Bay 12 Games Forum

This mod has a few separate aims:

• Provide adventurers with access to as many vanilla Fortress mode crafting capabilities as possible, plus reactions for some other items foreign to dwarves, with pure raw edits.
• Maintain the crafting style of vanilla Adventure mode, with many things being assembled from component parts, but update the system to allow assembled items to have quality levels.
• Replace crafting workshops with portable tools more befitting of a travelling artisan, from the humble mallet & chisel, to the workbench, all the way to portable magma furnaces.
• Stay as compatible as possible with other mods. Only 1 vanilla file has been edited so far, reaction_other, and this edit is just to tidy up the Adventure mode crafting menu. This edit can be overwritten by other mods without causing any real problems.
• Be easy to amend, so that it is no trouble to add in reactions for items added in future updates, or in other mods.

I've attempted to keep as vanilla as possible with this mod, but there are a few small deviations here and there, such as:

• Expanded knapping, providing access to some of the new tools added in by the mod, as well as stone arrows, bolts, picks, spears, and large daggers, alongside the vanilla stone axe. Picks are added because they are used for a reaction to turn boulders into small rocks, the others are there just because it seemed reasonable to be able to make them.
• Obsidian casting, for obvious reasons, cannot be done in traditional Fortress mode fashion as an adventurer, and it doesn't seem possible to fill buckets from adjacent magma, so a reaction to use a smelter to melt small rocks has been added, as has an obsidian casting reaction that uses a bucket of magma, a bucket of water, and a tool called a boulder mould.
• There is also a glassmaking reaction to make a small rock, for easier knapping of actual sharp weapons provided adventurers have access to sandy soils.
• Any and all blocks can be turned into logs, so adventurers can use them in buildings.

!!IMPORTANT!!
Reactions check containers in a strange manner. It seems to me that it checks the top item in the container's inventory, and cycles through them until it finds an item that doesn't fit the description of the item it's searching for. This means that if the items that are used in the current reaction aren't at the top of the container's inventory list, the container is ignored.

Update Log

DFFD Link: http://dffd.bay12games.com/file.php?id=14021

Currently, AFAIK, all body attributes have effects outside of labours, but soul attributes seem to affect very little in that regard, notable exception being willpower. Here's a list of possible generic effects that some attributes could have.

Analytical Ability - Affects rate of skill gain (Higher analytical ability = faster skill gain)

Focus - Affects the intensity of the effects of unmet needs (Higher focus = smaller debuffs from unmet needs & larger buffs from recently met needs)

Intuition - Affects chance to auto-dodge/block/parry (Higher intuition = higher chance to auto-dodge/block/parry)

Patience - Affects the rate of loss of focus from unmet needs (Higher patience = slower focus loss)

Memory - Affects rate of skill rust (Higher memory = slower skill rust)

Empathy - Affects the intensity of thoughts generated from social interaction (Higher empathy = greater mood boost and busts from social sources)

Social Awareness - Affects the rate at which relationships are formed (Higher social awareness = make friends faster & form grudges slower)

That's all I got, I know I didn't get all the attributes and the suggestions I gave can probably be greatly improved upon, but that's the sorta stuff forums are for right?

So right now, iirc, there's an issue with antisocial dwarves, they have a broad but shallow relationship pool because they seek places to socialise, but no specific dwarves to socialise with, leading to low marriage rates and an overdependence on migrants to keep population up, as well as poor mood due to a lack of friends to have pleasant conversation with, and lack of weddings and children to boost mood too, though if a marriage does manage to happen then there is certainly no shortage of children for that couple. I have a couple of suggestions to remedy this:

1) Dwarves make plans with friends and hang out together when they feel the need for some social interaction, friends who are also feeling that need, or who aren't really doing anything anyway, agree to meet up for an activity (they don't necessarily have to meet up to plan, they could use whatever dwarven telepathy they use to take orders from the player/nobles). They all go to the same meeting area/location, stay close enough to each other that each member of the group can talk to at least one other group member, and they perform appropriate activities for the zone, be it drunken revelry, admiration of art, or a group study. This should be restricted to dwarves that are already friends, and group sizes should stay fairly small to keep it distinguishable from parties, maybe a maximum of 8 so that if they go to the tavern or the library they can all sit around the same table.

1a) A dwarf who has no friends in their current burrow who feels the need for some social interaction seeks friends among some of their acquaintances, these interactions may end in drunken fistfights if they end up having grudges rather than friendships, but hey then they might get a little more focus after causing trouble/fighting/arguing as well as the conversation prior to the violence sating their need for social interaction.

