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[Zoomulator]

So our dwarves run around eating and eating, but then what? I figured a mod that would add required excrement handling would be interesting. So I started searching for how to possibly modify stains like mud or blood, or even modify liquids. How ever, they don't seem to be anything for it in the raw files so I'm pretty lost.

Since I have no experience in modding DF anyway, and so on, I thought I'd throw my idea out there:

- Dwarves get the need to go to the loo.
- Pit zones could be assigned as latrines.
- Large amounts of excrement cause disease amongst the dwarves, and cause bad smell.
- Running water can be used to transfer the sewage elsewhere.
- Large sewage areas may spawn ratmen or other scary stuff.
- Maybe possible to use excrement as fertilizer after some treatment.

Such a system would require you to build additional infrastructure, providing more challenges for your grand fortresses.

Anyone got an idea how to create this, or is the ideas too low level to be easily modded? Other thoughts?

[Grimlocke]

Bluntly said, cant be done. Way out of reach for raw modding.

[Zoomulator]

I was afraid of this.

Any thoughts of it as a feature suggestion in the game then?

[Lord Vetinari]

It's somewhere (quite high, if I remember well) in the eternal suggestion list. You may add your vote.
As far as I know, no words from Toady about that.

[Max White]

Sometimes you get tired of the same old song and dance, so let's mix it up a little.
Sung to the tune of my heart will go on.

Every day in the forums
I see you, I click you
And I think why must this go on

If not on the wiki
Try the sticky, please
And then your suggestion can't go wrong

Near, far, wherever you are
I believe that you should know the rules
Once more we go through this crap
And I'm here in your thread
And I'm telling you, this shit can't go on.

Please, no more of sewers
We've heard it, we've been there
Now lets never go there again

Sorry if your behind
But this debate, has gona stale
And is on eternal suhhestions
Near, far, wherever you are
I believe that you should know the rules
Once more we go through this crap
And I'm here in your thread
And I'm telling you, this shit can't go on.

Now lock this
Or your taking the piss
And I know that tomorrow, we go again
I'll stay, forever this way
Telling people they they just
Should not try, to go on and on

[Solace]

I believe it's officially "too gross" (although rotting corpses aren't). However, after the magic/alchemy/industry type things are added, there could be "waste management" in general, so maybe if it was nonspecific like that it could get in.

[NW_Kohaku]

As Max_White has said, there have been many threads on this before. 

This is the largest, longest-running, and the one with a high ranking in the ESV, AFAIK: http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=52643.0

Also,
From a Reddit article:

I like fertilizer, animal tracking and sewers. I dislike potty breaks. This is an example of realism that I think has a lot of potential for trouble. Potty breaks in adventure mode might be realistic, but there are immersion issues there. He he he, I mean in the sense of the player being kicked out of their groove. The other kind of immersion wouldn't be so bad, because sewers are common adventure environments. In dwarf mode, dwarves already take a lot of time out for self-maintenance, and this would be a more senseless kind, compared to something like eating.

[Funburns]

I hesitate to suggest this, since I'd prefer my dwarves to use nuclear fission for their digestive needs until (if...) a more detailed system is properly added to the game, but I think you can hack together a simulated waste and sewage system with a bit of imagination-stretching. The basic principle is stolen from some plans for an automatic quantum dumping machine, wherein the operating chamber is replaced with a stockpile. There are several points where I'm not sure if this works due to my never having had nor wanted to build this.

What you'd do is mod in a 1x1 workshop that either consumes nothing but dwarven time and labor or a single unit of food. This workshop would create a unit of "waste," which would sit in the shop and be used for nothing. It could rapidly or immediately begin to spew miasma.

The important part is how to automate the disposal system. You could create a 1x1 room, sandwiched between a door, a waste catchment pit and a pump to simulate a flush toilet. There would need to be a long corridor infront of the room, in which lay a carefully designed mechanism to ensure that a dwarf would only trigger the automatic flush system when it was walking AWAY from the water closet. This system would cause water to flow from the pump next to the toilet into the catchment pit. As long as the water flowing over the workshop is not 7/7 deep, it should cause object-moving flow to occur, pushing the waste into the pit.

