Bay 12 Games Forum

I figured I’d have a look at armour weights to decide on an effective loadout that doesn’t weight down inexperienced dwarves too much… and I’d be interested in corrections or alternative takes.
Boy, is armour heavy! Weights for dwarf-sized items, iron/steel unless stated otherwise - obviously, copper or bronze will be even worse.

leggings, greaves: 22
mail shirt: 19
breastplate: 16
shield: 10
buckler: 8
helm 7
mace, battle axe: 6
pick, hammer, spear, high boot: 3
low boot, short sword: 2
gauntlet, cap, bone greaves, leather armor: 1
other bone, wood, leather pieces: <1

80Γ (and 11 metal bars) gives us a full set of metal armour without duplicates: mail shirt, breastplate, helm, greaves, low boots, gauntlets, shield. Why low boots? It shouldn’t matter much either way, but as I understand it:
High boots' additional layer on the lower leg doesn't help much, and may cause us to lose our foot protection to accumulating damage there (greaves protect the lower legs and seem less prone to breakage).
We can fit two more mail shirts if our dwarves are legendary armour users and don’t feel the weight. but at 118Γ and 15 metal bars that seems excessive – especially if we consider that 2 cloaks should do more for protection if I understand the mechanics correctly.

37Γ (and 5 metal bars) gets us most of the protection: Steel mail shirt, helm, high boots and gauntlets, leather armour, bone greaves, some lightweight shield. This offers almost full protection against immediately crippling hits, but accumulating blunt damage (no rigid metal layer on torso and legs) and item wear affect staying power.
Non-metal shields break quickly, perhaps a second weapon is attractive instead: insurance against disarming, more concentrated training or a mix of attack types, still lighter than a metal buckler. However, shields seem superior against ranged and especially firebreathing enemies.
We need high boots here - otherwise there's no metal layer on the lower legs.

5Γ or so would give us my preferred starter/civilian kit: leather armour and boots, bone greaves, helm and gauntlets, lightweight shield. Metal cap and gauntlets would be a weight-efficient upgrade if we can spare the resources; metal gauntlets and boots should also improve unarmed attacks.
I usually don’t bother.  We get better use out of our metal by fully armouring real soldiers, or arming everyone – a naked civilian with a good weapon is a threat to a fully armoured invader in melee, a somewhat experienced miner fights at an advantage.

I've always liked to armour my civilians - leather armour and boots are enough to keep their non-existing panties un-twisted from nudity concerns, and they don’t wear out. Very convenient and thematic enough: sturdy workwear seems dwarfier than flimsy fast fashion. I’ll produce some regular clothing as accessories and for misguided nobles, courtiers, elf-lovers and other delicate degenerates.
Obviously leather is not the end of it: Bone is a superior material, allowing for gauntlets, greaves and helms - a bolder fashion statement, but now we have full coverage in lightweight materials. It won’t make much difference against well-armed invaders, but it’ll help against wildlife and will train armour user skill wtihout slowing us down.

I recently stumbled across something so basic I was surprised I had neither seen it nor thought of it before.
Or maybe it's so simple that nobody found it worth talking about.

X>>>>>X
X>>>>>X
X>>>>>X

Essentially, just a perforated floor accessible from stairs at the east and west. With 7/7 magma below the whole thing and around 7 more units (total) on top, it's traversable most of the time... but trying is inadvisable, the magma sloshes around nicely.

I admit it's not the most deadly or FPS-friendly thing, causing flow, temperature and pathing calculations.
Still, I find it neat conceptually and literally. It's maintenance-free with no evaporation or magma loss, self-cleaning, and requires no crafted parts.

What are your little ways of doing things just a bit differently, that you find useful even though they don't seem to be common practice?

I use a lot of down stairs without matching up stairs. A walkable, unbreakable floor that doesn't block falls or fluid movement? Just what I want for my guest entrance.

I'd like the ability to make wrought iron or cast iron items, as the materials are sufficiently different.
Short summary: Nature is being a bitch about letting you make steel.
Pure iron is relatively soft, heating and working it in the presence of carbon hardens it enough to be useful - this is wrought iron.
You can't get the 0.2-2% carbon you want easily: continue heating it and you'll reach a jump point where the melting point drops under current temperature and you instantly get a puddle with excessive carbon in it. Cast it and you get something that's nice and hard, but brittle.

Leather is assumed to be clothing-grade stuff that's been treated to stay soft. Leather armour was hardened (soaking, boiling, appying molten wax... the last would tie in beautifully with an existing industry). From what I've seen, more low-grade armour would really enrich the combat system.

And while I've complained about it before... adamantine still makes no sense. Density of average stone when liquid, density of styrofoam when solid... it expands to 13 times its liquid volume when solidifying into an instant marshmallow? Max_Edge isn't rigidly defined, but carrying an edge so much finer than obsidian is physically impossible with adamantine's entries for molar mass and densitym even if we assume it to be perfectly amorphous. Then there's the behaviour under stress: It doesn't deform at all... until it snaps without warning. Dwarves with adamantine sutures would literally cut themselves apart.
Nonsensical magic faery glass is an unsightly blemish on an otherwise very sweet material/combat system that never ceases to amaze me with little details that I hadn't considered. Also, I don't think the current values work too well for gameplay either.

I think truetype support was an excellent idea. However, the fixed ratio of tile size to font size is rather restrictive: I'm sure I'm not the only one who would be very happy about the ability to run some nice 16x16 character sets in combination with a minuscule that isn't too minuscule.

Easy in-game scaling would be best, but being able to set a multiplier in the .ini would go a long way.

What useful little features do you incorporate into your projects that make them more useful or technically sweet? Points for being easy and and widely applicable; the sort of thing that makes you go 'why didn't they simply...' when looking at other people's fortresses. Bonus points for simplicity, compactness and overall elegance.

I love the ability to turn pressure on and off with the pull of a lever, by installing doors that will block orthogonal  connections while a diagonal one is always open. Usually in additin to a standard on/off switch, of course... and often in sequence so I an set to which z-level everything will be pressurised.
Using this on both inflow and drainage, this allows very controllable selective flooding and a few other useful tricks.

First, I can't stress enough how awesome it is to simply assign different materials real-life properties and have the game take care of everything that follows. However, this requires the entries to make sense in the first place. I thought I'd make a thread to suggest tweaks to make DF even more of a geeky delight.



I'll start off with something that doesn't exist in the real world, adamantine. I'm not challenging the sheer structural strength of the stuff. As a mythic metal, a lot is justifiable here and I'd only worry about his after the more problematic entires are taken care of.
However, do the following feel right?

1) It has roughly the density of balsa wood, aluminium is approximately 13 times as heavy.

2) The edge it can carry, given as a unitless number. Most metals including steel have 10000 (there probably should be some variation here, but I don't have specifics atm), obsidian has 20000, adamantine has 100000. Afaik, nothing in the real world carries a finer edge than obsidian (although some are similar and have other desirable properties - hardness, durability etc), so this seems very extreme as well.

3) There is no elasticity and no plastic deformation; it doesn't give at all before snapping entirely (which would, of course, take quite a bit of force). Parrying a blow with something that light and that inflexible would probably result in either cutting straight through their weapon or having yours knocked out of your hand.