Bay 12 Games Forum

Oops, I didn't notice this subforum earlier... I guess I might as well restart here, then.

Anyways, my primary aim here is refining the game mechanics without altering its tone or focus. This means tweaking, balancing, and even pruning elements far more than adding them. It is my intent to stay true to original feel of the game as much as possible, and only make changes where I feel something is "missing" from vanilla DF.

The mod's raw is posted on GitHub:
https://github.com/Nnelg/DF-Fine-Polish

Features: (limited for now; have to start somewhere)

• Rebalances the value of metal alloys.
• Expands glazing with more accurate lead/tin glaze and several mineral pigments.

Anything else I think of I'll toss in as well. Currently I'm thinking of going into rebalancing stone occurrences and organizing creatures by biome. I'm also considering adding some variety to deep metals, but aren't as sure of that one.

Okay, so this thread is for collating a series of mods I intend to produce with the primary aim of refining the game mechanics without altering its tone or focus. This means tweaking, balancing, and even pruning elements far more than adding them. It is my intent to stay true to original feel of the game as much as possible, and only make changes where I feel something is "missing" from vanilla DF.

The mod's raw is posted on GitHub:
https://github.com/Nnelg/DF-Fine-Polish

Features: (limited for now; have to start somewhere)

• Rebalances the value of metal alloys.
• Expands glazing with more accurate lead/tin glaze and several mineral pigments.

Have you ever wanted to turn all those large robes the human invaders drop into bags? Or feed your unused wooden furniture to the furnaces? Or maybe recover the decorative gems and metal studding from low-quality objects? Well, that's what this idea is about.

Basically, the concept is to extend the functionality of the Melt designation to non-metal items and decorations on items. Any valid object can be designated with Salvage or Melt Item, making it valid for recycling. Most recycling (other than melting) should take place at the Craftsdwarf's Workshop, unless a new "Salvage Yard" workshop is made. (Perhaps with associated "Salvaging" labor and skill.)


First, the new basic forms of recycling:

Cloth (and Leather):
Any cloth objects would be reduced to a partial stack of the cloth used to make them. This would only retain the basic material and dye of the cloth (if applicable), whereas the quality would be reset to "no modifier". (Any images sown on an item would be salvaged as well.) Worn-out clothing (and images on them) would have decreasing returns the more worn-out they are. This is done via the "Scrap Cloth(/Leather?) Item" labor.

Wood:
Wood items could be consumed in a Wood Furnace with the "Make Charcoal/Ash (use item)" labor. This may result in less than a full bar of the resultant material, especially with crafts and mugs (e.g., items that come more than one to a log).

Glass:
Recycling glass is a bit more complex. First the glass items marked must be salvaged via the "Pulverise Glass Item" labor at the Craftsdwarf's Workshop. This would produce bags of "Crushed [Crystal/Clear/Green] Glass", which could then be reused at the Glass Furnace.

Wax:
Barely worth mentioning; but wax could potentially be recycled at the Craftsdwarf's Workshop, under the "Melt Wax Item" labor (which would not require fuel).

Stone/Ceramic/Bone/Shell/Horn/Gem/Other:
Unless a more realistic refuse system is implemented, the only purpose of salvaging these items is to recover any decorations on them (or perhaps train a relevant skill while disposing of garbage). The basic material the item is made of is lost. (See below for decorations.)



Finally, some decorations can be recovered during salvage operations (including melting items). Cloth and Leather images (as mentioned before) would be reduced to their composite materials like cloth/leather items. Gems and metal studs could be salvaged wholesale. Everything else, however, would probably be lost.

A lot of real-life gems have lots of variations in color due to very minute amounts of impurities. At the moment, DF represents this by having multiple different gemstones with similar names and characteristics.

But this creates a few problems:

• Deposits of gems across a site are usually completely homogeneous in terms of variety. Finding Wood Opals means nothing good for your prospects of Wax Opals.
• Dwarves which prefer one variety care nothing about any others. (Not necessarily a bad thing, but still.)
• Rare sub-varieties have to be shoehorned in with ENVIRONMENT_SPEC and CLUSTER_ONE under separate raw entries.
• The different entries for sub-varieties of one variety of gem are easy to get mixed up among the other gemstones, becoming a pain to find. (Especially if you don't know they exist.)
• Fine-tuning the balance of frequencies between different varieties and sub-varieties requires a fair amount of algebra.

So, I thought that if the different sub-varieties could be grouped together somehow, then most of these problems would be fixed; and I realized the framework for such a solution already exists in creature castes.

If gems had something akin to castes, then things could be a bit simpler.  All variations on a gem would be in one place, and it would be easier to mod and generate. The different varieties can still be treated as different substances, just like materials (bones etc.) from different castes.

Let's call this the [VARIETY:<gemname>] tag.


Other than the appropriate tags for describing the different attributes of each variety, there is one additional tag needed:
[VAR_RATIO:<X>:<Y>:<Z>]

Now, it'll take a second to explain this. First, I need to describe how I figure varieties fit into worldgen.

Worldgen should proceed as before up until the point where a gem is to be chosen as a mineral deposit (however it is that is done). At that point, a new step is added: choosing the primary deposit type. This is where the first number comes in. One variety is chosen as the primary variety; the assumed basic variety for the entire deposit. (Figuring out which works exactly like figuring out a caste with [POP_RATIO:<X>] tag.)

