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[NW_Kohaku]

Sockless, could you spoiler that chart?  It's kind of huge. 

Anyway, yes, that chart and the wikipedia article that refernces it has been linked in the last thread several times.  Again, the real point of that is that it doesn't really matter much, because the granularity of the soil is not a really relevant aspect of soil fertility.  If anything, it will be compressed into a single "drainage" stat so that players aren't too handicapped by something that is really complexity beyond anything they can really control.

As for the alkaline soil, yes, I have seen that, as well.  That will come in the "Advanced NPK and Specific Fertilizers" section.

We've also had discussions on what sort of land area you need to "realistically" farm for the numbers of people we are talking about, and this will be mentioned in one of the closing sections on the thread. I should also point out that the neutrality of that article you referenced (which I've seen before in the thread) is very much disputable, as it is basically a pro-veganism screed.  Veganism wouldn't even be possible in medieval times thanks to Vitamin B₁₂ deficiency, as was raised back then.

For "hydroponics" in gravel... that's not really hydroponics except in some very technical definitions, and it's really beyond medieval farming methods, anyway.

For Aquaculture, that isn't farming by raft, that's fishing.  Or rather, it's fisheries, which would certainly be an option available to ancient, much less medieval fishermen.  Ironically, the article actually talks about how the Ancient Chinese first practiced this by trapping carp from their rivers.  There's also the interesting Algaculture article, where algae is purposefully grown in shallow vats so as to reduce it to fuel or fertilizer.

Aquaponics, however, was what I was thinking of, and it entails using fish and plants floating on rafts above them in a symbiotic relationship to work properly.  This was performed by the Aztecs, in what were called Chinampas within the dwarven limits on technology, as opposed to true (water) hydroponics, which was not really done until the 17th century.  They are basically "rafts" that are built into shallow lakes (which dwarves can create artificially), which let the plants to clean the sediments out of the water (as in hydroponics), but instead of manually resupplying the nutrients, the way that hydroponics has to be carefully monitored for proper nutrient balance, you just let the wild fish excrete fertilizer into the water.  The plants clean the water of excrement for the fish to have clean water, and the fish go about excreting more.

I have already mentioned soil salinity in this thread.  Likewise, I have mentioned NPK in water.  Both are in the "Water Management" section.

Similar methods were used in some forms of rice paddy farming, apparently, letting small forms of carp or eels into the rice paddies to help fertilize the water, and hence soil.

I should probably get around to that "Alternative Farming" section soon.

But it also seems like any nutrients that are brought into the system would stay in it too.  Like, new immigrants, wandering animals, or several goblin sieges.

Yes, this is ultimately not going to be a perfect model of balance.  Dwarves will probably have some excess material to spend upon expanding soils, provided they conserve their materials well.  I can just produce leaks in the system - humanoid operations are just never perfectly efficient, after all.  There are also going to be some additional methods of producing some more fertilizers to throw into the farms, including through mining (which is non-renewable, hence short-term), and with breaking apart stone, including volcanic stone through the use of pest-vulnerable lichens and microorganisms, which can help lead to an overall throttle on the expansion of materials. 

This, and all other matters that really come down to "making the numbers look right" are really what should be left for the last steps of the construction of the system.  What you really need is to have the model constructed in theory before you can worry about making the constants fit the equation.

Secondly, as a minor point, and I'm almost completely certain that it's been mentioned, the spoiler rocks could probably function as a magic source.

I'm not sure whether or not that would be a good idea off the top of my head.  On the one hand, it does give a good reason to why some areas of the game may have more magical flora and fauna, and it would punish players with less useful caverns if they plundered the cotton candy stalls of all their gooey goodness.  On the other hand, I'm not sure I want to punish the players for that, necessarily.  There's already a punishment for eating too much of the cotton candy.  Plus, it's what's under the big top that holds the serious magical sources.  Colonizing the circus could be a really fun place if we have actual circus-raised crops, much less if we could do the "Total Victory Condition" of altering the circus to Dwarftopia, where every eerie corner turns into an overfull ocean of fermented ambrosia after shooing off the last of the clowns.

[Silverionmox]

A possible way to simplify the soil shenanigans is to just tag the different soil types and the different plant species. Loamy sand, for example, would get the [SAND] and [LOAM] tags; any plant with the [SAND] or [LOAM] tag could grow there. New player-created soils can get the same tags, that way they'll fit right in with the others. In addition, new tags can be defined, for example [MARSH], that can be added to existing soils and plants as well. This reduces complexity (for example, loamy sand and sandy loam would be functionally identical), but I don't think that takes away gameplay possibilities. For what it's worth, I've never heard about any historical people bothering to manipulate the grain size of the soil for plants except for potted plants and terrariums.

