Bay 12 Games Forum

In any case, technology would be fun...

But would it be !!FUN!! ?

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I would also like the ability to take a block of sand/soil/clay and move it elsewhere for farming purposes.

This isn't any more realistic than pouring water on the rocks. The soil would be very quickly depleted of nutrients, so in either case, you still have plants growing on make-believe energy. So I'm not sure it's worth the effort to replace one unrealistic mechanic with another unrealistic mechanic, in the name of realism...

If you have to haul in more soil every growing cycle, then okay that would make sense.

Fair point. Then again, it is a magical world... 
I suppose fertilizer would work but I don't like the idea of having to waste my logs on fertilizer...
Hmm... To spite both my parents being agricultural experts I really don't know how to make it more "realistic". The obvious and most simple way is to increase food consumption and reduce food production. However the whole nutrient thing is still there. If soil nutrition were a thing, then I already forsee it being another fps dump. Imagine now having to calculate a strange nutrition/biomass stat for half the map.

Side thought: Shouldn't overgrown caverns have soil layers or pockets of some form of subterranean soil or something that can function as soil for underground plants?

I got rid of some of the weird text glitches but realized I should probably just rewrite and simplify the whole main post. Not everyone wants to read an entire novel...

It would occupy a large portion of time in Toady's schedule. Setting up videos, editing them, uploading and all that nonsense is not really something he cant already do with mere images and text. Besides, dwarf fortress is a game better played than viewed. If anything, video tutorials might make it all the more confusing to understand what exactly he is working on and how it's coming along.

That said, I would greatly enjoy a DF talk every now and then

Hello guys. It's me. I still haven't gotten around to fixing the terrible coding of the main post. Im busy at the moment(guitar, art school and programming stuffs). I like the idea about taking beds for personal areas and claiming furniture(and maybe other things? Who knows. Perhaps a new mood would be in order where a dwarf just takes random junk and places it in his room. Like an alchemy mood or something, and begins to create a new substance and only he can then replicate it in his home-made lab). I thought about that but at first dismissed it as a proposition exactly because it seemed too damaging to those of us who like to manage EVERYTHING.

I also very much like the theft and prison suggestion. I had not thought how that may actually give prisons a purpose and I was not certain what to do with prisons at all. Thanks for the idea!  I will get these up tomorrow-ish on the main post/list allong with fixing the damn size text things.

Sorry about that.

While we're on the subject, do you think I should add moods as well or no? I feel tempted but I also feel like that would be beyond what this thread was originally intended for. Like, I feel this would help the alchemy department, which is essentially a concept for procedural  production, but should I? Feel free to post your own mood interactions and anything else.

Also thanks for reading.

Son of a

The vast majority of players would simply want their workshops turned on for every job, including newbies.

I would have to agree.

For now I am less concerned with job permission management and more focused on the whole "tool production tree" thing. I have an interesting model in the works. Will post more after school.

Workshop areas sound conceptually powerful and realistic and stuff, but they also sound extraordinarily more confusing for newbies, in a game that is already infamous for being like 10x more confusing for newbies than anything else.

"want stone stuff? Build a modular stone shop" = super intuitive.
"Want stone stuff? Well you make a zone that can overlap with other ones and share this venn diagram of tools, the number and type of which you have to look up from this big table here and then craft them in other zones which need their own venn diagrams of tools to make those tools, and..." = wtfrunsawayscreaming

If you can come up with a powerfully flexible way to scale the complexity with experience (by options) without resulting in two totally different gameplay experience, then it could work. Also, even for advanced players, as much as possible needs to be automated, which is a non trivial set of algorithms here.

Im cetain it wouldn't be THAT complicated. If anything, it might be easier to understand why processes happen and how they come about.

For instance, you want stone stuffs?

Create workshop area -> assign mason's workshop. Bingo you have aworkshop.
Now you just q over it and realize and see a screen that looks something like this:

The "A: New task" stands out. When he presses that, something like this pops up:


Now it has a list of tasks you can preform right now and a list of tasks that you cannot yet preform. There's even indicators that show what exactly is the problem and pressing "v" gives even more information about the task.

Does that really seem complex? And if so then what would you propose to make it better?

Also I went "wtfrunsawayscreaming" the first time I played DF. I remember I accidentally set the whole area to channel and didnt know wtf was happening. I knew that the U lists units and I noticed that some had little blue arrows pointing down but I didnt know wtf was going on. Only through people like Captnduck did I learn how to play the game. I enjoyed the process of learning very much.