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[NW_Kohaku]

You seem to be using a fertility modal that I'm not familiar with.
The official fertility modal as I understand it is

• Green manure and other raw biological material: poisonous to plants if there is more than a certain amount. Gets converted to organic matter over several months.  When you plow a crop in, this is what is added.
• Organic matter: keeps nutrients from washing away in the water (not necessary for growth)
• Nitrogen: necessary for growth, washes away easily, can be created by growing legumes
• Phosphorus: necessary for growth.  Closed on map nutrient cycle
• Potassium:  just like phosphorus

None of the composts or other supplements are pure biological material or organic matter, they all contain plenty of nutrients to do the fertilizing for them.

I think NW_Kohaku is arguing that we don't need to bother modeling organic matter because different soil textures already have different amounts of nutrient leaching so organic matter would be redundant.
I want to include organic matter because I'm really attracted to the idea of allowing a badly maintained forest to erode into a sterile wasteland that can no longer hold any nutrients.

That's not actually the model...

The specific post is here.

But basically, the model goes like this:

Water, Biomass, Nitrogen, Phosphorus, and Potassium are all soil nutrients that get tracked as part of the soil and changed in the soil constantly.

Acidity and CEC/Drainage are also tracked in the soil as basic soil stats that aren't likely to change much.  (Putting humus depth here as a separate variable is also floated as an idea if keeping biomass for decomposers is desirable, but it's possible to consolidate it with biomass in general.)

Biological toxicity (this means things like hot fertilizer or leaving corpses on a plant to decompose), Heavy Metal toxicity (magma or other problem materials), and Salinity (irrigating with ocean water or adding ammonia to irrigation) are tracked as pollutants which are basically like bad nutrients.

Beyond that, there's a few stats that are also important, but not actually part of the soil, including energy source (I.E. sunlight available, but could also be if there is the right kind of magic field if we're talking the xenosynthesis stuff, ilke needing to be in a good biome if you're raising sun berries), temperature/climate, pest populations, plant crowding/weeds, and possibly also air quality.  (Air quality being part of an even more advanced concept where caverns need oxygen replenishment so you can't completely seal them off unless you have (magic) oxygen-producing plants underground to scrub your air.)


All of the nutrient-type variables are needed within certain bounds for growth.  (Plants don't grow without water or nitrogen or biomass, but there's an upper bound where you can over-water it, and that hurts growth, too.  There's an inner bound with ideal growth, and an outer bound with growth slowed, and outside those bounds, growth stunts.)

Some plants don't need much biomass/humus depth, but those are mostly grasses that aren't going to produce anything edible to a humanoid.  Most need at least some, and it's treated like a nutrient. 

Of them, specifically, water is obvious - keep throwing more in, but ground covers, low drainage, and deep humus/biomass levels slow its rate of decline. Biomass needs some sort of compost added to it to keep up or else have plants tilled back in or soil-building plants. Nitrogen can have nitrogen fixators help build up levels, or compost, or lant/ammonia.  P and K both just need something externally added, like bonemeal or potash.

Drainage and acidity don't change much unless you do very intensive work on it, like replacing the soil or stirring ground sulfur into the soil. 

Pollutants shouldn't go up much besides maybe bio-toxicity unless you're doing something wrong, and salinity because you're adding in urea/ammonia when irrigating it as additional nitrogen (that's the "manure tea" part wierd was talking about), and they go down slowly as plants can leech things out.  Salty soil needs things like saltgrasses (which are cattle fodder) to leech salinity out, for example.

[winner]

what is biomass as separate from humus? If there are thoughts of combining them there must be details that differ?

So when you add material to be decomposed in your model, it is immediately turned into humus/biomass, but at the same time some biological toxicity is added? And then fairly quickly (like over a season) that biological toxicity goes away?

[wierd]

Technically, "Biomass" is what is above the ground, and "humus" is what is below the ground.

The conversion of one to the other is very inefficient, even in nature. A considerable portion of it is converted into various gasses that escape.

[NW_Kohaku]

what is biomass as separate from humus?

As part of the model, biomass was originally there to represent undecomposed material, like throwing a log or sawdust down as food for decomposers like mushrooms, while humus is fully decomposed and part of the soil. 

To streamline the process a bit, you can consolidate humus into biomass, and just make very high biomass quantities represent undecomposed matter that gets in the way of some plants (sort of like mulch) and very low biomass representing depleted soil that can be washed away.

[winner]

so you have biomass which is the organic material pre composting and you have humus which is it post composting and as it rots it releases some portion of toxins into the soil.

are you planning on modeling the nitrogen that is temporarily used by composting material?

[wierd]

how do you intend to deal with Peat?

