Bay 12 Games Forum

When you retire or save-quit, you get a list of all those in your fortress which have died or been injured and its compared with what a 'good player' should have gotten in similar circumstances (enemeies encountered vs minerals etc). This list is posted and updated online. Any particularly bad player is highlighted and shamed.

Dwarf fortress moves over to an invented runic language. This language is proceedually generated for each civ and world. Everything is in this language.

These are a few of my bad ideas. I think they actually have kernels of really cool mechanics in them, but my suggestions would be difficult. Number 2 I would like to see implemented in some way, although I can see it becoming a personal hell for some dwarfs (imagine being a weredwarf if no 2 was implemented). No 6 would result in the world being constantly set on fire.

1) A fleshed out series of laws. Scholars and nobles can propose bills and as your settlement advances, you can get courts or parliaments (depending on laws). Laws can determine a great deal, from methods and the nature of justice (length of punishment, repeat offender status, child immunity etc) to the nature of society. From a liberal society as it currently exists, to one strictly divided between patricians and lesser classes. Patrician, Plebe, Resident, Slave. Grades of each determined by law and debate. Even the nature of the law system should be up to laws and debates, starting with an absolute monarchy. The player has the role of determining what laws get advanced, reading petitions and giving their consent or disapproval. These laws are all encompassing. From who can view artefacts, what people can own etc.Nobles of sufficient rank don't need the players approval to implement laws.
Laws can be set on a civ scale by the mountainhomes and the player has to obey them, ranking up in the fortress mode means getting a wider and more expansive set of control of the law as the fortress becomes more prominent. Civ laws might even allow each Duke to run his fief as a personal kingdom. The player has to petition the mountainhome for national laws at each caravan or even start their own Civ. A French Revolution style event or civil war can trigger if certain conditions are met (laws cause too much unhappiness on the lower orders, nobels feel too sidelined, civs find the mountainhomes too restrictive etc) and the player can find themselves in the middle of it or even having to create a guillotine. All this require maintaining lawyer dwarfs in comfort. Edit: Dwarf fortress should impliment an expanisve proceedually generated litigation system.

2) Dwarfian organ donation and life support.

A chief medical dwarf has to level up to perform certain operations correctly, doing so by dissecting fallen dwarfs and intelligent creatures (men-creatures or captured goblins). Eventually, they learn how to make dwarfian life support with pump mechanisms. This allows a dwarf to stay alive even when multiple body parts are destroyed.  After a while and after plenty of research (the ethics and extent of which is a law setting), the dwarfs learn to make advanced artificial limbs and perform organ/limb donation. The register can be maintained and stocked several ways. Through justice, dwarfs can be placed on the register for committing crimes or be sentenced (if serious enough) to be harvested or dissected for research (all executed dwarfs have their bodies donated to medical science). A nobel or patrician can demand a transplant (automatic if needed) and this is performed by the chief medical dwarf (either in the fell mood/ vampire way or randomly picked like failing a mandate). This is from the lower and selects peasants first. A dwarf can be designated to be a prefered organ donor and will be harvested if required. By organs, I mean everything, from eyes to limbs.

3) An expanded class system.
All administrators, their spouses and children and nobles get a patrician modifier. They must have better accommodation than their plebe peers, may petition for raids and other items and have greater demands. The patricians, once enough of a population in a fortress has been reached, will marry only amongst themselves and even demand separate and grader communal spaces. They may even demand personal shires to their personal gods, complain bitterly and throw tantrums if a peasant has better stuff than them etc. Patricians demand finer and better food and booze and get unhappy if they are not treated according to their station. They are treated more gently in justice and get unhappy if they are assigned professions that are bellow them.

4) If a player messes up badly enough, with enough deaths, mismanagement (mass starvation and dehydration) or the dwarfs get unhappy enough, the save will encrypt itself in the background and then permanently kick out the player. This is for humanitarian (dwarfmanitarian?) grounds.

