Bay 12 Games Forum

Updated for steam version.

Still testing this so feedback is appreciated.

Eggs are no longer proportionate due to various reasons, but I think the new way of working is reasonable balance wise.

Updated for 42.05

Any issues, please let me know.

There's a really old mod somewhere in which silkworms are a hivable creature and instead of honey they produce thread, but I never got around to properly updating and playing around with it. Give the forums a search, it'll be around somewhere.

I know all this, i was just confused as to why the [USE_MATERIAL_TEMPLATE:SILK:SILK_TEMPLATE] was indented under [BODY_DETAIL_PLAN:EGG_MATERIALS]

You seem defensive about this, i'm only trying to help.

Yeah, it's probably the most efficient way of doing things but i don't feel sacrificing simplicity through dfhack efficiency would be the best option. Its of my personal opinion Toady should provide more modding support so we can have greater interaction with reactions... but i'm sure i'm no special snowflake with this opinion.

No it's a lot simpler. There's a material called EGGSHELL_TEMPLATE, this is what all eggs are made of, the EGG_WHITE and EGG_YOLK are just kind of like attributes.

As it stands, all animals that lay eggs make them out of [MATERIAL_TEMPLATE:EGGSHELL_TEMPLATE], but you can designate them to lay them out of any MATERIAL_TEMPLATE, in my mod they do so out of [MATERIAL_TEMPLATE:SILK_TEMPLATE].

[LAYS_EGGS]
         [EGG_MATERIAL:LOCAL_CREATURE_MAT:SILK:SOLID]
         [EGG_MATERIAL:LOCAL_CREATURE_MAT:EGG_WHITE:LIQUID]
         [EGG_MATERIAL:LOCAL_CREATURE_MAT:EGG_YOLK:LIQUID]
         [EGG_SIZE:150]
         [CLUTCH_SIZE:3:6]

Then you can do whatever you want with the eggs and if the reaction takes material from the egg reagent it will make a product of that material.

However to stop weavers making EGGSHELL thread out of chicken eggs, i use a [REACTION_CLASS:SILK_EGG] under silk, so reagents of that material can only be used in the reaction.

As for [PRODUCT_DIMENSION:1500], i don't believe that's relevant anymore, but we can trick dwarf fortress and turn the eggs into globs (like meat and fat), which will give us an arbitrary amount of "egg globs" in relativity to egg size, which can then be exchanged into an appropriate amount of thread by a second reaction.

I hope this makes sense, and i haven't horribly misunderstood...

Shameless self promotion coming through.

I don't think i've seen silk industry done more efficiently than using eggs, which is remarkably simple to do.

My mod does exactly this, by making spiders lay eggs with silk shells, which are fed into a reaction to convert the eggs into globs, then another reaction to convert the globs to threads.

The last two steps could be converted into one, but doing it with two enables larger eggs to give more threads.