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[d_V]

I read part of the opening post for this thread, and then the tl;dr version of your layout, and I had wanted to say, "I think making a section of Dwarf Fortress intuitive and easy to pick up for newbs would be sort of outside the scope of DF and against its grain. Like intuitive, non-esoteric quantum physics or the electoral college: bullshirt."

Then I read the post.

Good show! It's complex and automatable enough to be awesome and interesting, but so far beyond what anyone is expecting to EVER have to go through (i.e. just like the rest of DF) that if a newb thought they could pick it up, they may as well start drinking liquor right after breakfast.

You have my vote. I was actually thinking farming was a little too stupid simple and could be way epicer.

[Morrigi]

I think this is all excellent, well thought through, and would be a good addition to the game. +1 Support.

[sonerohi]

You have my support for this idea. I would like to see potential improvements in how we can farm though. Importing a seed drill for a hefty price, for example.

[Epigene]

Farming in DF is far too easy, no question. It should be made harder by using two methods - one, decreasing farming-product yields in a straightforward numeric way and two, introducing farming-related variables to scale up complexity while at the same time providing more options for success. While the OP has a much grander vision for DF's ultimate simulation of ecosystems and weather, I believe it's a bit too much for just the purpose of making farming more challenging (and rewarding) with minimal development requirements.

Here are OP's suggestions I am thoroughly behind (from the TL;DR version):

The goal should be to make something simple to start with, so any random new player survives their first year, but progressively more difficult as time goes on, challenging those who have mastered the basics.
It should be possible for players to get by without knowing terribly many tricks, but with rewards for the player who truly masters the system, in much the same way as dwarfputing.

• Solution 1: Multiple soil quality variables
  
  • Multiple variables for soil quality (instead of just a simple "fertility"). Several of these soil variables, especially the nearly impossible to change ones, may add variables to the game, but not terribly much complexity, as players will have few reasons to actually worry about soil acidity or salinity once you have already picked a plant suited for your soil.
• Solution 3: Different methods of obtaining Fertilizers
  
  • Decomposing organic waste (including corpses, grinding down bones, and manure) into fertilizer is the most sustainable and reliable method.
  • Some fertilizers can be mined or traded for, but they are of finite or unreliable supply. Minable Sulfur can be used to change soil acidity, and make some soil suitable for different crops long-term, however.
  • Exotic fertilizers, like magma, can be used, but require more elaborate engineering, and may cause soil pollution that limit what crops are viable
• Solution 6: More farmable materials
  
  • If you can farm trees for wood, plants for cloth, flammable oils, medicinal herbs, and many other resources besides just food (basically, anything that isn't mined can be farmed), then there is a reason to constantly upgrade farms - you want more than just basic survival on food, you want more stuff.  This lets the complexity of a farm for food become easy, but having to sustain more farms for more crops for more uses means that you are encouraged to farm more complex methods to gain greater yields for non-essential products.

Why so few and in such a limited scope.?
Warning, theoretical rambling inside!

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

I see DF as a simulator. IRL farming depends on three things: water, nitrogen (and other plant micronutrients) and carbon dioxide (and light, but for underground plants in DF this consideration is redundant). In fact, for every kilo of plant matter, 40% of the mass (as carbon) comes from the air and 60% from the water. The nitrogen i.e. fertilizer part may be miniscule (below 1%) but without it no plants can grow. Out of these three things so far DF simulates two - air, which is practically a given and water (mechanics of which work fantastic, but wetness and mud-producing properties could be improved). So if DF were to live up to simulating farming down to the fine grain it would have to start tracking the nitrogen i.e. fertility levels of not only the soil, but dwarves. Basically DF would have to start simulating the whole nitrogen cycle. And there is a problem with that - excrement. For non-plant life nitrogen is toxic and while a necessary part of proteins and plant fibers, nitrogen is inside animal (human and dwarven) bodies only passingly before it is excreted either in liquid or (semi)solid form. So if a nitrogen cycle were to be implemented to track soil fertility, an inevitable side-product of this would be dwarves having potty breaks to return the nitrogen to the soil. I am not saying this can not or shouldn't be done in DF version 1.01, but for the next, below 0.5

So here is what I would like to see done with farming in DF in the next couple of versions:

• Less ease. Feeding 200 dwarves under goblin siege should be a nerve-wrecking ordeal. Present crop growing time must be increased by 30%, some crop failure due to failure to germinate must be introduced. For agrarian science!
• Farm tools! (non-mandatory, increase yield modestly);
• Tree and cap farming with concomitant natural non-cave cap growth reduced (for now it is easy to reach wood sustainability by simply digging out a whole 2x2 embark size soil z-layer and felling the naturally growing caps. One should be able to farm caps, but have them grow reasonably slowly (50% reach maturity withing two years, some fail due to pests?));
• Further crop and animal product recipes - poisons, medicine, drugs.
• Somewhat modified fertilization mechanism:

• Expanded fertilizer (ash) sources: any wood object (as suggested here http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=132318.0), corpses and refuse (since bodies and bones won't burn on their own, how about a reaction where two logs and three bodies give four ash?), nitrogen-rich minerals (a new type of economic stone).
• Fertility modifies crop growth time in an exponential manner: 0 fertility severely penalizes (+50% growth time on top of the 30% mandate?) while the maximum (7?) grants a minimal boost of 20%, the whole range being, say: F0(-50%); F1(-25%); F2(-10%); F3(0%); F4(+8%); F5(+14%); F6(+18%); F7(+20%).
• To counter the previous, all (most?) soil starts out at fertility level two.

