mentioned earlier.  Forest gardens would practically become "do nothing agriculture", because the polyculture is balanced so well that the plants are left to care for themselves.  This requires having a very specific and balanced set of trees, shrubs, grasses, and pests in perfect balance to be sustainable without the need for direct intervention except the need to regulate water or fertilizer inputs to match the food that you take out of the system.  It's basically like setting up a biodome.  This should be extremely rare, and only possible under extremely strict conditions, and as such, would be something like the dwarfputers, where only a few people even try to understand the system thoroughly enough to actually accomplish this sort of feat.  It mostly exists as the extreme end of designing a complex system so as to be as efficient as possible.


Thank Heph for this video, it really made my brain explode when I saw it: http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/willie_smits_restores_a_rainforest.html

That's polyculture in action, turning a barren wasteland into a rainforest.  It's something I doubt very many players would master, but that's the entire point of putting it in: To give players something to build up to.  You don't need to do that, but if you do, you've created something absolutely amazing.  The stuff in that video doesn't take modern technology to do, the set of pineapples and palms and ginger and other ground vegetation as a system to replenish the soil was used by Native Americans of the Caribbean before Europeans ever "discovered" the people living there. 

I recently talked to one of my professors about Dwarf Fortress, talking about how the geology was so realistic that I actually developed an interest in, and learned a great deal about geology just because I played this game.  She was impressed and said that she never really considered games as a potential teaching tool before (obviously not one to have spent much time on them before), and this is one of those things that I think can really make Dwarf Fortress more than a game.  It can become a simulated world that teaches us more about the real world if we just make the simulation accurate enough.

[NW_Kohaku]

OK, I had nothing really better to do with my night, so I went ahead and wrote another section, which brings me much closer to the conclusion.  This one is the sort of "closing argument" it feels like, since it's tying together so much.

I still need to go back and change it, now, though, since now that I think about it, I need to talk about the specific mechanics of the variable size again.

Speaking of going back and changing stuff, I went and wrote in a couple more sections on the Plant Growth section that I forgot to mention, and felt that was the best place to stuff it.

I only have a couple more sections to write, really.  One is the xenobiology section, which I'm still not entirely sure how I want to handle it, so it's going to be the last major hump to clear, but after that, it's just the nutrition section, and that's the home stretch.  I'm almost done with this monster.     After that, it's just trying to make up my mind on the Interface section.

[Ethicalfive]

Ok, so this thread is a huge monster, I can't possibly read through it all without devoting a few hours! (did a quick search though to make sure I dont re-post anothers suggestion)

Mushrooms need reworking! I forgive toady for not understanding the nature of fungi, much like most people dont understand the nature of dwarf fortress.

They come as primary decomposers(Wood,straw) and secondary decomposers(manure,compost) or even as mycorizal(synergistic with plant roots). Right now you chuck some plump helmet spawn in barren earth and they grow. I'd love to see wood or straw dragged to mushroom beds for primary decomposers, then secondary decomposers can be planted on the bed, then a plant crop could be planted on the rich mushroom compost. Something like that.

I think it's ignorant and simple minded to treat fungi and plants as the same thing, when infact, fungi have more in common with us than they do plants(fact) I'd love to see better mushroom support implemented at some point and would add interest to the fort, plus with less uses for wood now, would be an interesting application IMO.

[NW_Kohaku]

Ok, so this thread is a huge monster, I can't possibly read through it all without devoting a few hours! (did a quick search though to make sure I dont re-post anothers suggestion)

Well, it's certainly become a monster, I can't deny.  (I was taken by a secretive mood, and planepacked far too many ideas into a single thread.)  It's almost "complete" by the definition that I've written out most of the arguments I want to make and can form a complete system, but I still need to go back and rewrite a lot of this.

Anyway, I hope that I can create something that isn't too overwhelming for the players, while at the same time producing that sort of "living world" feeling with a massive backstory to it that Toady seems to be working towards with a comprehensive ecology system.  Something that makes a real simulated fantasy world instead of a set of tools for the player to interact with to produce more materials.

To that end, mushrooms become different from plants.  I think the reason why mushrooms are just plants that grow when you throw "mushroom seeds" at mud was because early on, the game was nothing more than a game where every aspect of the game was designed from the standpoint of what the player will get from it.  Dwarf Fortress has since moved on to making the most realistic simulation of a world it possibly can, even when it's outside the player's control what actually happens in that world. 