Peat is basically just raw humus, from a peat bog. It is often highly acidic, from being saturated in tannins and other organic acids, but is likewise VERY rich in many vital plant nutrients.  Treating it with lime as a chellating agent to bring down the pH into a more sane range, would make it a drop in replacement for compost!

[NW_Kohaku]

so you have biomass which is the organic material pre composting and you have humus which is it post composting and as it rots it releases some portion of toxins into the soil.

are you planning on modeling the nitrogen that is temporarily used by composting material?

Well, proper composting wouldn't be done on a farm plot, but in some sort of composting building/workshop such as a worm farm or something.  (Unless you were putting it in as feed for a decomposer that you would till into the soil.)

However, the idea is that the nitrogen content of an uncomposted fertilizer (like raw manure) would be higher, but add to the toxicity as well as biomass, while adding compost would have less nitrogen and but not add toxicity.

If you do have a decomposer on a farm plot you are adding biomass to (like mushrooms), then it eats through your biomass as it grows, and you could either eat the mushroom (as something you grow basically directly from biomass and water and few, if any, other nutrients) or till it into the soil to build up the soil nutrients like NPK and add a little biomass back.

If biomass and humus are separate things, as biomass decomposes and is eliminated, it adds to humus.  Adding compost just adds to humus, not biomass in this event.  Tilling mushrooms back into the soil would add to both biomass and humus.

It's kind of simpler to think about with them as separate things, but I was also just trying to keep the number of total soil variables down, which is why Drainage and CEC are also just the same linear variable.

how do you intend to deal with Peat?

Peat is basically just raw humus, from a peat bog. It is often highly acidic, from being saturated in tannins and other organic acids, but is likewise VERY rich in many vital plant nutrients.  Treating it with lime as a chellating agent to bring down the pH into a more sane range, would make it a drop in replacement for compost!

I think that may have been included as one of the externally-available fertilizers (like mining for fertilizers, something non-renewable), but yes, I remember peat as being one of the things you could use as an acidity-altering substance, like sulfur and lime.

[winner]

(I think it would be simplest to have a "dig compost" job that turns humus from a stat into an item, when it gets set back down it turns back into a stat.  That way there would  be no fundamental difference between composting on your fields and composting in a pile, just efficiency differences)


In real life the biomass from the previous crop continues to decompose during this years growth.  Because the micro-organisms that decompose this material temporarily lock away nitrogen, adding too much delicious carbon containing material can cause your crop to starve for nitrogen because the decomposers have a population boom.  This nitrogen is released again when the micro organisms die.  As you know this is why the carbon to nitrogen ratio of your raw biological material is so important.

I think your intent is for biological toxicity to modal both this nitrogen starvation and the decomposing organisms acting as facilitative plant pests?

[NW_Kohaku]

(I think it would be simplest to have a "dig compost" job that turns humus from a stat into an item, when it gets set back down it turns back into a stat.  That way there would  be no fundamental difference between composting on your fields and composting in a pile, just efficiency differences)

Sure, it's one way to model it if you want to make compost/humus on a "farm plot" you only use for making compost and then dig it up and move it to a farm plot you actually grow crops on, that's one way of doing it.  I was probably thinking of working it so that you could transfer dirt from one plot to another, but never actually explicitly said it. 

Making compost just explicitly a bag of dirt you can take from one plot and dump on another may potentially help make it possible for different composted items to have different nutrient values for the same amount of humus/biomass you are shoving (which is a positive), but also lead to something of a proliferation of item data (a possibly prohibitive negative).

I think your intent is for biological toxicity to modal both this nitrogen starvation and the decomposing organisms acting as facilitative plant pests?

Nitrogen starvation comes mostly through dropping nitrogen itself.  (The decomposition of biomass would result in less nitrogen from a compost than directly adding hot manure would add before turning into compost.) Biological toxicity comes from bacteria or fungi in the soil (or harmful biological chemicals like directly-applied urea) that are harmful to the growth of the plant, and are usually a result of "hot" manure. 

Or basically, if you think of it in terms of what you add to the soil, hot manure adds more nitrogen but also more biological toxicity, while compost doesn't add as much nitrogen, but neutralizes the toxicity.

[winner]

I'm a little more comfortable with rotting material creating localized infestations of a saprophytic pest that causes incidental damage to living plants, rather than calling it biological toxicity.  The game play effect is about the same, but I enjoy the thought of goblin corpse causing problems because the blood maggots damage plants that grow right next to it rather than thinking it is because as it putrefies it leaks temporary toxins into the soil.  They wouldn't be able to reproduce by eating living plant matter and shouldn't spread but if an infestation of a pest or disease can vary in density I would prefer that they be the reason for biological toxicity.

High levels of nitrogen cause salt toxicity which is why manure tea is one way of using raw manure without as many problems.

