[A17] Rainbeau's Fertile Fields

[SpaceDorf]

Might be better for your own sanity

What is this "sanity" you speak of?

Overrated  That's what it is ..

[dburgdorf]

Fertile Fields has been updated yet again:

- There are now two types of sandbags. Standard sandbags are made with cloth and sand, while heavy sandbags are more durable, and are made with leather instead of cloth.

- Corrected a stupid mistake that was causing all rock chunks created by stone to rocky dirt terraform actions to be granite.

[moonra]

I don't seem to have recipes to get rid of mud, everything else is working fine, I think, but nothing to or from mud.

[SpaceDorf]

Marshy Soil removes Mud ..
you get it after you research terraforming ( i think .. maybe as soon as farming was enough ..  )

( told you rainbeau .. its confusing )

[dburgdorf]

OK, SpaceDorf, I finally had a chance to really look at your post from last week about marsh, marshy soil, and mud, and I think I can address your concerns as follows:

(1) I'll remove mud from the "marsh -> marshy soil" terraform. In retrospect, that was an odd place to put it, anyway.

(2) I'll add a "soil -> marshy soil" terraform that gains you 1 pile of dirt. (This is the flip side of the "marshy soil -> soil" terraform that already exists, and costs 1 dirt and 1 fertilizer.)

(3) I'll make mud an optional step between soil and marshy soil, with the following new terraforms: "mud -> marshy soil" (gain 1 dirt), "marshy soil -> mud" (cost 1 dirt), "mud -> soil" (cost 1 fertilizer), "soil -> mud" (no cost or gain).

On a side note, I'd never considered that anyone might actually want to make mud. You're the first to ever suggest to me that it might be desirable to do so.

(4) I'll add a "marsh -> soil" terraform that will cost 2 dirt and 2 fertilizer, for those who don't want to bother turning marsh to marshy soil and *then* to regular soil.

I think that'll take care of all of your "itches." 

[Mufflamingo]

Its not really confusing. Its not that hard when you get used to it. In my first playthrough yeah I got overwhelmed but after a while I got used to it. 

[SpaceDorf]

On a side note, I'd never considered that anyone might actually want to make mud. You're the first to ever suggest to me that it might be desirable to do so.

Must have been my inner child that noticed how useful mud is. I have to admit I never really noticed how useful mud is as a soil type before I compared them so thouroughly.
The actual usefulness of the mud is still bound to your mod, though. If I could not remove or create every soil type whereever I wanted there would be no use to mud at all.

Also Fertile Fields is the first mod that really slowed down my building progress. Turning everything piece of ground into rocky dirt before I build on it needs a lot of time and storage space.
build

I think that'll take care of all of your "itches." 

I think it does.  A mod special tailored to my wishes ..

[moonra]

There's no way to make smart recipes like "Turn to Marsh" that would know the amount of materials and work it'd need to that from whichever terrain you put it on, right? That would make this mod soooo much less confusing.

[Canute]

No, this would require alot more recipes for the teraform menu.
You would need a recipe for each possible terraintype to turn into Marsh.
And since this shouldn't be only just for Marsh, you need the same for Soil and all other types.
Thats why you just can terraform to the next step.
And if you did that a few times you get a feeling about it.

[SpaceDorf]

I wrote something longer, but deleted it, it started to make no sense anymore.

The short of it was : I think technically it is possible. But the effort required to implement this outweighs the use the option had. Furthermore the solution would be slow and possibly lead to memory or calculation crashes.

[moonra]

No, it would reduce the amount of recipes on the Terraform menu, instead of the "Marsh from Soil", "Marsh from Marshy Soil" and "Marsh from Shallow Water" we have right now it would simply be "Turn to Marsh". The Terraform menu would have about a dozen recipes instead of the 27 it has now.

I'm not saying this would be easy or feasible, of course, I know nothing about programming.

[dburgdorf]

No, it would reduce the amount of recipes on the Terraform menu....

You can reduce the number of icons on the Terraform menu right now, simply by installing Fluffy's "ArchitectSense" mod. If that's installed, the Terraform menu, instead of including one icon for each possible transformation, will contain just one icon for each destination terrain, with submenus to determine which terrain type you're switching from. 

(I realize that's not as neat as what you're asking for, but what you're asking for -- a completely dynamic system that could determine the costs, etc., of the destination terrain based on the terrain you select to build on -- would require far more custom coding than I'm comfortable trying to tackle.)

[SpaceDorf]

No, it would reduce the amount of recipes on the Terraform menu, instead of the "Marsh from Soil", "Marsh from Marshy Soil" and "Marsh from Shallow Water" we have right now it would simply be "Turn to Marsh". The Terraform menu would have about a dozen recipes instead of the 27 it has now.

I'm not saying this would be easy or feasible, of course, I know nothing about programming.

Thats what Canute and I tried to explain .. with to much techno-babble I guess.

So here is the long version I deleted before in a hopefully coherent manner :

You would still require a minimal amount of buttons for each groundtype you have to change the ground below into this.
But instead of placing the recipe ( thats what it is called in the def files ) for turning one ground type into another by hand,
the computer has to look up the recipe ( or calculate it ) in real time, while you are dragging the area you want to convert.

The size of the  lookup table for the calculations or recipies ( which Rainbeau would have to create by hand ) would be the (number of ground types) squared .. while the numbers of calculating the correct recipie also increase by the size of the area you are dragging ( and be honest .. most areas are squares .. )

which gives us an algorithm that has to work with a number of steps that increase by the exponent of 4 .. in realtime, if unpaused while calculating everything else .. ,

Which brought me to my conclusion : slow, possibly unstable by overextending processing recourses and way to much effort for to little gain.

[moonra]

Thats what Canute and I tried to explain .. with to much techno-babble I guess.

Ah, yeah, he said "recipes FOR the terraform menu" but I read it as "recipes IN the terraform menu", my bad.

I'll definitely give the Architect Sense mod a try, I had heard about it but didn't look it up.

Aaaand also my bad for not really seeing the "Place on marshy soil OR mud", too many recipes there, easy to miss it.

[dburgdorf]

Fertile Fields has been updated again:

- Mud is now an optional step between soil and marshy soil; both of those terrains can be converted to mud, and mud can be converted to either of them.

- It is now possible to convert marsh directly to soil, instead of having to do it with marshy soil as an intermediate step.

- Added a herringbone pattern brick floor for a bit of variety.

- Replaced the code-based deletion of VG items with XML patches. On the down side, if you're using "Vegetable Garden," your log file will now be spammed when you load the game with yellow "def-linked translation error" warning messages. On the up side, the VG items I want deleted should now actually stay deleted.