Bay 12 Games Forum

Yeah the shaft of enlightenment is insane. I sometimes use it on goblins if I'm bored and want to give my commander a challenging arena fight. Literally just push a creature holding a weapon down a tall shaft with an upright spear at the bottom. There is a very tiny minutely small chance they will simply go splat, but most of the time they parry the spear. It gives them mad xp gainz because the game counts fall damage as the ground hitting the dwarf. Normally a dwarf cannot parry the ground, but when the ground is a spear, he can. Parrying super deadly literally exploding into gibbets damage = huge xp gain.

If the only purpose of the migrants being allowed in is breeding, you could make a shed with a burrow designated in it, and assign the migrants in there, and also put a meeting zone in it. Disable all jobs on the migrants so you don't get cancellation spam. You now have a way of growing the population through breeding without compromising the integrity of the whole "starting four are Armok's chosen" thing or what have you.

PTW. Try talking to the guy who's running Roomcarnage, DS. That fort includes a device for melting glacial ice with liberal amounts of magma, causing constant caveins, melting, re-solidification, and obsidianisation. Probably one of the most horrific stress tests you can put your FPS through.

Rocks. One would obtain rocks

I am going to tell you something that will make your life much easier with regards to industry:

Use the shift key plus directional keys to make a 21*21 room centered on your central staircase. place three mechanic's workshops in a row coming down from the central staircase. Place a row of three masons workshops to the left of the central staircase. Place three jewelers workshops to the right of the central staircase, and place 3 craftsdwarf's workshops to the north of your central staircase. In the top left corner, place a stockpile for furniture, place a stockpile for finished goods in the top right, place a stockpile for stone at the bottom left, and a stockpile for gems at the bottom right. This area will let you create high value furniture and trade goods all on the same level. Which is nice.

At the same time, you can mine out a largeish area north of your craftsdwarf workshops, and designate this as a refuse stockpile. Remember to put a door in the wall! This way you will have easy access to bones for bone crafts and bone bolts at your craftsdwarf's workshops.

And here is probably the thing that takes you the longest to safely figure out as a noob (or at least, it did for me): safe garbage disposal. In your refuse stockpile, build this:

side    top view
view   
        z+1   z+0
_PS o   ooo   ooo
__oBo   oho   oBo
        oSo   ooo
        oPo
        o_o

h hole
_ floor
o wall
S track stop
P pressure plate
B raising (NOT retracting) one-tile bridge

Build the track stop with d-C-S, and set it to dump in the direction of the hole in the floor (press d once you've selected track stop in the build menu until it says "dump north" if the hole is to the north of the track stop. Build the pressure plate with b-T-p, and set it for any weight and to trigger when citizens step on it (the menu is fairly intuitive). The bridge you just build with b-g, but make sure you press w, a, x, or d before placing it to make sure it raises and DOESN'T retract. Once the bridge is built, (q)uery the pressure plate and link it to the bridge with a-b (You will need 3 mechanisms built at a mechanics workshop out of 1 stone each to build this).

Once you've built this, (make sure the bridge is completely walled off once it's linked up!) construct a wooden minecart at a carpenter's shop. then press h to open up routes and press r to create a new minecart "route." Move your cursor with the arrow keys onto the track stop and press s to create a new stop, and then go into the stop's settings menu. Press x to remove all the depart conditions, then move your cursor onto the refuse stockpile and press s to set the stop to take form it. Press enter to set desired items, in this case: refuse corpses, items, and body parts. Press esc to exit the routes menu, and voila, you have a system that will dump refuse onto a raising bridge which will pulverise it into oblivion, and it's all automatic, no oversight needed.

Cooking was an important discovery in our human history (more important than farming, I'd say). It increases the amount of nutrients absorbed by the digestive system. Also, language most likely originated around the campfire from people waiting for the meal to cook and talking about things. IMO though, I don't think Dwarf Fortress should start so far back in time. I mean, you can't even have civilisations or even towns without farming.

