Mythruna

One of the fun parts of this game is getting to do the research into different period-level technologies.

For example, the other night I was interested in what an iron smelting "building" might look like in case I could easily create one for my little AI tester.  This led down some interesting searches and I eventually ended up at medieval blast furnaces.  Incredibly low-tech (but high on lore) way of extracting iron from ore.  It's very interesting and apparently there are some places where people still try to run one of these for education/research... they even had some pictures/video.

It was also reassuring that my numbers on how much iron a basic smelter can produce from ore was not too far off... and the labor involved was at least Mythruna-realistic.

That brings us to the farm.  I spent some time googling trying to come up with some nice numbers for how many people a Mythruna farm can feed.  There are no straight answers and anyway I have the right to throw them out.  I only have to be Mythruna-realistic.

One guy was doing some similar research and had posted a blog about it.  He'd heard a quote that it takes 2 acres of wheat to feed one person for a year.  That's not a good number for me because 2 acres is about 8100 blocks... the equivalent of about 8 strongholds.  Just to feed one person.

On the other side, I looked up how a modern farm produces and came up with a number that a modern US farm can produce 9000 lbs of corn per acre.  This works out to be about 1 kg per square meter... 1 kg per block.

This sent me to the local grocery store web site where I could read about corn packaging and "serving size".  (Just yet another strange site to hit on my quest.)  2 lbs of corn would have 10 "servings" according to the box.  If we pretend that a "serving" is a meal to a Mythruna villager than that means that 1 block serves 10 meals.

If you have a town of 30 people that need 3 meals a day... that's 90 meals per day.  2520 meals per mythruna-month... so 10080 per mythruna-year.  So if a farmer only grew one crop a year then that means the farm only has to be 1008 blocks.  That's smaller than a stronghold (1024).

Obviously none of the above is "realistic" to real life.  Heck, a Mythruna year is already only 1/3rd of a real life year and trees will grow to maturity in only one year.  But this was my sort of "minimum logical bound".

The "minimum logical bound" is basically fudging to the most fantasy-extreme while still having a logical progression for getting there.  In this case, the lower bound premise is that a 32x32 plot of land could feed a village of 30 for a year.  We need these lower bounds because the reality is that to feed those 30 people you'd have to farm all available land you could get your hands on for more than the size of a city.  30 x 2 acres is 243000 sq meters.  That's twice the size of a city plot.  At max clip, you couldn't even see it all.

What's fun for the game falls somewhere between these extremes and I figure out the "minimum logical bound" just in case it also turns out to be too big.  If I fudge every step in my favor and I still have city-sized farms just to feed a village then I'm in trouble.

Anyway, with the understanding of bounds firmly in hand, I approached from a different angle.  For my own aesthetic sensibilities, what would a 30 person town farm look like.  So I built one.

(http://i.imgur.com/6pkUJ.jpg)

Now, in another post I've already described that this is using middle-ages style crop rotation... so one fallow field and two working fields (you could up to 3 but I like the 2 and 1 layout).  So a farm can produce from two different crops.

The sections are (from left to right), 169, 146, and 177... and could easily be made to match.

Mythruna life would be extremely boring if it took a full season to grow anything... so I will do shorter growing seasons.  After all, if a tree grows to full size in a year then crops can turn over pretty quickly.  So I think crops can produce once a week.  This is 168 hours in "real life" time... and I think that's reasonable.  Some plants may produce more often but 1 week is my baseline.

There will also be three months of growing and only the winter month means no planting.  So you get a full 12 weeks of growing, or 12 harvests per Mythruna-year.

This means that whatever one block is producing, it does it 12 times a year.  Our town needs 10080 meals per year.  I don't know if you're already starting to do the math in your head... but it means farms don't have to be very productive.

However, I will throw an additional wrench in the works.

Even at this modest size, there is no way that a city would be able to farm all of its food.  It would just end up being too sprawling and unfun.  So a city may have one local farm (and of course the citizens may have gardens) but the bulk of a cities crop-related food will be imported from the surrounding towns.  So it may be a good idea for towns to produce 2-3 times what they need to eat and then export the excess.

So now we crunch some numbers...
2 crops of 170 squares each... 340 producing squares.  They produce 12 times a year: 4080 yields per year.

The town needs 10080 meals to feed itself and we'll double that for exports: 20160.

So, IF a town is ONLY eating crops, a square needs to produce 5 meals a harvest... given the farm that I built and the desired output.

