Bay 12 Games Forum

I assume it's a bug, but will check the opinion here before submitting a bug report.

Playing a truly dead civ, I was surprised to see a message claiming a hamlet had been conquered and linked economically to my fortress.
Checking exported legends info (at the beginning of the year), I can see the hamlet has been attacked by my goblin civ neighbor, that had not yet attacked me at the time, and wasn't at war at embark, with that attack being repelled.
The civ screen shows the hamlet as being controlled by those same goblins, who are now at war with my site. Thus, I assume the gobbos attacked a human site, conquered it, and it somehow attached itself economically to their soon to be enemy. I believe I've seen a couple of similar head scratchers in the past (with a live civ) where a couple of sites were reported conquered and linked to my fortress, but every civ screen check has shown them as as controlled by the active enemy (who'd already attacked my site before those linkages).

I've now found "Wagon Wood Logs" unexpectedly in my trade depot. I have no indication of anything happening that ought to cause scuttling, and I believe I've seen the caravans leave normally (although I haven't seen the wagons, only the animals and their draggers, as I rarely look at where the wagon entrance starts, nor at the wagon entrance tunnel). In addition to that, I don't find any garbage that a scuttling wagon ought to dump. However, both occasions happened after I'd bought bins with leather (not sure if I bought cloth bins on both occasions, but at least before the second one). Has anyone else seen something similar?

- You can't do anything about those suspicions undead/necro visiting hordes until you've had a crime of any kind (typically a tantrum related one), which finally allows you to bring units in for questioning. Before that, no matter how much suspicious behavior you see, you can do nothing.
- To be able to interrogate villains, you have to enable the injustice system, which causes more harm than the one prevented (as that amounts to essentially nothing). This harm can be worked around by modding mandates out of dwarven noble positions, though.
 - Once I've finally gotten an excuse to start questioning suspects, I've had little success in getting the necros to implicate their local associates. I've gotten some bosses, which is completely useless as those never visit the site.
- In the event you actually get a theft report before the artifact has left the site, you still won't get it back, as even if you manage to catch the messenger carrying it off, you can't get it out from the inventory, as it can't be dumped or forbidden (that you can use DFHack to get it back for a second before it's stolen again is absolutely no excuse for vanilla).
- Selecting interrogations or convictions are fire-and-pray orders: once given (e.g. accidentally by trying to get some additional info that isn't there) you can't take them back.
- The interrogation list is cluttered with animals, invaders, FBs, and dead units. The only good thing I can say about it is that DF didn't crash when I tried to interrogate a dead unit: it just pretended to schedule an interrogation while not doing it. You also can't select multiple interrogation targets at the same time, but have to scroll though that the same pages of the list for each one.
- The sentence feedback is extremely poor. Once in a blue moon you may see something about a pending sentence, but most of the time you're limited to see "fighting" reports and have to deduce (from the parties involved) that the sentence probably was a beating. Similarly, you may see someone being hauled off to prison for an unspecified amount of time. Obviously, there's no info of what the sentence resulting from a conviction would be, and you have no control over it.
- The only results of sentences are that your fortress is punished if it's a citizen, through loss of production. It doesn't seem to have any effect whatsoever on the criminals (while imprisoned they are temporarily incapacitated, and I assume the same goes for hospitalization, and I assume it might "help" getting them stressed), but they'll be right back to crime the second they're able to.
- The counter intelligence screens are rather useless. They get cluttered by info about crimes elsewhere, which you can do absolutely nothing about (if restricted to the reports that would be mildly amusing the first 10 times), and there's no way to tell which "Plot against For" line corresponds to the plot a particular criminal you want to interrogate is involved in: it's totally disconnected from the "organization charts" section.
- The were villains that enter the fortress under the guise of visitors and then explode in the tavern aren't fun at all, in particular since the horde of visiting necro villains then make armies out of the slaughter that ensues.
- While legitimate visitors run out (killed by invaders, as they don't have the sense to turn around when the fortress is besieged by undead hordes), there's no shortage of villains: they'll show up even if no legitimate ones appear.
- You can protect the artifacts that can be carried (weapons and armor) or built, but everything else will be stolen sooner or later. If you try to store them in a locked room, I'd expect there to be a rush of corrupt citizens making a beeline for the store room (even if it is on a pedestal with a floor grate above in an attempt to get some use out of the artifacts) as soon as the door is unlocked to store a new artifact. Mine cart dumping into a pit might work, but there they'd be completely useless for everyone.