Yeah, with regards to cooking, I am making the pre-farming and early farming stuff very simple, so that you'll advance through it fairly quickly. I mean, I am getting in as many non-redundant technologies as I can (and some redundant ones), but you'll still skip the couple of hundred thousand years between "rock" and "sharp rock on a stick," and part of that is making it so that the discovery of fire instantly unlocks primitive cooking. As to towns and things, hopefully by the time this suggestion would be implemented, Toady would have completed the arc that allows you to send out embark parties as the mountainhome (I think that's part of military). Every site and group on the map at the end of worldgen/start of history will count as a separate civilisation. Since you will be the only outpost of your civilisation, you will be the mountainhome automatically, and as a bonus on top of seeing the technology develop, you'll get to see civilisations rise and fall as well. The popcap will be the point at which dwarves start starving to death due to limited resources, which means you will be desperately assigning more gatherers to get more food, which means someone will think of farming eventually. Or, alternately, you become such a successful hunting society, that you decide to set those hunters of yours against smarter prey. Or a bunch of other possibilities. It'd just be cool to see how far the Dwarf Fortress engine could take us.

The only big non-decorative things in metallurgy up until the industrial revolution, apparently, were:

tin and lead smelting (Toss some ore into a campfire and you'll see the metal, very easily discovered by chance)
copper smelting (Requires a much higher heat than a standard campfire. Accidentally put some ore into a kiln maybe?)
bronze alloy (Copper and tin in the right proportions makes bronze, possibly discovered due to a source of copper ore contaminated with tin)
iron smelting (First discovered millennia after bronze. Probably involved people experienced in working with ores doing some experimenting)
wootz steel ( discovery probably a complete accident in building an iron furnace)
Blast furnace

So I think I'll be taking everything up until the iron age or so, right SixOfSpades?

With regards to language, that would require a true procedural language generation engine, which is very difficult. Toady has stated that he doesn't want to leave it as is, with no sentence structure or anything, and that means I'll have to figure out something capable of starting with grunt noises and ending in Renaissance-level literature.

Anyway, moar tech! I'm gonna try to get everything you can possibly get without metal tools before moving on to copper age tech.

Sling
Requires: Fibre cloth or Rawhide
Skills: weaver, tanner, clothesmaker, or leatherworker (order of increasing likelihood)
ID makes an artifact sling. If he is a weaver or clothesmaker, he will make it out of plant fibre cloth at a craftsdwarves shop (If craftsdwarf's workshop is not unlocked, ID will knock down a farmer's workshop to build a craftsdwarf's shop). If he is a tanner or leatherworker, he will make it out of rawhide at a leatherworks (knocking down a scraper's workshop to build a leatherworks if necessary).
Slings use rocks as ammunition, dwarves can only carry a handful at a time without quivers. Slings are quite long range and quick-firing, but don't do much damage at longer range.
Will need a new slinger weapon skill.

Special stones
Requires: Sling
Skills: slinger, knapper
ID makes some smoothed rocks at a knapper's or craftsdwarf's workshop. Smoothed rocks are ammunition for a sling that provide much greater accuracy and slightly increased range.

Throw the spear, Urist!
Requires: A dwarf who uses a spear-type weapon
Skills: Speardwarf
ID will suddenly get the idea to throw his spear at his current target. Allows dwarves to throw spears as ranged weapons.
Uses throwing skill.

Javelins
Requires: Throw the spear, Urist!
Skills: woodcrafter, weaponsmith, thrower
ID grabs a stick and a sharp rock (or a metal spearhead if you're that advanced) and turns it into a primitive javelin at a craftsdwarf's workshop. Javelins have better accuracy and range for throwing than spears, but are poorer melee weapons.