Since the humus is the biologically active part of the soil*, I suggest that it can only exist as a floor. Mixing it in with other soil would make it disappear or turn into that soil. It would be generated automatically on a soil square or replace a soil floor within a season if weather conditions allow and plants are present in the vicinity. I think it should be a requirement to grow plants.

*(rather than technically different, its existence/functionality depends on the context; therefore transporting it to an underground cave would be pointless, since vastly different organisms are needed there)

As a reminder, note that any industrial center receives food from the outside. I agree that tilling the fields shouldn't be the players burden, but Toady has been putting peasant villages with large fields in the game. Now they only need to bring their surplus to your fortress, willing or otherwise .

[NW_Kohaku]

No, I think a variable that vaguely represents both drainage and CEC should exist, and simply be a linear scale variable just like most of the others.  It's not ideal and perfectly realistic, but we have to abstract some things. 

It will basically mean that plants that like sandy soil with plenty of drainage (like, say, grapes) will just like a lower-CEC type of soil, and that's that.

I guess the scale of this CEC-D scale would like this (source on CEC values:

• 0-5: Gravel or rock.  Only things like lichen grow here.
• 5-10: (standard) Sand.  Few things grow here, and they probably have very extensive root structures, or are basic, tough grasses.
• 10-15: Loam. Generally average soil, good for plenty of crops once you build some humus.
• 15-25: Silty loam or silt.  Fine soil, with plenty of CEC.
• 25-50: Non-Kaolinite Clay.  Very fine soil, which can be rich in CEC-dependant nutrients.  Has drainage problems, so some plants can't tolerate it.
• 50+: (Humus), peat and, basically, swamps.  Soil that has serious drainage problems.  Most plants would have problems with this soil.  Technically, humus isn't a soil type in these game terms, since there's too little of it.

This is obviously only going up to around 50 - the scale can be expanded or contracted as necessary.  I wouldn't contract it to the point where sand is only 1 point different from loam, however.

All the other soil types would just fit somewhere into that scale, so black sand might be 20 on that scale, like a silt.   

Other than that, we might develop a "humus depth" variable, although it's debatable whether that's really necessary.  In fact, I almost would rather just have a humus depth meter than the "CEC-D" combined CEC and Drainage stat, since that relates to how long the player has been caring for the soil, and purposefully spending time building it up and not letting it get drained away, as opposed to what the soil was like when the player found it.

(And yes, Silverionmox, I'm thinking of soil as a "floor covering" instead of as a tile below where the crops grow.)

Also, on that note, I'm not sure many fortresses are "industrial centers".  A typical fortress probably only has 3-5 people in its "steel industry".  It's just that up to now, that was enough to buy entire caravans.  Those rural podunks that ship food in can have more population than a fortress does. 

I think trading for (or stealing) food is all well and good for players who want to go that route.  With the Caravan, Army, and Kingdom arcs, you'll be able to just send out expeditions to give you the things you lack.  I do think, however, that some people enjoy this kind of depth of play, and would love to build a working fishery or a chinampas or a terraced mountainside covered in rice paddies or have a pasture with sheep to graze and then let their herd of Giant Lions feed upon the sheep so you have a Giant Lion ranch.  Making these entertaining gameplay systems makes them worthwile to pursue, even if you don't really need to pursue them, strictly speaking. 

If you can have 50 cows, 50 horses, 50 of whatever else in your fort just because you bought a mating pair and shoved them in a pit for all eternity, then they're not fun or compelling, they're just stuff that's there.  If you have to work for your cows, make sure they aren't overgrazing or getting diseases, then having a large number of cows can make your fortress different from other fortresses, and be a part of the fun of the game.  At the same time, you don't have to raise cows if you don't want to.

[Silverionmox]

I was strictly speaking about soil granularity; even with tags there should still be a value for moisture absorption capacity indeed. Peat for example can soak up a lot of water, to the point where the landscape noticeably sinks when drainage ditches are dug and the water flows away. It's probably not worth the payoff to implement that specific effect though. The reason why I suggested tags is that it seems unlikely that soil types would play a role beyond the general classification, plant type distribution etc. In addition, we also need drainage values for other rocks and materials than soil, that might not be granular at all. So the question is how much distinction the program needs between the two values. For farming purposes they certainly can be combined.