Code: [Select]

water╔═╗
 ┌-- ║·║ <-- Chute to clean water cistern
 v   ║%║ ^ pump
╔════╝%║ | direction
║·%%‼╥·║ <-- Chute to waste catchment
╚═══╦┼═╩═══════════════════════
  ->║++++++++>+^╞═══════════╡^+
pump╚══════════════════════════
direction    4 3      2      1
‼ = vertical bars prevent anything from following the dwarf in and standing here, as a stand-in for whatever it takes to allow the water to spread so it's not 7/7 deep and thus has flow
╥ = porcelain throne

The player would queue up a "Disposal" job in the water closet. A dwarf would feel the need, and subsequently walk over the entry pressure plate (1), causing the bridge (2) to open and drop the dwarf one zee-level down, in a short tunnel leading back in to the main tunnel by way of the stairs (4) placed beyond the second pressure plate (3) to ensure the flushing mechanism would not be triggered while the dwarf was present.

The dwarf would use the modded-in reaction to generate a particle of waste in the water closet's 1x1 workshop building (╥), then leave. On the way back, the dwarf would trip the flushing mechanism (3) and safely walk over the bridge (2), since the bridge would not be connected to the flushing mechanism. Tripping the bridge trigger (1) on the way back is not an issue since there should only ever be one dwarf in the loo at any given time.

When the exiting dwarf flushes this device by stepping on (3), a screw pump (left of the john) activates and sends a small amount of water, somehow properly measured so as to ensure it does not exceed 6/7 water units and thus has the property of flow. This would push the miasmatic filth into the catchment pit. The water in the pit would then be drained somehow, perhaps by an additional pump.

Reasons this may not work well:

• I'm not sure if items generated in a workshop will be subject to the push effect of water flow. This one's a dealbreaker. If items can't be water-pushed out of the workshop they were generated in, the only alternative is to have a dwarven waste shoveler... the least impressive solution. Or you could persuade some goblin captives to do this for you.
• There may be numerous circumstances where creatures could follow the dwarf in and stay there (make the entry/exit corridor longer to increase the likelihood they'd follow the dwarf out in time).
• Getting water flow to behave predictably may be troublesome. If this is a problem, it may be remedied with sufficient space and redundant flush pumps hooked up to the pipe focusing the same "workshop," so you can get probability on your side. Eventually one of the flushes would flow the waste item into the catchment pit.
• Dwarves would need to be told to "relieve" themselves via job queueing. This could be set to repeat and made to require a unit of food, though this would be a pointless loss of (trivially produced) food items, and one dwarf would end up being the only one using the restroom for an entire year.

Of course, even if none of the above is too much of a problem, the dwarven flush toilet would still be about as useful as an extraordinarily smelly, ugly and complicated temple to Armok, with none of the screaming evil priests, chained ravenous horrors and pentagrams drawn in blood. ... Please.

[sockless]

We'd need to have diseases implemented better as a start to this. Also the dispersion of contaminants needs to be better, otherwise the only way to get rid of the waste is to chuck it in a river and wait for it to flow away, which is a problem if your map doesn't have a river.

[NW_Kohaku]

We'd need to have diseases implemented better as a start to this. Also the dispersion of contaminants needs to be better, otherwise the only way to get rid of the waste is to chuck it in a river and wait for it to flow away, which is a problem if your map doesn't have a river.

Technically, chucking it in the river and hoping it just floats away is how sewers historically worked before the past couple centuries.  Otherwise, you created a cesspool.  Basically, just a low-lying pit for all the sewage ditches to run to.  And they would overflow and potentially flood low-lying neighborhoods in heavy rain.  Fun times.

Dwarves would probably just dispose of their waste into magma, though.

Of course, there's always the fertilizer uses if we get the farming improvements.

[idgarad]

We'd need to have diseases implemented better as a start to this. Also the dispersion of contaminants needs to be better, otherwise the only way to get rid of the waste is to chuck it in a river and wait for it to flow away, which is a problem if your map doesn't have a river.