I can live with that.  In reality, Mythruna diets will be more varied than that... heck, two of my test towns already fish for more than half their food.  Also, that full output implies a significant application of labor... though most of my towns so far seem to have a lot of idle citizens just waiting to work the farm. ;)

Great! In a logical way, if Mythruna's soil is VERY fertile would it be possible for crops to grow faster to minimalize the farm size? Like how you said once a week is a harvest. The Export/import idea is great. Like if a town that has trouble producing food, but produces more iron/other minerals. Export for the Money to Import food! It's really cool reading your set plans and ideas.

Importing and exporting is already part of the plan.  It's just one of the things I haven't implemented yet in the AI tester but if you look at the posted screen shots you can already see a column for it on the balance sheets.  It's sort of required to make everything work.

As it turns out, in all of my planning I was able to completely remove money from the equations.  I originally had it but it crosses itself out in all balances because it's just a way to delay value in an exchange.  For example, you sell a sheep for five gold and then use five gold to buy a sword.  From the management AI's perspective, it's the same if you just traded the sheep for the sword directly.  Money is like the distance between buildings... it can be assumed to exist but doesn't need to be calculated directly.

...at least not until a player comes by.  Just like the game can "reverse engineer" where the NPCs are, the game will have to "reverse engineer" how much cash everyone has and what things are stored in the store rooms, etc. at the given time.

But I don't need to worry about that yet.

Great article Paul. Now when meat comes into play will just be extra crops for storage/export?

Yeah, I didn't have to add any code to handle crops because it's still just a labor to resource conversion.  But I didn't know what the conversion rate should be.

I still haven't implemented fixed no-input-required resources like wells, etc..  This is trickier still when the source can be influenced by people... for example, a forest acts like "tree storage" and it acts like a "fixed resource" since it can produce some number of trees just on its own.  But I've already modeled replanting and so I have to wrap all of that together.

Other fixed resources are just the dependencies of actual producers (like wells, mines, fishing spots, hunting grounds, etc.) and storage will be treated like that, too.

Storage and fixed resources are the last things I need to implement before the resource dependency stuff can be as complete as I want it.  Oh, and trade routes for import/export.

The way the timetable is set up, money would probably not work. Just like you said, money is saved up throughout the year to buy things, since a farmer could only be paid once a year and trading for things just once a year isn't practical. However, if people are able to trade once a week, that would be fast enough to allow impulse trading at times (such as your sword broke and you need a new one).

Money can be added for the aesthetics, but I think some people will be diverted. Their game would be to save up as much money as they can, in turn being able to buy anything they want, and in a game run by producing and trading, a rich man would have incredible power. (Imagine researching a city you found, then buying most of the imports the town relies on, you can easily cripple a town you hate, or reverse the process to strengthen a town you built.)

I think you want the production to be important, and through the production, trade will be a means of balance and communication. Money can offset the balance, and if money is involved you will have to set up a banking system to the extent of getting loans to buy resources to build, since the AI will probably focus on needing money as a median to getting what they need and so you will have to buy instead of trade for materials.

Many will be important for players.  And money will be important in the detailed actions of an NPC.

...but money turns out not to be important for the day to day management at the town level.  It's just a transactional medium.

In the case of sell a sheep, then buy a sword, you don't need money if you are selling the sheep to the swordsmith. But won't you need money if you sell the sheep to the butcher and buy the sword from the smith?

Within the town, no.  Only if the player is there.

Otherwise it can be assumed that goods transfer is perfect.  The butcher may have given you meat and you give meat to the smith.  It really doesn't matter as it's mostly a closed system with fixed inputs and outputs.

Hey Paul,

tell me if I can lend you a hand. Here are a lot of medieval groups in my area. Like artits, musicians, blacksmiths and so on. They show their skills at different festivals wich take place a few times during the summer.
Recently I saw some of them with amazing costumes! There were even some harlots dancing in a group of armed men with some wine (or Met) in their hands. They had these yellow ribbons attached to their dresses.
The festival before a group was playing music on selfmade instruments. Sounds similar to pipers.
And we have some castles, ruins etc. around here.

So if you need some information, contacts, pictures or whatever, feel free to ask :)

Reminds me somewhat of scotland. :)

I'm reasonably well studied on the middle ages though it's always surprising to find an area that I didn't learn about before.  Iron smelting was a fun trip through the web... and I ended up knowing exactly how a Mythruna blast furnace will work.  (Search for "medieval blast furnace" for some neat diagrams.)

