Lots of good stuff is wandering through the game this week as we finish a bunch more systems and lurch towards The Great Content-ing:
– Immigration is in – bands of migrants will arrive, ranging from people for your work crews to upper class capitalists and the wretched Aristocracy. (Not implemented yet: the jolly Population Dispersal Zeppelin.) This is implemented handily via our newly-finished event system from a few weeks back; other random events that can happen at present are wretched Novyrus peddlers and Invasions From The Deep.
– Various screens are being implemented, and David is sending them back to me with lots of jolly comments about how terrible they look.
– On the technical front, good progress is being made on the loading and saving front, using a plaintext save-file format (actually, more XML) which will hopefully alleviate some of the problems with the binary approach we used with Dredmor.
But what I actually want to talk to you about today is farming. Inspired by the fact that our citizens have had nothing to eat but berries and the occasional hunk of meat scavenged off of an auroch for the past eight months, we decided to implement farming this week.
To create a farm, you use our new “zoning” mechanism designed for things that are not buildings, but are still constructions. These currently include stockpiles, farms, graveyards, pasture lands, and garbage dumps – so all your favorite zones from similar titles. Overseers and work crews arrive on the farm, till the soil, and plant seeds.
After a little time:
It’s a homely, homely opium farm.
And we’ve grown opium poppies. Excellent! Other commodities that you can grow at present include:
– wheat, for bread, beer, or grain alcohol;
– grapes, for wine and vinegar;
– cabbages for sauerkraut, the Stahlmarkian Treat;
– tea, tobacco and coffee, for Stimulation of the Creative Mind and trading back to the Empire;
– various sorts of fruit trees for consumption, distillation or juicing;
– Selenian Fungal Polyps
David sent me this in the original ticket. I’m not totally sure what to do with it.
Crops have different patterns that they grow in on a field, and different delay times. All of this is in one EDB file so that artists can easily add new types of crops with their own stages. Note that the blending on the ground isn’t completed yet; because zones render on top of the landscape, they need additional code to correctly blend their edges and interact with our deferred renderer. All things in all time, though.
Also note the presence of a poet weeping in the field of poppies, and a chicken eating opium.
Most agricultural goods require some sort of secondary processing to get the most worth out of them. Right now the three workshops that can process agricultural goods are the bakery, the distillery, and the chemist. Wheat can be processed into bread at a bakery, and beer or grain alcohol at a distillery; raw opium can be processed into healthful Laudanum at a chemist’s workshop, where chemists make Laudanum, gunpowder, and… well, that’s it at present. Grain alcohol or wine can then be further fermented at the distillery to create vinegar, which can be combined with salt for pickling things (pickles, fungi, soldiers).
TL;DR: Basically, we now have farmer’s markets or something.
Wow that google image search for “Selenian Fungal Polyps” was surprisingly tame!
Down on the farm where the plowmen meet, the machines play till by numbers…
Pickle brine is a tasty water substitute.
Oh, but of course, to say nothing of hangover remedy!
…it always comes back to Novyrus with some people.
Opium AND gunpowder? Wow, the chemist’s sounds exciting! Clearly, you also need silk, khat and bhang, to round out the historical-drug-use combination and to make the opium dens as swank as possible!
I don’t know what you have planned for the chemist, but Historical chemistry has many things that you could include, but they may not fit with the direction of the game. One is Carbolic Acid AKA Phenol.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phenol
Reading my great, great grandmother’s journal, we found that Carbolic acid was often used a hundred years ago and you would go to the local chemist to buy the stuff. It would be mixed with things like bees wax and Camphor.
Another is Camphor
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camphor
Scroll down to small doses/Large Doses to see if any of those things could fit in the game and add ‘fun’.
Both of these could have some useful in-game uses. Phenol was used as a cheap antiseptic… could be a helpful product for your Barber/Surgeon. Also it was used in certain cosmetic products, which are precisely the sort of luxury goods that Aristocrats might demand when they start showing up.
Camphor also could have some interesting game applications. It was used as an anti-rusting agent (lots of machinery/tools in the game already) and for sweets (again, a possible luxury good).
It was also used as a moth repellent. Which would only be helpful in the Highly Unlikely event that a swarm of giant flesh eating moths make an appearance.
Are you planning on adding a brewery for beer (since beer isn’t distilled), or are you just going to have all alcoholic beverages produced at the distillery for simplicity’s sake?
We’re erring on the side of simplicity, to start. There are such a tremendous number of processes required to make everything that we need to collect related categories into workshops so a colony can operate without a hundred specialized industries, even if that may be how it’d actually work.
So, yeah, there’s one workshop where stuff is turned into booze.
Very belated reply here, but I just wanted to say thanks for answering my question. Though I am a beer nut and think it would be cool to have a separate brewery, I realize that things would quickly get out of hand and understand the need for streamlining. As long as we have beer, I’ll be a happy camper.
Two things you mentioned in this post – zones and gunpowder – have neatly combined in my head into a minefield. Do it; “the mines are in here somewhere” seems entirely appropriate.
I suppose I could see this game getting a ‘T’ rating for all the booze and poppies and dangerous amounts of sauerkraut.
Allow me to be the first in line to pre-pre-order the Wheat Pack DLC.
Wheat –> Miller –> Flour –> Baker –> Bread
Wheat –> Distillery –> Delicious Wheat Beer
But, regardless of my above Dorfy nit-picking, I’m SUPER PLEASED WITH EVERY UPDATE FOR THIS GAME.
but will there be alcohol with fermented cogs, wherein one may “drink the cog” (and presumably thereafter wear a torso covering announcing such action had taken place)?
Woud it be possibel to make zones fore por slum pelope were they can build there smal huts of old TNT boxes and wathewer they coud find. Becuse tere is allways slum districkts were por pelope build in totalt mess and it woud feel wrong if the player coud Control this so a zone woud be god like in sim city.