I think this thread represents the best way to move farming and the ecosystem from a simple tool that the player uses to extract resources up to a living system the player just tries to interact with in a limited way.  (And that means that mushrooms are more mushroomy.)

[Andeerz]

I think this thread represents the best way to move farming and the ecosystem from a simple tool that the player uses to extract resources up to a living system the player just tries to interact with in a limited way.  (And that means that mushrooms are more mushroomy.)

I agree.  :3

...but I still wanna see something about what I suggested in my last post in this thread... >.>  ...eventually... or maybe I could gather the info for you and present my findings to you and see what you think!

[NW_Kohaku]

I agree.  :3

...but I still wanna see something about what I suggested in my last post in this thread... >.>  ...eventually... or maybe I could gather the info for you and present my findings to you and see what you think!

I'm sorry if I gave the impression I blew you off, because I haven't. 

I've kicked around the idea of procedural crop domestication before, although it hasn't gotten the best of responses.  The thing about unnatural selection is that it takes some sort of compensatory drawbacks in the forms of things like vunlerability to pests and disease. 

I want to get the Xenosynthesis and Nutrition sections down plus patch up Interface, then I can declare the "rough draft" done, and I can try getting some rough formulas for some procedural generation going. 

"Guns, Germs, and Steel" is unfortunately one of the Jared Diamond books I haven't read.  I'll try to get to it sometime over the weekend.

[G-Flex]

Anyway, I hope that I can create something that isn't too overwhelming for the players, while at the same time producing that sort of "living world" feeling with a massive backstory to it that Toady seems to be working towards with a comprehensive ecology system.  Something that makes a real simulated fantasy world instead of a set of tools for the player to interact with to produce more materials.

I understand what you're doing here, but don't you think you're coming off more as if you're trying to design game systems yourself rather than give input?

[NW_Kohaku]

I understand what you're doing here, but don't you think you're coming off more as if you're trying to design game systems yourself rather than give input?

Not really, this is Toady's magnum opus of a game, after all.  He's the ultimate gatekeeper of what goes in or out of it (barring mods or hacks).

Everyone has an idea of what they want Dwarf Fortress can be or should be, and aren't afraid to express that quite emphatically.  Steampunk versus magical and beardless versus bearded and the like rage.  Some people have put out very detailed plans for how things like pathfinding can be performed.  You've done quite a bit of work on how combat should be handled.

All I've done here is try to make my best guess at what Toady wants to do with his game, and try to match the sorts of things I find exciting and compelling in a gameworld to his mode of telling the story of his gameworld. 

Toady has said things like how he doesn't know how to start up a cave-in system because he isn't sure how to convey information to the player on how much stress any given load-bearing wall is under.  If someone decides to try to crack that particular nut, and comes up with a proposed system for how to handle and display the stress and load of walls and supports, they'll be suggesting a way for Toady to code something into the game, but that doesn't mean it's any less a suggestion.

After that, all I can do is hope that I've made a compelling enough argument that Toady will concede that at least some of it is a good idea, and try to put it in. 

If I can come up with practical applications for every little feature I want in, I think I have a better shot of convincing Toady to put those features in.

If I can come up with a rough sketch of how to do it, I think I have a better shot of convincing Toady that it isn't "just too complicated" to work on. 

I'm doing what I can to create a proposal that has something to cater to all the demographics of DF players, and presents something that will appeal to Toady in the best way I know how.  Barring any direct feedback, that means I have to make some gross assumptions, but it's the best that I can manage, and I think it's better to try to take those risks than just sit quietly in the dark and do nothing.


EDIT:
One of the things that really set me off on this path was this quote:

We haven't made any final decisions.  I think a NPK+pH model does give you something back, because you'd get some really great varied local landscapes and it would take care of crop rotation, composting, naturally poor soil, or whatever else, but it introduces a farming interface problem to dwarf mode in terms of conveying the information in wholesome terms and allowing you to solve problems that come up.

I've tried to get more information from Toady on what he means or what he wants to do, but it generally winds up causing fights in the Future of the Fortress thread when I try, and it's just hard to get any sort of clear statements on his intent, but...

Here, he's talking about how he wants varied plants, composting, naturally poor soil, but that he is having trouble coming up with ways to let the player interact with such a situation. 