5)  A full sex system logged through the sparring screen. Pauses the game if orgasm is achieved with an announcement window.

6) Gunpowder and firearms.

Again, discovered through research. I dislike how hard it is to get fire in the outer-world, so I suggest implementing black powder and firearms. Players, through the alchemists bench, can make bars of gunpowder which makes certain charges. Crafsdwarfs and metalsmiths make shot and siege workshops or gunsmiths make things like cannons, bombards, arquebuses and grenades. These are much more powerful than bows and standard siege equipment, but has the possibility of immolating the dwarf upon firing. Firearms and other such weaponry can be a feature of human sieges. Human seigers can plant large charges which completely destroy a certain amount of grid squares (I suggest 4 in every direction) to gain access to a fortress. They will blast their way into a fortress until the last dwarf is destroyed. Smaller charges can destroy doors. This can also be used by defenders.

7) Have guests in taverns pay for food and lodging with coins. Have nobles demand coins be minted. Don’t actually do anything requiring coins yet (although coins would be a good way to get metal).

9) Re-impliment the economy system, but with fractional reserve banking.

10) Unify the two game modes. The player is an actual dwarf, the expedition leader. The dwarf fortress screen is accessed through their office for planning, but otherwise, its adventure mode. The player can’t switch to the mayor if they’re elected and instead has to make sure they get elected. Its the players responsibility to gain all the items for the initial embark and the first 7 dwarfs. They also need to petition the mountainhome.

11) Implement a gas system based on the fluids system. Certain activities (and dwarfs themselves) produce CO2 and CO. If a fortress isn’t ventilated, the lower levels will become toxic to life and the dwarfs pass out and eventually die. Kitchens, forges etc produce enormous amounts of CO. Players have to install ventilators and built chimneys and advanced ventilation or the dwarfs die in quite shallow mines.

Yay, the top half of my map north of the river is now tree-spawn free. Stripmined it all down to bedrock, save for a 3x3 edge around it.
The battle for preserving FPS continues.

I do get occasional 'something has collapsed on the surface' messages though. I think that's phantom trees trying to grow into maturity in mid air.

Its annoying. FPS death is sadly incurable. When my fortress decides to go down to 7fps, its sadly dead.

I've just had my fortress experience FPS death on the second season. I've got about 30 visitors, 10 dwarfs and 4 animals. 7fps. In this fortress, 7 of those men are out artefact hunting, leaving 3 dwarfs to man the fort. It shouldn't be experiencing this kind of fps death. But this fort is just an attempt for me to see if I can get any artefact through raiding other than blooming books. I haven't yet been able to get a successful raid on anything that hasn't just recovered books. Even towers seem to get me endless books, but no slabs.

The artefact missions seem to be bugged, at least in forts with the visitor bug. In my fort, no mission to send artefacts retrieval missions just results in the dwarfs disappearing off the map and then reappearing with an empty mission log. I've also experienced more crashes and premature fps deaths in this version than other versions. My nearly two year fort has gone to 6fps, with just 50 dwarfs and 84 visitors. It has a narrow river, but no active pump stacks or caverns revealed. It also has maybe ~15 animals. There is no way that it should have fps death this early. Even with my computer completely minimised (with all programs including therapist) cut off and df on highest priority, I only get 8 fps ffs. Its been about 5 forts now that have died really early thanks to fps death.

So I'm creating a large island with a 1000 year history in the hope of getting a fort without problems. However I'm probably going to soon give up on DF for another few months if my next world/ fort doesn't work out. I've lost too many hours to crashes and about 5 forts to FPS death when they should be at 50+ at least (if not a solid 100).

Edit: New fort, season one and already I have 11 elf visitors. I haven't even built a single workshop yet.