As for the food imports, those are good for players that would rather be as little as possible involved with farming (but would rather have a military to protect villages, for example). If food imports are a viable option, then increasing farming complexity doesn't bother anyone. Whether an industrial, political, trading, religious or other center in medieval times, food went from their surroundings to there. In well-developed regions, taxes, tithes etc. amounted to 50%. Taxes in kind were typically delivered as bushels of grain to a warehouse in the city or near the cloister.

[AngleWyrm]

In the current 31.18 version, all of the player's farming needs are settled in the first year. After that, the player occasionally sets fields to fallow/planting as the food storage accumulates, and may also produce fertilizer for the fields, which can be set to auto-fertilize.

What additional actions will a player engage in, or consider with this more advanced farming model?

[NW_Kohaku]

In the current 31.18 version, all of the player's farming needs are settled in the first year. After that, the player occasionally sets fields to fallow/planting as the food storage accumulates, and may also produce fertilizer for the fields, which can be set to auto-fertilize.

What additional actions will a player engage in, or consider with this more advanced farming model?

I kind of wrote this whole thread answering that.  Granted, there are some sections yet to be written, but generally speaking, this is all about things the player will do.  Can I answer with D. All the Above?  Because that question has a rather long answer.

[monk12]

In the current 31.18 version, all of the player's farming needs are settled in the first year. After that, the player occasionally sets fields to fallow/planting as the food storage accumulates, and may also produce fertilizer for the fields, which can be set to auto-fertilize.

What additional actions will a player engage in, or consider with this more advanced farming model?

Second post, first section is what you're looking for, methinks.

Back to reading....

[NW_Kohaku]

I need to update that section, too...

[sockless]

We must remember that DF is not a medieval simulator and is actually a fantasy world simulator. Hydroponics in substrates is very much hydroponics, since the gravel itself has little/no effect nutrient wise, and the water carries the nutrients instead. Hydroponics in gravel would be perfectly feasible, since we have other things that were never done in medieval times, like complex traps and coke making, neither of which were done in medieval times, coking was first done in Europe in the 17th century, which was also when hydroponics was first done in 'modern' Europe.

[NW_Kohaku]

Well, if a 0 CEC-D value soil type is "gravel", then you could certainly farm that gravel if you found the right kind of plant for that.  It's just not a special "hydroponics" form of farming, it's just regular farming on gravel by the way this system handles it.

[sockless]

Hmm, that would be a good way to implement it, but with 0, it might not work, as the nutrients would dissipate as soon as they appear, so maybe a value of 1. Technically, that's not really CED, which is more about chemistry and the ions bonding, but it's a fine term to use. The thing though is that I was thinking of having water run through the gravel, so you'd like crush up some rock and throw it into a channel, which you'd then run water through.

[Interus]

Yes, this is ultimately not going to be a perfect model of balance.  Dwarves will probably have some excess material to spend upon expanding soils, provided they conserve their materials well.  I can just produce leaks in the system - humanoid operations are just never perfectly efficient, after all.  There are also going to be some additional methods of producing some more fertilizers to throw into the farms, including through mining (which is non-renewable, hence short-term), and with breaking apart stone, including volcanic stone through the use of pest-vulnerable lichens and microorganisms, which can help lead to an overall throttle on the expansion of materials.

I actually realized there's already a built in way of simply taking nutrients out of the system.  Or there was.  I don't know if dwarves are still unhappy about a friend being left to decay outside if they're given a memorial instead of a coffin.  But if the body is buried in a coffin instead of left out to rot, then any nutrients in the body are permanently secluded from the soil and the rest of the system.  So while dwarves will still return much of what they use, they won't add to it simply by being there, and they'll probably take a little out at a time as they die, though it wouldn't really be noticable, since whatever nutrients they had in their bodies weren't part of the soil yet anyway.

I still don't know about sieges, but you did say something about trying to balance this with people who really enjoy the military aspect so they don't have to worry about it as much, and a way to utilize enemy bodies as fertilizer might not be such a bad thing.


I didn't think about the idea that mining the spoiler rocks would mean that you also make the area less magical.  I was assuming that they'd be present, and somehow forgot that at least one of them could be dramatically impacted by the player, which would make growth rather difficult.  I just liked the idea of increasingly bizarre plant life as you got close to them.  Perhaps, and I'm not sure about this, a combination of plants that produce magic, which affects quite a bit of the surrounding area, and may linger after the plant dies, and plants that absorb the magic.  In the wild, both would be found growing near each other.

