Tamriel Rebuilt :: View topic

**ihavefivehat** · Member 20 Oct 2014

**gro-Dhal** · Lead Developer 05 Nov 2006 Location: A charter'd street

Well anything that fits the Indoril aesthetic or adds atmosphere can go here: http://tamriel-rebuilt.org/old_forum/viewtopic.php?t=24575

I proposed two unusual agriculture ideas a while ago and it would be neat if someone could bring them to life:

**Biboran** · Member 26 Sep 2014 Location: Russia

http://rghost.ru/58638673
Something like this?
The fields in the shallow marsh. The village of huts in the middle of the backwater. Around the mangrove forest of very large trees like eucalyptus. Vines everywhere.
Slaves to work the fields, and the overseers of boating. There are baskets on their heads, as in India. Then use pitchers with acute bottom to easily put in the soft sand.

**ihavefivehat** · Member 20 Oct 2014

**sasquatch2o** · Developer 15 Jul 2014

Looks nice but fugus typically grows from ground. If I were to make a shroom farm in morrowind I would make manure an compost statics. On exterior place logs on ground in ordered fashion and compost piles with guar or cloth overhangs close to ground over them. Maybe have an irrigation ditch nearby with buckets for water.

Could also have mushroom cultivation in caves with manure piles in roughly erected wooden boxes. Passages would be lined with manure piles and compost boxes. Logs are imported and left to rot out once they have been inoculated by shroom farmers. Guars (manure) and guar carts are obviously key to many large mushroom growing operation. For that you need bedding, guar pens and grains/veg. Free range guars shit in the field where small amount of mushrooms might be found. The type of mushroom should be reflected by type of growing material and environment. Factors such as full or partial shade, covering or not, mix of bedding and manure, and required moisture should all be considered.

Although I like the drawing, do not consider rope based fungi farm to be practical. It's labor intensive and would not be damp enough. Nice drawing although later work should be posted in relevant topic or within concepts.

**ihavefivehat** · Member 20 Oct 2014

I appreciate the thoroughness of your thinking. I do think my idea is feasible, though. I'll explain how I arrived at it's design.

What you describe is very similar to the way mushrooms are cultivated in the real world, as seen in this picture:

http://coldwatergardens.com/monthly_newsletter/images/november/shiitake_large.png

I considered using this idea, but I couldn't come up with an interpretation that I thought would be visually interesting as an in-game asset, or which fit in with the overall aesthetic of Morrowind. Instead, I based my idea off the Usnea type of fungus, which grows in sunlight from the branches of trees that are dying, but still standing:

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/4/4c/Usnea_2_%282005_07_19%29.jpg/640px-Usnea_2_%282005_07_19%29.jpg

My idea was that the ropes on my structure would be made from natural fibers and allowed to decay in order to mimic the dying plant material that the fungus would require in a natural environment.

I also liked this idea because it could make for a self-contained and easy to place in-game asset. In other words, it wouldn't require the creation of a large farm complex or other models to justify it's existence.

This isn't to say that there isn't room for a more complex, large-scale type of mushroom cultivation in the mod, but this idea wasn't intended to fill that role.

edit: Sorry, I'll try to find a more appropriate thread to continue this discussion.

**Gnomey** · Lead Developer 19 May 2006 Location: In your garden.

The above posts have been split from this thread. I think the concepts should focus on two Houses: Indoril and Hlaalu. Dres agricultural concepts should generally go here. (House Redoran will probably have no agriculture to speak of and, aside from the fact that it's even further down the line than House Dres, I do not think Telvanni lands should have much to do with agriculture, as the locals would tend more towards herding).

Here's what was discussed (to my knowledge) on IRC on the topic of Indoril agriculture:

To summarize, for Alt Orethan we will need a crop that is able to cover a lot of ground with relatively few polygons, so that we can have large fields near Almalexia without melting computers.

Rough ideas were that the plant could be used for textiles, eg. for dyes; could be used to make a sort of cheap gruel to feed the lower castes; and maybe could be used to make some sort of beverage, also for the poor, which may or may not be alcoholic. (I'm actually thinking not alcoholic at the moment, as alcohol would impair the productivity of the labourers. Effects such as restore fatigue and drain intelligence should work, though).

You don't have to limit yourself to the above discussion, though; it's just one direction we could go. Mass agriculture in a forest environment might also be worth exploring for Lan Orethan, in case we want to go that route, though again the number of polygons would very much be a concern.

As for Hlaalu agriculture, the IRC discussion is fairly short:

The meat of the discussion is in this thread, including gro-Dhal's quote above.

Finally, to reply to ihavefivehat's concerns on drawing style, TR generally employs two kinds of concept art: functional concept art, which basically acts as a blueprint for modellers, and atmospheric concept art, which is there to develop the look and feel of a certain subject, such as a region.
Unlike TR's earlier Hammerfell project for Oblivion, Morrowind requires relatively few new assets; however, it is just as important to develop distinct looks and feels for different Morrowind regions and factions, making atmospheric concept art comparatively important.
As an example, you could make pairs of drawings illustrating the contrasts between Hlaalu and Indoril agricultural practices. I think a more impressionist style would work very well to that end, as those practices should reflect the vastly differing attitudes of the two Houses, rather than just being a palette-swap of different crops.

**gro-Dhal** · Lead Developer 05 Nov 2006 Location: A charter'd street