2) Sexually compatible and available acquaintances (not friends since if they were gonna be lovers they would be already), and already existing couples, go on dates if both of them feel the need for romance. Dating acquaintances may also result in a brawl if they end up with a grudge since they're only acquaintances, but you can RP it as the dwarven equivalent of getting slapped for saying/doing something the other person strongly disagrees with. Dates would basically work just like friends meeting up, with the exception that only 2 dwarves may be on the same date.

Hopefully, both should make dwarves happier and more sociable, 1 should get them to form cliques, which could be expanded into gangs during the crime arc or something if the game can be made to recognise these cliques somehow, and 2 should make them less prone to extinction through celibacy.

EDIT: Thread was a bit longer than I anticipated, so I'm gonna list as many related suggestions that popped up during the discussion here as I can find (not including those mentioned in the OP) to make it easier for people to get involved and add their own ideas and opinions, or to pique interest into reading the thread since I'm just doing quick 1 sentence summaries of the suggestions.

Currently trappers exclusively catch vermin using animal traps, which can then only really consistently be used as pets that cause as many bad thoughts as they do good, with the occasional vermin that can be dissected for a low-value product, with the possible threat of burning your fortress down from within if you don't dissect them fast enough. I have a suggestion that could make them more worth the effort.

Nets.

A thrown projectile that deals no damage, but entangles opponents, essentially caging them. Players could designate an animal that they want to catch, and a trapper would go out and try to throw a net at it, providing players with a more reliable source of wild animals than simply placing cage traps around randomly and hoping something wanders into them. Nets could have increased wear while an animal is contained within it, much like the increased wear on equipped clothes, encouraging players to move caught animals into cages ASAP if they're making rope nets, but they could be more relaxed about it if they used chain instead.

3 possible bonuses to this:
1) If the net could be 'reeled in' to bring it back to where it was thrown, fisherdwarves could finally get revenge on the carp.
2) If added, these could be the first step towards adventure mode animal training.
3) The thrower skill might actually get used outside of tantrums and adventure mode.

I have a few unrelated suggestions that seem too small to warrant a thread each:

1) Baby animals should cost fewer embark points than adults, because currently there is no reason to embark with them
2) The [TOTEMABLE] tag should be possible to reference within the raws, to allow the exclusive use of skulls in reactions
3) Corpses and/or body parts should be capable of wearing clothes, so that things stop stripping at the moment of death

So I decided I'd try my hand at modding something small into the game to make trading in adventure mode more viable: whittled & sculpted crafts, made from branches and small rocks (was originally also going to add totems but apparently there's no way to differentiate skulls from other [USE_BODY_COMPONENT] items in vanilla). Whittling works just fine and is basically a copy/paste of bone crafts with the reagents copy/pasted from helves, the word "bone" replaced with "branch", and the skill switched to woodcrafting, but I decided sculpting stone should require a hammer & chisel, and it mostly works. I can do the reactions just fine, there's just this one problem I'm having. The game clearly recognises that the hammer is supposed to be a blunt hard item, it even says it at the top of the screen in the crafting menu, but this doesn't stop my adventurer from using his llama wool sock as a hammer. I'm using [HARD_ITEM_MATERIAL] to specify that it should not use soft items such as clothes, can anyone tell me what I'm doing wrong? Figurine reaction below for reference.

[REACTION:SCULPT_STONE_FIGURINE]
[NAME:sculpt stone figurine]
[ADVENTURE_MODE_ENABLED]
[REAGENT:stone:1:ROCK:NONE:NONE:NONE]
[NO_EDGE_ALLOWED]
[REAGENT:chisel:1:NONE:NONE:NONE:NONE]
[PRESERVE_REAGENT][HAS_EDGE]
[REAGENT:hammer:1:NONE:NONE:NONE:NONE]
[PRESERVE_REAGENT][NO_EDGE_ALLOWED][HARD_ITEM_MATERIAL]
[PRODUCT:100:1:FIGURINE:NONE:GET_MATERIAL_FROM_REAGENT:stone:NONE]
[PRODUCT_TOKEN:figurine]
[SKILL:KNAPPING]
[CATEGORY:ADV_STONE_SCULPTING]
[CATEGORY_NAME:Sculpt stone]
[CATEGORY_DESCRIPTION:Make crafts from stone using a hammer and chisel.]
EDIT:
A little more testing has revealed that it is specifically wool clothing that can be used as a hammer, and presumably other wool items too

EDIT 2:
Possible culprit found, in the materials raw hair has the [ITEMS_HARD] tag, presumably wool uses that, not sure what I'm about to break by deleting it but there's only one way to find out

EDIT 3:
Yeah it's fixed now, and it doesn't seem to have had any repercussions in adventure mode as far as I can tell

Made a forum account just for this post, cause it seems important.

