User:Sadvak

Beginner's Guide to Ecology

(or, why won't my plants grow anymore?)

Basic explanation

Whenever you hear someone talk about an area being polluted or the soil being depleted, or whenever your flax or veggies stop growing the way they used to, what's really happening is that one or more ecology factors are out of balance. The good news is, you can test for this and even fix it, once you know how.

Baseline values

There are eight different ecology factors, that represent things like soil nutrients, industrial pollution, etc. Each ecology factor can be raised or lowered by player actions or by naturally-occuring effects, but each has a baseline value that it will gradually return to when left alone. Generally speaking, when a factor is too far away from its baseline in one direction or another it will start to cause problems, but the exact details will vary. As a general rule, if you're having trouble growing and see that one or more ecology factors are far from their baseline, bringing them back in is likely to help with those problems.

The baseline values can be found at Ecology#Single_Point_Tests.

Getting started

The most important thing to know when getting started in ecology is, test! If you want to know what's going on, test ecology values first, and test regularly while making changes. If you try fixing ecology problems without testing, you can end up just making everything worse. So, buy as many levels of Ecology as you can afford from the School of Body - the tuition is pretty cheap. Once you're able to, make some ecology survey kits at a Chemistry Laboratory - you can do a detailed survey with one of those kits to test every ecology value at once. This is a great first step when you're not sure what your problem is, just run a detailed survey and look to see what's off from the baseline.

Once you've purchased the skill, you can test ecology values either by clicking on Ecology in your skills list or by clicking on the materials used for that test in your inventory.

Changing ecology

Once you've identified your ecology problem, the next step is to find a way to change that factor.

There are a lot of different things that can change ecology, but one thing they tend to have in common is a random chance of taking effect. For all the things listed below, there's only about a 5% to 10% chance that they'll actually do anything each time you do them, but if they do, the size of the effect is always the same. This randomness is one reason why it's important to test frequently, as you can end up going a long time with no change, then very quickly overshoot your target by chance.

Easy ones to change

There are two ecology values that are particularly easy to change:

Raising ground water

To raise ground water, just dump out jugs of water. If this has an effect, it will raise ground water by 0.0153 per jug. So, if you know exactly how much you want to raise the ground water, divide that number by 0.0153 to get the number of jugs. Fill that many jugs, then empty them all at once, then test ground water again. It either won't have changed, or will be exactly what you want. Repeat, testing each time, until the change happens.

Adjusting pH

pH can be raised by dumping out salt water, or lowered by dumping sulphurous water. Either way, it changes by 0.002 per jug (if at all); just follow the above procedure using that value.

Note: doing this will also raise the ground water as above, so if ground water is already at an elevated level, using this method could raise it too high to grow vegetables.

Vegetables

Vegetables are the swiss army knife of ecology modification. For any eco value that you want to change, there's a veggie that can do that for you.

Check the ecology tables on the Vegetable page, and find one that changes the value you want in the direction you want - the more plusses or minuses, the faster it'll make that change. If the symbols you want are in the Mature or Harvest rows, just grow that vegetable normally, testing that ecology value regularly as you do. If it's in the Death row, plant that vegetable but don't water it, just let it die and pick up the seeds. Again, test early and test often to avoid going too far with the changes.