What if tattered clothes could be brought to the clothiers shop and recycled? You could maybe get about 10-20% of the cloth used back and once you got enough you get a bolt of cloth of the relevant type. That would also get worn out items out of the system.

I was mentioning submerged though. Anaerobic decomposition tends to be much slower. Also, most dead bodies don't cause anyone to drop death from heavy internal bleeding and such immediatly. Why would one dead crow in a puddle of water be a thousand times deadlier than an entire battlefield of slain soldiers. I agree that rotting could cause diseases, but this is not the way to implement them.

Besides, it makes little sense from a gameplay perspective too. At the moment, the only way to get something out of the water is draining the entire pit, and between the OP/UP dust attacks and siegers tendencies to dodge in water, it would make for a very annoying mechanic.

fakeedit: Your new conviction ninjas me a bit, but here's some food for thought from my head, still, if anyone thinks it worth reading... consider this the most passive of suggestions, however, if indeed that.

The faster-rotting stuff would be things with a water covering in a non-watery environment.  At a low (but not-cold) temperature so that the clothes don't dry (or get preserved).

(Technically, if you piled things up a bit, you might get that effect in a set of clothes sitting in shallow water, wicking the liquid up into the topmost clothes, but it'd probably end up slumping down so that all remaining rottables find themselves under the water level in anaerobic conditions...  A pair of trousers would just lay in a 2/7ths water puddle without noticable rotting, or at least without noticable gaseous emissions although it might foul the puddle.)

Maybe the presence of a mist-generator (or, at least, the presence of mist, howsoever caused) would be conducive to open-air rotting.  It would be an interesting counter-point to the mist-generator keeping your dwarves generally happy to find that it also means that worn clothes degrade quicker on dwarves that pass through the area, so need more support to prevent the resulting unhappy thoughts of slowly losing their fine clothing...


I do feel that clothes tattering but having no obvious method of recovery/re-use/recycling (or even of sorting damaged ones separately from the non-damaged ones) is a little bit of a blatant omission when there's other realism-simulator levels of detail (including the accumulation of damage to the clothes, itself) so freely given.  I don't know if I'd go for miasmic rotting towards syndromes (unless there's something in the plant/whatever materials that's psychoactive or bioactive when released in that way, and Forgotten Beast Leather items might be interesting to wear, if not prepared right).

Charcoaling non-wooden items intrigues me (although I'm again not sure as to the viability).  But repair and patching is probably the thing to look at...  How about an *item* that becomes an X*item*X (or x-bounded, but an XX-ed one might be too far gone) can be mended into an +~*item*~+ (the "~" being a "mended" equivalent to the "decoration" modifier[1]), or perhaps an even better quality, in the right hands.  Mended again it becomes (perhaps) -~+item+~- (original mends becoming the substrate quality), and there's a chance (where a no-quality mend is made, or some other critical failure that is available at a low level to even the most legendary craftsdwarfs in the appropriate skill) that the item is destroyed.


(And when I'm adventuring, I just want to wander up to altar of the temple of Gapp, or into Griffith's leather workshop.  But that's what happens when you start to mix your game-settings up. )

But this is just me making what is probably a rehash (whether consciously or not) of old arguments.


[1] I don't currently know whether if that also exists, the mending modifier should be applied externally or internally to the double-chevron decoration assignment.  Possibly outside, if at all, but I could also imagine that mending would actually replace existing decorations (whilst removing the wear'n'tear modifiers, and that a mended item would then be open to be re-decorated on top (and externally to) the mending modifications (i.e. the mending modification tags).

You asked me why do rotting things should cause evil fog. I think it'll be just !FUN!. Some king of enemy inside the fortress. May be there sould be some weak fogs, not so lethal. Or the power of it can depend on region(more powerful fogs in terrifying regions). And yes, big battlefields with lots of blood and corpse can cause fogs too. Just to make dwarven life more difficult.

Yeah...no. Just no. There's neither realistic nor logical basis for this. There is no reason to make dwarven life impossibly harder just because we can. You know all those dwarves in your fort who have ever had a "disgusted by miasma" thought? Replace that with a "delighted to become a horrible abomination who destroyed the fort" or a "sad to have died from a deadly fog" thought.

Logical and realistic basis in FANTASY world simulator with dragons and magic. Ok. As you wish.

Oh, I'm sorry. I forgot, the slightest element of something which doesn't exist IRL means we can throw random bovine excrement into the game wily-nilly. Never mind that Toady has shown a dedication to realism, with his geology and temperature and injury mechanics and such.
It's not perfect, but it's alpha. Okay? So don't go around, suggesting that we make the game virtually unplayable with a mechanic that has no basis in either real life or in fantasy literature.

Sounds like you are suggesting a compost barrel...

There are several styles, depending on the implied intent.  For rapidly eliminating clothing, with ease of input, and a reasonable risk of smell-- you could just make a barrel with a bunch of holes in it, and toss damp XXSocksXX inside, like this one, since it wont produce a whole lot of compost:

If you would prefer a means of generating compost, it'd be saner to use a closed, tumbler style composter, like this one:

Composting does produce nasty smells at first, so it should produce miasma.

personally, what I would ask for (since I have looked into building a mod for myself to eliminate socks in much the way you requested) is a way to track item quality as a reagent, and to request "[REFUSE]" as an item token to be used in custom reactions. That way the modding community can come up with large numbers of differing and interesting ways of dealing with the trash in a less painful fashion.

regarding "option 1" It would be nice if the "melt" command was replaced by a standard "Recycle" that would be executed at appropriate workshops: Melt a Metal Item at smelters (returning partial metal, as usual), Unweave a Cloth Item at Looms (Returning only a portion of thread, and even less if the item is worn), Burn a Wooden Item to Ash/Charcoal at the Wood Furnace (partial yield compared to logs), and maybe some "Salvage leather scraps" option at the leatherworks.  Stone items don't seem feasibly "recyclable", but then they don't wear down and aren't mutually exclusive with anything they should logically be converted into.