Technically, chucking it in the river and hoping it just floats away is how sewers historically worked before the past couple centuries.  Otherwise, you created a cesspool.  Basically, just a low-lying pit for all the sewage ditches to run to.  And they would overflow and potentially flood low-lying neighborhoods in heavy rain.  Fun times.

Dwarves would probably just dispose of their waste into magma, though.

Of course, there's always the fertilizer uses if we get the farming improvements.

Last I checked humans historically used animal waste as fertilizer, not there own. There are issues with using human waste on human food. If dwarfs need to crap then that should apply to livestock also. Using livestock waste as fertilizer, perhaps even methane (gas fueled lamps anyone?)

[NW_Kohaku]

Last I checked humans historically used animal waste as fertilizer, not there own. There are issues with using human waste on human food. If dwarfs need to crap then that should apply to livestock also. Using livestock waste as fertilizer, perhaps even methane (gas fueled lamps anyone?)

Two words: Night Soil.

Also, humanure for the modern equivalent.

Medieval and ancient peasants often had very few livestock, since it was much less efficient as a means of producing food to grow food then feed it to an animal then eat the animal than it was to just eat the food you grow on a field.  (Yes, eating the same foods over and over lead to nutritional problems, but that's why there's beri beri.)

Yes, there are issues with it, but they just dealt with those issues - all the crops typically had to be boiled down to mush to be sure that you killed all the E-coli that came from using human manure. 

Enjoy your three months of unseasoned turnip gruel every Winter, since things like turnips are the only foods that grow in the cold of late Autumn, and you have to eat all your food heavily cooked to avoid disease.

Thing is, Medieval and Ancient farms were used to the absolute breaking point.  The populations of the world expanded until it hit the absolute cap placed on their societies by their capacity to produce food.  Every time a farmer had children, the farm would be subdivided and subdivided to accomidate leaving some field for their children until eventually farms were so small that there was no way to divide the farms any smaller without condemning all the future farmers of that land to death. At that point, the younger kids were just kicked off the farm, and told to get a job as an apprentice craftsman or something.

There was simply not enough fertilizer to keep the farms working without using human waste as a fertilizer source.  So yes, it was used.  Animal waste was used whenever possible, of course, but they couldn't be that picky when they were faced with the very real possibility of starvation every single year.  Part of the reason that Lent (in early Spring) is the season of traditionally going austere and eating less is because there was typically much less to eat until the first harvests could finally start bearing fruit.  In Japan, there's the saying "There are seven gods in every grain of rice" (referring to seven different rice gods), meaning that it is an affront to their entire religion to waste a single grain of rice, food had to be so carefully rationed to make sure they saw the year through.

It's also why the Black Death was ironically one of the best things to ever happen to the people who actually survived it - so many of their neighbors were dead, so much land was unclaimed that they suddenly could consolidate many of the farms, and they didn't have to worry about going hungry anymore.  They could even spend land on growing grapes or livestock, and expand their diet to better wines and meats.  It also freed up much of the labor to be able to pursue other pursuits than just trying to survive the Winter, and is credited with directly contriubuting to the emergence of the Rennaisance.

[Sonlirain]

Sewers? The would be a nice addition to any fort imo. Just shorten the sleep/eat/drink breaks so the dwarves will spend an equall ammout of time for self care. (unless you plan the fortress wrong and they have a long way to the loo).

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

[anon_outlaw]

i actually kinda built a sewer system for an above ground fort, it was a aqueducts carved out underneath all of the roads with dozens of wells around the city.

[catoblepas]

Excrement, night soil, filth etc would be a nice addition to DF. It would add new ways to fertilize crops, and would make hygiene and fortress planning more important. If diseases and infection get implemented to a higher degree at some point in the future, I would hope that some form of waste to be introduced. Besides, if the 'tavern for visiting adventurers' suggestion ever gets implemented, we'd have some place for adventurers to poke around in besides the underground, since we all know adventurers like to poke around sewers killing rats.