Until just now it was my understanding that a trained Giant Cave Spider doesn't shoot webs at hostiles, that's what the wiki says and I'm only playing my second proper fortress, so I pretty much rely on the wiki for everything, so I'm gonna go ahead and assume my GCS based execution chamber filling literally every tile with silk the first time I used it is unusual, I'll go over what I did in as much detail as possible, to the point where it's probably unnecessary, because I am but a Dabbling Fortress Builder and Not Scientist, though I do plan on posting on this thread again for my next test(s), where I'll try removing certain steps to find out which ones are and aren't necessary. Also I am currently using 0.44.05, I've not updated yet cause I'm waiting for the inevitable fall of the fortress, I'm surprised I've even lasted this long.

So, first possible important detail: The 5 GCSs are pastured in a 7x7 room, at the end of a 20 tile long, 1 tile wide hallway completely filled with cage traps on a subterranean soil layer 3 z-levels from the surface, this room was initially a precaution to prevent a GCS from reverting to wild and eating my fortress' entire population, later used as a mating room to build up my trained GCS numbers just cause it was already made and not being used for much else now that my trainers are somewhat competent, and following my most recent goblin siege I decided I was going to feed the prisoners to the GCSs cause my military is already pretty well trained and pitting them against 2 goblins and 2 beak dogs seemed like more effort than it was worth, and also I thought it would be mildly amusing, their cages were built 1 tile's distance diagonally away from the 4 corners of the room, inside the pasture, beak dogs on the bottom, goblin hammerman on the top left, goblin spearman top right.
Possibly related detail #2: I caught the goblins on a different IRL day to building the cages and releasing them via lever, I hope that didn't have any effect on things but it's a possibility.
3rd possible relevant detail: I forgot to unforbid the goblins' equipment before designating dumping, they still had arms and armour when put in with the GCSs (didn't help them at all, and the helms probably boosted web production), and I am aware that during sieges any trained GCS will not web invaders, but maybe they react differently when there isn't an ongoing siege?
Next year's siege I'll do as many tests as my military will allow me to gather subjects for, hopefully providing me with at least 1 beak dog and 1 troll for testing on intelligence levels, and I might try to get an elf or two, I'm not at war with them (yet) but they are an important test subject for this; their unique relationship with wildlife could mean that the hippies are even more useless than I thought they are an unsuitable medium for generating silk.
Priority of tests will be as follows:

1)Test if exiting the game/turning off computer is necessary
2)Test if subject needs to be in GCS pasture
3)Test if subject must be armed during procedure
4)Test if subject must be armoured during procedure
5)Test if subject may be restrained

After the first 4 tests I should be able to determine what exactly caused the GCSs to shoot webs when usually they wouldn't, unless of course all tests turn out to prove their potentially relevant detail to actually be irrelevant.

Bonus: If tests 2 gives results that allow for it, use of fortifications could mean only one subject is needed, or perhaps for greater efficiency, one subject per GCS, however in order to actually collect the webs a marksdwarf may be needed to clear the area before any doors are unlocked, though info from test 5 may make this less of an issue

I had 3 other theories on this: that the GCSs being descended from male and female Hist Fig GCSs that I captured had some effect on things, that the GCSs being pregnant was somehow relevant, or that they are young enough to have not had to receive training yet did something, all of which were debunked when I checked the combat logs, as luck would have it I had unintentionally included control groups, there is a single male present and one of the females has recently been caught from the wild and thus was neither untrained nor a Hist Fig or descendent of, that meant if any of these were true, one of the GCSs would have no "the giant cave spider shoots out thick strands of webbing" in it's combat log, but all GCSs shot webs.

Anyone willing to test this out in 0.44.06 please do, I'm going to be converting the fortress of Bronzevipers into a GCS lab for the next 1-5 years depending on how many goblins my military kills before they have the chance to get caged per siege, so I won't be updating anytime soon. Also if anyone comes up with results before me please share, even if it is that you were able to replicate the results under the exact same conditions, it's at least proof that my game hasn't bugged out or something.

I've saved a screenshot of the silky room (been mostly harvested cause I accidentally left the game running before thinking to take the screenshot) while showing that the GCSs are tame with v (and also a potter busy harvesting silk), and I also got a screenshot of the combat log showing a goblin being webbed then bitten and repeatedly shaken around, will post as evidence if someone tells me how, I don't really know how to forum