Atlatl (spear thrower)
Requires: Javelins
Skills: woodcrafter, bonecarver, thrower
ID makes an artifact Atlatl, an arm-length shaft with a sort of cup at the end for holding the butt of a spear, out of bone or wood. A dwarf can use the Atlatl to fling spears much further and much harder (but with less accuracy), thanks to the increased leverage it provides. Essentially functions as a ranged weapon which uses javelins as ammunition.
Uses thrower skill.

Fletching
Requires: Atlatl or Bow and arrow
Skills: woodcrafter, bowyer
ID messes around with either a javelin or an arrow for a while at a craftsdwarf's shop, then emerges with a fletched arrow or Atlatl dart. From now on, you can produce Atlatl darts as ammunition for Atlatls that remove the accuracy penalty. You know have long range, accurate, powerful spear slingers (provided Atlatls have already been invented). You can also produce fletched arrows instead of unfletched ones, as soon as Bow and arrow has been invented, also removing the massive accuracy penalty for bow and arrows.

Bow and arrow
Requires: Throw the spear, Urist! and Cord. VERY unlikely with just those two, likelihood increased for every ranged tech known to your dwarves, especially fletching.
Skills: woodcrafter, thrower
ID makes an artifact bow and an arrow at a craftsdwarf's shop, converting it into a bowyer's workshop. Currently, arrows lack any fletching and thus are pretty inaccurate. They are, however, cheaper and quicker to produce than javelins, and deadlier than slung stones. Arrow are produced using the fletching skill at a craftsdwarf's workshop.
Unlocks fletching job.

That's all for today, folks! (I did also revamp my original list...) Pre-metallurgy tech will still have another few entries.

Note that small improvements can keep happening as inspiration moods continue which don't necessarily open up whole new technologies. So your spears are constantly having their shaft design improved, knappers are constantly improving their sharpening techniques, slingers are developing slightly better slings for themselves, butchers are finding better animal glues resulting in increased durability for everything... All these sorts of things can probably be handled by a procedural engine without us making a new tech for each and every single one, without too much issue. I mean, the idea is the same in the high renaissance or in 2000BCE when it comes to holding an tip onto a shaft, and yet, the techniques have obviously been improved over time. It's just in a very linear direction, so every step need not be manually detailed fully.

For these linear advances, Toady could create and assign a tag like [INNOVATION:GLUE:7:BUTCHER:25:MAKE_ITEM:NONE] to fat in the general tissue template, to indicate that any dwarf who handles any generic fat has a chance of 25*butcher_level^2/1000 percent chance to be struck by an inspiration to improve gluemaking technology without producing an item, and handling of fat can provide 7 distinct inspirations in that area, also meaning that a fat-based inspiration. We already know that dwarves can detect what they're handling already thanks to them being pleased at work when they get to work with materials they like. This tag could also be used for things like [INNOVATION:FLETCHING:20:ARCHER:2:FLETCHER:5:MAKE_ITEM:ARROW] to the raws for arrows, to ensure that whenever a dwarf handles arrows, they have a (2*archer_level^2/1000)+(5*fletcher_level^2/1000) percent chance to become inspired and advance fletching tech one of 20 possible times, creating an artifact arrow in the process. The degree of advancement that happens each time would be set in the raws for each tech, and so would the effects thereof. This models a dwarf using an arrow, either by firing it or making it or carrying it, and thinking on his experience as an archer and his experience as an arrowmaker and thinking "now what could I do to make this better?" The simplest way to do it would be so that the game engine runs through the raws for a tech each time an inspiration for that tech is completed, and then modifies the data values in the raw entries of other objects accordingly.