The best way to deal with villains is probably either to forego visitors altogether, or to kill the obvious villains with DFHack as soon as they are announced (if trying to sic the militia on them you're getting a loyalty cascade sooner or later, at least if you've accepted petitions). At the very least, you can expect other visitors (if you get any) to get bugged hiddenly aggressive from time to time.

In short, the Villains just bring a lot of trouble, and while you can spend effort to investigate and convict, that effort is a wasted chore that has no useful effect.

So I had this visiting scholar, clad in full armor and having a few trinkets made out of bone, some of it from sapients. Great, another necro visitor under a false identity... In addition to the other two and the intelligent undead ones already present.

Suddenly the bugger turns into a were, but just stands in the middle of the room, and quickly turns back just after I realized that this probably would be the end of the fortress. So instead of trying to flee to the "safety" of the outside, I can sick a squad of my raw recruit level dorfs on it and eliminate it.

Something completely different: All my visiting scholars are bugged. They read my books, all 6 of them, (and hold on to them, so I have to dump them back), but they don't research, but just have no activity, apart from the reading (this might be what saved the fortress). The tavern visitors behave normally. The scholars leave normally, though.

At the first autumn arrived, I realized I didn't have either a trade depot or a wagon access. Somehow the trade depot was finished in the nick of time, and I saw the wagons arriving (somehow missed the arrival message with my own pausing), but the trade depot is in my recessed courtyard (13*13 area channeled one level down into the ground), in the process of being decked over, with two single tile holes in the roof at two corners. Somehow the wagon managed to go down one of these holes and unload their goods.

Sites spreading evil are new to 0.47.01, but what, exactly, are the possible effects of this evil?
What I think I know (updated based on some of the below):
- The Evilness value gradually increases while the influence is present.
- Evil plants and creatures can be added to the region pop and be present at a new embark. May be tied to one or more spheres.
- Night creatures of the HFEXP... type can be added to the region pop.
- 100% vegetation death can be tied to a region, presumably affecting only Evil tiles. May be tied to one or more sheres (death? blight?)

Effects I think are present:
- World tiles with habitations are exempt (player fortresses, hamlets, etc.) from the spread of evil?
- Effects of the evil do not take effect until a tile has tipped over to become Evil (apart from Good->Neutral)?
- Once the evil influence is gone, Evilness stops increasing, but does not fall back toward its initial value, leaving all effects as they were?
- Evil weather does not spawn in these areas (unless they are "normal" region interactions tied to a region that was evil originally)? No new region interactions associations have been seen, comparing start of history with the end of history.

Open questions:
- Once Evilness increases from Good to Neutral, does Good aligned flora/fauna disappear?
- What effects do spheres have, which spheres, and how do you determine what the influencing sphere(s) is?
- Can these areas be reanimating (while the rest of the region is not)?
- Can you get "normal" undead in these areas (excluding what's "normal" to the region and "visitors" from neighboring ones)?
- What about night creatures?

This suggestion is aimed at the Premium release, or, at the latest, the tail of it, prior to the Big Wait. In order to make that as realistic as possible, the suggestion is to make as small changes as possible, while still allow the plants to be viable for farming. Thus various improvements (such as adjustment of farming periods, additional produce, etc.) are out of the scope and are better suited for other suggestion threads.

Relevant bugs:
- 6940 (long standing bug with varying contents as parts have been fixed and new plants introduced)
- 8226 (Preference string for oats being "beer" when it doesn't produce beer and won't). Included only because the file is affected anyway.
- 10581 (Trees yielding no wood never show up). One of the "trees" is the banana plant, and its absence means the absence of banana and the booze made from it, apart from luck with elven imports.