The second two numbers come into play when it comes time to generate individual tiles. You see, each individual tile has a <Y>% chance of being the primary variety, where <Y> is the second number from the [VAR_RATIO:<X>:<Y>:<Z>] tag. (I figured that some varieties could be more homogenous than others, so it's better to leave the option open.)

If a tile isn't filled with the primary variety by this method, then the variety is chosen at random with the third tag, again treating it just like a caste's [POP_RATIO:<Z>]. (I know this allows for it to be the primary variety anyways, but it doesn't have to be perfect.)



Doing this would fix all the problems mentioned above save #2, which is still easier to fix because of it. There's lots of room in that one tag for a large variety of different distributions. Some varieties might only occur when they predominate a deposit, others could never be the primary variety. One could have a variety that is dominant in name alone, falling back on the final random choice each time (i.e., <Y>=0). And best of all, there's more variety to the gems your dwarves find mining.

So, after much debate there doesn't seem to be much opposition to the notion that "native aluminum" is unrealistic.  My suggestion is now to remove it from the game entirely.


MAJOR EDIT:
Sardice was great enough to actually go out and find a book describing a dwarf-doable means of refining impure platinum. 

• The stone 'platina' should be found as small clusters in chromite, hematite, native gold, serpentine and olivine, and as veins in olivine as well.
• Platina itself is unsmeltable.
• The "Refine platinum (use lead ore)" reaction takes one galena ore (coded as ore of lead), one platina rock and one unit of flux and produces 4 platinum bars and 4 lead bars.
• The "Refine platinum (use lead bars)" reaction takes one platina, 4 bars of lead and one flux, producing 4 platinum and returning 4 lead.
• The "Make white gold (use gold ore/bars)" reaction(s) should take one platina and one native gold (or 4 gold bars) to a smelter and output 8 "white gold" bars.
• The "Make white gold (use platinum bars)" reaction takes one platinum bar and one gold bar and produces two white gold bars.
• The prices of these two materials could use adjusting, but for that matter all metals do; leaving platinum's price as-is is the current recommendation.
• The frequency and occurrence of platina could be updated even more (will do additional research if the argument stays calm...)

---

More clarification:

Platina, being platinum alloyed with small amounts of Platinum-Group Metals, is not a workable metal for the same reasons pig iron isn't: because it is brittle.  If one were to try and hammer it into a desired form, it would fracture and break instead of bend.  Also, even if dwarven furnaces could get hot enough to liquify it, and a mold that could withstand such temperatures was found, the resulting artifact would be fragile in the extreme, threatening to crumble at the slightest jolt.

The way man dealt with this historically (so far as I can tell) was to alloy it with another metal such as gold, increasing its malleability to workable levels; hence my "white gold" suggestion.

---

So, in case you haven't been watching the devlog, the rate at which boulders drop from mining is no longer skill-based.

Now, rocks drop at a flat ~25%, gems 100%.

However, blocks now come multiple to a boulder so if you're using the stone for construction the effective drop rate will be closer to ~100%.

And if you aren't, this means up to 75% less microline to atomize.

Bars also come multiple to an ore now, so that's ~100% drop now too.



So then, the end of avoiding mineral veins until one has a legendary miner is nigh, everything's effective drop rate's gone up, and there's less micromanaging the miners.  Seems like a complete win to me, but at least one person said they'd think it'd be tedious to have to mine 4x more for the same number of boulders, so here's a poll for it!

So I was thinking about something Toady said about having multiple items merge into an 'amalgam' that'd be hard to climb over as an anti-quantum stockpiling measure, and figured "why not expand the concept"?  Now would probably be the time to do it too, seeing as Toady's currently working on hauling.


I think that there should be a movement peanalty for moving over stones, and perhaps other objects as well.  If all objects were assigned a 'size', then large objects (especially a multitude thereof) could impede the progress of units moving into a tile, possibly forcing a crawl if the pile is big enough.  This would also provide foundation for future item interactions, for instance:

If there are many items in a tile then they might run the risk of slumping if a unit (or another item) moves into the pile.  The 'landslide' check could be made every time a unit or projectile enters said tile, and would scatter items into adjacent tiles.  If there are already items in adjacent tiles, then they could 'funnel' a landslide in another direction and/or have landslides of their own triggered.  Woe betide the hauler who brings *one rock too many* to that quantum stockpile...

Also, there's the possibility of tripping.  Risking a dwarf go prone with a bad thought occasionally should be enough of a reason to keep major hallways free of clutter for most.  The trip check could also take liquids into account (if it doesn't already!); however, a soldier with any level of confidence shouldn't risk tripping over a corpse unless dodging. (Perhaps a skill, [climbing?] or maybe only civilians should risk non-dodging trips?)


In any case, this should fix quantum stockpiling by making it risky, add yet another dimention or realism, and perhaps make for nice landslide traps.

Ok, so here's a couple examples I've seen of illustrations made by artistic forumgoers that probably have no links to them outside of their respective threads... Until now:

Thread: ♠ Fungi of The Caverns - A Field Guide ♠


So, that's just a few I know of; I'm absolutely certain there's more.  I probably won't be updating the OP, so the thread will live or die on your replies...  Good luck, and happy hunting through old threads!