Getting HEWN to work with Dwarf Fortress Classic

[Aardworm]

So, as everyone that runs DFClassic has noticed. It's best mod (HEWN) does not work with it. I ended up trouble shooting it with Claude.ai and wasn't able to fix it but I made a summary of everything that was checked. If the mod creator at some point wants to revisit porting it over properly to DFClassic, it may save them some time. I, for one, would be incredibly grateful if the mod creator would fix it.

This is Claude's summary:
HEWN crop-generation bug — troubleshooting summary
Setup: Dwarf Fortress Classic (non-Steam/itch build), 53.10, with DFHack. HEWN 1.06 installed per the readme (9 vanilla packages deactivated, HEWN active at bottom of load order).

Symptom: World-gen always fails with "FARMING CIVILIZATION PLACED WITHOUT CROPS." errorlog.txt shows every creature failing with Unrecognized Material Template / missing material template for things like SEED_TEMPLATE, STRUCTURAL_PLANT_TEMPLATE, SINEW_TEMPLATE, etc. — meaning material_template_default.txt (from Vanilla Materials, or HEWN's replacement) isn't present in the loaded raw set at all.

Bugs found and fixed in HEWN's files
info.txt has an unterminated [DESCRIPTION:...] token. Line 8 opens the tag but never closes it with ]. DF's raw parser scans for the next ] to end a token, so it silently swallows all nine [CONFLICTS_WITH_ID:...] tags plus ~30 lines of install-instructions prose as literal text inside DESCRIPTION. None of the conflict declarations were actually registered. Fix: close the bracket right after "...Sets."
Three typo'd/invalid color tokens in plant_standard.txt: AMETHYSTENROD (×2, on CEDAR wood and ASH bark dye — vanilla was GOLDENROD) and AMETHYSTEN_YELLOW (LARCH bark dye — vanilla was GOLDEN_YELLOW). Looks like a "GOLDEN → AMETHYST" find/replace that produced "AMETHYSTEN" instead. Recolored all three to valid AMETHYST.
Neither fully explained the crop failure alone, but both are real bugs worth fixing at the source.

The actual blocker: DF Classic's local mod-staging step is unreliable
This build reads its mod library from %AppData%\Roaming\Bay 12 Games\Dwarf Fortress\mods\ and stages the active per-world copy into ...\data\installed_mods\ — not from the game's own install directory (files there had zero effect, confirmed repeatedly).

Across many attempts, all with an identical, screenshot-verified-correct mod selection (HEWN active at bottom, correct 9 vanilla packages off), the staging step never reliably produced a valid single HEWN folder at world-gen time:

Sometimes installed_mods ended up completely empty (no HEWN at all).
Sometimes it produced a double-nested folder: installed_mods\HEWN (1)\HEWN\... — one level too deep for DF to find info.txt.
errorlog.txt repeatedly logged Two installed mods have the same id and numeric version: HEWN (1). Using the first encountered... even when only one valid HEWN folder existed on disk beforehand.
Manually pre-staging a known-good, correctly-structured HEWN folder directly into installed_mods (bypassing the in-game copy step) still triggered the same duplicate-ID warning and missing-template flood, even though the manually-placed folder itself stayed intact afterward.
This points to a bug in DF Classic's own mod activation/staging mechanism on Windows, not HEWN's raws. The user confirms HEWN works correctly on the Steam version of both DF and the mod (via Steam Workshop) — Steam's subscription pipeline likely bypasses this local folder-copying mechanism entirely.

Questions for the mod author
Aware of the unterminated DESCRIPTION bracket in info.txt? Doesn't block Steam users but is a real bug in the shipped file.
Any other reports of "no crops available" worldgen failures specifically from DF Classic/itch (non-Steam) users?
Any known interaction between the manual install/ subfolder (which itself contains nested data/art folders — unusual for a mod) and DF Classic's mod-copy routine? (Tested and ruled out as the cause here, but worth flagging as an atypical structure.)

[Fel]

In case you didn't know, there is a thread for the mod on the official forum, posted by the mod author.
It is likely the best place if you wanted this to reach him.
https://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=183729

[Aardworm]

Originally posted by Fel:

In case you didn't know, there is a thread for the mod on the official forum, posted by the mod author.
It is likely the best place if you wanted this to reach him.
https://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=183729

thanks, I'll post there too. I was thinking, considering that it was mainly made for steam, I may as well post here.

Btw; adding the mod manually to the steam version so doesn't work. Only workshop works, right now.

[Fel]

I just noticed but there is a download with the game (classic 53.10), dfhack and the mod, maybe what you were looking for (the link is near the very top of the thread I linked previously).

The dffd download for the mod also lists install instructions, the mod seems to require more than "add the mod, activate the mod".

All of this is just from reading though as I don't know the mod and haven't tried any of it.

[smol-wittle-debil]

Im sure the mod author will find an AI telling them how to create their mod very helpful and welcome