[Draco18s]

Rez this thread, as this is relevant.

I have NPR on in the car and on You Bet Your Garden this last week, Mike McGrath briefly mentioned a topic on water harvesting / water conservation that I think is highly appropriate for DF.

The segment can be located at about 35 minutes in (there's a tall bar that stands out that is right at the beginning of the caller's segment, takes a few minutes for Mike to get around to the question) during which he talks about a chapter of this book.

He talks about using large, otherwise empty areas of land and stamping down the dirt to make it impenetrable and using it as a giant collection basin for a single tree, out in areas that don't get a whole lot of rain.  Which reminded me of when I was out in Israel and visited Masada.  They had a similar water collection system along the cliffs and hills:



This should definitely be something that can happen in Dwarf Fortress.  Right now we tap surface lakes and use them as basins of water collection due to how rain works, rather than being able to construct our own.

[LeFourbe]

WoW that's amazing ! :O I was diging in the forum, reading old topics and then ... THAT ! The most amazing suggestion I have ever read !

Is Toady realy working on the suggestions (http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/eternal_voting.php) ? I hope Toady is working on this one (even just a little )  Because it MUST be implemented !

You did an awesome work everybody !

Long live the DF community and long live DF 

(PS : i'm a little frenchy, sorry for the eventual mistakes...)
(PPS : sory for digging accideltaly into this ≡«☼old thread☼»≡  )

[Urist Tilaturist]

This looks like a superb suggestion, albeit a very old one. Farming needs to be made into something that resembles actual farming. It is too easy now.

[Waparius]

Is Toady realy working on the suggestions (http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/eternal_voting.php) ? I hope Toady is working on this one (even just a little )  Because it MUST be implemented !

Apparently after he and ThreeToe went through at least the first page or two of the whole suggestions forum they've settled into a pattern of regularly going over new posts once they reach page 4 or so of the forum (to make it easier to read through without the thread constantly updating itself.

[Draco18s]

I love seeing this thread pop up every once in a while.
And there is a farming improvement item on the eternal voting thing, it's #9.  The thread linked there is actually the old thread, this being a reboot.  But farming is still top-10.

[LeFourbe]

Waparius : Okay, thanks. That's nice, we have a chance of seeing some improvements soon ... *dreaming* :p

Draco18s : Yeah, I've voted for farming improvement on the voting php script. Let's hope for a brighter future in DF agriculture ^^

[NW_Kohaku]

OK, it's been a year or so since I've been here last... (A whole version jump with plantable crops! Wow! If only there were some sorts of differences between all these plants!) 

In any event, I updated a couple of segments, mostly the Water Management segment near the start, in light of talk about the California droughts that have been continuing into this year.  I also put reference to some of Winner's ideas in there.

I'll try to modify to react to the new crops, but I'll have to play with it a little before I make up my mind for myself...

And thanks, glad you liked it, LeFourbe.  I've been mashing this idea up against others for over half a decade, now.    I sure hope it's been refined by now.

[Pencil_Art]

Looks like a really good idea, and well thought out.

[NW_Kohaku]

I made a few updates in terms of water management and farming water, mostly relating to some more things I've read regarding algal blooms and how drip feeding works.

[NW_Kohaku]

Importing an argument from another thread:

Spoiler: Original Post (click to show/hide)

Hey guys! New here, but huge fan of the game. Always wanted to do an ecology/permaculture farming sim, (still haven't found a good one), and from the very beginning thought DF is a perfect start. I am irl a former-computer engineering student-turned-professional horticulturist and practical ecologist. I know agriculture is something on the development horizon, so hopefully I'm not too late here.  There is already so much care that goes into world formation geology, it seems natural to continue that into dynamic game-play.

In one sense, I'm bumping this http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=76007.0 pretty exhaustive thread, but also wanted to bring my own spin, which will probably include some points already made, but may also offer a good marriage of intuitive simplicity and fun/challenging complexity.

I think a big part of the crux of soil and ecology and its translation into human understandable/programmable language is the overwhelming complexity that unfolds when you approach the subject from a reductive/scientific pov.  Here, I think it would help to focus on the basic foundational, modular/symbolic concepts upon which all living processes (plant and dwarf alike) are modeled.

There are four ingredients to living processes: mineral, air, water, and carbon (the old Greeks called it fire, a simple model of synergetic carbon reduction/oxidation; combustion and respiration are ecologically very similar). Balance is an important concept (in fertile soil: 25% air, 25% water, 45% mineral, 5-10% carbon). Mineral is heavy/slow and air is insubstantial/fleeting, but water and carbon cycle endlessly through atmospheric and terrestrial phases, and in transition, they are extremely manipulable.