This is why I've tried to come up with a plan for entailing everything that people could want in an ecological simulation, and then tried to come up with a way of actually having mechanics that could be explained to the player - the thing Toady was saying he was having trouble coming up with a good way of doing. 

[G-Flex]

Yeah, I get what you mean and I probably acted a little reactionary there. I just find that the best way to give suggestions is to identify game problems/goals, what concerns are there, what would be necessary to fix (or reach) them, and then perhaps some examples... whereas some people (not necessarily you I'm talking about here) jump straight to "here's my giant-ass overwrought suggestion for a magic system" -- which we've all seen before -- before really considering that such information has a very low signal-to-noise ratio when more abstract feedback (in this case, "what this game needs to get out of a magic system and what design concerns need to be dealt with and how") is necessary before even embarking on more specific suggestions.

Again, I'm not complaining about you here, probably just misdirecting frustrations a little bit.

[NW_Kohaku]

Well, the stuff in the first post represents the abstract feedback and framework I put on this post... and honestly, I worried that I spent too much time talking about abstracts and not enough going into the things like Interface.

It was really the Interface section I consider the most important, since after all the "here's why we need to do something" and "here's what could be done", it's the Interface that Toady specifically flagged as the thing that most troubled him.

The problem is that I really need to throw down the whole system before I can really talk about how to interact with that system meaningfully.  I got a little antsy and tried to write the Interface section a little early, just so that it was there.

Not having a fully-written-out idea that I can reference and go down the checklist for, it made writing the Interface section a bit difficult, so I want to finish off the rest of the things that are going to be entailed in the proposal so that I can wrap all of that into a single big proposed Interface idea.

Toady said he's not sure he'll ever get around to realistic cave-ins because he's not sure of how to display the information to the player.  He's said he wants to do the sorts of farming things I find really exciting, but that he's not sure he knows how to display that information to the player.  Well, nothing succeeds like success, right? If I can make a way to show how to display that information to the player, then it proves it's possible.  If he doesn't want to take my exact suggestion, so be it, but it at least shows it can be done, and hopefully that makes it much more likely he'll throw in all those neat complex simulation things that make me giddy to imagine.

The recent ceramics stuff is a good example - I was proposing porcelain about a year ago, and while what we actually got wasn't really what I asked for, it's certainly close enough that I can just mod over what I really want.  That's certainly good enough for me. 

[NW_Kohaku]

Xenosynthesis

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

So... Magic.  A hot topic in the forums, to say the least, but I did a spin-off thread on the subject, and managed to get some generally positive results from most anyone who read the topic.

On the surface, plants use sunlight to power their ecosystems through the use of photosynthesis.  Underground, plants would have to take advantage of a different energy source to power their biologies.  The cavern ecosystem simply doesn't run on just the scraps of the surface, and it's not really based on chemosynthesis, either.  We have floating guts, hungry heads, and amethyst men living in an environment with underground trees whose wood is permanently at the freezing point of water, even years after they have been cut down.  We have a clearly magical ecosystem, and that means that these xenomorphic plant and animal systems need a xenosynthetic energy source. 

This means, as an ecosystem, magic is the "sunlight" that powers the plants underground.  This means bringing the sphere system into the game as a source of magic power.  As the game currently has "good" and "evil" and "savage" biomes, it should be possible to have something like a half-dozen to a dozen or more types of different magic "flavors" that can power the ecosystems of underground, as well as the way that evil biomes already exist aboveground.  This means that in the cavern systems, there would be some magical fields that might apply to only one or two levels of the caverns per embark tile.  The surface might have evil alignment in the northern mountains, and savage alignment in the southern jungle, while the first cavern might have a "dreams" sphere alignment in the north and a lack of any magical influence in the south, the second cavern might have "dreams" up north again, while the south has "duty" as a sphere.  In the third caverns, "darkness" and "blight" might have hold.  (And the HFS has a sphere all its own, potentially with some HFS "plantlife" made of living glass tendrils that slice at passerby.)  Each of these spheres has their own associated life forms that live in their niches, making the strange yet colorful underground worlds actually vary from place to place like the surface biomes do already.

