Bay 12 Games Forum

If this ever gets fixed, I'd propose to just change it so that the food the soldiers drop become "normal" status food that can be eaten or hauled by everybody.

I like the idea that the soldiers are arrogant and just drop food on the floor like "somebody else fix this."

(I believe the issue is that the food the soldiers drop is still "owned" by the soldier, so that nobody ever moves it.)

Recently played Red Dead Redemption, and the game has a thing that would be awesome in Adventure Mode.

It's small missions where you need to gather a number, like 7-10, of a specific plant. It's surprisingly addictive to roam around the countryside looking for the plants.

Dwarf Fortress has a huge number of plants that could be used for more than decoration.

I suggest to create quests where you need to locate a type of plant, grab it and return it to start: "Go find me 6 leaves of Mountain avens and ye shall be rewarded".

I had huge amounts of fun roaming around the DF-countryside, looking at nature, and running into trouble and weird stuff on the way. BUT it would be even more fun if you actually had an in-game reason for the character to travel to some remote savanna or tundra and look around.

I think it will be so much fun that I suggest just adding it now with a placeholder system. Add naturalist scholars that should be fairly common and place them somewhere easily accessible like in human and dwarven taverns. They're just standing there pestering people to get them plants for their studies. You talk to them, they give you the quest to get some randomly picked plants. When you bring them back he says he's happy for them and he asks you for some more.

Further down the road, plant-gathering missions could be connectied to whatever functions plant are given - if they have a use for magic, the mission-giving NPC could be an assistant to a wizard needing plants for some spell. (Actually would love if necromancers needed plants for their horrible experiments.) Or if medicine is introduced, it would be doctors asking for plants to try them out in treatments. It could also be connected to religious rituals, like the Grand Orange of a religion needs random plants for the religious stuff.

As for the reward for the quest - well the usual reward of mission in adventure mode is a pat on the back, and I'd be completely content with that. Perhaps a new reputaton title like "Explorer of nature" could be added? This would be more than enough motivation for many players I think.

Bonus 1: The same thing could be done with hunting animals. "Get me 6 hides of giant cheeth."

Bonus 2: As a high-tier difficult version of it, there could be asked for underwater or underground plants. These should not be mixed in with the normal surface missions. Maybe when you max out your rep of the surface missions or did 20 of them, the NPCs would then switch to underground plants and underwater plants. Locating a cave entrance and managing to get in and find your way back out with 5 specific plants would be SUPER challenging to me - much more than killing a megabeast.

In polytheism, nearly everybody would pray to a bunch of gods, depending on what was going on in our life. Say in Norse religion, you wouldn't "follow" some god and like pray to Thor all the time for all purposes.

In Norse religion you'd pray to Thor for Thor-stuff and to Odin for Odin-stuff and to Frey for Frey-stuff, but it wouldn't make sense to like "follow" one of them. You wouldn't pray to Thor to like cure your cow, because Thor doesn't do that sort of thing - Frey does though.

I propose thar for praying purposes it is made less important which god a dwarf is following and more important what happens to the dwarf.

Mechanic:

Create lists of connections of the existing game events with the spheres of gods.

Example: "had to drink vomit" relates to spheres misery, muck.

A game event happening to a dwarf then triggers a need to pray to a god related to a sphere connected to the event / a god with spheres opposed to the event.

So dwarves drank vomit and then they want to pray either to the god of misery or the god of happiness about that. But they're not going to pray to a god of minerals after you drank vomit, because the god of minerals doesn't give a shit about what you drink.

Is a temple for a god of the sphere not available, the dwarf isn't able to process the event properly, he's got to go instead to the all-purpose temple and do the praying, and you get bad thought/memory like "Wasn't able to pray properly about drinking vomit."

Example 2: A dwarf becomes a parent > family or longevity or pregnancy - to say "thanks" or to pray for luck for the child/the new family.

Example 3: Caverns are breached > a bunch of dwarves want to pray to caverns, mountaint, minerals to deal with it

And so on so all the spheres get events and all the mayor events are assigned.

Result:

It would depend on how the fort plays out whch gods that were popular. It would also change with time.

Like if you invaded or do raids or conquests, gods with spheres war, courage, fortresses etc get a rush of popularity as an aftermath. So you could see like "whoa look they're all down there in that temple after the raid."

When you open caves, gods with spheres caverns, earth, minerals etc get a rush.

