Bay 12 Games Forum

No. Currently the materials and items available to caravans are set at the time the starting site is created, based on resources available in some close proximity. The exception to that is books, which become available gradually as they are written or recovered (and they can include necro books...). I guess it could also include religious items, such as dies, if caravans carry those.

I would guess (re)introduction of the economy should include a more dynamic supply and demand situation where resources are gained and lost depending on the extent of the trade network.

Currently a civ can't gain new kinds of tame animals either, as training knowledge filtered back to the civ can't reach the fully tame state.

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Last few times I tried that, the bugger climbed right back up and got stuck again.

Hm, hasn't happened to me (although I don't think I've had a mood in such situations, but definitely a meeting, with the stupid diplomat standing lower on the stair and blocking the path until the mayor was teleported away, at which time the they both went to the office and had their meeting).

I guess that if a picker gets stuck while picking and is teleported away before the picking task is finished he might return to the designated position. In that case you'd probably have to wait until the bugger gets hungry/thirsty, or even parched/starving, at which time the current task should be abandoned.

After a while the dorf will go bonkers due to failing the mood and some time after that he'll die. However, I'd either try to build stairs up to beside the dorf or cut the tree down.

I wouldn't be shocked if DF didn't always respect the elevation PSV value if it plonks down a volcano in a tile, in particular if that tile was surrounded by mountain tiles on at least two (out of 4 perpendicular) sides.

You can't paint good/evil because it's assigned by DF internally during world gen. The reason is probably because good/evil are region features (recently modified by evil spreading from sources, but that's probably more of a temporary hack than a "real" implementation, as spheres will require a new framework during the map rewrite anyway), and regions are build from the other primitive parameters that are available (salinity isn't available either, but salty/brackish/fresh doesn't affect region type). If you define primitive parameters in neighboring tiles that result in the same region type they join up to form a single region.
Evilness can be hacked during/after world gen, but that's the current extent. It would be possible to have a script interrupt world gen immediately after assignment of evilness to override those values, but it's quite possible DF doesn't detect that and you'd have to hack the flora/fauna of the region as well to make it work.
As you say, a PSV world allows you to paint what becomes regions such that you can manually split them into good/neutral/evil based on size to a decent degree.

Variance shouldn't have any effect on a fully defined PSV world. However, if you specify only some of the parameters and let DF generate the others it will do so (and I generally use fully defined PSV world, so I don't know much about how the hybrid approach works).

The wiki should be able to tell you which biomes belong to the same region type. "Hills" and "Grassland" have the same biomes (savanna, etc.), while all the other biomes are present in a single region type only.

A volcano is a "feature" that exists within a tile, and so isn't tied to any particular region type, even if the cone may rise to mountain elevations.

Rivers shouldn't split regions, as they appear "on top" (they're "features"). I suspect the cases you've seen are grassland/hill regions (they differ only by Drainage).

Never seen any flooding (although someone recently said that happened, although it wasn't verified as far as I've seen). Lake formation happens during world gen and can't be controlled by PSVs, though. Elevation below 100 results in ocean tiles (which can result in very small oceans...), not lakes.

A major civ killing factor is megabeast/titan count. They tend to stomp out a lot of civs while they only have a single site if you have a lot of them.

Larger maps typically have more civs on them, but more civs means there's a greater chance some survive somewhere, so reducing the number of civs reduces the chance/risk of them being near each other.

You probably don't want to play a truly dead civ, as those a badly bugged: No travel possible, so no raiding. Your civ won't found sites (naturally), but you can't conquer any either, so you're relying on sites to spontaneously tie themselves to you for those nobles. If you lose your expedition leader it won't be replaced, which locks out a lot of functionality if that happens, but I think getting a mayor will get past that problem (there should be a new one elected the next summer).

df.global.world contains almost everything of interest (there are things outside, like df.global.ui). gui/gm-editor is the standard tool for looking at df structures, but you can also look at the XML source for it (either in a local copy of dfhack if you compile it yourself, or on github (approximately named dfhack/df-structures). The XML has the advantage that there are some comments in there, but gui/gm-editor is usually easier to use because you don't have to guess at the file things are stored in).

Entities are stored in df.global.world.entities.all.

I don't really know what a nemesis record is for, but there are references to them and they, in turn, reference the hist fig targeted, which has been sufficient for my purposes so far.

"gui/gm-editor df.global.ui" will show you the top level of ui, and allows you to traverse further down the tree (when the elements are compound, of course), but, as indicated above, you probably want df.global.world as your top exploration level.

I really like the fungiwood and spore trees (although I agree with voliol that it looks a bit odd with the fungiwood "nodes" sometimes looking like they're disconnected from the "tree". I'd prefer to have the "thorn" part of the blood thorn emphasized, but won't complain if it ends up like this in the end, as this first iteration looks very good. In comparison, the tunnel tube looks a bit "boring", but it's still suitably distinct from anything else (I'd experiment with a cap that's about half again the size of the "stem" at each top level if I had any artistic ability, but it may well end up just looking stupid, and would require the caps to yield to stems beside them when present [in which case I wouldn't have a gap in between, but actually fuse them]).

The cap set is a bit boring in comparison, but certainly serves the purpose of being distinct color and pattern wise. It might be possible to satisfy the "stunning color" goblin cap pref string by adding weird patterns in a very different color on top of the RAW basic color (but in the skin only, so it wouldn't affect the wood).