Bay 12 Games Forum

i'm chipping away at that neopets mod again and decided based on One (1) singular item description that i wanted to research and rework and overcomplicate an entire industry in this already very complex game

quick context for people who aren't familiar with neopets, there's creatures in the game called petpetpets that are generally like. your roaches, mosquitos, whatever creepy crawly thing you can think of. they're vermin, basically. and there's a specific petpetpet called the scriblet (imagine a blue and red roach with three horns) whose description says

This little creature will scribble anything anywhere, keep it away from your pet.

and so i looked at this and thought

"wouldn't it be cool if you could farm these guys for ink to make books"

but the writing industry in vanilla df doesn't actually require ink at all, so now i have to figure out a way to make this whole thing work. and so that led me down a whole rabbit hole of researching various forms of writing and record keeping and a bunch of other stuff to basically try and build on what the writing industry already has in the game, because this mod is already getting pretty ambitious so i might as well go all in. this includes taking a look at things that don't actually involve ink at all, like clay and wax tablets.

and so what i'm trying to figure out is

1. what are the mechanics around books/scrolls/codices/etc getting destroyed in things like raids? because i know it can happen, but is the destroyed item just completely removed from the world or is there any way to make it so pieces can still be left behind for people to rediscover and use? both for purposes of destroying certain stone slabs and because the bit of research i did led me to learning about ostraca, which i think are just neat

2. speaking of which, can you actually break things made of clay/earthenware pottery during gameplay? like, if someone knocks down a clay statue or drops an earthenware jug off a cliff, can it break or is the item still intact (or deconstructed with things like statues)? because i know gem windows can break into whatever gems were used to make them, but i've never really tested breaking things like this. also there's a random throwaway weapon in neopets that's literally just some broken pottery used as a shiv and i want to include it if i can because i think it's funny.

2. can wax objects be melted down to reform the material into a different object? i've never really messed around with beekeeping, and taking a look at the wiki it seems like wax isn't really used for anything aside from crafts, so i'm really not sure what i'm working with there, but we can already easily melt down preexisting metal objects so it doesn't seem like that much of a stretch

3. is it actually possible to change what the game considers a book or a slab? i can find the data for scrolls in item_tool, so i know messing around with scrolls specifically is potentially possible, but i can't seem to find anything on books, codices, or slabs (though i guess slabs would probably be in buildings, but the vanilla building raws are pretty much barren)

basically i have a whole lot of stuff i need to figure out but hopefully it should eventually mostly work, fingers crossed

started an island fort in a savage ocean to try and see if i could find any (slightly modded, for the sake of hopefully surviving on land) whale people. no luck on that so far (it hasn't been very long, we've only been here a little over a year). considered trying an arctic embark for the chance at some narwhals, but the place that felt most interesting to me was in a tropical ocean so that's not happening. kinda wondering if i didn't include enough ocean in the embark, since what i do have isn't especially deep (only a few z levels).

but i was talking to a friend of mine about the whole whale people quest and explaining how animal people work, and that got me thinking:

this is actually a fairly big island. big enough that there's actually a couple of other sites on the other side of it. two abandoned elven retreats. they're actually part of why i chose this island over an arctic retreat, i'm really curious about what happened over there. haven't sent anyone to investigate yet (been too busy taking care of other things to train up a proper military to deal with whatever killed those elves), but the world map says there's "no civilized population". part of me wants to check legends mode, but i'm holding myself back so i don't ruin the surprise. more fun this way.

but now i'm curious about something (that's probably extremely unlikely to actually happen, but we'll see).

i haven't found any caverns yet, but eventually i'll stumble into them. and when that happens, i'm likely gonna have to deal with some animal people. if i avoid them long enough (try and keep my dwarves out of sections of the cave i know they're likely to be and whatever else i can figure out to minimize unnecessary deaths), will murders eventually happen between the animal people?
and if so, is there a possibility that the exiled murderers might wander into my fort?
and if so, if i drive enough exiled murderers and/or tavern visitors onto the surface and away from my fort over many many years, will they eventually be able to stumble their way into those abandoned forest retreats, claim them as their own, and make an aboveground subterranean animal person civilization?

like. this probably isn't something that's ever gonna actually work. but i wanna know if it's feasibly possible. because it'd be neat (and sorta funny if they end up being cave swallows or bats).