The point of this:

-To make some temples important or not important to build, depending on what happens. You should get screwed over to the degree if you haven't got the relevant temple, making it for instance important to build a cavern-temple before breaching the caves or a war-temple before you raid your neighbors.

-To create change in which temples are used the most. IMO it would be satisfying to see a rush to the god of war after an invasion.

-It would reduce randomness of religion where dwarves meditate about stuff that isn't related to what happens in the fort. By defiinition what they pray to/meditate about is random and not related to the fort.

- It would be cool to have to prepare for stuff. Like before you breach the caverns experienced players would build a temple to a cavern-god in order to prepare for the rush to that god. Or you'd build a war-god temple before you start raiding, so you're not caught pants down and war-minded dwarves not having a place to pray to the war god.

-You'd see what you were doing reflected in more stuff in the game. Like if you were constantly raiding, the dwarves would meditate about raids more than they meditated about minerals or murder.

It's a suggestion to limit the somewhat excessive amount of monasteries.

As a bonus, sites get more interesting stories.

The proposed mechanic is:

When a religion gets to the point of creating a monastery, a check is made for monasteries with 0 pop starting from the oldest monasteries.

If one is found, the new religion moves in the empty place.

The former culturally-specific-stuff like statues etc are removed and thrown in a junk pile and replaced with new statues. If there are differences in buuldings, the specific buildings are left where they are abandoned, and new are build.

If the same thing happens again, the monastery goes back into the pool of "available" monasteries and the process is repeated.

It could be used to have very interesting sites emerge. They could have a bunch of overgrown not-been-used-in-centuries altars.

Just on the second fort. Both of them get annual "mini-invasions" of 5 units from a necromancer starting after I get 1 migration wave.

 1st fort it was zombies, 2nd it's experiments.

I wonder if this is new? They're coming so fast I haven't smithed any armor or weapons let alone set up military.

So I hole up and end in a sorta cosy situation with 15 dwarves holed up for years & unable to get new migrants because I'm permanently in "invasion"-status.

It's new to me. I'm used to getting invasions when I'm at like 50 dwarves and have a beginning military squad. Steam-version I get invaded when I have like 10 dwarves and am setting up the essential infrastructure.

Also I'm more used to like 50 goblins or nothing. I'm curious if mini-invasions of 5 units is new or if I just for some reason never got them?

Maybe it's about getting used to - but I miss most of the annoucements on the left of the screen. I guess there's so much going on in the game so your attention is focused on the middle of the screen.

I for instance miss most of the caravan annoucements So I don't really trade a lot as the caravans come and go and I don't even know.

I also miss moods. I mostly just notice a dwarf has a mood if I want to build something directly in a workshop and I notice some dwarf took it over - and since I don't know how long he's been there craving missing items, I don't do anything about it since he might just have a day left before going mad. Or I notice the announcement of a dwarf completing an artefact, and I'm like "whoa, didn't even know you were working on one!"

I THINK some dwarves die because of not having supplies for their artefacts, but I never knew it happened. The whole thing of "mood, no silk cloth, madness, death" can happen and all I know of the little drama is that "a bedroom is empty now, somebody or other must have died for whatever reason."

I feel like caravans and moods and maybe some other things (deaths? fights?) should get the "big" announcement where the game is paused and you get a text box.

Maybe players should be able to toggle which announcements they want as BIG and which ones they just want on the left screen. (For instance animal births, it's cool that it gets a little thing on the left you can look at when you want. But'd I'd like to know if it was this year or last year lol. And I guess some players don't care about caravans at all, so it's great for them they're sorta invisible now.)

Also when I get around to seeing the announcements that somebody died or there was a fight or whatever, I have no clue if this happened yesterday or months ago.

So I think they need a "happened x days ago" column so you get some more clues as to what happeed. As it is, I just shrug like "some people fought at some point in time for whatever reason" and close it. I have too little information to even know if it's something I can do anything about.

I THINK the annocement system makes me more sort of distant to some of the things happening in the fort. Before I felt more like part of the fort, now I feel more like I'm a manager of a factory in another country and I only know like the most general info.

whoops wrong category.

how do I delete a post?

I just had three undead waltzing through cage traps, ignoring them like bosses.

Is that normal or do these specific undead have some new freakish power?

One of them was an intelligent undead, the other two seems to be regular zombies.

Is there some change to cage traps regarding which creatures they work on and which they don't?