Mushrooms still exist, but they are a separate type of "crop" that needs biomass and water.  They need a constant supply of "dead stuff" to feed them, and they should also possibly be capable of breaking down the "underground crop" distinction.  Mundane mushrooms can grow above or underground.  Magical mushrooms (which may have more in common with plants and just look like mushrooms) would simply need to grow near the magic fields that power them, and could grow above or underground.  In a chunk of the underground with absolutely no magic, only mushrooms will be capable of growing.  If what you want is just mushrooms, that's certainly a good thing - you have nothing to fear from crowding weeds or magical pests in a magic-dead area with no sunlight, so your fungi can grow in utter peace.  It does, however, mean that you will need to constantly supply the mushrooms with new biomass to feed upon.

Writing this now, in the wake of 31.19, however, there is a big opportunity for changing the way that plants and animals in general work.  Metals have already been made rare, but plants are always available in the same varieties (excepting only the sphere-aligned ones, and even then, you can trade for those sometimes,) and as such, you can pretty much always have full access to infinite supplies of prepared food to sell and the textiles industry, plus a pretty good chance of either glass or ceramics.  Stone materials are, of course, always available in functionally infinite quantities anywhere. 

Metals and other ores and minerals could be potentially tied to different magical effects.  Plenty of iron and flux is a great boon, so maybe the magical fields in areas that are so beneficial are much less beneficial in other areas.  You can harvest much more food  in magical fields that only occur when you don't have iron and flux in massive quantities.  In many fairy tails, cold iron (wrought iron) is a weakness of magical creatures and magic in general.  Maybe pig tails or other textile industry products depend on magic fields that are averse to some sort of magical field disruption caused by iron.  That way, the abundance of one material creates the absence of another. 

This obviously applies over to other underground xenosynthetic plants that require different magic fields as their energy sources.  A magma sphere might be great for alchemical ingredient plants like "fire grass" that can be used to make flammable liquids or explosives or heat sources, but are unsuitable for farming many other types of underground crops.  Underground trees and underground textiles might require different or even opposing magic types, making players have to either choose between the two, or manage conflicting magic zones.  The more different kinds of economically viable magic plants there are (and alchemy may be the best way to simulate this), then the more conflict you can create between player desires for one resource over another.

Having access to the magic fields for these plants is like having access to sunlight for mundane surface plants.  You can't just import a sunberry and start planting them wherever, they need their magic to grow. 

There is a limited amount of this magic in the area for them to absorb.  Like photosynthetic plants, xenosynthetic plants might have "leaves" of one form or another that tries to grow to the best spots to absorb as much magic as possible, and in the face of competition, may grow weed-like tendencies to try to "shade out" their competition by growing their leaves in the way of the rival xenosynthetic plants by absorbing all the magical flows for themselves, starving the rivals.  This means that the same crowding rules for sunlight might be applied to crowding for magic, as well.  (Of course, magic plants might just literally up and do battle with one another, suddenly growing flaming vines to smite their planty foes.)

Another idea for creating a "magical climate" might be to make some magic fields fluctuate by season, rather than being a permanent static feature of the caverns area.  Currently, sweet pods are a seasonal crop underground, in spite of the caves having no real season.  Something to make the caverns more dynamic and changing could be a waxing and waning of magic power, causing certain creatures from competing magical spheres to wax and wane in dominance of the area with the coming and going of seasons.

Similar to some of the other changes that one can make gradually to biomes on the surface in general, however, I've recently started taking to the idea that players can manipulate the sphere magic biomes, such as what creates the zombies in the evil biomes,  through some player actions.  The start of this idea being here, and being developed in this later thread before I really tried to put forward the Xenosynthesis thread.  This would mean that, while dwarves have little actual access to magic (barring something like capturing zombies or unicorns and dumping them on invaders) they can have some means of controlling the magical climate of their area the way that they have some control over the type of biome they are farming in through soil cultivation or soil erosion. 

Rather than having a simple magic field that is unchanging like the way that the evil of a region is unchanging now, or even the way that rainfall is unchanging in a region is unchanging, dwarves could perform some actions that could raise or lower the different magical sphere factors in their environments. 

This means the presence of unburied/unmemorialized dead can raise the "death" sphere of the place, causing more haunting, and also changing the environment to have death-sphere-related flora and fauna, as well.  Zombies could be powered by a strong death sphere influence, as could corpse berries or the like.

While it is possible for artifacts to cause a general change in the magic of the area around them, it is somewhat problematic to have actual physical objects create magical effects, since you could just move them some place when you want a magical field to be applied, and then try to find some way to just move that artifact (or turn off its effect) in order to have very direct control over magic. 

