Bay 12 Games Forum

Maybe the cures should be connected to syndromes rather than plants (so you can have non-plant cures)...

I did think about that a bit, since plant-only cures seems like exactly the kind of artificial limitation that would infuriate modders down the road. The problem is, right now there is no general "apply medicine" job, so limiting it to edible substances seemed like a reasonable compromise. Of course, I don't see why meat, fish, or modded-in edible stuff couldn't also work, but I don't know how complicated it would be behind the scenes to implement procedural logic like "EYE_TEMPLATE has EDIBLE_COOKED, so newt's eye is eligible to be a medicine." Plants seemed simpler to grasp, since the EDIBLE tag is associated with the plant instead of a material template. But in the end it's a suggestion, so I'm sure if Toady decided to implement it he would ask that same question and do something appropriate with it.

So I got to thinking, now that we have this enormous variety of surface plants available, that traditionally one of the most important aspects of herbalism was as medicine. I suggest a simple system of curable syndromes and medicinal herbs that shouldn't be too intrusive or hard to implement, and that I think ties in nicely with Toady's expressed inclination toward more procedural-everything game mechanics.

The changes would be:
* Syndromes get a tag indicating that they are cured by a given edible plant. Can be specified in the raws, but procedural (e.g. FB) syndromes get random cures as well.
* If a dwarf who is currently affected by a syndrome consumes an edible plant, the syndrome effects are removed and a cooldown timer is set preventing the dwarf from being re-infected for a period of time.
* When the above happens, an announcement is output, allowing the player to serendipitously discover the cure for a given syndrome.
* Alternately, the diagnosis job would have a skill-dependent chance of revealing the cure for a syndrome.

Optional enhancements to this mechanic could include:
* If a dwarf has been diagnosed as having a curable syndrome, the next Feed Patient or Eat job relating to that dwarf will first search for an edible item that is/made from the cure plant.
* Some reaction products (I'm thinking Golden Salve here) get a MEDICINAL tag, making them eligible to to be eaten only as part of the above special curing jobs, and possibly get stockpiled in the hospital.
* If it can be done in a suitably lightweight way, track what a dwarf has eaten recently and apply the cure cooldown retroactively, so it becomes possible to proactively inoculate a dwarf against a known syndrome.
* Make syndromes and their cures (e.g. a demon lawgiver's breath, a foul fog) things you can ask about in adventure mode or be told about by the trade liaison.

Just imagine the conversation in the dining hall, as a new migrant asks about the freakish weather outside. Quoth Urist McHealthy: "Well, this place was a stinking pus-coated hellhole for a while. But then that new doctor showed up, and since then everything's been groovy! Eat up now, a rat weed biscuit a day keeps the rotting limbs away!"

You could probably fill it right up to 7/7 to decrease any potential lag from flow calculations further.. the closer to totally full it is the better really. I'm not sure if it will still operate if you have it TOTALLY full, but my intuition says yes.

Yup, totally will. I've built a number of these in 34.11, and it seems like the flow/power stuff is unchanged in 40.xx. Once the flow is going (i.e. all the wheels are producing power) you can shut off the outlet and fill the channel up to 7/7. After that, you can even close off the inlet as well and have an eternally "flowing" isolated pool. If you check with the dfhack liquids plugin, you'll see that all the tiles where water was flowing out off the map edge are marked as "permaflow."

Quote from: smjjames on October 06, 2014, 08:01:41 pm

You probably don't have enough high mountains, if there aren't any, the mountain halls won't get built.

I don't think that's it. I tried reusing the seed from my 40.08 game, that had given me a nice high mountain range that was a total anthill of mountain halls and tunnels underneath. In 40.13, exact same geography, mostly the same fortress and hill sites show up, but no mountain halls or tunnels at all that I could find.

Hmm, false alarm I guess, but the actual answer turns out to be kind of interesting, so I'll share it here.

To check that it isn't an elevation thing, I took that same world and re-genned it a few times changing only the history seed. Lo and behold, after a couple of tries, mountain halls start popping up everywhere. It seems that earlier, the generated fortresses were getting knocked over too quickly (whether by neighbors or FBs). As soon as I got a world where a couple of forts in the same mountain system survived long enough to build a tunnel between them, mountain halls popped up along the tunnels.

Moreover, the existence of mountain halls considerably improved the survivability of their dwarf civ. I guess because they represent a population reserve that can't be conquered by hostile invasions. In worlds that have them, legends is full of messages about dwarves resettling abandoned forts and hillocks. In worlds without them, those tend to just stand empty until some other group settles there, resulting in silly things like elf fortresses. (Yes, that's actually how they are listed on the world gen map.)

Speaking of which, has anybody actually encountered a Mountain Halls site in the latest release? I've been playing in 40.08 for a little while, but today I tried genning a few worlds in 40.13. According to legends, all of the dwarf civilizations had only Fortress and Hillock sites, and paging through adventurer start locations never gave me the option to start in a deep site, either. Come to think of it, I don't recall seeing any mention of tunnel-building in the legends, either, so maybe that whole subsystem is broken.

Pity, I had a lot of fun in my 40.08 game tooling around under the mountains in the tunnel network.

Yes, at sufficiently low temperatures anything made of organic materials will be killed by exposure. The mechanism seems to be that exposure to cold causes materials with a COLDDAM tag in their material template to be damaged by cold. Living tissue will receive frostbite wounds, nonliving plant/animal materials will become worn. Creatures stuck out in the cold will generally die when the frostbite affects the brain, and then the cold-based wear damage will eventually destroy the corpse. All that will be left will be a pile of whatever metal/stone items the creature had left on the tile where it perished.

Also, insulation actually is helpful. I think the game calculates temperatures layer-by-layer, so the more layers a creature is wearing, the longer it will last before frostbite starts on the covered body part. In addition, temperature changes faster if a body part is in direct contact with something cold than merely being exposed to a cold environment. As a result, footwear becomes very important if you are going to send anyone outside at an extremely low temperature site. Frostbite of exposed feet can be nearly instantaneous, and worse, without precautions you can wind up with a tantrum spiral from loads of dwarves having their shoes freeze off. (Having no footwear is a surprisingly large negative thought.)

Yup, seems pretty common actually. I'd say in the majority of the long worlds I've made, history entered the Age of Goblins somewhere between the second and fourth century.

Although, it's not like your adventurer is the only hope for dwarf-kind! Violent critters that they are, goblins will quite happily murder each other willy-nilly under the right circumstances. I just had a world pop out of the Age of Goblins into a second golden age right around the year 800, because a war between a goblin civ and a goblin-dominated human civ killed off ~20000 gobs. Although even after that, they remain the most numerous race by a fair margin.

Has anyone brought this thread to Toady One's attention?

I feel that that would be a rather interesting reaction.

Toady never specifically mentioned fixing this behaviour, but I've tried this and it no longer works in 0.40.