I keep getting the visitor bug. I got 130 visitors in my tavern with a cap of 100, all within 2 years. I've yet to receive any petitions for residency, which is really annoying. I set my emergency burrow under my tavern, which I hoped would cull a few of them come !FUN!, but a werebeast only killed 2. I'm in an area without elves, so its not that that's causing it. I've sadly got only 20 in my military and only platinum ore so far, so its going to be a while before I can use my overpopulated pub to train my military.

In other news, someone died in my river. 5 pump stacks later and an aqueduct across half the map, I've recovered the corpse.

So I've started the fort Fealtymasions on a large 500 year old island world, with the hope that I could get more artefacts and !FUN! with raids. And I've sent 10 of my sacrificial lucky dwarfs on an adventure of a lifetime. They are out to seek Ringpurged, an artefact steel crossbow. And what a journey it will be.

This is the journey: It will take them 12 days to get there, traveling from our mountain holdout, across a band of elf fortresses, Human towns and dwarf mountain-homes to wade through an evil infested goblin hellhole, to reach the location of Ringpurged. This is the location of Ringpurged:.

The crossbow Ringpurged requires traveling deep into my worlds Antarctic circle, across an evil glacier containing a dark elven fortress called Tormentstaves (the purple dresser), which is surrounded by a circle of 4 dark goblin pits (the grey cloth). Once those are passed, its only up a mountain range and onto its frozen icecap, the tallest place on my world and then to recover Ringpurged. After its recovery, its only a matter of going through it all again to get back to Feltymasions.

I equipped my squad with the finest copper armour I could forge, except for those dwarfs who refused to part with their leather cloaks etc, and copper weapons. The Brilliant Razors were set off at the end of Autumn to make their expedition at the hight of winter. Checking my stockpiles, only 5 carried their copper helms and most left their weapons at home. As they are a new squad (and my only squad), they will survive untrained and untested on their journey, relying on whatever skills they came here with. They have yet to return. May Amok have mercy upon them.

[EDIT] UPDATE:Winter has given way to spring which has given way to Summer. No sign of my dwarfs.

I've done some !SCIENCE! with setting out raids. I've found two bugs so far- if your dwarf gives birth whilst travelling, the baby is left somewhere out there. The mother will then constantly cancel tasks to seek infant, followed by cancelling seeking the infant because its inaccessible. Eventually they die of thirst or starvation. Another unique bug is that some dwarfs can get stuck travelling long after their other squamates return. You can replace them in the military screen (normal way), despite supposedly not being allowed to remove travelling dwarfs from squads. If they do return, I suspect its causing my fort to crash (grr). Same with captured members, they are no longer 'on the squad', but I suspect that they get placed back on when they are returned to the fort (but my game crashes in that scenario too).

I've found the same bug as other people, where squads trying to find artefacts just go off the map for a day or two and return without doing anything (and without any entries on the log). For raids on other civs, I've found my military squad will often get books from even small settlements (of ~50-100). They can return with 5 books per raid sometimes. When the squad returns, they will just dump the book outside and it will require another dwarf to haul it to my library. As for getting more artefacts, my current world has been hamstrung by the inability to travel over water. Sadly the artefact screen doesn't organise known artefacts by proximity, which along with the inability to search, makes it a nightmare to raid nearby. I'm creating a new large island for !SCIENCE! to see what happens with raids. I would like some more mission types than just raids and scouting. I would like to send out a group of dwarfs to start a new settlement, to dispose of migrants/ unwanted dwarfs.

As for other stuff, I've found that I can only create 3 squads max and its possible for raids and other !FUN! to happen whilst all the military is out travelling. I don't know if there is a way to get around it atm, but its frustrating when an ambush happens and I don't have a military to respond (or the option to create a new squad). I've also found that with the missing member bug (where one squad member is still travelling), it stops the entire squad from being given regular orders (station, attack etc), although they will still train and carry out their schedule. This is unless you replace the missing member, but I suspect its caused crashes. I would test further, but I'm getting FPS death in my current save, so I'm pinning my hopes on this new world to do more !SCIENCE!. I hope this helps people though.