Of course, having a "source of magic" like a crystal glass statue that you can't move, but can shatter if you so choose could be a fairly viable strategy.  In the caverns, a strange ruin built around a crystal glass statue could be discovered, and around it, magical plants of great value and rarity are grown, but so too are dangers to your fort.  You can try to exploit this ruin's wealth, or shatter that statue and kill the magic, just to be safe.  Who knows if the powers of the statue will change if you drink too deep of the powers of this unknown magical artifact, and why did the previous culture fall into ruins, anyway?  Well, obviously, it's risky, but just taking a LITTLE won't hurt, right?  Wow, that worked out fine!  How about a little more, then...

Other sources of magic might be an open portal to another world or dimension.  This may not necessarily be a crossable portal (from this side), but it would mean that players would have little they could do about the portal, except maybe try to close it, if that were possible, by going through it and closing it from the other side.  The HFS could be a portal, itself, if it is not literally meant to be directly below the magma sea.

Some features like underground rivers or lakes might be a type of portal, where the water comes from another watery dimension, and so do the snakemen and giant toads and such.  If the watery magic rises in power, the cavern lakes can start flooding and more creatures can spawn out of those lakes, although some of the benefits of cavern water (like all the plants that grow there and resources you can gain from them) go up as the risks of cavern floods go up. 

The flora and fauna of the region absorb the magic, but it is also possible to have some of the flora and fauna also generate some of the magical energy in the area.  Something like a corpse bloom might grow when there is plenty of death in the area, and if left alone, may gradually add some death magic into the area, which might be consumed (dropping the area magic power) by other creatures, like zombies.  Zombies would then need to have access to that death magic, and not be able to leave the area of their death magic without gradually growing "hungry" for that death magic, and the zombie will fall apart if they do not have death magic to sustain them.  Hence, they can only make some temporary forays into the areas not covered by the death magic.  Of course, if they can find and murder a living creature, and desecrate its corpse in a way that adds death magic to the area, they can sustain themselves on the death magic they have released, and maybe spread their death sphere so that more corpse blooms grow in the area.

Conversely, some sort of Memento Morii Morninglory might be planted that could still the dead, and drop the area death magic, so that if you were being attacked by zombies, then, like with pests, you could plant something that actively drained the death magic from the area, depriving the zombies from the death magic they need to "survive" upon.  That might even work to repel zombies and such entirely, since they may have an instinctive aversion to even trying to go into areas that have those flowers that weaken their ability to sustain themselves (although they will pursue a living being they see run into that area, they won't go exploring that area on their own).

A pest might even have magical properties.  A ghast fly swarm might be attracted to corpses just lying around a battlefield unburied or otherwise removed from the open air.  The ghast flies would then generate death magic that could raise some of those dead goblin soldiers on your doorstep to become goblin zombies. Only by ensuring that you have the means to repel some ghast flies can you ensure that death doesn't visit your doorstep with return visitors.  Releasing spiders to catch and kill the flies would stop them from being able to raise the death magic levels enough to raise zombies, as would simply burying the goblin invaders in a shallow mass grave.

The other route that this magic can go down is marrying spheres to divine magic.

Potentially, if sphere magic is crossed over with divine magic, so that each sphere represents a god or force, such as the elves' forest deity, there could be two factors of each magic sphere - the amount of power and influence that deity or sphere's force has in the area, and also how much they favor your fortress generally.  Hence, a forest spirit could be very weak and it wouldn't matter how happy or angry it was with your fortress, since it couldn't do anything to you, anyway.  A powerful forest spirit, however, may demand much of your fortress lest you lose its favor, and the powerful force of nature or deity will find ways to seek its vengeance upon your fort. 

Making such a magical force an irrational, emotional being completely immune to logic and sympathy could help make magic an even more dangerous toy to play with.  The goddess of love doesn't care a thing about how well the relationships work out, she just wants as many people falling in love with one another as possible.  Love at first sight is all that matters.  How dare you talk back about a goblin and a dwarf never being meant to be?! HOW COULD YOU BETRAY ME LIKE THAT?!  WELL, MAYBE THIS GIANT SWARM OF KILLER FLUFFY TEDDYBEARS AND LIVING RED ROSE STRANGLERS AREN'T MEANT TO BE TEARING OUT YOUR EYEBALLS, EITHER!