Actually, that's probably not a great idea, because unless the plants in the wild somehow auto-rotate instead, then it pretty much allows you to just grow both things in fields right next to each other and never worry about rotation from magic, though you would still have to deal with at least some of the other nutrients.  I believe you or somebody mentioned wandering creatures that produce magic-nutrients and that's probably a better way.  Then you'd probably have to have some tame ones and something like the fallow feeding field at times for them to mana-fertilize.

[NW_Kohaku]

I actually realized there's already a built in way of simply taking nutrients out of the system.  Or there was.  I don't know if dwarves are still unhappy about a friend being left to decay outside if they're given a memorial instead of a coffin.  But if the body is buried in a coffin instead of left out to rot, then any nutrients in the body are permanently secluded from the soil and the rest of the system.  So while dwarves will still return much of what they use, they won't add to it simply by being there, and they'll probably take a little out at a time as they die, though it wouldn't really be noticable, since whatever nutrients they had in their bodies weren't part of the soil yet anyway.

Ah, yes.  This is why I never wanted to be buried when I died, even as a little child.  I just thought the idea that you would set land aside for dead people forever was just wasteful and stupid.

It kind of carries over to playing DF, I never liked burial by coffin.  I prefer "dwarfy funerals" by magma-flooding a burial chamber and casting it in obsidian, sending the body back to Armok/The Stone.

last two paragraphs of the post

I went and made a spin-off thread just for this topic, although it's kind of loosely spun only vaguely in the direction of the topic.  Since that topic has less of a "price for entry" in terms of front-loaded reading, I figure it will get more traffic in general, and could stimulate more conversation in the community.  I'd like to try to get a general community conversation going on what things we want magical and what the magical effects should be, so posting further thoughts on this topic in that thread would be appreciated.

I'd also like to make caverns have an "underground biome", though, that depends on the magic fields present in the area, and cotton candy is present in EVERY cavern's lower levels, so it would make for an omnipresent magic field.

[therahedwig]

I actually realized there's already a built in way of simply taking nutrients out of the system.  Or there was.  I don't know if dwarves are still unhappy about a friend being left to decay outside if they're given a memorial instead of a coffin.  But if the body is buried in a coffin instead of left out to rot, then any nutrients in the body are permanently secluded from the soil and the rest of the system.  So while dwarves will still return much of what they use, they won't add to it simply by being there, and they'll probably take a little out at a time as they die, though it wouldn't really be noticable, since whatever nutrients they had in their bodies weren't part of the soil yet anyway.

Ah, yes.  This is why I never wanted to be buried when I died, even as a little child.  I just thought the idea that you would set land aside for dead people forever was just wasteful and stupid.

It kind of carries over to playing DF, I never liked burial by coffin.  I prefer "dwarfy funerals" by magma-flooding a burial chamber and casting it in obsidian, sending the body back to Armok/The Stone.

Uh... guys? Coffins and the people inside them aren't eaten by any worms, but they do decompose, and the nutrients do go back into the earth and the groundwater('cept when you have those cheap-ass plastic-coffins, they don't decompose >_>). Otherwise the whole point of burying, at least for christians, gets lost.(The idea being that you return your body to the earth, and back into gods ownership, from whom you borrowed it)

The reason why people don't build over graveyards besides headstones, is partially so they can mourn and partially because people think it's creepy.(The headstone is mostly so heavy so your dearly beloved ones stay dead)

Furthermore, graveyards do get cleaned up(like when the family doesn't pay for the plot anymore, then the bones get stored up in a more archival fashion) except when they're monumental graveyards. /Raised by an art-historian.

The problem is STONE coffins in STONE tombs.

There's a Indian religious group that solve this problem by having the carion birds feed on their dead. They build this giantic tower, on top go the bodies, and from under they get the clean picked bones which then get burned.

/Mildly offtopic. ?

[NW_Kohaku]

Umm... not really.

Modern caskets are made of metal, designed to be pretty much hermetically sealed, put in a concrete vault, and the bodies are pumped full of embalming fluids.  None of that sounds particularly like the point is to "return to the soil".  You have to specifically ask for and pay for a "green burial" that involves the sort of "return to the soil" type of stuff you're talking about.

Even early Christians would try to put their dead in crypts, where they would presumably remain until the Final Judgement.  Even though it's not part of Christian or even Jewish dogma that you need to preserve the body for ressurection, they still tried to do it, perhaps because of Egyptian influence on the Jews, and Jewish influence on Christianity, which forbade cremation.

It's just that all of those get full, eventually, so they make more room by throwing out the dead nobody thinks anyone will miss so they can sell those plots again.