All of this will likely require a lot of work. That's the point of my asking for help. If I thought I could plausibly do this myself, in a reasonably short amount of time, I probably would, since it would make consistency and quality-control easier tasks.
I just want it clear that I fully understand the work involved here, possibly better than most, since I've already completed some truly gargantuan projects for Dwarf Fortress, and am still working on even larger ones, years after starting them. (check out my 'Multitudinous Vermin' mod, for instance.).
You can add reactions only to a small list of workshops, but create unlimited new ones.
Would you mind clarifying that statement, please?
Is it possible to add unlimited new
reactions, or unlimited new
workshops?
Another "problem" I see is that most of your proposed changes have no merit for the player. For example this: (etc)
I have to strongly disagree, atleast in theory, but please keep in mind that this is only one small facet of what I'm trying to accomplish.
But here are some reasons why it's not an
unimportant facet:
Hunting, fishing, and managing of animals are each arguably much more involved, challenging, and interesting than growing food with farms right now, and salt has historically been one of the most highly prized, useful, and highly traded, substances on Earth, and has been the focus of many very interesting points in history--politics, art, wars (and peace), even religion and philosophy have all been affected by salt and it's properties.
The two (meat and salt) go hand-in-hand very nicely, as they do in real life.
Eating rocks (and salt is a rock) is certainly "dwarfy", and if humans eat salt as extensively as we do, on average, then it stretches believability to suppose dwarfs would not.
Also, if we're going to have a much more extensive economy, that's rebuilt pretty much from the ground up, then preserved foods certainly deserve a place in that economy, considering that they have been an extremely important part of human economics, and human survival, from the stone age, and continuing.
They involve a lot of different facets of the game, they're scalable, in that they can involve just a few, or very many, resources and processes, and they intrinsically are atleast partially self-balancing (trying to get rich selling megabeast bacon is by it's very nature not typically an easy task).
Fishing would gain significant potential importance, and butchering would likely become more central, considering that it's already fairly "fleshed-out" (the pun was unavoidable).
There should also be quite a bit that can be done food preservation that can help set up some of the groundwork for how other resources/processes, and Value, will be handled and systemized, and modding this in should serve both starting Fortresses, and advanced ones.