Proposed implementation:
- Modify plants that produce inedible seed "containers" to directly produce the seeds, taking a cue from nut bearing trees.
- Add explicit seeds to plants that produce edible seeds, but do not have working seed extraction byproduct reactions (for some reason the absence of a usable "structure" component knocks out this functionality).
- Introduce two new reactions for the Farmer's Workshop to extract seeds from plants and "fruit" that can not be "repaired" through the mechanisms above. This affects plants that can only be cooked and whose seeds are inedible, as well as "fruit" without a usable "structure" part and whose seeds are inedible, and thus won't be collected by plant gatherers.
- Add the new reactions to the dwarven section of entity_defaults.txt.

Details:
Reactions, to be added to reaction_other.txt (I placed them last, but there may be a more logical placement)

Lines to be added to entity_defaults.txt:

Modified plant_garden.txt (file too large to be posted directly):
https://www.dropbox.com/s/phptxvygymrqbfl/plant_garden.txt?dl=0

Modified plant_crops.txt (ditto):
https://www.dropbox.com/s/bx7y2cpzgk163jf/plant_crops.txt?dl=0

Both of the files above have modified and added lines clearly marked.

Replace the first two entries in plant_new_trees.txt with
The change for both trees is an introduction of a WOOD material section. This results in the trees producing wood when felled (which they shouldn't), but without this sections DF refuses to generate any trees or saplings of these species.

What I think I know:
- "Normal" civs have a 30 tile range.
- Kobolds and necro towers have a 10 tile range.
- Mountain and Ocean world tiles can only be passed through if there's a site on it.
- Range is measured from the closest settlement, not the capital.
- Range is calculated along the closest path, at the cost of 1 per tile, regardless of whether it is diagonal or perpendicular.
- Mid level tile information isn't used at all, i.e. an Ocean world tile that actually has a land bridge across is nevertheless not passable.
- A site on an impassable tile can be reached if a neighboring tile is passable, and makes the tile itself passable.

What I suspect:
- That Lake tiles are treated the same as Mountain and Ocean tiles, i.e. as impassable.
- A civ set to start in caves fail to expand to new sites and does not show up as a neighbor pre embark (according to tests with modded humans).
- Some unknown criteria can cause the neighbor indicator to be "NO TRADE". The wiki explains that the lack of pack animals causes "NO TRADE", and access to pullers does not negate the indication (but does allow for trade). I've just seen "NO TRADE" in a close to vanilla world (gobbos modified to start on glaciers), but won't investigate it further for the time being.

Known Unknowns:

- What are the exact criteria for determining what a civ's neighbor range is (or, even better, if there's a field somewhere that allows you to read what DF has decided, although knowing a controlling token would help modders)? Site type rather than civ type, as proposed by Fleeting Frames is a very reasonable possible alternative criterion. Humans modded to start in caves are hidden like kobolds, but are nevertheless sending a caravan to a fortress at a range of 16 (the range at which I tested it). Kobolds modded to start at mountainhomes have a normal range according to DF pre embark info, so my best guess is that the military range is restricted to 10 when starting in caves, even when the trade range is longer.
- Which sites are considered to be civ settlements from a neighbor range determination perspective? Caves can sometimes be settled by people belonging to a civ (and get linked economically to player fortresses), and there are e.g. refugee camps, but does it make them count?
- What makes a site dead? This is particularly relevant to necro towers, as I haven't found how to distinguish active ones from dud ones. DF does make a distinction for towers pre embark (it's hard to locate any test case that would test civ attached sites).

Unknown Unknowns:
- The things I've failed to realize will have to be taken into account as well.

Why care about the details: The practical use would e.g. be to allow a script to visualize civ/race ranges pre embark, and possibly to search for sites with certain kinds of neighbors. Besides the practical uses, it's DF info...

Edit: Updated the above based on Fleeting Frames feedback.
Edit 2: Further updates based on findings in this thread.
Edit 3: Updated the above. In particular, looking at DF's display shows "inexplicable" access to mountain tiles that can be explained by hidden LairShrines in adjacent tiles making those mountain tiles passable. Thus, "settlement" has been replaced with "site" when it comes to passability above. Note that the range of sites hasn't been explored, though.