Soil Quality Lite
Adds "Soil Quality" modifiers to every land location. These can drastically affect the production of food and other agricultural goods.
Based on weighted averages of different soil types in each province from the 1974 FAO-UNESCO Soil Map of the World.
What are the soil quality grades?:
Barren – salt flats, sand dunes, and glaciers: places that don’t even have soil. In white on the map images.
Permafrost – where it is practically impossible to grow crops. Soils that end in "x" or have permafrost marked on the map. Black.
Awful – seriously compromised by shallowness, with rock as close as 10 cm from the surface (I, U) or better soils that have massive contamination from e.g. shifting sand on top of them (MISCLU). Almost impossible to cultivate productively. Dark red.
Very Poor – Severely limiting: salinity/sodicity, aridity, waterlogging, poor nutrient retention (A, F, S, X, Y) or better soils that have significant contamination (phase). Red.
Poor – Nutritionally better, but still lacking, soils: sandy/leached, some salinity (Bd, Bf, Bg, D, most G’s, Jt, most O’s, P, Q, Rd, W, X) or stony/shallow phases. Orange.
Average – Adequate nutritionally, but not outstanding (E, Gm, Lv, most R’s, V) – middle of the road. Yellow.
Good – Above average: fertile loams, self-liming, good nutrient retention, or some alluvial renewal. (Most B’s, Hc, Hg, K, most L’s, M, N). Green.
Excellent – The finest soils on Earth: deep, fertile, self-renewing alluvium, "black earth" Chernozems, well-structured volcanic soil (most J’s, C, T, Hh, Hl). Light blue.
Why are there green numbers in the bad soils?: The buffs to fish, rice, livestock, etc. should partially mitigate the effects of bad soil for the food productivity of these goods. Paddy rice and potatoes were historically prized for their tolerance of bad soils; livestock indirectly turned what did grow in bad soils into useful nutrition; fish (and, outside the harshest conditions, game animals) were hardly affected by soil quality.
*province* should have better/worse soil!: I’ve done my best to manually correct areas I felt deserved a boost, but probably 95% of locations are still using automatically generated values. Tell me about it in the comments and I’ll investigate.
Why "Lite"?: Because I created this mod as the first step in a much more ambitious project: a total overhaul of the agricultural system away from RGOs. Release date very much TBD!
