Bay 12 Games Forum

Unfortunately, at least according to my first pass, it looks like only Immortality will get historical figures to seek out secrets on their own initiative. Also, for some reason, my 1050-year worldgen with many civilizations doesn't seem to have produced any widely-read slabs, although that may be due to technical difficulties preventing me from finding them.

The fact that the Secrets of Life and Death tend to be duplicated twenty times over or so during worldgen makes me wonder if it would help to have multiple copies of the same secret in the raws.

Also fun: it turns out that any creature with innate supernatural knowledge of a secret can write a slab on it. I found a slab about the secrets of fire written by a dragon.

What, I have made custom secrets and they worked fine and lots of mages were in the towers.

The best part about the new version though?
People will keep reading these books in libraries after worldgen

Well, yeah, obviously if you're fine with having all the wizards run off to their private towers it'll work. The trick is getting them to mix in with the general population so they can actually affect things.

And yes, this means that these books will theoretically be available to your fortress in gameplay.

Unfortunately, the "secrets" system used for necromancers isn't very extendable. The only motive for learning a secret that the game recognizes as valid is immortality, which only applies to historical figures in their extreme old age, and never to goblins or elves. Additionally, historical figures looking to learn a secret only seem to bother searching necromancer towers for potential mentors. So secrets that aren't about necromancy are pretty much doomed to never spread out beyond the first person to discover them.

The new knowledge system changes everything.

Inspired by thriggle's discoveries here, I created the following secret:

[INTERACTION:SECRET_FIRE]
[I_SOURCE:SECRET]
[IS_NAME:the secrets of fire]
[IS_SPHERE:FIRE]
[IS_SECRET_GOAL:IMMORTALITY]
[IS_SECRET:SUPERNATURAL_LEARNING_POSSIBLE]
[IS_SECRET:MUNDANE_RESEARCH_POSSIBLE]
[IS_SECRET:MUNDANE_TEACHING_POSSIBLE]
[IS_SECRET:MUNDANE_RECORDING_POSSIBLE:objects/text/book_instruction.txt:objects/text/secret_fire.txt]
[I_TARGET:A:CREATURE]
[IT_LOCATION:CONTEXT_CREATURE]
[IT_REQUIRES:CAN_LEARN]
[IT_REQUIRES:CAN_SPEAK]
[I_EFFECT:ADD_SYNDROME]
[IE_TARGET:A]
[IE_IMMEDIATE]
[IE_ARENA_NAME:fire mage]
[SYNDROME]
[CE_DISPLAY_NAME:NAME:fire mage:fire mages:fire magic:START:0]
[CE_CAN_DO_INTERACTION:START:0]
[CDI:ADV_NAME:Hurl fireball]
[CDI:INTERACTION:MATERIAL_EMISSION]
[CDI:USAGE_HINT:ATTACK]
[CDI:BP_REQUIRED:BY_CATEGORY:HAND]
[CDI:FLOW:FIREBALL]
[CDI:TARGET:C:LINE_OF_SIGHT]
[CDI:TARGET_RANGE:C:15]
[CDI:MAX_TARGET_NUMBER:C:1]
[CDI:WAIT_PERIOD:30]
[CE_CAN_DO_INTERACTION:START:0]
[CDI:ADV_NAME:Spray jet of fire]
[CDI:INTERACTION:MATERIAL_EMISSION]
[CDI:USAGE_HINT:ATTACK]
[CDI:BP_REQUIRED:BY_CATEGORY:HAND]
[CDI:FLOW:FIREJET]
[CDI:TARGET:C:LINE_OF_SIGHT]
[CDI:TARGET_RANGE:C:5]
[CDI:MAX_TARGET_NUMBER:C:1]
[CDI:WAIT_PERIOD:30]
The result? Over the course of a two-hundred and fifty year worldgen, an elderly dwarf uncovered the secrets of fire, wrote them down, and stored the resulting slab... in an ordinary library in the dwarven fortress of Hammerlearned, open to anyone to come visit. Over the years, numerous scholars have visited the library of Hammerlearned, and some of them have happened to come across the peculiar bronze slab Gravelglow:



In short, if you mod in a secret that does not grant the animate dead ability (and thus send the historical figure off to build a tower) there is a possibility that they will store the slab in their local library. Scholars who visit the library during worldgen may then learn the secret, causing it to spread. Presumably they will eventually write spellbooks of their own and store them at their own local libraries, but 250 years apparently isn't long enough for that to happen.

This opens up a lot of potential for modding in new magic systems.

CotC is now out.

Unfortunately, yes. The game uses a proprietary model format.

It is possible to replace the models with ones from HoI3, if you have it. I may look into making a submod that does that at some point. It's not a huge improvement, but at least the ships will look like some kind of ship.

Is there a feature list somewhere?

There's a partial one in the FAQ I've put up, although there's too many new features for me to make a complete one.

You cite Dune as one of the inspiration, any reasons why you didn't go full Dune (I like Dune. :p)? How close would you say it is to the Duneverse?

I just wanted to make an original setting, mostly. In general, the universe won't be very Dune at the beginning, but it's intended to get significantly Dune-ier as the game goes on. It's actually more directly inspired by Fading Suns.

How rich is your universe? Is there a lots of events? Are duels in?

Rich enough, I think. There aren't a lot of events at the moment - this is an alpha. And while I considered duels, they didn't seem appropriate for the genre, at least not for now.

If you want a modding solution, you can just add a POP_RATIO token to both male and female castes. [POP_RATIO:1] for females and [POP_RATIO:2] for males will get you 2/3rds male fortress on average. Might cause reproduction problems, though.

sadly enough, it seems like its impossible to make a reaction that creates non-vermin creatures, so i don't think we'll see phazon mutations any time soon ( a shame, i really wanted to make a phazon workshop...).

next version will have a updated graphic set, some phazon-based creatures (a few filled with harmful phazon gas, most having attacks that force contact with the stuff that'll cause some nasty side effects), and i'm thinking of splitting up the space pirate race into different castes according to the various species/colors (the different colors of metroid/super metroid pirates, the variants from metroid prime, flying pirates, and the variants from the ms paint space pirate comics)

I think he means the next version of DF, which will ostensibly have mutation-inducing syndromes.