DF already does pretty well with the mechanics of water and its seasonal flux, though there are some tweaks that could be implemented with how it soaks into and is held in soil.

I think carbon would be a good place to start with adding a new mechanic around soil fertility modifiers to soil tiles (similar to the 1-7 depth-scale of water?). The roots of plants are really the primary builders of soil carbon; as they grow and die and regrow through the seasons, they leave behind carbon-rich air/water channels in the soil. In this way, disturbance associated with annual cropping systems depletes soil-carbon, while long-term/stable perennial cropping systems build soil-carbon. This type of soil-carbon would probably be part of world-generation. I would love to see an agricultural option that allows perennial guild/community style planting zones that could be built up around pre-existing fruit/nut trees, though I understand the current system of annual cropping has an attractive mechanizable aspect for many (hence our modern reliance on industrial fertilizers and machinery).

And then of course there are the possible fun sub-mechanics surrounding the translation/cycling of "waste" (refuse, corpses…) into "resource". Some waste is rich in carbon (wood and other dry/brown vegetation), while some waste is rich in nitrogen (green vegetation and especially animal products). Carbon and nitrogen have a kind of twin-sibling relationship.  Too much nitrogen causes carbon to be quickly respirated (depleted) from the soil, and leads to collapse of soil-life when the artificially-applied nitrogen is eaten up and washed out of the soil (think like the binge-crash of sugar or hard-drugs), while too much carbon ties up plant-available nitrogen and/or leads to water-saturation/anaerobic conditions. In this way, there should be an appropriate sense of time and place regarding the manipulation of these resources.

Ideally, we "complex" these valuable resources by 1) facilitating interaction, and simultaneously 2) slowing/buffering the flow through the system. Terracing linked up to a drainage/water-source is a perfect example of complexing water.  Planting nurse-logs/corpses in the ground, "chop-and-drop"/chip/leaf mulches are examples of complexing carbon into the soil system.

Mostly, the focus should be on the interactions of water and carbon, as these really lie at the heart of healthy soil and plants.

Gotta run,
Thanks again for a really fun game.

-B

And then responding to this:

For that mater, the core of what I am asking of you remains unanswered: How would players actually interact with any of this data?

Building latrines, stables, stockpiles, activity-zones, and hauling water, manure, mulch, and querying farm tiles and farmers' workshops. I don't think the average player wants to have to deal with more greater quantities/qualities of soil amendments than that. Am I understanding your question correctly? I don't think I can get more detailed, as I am not into modding the RAWs or whatever.

No, I don't think you're understanding the distinction I'm making.

You are talking about items in the chain of production for the simulation, I'm talking about interface.  This thread is both about having a simulation, yes, but more importantly about the interface that allows the player to understand and interact with it.

See the images in the TL;DR post (or the whole post if you haven't read it yet), and then the Interface post, which explains in depth how the player would actually interact with this system.

To make a long story short, I am suggesting a whole new interface not dissimilar to the military screen, where agricultural activity (including ranching and forestry among others) are all scheduled by the player, then automatically carried out by the dwarves so as to eliminate the need for micromanaging a constant "add more fertilizer" button press that players, simply, would not remember to press. 

To this end, I don't see why removing one or two resources from the game really makes the game simpler.  Either you're suggesting a workshop and manual job assignment scheme, which would be massively more micromanagement-heavy and complex, even with less "moving parts", or you're basically just saying you want to keep the overwhelming majority of what I talked about, you just want to make "carbon" be "more important" by removing some of the other variables.

From what you've said so far, I get the impression that you're not actually interested in a simpler system, you're trying to argue against "NPK" in favor of "CN" because of a political/philosophical opposition to modern fertilization practices.  If so, that's perfectly fair, I enjoy such an argument more than arguing complexity of interface, but I'm still not sure what it is you actually want players to see when they are operating in this system that would be different from what they see in the system currently outlined.

I'm not sure why people are so hung up on sevenths...

Because as a player, the 1-7 water-scale is the most immediately available presentation of an already-implemented finer-gradation than the all-or-nothing that-which-needs-to-be-dug and that-which-has-been-dug. Really, the programmable bits and the UI scale really don't matter so much as long as there is some kind of non-zero-sum spectrum of soil characteristics.

The thing is, it does matter significantly. Sevenths of water are crude and have to be handled with random motion taking place dozens of ticks for optimization reasons, but have to be large because they occupy 'physical space' to the point that they block portions of the map and force connectivity redraws.  Plants already have growdurs that are only checked in hundreds of ticks because they're meant to be slow and not take up processor time too often, but they are also still measured in the hundreds.  Sevenths need to have random checks, and that can mean forcing a dwarf to re-water a tile before he's even gotten to the next row of crops because of some randomly "bad rolls".

However, you do bring up the major, recurring theme I do have to bring home - players generally don't recognize the things they don't see.  This is the core of my argument of why we can have complex systems without making it seem complex to a player: They just don't see the complex numbers, they only see the simple ones.

The objective shouldn't be to make a simple set of interactions, it should be to make complex interactions where the numbers the player doesn't directly need to interact with are hidden.

[Waparius]

Ha, pretty sure Toady mentioned this specific thread in the latest interview. :p