Material Ash

[Brygun]

Dear Saami,

How about instead of having fires burn out to leave 'ash' as something that can be picked up. Perhaps with some ratio to the amount of wood burned. Ash as in the remains from a burned fire.

Not sure what the ratio of burned stuff to ash should be. (possible research assist )

This could lead to change in how agriculture fertilizing is done. Rather than needing to make a fire at every tile you could bring over the ash.

Ash as resource now becomes something modders can use in other construction

It also means you might have a role-play chore of cleaning out your cabin's fireplace.

There is some risk of data bloating though as every fire you make travelling leaves ash. I've not yet thought of a suitable logic process for removing excess ash. You would want to make it possible to store ash so that farmers could make a winter stockpile for putting on the fields in the summer or that crafter's could store for use.

One different approach would be to harvest a burned out fire to give you some ash. Tile then shows a 'harvested' burned out fire. However, if you relight a fire on the same place how would you record more ash being there?

[PALU]

UrW uses slash-and-burn farming for a reason. The usage of fertilizing (and crop rotation, as well as fallow periods) were much later developments and were certainly not known in backwards parts of the world at the UrW time line. The issue with the current system is that it doesn't decrease the crop yield over time (I believe that's planned), requiring new plots every few years.

[Brygun]

One thing in the current system is the amount of wood to make your 'burnt out fire' spot isn't considered. You can burn a whole tree and still get just one tile. Current protocol I use is to make up firewoods and burn them in clusters of ~10.

The ground still need to have the burnt out fire on it to turn it into a farming tile. Really though the ash could be left in place a long time, barring wind/rain/animals, and still be usable.

I still haven't tried scattering tinder through the woods for a large scale forest fire. The result in game right now is that the 'ash' of the burnt out fire is gone before you can process more than ~10 tiles. TMU slash and burn is burn down an acre then over days turn over the ash.

[PALU]

The UrW mechanics for slash-and-burn means you need to use some techniques that aren't realistic to do it because of the restriction on how quickly you'd have to convert the land.

My current protocol is to clear cut the future farming area during the winter and move the trunks/logs out of the way and then place branches in 9 tile long rows with one empty tile in between the rows in 9*9 patterns. I then set fire to one row and return to the start to process the soil (the first tile has burned out when the last one is done). Most days two such rows can be processed. Why 9*9? When harvesting you have to process tiles one tile away, which means you can reach 3 tiles in front of you, so I can just move along the center of a 3*9 stretch, and 9*9 is symmetric. It can be noted, though, that UrW village farming areas consist of individual plots scattered throughout the area, possibly where trees once stood.

If I were to do it in a somewhat realistic fashion, I'd cover the whole area with branches (not cutting any trees beforehand, at least not in the area, but possibly beyond to limit the spread of fire) and set fire to one end, letting the fire spread and then spend weeks processing the soil, but that's currently not possible with UrW's model.