WIP: Natural Diversity

[Abandoned]

@Bartender     will look forward to the forest then, thank you. Regarding compatibility, with The North mod, the old version had collectible firewood, I am assuming version 5 still has it.

Using thatch for fuel, to be realistic it would take a great deal of dry grass for fuel, it would burn very hot and fast but as another source of fuel in the game it would welcome. 

[despo_20]

Using thatch for fuel, to be realistic it would take a great deal of dry grass for fuel, it would burn very hot and fast but as another source of fuel in the game it would welcome.

This is precisely the problem. It's not easy to find a realistic way to produce fuel from grass and reeds...

[kid1293]

@Bartender - Pressure the grass (a lot of grass for one brick)
and you have a fuel equal to firewood.

About Forest Outpost and a NatDiv version. Yes.
I will start with thatch requirement for the houses.
Gatherer already collects from NatDiv.
It is not much change, but this version will require
your mod to be active or waiting for the trader. 

[Paeng]

It's not easy to find a realistic way to produce fuel from grass and reeds...

How about switchgrass, or panic grass? I read that in the 1800s, grasses were widely used as a heating fuel in the prairie regions or areas with little forested land. Farmers there relied on harvested straw and prairie grasses, or 'prairie coal', often twisted into bundles and burned in simple stoves.

[tanypredator]

Yes, thinking of the green color of new grass bundles I also thought about drying and pressing. One more thing to consider is yield - if I noted right, one woodcutter and manual gathering (or one woodcutter and one forester) can provide sufficient (but not plentiful) amount of fuel for first 4-5 houses.

[Necora]

To add, the tighter you bundle the grass, the slower it burns. Here we have processed fire logs that burn for a few hours (I never use them, they are more for decorative purposes IMO because you still need a lot of them to keep a fire going all night in a wood stove and they are quite expensive so I stick to good old dry wood) that are basically various organic plant material compressed into a block and doused with lighter fluid.

You know hay has been toted as an eco friendly building insulating material? If you bundle hay tightly it actually becomes a fire retardant, it is so densely packed that not enough oxygen can get in to feed the fire and it becomes pretty much fire proof. Also has good heat retaining properties when put in a wall. It is meant to be a good alternative to that nasty old asbestos and was used for such in times gone by. Perhaps a building material apart from thatch could be used from this?

[brads3]

from playing my last game i think of the thatch as bundles of cut dry grass. i didn't have a thatcher hut working and gathering thatch very long. going by what the bannies collected while clearing to build,there never was an over abundance of thatch. with the changes to the tree growth that this mod brings,my original wood chopper never got ahead on firewood. the bannies would burn some thatch especially the houses farther away from the chopper. now if the thatcher harvests a lot of thatch and we get overpowered with it,then i do think we will need a bundler for it. i agree burning just cut grass isn't as good as wood in amount of heat or lenght of burn time. i do find the way BT has it implemented is better than i thought originally though.

[QueryEverything]

Using thatch for fuel, to be realistic it would take a great deal of dry grass for fuel, it would burn very hot and fast but as another source of fuel in the game it would welcome.

This is precisely the problem. It's not easy to find a realistic way to produce fuel from grass and reeds...

Ah @despo_20 , but good sir, it's not uncommon  
https://www.ruf-briquetter.com/materials/wood-a-non-wood-biomass/straw-briquetting
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biomass_briquettes
http://www.biomasscenter.org/resource-library/fact-sheets/grass-energy-basics
http://www.woodbriquetteplant.com/news/briquetting-machine.html

In fact, there's also the self-combustion of hay bales which have been recorded. 
Sawdust & rice, nut husks have also been used.  Maize (corn, which is a Vanilla product) has also been used.

There are many examples, and from what I read, even Nepal has used biomass briquettes for longer than recorded history.  (I wouldn't the accuracy, but let's say Wiki doesn't lie )

@Bartender - Pressure the grass (a lot of grass for one brick)
and you have a fuel equal to firewood.

About Forest Outpost and a NatDiv version. Yes.
I will start with thatch requirement for the houses.
Gatherer already collects from NatDiv.
It is not much change, but this version will require
your mod to be active or waiting for the trader. 

Sounds promising @kid1293    woot!

It's not easy to find a realistic way to produce fuel from grass and reeds...

How about switchgrass, or panic grass? I read that in the 1800s, grasses were widely used as a heating fuel in the prairie regions or areas with little forested land. Farmers there relied on harvested straw and prairie grasses, or 'prairie coal', often twisted into bundles and burned in simple stoves.

I've had a little more poking about on this and learned more than I knew, I also learned some things I wish I didn't know about biomass fuel ...  oh, my lords, seriously went down a rabbit warren I wish I didn't with that one. 

To add, the tighter you bundle the grass, the slower it burns. Here we have processed fire logs that burn for a few hours (I never use them, they are more for decorative purposes IMO because you still need a lot of them to keep a fire going all night in a wood stove and they are quite expensive so I stick to good old dry wood) that are basically various organic plant material compressed into a block and doused with lighter fluid.

You know hay has been toted as an eco friendly building insulating material? If you bundle hay tightly it actually becomes a fire retardant, it is so densely packed that not enough oxygen can get in to feed the fire and it becomes pretty much fire proof. Also has good heat retaining properties when put in a wall. It is meant to be a good alternative to that nasty old asbestos and was used for such in times gone by. Perhaps a building material apart from thatch could be used from this?