Hence, the dwarven god of Justice demands someone be hammered for committing the crime of not fulfilling a mandate, no matter the fact that it's not really anyone's fault that there wasn't any way for the fortress to make or trade for rose gold.  You have to see justice impassively carried out no matter how irrational it might be.

This would also mean that religious services and festivals and the like could be used as sources of (or ways to drain) magical power for the area.  A religious festival praying for a better harvest may actually generate the magical power needed to make one possible.


In the light of Xenosynthesis and magical underground flowers, creatures similar to bees underground make perfect sense, as many flowers in underground fields would have no means of pollenating other flowers, especially since the wind is much less dynamic in a cave.  Attracting a pollenating insect like a bee with nectar so that they could help the plant breed would make perfect evolutionary sense as a logical extrapolation starting from the position of an arbitrarily magical underground flower. 

In fact, such plants might just need a bee-like creature to pollenate them.  This "beneficial pest" might be required to be available in the soil or artificially hived and set in the area of the crops, lest the harvest be stunted for lack of pollenation.  (Possibly involving a multiplier of crops harvested based upon the number of pollenating insects, up to a logical maximum, so that you could normally get only a small number of crops from a harvest, but get up to 5 times as much depending on having a sufficient number of nearby pollenating insects.)

[NW_Kohaku]

I'm not sure I did everything I really wanted to do in this last one, although I covered all the major topics, at least.  It's obviously more vague because I haven't been able to really hammer out all the details on this one like I have the other things, and get a very specific idea of how these things can work.

This is partially because I'm not really sure what sort of spheres we will be working with, though, ultimately.

Anyway, there's only a little more to go in this thread before I think I can really say I have the rough draft done.  Nutrition modelling and then the Interface meddling. 

Yeah, I get what you mean and I probably acted a little reactionary there. I just find that the best way to give suggestions is to identify game problems/goals, what concerns are there, what would be necessary to fix (or reach) them, and then perhaps some examples... whereas some people (not necessarily you I'm talking about here) jump straight to "here's my giant-ass overwrought suggestion for a magic system" -- which we've all seen before -- before really considering that such information has a very low signal-to-noise ratio when more abstract feedback (in this case, "what this game needs to get out of a magic system and what design concerns need to be dealt with and how") is necessary before even embarking on more specific suggestions.

Again, I'm not complaining about you here, probably just misdirecting frustrations a little bit.

Actually, on thinking about this for a while, I don't suppose you could try to share what you consider to be "the best way to suggest things" with me?  I could certainly use refinement of technique.

[G-Flex]

I can't critique your suggestions too much because I haven't really read the majority of it (in fact, I need to give this thread more of a look).

In general, though? A good suggestion is what's useful to the developer. It all stems from that. Identifying a problem with the game is useful, or reasons why a problem might be caused or how to solve it. This much is obvious enough, but a lot of people don't focus on that.


I think an example would be useful here. Let's talk about, say, magic. Farming would be another easy example, since it's another broad feature set with serious gameplay implications, but magic is even more open for discussion since it doesn't really exist yet. An example of good feedback (in my opinion) would be to bring up what kinds of gameplay aspects you'd like to see magic accomplish, and why. For instance, I'd like to see a sort of mystical, subtle system with all its implications explored (e.g. the implications of being able to purify water magically) rather than magic being seen as utilitarian spell-slinging and/or not really affecting the gameworld as a whole very much even when it should (e.g. D&D in both regards, really), because I feel like that can create a more profound, believable world more rooted in realistic behavior and folklore than it would be rooted in magic systems for the sake of generic fantasy magic and fireballs.

An example of bad feedback would be any given example of someone creating a thread throwing out some huge overwrought idea for a magic system that he think would be neat, without so much regard for how it satisfies the design goals of the game. The problem here is twofold: First off, if anything's going to help Toady out, it's not specifics, it's abstract design feedback. Saying "I'd like magic to focus on general concepts A and B for reasons X and Y related to the game's design goals P and Q, and here's a bit of reasoning" is more useful by itself than a giant post saying "I'd like magic to be specifically A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, and I because I think it would be fun", because the former is more constructive from the perspective of a developers. If I'm a developer, I want to know what the players want from the game, or what they want to see from it, or what they see as problems in it, and to give feedback related to design goals and decisions; a suggestion without this, without much awareness of the game's actual developmental process, is nearly useless. Secondly, the latter sort of suggestion has a terrible signal-to-noise ratio. The more work you put into the specifics of a suggested system, the more your returns diminish, because the more and more likely it gets that the developer's implementation would have already diverged by that point, and specific implementation details usually aren't the sort of thing the developer is looking for anyway.

