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:

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

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.