Raw entries for techs could look something like:

[TECH:FLETCHING]
[UNLOCK_INSPIRATION:REQUIRES:TECH:CORDS:LEVEL:1:TECH:BOW:LEVEL:1]
[UNLOCK_INSPIRATION:REQUIRES:TECH:CORDS:LEVEL:1:TECH:ALCATL:LEVEL:1]
[ADVANCE:1:1:MODIFY:ITEM:ARROW:RANGE:ADD:5]
[ADVANCE:1:1:MODIFY:ITEM:ARROW:ACCURACY:SUBT:10]
[ADVANCE:1:1:MODIFY:WORKSHOP:CRAFTSDWARF:ADD_REACTION:ALCATL_DART]
[ADVANCE:2:7:MODIFY:ITEM:ARROW:RANGE:ADD:1]
[ADVANCE:2:7:MODIFY:ITEM:ALCATL_DART:RANGE:ADD:1]
[ADVANCE:2:7:MODIFY:ITEM:BOLT:RANGE:ADD:1]
[ADVANCE:2:20:MODIFY:ITEM:ARROW:ACCURACY:SUBT:1]
[ADVANCE:2:20:MODIFY:ITEM:ALCATL_DART:ACCURACY:SUBT:1]
[ADVANCE:2:20:MODIFY:ITEM:BOLT:ACCURACY:SUBT:1]

What this would mean is that:

• The fletching technology can be the unlocked by an inspiration if cord tech and bow tech are both at at least level 1 OR if cord tech and alcatl tech are both at at least level 1
• The first advancement, the initial unlock, in fletching tech will be a much greater change than the rest.
• For advancements 2 through 7 in fletching, arrows, alcatl darts, and bolts all have 1 added onto the first number in their [RANGE:x] tag
• For advancements 2 through 20 in fletching, arrows, alcatl darts, and bolts all have 1 subtracted from the first number in their [ACCURACY:x] tag.

Toady could also make tags to add to creatures which allow you to detail actions performed by those creatures that can [INSPIRE_SELF] or [INSPIRE_OTHERS]. For example, a cow could have [INSPIRE_OTHERS:GRAZE:DOMESTICATION:7:PLANTER:1], which means that a dwarf that sees a cow grazing will have a 1*planter_skill^2/1000 percent chance of advancing domestication tech by one of seven levels.

Or you could have [INSPIRE_SELF:STAB:SPEAR:100:SPEARDWARF:1:WOODCRAFTER:2:KNAPPER:3:WEAPONSMITH:3] on a dwarf to signify that a dwarf stabbing something will have a chance to become inspired with an improvement to spear technology according to the sum of the squares of their speardwarf, woodcrafter, knapper, and weaponsmith skills.

There would also need to be a separate set of raws for each civilisation to avoid one dwarf inventing a better boot causing all dwarves everywhere to be able to make better boots.

Of course, Toady would have to program the game to be able to change the raws on the fly, but that shouldn't be too hard. Hopefully. At the very least, a stopgap would be to automatically save, surreptitiously quit, apply raw changes and reload each time an innovation finishes.

It's worth mentioning here that I only have a very rudimentary idea of how the raws work, so I could be spouting gibberish, and I'm almost certain I should be attributing range and accuracy to weaponry not ammunition. But you guys get the idea. With these tags added to materials and these techs in the raws and doing their thing, it would be very possible to make a dawn of time mod even if it wasn't included in the main game.

Someone with more RAW experience, what do you think?

You can work around the clothing issue by just making every dwarf an inactive member of the military with a leather uniform. But anyway, you should build a one-storey curtain wall around the area you'll be expanding into, and then raise the original wall a level. The next time you expand again, do the same thing, and raise the inner two walls one level each. You should now have a 1, 2, and 3 z level high wall, for a really cool tiered-city effect.

Since no trading is done, I'm assuming your going to reject barony status. You could make a republic themed city-state, complete with an assembly hall and stuff, and your mayor's residence and senate house would take up most of the original inner wall area.

Of course, all this is far down the line, once you've actually got that exponential population growth thing working for you. For now, just claim a largish area around your village by building a wall around it, and get a forge built to ensure the safety of your starting anvil. You did start with an anvil, right?

That is a good point. How would we know if Toady has noticed something though? I'm all set to keep going until renaissance but you're right, there would be no point unless Toady actually decides to implement this.
Oh Great Toad, give us a sign!