It's usually in the specifics that I end up doing research and half of that is not so much about the answer but how I arrive at the answer.  After all, Mythruna's world is very different than ours, and relatively speaking, the inhabitants have quite a few advantages.  The farm discussion is an interesting example... since it's important to remember that a Mythruna farm produces 36 harvests in the amount of time we'd call a year.

(1 harvest a week for three months out of the four month Mythruna year = 12 harvests a Mythruna year which is 1/3 rd of our year, so 12 * 3 = 36)  ...which definitely affects the amount of people a single farm can feed.

I always have to inject a little of the "mythruna magic" into my web searches and calculations.

Oh, and thanks for the offer.

You're welcome.
Jup the medieval time was realy amazing. I love to visit locations or festivals with my wife and friends :)
Luckily there are a lot of them here.
I'm curious what your medieval-mythruna-mixture will look like!
Mixing these facts with some math and magic is a attempt for gamecreation I've never seen in any other game. Thats very unique and very interesting.

I mostly just use the facts as a loose guide... to help fill in the blanks and make things seem a little more plausible.  But so far I like the combination. :)

I have a little thought too add to farming.

Where I come from there are very little water to, well water crops with, and in the old days we used something called "sjeltreko" with "vassveger"(aquaducts) too water crops with, it is basically a water shovel.

Here is a piece of an article of a neighboring town that I found:

"Lom has a long tradition of water, or rather with too little water. And although Lom has the best drinking water in Norway, the farms in Lom have struggled to get enough water for their fields. Therefore, farmers had to bring water from the snowy mountains and down to the valleys, using aqueducts (vassveg). The tool they used to spread the water over their fields is called a "Skjeltreko", and it resembles a large spoon or ladle."

Just a thought for mountain-based villages and the like.

(http://media31.dimu.no/media/image/NF/NFL.00023/175966?width=600&height=380)

(http://img.digit.no/921/921398/original.998x666.jpg)

Interesting.  Water sources will definitely matter for farms in certain climates.  I'd only really considered irrigation, though.  I guess players can get as creative as they want, though, if I do my job right. :)

seems like a nice angle to try and include.

Also seems like something that might be an easy mod someday if the game doesn't include the requisite parts already.  I have to leave something for the modders to do. :)  (heheh)

*sigh* guess your right. makes me wish i knew how to mod.

First learn java, http://www.youtube.com/course?list=EC0BB627CDBB8FE359
then learn groovy. http://groovy.codehaus.org/Getting+Started+Guide

Your one to talk... xD hahah just messing around unn xD

i know how to learn, i just dont have the time right now. plus im learning java in school anyway

lol that's right :)
FutureB, I actually am learning java.

( i am sorry if i repost a question that have been answered before)
1st. You said that it takes 168 real life hours to grow a wheat plant, isn't that too long? (or did i missunderstand that?)

2nd. I think that you need in-game moneys. You can't trade a sheep for an expensive crystal or sword. That's way too little. You need to sell stuff and save the money for later.

3rd. I think it would be Cool if it could be possible that wheat crops could fail to finish. Because of bad wheater,posion or other players, animal eating them.

4th. Is it possible to found your ownd city? By making some houses and NPC's could move in and work for You?
-ma9nu2

Where did I say this?  I can't find it and it makes no sense out of context.


I think you may have misunderstood.  There will be money in the game but the town AI won't care about money for its internal functioning.  It operates purely on resources.


Yep.


Yep... covered elsewhere at length.  I think maybe in the thread on the property system.

I found it here. I am sorry if i missunderstood. I am from Norway and i can say that i am not very good in english writing/understanding.  :P

Mythruna life would be extremely boring if it took a full season to grow anything... so I will do shorter growing seasons.  After all, if a tree grows to full size in a year then crops can turn over pretty quickly.  So I think crops can produce once a week.  This is 168 hours in "real life" time... and I think that's reasonable.  Some plants may produce more often but 1 week is my baseline.

I must have meant 168 minutes in real life time since it's 168 hours in game time.

The real question is why a forum search for 168 didn't find that other post. ;)

The sims operates under 1 Game hour = 1 real minute. There is, of course, speeding up  time in the sims though.

Ok.  Not sure how that is relevant. :)

Mythruna already passes time at 1 game hour = 1 real minute.  You have a clock and a calendar already.  This has been covered before, though.

Did you mean to add anything to that or just quote it and move on? :)

Crud, read the last thing in the quote. I messed up something and I don't know how! :D