Bay 12 Games Forum

Hey guys, sorry for the delay! Haven't really been feeling the Dwarf Fortress recently. I'll have my turn finished and uploaded tomorrow. I think I'm going to drop out for a little while after that, though.

Just a few idle thoughts from my time playing and tweaking this mod. Others may not share my opinions, of course.

The ability to directly forge metal armor would be nice. It didn't make much sense to me why I had to make a non-metal version, then reinforce it. Especially in the case of gauntlets, under which players are generally wearing a pair of gloves anyways.

There are a lot of low-tier items in the crafting list that I just can't see myself ever making. Stone and bone tools sound cool, but serve no purpose once you find even a slight bit of metal. Maybe if megabeast bones had properties similar to adamantine or even steel, but otherwise I can't see myself ever making anything with them. That said, adorning the grip of my sword with dragon bone is pretty awesome.

Two step production of spears is a pain. Again, I'm never going to bother with stone/bone/wood spears, so maybe I just don't see the point and others care about it more.

Being able to resize clothes and armor sounded nice, but in practice it's better just to tear everything down to scrap and craft a ☼new version☼...

...Except that you can't craft many important types of clothes, like leather shirts, trousers, and more. If part of this mod's goal is to enable players to walk around in the skins of their defeated foes, this seems important. Especially for players who don't want to sacrifice their metal armor for bone.

I'd like to try my hand at a turn of modding.

I have a few ideas about the lore in the meanwhile (not yet sure what bits could be represented well in-game, though).

So far we're discussing both magic and invaders from another universe. This is on top of an entirely new setting. Three degrees of separation is a bit too chaotic, in my opinion. It makes it difficult to explain to people, and I think what we need to pull something coherent from this adventure in godhood is tighter focus. And on that note, I really love the story being told in the background of young gods crafting a universe.

I think I have a way to describe these separate things, magic, world crafting, and extra-dimensional invaders coherently.

You see in small applications, magic can be a force for order. It can allow those sensitive to it to shape the world around them. Some cave creatures and rocks may even use it passively, perhaps for bioluminessence. But in our godly haste, we overlooked it's cost. As our world grew more attuned to the forces of magic, it began to rend at the fabric of our creation, in places breaking down the very rules it was built upon.

These stains upon our grand tapestry are know as 'evil' to some, but they are simply the workings of chaos. The touch of the mad gods, who lurk in the shadows. We who build this world are gods of Order and Chaos. Only time will tell which side will claim this realm.

Story time finished, what do you all think? I'd call it the Realm of Order and Chaos. Perhaps when a suggestion is brought up, we could call it orderly or chaotic, and if it's orderly it becomes apart of the base realm, and if it's chaotic, it becomes a product of the blighted chaos biomes.

AGH! As with all new skills, mistakes will be made. I used the wrong skill token (should be FORGE_WEAPON, not METALSMITHING) in a few places. My save hasn't exploded horribly or anything yet, but I didn't use any of the bugged reactions before I caught the mistake. I went ahead and fixed that, and made a few tweaks to the reaction descriptions while I was at it.

Here is the new version if you want it. Changelog is over on the dffd page. A changelog for a mod of a mod (of a mod?). Truly, what has this world come to?

While looking around, I spotted mention of Categories for reactions. However they're apparently only for Fort mode. Such a pitty. 

The key things I've noticed so far:

• metal arrow production should canonically use FORGE_WEAPON, not METALCRAFT.
• metal weapon production should use FORGE_WEAPON
• metal armor production should use FORGE_ARMOR

I'm assuming the only changes that need to be made for those issues are in reaction_other.txt. I'll toss up a copy of that file in an hour or so if anyone wants it.

One way we could work this in is to add a single "fortress turn" after every 10 or so adventure mode turns. I'll admit i'm not very well versed in fortress mode and what can be accomplished in a week, though. The point would be to develop a fortress for the sake of future adventurers, not for the sake of the fortress itself.

(PS sorry for the huge delay! I lost my notes and had to do some digging through the save file to pull out some details.)

I don't think traps activate in adventure mode right now, anyways. But even if they did, it would probably still be a good idea to have them. Can't let just anyone into the treasure hall!