What about mundane surface farming that doesn't rely on magic? Would all plants necessarily be magical?
This seems like it could be a lot of fun. My main concern is that it might shift the focus of the game too much toward agriculture/magic spheres.
This is a spin-off thread of the
Improved Farming, Rebooted: Violate the Earth! thread. "Mundane" farming is already pretty extensively covered over there in a way that intends to be as accurate to real-life farming as possible without requiring players get a degree in soil science to figure out what is going on. The problem is that caverns are just plain magical, and as such, magical farming systems are logically demanded.
To an extent, the point really IS to make agriculture more of a focus of the game, at least to the degree that the player wants to let agriculture become a focus, since farming is just simply too shallow a system as it stands, without forcing players to spend more time on farming than they really want to if all they want to do is kill things and ignore as many other systems in the game as they can get away with.
With that said, I'm actually trying to create a sort of "suggestions web" of several interwoven steps that can be taken to make DF a game with less of a learning plateau and complexity and bredth in gameplay without any depth to that bredth, and to add more depth to the game's many different component pieces, and work the game to having more end-game complexity and challenge instead of just providing an upfront "hump" you have to clear before the game ceases to be any challenge, and just lets you play around.
Improved Farming will involve the lumber, fishing, hunting, ranching, farming, herbalism, cooking, and brewing all within its purview. I haven't made any thread of my own on it, but the
Abundance of Resources thread covers mineral and metal wealth, and how its complexity can be improved and given more depth.
Class Warfare involves making dwarven societies, and the tragically shallow "happiness" meter more complex. These three fields of Soil, Stone, and Dwarves represent the three major internal concerns/resources that players can concern themselves with.
The upcoming Caravan and Army and eventual Kingdom arcs all make matters external to the fortress more complex and compelling, as does the reworking of Siege mechanics. I am working on my own thread on making this more complex, but
Dwarven Imperialism is what I am using as a starting point in that endeavor.
For the dedicated megaproject builder, however, the best place to look is the legendary
Improved Mechanics thread.
So yes, I'm trying to make the game have more ability to focus upon agriculture/magic, but there are a great many different things that DF players can focus on, based upon their personally favored style of play.
(Oh, and I'm
also planning on doing an Alchemy thread after this that would involve combining some of these magical flora and farming into creating more practical solutions to dwarven problems. When we have an expanded farming system that can make certain kinds of plants prohibitively difficult to cultivate, while basic food is relatively easy to grow, we can then start talking about alchemical components that use base plants or difficult-to-raise creatures being able to create really powerful effects because being able to create that sort of alchemical mixture represents a signficant investment in time, dwarven labor, and resources. So, a military player might just train plenty of replacement dwarves with harsh training to handle difficult recurring seiges, while farmer/alchemist players would respond to a difficult seige with catapults loaded with glass spheres filled with a napalm-like oil that burns on contact with air. The basic gist of it is that different systems having more demanding complexity to master would not interfere with the different playstyles of different players.)
Wow... what a complex answer to a simple question. But yeah, I am writing a lot and doing a lot because I think that, in a sense, DF is starting to paint itself into a corner where it can't really expand itself as a game without first revisiting some of its basic concepts, and putting in some depth to its more meaningless numbers so that there is real meaningful difference in the things that are to be put in compared to the things that have come before.