[Draco18s]

The issue, is that the optimization that is optimal for the site, is only optimal FOR THAT SITE. That is how nature WORKS. It establishes and maintains local maxima, based on the available nutrients, and set physics.

* Draco18s phases out of the conversation

[Tsuchigumo550]

I feel it's better to post here rather than on the fourm itself because it's probably been discussed before, and it's a subset of this farming expansion.

Crossbreeding and Variation In Plants:
A system where plants can be cross-bred and cross-pollinated as well as have differences between plant.
For instance, a Plump Helmet Spawn may wind up producing two Plump Helmets, none at all, low-quality ones, etc.

Though, the meat of this post, and the one I thought out:
Cross Pollenation would have it's own workshop: taking two types of seeds or spawns available and then adding time (a dwarf will be laboring, so not a full growth cycle) to produce a new type of seed. Currently impossible, i believe, due to the way plants work along with the game in general, but if we get to a point of random-generated plants, and creation of a workshop that would take and blend raw tags together, new plants could be created.

Let's say two of these new plants, Silverwheat and Sky Grain.

Sky Grain is a plant that, by lore, grows 12 feet tall. It's a part of the Wheat family.
Silverwheat is a wheat that is somewhat valuable, and makes good beer.
Both are brewable, and make mid-high class booze
Both are edible ingredients, of mid-high quality
Sky Grain grows 2-3 tiles tall, Silverwheat 1.
Sky Grain is lightblue, Silverwheat is Silver.

The plants can be crossbred 3:1, 2:1, 1:1, 1:2, or 1:3.
For instance:
Sky Grain 3:1 Silverwheat
Results in something like "Sky Wheat" where most properties of Sky Grain are retained, but some are slightly altered, such as color, growth height.

Sky Grain 1:2 Silverwheat.
This one is weighted to Silverwheat, but not as sharply. Most of the properties will be closer to Silverwheat, but the influence of Sky Grain is evident.
Midnight Berries: A poisonous (nervous necrosis,paralysis) edible plant. Grows mostly on 1-2 tile long vines. Low quality for everything, can make dye.
Suzu Flower: A yellow flower that's edible, brewable, and can be made into dye. Fair quality, and causes slight nausea if eaten (not brewed.)

Mixing them 1:1 could result in something like this: A flowering, berry-producing plant where the berries grow from the flowers. The flowers grow on vines, and they are a mixed yellow-purple pattern. The berries are a dark purple, and if eaten, cause nausea and paralysis, and can cause necrosis. They can be brewed and made into a dye (light purple), the beer is of mid-low quality, and the plant itself is a 1-2 tile vine.

[NW_Kohaku]

Crossbreeding and Variation In Plants:

Crossbreeding was actually mentioned a couple pages back, and Wierd popped in then with something relevant to how you are setting this up...

Basically, if you allow for straight-up crossbreeding like this, it opens up the door to nigh-infinite permutations of every crop in the game.  Each new crossbred seed would need its own data or else it would have to be algorithmically constructed every time the game needed to access information about it.  This can, again, lead to a cascade of item data.

You might want to look at the Alchemic Property Tokens thread I wrote for one way I proposed getting around this for all reactions in general where you combine materials.  It relies upon the notion that you build passable tokens that are modifiers of a simple default material, and reactions are simply ways to create new shapes for materials or combine properties from different materials.  (It's like crossbreeding for everything.)  The idea there is that it makes things easier to combine algorithmically by simply having tokens that may or may not be passed.

Doing this makes data on all materials being produced algorithmically more possible, and also more generally requires all materials having their data algorithmically constructed.

[SirHoneyBadger]

I hope you're happy, NW_Kohaku. I didn't manage to read more than a third of the first page of this damned thread, before I realized that I'm going to have to mod all of it into the game. There go 2 years of my life I haven't lived yet, and I'm not even going to get to miss them.

I'll read the rest of it later, and doom myself gleefully by taking lots of notes.

[jseah]

I propose a change (for later) with respect to xenosynthesis and magical biomes. 

The standard nutrients and pollutants are no longer differentiated into well, nutrients and pollutants.  They're just stats.  Some plants like certain combinations, and some dislike them.  Who knows, a magic plant might find nitrogen poisonous and want exactly zero of it. 

Anyway, sunlight is special, but the other energy sources from magical biomes can be tracked as a nutrient/stat/pollutant.  Assuming you're trying to grow sunberries, they use the 'good'ness in the soil and (presumably) make 'good'ness by making the area around them a bit more 'good'.  Or perhaps events are required to restore magical energy levels or a keystone artifact/natural formation. 

In any case, it is obvious that 'evil'ness levels in the soil will act as pollutants for sunberries and as nutrients for silver barbs.