Where I live there are a lot of mudbrick houses, in fact there is an annual fundraiser for our local high school, the Mudbrick Tour, and they go through the processes involved and using hay & other dried items in the way that @Necora has noted.   I've seen how some bricks have been made. 
I was at a family friends place whilst they were adding an art studio and we asked what went into their homemade bricks, apparently everything that was in the 'pile', their house has a number of resident frogs, permanently inhabiting the building.   

[despo_20]

Thanks everyone for suggestions and research!

It's true that grass is used as fuel and also with good yields, but modern technologies are needed.
Modern stoves are needed to have a good performance. I think at grass pellets.
And to have good compression and drying, they need techniques that aren't compatible with a newly founded medieval or colonial village.

The problem is to create something that is useful in the early stages of the game. Just throwing straw into a fireplace isn't good.
Certainly we can create a "pressing and drying building" which refines grass bundles, reeds and also the thatches in excess into fuel bricks 

I'll talk about this with my friend Bartender and we see what can be done 

[Tom Sawyer]

Welcome on WOB! You and Bartender are making great models and have interesting ideas. With fuel from grass I think you are right. It's hard to create something realistic. It's a rather modern technology of biogas or a very special ancient use in treeless regions. If people had wood then they used it for heating homes. Only if no wood was available they had to think about alternatives. In a Banished landscape full of forests they would use grass from a meadow to feet animals. To heat homes would be far too inefficient. But it's just talking about realism. In game you can create whatever you like and to make a realistic simulation is not the ultimate concept.

[Bartender]

Thank you very much for all the suggestions everyone ! We have a lot to think about .

I do tend to agree with what Despo and Tom Sawyer said; grasses as a biofuel would not have been common practice in the era and environment that banished is set in. Furthermore, even with modern technology, it's a rather inefficient method. Thus from a realism perspective, it's possible but maybe not the most obvious thing to do for our bannies.

From a gameplay perspective, I personally do believe that an alternative way of gathering fuel is necessary for this mod. The amount of trees on the map is reduced by the introduction of the grasses, so producing enough firewood especially early in the game may be a more difficult task. At the same time, introducing a new fuel should not make surviving the winter too easy either.

We will have some thought about this, and see if we can find an elegant solution that provides both realism and a balanced gameplay .

[Nilla]

I would suggest, you look at the way @Tom Sawyer solved this in the North; the people find firewood in the woods. That's the way it worked in life anyway. I am sure no one cut a big tree just to get firewood. They used branches, small trees, dead wood.... Another, also realistic way, would be, if a forester cuts a tree, it gives 2 logs and 10 firewood (or something like that). I agree, unless you're in a desert or in the Arctic or some other area with no or very few trees, no other material is realistic.

[despo_20]

Thanks for the welcome @Tom Sawyer 

I am sure no one cut a big tree just to get firewood. They used branches, small trees, dead wood...

I'm agree

Another, also realistic way, would be, if a forester cuts a tree, it gives 2 logs and 10 firewood (or something like that).

I like very much this idea!

[Necora]

I would suggest, you look at the way @Tom Sawyer solved this in the North; the people find firewood in the woods. That's the way it worked in life anyway. I am sure no one cut a big tree just to get firewood. They used branches, small trees, dead wood.... Another, also realistic way, would be, if a forester cuts a tree, it gives 2 logs and 10 firewood (or something like that). I agree, unless you're in a desert or in the Arctic or some other area with no or very few trees, no other material is realistic.

Just correcting, no it is not the way it worked in real life.

You'll never get enough wood to heat a home from just finding sticks, branches, dead wood etc. For one, it is poor fuel as it is small and not very dense, especially dead stuff. I use about 4 cords of wood just in winter to heat my very small home, and I have modern tech to help out. Colonial families would have used 30 to 40 cords of wood a year just to heat a home. This is about 1 acre of forest, so no, you won't heat your home just on foraged wood items, you need forestry to do it. Then there is the issue of dry wood, the firewood choppers in game I think we have to accept that they not only chop wood into firewood but also deal with drying the wood, it takes a good year to dry a batch of firewood to make it worth heating a home, wet wood is incredibly inefficient. Now, this isn't to say I disagree with the idea of getting firewood straight from the forest to help out a little especially if the forests are reduced due to the meadows, obviously you need your tinders and things, but getting firewood straight from the forest is not a realistic source of wood fuel to heat a home, you needed to chop trees and process the wood to do this.

Even going back to the Romans and Greeks, they had elaborate heating methods for homes and would definitely not have just foraged for fuel, you can only do this with good dry forested firewood.

[Abandoned]

Regarding heating home with wood today.  We have a medium size home in cold northern US that has a solarium (sunroom) making it passive solar and we have a small woodburning stove, we have 1 acre of forest.  We have not ordered a cord of wood in years, using our own downed trees and big branches we cut and split ourselves.  Smaller branches which I call better-than-kindling pieces are stacked with a small pickup truck load of end cut scraps of hardwood from a nearby lumber yard, twigs go in kindling boxes stacked in the garage.  The other wood is stacked outside in one of three stacks and allowed to weather.  We use one to one and a half a cord a wood a year depending on the weather, very realistic.  We do have back up electric heating which we rarely use.  When power is out we have heat and a means of heating food and water and when the power isn't out there's hot apple cider or mulled wine and a long winters nap in front of the fire.   

Good activity and exercise for summer and fall.