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DF General Discussion / Re: Future of the Fortress
« on: November 03, 2021, 05:39:49 pm »I am also interested to see what a new 'friendly' embark screen UI will be like, if theres any general refinement in the presentation of a embark, since most players outsource to DFhack for the info they actually want, like a geological survey hinging on almost cheating on the content of the soil and ore densities/types.
But i suppose in context, you can say dwarves run around with dousing rods to get the briefest of ideas what lies on embark, or least they know already without calling upon generalized geographical knowledge (abstract from scholarly pursuits, but maybe probably shouldn't be so omniscient about it without good reason)
True, DFhack's `prospect` is a bit overly generous with quantities and depths, but really the idea that dwarves would stop at some random location on the strength of "There's some kinds of metals here, somewhere!" as in standard vanilla embarking that's historically strange and unrealistic.
If you surveyed DF players about what metals and minerals they hoped to find in an embark, I suspect iron would head the list, with gold, silver, copper and coal all pretty high up. All of those are commonly found in surface outcrops and placer deposits in streams and rivers. Even in Roman times iron mines were placed more depending on convenient forests to cut for fuel than any difficulty finding the iron, which we know later miners would often locate by walking around after a rain and smelling* the distinctive metallic odor. Once embarked in DF, you'll routinely find one or more of these in stream beds if they're present, or boulders and outcrops, so they're only really hidden when choosing the site. I imagine dwarven caravans and other surface travelers would make notes as they go, and they'd probably be doing the same in the caverns for deep metals. I hope our hearty band of seven would at least check the river banks, and the rocks at their feet!
None of this takes into account any special dwarven relationship with stone or mining!
I'd like to see something more like PatrikLundell's `embark-assistant` make it into vanilla. It's a more fine-grained version of vanilla site search, able to check for individual minerals and features, without concerning itself overly with the quantity of resources like `prospect`.
* I've lived in a place with enough surface deposits of copper ore that half the valley smelled like wet pennies after a rain, and the stones would be blue or green depending on how wet they were, like great boulder-sized humidity gauges. It was only saved from commercial mining by the fact that it would cost so much to build proper roads through the mountains (and a small side helping of the local people having defended themselves by strength of arms in a not too distant civil war.)