Illustrated example: Take my basic magic suggestion above, about magic being subtle and all that jazz. Now, I could go further and describe some basic ways that could work, like herbalistic medicine, minor alchemy, spiritual hedge-magic, and so forth. That's still pretty useful, because those are nice food for thought and flesh out the kind of thing I'm getting at. I could also go one step further with, say, alchemy, and say what general flavors of effect alchemy should be able to produce. I could then go more steps forward, and come up with this huge system of what alchemical "elements" are involved, what effects each of them has, how they are combined, and so forth, with charts and tables and essentially a fully fleshed-out system. At this point, the problem is that the developer will likely have lost me at one of the much earlier steps, because it's doubtful that his own design decisions will take him in the exact same direction as me, and even if they did, those implementation details aren't up to me to begin with. Basically, spreading a whole suggested and detailed system on the table out like that only serves as a working proof-of-concept that a more general suggestion or idea can work (which is what I believe you're trying to do), but some threads here have forgotten that, delving straight into "HERE'S MY IDEA FOR A MAGIC SYSTEM", which is utterly useless because even if they did state a more general purpose for it, the vast majority of the effort has gone into specific details that are almost guaranteed to go either unconsidered or simply unused, because a game developer will get much more out of "here's the kind of stuff I want, why I want it, and how it would suit the game" than "here's some very very specific details of how I would do this thing I want", especially in terms of cost vs. benefit.

I apologize if I'm overexplaining, but it's because I feel like I'm probably not explaining it well.

tl;dr Toady gains more from "I want this type of feature to have these gameplay characteristics because it would suit the game in this way" than he does from a long rambling post about how differently colored magical obelisks guarded by silver lava-surfers underneath the planet can be ground down and mixed in variable proportions (see attached Excel spreadsheet) to produce different healing potions that are then injected under the skin using bee stingers attached to plungers made out of vulcanized rubber you negotiated from the rubber tree spirit that refills its supply exactly 150 ticks and half that if you're an elf but if it's a full moon there's a risk that the rubber will be poisoned and you'll have to rub obelisk dust on it BEFORE touching it with bare hands or else the gods (see other attached Excel spreadsheet) will piss on you in a color related to their sphere of influence a number of times equal to the current day of the month multiplied by the phase of the moon, unless it's the Wyld Hunt (see my other suggestion thread!!!) in which case the Huntsman has the possibility of killing the dwarf instead, _{leading to his ghost poisoning all obelisk dust in your stockpiles, which reverses all their effects, and the potion has to be injected by someone who isn't an elf because elfs are only good for magma burial and also they need blood magic because they need something to differentiate them from the dwarves (see my suggestion thread on blood magic) but really the most important thing is that the obelisks are involved somehow and if you can do that I'm happy because I saw 2001 when I was a kid and that's what it makes me think of}

[NW_Kohaku]

Hmmm... I kind of do both.

The thing starts as a purely abstract, and works its way in talking about features, then I get into proof-of-concepty things near the end.  (I want to finish off with a mockup set of plants just to illustrate what sort of things we could do, although I have absolutely no doubts that Toady won't want to use the procedurally generated random crap that gets spit out in favor of whatever procedurally generated stuff he can program to be spit out.)

Maybe it's the starting off from the detailed and technical end of the spectrum and working to the more abstract growth that the thread performed (where people were arguing how many tiles of farm or how many farmers would take to feed 100 dwarves), but I sort of felt like it wasn't really a complete suggestion until I threw in exact numbers that would make the whole thing work.  I kind of felt bad that I didn't put in precise numbers in the earlier NPK section, so I wrote another Advnaced NPK section, and then felt that needed to be more detailed, since it's not a complete suggestion until it has an exact metric.

That said, I think there's something worth disagreeing about with what you have said, in that I don't think that people really always grasp what it is they really want with these suggestions.  Especially with things like the magic arguments, some people just seem to declare they want random kill-your-whole-fort on a roll of 1 magic or Tolkien magic or D&D magic without really thinking any of it through, and without really being willing to discuss it.  Taking the time to actually think about how it would have to be implemented, and how the player actually has to interact with it has made me do some pretty serious revisions to this suggestion, which just talking about my feelings wouldn't have done.